A point has yet to be made about the four American socialist Democratic congresswomen whom President Trump is advising to go back to the places they came from. It’s not just that three of them were born in America. It’s that while Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Omar Ilhan, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley may change America, the likelihood is that America will change them even more. And it has a way of changing all of us for the better.

It’s not that we agree with the Squad’s socialist sentiments. We prefer the kind of pro-growth, laissez-faire capitalism of which Mr. Trump is a tribune. We’re edited, though, by a veteran of the English-language successor to the greatest socialist newspaper of all time, the Jewish Forward, founded in 1897 by Abraham Cahan, a revolutionary who fled the Czarist police in Russia. The epic the Forward covered during its first century was the arrival in America of millions of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe.

The Forward led the socialist faction among them. Published in Yiddish, and with barely a word of English, it grew to be one of America’s first national newspapers, with editions in Los Angeles and Chicago as well as New York. So on fire with socialist ideals were the Forward’s editors that they had carved into the facade of their headquarters on the Lower East Side bas reliefs of Marx, Engels, Lasalle and Adler. The Forward fought for labor unions and vast government programs.

In its early decades, the Forward ridiculed Zionism, though not out of the anti-Semitism that so often infects today’s noble comrades. The Forward, like most socialist institutions around the world, opposed our entry into World War One. No doubt all this earned its editors and readers countless catcalls suggesting they go back where they came from. Our government threw the Forward’s hero, Eugene Victor Debs, into jail and threatened the paper’s postal permit.

Then a series of events began to happen. World War One did break out, and America did enter the lists. Suddenly, American patriotism trumped the socialists’ loyalty to their cause. Socialists in Germany threw in with the Germans and Socialists in England with the English. Socialists in America with our own doughboys. The socialist international collapsed. Then, after the war, the Forward turned furiously against communism.

This happened in good part because, albeit briefly, Cahan, without any help from Mr. Trump, did go back, if only briefly, to where he came from. He made a reporting trip to Soviet Russia, where he’d once been in the underground against Romanov rule. He managed to meet with some of his old comrades and found them defeated and depressed. One he particularly admired, Vera Figner, was so frightened that she warned him about the communists only sotto voce.

Cahan came back to warn his readers that the communists were worse than the czar. He began to exhibit ever greater enthusiasm for America. He forsook his literary career and threw himself and his paper into the anticommunist struggle in the labor movement. Eventually, the Forward helped create — and fund — the anticommunist labor faction that became known as the Free Trade Union movement, which played a role in history that is an all-too-little appreciated.

In Europe, it helped defeat the communist dock workers and get our Marshall Plan aid landed on the liberated continent. The Free Trade Union movement helped defeat the communist students who tried in 1968 to topple the French Fifth Republic. It was with the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions that there affiliated a little known labor union in Gdansk, Poland, called Solidarity, which rose up and cracked Soviet rule in the East bloc.

We’ve told this story before in these columns, but rarely has it has seemed as emblematic as in this moment when a President of America is feuding with the young socialists. Cahan himself edited the Forward until his death in 1951, and in his later years a colleague, David Shub, wrote that Cahan still considered himself a Social Democrat. “But in the last few decades he would put the accent on the last word — democrat. He put political and spiritual freedom of the person in first place.”

In other words, America — and life, but mainly America — had changed Cahan. And, as it does so often, for the better. It didn’t change him completely. Cahan went to his grave thinking of himself as the same person who as a young boy had swayed over his prayer books in the yeshiva of his youth. That too is a triumph. It’s not our purpose here to suggest that America will change AOC and her squad the same way it changed Cahan. It is to suggest that it would be shortsighted to count them out.