Citizenship: Its Privileges and Responsibilities
‘This is the first time I have ever ventured to submit a manuscript of any kind. And I am doing so now because the whole matter of citizenship looms large in my thinking as I watch the daily papers for news of world happenings. I live in a small Mississippi town. Down here it has never occurred to me that my country had any need of my services, except in case of war, and then only as a private. But of late I have been thinking perhaps it does need me, and millions more like me, just to be good citizens. That is what I have tried to say in the essay. It has done me good to give that feeling words, even though those words never appear in print.’
That is the spirit of most of the 599 essays submitted for the prize, and it made reading them a heartening experience. The essays also reveal the influence that refugees have had on American consciousness. More frequent than any other was the constructive suggestion that since naturalized citizens and newcomers had to learn about our traditions, rights, and obligations as citizens to meet the citizenship tests, why should not native-born Americans pass the same tests? Tolerance, sacrifice, responsibility, were advocated in almost every essay. In less than half a dozen was there any expression of intolerance toward Jews, refugees, Negroes, or Jehovah’s Witnesses. But there was a disturbing frequency of expressed distrust of education, particularly higher education. Although nearly every one listed free education as a major basis of democracy, many of these same papers attacked teachers with prejudice and hatred, their irreligion, skepticism, Communism or Fascism, and other ‘bad’ qualities.
Three of the essays were written by college presidents, one by a state senator, numerous others by teachers, professors, ministers, lawyers, and journalists — and many by WPA workers, young boys and girls, housewives, business men, engineers, the unemployed. Almost every nationality was represented, and every age. It was a truly democratic cross-section.
The essays by W. C. Newman, of Indianola, Mississippi, and W. Seward Salisbury, of Oswego, New York, will be published in the December Atlantic. — THE EDITORS]
IT is man’s privilege to assume the responsibilities of citizenship. And it is his responsibility to ensure the privileges of his fellow citizens. Two things are vital to democracy: that every man grant every other the rights he claims for himself, and that every man accept the obligations he expects others to exercise. The good citizen concerns himself with the privileges of others and the responsibilities of himself.
The basic privileges in a democratic society are contained in our Bill of Rights. Our country was colonized and its Constitution established by men and women who were denied them at home and who braved perils in order to establish communities where they would be safeguarded for others as well as for themselves. But with the passage of time civic rights are translated into personal prerogatives. Nine out of every ten times today that the Bill of Rights is invoked it is for the benefit of the person speaking. Do we want freedom of speech ? We want it for ourselves, but we do not fight untiringly to ensure that our opponent will have it also. Do we want freedom of religious worship? We want it that we may worship freely. As citizens we think too often and almost exclusively of ourselves.
This is true in the world-community of democracies. Was Great Britain excited about the loss of civic privilege in Spain? Was France willing to act when the privileges of the Czechoslovakian citizens were challenged? Great Britain and France awoke when the danger was to their own privileges. And the United States is equally self-centred. Only when the navy of Great Britain is in peril and the army of France routed do we talk of peacetime conscription and the building of a two-ocean navy.
It is also true within a democracy. The citizen outside of Louisiana was amused by the antics of Huey Long. The violation of civic rights in that state did not alarm him. It did not affect him. A small New England town drives out Jehovah’s Witnesses by mob violence, but, since they are untouched, the large body of its citizens do not object. A man two thousand miles across the country is persecuted because of his race. It is a good newspaper story. But give us a Huey Long, let us experience mob violence, or take away our job because of our race, and the story is different. When we as individuals see danger to us as individuals we rise to the defense — but to the defense of ourselves.
Civic privilege has received the wrong emphasis. School children are promised life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They are told of equalization of opportunities. They are taught to expect something for themselves. They should be taught to safeguard these privileges for others. They are taught that democracy has been set up for the benefit of each of them individually. And so it has. But they have not been told that its benefits can be gained only through giving them to others. In life one never finds happiness by seeking it; in a democracy one never gains privileges by demanding them. One works for oneself best through others: this is the fundamental lesson of Christianity and the fundamental lesson in making democracy work.
The state bestows on us the rights of citizenship and guards these rights. But our state is its citizens. It is we who bestow those rights and guard them. It is this gift and this guardianship that are the privilege of the citizens of a democracy. It is your privilege to see that your neighbor is not imprisoned without due process of law. It is your privilege to ensure that your neighbor is allowed to elect his representatives in government. It is your privilege to defend your neighbor’s right to write and publish what he pleases on controversial issues. It is your privilege to see that your neighbor receives justice under law without regard to creed, race, or economic status. These are indeed privileges: many today may not exercise them.
These privileges are our responsibility. They are the responsibility of each individual citizen. We know that to grant civic privileges to those who would destroy the Bill of Rights is to endanger the rights of all. Today it is both a responsibility and a privilege to deny rights to those who would take them from us. We know, furthermore, that to place unlimited responsibility in the hands of one man or a small group of men is to lose all privilege. We must each of us, therefore, shoulder a share of the responsibility for good government.
We assume that we fulfill that responsibility by going to the polls on election day. Each citizen registers his judgment as problems affect him. If the majority benefits, the problem is settled favorably; if not, unfavorably. The majority rules in gaining the greatest good for the greatest number. This has been the theory. It worked well in the New England town meeting. There the issues were small. The individual citizen could see them in their broadest light. Should the community establish a high school? It was not a majority of those who had children of high-school age that decided this question. It was the majority of those who realized that a high school would benefit the entire community. And that majority was willing to tax everyone, including bachelors and spinsters, to achieve that benefit.
But we have outgrown the town meeting. In the first place, we vote through representatives. And representative government is widely misunderstood. We are mistaken when we suppose that the number of letters and telegrams that reach our Congressmen before action on an important bill is the measure of the working of democracy. This bill hurts agriculture; the farmer writes his Congressman to oppose it. Another bill limits business profits; the business man wires his Senator to defeat it. But who are we to ask our representative to care for our particular interests? He is your representative not in the sense that he is your mouthpiece, but rather in the sense that you elect him as a man wise enough to care for the welfare of the entire electorate. Write your Congressman? Yes, if you as a specialist can offer sound advice. But never command him.
Secondly, the problems we face are larger than were those in town meeting. We are asked to vote on foreign policy, tariff problems, social security. Such problems have important implications reaching beyond the horizon of the individual voter. Hence large issues are seen in their widest import only with great difficulty and self-effacement. Individual gains are far too often taken to be measures of value. If the problem is one of public utilities, we vote as the issue affects us individually. If a bonus bill is under consideration, its protagonists try to whip up a majority of those who will be favorably affected. A senatorial bloc opposes a national-defense measure because the contracts are not awarded to its local communities. Some seek narrow self-interest deliberately; many lobbyists are in this group. Some do so because they lack courage or understanding. Most are guilty because they misconstrue the significance of the ballot.
Your responsibility as a citizen is at the polls. So much is true. But your responsibility is that of putting yourself in the background and voting on public issues as they affect the entire community, whether it be town, city, or nation. Your responsibility as a citizen is to be an intelligent voter. To be intelligent about public issues is to understand them as they affect your fellow citizens, not simply as they affect you. It is your responsibility to vote against the repaving of your street if some other street is in greater need of repair. It is your responsibility to vote money out of your own pocket for unemployment relief if there are others who cannot get work. It is your responsibility to vote limitations on your activities if those activities are in danger of working against the welfare of the whole. It is your responsibility, in short, to vote for your fellow citizens as you would wish them to vote for you.
These are the responsibilities and privileges of citizenship in a democracy. It is your privilege to ensure for your fellow citizen the rights guaranteed in our Constitution; it is your responsibility to exercise your citizenship at the polls for the benefit of the body politic of which you are but one small unit. The danger to our way of living today is not invasion — it is selfish citizenship. Selfish citizenship makes a democracy inefficient and corrupt. If democracy is to survive, it must be made to work. There are doubts abroad in our land that it can work. The choice is between the privilege and responsibility of working for your fellow countrymen and the loss of all privilege and responsibility. Either we exercise our citizenship or it will be taken from us.