Part 1 (1/2)

America First.

by Various.

FOREWORD

America First was the central thought in President Wilson's address to the Daughters of the American Revolution on the twenty-fifth anniversary of their organization--their Silver Jubilee--in Was.h.i.+ngton, D. C., October 11, 1915. The president declared in this address that all citizens should make it plain whether their sympathies for foreign countries come before their love of the United States, or whether they are for America first, last, and all the time. He a.s.serted, also, that our people need all of their patriotism in this confusion of tongues in which we find ourselves over the European war.

The press throughout the country has taken up the thought of the President and, seconded by the efforts of the Bureau of Education, has done loyal work in making ”America First” our national slogan. This is all good so far as it goes--especially among the adult population, many of whom must be educated, if educated at all, on the run. But the rising generation, both native-born and foreign, to get the full meaning of this slogan in its far-reaching significance, must have time for study and reflection along patriotic lines. There must be the right material on which the American youth may settle their thoughts for a definite end in patriotism if our country is to have a new birth of freedom and if ”this government of the people, by the people, and for the people is not to perish from the earth.” The prime and vital service of amalgamating into one h.o.m.ogeneous body the children alike of those who are born here and of those who come here from so many different lands must be rendered this Republic by the school teachers of America.

The purpose of this book is to furnish the teachers and pupils of our country, material with which the idea of true Americanism may be developed until ”America First” shall become the slogan of every man, woman, and child in the United States.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Acknowledgments for permission to use copyrighted and other valuable material in this volume are hereby tendered to authors and publishers as follows:

To President Woodrow Wilson for his three addresses ”America First,”

”The Meaning of the Flag,” and ”Neutrality Proclamation.”

To Secretary Franklin K. Lane for his speech on ”The Makers of the Flag.”

To William Jennings Bryan and his publishers, Funk and Wagnalls Company, New York and London, for extracts from his address on ”The Patriotism of Peace.”

To Archbishop Ireland for extracts from his address on ”The Duty and Value of Patriotism.”

To George L. Schuman and Company, publishers of _Modern Eloquence_, Chicago, for the following extracts and addresses: ”Our Country,” by William McKinley; ”Our Reunited Country,” by Clark Howell; ”The Blue and the Gray,” by Henry Cabot Lodge; ”A Reminiscence of Gettysburg,” by John B. Gordon; ”The New South,” by Henry W. Grady; and ”The Hollander as an American,” by Theodore Roosevelt.

To A. C. b.u.t.ters for the address on ”Was.h.i.+ngton,” by John W. Daniel, from _Modern Eloquence_ published by George L. Schuman and Company.

To Henry Watterson, Louisville, Kentucky, for the extracts from his lecture on Abraham Lincoln.

To E. Benjamin Andrews and to his publishers, Fords, Howard and Hulbert, for the extracts from his lecture on Robert E. Lee.

To J. B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia, for the poem by Thomas Buchanan Read, ”The Rising in 1776.”

To Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, for the poem by Henry van d.y.k.e, ”America for Me,” and also for the extract from the poem ”Wanted,” by J.

G. Holland.

To The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Indianapolis, for the poem by James Whitcomb Riley, ”The Name of Old Glory.”

To Henry Holcomb Bennett for his poem ent.i.tled, ”The Flag Goes By.”

To Christopher Sower Company, Philadelphia, for the poem by Edward Brooks, ent.i.tled ”Be a Woman.”

The selections from the poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and Bayard Taylor are used by permission of and special arrangement with Houghton Mifflin Company, the authorized publishers of the works of those authors.