294 THE CLASS STRUGGLE THE NEW AMERICANISM 295 industrial progress that not until the capitalists of the foreign North invested their capital in the South has the latter made progress since reconstruction days. Just in proportion as northern capitalists have fertilized southern establishments has this backward region begun to awaken and take on new life.
The Americanized South is the leader in every phase of modern reaction and a consistent opponent of progress. It leads in illiteracy and is the last in education. The percentage of illiteracy in the South is as follows: South Atlantic States, 16 per oent; East South Central, 17. 4; West South Central, 13. In the North: New England, 3; Middle Atlantic, 7; East North Atlantic, 4; West North Central, 9; Mountain, 9; Pacific, In the South the per capita of expenditure for schools is 79; in the North, 37. The cost per capita average attendance in the South is 18. 98; in the North, 52. 09.
The political backwardness of this Americanized section is also apparent. The Negro is almost completely eliminated as a voter as well as many thousands of poor whites. The land of boasted chivalry, it is the one section of the country where no concessions have been made to woman suffrage, with the exception of Arkansas, which merely permits women to vote in presidential primaries and grants a restricted municipal suffrage.
The case is complete against the New Know Nothingism.
The genuine American stock, that is the descendants of our colonial ancestors, who have relied on their own initiative and have maintained a prejudice against other peoples and had little contact with them, give us the one example of arrested development in the United States. Just as the higher aristocracy of slave owners embraced Know Nothingism in the declining days of their rule, so the reactionary elements who today seek to reduce political and economic views to a standardized pattern seek refuge in a revival of this barren crusade of ante bellum days.
If the educational program of the average school board today is carried out for the next ten years the next generation of Americanized citizens will be a shallow brained collection of vain boasters of everything American, oblivious of the capitalist oligarchy that is fast acquiring complete control over the things they venerate. The program is one patterned after the Prussian model which our super Americans affect to despise. It implies unquestioned obedience and submission to economic wrongs and political tyranny, a discouragement of independent enquiry, and a blind worship of the status quo. strutting ego maniac Kaiser with his Junker assassins have profited by this standardized education and have even dragged the once great Socialist movement of Germany by the heels in their war of conquest and annexations. The only counter force to pan Germanism and exaggerated Americanism is the panhumanism of Socialist internationalism, a conception that recognizes our own defects as well as the merits of others. proletarian internationalism that opposes the chauvinism of each nation, that opposes the cultivated hatreds of the ruling classes, that seeks to cultivate an era of good feeling and solidarity among the unhappy workers of the world, is more needed than ever at this period. Socialists owe much to the future of this ideal by doing all they can in counteracting the hatred and chauvinism that are now being impressed upon our youth. Otherwise the type of pure Americanism now having its habitat in the South will find a home in the North and reaction will secure a firm place in the struggles of the future.