Primary Source: Speech on Immigration by Louisiana Congressman Charles Buck, 1896
Wade Trosclair
Source:
Speech on Immigration by Louisiana Congressman Charles Buck, 1896
The Historic New Orleans Collection – Williams Research Center
Deutsches Haus Collection – EL 1. 1984 – Item 146
Directions:
Have students preview questions, read, and then answer questions. Use questions for class discussion.
Standards:
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RH.9-10.1
Cite specific textual evidence to support analysis of primary and secondary sources, attending to such features as the date and origin of the information.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RH.9-10.2
Determine the central ideas or information of a primary or secondary source; provide an accurate summary of how key events or ideas develop over the course of the text.
Speech on Immigration by Louisiana Congressman Charles Buck, 1896
Born in southwestern Germany, Charles Buck immigrated to the United States with his family
in 1852 when he was twelve years old. He and his family settled in New Orleans, Louisiana, where Buck spent his professional career as a lawyer, served on the school board, and was a city attorney (1880-1884). He was elected as a Democrat to Congress and served only one two-year term (1895-1897) and ran unsuccessfully for mayor in 1896 and 1904.
On May 19, 1896, Buck gave the following speech in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives in opposition to an immigration bill that would have required all immigrants to the United States to be literate and to prove to be able to read and write by undergoing an educational test upon their arrival. Although his speech gained the attention of the press, it ultimately did not sway many minds. The bill — H.R. 7864 — passed both houses of Congress. Democratic President Grover Cleveland, however, shortly before he left office, vetoed the bill and in his veto message he made many of the same arguments and expressed similar sentiments that Buck made his in speech, which deals not only with immigration as a matter of policy, but more importantly, with immigration as it relates to American history and identity.
Mr. Speaker, . . . if there is any citizen in the United States of America who values the glory and the grandeur of our citizenship it is the foreign-born citizen, and the more so because he has it not as a matter of right, but by the grace of the laws and the humanity of the people of these United States. [Applause] But, Mr. Speaker, coming to the subject before the House, one would think from the expressions of alarm and dread that Pyrrhus [an ancient anti-Roman Greek general] was at the gates of Rome. The argument is presented that the Republic is in danger; that our laboring men are clamoring for protection; that our morality is about to be impaired and degraded; that our citizenship is to be lowered in . . . its standard; all by the coming of new immigrants to this land.
I will not weary this House with statistics . . . The immigration ten, twenty, thirty, or forty years ago was, in proportion to our population, greater than it is now. Where is the danger? There is no danger. Why? Because the principles upon which this American Government rests are the principles of all humanity; and every man who comes here comes to be an American, because to be an American is to be a citizen of the world — a cosmopolitan. [Applause]
It is said that the German-American citizens are not opposed to restriction of immigration from southern Europe. I know the Germans; they are sometimes clannish and selfish, but for myself I would be ashamed of myself as a German-American citizen if I were to utter a sentiment or make a stroke of the pen that would deny to the humblest lazzaroni[poorest of the poor] in the streets of Venice the privileges and the benefits that I have acquired at the hands of the people and the institutions of this country. [Applause]
Mr. Speaker, we are told that an educational test is the panacea [a cure-all] for the evils of immigration. Why, sir, what was it with which the serpent tempted the woman in the Garden of Paradise? “Erites sicut Deus, scientes bonum et malum” — the knowledge of good and evil. Knowledge is not a protection against immorality; it is not a “test of character.” The man who knows not how to write and read — who has grown up under those ancient and oppressive institutions which forbade his development — may have the heart of a Julius Caesar in his breast, and, coming to this country, become one of its great achievements — one of the manifestations of the civilization of the New World. [Applause]
My friend the gentlemen from Michigan [another Congressman]said, “We need send no missionaries abroad.” True. I tell you, sir, that American Christianity enlightened by American principles of humanity — the two going together — will emancipate the world. And those poor devils that you speak of — those Italians, Hungarians, Poles, Russians, or whatever they be — may reap here the benefits of a civilization which is for them as well as for you and for me. [Applause] “America for Americans” is all well and good; but is a barbaric heresy. “America for the world” is what Washington and Jefferson taught. We are big enough to take in all who want to come.
Mr. Speaker, this educational test . . . is aimed at the races of southern Europe. My friend the gentleman from Missouri [Mr. Bartholdt], whose argument I admired and watched with intense interest to see how he would apply his conclusion to his reasons, said that there may be a just prejudice between Germanic and the Latin races. No; there is no prejudice in the heart of the Germanic races against the prosperity, much less against the aspirations, of any people; and if we are to go into the ethical history of the nations of the world it would be an easy matter to prove that Italy and Hungary and Poland and any of those nations have produced specimens of the highest standard of humanity — equal in their possibilities to the greatest of the earth.
It is wrong, sir, to reason from special cases. Exceptions but intensify the rule. It is a paradox in the history of the world that the two great Republics, France and the United States, should have furnished the assassins of Presidents who were the chosen representatives of the people. Yet would it occur to any man to say that the Americans are a nation of assassins because a Lincoln and a Garfield [U.S. presidents] and a Carter Harrison [mayor of Chicago] died by the hand of the assassin?
There is no just way to look at this question except by the rule of principle. Why should we depart from that and inaugurate this discriminating legislation of educational tests and consular inspection? Why, gentlemen, let us be candid. Let us say at once that the American people are great enough unto themselves; that they are ready to defy the providence of God and say: “This country shall belong to us alone; we want no others to feed upon our soil and clear our forests and build new railroads; we have enough of all.” There is an absurdity in the very statement of the proposition.
The relations of the American laborer and the different classes of labor adjust themselves. You want the scavenger in the streets as well as the skilled secretary and the stenographer and the telegraph operator. You must have them all. They are all “logical necessities” as has been said, in the various stages of our civilization. And each man will find his place; each one will take his station according to his ability, according to his light, according to his environment and his opportunities.
There is no danger to us. Is there danger to any of you or to your wives and children? Are you not so far above any such considerations that you are bound to confess that what you talk about lives but in your imagination, that it is what you think and not what you know. The American laborer! There is one way to protect the American laborer greater than that of keeping out his brother, which he himself does not ask. The honest American laborer is a cosmopolitan; he sympathizes with his brother wherever he comes from, and history and statistics prove it. I deny the assertion made here that the laborers of the United States of America demand the restriction of immigration because it impairs their chances for livelihood, their opportunities in the race for life. [Applause]
Mr. McCall of Tennessee: Will the gentleman allow a question?
Mr. Buck: Certainly.
Mr. McCall of Tennessee: I understand you oppose this measure because it restricts foreign immigration by applying an educational qualification test before the immigrant can be admitted?
Mr. Buck: That is right.
Mc. McCall of Tennessee: How does the gentleman reconcile that with the proposition that the several Democratic States of the South impose an educational qualification upon their own citizens [African-Americans], who are born and reared on the soil, before they are permitted to vote?
Mr. Buck: The question of citizenship is one thing, and the question of immigration is quite another. And whatever sentiment may exist with reference to the question of which the gentleman speaks, or whatever political conventions may have declared, I am now stating my own sentiments before the House.
I submit, Mr. Speaker, that an educational test accomplishes no purpose. If the immigrant is educated, so much the better; if not, he still brings his labor and his honest purpose, and these have their value . . .
And as to education, do these poor men who have grown up under systems of European oppression live forever? Why, Mr. Speaker, they rapidly pass away or assimilate themselves with our population; and if not, their children do. These go into our public schools — our public schools our grandest institutions — the workshop that turns out the great American citizen; and in these schools, which are great enough and big enough for everybody, they imbibe an infinite love of country and an admiration of its institutions and of its greatness which breeds in their hearts a loyal patriotism that perhaps does not exist so keenly in the heart of the native citizen — for to the foreigner citizenship involves at once duty, consecration, and gratitude.
America is great in her material industries and in all the development that make up an advanced civilization, and she is as great in her charities as in her power. These charities are the growth of her humanity; they have made her the great civilizer of the world, the vanguard of all the nations of the earth. In doing this “charity,” gentlemen, do not forget when you cast your votes on these measures, that you are following out and realizing the logic of history.
You are but paying your obligation to mankind. It is true that the Declaration of Independence went out from American soil, but it is equally true that its spirit goes far back into the history of the world. It is equally true that the emancipation of the human race began after the light of Christianity was thrown on the world; when Aerminius defeated the Roman legions in the German forest; and it grew from the valley of Runnymede, in England [Magna Carta]; it had found its most emphatic expression when a German monk [Martin Luther] in the little village of Wittenberg posted on his church door the theses and philosophy of the liberty of human thought. [Applause] You have it not all from yourselves. Do not forget those from whom it came.
The Congress of the United States sits twice every twelve months, and if a great wave of migration should come and threaten to engulf us — in other words, if “Pyrrhus reaches the gates of Rome” — it will be time enough for us to close them. [Applause] If the flood comes, if we ever see cause enough to withdraw the hand we have extended to the whole world, we shall have time, right, and power to say, “Now let it stop.”
But to stop at this time for no urgent reason but, as the committee gently and delicately express it, in honor and “regard for a public sentiment,” what kind of statesmanship is that? Public sentiment [public opinion] may be as wrong as it may be right. Vox populi [the voice of the people] is vox Dei [the voice of God] only when the voice comes spontaneously from some great demand of the human heart. [Applause] It is an evil and treacherous sophism [false argument] when it comes up as an appeal to selfishness. [Renewed applause]
I have abstained from wearying the House with statistics and figures. They prove nothing. I have shown that the history of the nation is an argument greater than all statistics, and the facts before our eyes provide an argument which we can not ignore — which duty to our fellow men and to humanity forbid us to ignore — that this country, with a faculty [ability] of absorption and assimilation of which the history of the world knows no parallel, and furnishes no similar example, has grown great by absorbing more than forty million of foreigners who came here after 1790 — I may say after 1820 — because foreign immigration up to that period was substantially insignificant.
A nation that could do this, a manhood that combines within its great heart and its brilliant intellect the faculties of the American people, is great enough to absorb more and grow in the absorption. Do not believe, as has been said, that contact with so-called inferior races will degrade the superior. They are not inferior races. They are lower in the standard of intelligence and the measure of actual achievement, but they are not lower in the possibility of development. The very moment the light of your liberties and the philosophy of your great promises and teachings enter into their hearts, there are born upon these shores new men, new beings, with new aspirations and new hopes.
Do not cut them off. There may be failures as there are everywhere. There are failures in great families and in great nations . . .
The gentleman [another Congressman] says we need no missionaries, but you do send them abroad. You send them to Africa and to China and to Persia, and everywhere to preach the gospel in obedience to the command to spread the word of God “among the nations of the world.” How inconsistent is it, if you do that, to do no charity and no missionary work at home by refusing to receive into the bosom of your family those whom you should help to elevate and those who you should help, not with your own, but with that which has come to you through the efforts of centuries and the ambition of men like yourselves before you.
I know, gentlemen, that this is perhaps merely an appeal to sentiment, and it may have little effect upon the final vote; but practically an educational test is absolutely valueless. I do not think there is a man upon this floor who values more highly than I do the benefits of an education; but I am willing to enter the library and the domain of statistics and contend with any man upon this floor and prove that the great crimes of the world, the assaults upon civilization, are committed not by the ignorant, but by those whose vicious tendencies and natures are made more powerful by the light of knowledge. Not to speak of the anarchist and the socialist and those “unhinged” people who are highly educated, but who have that education which only furnishes a dangerous power . . .
Mr. Speaker, I believe that pandering to this so-called sentiment which requires the restriction of immigration will turn out a fallacy and a misfortune, because in the first place it is wrong and no wrong can ever lead to good. If it could be demonstrated that immigration is practically injurious, that it does threaten the labor or the capital of the morality or the civilization of the United States, I should not have one word to say; but how is it that when immigrants came to these shores at the rate of 400,000 and 500,000 a year, nothing was ever said or done, and there were no fears abroad that the liberty of the country or the morality of the people were in danger? It is a mere sentiment. It is a mere notion, impracticable, injurious to the interests of the country, and hostile to the spirit of our institutions and to the civilization of the age.
. . . I say it is wrong in principle, and for that reason must be bad statesmanship, to legislate against the course of the movement of this history which has developed this country, made it great, and promises to make it greater — so great that nothing in the history of the human race can compare with or aspire to it. This is not a mere compliment. It is a truth taken from the logic of events. This continent, with all its resources, as shown by the chairman of the committee to be sufficient for a billion or two of people, is yet in its infancy. When Herodotus, in the very prime of Grecian civilization, returned to Athens from his voyages among the Egyptians, the only compliment he gave his countrymen was, “Athenians, you are yet children.” Who will say that this country, with the history of but a century, is not still in its infancy?