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Title: Races and Immigrants in America
Author: John R. Commons
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RACES AND IMMIGRANTS IN AMERICA
[Illustration: ELLIS ISLAND, IMMIGRATION STATION]
RACES AND IMMIGRANTS IN AMERICA
BY JOHN R. COMMONS
PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL ECONOMY, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.
1907
_All rights reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1907,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published May, 1907.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
CONTENTS
PAGE
REFERENCES vii
CHAPTER
I. RACE AND DEMOCRACY 1
II. COLONIAL RACE ELEMENTS 22
III. THE NEGRO 39
IV. NINETEENTH CENTURY ADDITIONS 63
V. INDUSTRY 107
VI. LABOR 135
VII. CITY LIFE, CRIME, AND POVERTY 160
VIII. POLITICS 179
IX. AMALGAMATION AND ASSIMILATION 198
INDEX 239
ILLUSTRATIONS
ELLIS ISLAND, IMMIGRANT STATION _Frontispiece_
PAGE
"RETURN OF THE MAYFLOWER." Painting By Boughton, 1834 _opposite_ 24
ANGLO-SAXON MOUNTAINEERS, BEREA COLLEGE, KENTUCKY _opposite_ 36
COUNTIES HAVING A LARGER PROPORTION OF NEGROES IN 1900
THAN IN 1880 _opposite_ 50
MOVEMENT OF IMMIGRANTS, IMPORTS OF MERCHANDISE PER
CAPITA AND IMMIGRANTS PER 10,000 POPULATION _between_ 63-64
ALIENS AWAITING ADMISSION AT ELLIS ISLAND _opposite_ 78
NORWEGIAN, ITALIAN, AND ARABIC TYPES " 90
SLAV, JEWISH, POLACK, AND LITHUANIAN TYPES " 96
INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS OF IMMIGRANTS--1906 _between_ 108-109
AMERICAN SCHOOL BOYS _opposite_ 122
FILIPINO GOVERNORS " 142
GOVERNOR JOHNSON OF MINNESOTA.--SWEDE " 154
DR. ORONHYATEKHA, MOHAWK INDIAN. LATE CHIEF OF
ORDER OF FORESTERS " 168
CHINESE STUDENTS, HONOLULU " 186
FACULTY OF TUSKEGEE INSTITUTE " 202
SLAVIC HOME MISSIONARIES " 216
ALIENS AWAITING ADMISSION AT ELLIS ISLAND " 230
REFERENCES CITED IN FOOTNOTES
"AMERICA'S RACE PROBLEMS." A series of discussions on indigenous race
elements and the negro. _American Academy of Political and Social
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ATLANTA UNIVERSITY PUBLICATIONS:--
No. 1. "Mortality among Negroes in Cities" (1896).
No. 2. "Social and Physical Condition of Negroes in Cities" (1897).
No. 3. "Some Efforts of Negroes for Social Betterment" (1898).
No. 6. "The Negro Common School" (1901).
No. 7. "The Negro Artisan" (1902).
No. 8. "The Negro Church" (1903).
No. 9. "Notes on Negro Crime" (1904).
No. 10. "A Select Bibliography of the Negro American" (1905).
BALCH, EMILY GREENE, "Slav Emigration at its Source," _Charities_, 1906.
"Introductory," Jan. 6; "Bohemians," Feb. 3; "Slovaks," March 3, April
7; "Galicia, Austrian Poles, Ruthenians," May 5.
BLUNTSCHLI, J. K., _The Theory of the State_. New York, 1885.
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by author and wife through southern Italy and Sicily and return by
steerage with immigrants.
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BUREAU OF LABOR, Seventh Special Report, _The Slums of Baltimore,
Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia_ (1894). Ninth Special Report, _The
Italians in Chicago_ (1897).
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York, 1903.
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34:694; "The Scandinavians in America," 35:613; "The Welsh in America,"
35:749; "The Italians in America," 35:122; "The Dutch in America,"
35:238; "The Spanish in America," 35:294.
COMAN, KATHERINE, "The History of Contract Labor in the Hawaiian
Islands," _American Economic Association_, 3d Series, Vol. IV, No. 3
(1903). "The Negro as Peasant Farmer," _American Statistical
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COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATION, _Annual Reports_, Washington.
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CUTLER, JAMES E., _Lynch Law. An Investigation into the History of
Lynching in the United States_. New York, 1905.
DE FOREST AND VEILLIER, _The Tenement House Problem_, 2 vols. New York,
1903.
DU BOIS, W. E. B., _The Philadelphia Negro_. Philadelphia, 1899; _The
Soul of Black Folk._ New York, 1903; "Negroes," Twelfth Census,
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EMIGRATION TO THE UNITED STATES, Special Consular Reports, Vol. XXX.
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_Facts about Immigration._ Reports of Conferences of the Immigration
Department of the National Civic Federation, Sept. 14 and Dec. 12, 1906.
New York, 1907.
_Federation._ Quarterly Journal of Federation of Churches and Christian
Organizations, New York. Especially June, July, December, 1902, March,
June, October, 1903. Also annual reports and sociological canvasses of
the Federation.
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1897.
FRANKLIN, F. J., _The Legislative History of Naturalization in the
United States_. Chicago, 1906.
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HAMPTON NEGRO CONFERENCE, Annual, 1897-1901.
HANNA, CHARLES A., _The Scotch-Irish_, 2 vols. New York, 1902.
HAWAII, REPORTS ON, United States Bureau of Labor, 1st Report, Sen. Doc.
169, 57th Congress, 1st Sess., 13:4231; 2d Report, _Bulletin_ No. 47
(1903); 3d Report, _Bulletin_ No. 66 (1906).
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Negro," _Publications of the American Economic Association_, Vol. XI,
Nos. 1, 2, 3 (1896).
HUEBNER, GROVER G., "The Americanization of the Immigrant," _American
Academy of Political and Social Science_, May, 1906, p. 191.
_Hull House Maps and Papers, A Presentation of Nationalities and Wages
in a Congested District of Chicago_, by residents of Hull House. New
York, 1895.
HUNTER, ROBERT, _Poverty_. New York, 1904. Chapter VI, "The Immigrant."
_Immigration Laws and Regulations and Chinese Exclusion Laws_, Bureau of
Immigration and Naturalization, Washington.
IMMIGRATION RESTRICTION LEAGUE, Prescott F. Hall, Secretary, Boston,
Mass. Leaflets.
INDUSTRIAL COMMISSION, Vol. XV, _Immigration and Education_; Vol. XIX,
_Miscellaneous_ (1901).
JACKSON, HELEN HUNT, _A Century of Dishonor_. New York, 1881.
JAPANESE AND KOREAN EXCLUSION LEAGUE, San Francisco. Leaflets.
JENKS, J. W., _Certain Economic Questions in the English and Dutch
Colonies in the Orient_. War Department, Bureau of Insular Affairs,
1902, Doc. No. 168.
JEWISH AGRICULTURAL AND INDUSTRIAL AID SOCIETY, _Annual Reports_. New
York.
KELLOR, FRANCES A., _Out of Work_. New York, 1904.
KELSEY, CARL, _The Negro Farmer_. Chicago, 1903. Also _Annals of the
American Academy of Political and Social Science_, January, 1903.
KING AND OKEY, _Italy To-day_. London, 1901.
KUCZYNSKI, R., "The Fecundity of the Native and Foreign Born Population
in Massachusetts," _Quarterly Journal of Economics_, November, 1901,
February, 1902. "Die Einwanderungspolitik und die Bevölkerungsfrage der
Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika," _Volkswirthschaftliche Zeitfragen_.
Berlin, 1903.
LAZARE, BERNARD, _Antisemitism, Its History and Causes_. New York, 1903.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, _Select List of References on the Negro Question
(1903). List of Works relating to the Germans in the United States
(1904). Select List of References on Chinese Immigration (1904).
Fourteenth Amendment_. List of Discussions of Fourteenth and Fifteenth
Amendments with Special Reference to Negro Suffrage (1906). _List of
References on Naturalization (1907)._
LODGE, HENRY CABOT, _Historical and Political Essays_. Boston, 1892.
LORD, TRENOR, AND BARROWS, _The Italian in America_. New York, 1905.
Especially Italians in American agriculture.
MALLOCK, W. H., _Aristocracy and Evolution_. New York, 1898.
MARSHALL, ALFRED, _Principles of Economics_. New York, 1891.
MERRIAM, G. S., _The Negro and the Nation_. New York, 1906.
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MÜNSTERBERG, HUGO, _American Traits_. New York, 1902.
NATURALIZATION, REPORT TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE COMMISSION ON. Submitted
Nov. 8, 1905, 59th Cong., 1st Sess., H. R. Doc. 46.
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Monthly_. "The Reconstruction of the Southern States," Woodrow Wilson,
87:1; "The Conditions of the Reconstruction Problem," Hilary A. Herbert,
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RACES AND IMMIGRANTS IN AMERICA
CHAPTER I
RACE AND DEMOCRACY
"All men are created equal." So wrote Thomas Jefferson, and so agreed
with him the delegates from the American colonies. But we must not press
them too closely nor insist on the literal interpretation of their
words. They were not publishing a scientific treatise on human nature
nor describing the physical, intellectual, and moral qualities of
different races and different individuals, but they were bent upon a
practical object in politics. They desired to sustain before the world
the cause of independence by such appeals as they thought would have
effect; and certainly the appeal to the sense of equal rights before God
and the law is the most powerful that can be addressed to the masses of
any people. This is the very essence of American democracy, that one man
should have just as large opportunity as any other to make the most of
himself, to come forward and achieve high standing in any calling to
which he is inclined. To do this the bars of privilege have one by one
been thrown down, the suffrage has been extended to every man, and
public office has been opened to any one who can persuade his
fellow-voters or their representatives to select him.
But there is another side to the successful operations of democracy. It
is not enough that equal opportunity to participate in making and
enforcing the laws should be vouchsafed to all--it is equally important
that all should be capable of such participation. The individuals, or
the classes, or the races, who through any mental or moral defect are
unable to assert themselves beside other individuals, classes, or races,
and to enforce their right to an equal voice in determining the laws and
conditions which govern all, are just as much deprived of the privilege
as though they were excluded by the constitution. In the case of
individuals, when they sink below the level of joint participation, we
recognize them as belonging to a defective or criminal or pauper class,
and we provide for them, not on the basis of their rights, but on the
basis of charity or punishment. Such classes are exceptions in point of
numbers, and we do not feel that their non-participation is a flaw in
the operations of democratic government. But when a social class or an
entire race is unable to command that share in conducting government to
which the laws entitle it, we recognize at once that democracy as a
practical institution has in so far broken down, and that, under the
forms of democracy, there has developed a class oligarchy or a race
oligarchy.
Two things, therefore, are necessary for a democratic government such as
that which the American people have set before themselves: equal
opportunities before the law, and equal ability of classes and races to
use those opportunities. If the first is lacking, we have legal
oligarchy; if the second is lacking, we have actual oligarchy disguised
as democracy.
Now it must be observed that, compared with the first two centuries of
our nation's history, the present generation is somewhat shifting its
ground regarding democracy. While it can never rightly be charged that
our fathers overlooked the inequalities of races and individuals, yet
more than the present generation did they regard with hopefulness the
educational value of democracy. "True enough," they said, "the black man
is not equal to the white man, but once free him from his legal bonds,
open up the schools, the professions, the businesses, and the offices to
those of his number who are most aspiring, and you will find that, as a
race, he will advance favorably in comparison with his white
fellow-citizens."
It is now nearly forty years since these opportunities and educational
advantages were given to the negro, not only on equal terms, but
actually on terms of preference over the whites, and the fearful
collapse of the experiment is recognized even by its partisans as
something that was inevitable in the nature of the race at that stage
of its development. We shall have reason in the following pages to enter
more fully into this discussion, because the race question in America
has found its most intense expression in the relations between the white
and the negro races, and has there shown itself to be the most
fundamental of all American social and political problems. For it was
this race question that precipitated the Civil War, with the ominous
problems that have followed upon that catastrophe; and it is this same
race problem that now diverts attention from the treatment of those
pressing economic problems of taxation, corporations, trusts, and labor
organizations which themselves originated in the Civil War. The race
problem in the South is only one extreme of the same problem in the
great cities of the North, where popular government, as our forefathers
conceived it, has been displaced by one-man power, and where a profound
distrust of democracy is taking hold upon the educated and
property-holding classes who fashion public opinion.
This changing attitude toward the educational value of self-government
has induced a more serious study of the nature of democratic
institutions and of the classes and races which are called upon to share
in them. As a people whose earlier hopes have been shocked by the hard
blows of experience, we are beginning to pause and take invoice of the
heterogeneous stocks of humanity that we have admitted to the management
of our great political enterprise. We are trying to look beneath the
surface and to inquire whether there are not factors of heredity and
race more fundamental than those of education and environment. We find
that our democratic theories and forms of government were fashioned by
but one of the many races and peoples which have come within their
practical operation, and that that race, the so-called Anglo-Saxon,
developed them out of its own insular experience unhampered by inroads
of alien stock. When once thus established in England and further
developed in America we find that other races and peoples, accustomed to
despotism and even savagery, and wholly unused to self-government, have
been thrust into the delicate fabric. Like a practical people as we
pride ourselves, we have begun actually to despotize our institutions in
order to control these dissident elements, though still optimistically
holding that we retain the original democracy. The earlier problem was
mainly a political one--how to unite into one self-governing nation a
scattered population with the wide diversity of natural resources,
climates, and interests that mark a country soon to stretch from ocean
to ocean and from the arctics to the subtropics. The problem now is a
social one,--how to unite into one people a congeries of races even more
diverse than the resources and climates from which they draw their
subsistence. That motto, "_E pluribus unum_," which in the past has
guided those who through constitutional debate and civil war worked out
our form of government, must now again be the motto of those who would
work out the more fundamental problem of divergent races. Here is
something deeper than the form of government--it is the essence of
government--for it is that union of the hearts and lives and abilities
of the people which makes government what it really is.
The conditions necessary for democratic government are not merely the
constitutions and laws which guarantee equality, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness, for these after all are but paper documents. They
are not merely freedom from foreign power, for the Australian colonies
enjoy the most democratic of all governments, largely because they are
owned by another country which has protected them from foreign and civil
wars. Neither are wealth and prosperity necessary for democracy, for
these may tend to luxury, inequality, and envy. World power, however
glorious and enticing, is not helpful to democracy, for it inclines to
militarism and centralization, as did Rome in the hands of an emperor,
or Venice in the hands of an oligarchy. The true foundations of
democracy are in the character of the people themselves, that is, of the
individuals who constitute the democracy. These are: first,
intelligence--the power to weigh evidence and draw sound conclusions,
based on adequate information; second, manliness, that which the Romans
called virility, and which at bottom is dignified self-respect,
self-control, and that self-assertion and jealousy of encroachment
which marks those who, knowing their rights, dare maintain them; third,
and equally important, the capacity for coöperation, that willingness
and ability to organize, to trust their leaders, to work together for a
common interest and toward a common destiny, a capacity which we
variously designate as patriotism, public spirit, or self-government.
These are the basic qualities which underlie democracy,--intelligence,
manliness, coöperation. If they are lacking, democracy is futile. Here
is the problem of races, the fundamental division of mankind. Race
differences are established in the very blood and physical constitution.
They are most difficult to eradicate, and they yield only to the slow
processes of the centuries. Races may change their religions, their
forms of government, their modes of industry, and their languages, but
underneath all these changes they may continue the physical, mental, and
moral capacities and incapacities which determine the real character of
their religion, government, industry, and literature. Race and heredity
furnish the raw material, education and environment furnish the tools,
with which and by which social institutions are fashioned; and in a
democracy race and heredity are the more decisive, because the very
education and environment which fashion the oncoming generations are
themselves controlled through universal suffrage by the races whom it is
hoped to educate and elevate.
=Social Classes.=--Closely connected with race division in its effect upon
democracy are the divisions between social classes. In America we are
wont to congratulate ourselves on the absence of classes with their
accompanying hatred and envy. Whether we shall continue thus to commend
ourselves depends partly on what we mean by social classes. If we
compare our situation with an extreme case, that of India,[1] where
social classes have been hardened into rigid castes, we can see the
connection between races and classes. For it is generally held that the
castes of India originated in the conquests by an Aryan race of an
indigenous dark or colored race. And while the clear-cut race
distinctions have been blended through many centuries of amalgamation,
yet it is most apparent that a gradation in the color of the skin
follows the gradation in social position, from the light-colored,
high-caste Brahman to the dark-colored, low-caste Sudra, or outcast
pariah. Race divisions have been forgotten, but in their place religion
has sanctified a division even more rigid than that of race, for it is
sacrilege and defiance of the gods when a man of low caste ventures into
the occupation and calling of the high caste. India's condition now is
what might be conceived for our Southern states a thousand years from
now, when the black man who had not advanced to the lighter shades of
mulatto should be excluded from all professions and skilled trades and
from all public offices, and should be restricted to the coarsest kind
of service as a day laborer or as a field hand on the agricultural
plantations. Confined to this limited occupation, with no incentive to
economize because of no prospect to rise above his station, and with his
numbers increasing, competition would reduce his wages to the lowest
limit consistent with the continuance of his kind. Such a development is
plainly going on at the present day, and we may feel reasonably certain
that we can see in our own South the very historical steps by which in
the forgotten centuries India proceeded to her rigid system of castes.
There is lacking but one essential to the Indian system; namely, a
religion which ascribes to God himself the inequalities contrived by
man. For the Indian derives the sacred Brahman from the mouth of God, to
be His spokesman on earth, while the poor Sudra comes from the feet of
God, to be forever the servant of all the castes above him. But the
Christian religion has set forth a different theory, which ascribes to
God entire impartiality toward races and individuals. He has "made of
one blood all nations." It is out of this doctrine that the so-called
"self-evident" assertion in the Declaration of Independence originated,
and it is this doctrine which throughout the history of European
civilization has contributed to smoothen out the harsh lines of caste
into the less definite lines of social classes. For it must be
remembered that Europe, like India, is built upon conquest, and the
earlier populations were reduced to the condition of slaves and serfs to
the conquering races. True, there was not the extreme opposition of
white and colored races which distinguished the conquests of India, and
this is also one of the reasons why slavery and serfdom gradually gave
way and races coalesced. Nevertheless, the peasantry of Europe to-day is
in large part the product of serfdom and of that race-subjection which
produced serfdom. Herein we may find the source of that arrogance on the
one hand and subserviency on the other, which so closely relate class
divisions to race divisions. The European peasant, says Professor
Shaler,[2] "knows himself to be by birthright a member of an inferior
class, from which there is practically no chance of escaping.... It is
characteristic of peasants that they have accepted this inferior lot.
For generations they have regarded themselves as separated from their
fellow-citizens of higher estate. They have no large sense of citizenly
motives; they feel no sense of responsibility for any part of the public
life save that which lies within their own narrow round of action."
How different from the qualities of the typical American citizen whose
forefathers have erected our edifice of representative democracy! It was
not the peasant class of Europe that sought these shores in order to
found a free government. It was the middle class, the merchants and
yeomen, those who in religion and politics were literally "protestants,"
and who possessed the intelligence, manliness, and public spirit which
urged them to assert for themselves those inalienable rights which the
church or the state of their time had arrogated to itself. With such a
social class democracy is the only acceptable form of government. They
demand and secure equal opportunities because they are able to rise to
those opportunities. By their own inherent nature they look forward to
and aspire to the highest positions.
But the peasants of Europe, especially of Southern and Eastern Europe,
have been reduced to the qualities similar to those of an inferior race
that favor despotism and oligarchy rather than democracy. Their only
avenues of escape from their subordinate positions have been through the
army and the church, and these two institutions have drawn from the
peasants their ablest and brightest intellects into a life which
deprived them of offspring. "Among the prosperous folk there have been
ever many classes of occupations tempting the abler youths, while among
the laborers the church has afforded the easiest way to rise, and that
which is most tempting to the intelligent. The result has been, that
while the priesthood and monastic orders have systematically debilitated
all the populations of Catholic Europe, their influence has been most
efficient in destroying talent in the peasant class."[3]
Thus it is that the peasants of Catholic Europe, who constitute the bulk
of our immigration of the past thirty years, have become almost a
distinct race, drained of those superior qualities which are the
foundation of democratic institutions. If in America our boasted freedom
from the evils of social classes fails to be vindicated in the future,
the reasons will be found in the immigration of races and classes
incompetent to share in our democratic opportunities. Already in the
case of the negro this division has hardened and seems destined to
become more rigid. Therein we must admit at least one exception to our
claim of immunity from social classes. Whether with our public schools,
our stirring politics, our ubiquitous newspapers, our common language,
and our network of transportation, the children of the European
immigrant shall be able to rise to the opportunities unreached by his
parents is the largest and deepest problem now pressing upon us. It
behooves us as a people to enter into the practical study of this
problem, for upon its outcome depends the fate of government of the
people, for the people, and by the people.
=Races in the United States.=--We use the term "race" in a rather loose
and elastic sense; and indeed we are not culpable in so doing, for the
ethnographers are not agreed upon it. Races have been classified on the
basis of color, on the basis of language, on the basis of supposed
origin, and in these latter days on the basis of the shape of the skull.
For our purpose we need consider only those large and apparent divisions
which have a direct bearing on the problem of assimilation, referring
those who seek the more subtle problems to other books.[4]
Mankind in general has been divided into three and again into five great
racial stocks, and one of these stocks, the Aryan or Indo-Germanic, is
represented among us by ten or more subdivisions which we also term
races. It need not cause confusion if we use the term "race" not only to
designate these grand divisions which are so far removed by nature one
from another as to render successful amalgamation an open question, but
also to designate those peoples or nationalities which we recognize as
distinct yet related within one of the large divisions. Within the area
controlled by the United States are now to be found representatives of
each of the grand divisions, or primary racial groups, and it would be a
fascinating study to turn from the more practical topics before us and
follow the races of man in their dispersion over the globe and their
final gathering together again under the republic of America. First is
the Aryan, or Indo-Germanic race, which, wherever it originated, sent
its Sanskrit conquerors to the South to plant themselves upon a black
race related to the Africans and the Australians. Its Western branch,
many thousand miles away, made the conquest and settlement of Europe.
Here it sent out many smaller branches, among them the Greeks and
Latins, whose situation on the Mediterranean helped in great measure to
develop brilliant and conquering civilizations, and who, after twenty
centuries of decay and subjection, have within the past twenty years
begun again their westward movement, this time to North and South
America. North of Greece the Aryans became the manifold Slavs, that most
prolific of races. One branch of the Slavs has spread the power of
Russia east and west, and is now crushing the alien Hebrew, Finn,
Lithuanian, and German, and even its fellow-Slav, the Pole, who, to
escape their oppressors, are moving to America. The Russian himself,
with his vast expanse of fertile prairie and steppe, does not migrate
across the water, but drives away those whom he can not or will not
assimilate. From Austria-Hungary, with its medley of races, come other
branches of the Slavs, the Bohemians, Moravians, Slovaks, Slovenians,
Croatians, Roumanians, Poles, and Ruthenians, some of them mistakenly
called Huns, but really oppressed by the true Hun, the Magyar, and by
the German. To the west of the Slavs we find the Teutonic branches of
the Aryans, the Germans, the Scandinavians, and, above all, the English
and Scotch-Irish with their descent from the Angles, Saxons, and Franks,
who have given to America our largest accessions in numbers, besides our
language, our institutions, and forms of government. Then other branches
of the Aryans known as Celtic, including the Irish, Scotch, and Welsh,
formerly driven into the hills and islands by the Teutons, have in these
latter days vied with the English and Germans in adding to our
population. The French, a mixture of Teuton and Celt, a nationality
noted above all others for its stationary population and dislike of
migration, are nevertheless contributing to our numbers by the
circuitous route of Canada, and are sending to us a class of people more
different from the present-day Frenchman in his native home than the
Italian or Portuguese is different from the Frenchman.
In the fertile valleys of Mesopotamia and the Tigris the Semitic race
had separated from its cousins, the Aryans, and one remarkable branch of
this race, the Hebrews, settling on a diminutive tract of land on the
eastern shore of the Mediterranean and finally driven forth as wanderers
to live upon their wits, exploited by and exploiting in turn every race
of Europe, have ultimately been driven forth to America by the thousands
from Russia and Austria where nearly one-half of their present number is
found.
Another race, the Mongolian, multiplying on the plains of Asia, sent a
conquering branch to the west, scattering the Slavs and Teutons and
making for itself a permanent wedge in the middle of Europe, whence,
under the name of Magyar, the true Hungarian, the Mongolians come to
America. Going in another direction from this Asiatic home the Mongolian
race has made the circuit of the globe, and the Chinese, Japanese, and
Koreans meet in America their unrecognized cousins of many thousand
years ago.
Last of the immigrants to be mentioned, but among the earliest in point
of time, is the black race from the slave coast of Africa. This was not
a free and voluntary migration of a people seeking new fields to escape
oppression, but a forced migration designed to relieve the white race of
toil. All of the other races mentioned, the Aryan, the Semitic, the
Mongolian, had in early times met one another and even perhaps had
sprung from the same stock, so that when in America they come together
there is presumably a renewal of former ties. But as far back as we can
trace the history of races in the records of archæology or philology, we
find no traces of affiliation with the black race. The separation by
continents, by climate, by color, and by institutions is the most
diametrical that mankind exhibits anywhere. It is even greater than that
between the Aryan and the native American, improperly called the Indian,
whose presence on the soil which we have seized from him has furnished
us with a peculiar variation in our multiform race problem. For the
Indian tribes, although within our acquired territory, have been treated
as foreign nations, and their reservations have been saved to them under
the forms of treaties. Only recently has there sprung up a policy of
admitting them to citizenship, and therefore the Indian, superior in
some respects to the negro, has not interfered with our experiment in
democracy.
Last in point of time we have taken into our fold the Malay race, with
some seven million representatives in the Hawaiian and Philippine
Islands. Like the Indian and the negro, this race never in historic
times prior to the discovery of the new world came into close contact
with the white races. With its addition we have completed the round of
all the grand divisions of the human family, and have brought together
for a common experiment in self-government the white, yellow, black,
red, and brown races of the earth.
=Amalgamation and Assimilation.=--Scarcely another nation in ancient or
modern history can show within compact borders so varied an aggregation.
It is frequently maintained that a nation composed of a mixed stock is
superior in mind and body to one of single and homogeneous stock. But it
must be remembered that amalgamation requires centuries. The English
race is probably as good an example of a mixed race as can be found in
modern history, yet this race, though a mixture of the closely related
primitive Celt, the conquering Teuton, and the Latinized Scandinavian,
did not reach a common language and homogeneity until three hundred
years after the last admixture. We know from modern researches that all
of the races of Europe are mixed in their origin, but we also know that
so much of that mixture as resulted in amalgamation occurred at a time
so remote that it has been ascribed to the Stone Age.[5] The later
inroads have either been but temporary and have left but slight
impression, or they have resulted in a division of territory. Thus the
conquest of Britain by the Teutons and the Normans has not produced
amalgamation so much as it has caused a segregation of the Celts in
Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, and of the Teutons, with their later but
slight infusion of Normans, in England. On the continent of Europe this
segregation has been even more strongly marked. The present
stratification of races and nationalities has followed the upheavals and
inroads of a thousand years introduced by the decline and fall of the
Roman Empire. Two developments have taken place. A conquering race has
reduced a native population in part to subjection and has imposed upon
the natives its laws, customs, and language. In course of time the
subject race becomes a lower social class and slowly assimilates with
the upper classes, producing a homogeneous nationality with a new
evolution of laws, customs, and language. This is the history of four
great nations of Europe,--the French, the German, the English, the
Italian. The other development has been the segregation of a portion of
the conquered race, who having fled their conquerors avoid actual
subjection by escaping to the mountains and islands. Here they preserve
their original purity of stock and language. This is the history of
Austria-Hungary, whose earlier population of Slavs has been scattered
right and left by German and Hun and who now constitute separate
branches and dialects of the unassimilated races. That Austria-Hungary
with its dozen languages should be able to hold together as a "dual
empire" for many years is one of the marvels of history, and is
frequently ascribed to that which is the essence of autocracy, the
personal hold of the emperor.
The little bundle of republics known as Switzerland is a federation of
French, Germans, and Italians, who retain their languages and have
developed what out of such a conflict of races has elsewhere never been
developed, a high grade of democratic government. Here in historic times
there has been no amalgamation of races or assimilation of languages,
but there has been the distinct advantage of a secluded freedom from
surrounding feudal lords, which naturally led to a loose federation of
independent cantons. It is Switzerland's mountains and not her mixed
races that have promoted her democracy. At the other end of the world
the highest development of democracy is in the colonies of Australasia,
where a homogeneous race, protected from foreign foes, and prohibiting
the immigration of alien races and inferior classes, has worked out
self-government in politics and industry. In the Roman Empire we see the
opposite extreme. At first a limited republic, the extension of
conquests, and the incorporation of alien races led to that
centralization of power in the hands of one man which transformed the
republic into the empire. The British Empire, which to-day covers all
races of the earth, is growingly democratic as regards Englishmen, but
despotic as regards subject races. Taking the empire as a whole, neither
amalgamation nor self-government is within the possibilities of its
constitutional growth.
In America, on the other hand, we have attempted to unite all races in
one commonwealth and one elective government. We have, indeed, a most
notable advantage compared with other countries where race divisions
have undermined democracy. A single language became dominant from the
time of the earliest permanent settlement, and all subsequent races and
languages must adopt the established medium. This is essential, for it
is not physical amalgamation that unites mankind; it is mental
community. To be great a nation need not be of one blood, it must be of
one mind. Racial inequality and inferiority are fundamental only to the
extent that they prevent mental and moral assimilation. If we think
together, we can act together, and the organ of common thought and
action is common language. Through the prism of this noble instrument of
the human mind all other instruments focus their powers of assimilation
upon the new generations as they come forth from the disunited
immigrants. The public schools, the newspapers, the books, the political
parties, the trade unions, the religious propagandists with their
manifold agencies of universal education, the railroads with their
inducements to our unparalleled mobility of population, are all
dependent upon our common language for their high efficiency. Herein are
we fortunate in our plans for the Americanization of all races within
our borders. We are not content to let the fate of our institutions wait
upon the slow and doubtful processes of blood amalgamation, but are
eager to direct our energies toward the more rapid movements of mental
assimilation. Race and heredity may be beyond our organized control; but
the instrument of a common language is at hand for conscious improvement
through education and social environment.
CHAPTER II
COLONIAL RACE ELEMENTS
Doubtless the most fascinating topic in the study of races is that of
the great men whom each race has produced. The personal interest
surrounding those who have gained eminence carries us back over each
step of their careers to their childhood, their parents, and their
ancestry.[6] Pride of race adds its zest, and each race has its
eulogists who claim every great man whose family tree reveals even a
single ancestor, male or female, near or remote, of the eulogized race.
Here is a "conflict of jurisdiction," and the student who is without
race prejudice begins to look for causes other than race origin to which
should be ascribed the emergence of greatness.
Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge[7] attempted, some years ago, to assign to the
different races in America the 14,243 men eminent enough to find a place
in "Appleton's Encyclopedia of American Biography." He prepared a
statistical summary as follows:--
EMINENT AMERICANS
English 10,376
Scotch-Irish 1,439
German 659
Huguenot 589
Scotch 436
Dutch 336
Welsh 159
Irish 109
French 85
Scandinavian 31
Spanish 7
Italian 7
Swiss 5
Greek 3
Russian 1
Polish 1
------
Total 14,243
When we inquire into the methods necessarily adopted in preparing a
statistical table of this kind we discover serious limitations. Mr.
Lodge was confined to the paternal line alone, but if, as some
biologists assert, the female is the conservative element which holds to
the type, and the male is the variable element which departs from the
type, then the specific contribution of the race factor would be found
in the maternal line. However, let this dubious point pass. We find that
in American life two hundred years of intermingling has in many if not
in most cases of greatness broken into the continuity of race. True, the
New England and Virginia stock has remained during most of this time of
purely English origin, but the very fact that in Mr. Lodge's tables
Massachusetts has produced 2686 notables, while Virginia, of the same
blood, has produced only 1038, must lead to the suspicion that factors
other than race extraction are the mainspring of greatness.
It must be remembered that ability is not identical with eminence.
Ability is the product of ancestry and training. Eminence is an accident
of social conditions. The English race was the main contributor to
population during the seventeenth century, and English conquest
determined the form of government, the language, and the opportunities
for individual advancement. During the succeeding century the
Scotch-Irish and the Germans migrated in nearly equal numbers, and their
combined migration was perhaps as great as that of the English in the
seventeenth century. But they were compelled to move to the interior, to
become frontiersmen, to earn their living directly from the soil, and to
leave to their English-sprung predecessors the more prominent
occupations of politics, literature, law, commerce, and the army. The
Germans, who, according to Lodge, "produced fewer men of ability than
any other race in the United States," were further handicapped by their
language and isolation, which continue to this day in the counties of
Pennsylvania where they originally settled. On the other hand, the
Huguenots and the Dutch came in the first century of colonization. They
rapidly merged with the English, lost their language, and hence
contributed their full share of eminence. Finally, the Irish,
Scandinavian and other races, inconspicuous in the galaxy of
notables, did not migrate in numbers until the middle of the nineteenth
century, and, in addition to the restraints of language and poverty,
they found the roads to prominence preoccupied.
[Illustration: "RETURN OF THE MAYFLOWER" Painting by Boughton, 1834]
Besides the accident of precedence in time, a second factor distinct
from race itself has contributed to the eminence of one race over
another. The Huguenots and the French, according to Lodge's statistics,
show a percentage of ability in proportion to their total immigration
much higher than that of any other race. But the Huguenots were a select
class of people, manufacturers and merchants, perhaps the most
intelligent and enterprising of Frenchmen in the seventeenth century.
Furthermore the direct migration from France to this country has never
included many peasants and wage-earners, but has been limited to the
adventurous and educated. Had the French-Canadians who represent the
peasantry of France been included in these comparisons, the proportion
of French eminence would have been materially reduced.
The same is true of the English. Although sprung from one race, those
who came to America represented at least two grades of society as widely
apart as two races. The Pilgrims and Puritans of New England were the
yeomen, the merchants, the manufacturers, skilled in industry, often
independent in resources, and well trained in the intellectual
controversies of religion and politics. The Southern planters also
sprang from a class of similar standing, though not so strongly addicted
to intellectual pursuits. Beneath both these classes were the indentured
servants, a few of whom were men of ability forced to pay their passage
by service. But the majority of them were brought to this country
through the advertisements of shipowners and landholders or even
forcibly captured on the streets of cities or transported for crimes and
pauperism. Though all of these classes were of the same race, they were
about as widely divergent as races themselves in point of native ability
and preparatory training.
The third and most important cause of eminence, apart from ancestry, is
the industrial and legal environment. An agricultural community produces
very few eminent men compared with the number produced where
manufactures and commerce vie with agriculture to attract the youth. A
state of widely diversified industrial interests is likely to create
widely diversified intellectual and moral interests. Complicated
problems of industry and politics stimulate the mind and reflect their
influence in literature, art, education, science, and the learned
professions. Most of all, equal opportunity for all classes and large
prizes for the ambitious and industrious serve to stimulate individuals
of native ability to their highest endeavor. It was the deadening
effects of slavery, creating inequalities among the whites themselves,
that smothered the genius of the Southerner whether Englishman,
Huguenot, or Scotch-Irish, and it was the free institutions of the
North that invited their genius to unfold and blossom.
These considerations lead us to look with distrust on the claims of
those who find in race ancestry or in race intermixture the reasons for
such eminence as Americans have attained. While the race factor is
decisive when it marks off inferior and primitive races, yet, in
considering those Europeans races which have joined in our civilization,
the important questions are: From what social classes is immigration
drawn? and, Do our social institutions offer free opportunity and high
incentive to the youth of ability? In so far as we get a choice
selection of immigrants, and in so far as we afford them free scope for
their native gifts, so far do they render to our country the services of
genius, talent, and industry.
=Incentives to Immigration.=--It is the distinctive fact regarding
colonial migration that it was Teutonic in blood and Protestant in
religion. The English, Dutch, Swedes, Germans, and even the
Scotch-Irish, who constituted practically the entire migration, were
less than two thousand years ago one Germanic race in the forests
surrounding the North Sea. The Protestant Reformation, sixteen centuries
later, began among those peoples and found in them its sturdiest
supporters. The doctrines of the Reformation, adapted as they were to
the strong individualism of the Germanic races, prepared the hearts of
men for the doctrines of political liberty and constitutional government
of the succeeding century. The Reformation banished the idea that men
must seek salvation through the intercession of priests and popes, who,
however sacred, are only fellow-men, and set up the idea that each soul
has direct access to God. With the Bible as a guide and his own
conscience as a judge, each man was accountable only to one divine
sovereign.
From the standpoint of the age this doctrine was too radical. It tended
to break up existing society into sects and factions, and to precipitate
those civil and religious wars which ended in a Catholic or aristocratic
reaction. When this reaction came, the numerous Protestant sects of the
extremer types found themselves the objects of persecution, and nothing
remained but to seek a new land where the heavy hand of repression could
not reach them. Thus America became the home of numberless religious
sects and denominations of these several races. From England came
Congregationalists (the "Pilgrims"), Puritans, Quakers, Baptists; from
Scotland and Ireland came Presbyterians; from Germany came Quakers,
Dunkards, Pietists, Ridge Hermits, Salzburgers, and Moravians.
It is not to be inferred that religious persecution alone in the early
colonial period caused emigration. In point of numbers commercial
enterprise was probably equally influential. In Holland all religious
sects were welcomed with a liberality far in advance of any other
nation, and at the same time the Dutch people were the most advanced in
the modern pursuits of trade and commerce. The Dutch settlement of New
Amsterdam was therefore a business enterprise, and neither before nor
after the conquest by the British was there any religious obstacle to
the reception of other races and religions. In this respect New York
differed widely from New England, where religious exclusiveness
preserved the English race as a peculiar people until the middle of the
nineteenth century. So diverse were the races in New York, and so
liberal were the opportunities open to all, that Governor Horatio
Seymour was able to say that nine men prominent in its early history
represented the same number of nationalities. Schuyler was of Dutch
descent, Herkimer of German, Jay of French, Livingston of Scotch,
Clinton of Irish, Morris of Welsh, Hoffman of Swedish, while Hamilton
was a West India Englishman and Baron Steuben a Prussian.[8]
Another colony to which all races and religions were welcomed was
Pennsylvania. William Penn established this colony both as a refuge for
the persecuted Quakers of England and as a real estate venture. He was
the first American to advertise his dominions widely throughout Europe,
offering to sell one hundred acres of land at two English pounds and a
low rental. His advertisements combined humanity and business, for they
called attention to popular government and universal suffrage; equal
rights to all regardless of race or religious belief; trial by jury;
murder and treason the only capital crimes, and reformation, not
retaliation, the object of punishment for other offences. Thus
Pennsylvania, although settled a half century later than the Southern
and Northern colonies, soon exceeded them in population. Penn sent his
agents to Germany and persuaded large numbers of German Quakers and
Pietists to cast their lot in his plantation, so that in twenty years
the Germans numbered nearly one-half the population. Again, in the
beginning of the eighteenth century, when Louis XIV overran the
Palatinate and thousands of Germans fled to England, the English
government encouraged their migration to America. In one year four
thousand of them, the largest single emigration of the colonial period,
embarked for New York, but their treatment was so illiberal that they
moved to Pennsylvania, and thenceforth the German migration sought the
latter colony. These people settled at Germantown, near Philadelphia,
and occupied the counties of Bucks and Montgomery, where they continue
to this day with their peculiar language, the "Pennsylvania Dutch." Not
only William Penn himself, but other landowners in Pennsylvania and also
the shipowners advertised the country in Germany, and thousands of the
poorer sort of Germans were induced to indenture themselves to the
settlers to whom they were auctioned off by the ship captains in payment
for transportation. Probably one-half of all the immigrants of the
colonial period came under this system of postpaid transportation, just
as at the present time nearly two-thirds come on prepaid tickets. It was
in Pennsylvania that the largest portion of the Scotch-Irish settled,
and before the time of the Revolution that colony had become the most
populous and most diversified of all the colonies. It was the only
colony, except Maryland, that tolerated Roman Catholics, and with all
phases of the Christian religion and all branches of the Teutonic and
Celtic races, Pennsylvania set the original type to which all of America
has conformed, that of race intermixture on the basis of religious and
political equality.
=The Scotch-Irish.=--It has long been recognized that among the most
virile and aggressive people who came to America in colonial times, and
who have contributed a peculiar share to the American character, are the
Scotch-Irish. Their descendants boast of their ancestry and cite long
lists of notables as their coderivatives. Yet until recent years it has
been the misfortune of the Scotch-Irish to have escaped historical
investigation; for American history has been written chiefly in New
England, whose colonial Puritans forbade them in their midst. In fact,
from the earliest settlement, the Scotch-Irish have been pioneers and
men of action. They have contributed to America few writers and artists,
but many generals, politicians, and captains of industry. In literature
they claim two eminent names, Irving and Poe; but in the army, navy,
politics, and business they claim John Paul Jones, Perry, Andrew
Jackson, Winfield Scott, Zachary Taylor, Ulysses S. Grant, Stonewall
Jackson, George B. McClellan, Alexander Hamilton, John C. Calhoun, James
G. Blaine, Jefferson Davis, Thomas Benton, Hendricks, John G. Carlisle,
Mark Hanna, William McKinley, Matthew S. Quay, Andrew Carnegie, John D.
Rockefeller, Horace Greeley, Henry Watterson, and hundreds alike famous
in the more strenuous movements of American life.
A paradoxical fact regarding the Scotch-Irish is that they are very
little Scotch and much less Irish. That is to say, they do not belong
mainly to the so-called Celtic race, but they are the most composite of
all the people of the British Isles. They are called Scots because they
lived in Scotia, and they are called Irish because they moved to
Ireland. Geography and not ethnology has given them their name. They are
a mixed race through whose veins run the Celtic blood of the primitive
Scot and Pict, the primitive Briton, the primitive Irish, but with a
larger admixture of the later Norwegian, Dane, Saxon, and Angle. How
this amalgamation came about we may learn from the geography of
Scotland.
The Highlands of Scotland begin at the Grampian Hills and the Lowlands
extend south from this line to the British border, and include the
cities of Glasgow and Edinburgh. The Scotch-Irish came from that
southwestern part of the Lowlands which bulges out toward Ireland north
of the Solway Firth. Over these Lowland counties, bounded by water and
hills on three sides, successive waves of conquest and migration
followed. First the primitive Caledonian or Pict was driven to the
Highlands, which to this day is the Celtic portion of Scotland. The
Briton from the south, pressed on by Roman and then by Teuton, occupied
the country. Then Irish tribes crossed over and gained a permanent hold.
Then the Norwegian sailors came around from the north, and to this day
there are pure Scandinavian types on the adjacent islands. Then the
Saxons and Angles, driven by the Danes and Normans, gained a foothold
from the east, and lastly the Danes themselves added their contingent.
Here in this Lowland pocket of territory, no larger than a good-sized
American county, was compounded for five hundred years this remarkable
amalgam of races.
A thousand years later, after they had become a united people and had
shown their metal in the trying times of the Reformation, they furnished
the emigrants who displaced the Irish in the north of Ireland. James I,
whom Scotland gave to England, determined to transform Catholic Ireland
into Protestant England, and thereupon confiscated the lands of the
native chiefs in Ulster and bestowed them upon Scottish and English
lords on condition that they settle the territory with tenants from
Scotland and England. This was the "great settlement" of 1610, and from
that time to the present Ulster has been the Protestant stronghold of
Ireland. In 1901 the population of Ulster was 44 per cent Catholic, 23
per cent Episcopalian, and 27 per cent Presbyterian, an ecclesiastical
division corresponding almost exactly to the racial division of Irish,
English, and Scotch. During the whole of the seventeenth century--the
first century of this occupation--the Catholics and Episcopalians were
in a much smaller proportion than these figures show for the present
time, and the relative increase in Irish and Episcopalians during the
eighteenth century was closely connected with the migration of the
Scotch to America.
For one hundred years the Scotch multiplied in Ulster and had no
dealings with the remnants of the Irish, whom they crowded into the
barren hills and whom they treated like savages. They retained their
purity of race, and although when they came to America they called
themselves Irish and were known as Irish wherever they settled, yet they
had no Irish blood except that which entered into their composition
through the Irish migration to Scotia fifteen hundred years before.
Yet, though they despised the Irish, they could not escape the unhappy
fate of Ireland. The first blow came in 1698, nearly one hundred years
after their settlement. English manufacturers complained of Irish
competition, and the Irish Parliament, a tool of the British crown,
passed an act totally forbidding the exportation of Irish woollens, and
another act forbidding the exportation of Irish wool to any country
save England. Their slowly growing linen industry was likewise
discriminated against in later years. Presbyterian Ulster had been the
industrial centre of Ireland, and these acts nearly destroyed her
industry. Next Queen Anne's Parliament adopted penal laws directed
against Roman Catholics and Presbyterians, and the Test Act, which
compelled public officials to take the communion of the Established
Church, deprived the entire Scotch population of self-government.
Nevertheless they were compelled to pay tithes to support the
Established Church to which they were opposed. Lastly, the hundred-year
leases of the tenants began to run out, and the landlords offered
renewals to the highest bidders on short leases. Here the
poverty-stricken Irish gained an unhappy revenge on the Scotch who had
displaced them of their ancestral lands, for their low standard of
living enabled them to offer rack-rents far above what the Scotch could
afford. No longer did religion, race pride, or gratitude have a part in
holding Ulster to Protestant supremacy. The greed of absentee landlords
began to have full sway, and in the resulting struggle for livelihood,
hopeless poverty was fitter to survive than ambitious thrift.
The Scotch tenants, their hearts bitter against England and aristocracy,
now sought a country where they might have free land and
self-government. In 1718 it is stated that 4200 of them left for
America. After the famine of 1740 there were 12,000 who left annually.
Altogether, in the half century just preceding the American Revolution,
200,000[9] persons, or one-third of the Protestant population of Ulster,
are said to have emigrated, and the majority came to America. This was
by far the largest contribution of any race to the population of America
during the eighteenth century, and the injustice they suffered at the
hands of England made them among the most determined and effective
recruits to the armies that won our independence.
Before the Scotch-Irish moved to America the Atlantic coast line had
been well occupied. Consequently, in order to obtain land for
themselves, they were forced to go to the interior and to become
frontiersmen. They found in Massachusetts a state church to which they
must conform in order to be admitted to citizenship. But what they had
left Ireland to escape they would not consent in a new country to do.
The Puritans were willing that they should occupy the frontier as a
buffer against the Indians, and so they took up lands in New Hampshire,
Vermont, Western Massachusetts, and Maine. Only a few congregations,
however, settled in New England--the bulk of the immigrants entered by
way of Philadelphia and Baltimore and went to the interior of
Pennsylvania surrounding and south of Harrisburg. They spread through
the Shenandoah valley and in the foothill regions of Virginia and
North and South Carolina. Gradually, they pushed farther west, across
the mountains into Western Pennsylvania about Pittsburg, and into Ohio,
Kentucky, and Tennessee. In all of these regions they fought the
Indians, protected the older inhabitants from inroads, and developed
those pioneer qualities which for one hundred years have characterized
the "winning of the West."
[Illustration: ANGLO-SAXON MOUNTAINEERS, BEREA COLLEGE, KENTUCKY]
The Scotch-Irish occupied a peculiar place in the new world. More than
any other race they served as the amalgam to produce, out of divergent
races, a new race, the American. The Puritans of New England, the
Quakers of Pennsylvania, the Cavaliers of Virginia, were as radically
different as peoples of different races, and they were separated from
each other in their own exclusive communities. The Germans were
localized in Pennsylvania and Maryland, the Dutch in New York, but the
Scotch-Irish "alone of the various races in America were present in
sufficient numbers in all of the colonies to make their influence count;
and they alone of all the races had one uniform religion; had
experienced together the persecutions by state and church which had
deprived them at home of their civil and religious liberties; and were
the common heirs to those principles of freedom and democracy which had
been developed in Scotland as nowhere else. At the time of the American
Revolution there were ... in all above five hundred settlements
scattered over practically all the American colonies."[10] Trained as
they were in the representative democracy of the Scottish kirk, thrown
on their own resources in the wilderness, mingling with the pioneers of
many other races, they took the lead in developing that Western type
which in politics and industry became ultimately the American type; yet
they retained their original character, and the American to-day is more
at home in Glasgow than in London.
CHAPTER III
THE NEGRO
Although the negro races of Africa extend across the continent and from
the Sudan to Cape Colony, yet the races which yielded the largest supply
of slaves for America were confined to a narrow stretch of the Atlantic
coast near the equator. For nearly two thousand miles from Cape Verde
the coast of Africa runs southeast and easterly, and then for another
thousand miles it runs to the south, forming the Gulf of Guinea, and
from a belt of land along this coast practically all the negro
immigrants to America have come. Here several large rivers, the Senegal,
the Gambia, the Niger, and the Congo--furnished harbors for slave ships
and routes for slave traders from the interior. Two circumstances, the
climate and the luxuriant vegetation, render this region hostile to
continuous exertion. The torrid heat and the excessive humidity weaken
the will and exterminate those who are too strenuous; but this same heat
and humidity, with the fertile soil, produce unparalleled crops of
bananas, yams, and grains. Thus nature conspires to produce a race
indolent, improvident, and contented. Seventy-five per cent of the
deaths are said to be executions for supposed witchcraft, which has
killed more men and women than the slave trade. Formerly cannibalism
prevailed, but it has now been largely stamped out by European
governments. The native governments are tribal, and the chiefs sustain
themselves by their physical prowess and the help of priests and
medicine men. Property is mainly in women and slaves, and inheritance is
through the female, except among the nobility of Dahomey, where
primogeniture rules. Written laws and records are unknown. The people
are unstable, indifferent to suffering, and "easily aroused to ferocity
by the sight of blood or under great fear." They exhibit aversion to
silence and solitude, love of rhythm, excitability, and lack of reserve.
All travellers speak of their impulsiveness, strong sexual passion, and
lack of will power.[11]
Such, in brief, were the land and the people that furnished one-sixth of
our total population and two-fifths of our Southern population. In
shifting such a people from the torrid climate of equatorial Africa to
the temperate regions of America, and from an environment of savagery to
one of civilization, changes more momentous than those of any other
migration have occurred. First, it was only the strongest physical
specimens who survived the horrible tests of the slave catcher and the
slave ship. Slavery, too, as a system, could use to best advantage those
who were docile and hardy, and not those who were independent and
feeble. Just as in the many thousand years of man's domestication of
animals, the breechy cow and the balky horse have been almost eliminated
by artificial selection, so slavery tended to transform the savage by
eliminating those who were self-willed, ambitious, and possessed of
individual initiative. Other races of immigrants, by contact with our
institutions, have been civilized--the negro has been only domesticated.
Democratic civilization offers an outlet for those who are morally and
intellectually vigorous enough to break away from the stolid mass of
their fellows; domestication dreads and suppresses them as dangerous
rebels. The very qualities of intelligence and manliness which are
essential for citizenship in a democracy were systematically expunged
from the negro race through two hundred years of slavery. And then, by
the cataclysm of a war in which it took no part, this race, after many
thousand years of savagery and two centuries of slavery, was suddenly
let loose into the liberty of citizenship and the electoral suffrage.
The world never before had seen such a triumph of dogmatism and
partizanship. It was dogmatism, because a theory of abstract equality
and inalienable rights of man took the place of education and the slow
evolution of moral character. It was partisanship, because a political
party, taking advantage of its triumph in civil war, sought to
perpetuate itself through the votes of its helpless beneficiaries. No
wonder that this fateful alliance of doctrinaires and partizans brought
fateful results, and that, after a generation of anarchy and race
hatred, the more fundamental task of education has only just begun.
True, there was a secondary object in view in granting the freedmen
suffrage. The thirteenth amendment, adopted in 1865, legalized and
extended the proclamation of emancipation, which had been a war measure.
But this was followed by servile and penal laws in all the Southern
states that looked like peonage in place of slavery.[12] Congress then
submitted the fourteenth amendment, which was adopted in 1867, creating
a new grade of citizenship--citizenship of the nation--and prohibiting
any state from depriving "any person of life, liberty, or property
without the due process of law" and from denying to any person "the
equal protection of the laws." But this was not enough. The next step
was the fifteenth amendment adopted in 1869, prohibiting any state from
denying the suffrage to citizens of the United States "on account of
race, color, or previous condition of servitude." Thus equality before
the law was to be protected by equality in making the law. This object
was a worthy one, and it added the appearance of logical necessity to
the theories of doctrinaires and the schemes of partisans. But it failed
because based on a wrong theory of the ballot. Suffrage means
self-government. Self-government means intelligence, self-control, and
capacity for coöperation. If these are lacking, the ballot only makes
way for the "boss," the corruptionist, or the oligarchy. The suffrage
must be earned, not merely conferred, if it is to be an instrument of
self-protection.
But it is the peculiar fate of race problems that they carry contestants
to bitter extremes and afford no field for constructive compromise.
Could the nation have adopted Lincoln's project of a hundred years, or
even thirty years, of gradual emancipation, it might have avoided both
the evils of war and the fallacies of self-government. But the spirit of
race aggrandisement that precipitated the one rendered the other
inevitable. With the negro suddenly made free by conquest, each fatal
step in reconstruction was forced by the one that preceded. The North,
the South, and the negro were placed in an impossible situation, and a
nation which dreaded negro suffrage in 1868[13] adopted it in 1869.
For eight years the government of the Southern states was in the hands
of the negroes. The result of turning the states over to ignorant and
untried voters was an enormous increase of debt without corresponding
public improvements or public enterprises. Even the negro governments
themselves began to repudiate these debts and they were almost wholly
repudiated by the whites after returning to power.
It is not necessary to dwell upon the methods by which the white voters
regained and kept control of the states. Admittedly it was through
intimidation, murder, ballot-box "stuffing," and false counting. The
negro vote has almost disappeared, and in more recent years that which
was accomplished through violence is perpetuated through law.
Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina, North Carolina, Alabama, and
Virginia have adopted so-called "educational" tests with such adroit
exceptions that white illiterates may vote, but negroes, whether
literate or illiterate, may be excluded from voting. As stated by a
prominent white Virginian, "the negro can vote if he has $300, or if he
is a veteran of the Federal or Confederate armies, or if he is a
profound constitutional lawyer." The fifteenth amendment, by decisions
of the United States Supreme Court, has been rendered inoperative, and
the fourteenth amendment, without helping the negro, for whom it was
designed,[14] has raised up government by private corporations which
never had been thought of as needing an amendment. With these decisions
it may be taken for granted that the negro will not again in the near
future enjoy the privilege of a free ballot.
This is a situation in which the North is as deeply interested as the
South. The South, during the period of slavery, through the privilege of
counting three-fifths of the slaves, enjoyed a predominance in Congress
and in presidential elections beyond its proportion of white voters. The
South now enjoys a greater privilege because it counts all the negroes.
The fourteenth amendment expressly provides for a situation like this.
It says:--
"When the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for
president and vice-president of the United States, representatives in
Congress, the executive and judicial officers of a state, or the members
of the legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of
such state, being twenty-one years of age and citizens of the United
States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion or
other crime, the basis of representation shall be reduced in the
proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the
whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such state."
Whether it will be possible under our form of government to carry out
this provision of the fourteenth amendment may be doubted, but that it
is fast becoming a question of live interest is certain. The educational
test is a rational test, but it is rational only when the state makes an
honest and diligent effort to equip every man to pass the test. The
former slave states spend $2.21 per child for educating the negroes, and
$4.92 per child for educating the whites.[15] The great lesson already
learned is that we must "begin over again" the preparation of the negro
for citizenship. This time the work will begin at the bottom by
educating the negro for the ballot, instead of beginning at the top by
giving him the ballot before he knows what it should do for him. What
shall be the nature of this education?
=Education and Self-help.=--We have argued that democracy must be based
upon intelligence, manliness, and coöperation. How can these qualities
be produced in a race just emerged from slavery?
Intelligence is more than books and letters--it is knowledge of the
forces of nature and ingenuity enough to use them for human service. The
negro is generally acknowledged to be lacking in "the mechanical idea."
In Africa he hardly knows the simplest mechanical principles. In America
the brightest of the negroes were trained during slavery by their
masters in the handicrafts, such as carpentry, shoemaking, spinning,
weaving, blacksmithing, tailoring, and so on. A plantation became a
self-supporting unit under the oversight and discipline of the whites.
But the work of the negro artisans was careless and inefficient. The
negro blacksmith fastened shoes to the plantation mule, but the horses
were taken to the white blacksmith in town. Since emancipation the young
generation has not learned the mechanical trades to the same extent as
the slave generations. Moreover, as machinery supplants tools and
factories supplant handicrafts, the negro is left still farther behind.
"White men," says a negro speaker,[16] "are bringing science and art
into menial occupations and lifting them beyond our reach. In my boyhood
the walls and ceilings were whitewashed each spring by colored men; now
this is done by a white man managing a steam carpet-cleaning works.
Then the laundry work was done by negroes; now they are with difficulty
able to manage the new labor-saving machinery." Even in the
non-mechanical occupations the negro is losing where he once had a
monopoly. In Chicago "there is now scarcely a negro barber in the
business district. Nearly all the janitor work in the large buildings
has been taken away from them by the Swedes. White men and women as
waiters have supplanted colored men in nearly all the first-class hotels
and restaurants. Practically all of the shoe polishing is now done by
Greeks."[17]
Individual negroes have made great progress, but what we need to know is
whether the masses of the negroes have advanced. The investigators of
Atlanta University, in summarizing the reports of three hundred and
forty-four employers of negroes, conclude: "There are a large number of
negro mechanics all over the land, but especially in the South. Some of
these are progressive, efficient workmen. More are careless, slovenly,
and ill-trained. There are signs of lethargy among these artisans, and
work is slipping from them in some places; in others they are awakening
and seizing the opportunities of the new industrial South."[18]
The prejudice of white workmen has undoubtedly played a part in
excluding the negro from mechanical trades, but the testimony of large
employers, who have no race prejudice where profits can be made, also
shows that low-priced negro labor often costs more than high-priced
white labor. The iron and steel mills of Alabama have no advantage in
labor cost over mills of Pennsylvania and Ohio.
The foundation of intelligence for the modern workingman is his
understanding of mechanics. Not until he learns through manual and
technical training to handle the forces of nature can the workingman
rise to positions of responsibility and independence. This is as
important in agricultural labor, to which the negro is largely
restricted, as in manufactures. Intelligence in mechanics leads to
intelligence in economics and politics, and the higher wages of
mechanical intelligence furnish the resources by which the workman can
demand and secure his political and economic rights.
The second requisite of democracy is independence and manliness. These
are moral qualities based on will power and steadfastness in pursuit of
a worthy object. But these qualities are not produced merely by
exhortation and religious revivals. They have a more prosaic and secular
foundation. History shows that no class or nation has risen to
independence without first accumulating property. However much we
disparage the qualities of greed and selfishness which the rush for
wealth has made obnoxious, we must acknowledge that the solid basis of
the virtues is thrift. The improvidence of the negro is notorious. His
neglect of his horse, his mule, his machinery, his eagerness to spend
his earnings on finery, his reckless purchase of watermelons, chickens,
and garden stuff, when he might easily grow them on his own patch of
ground,--these and many other incidents of improvidence explain the
constant dependence of the negro upon his employer and his creditor.
There are, of course, notable exceptions where negroes have accumulated
property through diligent attention and careful oversight.[19] These are
all the more notable when it is remembered that the education of the
negro has directed his energies to the honors of the learned professions
rather than to the commonplace virtues of ownership, and that one great
practical experiment in thrift--the Freedman's Bank--went down through
dishonesty and incapacity. With the more recent development of the
remarkable institutions of Hampton and Tuskegee and their emphasis on
manual training and property accumulation, it is to be expected that
these basic qualities of intelligence and independence will receive
practical and direct encouragement.
Coöperation is the third and capital equipment for attaining the rights
of citizenship. There are two forms of coöperation--a lower and a
higher. The lower is that of the chief or the boss who marshals his
ignorant followers through fear or spoils. The higher is that of
self-government where those who join together do so through their own
intelligence and mutual confidence. In the lower form there are
personal jealousies and factional contests which prevent united action
under elected leaders. Negro bosses and foremen are more despotic than
white bosses. The Colored Farmers' Alliance depended upon a white man
for leadership. The white "carpet-baggers" organized the negro vote in
the reconstruction period. The negro was in this low stage of
coöperation because he was jealous or distrustful of his fellow-negro
and could rally together only under the banner of a leader whom he could
not depose. With the growth of intelligence and moral character there
comes a deepening sense of the need of organization as well as leaders
of their own race whom they can trust. The most hopeful indication of
progress for the negroes is the large number of voluntary religious,
beneficial, and insurance societies whose membership is limited to those
of their own color.[20]
Liberty has always come through organization. The free cities of Europe
were simply the guilds of peasants and merchants who organized to
protect themselves against the feudal lords and bishops. Latterly they
gained a voice in parliaments as the "third estate" and established our
modern representative democracy. The modern trade unions have become a
power far in excess of their numbers through the capacity of the workman
to organize. With the modest beginnings of self-organization among
negroes the way is opening for their more effective participation in
the higher opportunities of our civilization.
[Illustration: COUNTIES HAVING A LARGER PROPORTION OF NEGROES IN 1900
THAN IN 1880]
The negro trade unionist has not as yet shown the organizing capacity of
other races. Only among the mine workers, the longshoremen, and
bricklayers are they to be found in considerable numbers, although the
carpenters have negro organizers. But in most of these cases the negro
is being organized by the white man not so much for his own protection
as for the protection of the white workman. If the negro is brought to
the position of refusing to work for lower wages than the white man he
has taken the most difficult step in organization; for the labor union
requires, more than any other economic or business association in modern
life, reliance upon the steadfastness of one's fellows. Unfortunately,
when the negro demands the same wages as white men, his industrial
inferiority leads the employer to take white men in his place, and here
again we see how fundamental is manual and technical intelligence as a
basis for other progress.[21]
It must not be inferred because we have emphasized these qualities of
intelligence--manliness and coöperation as preparatory to political
rights--that the negro race should be deprived of the suffrage until
such time as its members acquire these qualities. Many individuals have
already acquired them. To exclude such individuals from the suffrage is
to shut the door of hope to all. An honest educational test honestly
enforced on both whites and blacks is the simplest rough-and-ready
method for measuring the progress of individuals in these qualities of
citizenship. There is no problem before the American people more vital
to democratic institutions than that of keeping the suffrage open to the
negro and at the same time preparing the negro to profit by the
suffrage.
Neither should the negro be excluded from the higher education.
Leadership is just as necessary in a democracy as in a tribe.
Self-government is not suppression of leaders but coöperation with them.
The true leader is one who knows his followers because he has suffered
with them, but who can point the way out and inspire them with
confidence. He feels what they feel, but can state what they cannot
express. He is their spokesman, defender, and organizer. Not a social
class nor a struggling race can reach equality with other classes and
races until its leaders can meet theirs on equal terms. It cannot depend
on others, but must raise up leaders from its own ranks. This is the
problem of higher education--not that scholastic education that ends in
itself, but that broad education that equips for higher usefulness. If
those individuals who are competent to become lawyers, physicians,
teachers, preachers, organizers, guides, innovators, experimenters, are
prevented from getting the right education, then there is little hope
for progress among the race as a whole, in the intelligence, manliness,
and coöperation needed for self-government.
=Growth of Negro Population.=--After the census of 1880 it was confidently
asserted that the negro population was increasing more rapidly than the
white population. But these assertions, since the census of 1890, have
disappeared. It then became apparent that the supposed increase from
1870 to 1880 was based on a defective count in 1870, the first census
after emancipation. In reality the negro element, including mulattoes,
during the one hundred and ten years of census taking, has steadily
declined in proportion to the white element. Although negroes in
absolute numbers have increased from 757,000 in 1790 to 4,442,000 in
1860, and 8,834,000 in 1900, yet in 1790 they were one-fifth of the
total population; in 1860 they were one-seventh and in 1900 only
one-ninth.
It is naturally suggested that this relative decrease in negro
population has been owing to the large immigration of whites, but the
inference is unwarranted. In the Southern states the foreign element has
increased less rapidly than the native white element, yet it is in the
Southern states that the negro is most clearly falling behind. In the
twenty years from 1880 to 1900 the whites in eighteen Southern states
without the aid of foreign immigration increased 57 per cent and the
negroes only 33 per cent.[22] In only six Southern states, West
Virginia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Arkansas, have
the negroes, during the past ten years, increased more rapidly than the
whites, and in only three of these states, Alabama, Mississippi, and
Arkansas, was the relative increase significant. In but two states,
South Carolina and Mississippi, does the negro element predominate, and
in another state, Louisiana, a majority were negroes in 1890, but a
majority were whites in 1900. "At the beginning of the nineteenth
century the Southern negroes were increasing much faster than the
Southern whites. At the end of it they were increasing only about
three-fifths as fast."[23]
This redistribution of negroes is an interesting and significant fact
regarding the race and has a bearing on its future. Two movements are
taking place, first to the fertile bottom lands of the Southern states,
second to the cities, both North and South. Mr. Carl Kelsey has shown
this movement to the lowlands in an interesting way.[24] He has prepared
a geological map of Alabama, which with Mississippi has received the
largest accession of negroes, and has shown the density of negro
population according to the character of the soil. In this map it
appears that the prairie and valley regions contain a proportion of 50
per cent to 90 per cent negroes, while the sand hill and pine levels
contain only 10 per cent to 50 per cent, and the piedmont or foothill
region less than 10 per cent. A similar segregation is found in other
Southern states, especially the alluvial districts of Mississippi and
Arkansas. In these fertile sections toward which the negroes gravitate,
the crops are enormous, and Mr. Kelsey points out a curious
misconception in the census summary, wherein the inference is drawn that
negroes are better farmers than whites because they raise larger crops.
"No wonder the negroes' crops are larger," when the whites farm the hill
country and the negroes till the delta, which "will raise twice as much
cotton per acre as the hills." Furthermore the negro, whether tenant or
owner, is under the close supervision of a white landlord or creditor,
who in self-protection keeps control of him, whereas the white farmer is
left to succeed or fail without expert guidance.
The migration of negroes to the cities is extremely significant. In ten
Southern states the proportion of the colored population was almost
exactly the same in 1890 as it had been in 1860,--namely, 36 per
cent,--yet in sixteen cities of those states, as shown by Mr.
Hoffman,[25] the colored proportion increased from 19 per cent in 1860
to 29 per cent in 1890. This relative increase, however, did not
continue after 1890, for, according to the census of 1900, the
proportion of negroes in those cities was still 29 per cent. During the
past decade the negroes have increased relatively faster in Northern
cities. The white population of Chicago increased threefold from 1880 to
1900, and the colored population fivefold. The white population of
Philadelphia during the same period increased 50 per cent and the
colored population 100 per cent. In the thirty-eight largest cities of
the country the negro population in ten years increased 38 per cent and
the white population, including foreign immigration, increased 33 per
cent. In thirty Northern and border cities during the past census decade
the negroes gained 167,000, and in twenty Southern cities they gained
80,000.[26]
The Southern whites also are moving from the South, and in larger
proportions than the negroes, though the movement of both is small. In
1900, 7 per cent of the whites of Southern birth lived in the North and
West and only 4.3 per cent of the negroes of Southern birth. But the
negroes who go North go to the cities, and the whites to the country.
Three-fifths (58 per cent) of these northbound negroes moved to the
larger cities and only one-fourth (26 per cent) of the northbound
whites.[27]
The accompanying map, derived from the census of 1900,[28] shows clearly
both of these movements of negro population. The shaded areas indicate
the counties where negroes formed a larger proportion of the population
in 1900 than they did twenty years earlier, in 1880. Here can be seen
the movement to the low and fertile lands of the South and the cities of
the North and South. There are but two areas in California and Colorado,
not included on the map, where the population of negroes has increased,
and one of these contains the city of Los Angeles.
Were the negroes in the cities to scatter through all the sections, the
predominating numbers of the white element might have an elevating
influence, but, instead, the negroes congregate in the poorer wards,
where both poverty and vice prevail. Hoffman has shown that two-thirds
of the negroes in Chicago live in three wards, which contain all the
houses of ill-fame in that part of the city. The same is true of
Philadelphia, Boston, and Cincinnati.[29] In these sections negro
prostitution has become an established institution, catering to the
Italian and other lower grades of immigrants, and supporting in idleness
many negro men as solicitors.
We have seen that the negro population has not kept pace with the native
white population. The reason is found in the smaller excess of births
over deaths. Statistics of births are almost entirely lacking in the
United States. Statistics of deaths are complete for only portions of
Northern states and a few Southern cities, containing, in 1900, in all,
27,500,000 whites and 1,180,000 negroes. Of this number, 20,500,000
whites and 1,100,000 negroes lived in cities, so that the showing which
the census is able to give is mainly for cities North and South and for
rural sections only in the North.[30] It appears that for every 1000
colored persons living in these cities the deaths in 1900 were 31.1,
while for every 1000 white persons the deaths were only 17.9. That is to
say, the colored death-rate was 73 per cent greater than the white
death-rate.
In the rural districts there was much less difference. The colored
death-rate was 19.1 and the white death-rate 15.3, a colored excess of
25 per cent.
=Morals and Environment.=--In explaining the excessive colored mortality
there are two classes of opinions. One explains it by social conditions,
the other by race traits. The one points to environment, the other to
moral character. The one is socialistic, the other individualistic.
These different views exist among colored people themselves, and one of
the encouraging signs is the scientific and candid interest in the
subject taken by them under the leadership of Atlanta University. A
colored physician who takes the first view states his case
forcibly:[31]--
"Is it any wonder that we die faster than our white brother when he gets
the first and best attention, while we are neglected on all sides? They
have the best wards and treatment at the hospital, while we must take it
second hand or not at all; they have all the homes for the poor and
friendless, we have none; they have a home for fallen women, we have
none; they have the public libraries where they can get and read books
on hygiene and other subjects pertaining to health, we have no such
privileges; they have the gymnasiums where they can go and develop
themselves physically, we have not; they have all the parks where they
and their children can go in the hot summer days and breathe the pure,
cool air, but for fear we might catch a breath of that air and live,
they put up large signs, which read thus, 'For white people only'; they
live in the best homes, while we live in humble ones; they live in the
cleanest and healthiest parts of the city, while we live in the
sickliest and filthiest parts of the city; the streets on which they
live are cleaned once and twice a day, the streets on which we live are
not cleaned once a month, and some not at all; besides, they have plenty
of money with which they can get any physician they wish, any medicine
they need, and travel for their health when necessary; all of these
blessings we are deprived of. Now, my friends, in the face of all these
disadvantages, do you not think we are doing well to stay here as long
as we do?"
Another colored writer, less eloquent, but not less accurate, in
summarizing the statistics collected under the guidance of Atlanta
University concludes:[32]--
"Overcrowding in tenements and houses occupied by colored people does
not exist to any great extent, and is less than was supposed.
"In comparison with white women, an excess of colored women support
their families, or contribute to the family support, by occupation which
takes them much of their time from home, to the neglect of their
children.
"Environment and the sanitary condition of houses are not chiefly
responsible for the excessive mortality among colored people.
"Ignorance and disregard of the laws of health are responsible for a
large proportion of this excessive mortality."
It is pointed out by these colored students and by many others that the
excessive mortality of colored people is owing to pulmonary consumption,
scrofula, and syphilis, all of which are constitutional; and to infant
mortality due also to constitutional and congenital disease. The census
of 1900 reports for a portion of the Northern states that for every 1000
white children under five years of age there were 49.7 deaths in one
year, and for every 1000 colored children under five years there were
118.5 deaths, an excess of negro infant mortality of 137 per cent.[33]
The census also reports that negro deaths in cities owing to consumption
are proportionately 2.8 times as many as white deaths,[34] deaths owing
to pneumonia are 89 per cent greater,[35] while deaths owing to
contagious causes, such as measles, scarlet fever, diphtheria,[36] are
but slightly greater or actually less than the white deaths in
proportion to population. In the city of Charleston, where mortality
statistics of negroes were compiled before the war, it has been shown
that from 1822 to 1848 the colored death-rate from consumption was a
trifle less than the white, but since 1865 the white mortality from that
cause has decreased 38 per cent, while the negro mortality has increased
70 per cent.[37] The death-rates from consumption in Charleston in 1900
were 189.8 for 100,000 whites and 647.7 for 100,000 negroes, an excess
of 241 per cent. The lowest negro death-rate reported from consumption
in cities is 378.5 for Memphis, but in that city the white death-rate
from the same cause is 169.9, a negro excess of 123 per cent.[38]
At a conference held at Atlanta University, Professor Harris, of Fisk
University, concluded:[39]--
"I have now covered the ground to which our excessive death-rate is
mainly due; namely, pulmonary diseases, especially consumption and
pneumonia, scrofula, venereal diseases, and infant mortality. If we
eliminate these diseases, our excessive death-rate will be a thing of
the past.... While I do not depreciate sanitary regulations and a
knowledge of hygienic laws, I am convinced that a _sine qua non_ of a
change for the better in the negro's physical condition is a higher
social morality.... From the health reports of all our large Southern
cities we learn that a considerable amount of our infant mortality is
due to inanition, infantile debility, and infantile marasmus. Now what
is the case in regard to these diseases? The fact is that they are not
diseases at all, but merely the names of symptoms due to enfeebled
constitutions and congenital diseases, inherited from parents suffering
from the effects of sexual immorality and debauchery.... It is true that
much of the moral laxity which exists among us to-day arose out of
slavery.... But to explain it is not to excuse it. It is no longer our
misfortune as it was before the war; it is our sin, the wages of which
is our excessive number of deaths.... The presence of tubercular and
scrofulous diseases, consumption, syphilis, and leprosy, has caused the
weaker nations of the earth to succumb before the rising tide of
Christian civilization.... The history of nations teaches us that
neither war, nor famine, nor pestilence, exterminates them so completely
as do sexual vices."
CHAPTER IV
NINETEENTH CENTURY ADDITIONS
It is only since the year 1820 that the government of the United States
has kept a record of alien passengers arriving in this country. For
several years following 1820 the immigration was so slight as to be
almost negligible. It was not until 1820 that there were more than
20,000 arrivals. So accustomed have we become to large figures of
immigration that nothing less than 100,000 seems worth noting, and this
figure was not reached until 1842. Since then there have been only four
years of less than 100,000, and two of these were years of the Civil
War.
A striking fact which first attracts the attention of one who examines
the statistics since 1840 is the close sympathy between immigration and
the industrial prosperity and depression of this country. Indeed, so
close is the connection that many who comment on the matter have held
that immigration during the past century has been strictly an industrial
or economic phenomenon, depending on the opportunities in this country,
and that the religious and political causes which stimulated earlier
immigration no longer hold good.
A curved line on the accompanying chart has been drawn so as to show
the relative numbers of immigrants since 1800, and another line shows
the movement of imports of merchandise per capita of the population. The
latter, except for tariff changes, is a fair index of the cycles of
prosperity and depression. By following these two lines on the chart we
notice the coincidence is close, except for a few years prior to the
Civil War. Both movements reached high points in 1873, and fell to very
low points in 1879; then rose in 1882 and fell in 1885; then reached
another high point in 1892 and a low point in 1897; and finally, the
present period of prosperity and heavy imports brings the largest
immigration in the history of the country.
In following the history of immigration by races we shall see to what
extent the alleged coincidence between prosperity and immigration may be
counted as a social law. Probably in the middle of the century it was
not so much the opportunities for employment in this country as it was
conditions in Europe that drove people to our shores. When we come to
inquire as to the nationalities which constituted immigration at that
period, we shall find what these causes were. In 1846 occurred the
unparalleled potato rot in Ireland, when the year's crop of what had
become the sole food staple of the peasantry of that island was entirely
lost. The peasants had been reduced to subsistence on the cheapest of
all staples through the operations of a system of landlordism scarcely
ever paralleled on a large scale as a means of exploiting tenants.
It was found that land used for potatoes would support three times the
number of people as the same land sown to wheat, and the small tenants
or the cotter peasants paid the landlord a higher rent than could be
obtained from larger cultivators. Reduced to a diet of potatoes by an
economic system imposed by an alien race, the Irish people are one of
the many examples which we find throughout our studies of a subject
people driven to emigration by the economic injustices of a dominant
race. We shall find the same at a later time in Austria-Hungary, whence
the conquered Slav peoples are fleeing from the discrimination and
impositions of the ruling Magyar. We shall find it in Russia, whence the
Jew, the Finn, and the German are escaping from the oppression of the
Slav; and we shall find it in Turkey, whence the Armenian and the Syrian
flee from the exactions of the Turk. Just so was it in Ireland in the
latter half of the decade, 1840 to 1850, and the contention of the
apologist for England that the famine which drove the Irish across the
seas was an act of God, is but a weak effort to charge to a higher power
the sufferings of a heartless system devised to convert the utmost life
and energy of a subject race into gold for their exploiters. Much more
nearly true of the part played by the Divine hand in this catastrophe is
the report of the Society of Friends in Ireland, saying that the
mysterious dispensation with which their country had been visited was
"a means permitted by an All-wise Providence to exhibit more strikingly
the unsound state of its social condition."
[Illustration: MOVEMENT OF IMMIGRANTS, IMPORTS OF MERCHANDISE PER
CAPITA, AND IMMIGRANTS PER 10,000 POPULATION--1800 TO 1906.]
Thus we have an explanation of the incentives under which, even in a
period of industrial depression in this country, the unfortunate Irish
flocked hither. It is true that the population of Ireland had increased
during the century preceding the famine at a rate more rapid than that
of any other country of Europe. It was 3,000,000 in 1790, and over
8,000,000 in the year of the famine. At the present time it is only
5,000,000. The potato, above all other crops, enables the cultivator to
live from hand to mouth, and coupled with a landlord system which takes
away all above mere subsistence, this "de-moralizing esculent" aided the
apparent overpopulation. Certainly the dependence of an entire people on
a single crop was a most precarious condition.
During the five years, 1846 to 1850, more than a million and a quarter
of Irish emigrants left the ports of the United Kingdom, and during the
ten years, 1845 to 1855, more than a million and a quarter came to the
United States. So great a number could not have found means of
transportation had it not been for the enormous contributions of
government and private societies for assistance. Here began that
exportation of paupers on a large scale against which our country has
protested and finally legislated. Even this enormous migration was not
greatly in excess of the number that actually perished from starvation
or from the diseases incident thereto. The Irish migration since that
time has never reached so high a point, although it made a second great
advance in 1882, succeeding another famine, and it has now fallen far
below that of eastern races of Europe. Altogether the total Irish
immigration of over four million since 1821 places that race second of
the contributors to our foreign-born population, and, compared with its
own numbers, it leads the world, for in sixty years it has sent to us
half as many people as it contained at the time of its greatest
population. Scarcely another country has sent more than one-fifth.
Looking over a period of nearly three centuries, it is probably true
that the Germans have crossed the ocean in larger numbers than any other
race. We have already noted the large migration during the eighteenth
century, and the official records show that since 1820 there have
entered our ports more than 5,200,000 Germans, while Ireland was sending
4,000,000 and Great Britain 3,300,000.
The German migration of the nineteenth century was quite distinct in
character from that of the preceding century. The colonial migration was
largely induced on religious grounds, but that of the past century was
political and economic, with at first a notable prominence of
materialism respecting religion. From the time of the Napoleonic wars to
the revolution of 1848, the governments of Germany were despotic in
character, supporting an established church, while at the same time the
marvellous growth of the universities produced a class of educated
liberals. In the revolution of 1848 these took a leading part, and
although constitutional governments were then established, yet those who
had been prominent in the popular uprisings found their position
intolerable under the reactionary governments that followed. The
political exiles sought America, bringing their liberalism in politics
and religion, and forming with their descendants in American cities an
intellectual aristocracy. They sprang from the middle classes of
Germany, and latterly, when the wars with Austria and France had
provoked the spirit of militarism, thousands of peasants looked to
emigration for escape from military service. The severe industrial
depression of 1873-79 added a powerful contributing cause. Thus there
were two periods when German migration culminated; first in 1854, on
political grounds, second in 1882, on military and economic grounds.
Since the latter date a significant decline has ensued, and the present
migration of 32,000 from Germany is mainly the remnants of families
seeking here their relatives. A larger number of German immigrants,
55,000, comes from Austria-Hungary and Russia, those from the latter
country being driven from the Baltic provinces and the Volga settlements
by the "Russianizing" policy of the Slav.
=The Changing Character of European Immigration.=--Besides the Germans
and the Irish, the races which contributed the largest numbers of
immigrants during the middle years of the nineteenth century were the
English and Scandinavian. After the decline during the depression of
1879 there was an increase of all those races in 1882, a year when
nearly 800,000 immigrants arrived. At about that time began a remarkable
change in the character of immigration destined to produce profound
consequences.
This change was the rapid shifting of the sources of immigration from
Western to Eastern and Southern Europe. A line drawn across the
continent of Europe from northeast to southwest, separating the
Scandinavian Peninsula, the British Isles, Germany, and France from
Russia, Austria-Hungary, Italy, and Turkey, separates countries not only
of distinct races but also of distinct civilizations. It separates
Protestant Europe from Catholic Europe; it separates countries of
representative institutions and popular government from absolute
monarchies; it separates lands where education is universal from lands
where illiteracy predominates; it separates manufacturing countries,
progressive agriculture, and skilled labor from primitive hand
industries, backward agriculture, and unskilled labor; it separates an
educated, thrifty peasantry from a peasantry scarcely a single
generation removed from serfdom; it separates Teutonic races from Latin,
Slav, Semitic, and Mongolian races. When the sources of American
immigration are shifted from the Western countries so nearly allied to
our own, to Eastern countries so remote in the main attributes of
Western civilization, the change is one that should challenge the
attention of every citizen. Such a change has occurred, and it needs
only a comparison of the statistics of immigration for the year 1882
with those of 1902 and 1906 to see its extent. While the total number of
immigrants from Europe and Asiatic Turkey was approximately equal in
1882 and 1902, as shown in the accompanying table, yet in 1882 Western
Europe furnished 87 per cent of the immigrants and in 1902 only 22 per
cent, while the share of Southeastern Europe and Asiatic Turkey
increased from 13 per cent in 1882 to 78 per cent in 1902. During twenty
years the immigration of the Western races most nearly related to those
which have fashioned American institutions declined more than 75 per
cent, while the immigrants of Eastern and Southern races, untrained in
self-government, increased nearly sixfold. For the year 1906 the
proportions remain the same, although in the four years the total
immigration had increased two-thirds.
IMMIGRATION FROM EUROPE AND ASIATIC TURKEY BY COUNTRIES, 1882, 1902, 1906
1882 1902 1905
------------- ------------- -------------
NUMBER PER NUMBER PER NUMBER PER
CENT CENT CENT
Total Europe and
Asiatic Turkey 647,082 100 622,987 100 1,024,719 100
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Great Britain and
Ireland 179,423 27.7 46,036 7.4 102,241 10.0
Belgium 1,431 .2 2,577 .4 5,099 .5
Denmark 11,618 1.8 5,660 .9 7,741 .8
France 6,003 .9 5,117 .8 9,386 .9
Germany 250,630 38.7 26,304 4.2 37,564 3.7
Netherlands 9,517 1.1 2,284 .4 4,946 .5
Norway 29,101 4.5 17,404 2.8 21,730 2.1
Sweden 64,607 10.0 30,894 5.0 23,310 2.3
Switzerland 10,884 1.7 2,344 .4 3,846 .4
Total Western Europe 563,174 87.0 136,620 22.0 215,863 21.7
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Italy 32,159 5.0 178,375 28.6 273,120 26.7
Portugal 42 [41] 5,307 .9 8,517 .8
Spain 378 [41] 975 .1 1,921 .1
Austria-Hungary 29,150 4.5 171,989 27.6 265,138 25.9
Russia 21,590 3.3 107,347 17.2 215,665 21.0
Greece [40]73 [41] 8,104 1.3 19,489 1.9
Roumania [40]77 [41] 7,196 1.2 4,476 .5
Servia, Bulgaria,
and Montenegro [41] 851 [41] 4,666 .5
Turkey in Europe [40]86 [41] 187 [41] 9,510 .9
Turkey in Asia 82 [41] 6,223 1.0 6,354 .6
Total Southern and
Eastern Europe and
Asiatic Turkey 83,637 13.0 486,367 78.0 808,856 78.9
----------------------------------------------------------------------
=Italians.=--It was at this period that Italian immigration first became
noticeable. Prior to 1880 this stream had been but the merest trickle,
which now has become the greatest of all the foreign tributaries to our
population. In 1873 the Italians for the first time reached 8000 in
number, but they fell to 3000 in 1876 and so continued in moderate
proportions, but suddenly in 1880 jumped to 12,000, and in 1882 to
32,000. Falling off again with the industrial depression to 13,000 in
1885, they reached 76,000 in 1891, and then with another depression to
35,000 in 1895 they have now gone forward by leaps to the high mark of
287,000.[42] The Italians seem destined to rival the Germans and Irish
as the leading contributors to our social amalgam. Of course only a
small part are as yet women and children, but this is because the
immigration is in its early and pioneer stages. The women and children
follow rapidly when the men have saved enough money to send for them.
One-fourth of the emigration is on tickets and money furnished by
friends and relatives in the United States.[43]
The immigrants from Italy differ from those from Austria, Russia,
Hungary, and Ireland, in that they are not driven forth by the
oppressions of a dominant race, but as a result of the economic and
political conditions of a united people. This does not indeed exclude
oppression as a cause of expatriation, but it transfers the oppression
from that of one race to that of one class upon another. By far the
larger portion of Italian immigration comes from the southern provinces
and from Sicily, where the power of the landlords is greatest. In these
provinces of large estates held by the nobility, the rents have been
forced to the highest notch, an orange garden paying as high as $160 per
year per acre, and the leases are short, so that the tenant has little
to encourage improvement.[44] In many cases the land is rented by large
capitalist farmers, who raise therefrom cattle, wheat, and olives, and
are prosperous men. But their prosperity is extracted from the miserable
wages of their laborers. The agricultural laborer gets from 8 cents to
32 cents a day through the year and 10 cents to 38 cents through the
summer. Unskilled laborers get 25 cents to 50 cents a day, and such
skilled trades as masons and carpenters get only 27 cents to $1.40 a
day. This wide range of wages corresponds generally with the South and
North, the lowest rates being in the South and the highest toward the
North. In France and England wages are two and one-half times higher
than in Italy, while in Germany they are about 30 per cent to 50 per
cent higher.
Nor must it be supposed that the cost of living is low to correspond
with the low wages. This is largely owing to the exaggerated system of
indirect taxes. Although wheat is a staple crop, yet the peasants eat
corn in preference, because, for a given expenditure, it gives a
stronger sense of repletion. Of wheat and corn meal together the Italian
peasant eats in a year only three-fourths as much as the inmate of an
English poorhouse. Of meat the peasant in Apulia gets no more than ten
pounds a year, while the English workhouse pauper gets fifty-seven
pounds. The local taxes on flour, bread, and macaroni are as high as 10
or 15 per cent of the value, and the state tax on imported wheat is
nearly 50 per cent of its value. The consumption of sugar has decreased
one-fourth since heavy duties were imposed to protect native beet sugar,
and it averages barely over five pounds per head. The consumption in the
United States is sixty-five pounds per head. The iniquitous salt tax
raises the price of salt from eleven pounds for two cents to one pound
for two cents, and the peasants sometimes cook their corn meal in sea
water, although this is smuggling. What the peasants lack in grain and
meat they strive to supply by vegetables, and the proportion of
vegetables, peas, and beans consumed is greater than that for any other
country of Europe. The peasants drink no beer, spirits, tea, nor coffee,
but the average annual consumption of wine is twenty gallons a head.
Food alone costs the peasants 85 per cent of their wages, whereas it
costs the German peasant 62 per cent and the American workman 41 per
cent. The poor and working classes pay over one-half the taxes,
amounting, even without wine, to 10 or 20 per cent of their wages. There
are in the south and Sardinia some 13,000 sales of land a year on
distress for non-payment of taxes, and the expropriated owners become
tenants. Several villages in Southern Italy have been almost wholly
abandoned and one village has recently announced its intention of
removing itself entire to one of the South American republics.[45] The
rich escape taxation, which is laid largely on consumption. Besides the
state tax on imports, each city and town has its _octroi_, or import
tax, on everything brought into the city. These "protective duties rob
the poor to fill the pockets of the rich landlord and manufacturer."
Since 1870 wealth has increased 17 per cent and taxes 30 per cent. Taxes
are nearly one-fifth of the nation's income, against one-twelfth in
Germany, one-sixteenth in England, and one-fifteenth in the United
States. Wages rose from 1860 to 1885, but since 1890 they have fallen.
The army and navy are the greatest drain on the resources of the people.
They cost one-fourth more of the national income than do the armies and
navies of France and Germany. Eighty million dollars a year for military
expenditures in Italy is over 5 per cent of the income of the people,
whereas $194,000,000 for the same purpose in the United States is less
than 2 per cent of our incomes. In the Triple Alliance of Germany,
Austria, and Italy, the latter country crushes its peasants in order to
make a showing by the side of its wealthier partners. The army takes
every able-bodied peasant from industry into barracks and drills for two
years of his best vigor. But the long line of exposed coast and the
general military situation in Europe make it unlikely that Italy for
many years can shake off this incubus.
In addition to all these economic and political causes of pressure,
there is another cause of a more profound nature, the rapid growth of
population. Strange as it may seem, the very poverty of Italy increases
the tendency to a high birth-rate, and the rate is highest in the very
districts where illiteracy and poverty are greatest. Only the great
number of deaths produced by poverty and lack of sanitation prevents the
increase of population from exceeding that of the more rapidly growing
countries of Germany, Great Britain, and Scandinavia. It is not among
those classes and nations, like the middle classes and the thrifty
people of France, that the largest number of children are born, but it
is among those ignorant and low-standard peoples to whom the future
offers no better prospect for their children than for themselves. Early
marriages and large families are both a result and a cause of poverty.
Parts of Lombardy and Venetia have a thicker population than any other
European country except Belgium, which is really not a country, but a
manufacturing centre of Europe. The density of population in Italy is in
excess of that of Germany, France, India, and even China. It is exceeded
only by the islands of Great Britain and Japan, and the states of Rhode
Island and Massachusetts.[46] Emigration is the only immediate relief
from this congestion. All other remedies which operate through raising
the intelligence and the standards of living require years for
appreciable results, but meanwhile the persistent birth-rate crowds new
competitors into the new openings and multiplies the need of economic
and political reforms before they can be put into effect. Emigration is
a relief ready at hand, but it is not a lessening of population. For
many years to come Italy will furnish a surplus population to overflow
to America.[47] Emigration is also a means of revenue for the mother
country. For it is estimated that the peasants in foreign countries send
back to their families and relatives $30,000,000 to $80,000,000 each
year, and many of them return with what to them is a fortune, and with
new ideas of industry and progress, to purchase and improve a farm and
cottage for their declining years. It is said that already there are
several small country towns in Southern Italy which have risen from
squalor to something of prosperity through the money and influence of
those who have come home. This temporary emigration is probably over
150,000 each year going abroad or to adjoining countries expecting to
return.
Besides this temporary emigration there is an equally large permanent
emigration. This is of two kinds, almost as entirely distinct from each
other as the emigration from two separate nations. The North Italian is
an educated, skilled artisan, coming from a manufacturing section and
largely from the cities. He is Teutonic in blood and appearance. The
South Italian is an illiterate peasant from the great landed estates,
with wages less than one-third his northern compatriot. He descends with
less mixture from the ancient inhabitants of Italy. Unhappily for us,
the North Italians do not come to the United States in considerable
numbers, but they betake themselves to Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil in
about the same numbers as the South Italians come to us. It is estimated
that in those three countries there are 3,000,000 Italians in a total
population of 23,000,000, and they are mainly derived from the north of
Italy. Surrounded by the unenterprising Spanish and Portuguese, they
have shown themselves to be the industrial leaders of the country. Some
of the chief buildings, banks, flour mills, textile mills, and a
majority of the wheat farms of Argentina belong to Italians. They are
one-third of the population of Buenos Ayres and own one-half of the
commercial capital of that city. They become lawyers, engineers, members
of parliament, and an Italian by descent has been president of the
Republic of Argentina, while other Italians have been ministers of war
and education.[48] While these North Italians, with their enterprise,
intelligence, and varied capacities, go to South America, we receive
the South Italians, who are nearly the most illiterate of all immigrants
at the present time, the most subservient to superiors, the lowest in
their standards of living, and at the same time the most industrious and
thrifty of all common laborers.
[Illustration: ALIENS AWAITING ADMISSION AT ELLIS ISLAND]
=Austria-Hungary.=--Next to that from Italy the immigration from the
Austro-Hungarian Empire in recent decades has reached the largest
dimensions. While Italy sent 273,000 people in 1906, Austria-Hungary
sent 265,000 in that year and 276,000 the year before. Like the
immigration from Italy, this increase has occurred since 1880. Prior to
that date the largest number reported from Austria-Hungary was 9000 in
1874.
While these figures compare with those of the Italians, yet, unlike the
Italians, they refer to a congeries of races and languages distinct one
from another. The significance of Austro-Hungarian immigration is
revealed only when we analyze it by races. The race map of this empire
shows at once the most complicated social mosaic of all modern nations.
Here we see, not that mixture of races and assimilation of language
which in our own country has evolved a vigorous, united people, but a
juxtaposition of hostile races and a fixity of language held together
only by the outside pressure of Russia, Germany, Italy, and Turkey. This
conflict of races has made the politics of the empire nearly
incomprehensible to foreigners, and has aggravated the economic
inequalities which drive the unprivileged masses to emigrate.
Not only are there in Austria-Hungary five grand divisions of the human
family,--the German, the Slav, the Magyar, the Latin, and the Jew,--but
these are again subdivided. In the northern mountainous and hilly
sections are 13,000,000 Slavic peoples, the Czechs, or Bohemians, with
their closely related Moravians, and the Slavic Slovaks, Poles, and
Ruthenians (known also as Russniaks); while in the southern hills and
along the Adriatic are another 4,000,000 Slavs, the Croatians, Servians,
Dalmatians, and Slovenians. Between these divisions on the fertile
plains 8,000,000 Magyars and 10,000,000 Germans have thrust themselves
as the dominant races. To the southwest are nearly a million Italians,
and in the east 2,500,000 Latinized Slavs, the Roumanians. The Slavs are
in general the conquered peoples, with a German and Magyar nobility
owning their land, making their laws, and managing their administration.
The northern Slavs are subject to Austria and Hungary, and the
Ruthenians suffer a double subjection, for they were the serfs of their
fellow-Slavs, the Poles, whom they continue to hate, and in whose
longings for a reunited Poland they do not participate. The southern
Slavs and Roumanians are subject to Hungary. The Roumanians are a
widespread and disrupted nationality of Slavs, conquered by the Romans,
from whom they imperfectly took their language, but now distributed
partly in independent kingdoms and partly under the dominion of the
Magyars. The Croatians from the southwest mountains are among the finest
specimens of physical manhood coming to our shores. They are a vigorous
people, hating Hungary which owns them and calling themselves
"Austrians" to ward off the name "Hun," by which Americans mistakenly
designate them. The Magyars are the Asiactic conquerors who overran
Europe ten centuries ago, and being repulsed by the Teutons to the west
established themselves on the Slavs in the valley and plains of the
Danube. Boasting a republican constitution a thousand years old they
have not until the past year been compelled to share it with the people
whom they subdued. Astute politicians and dashing military leaders, they
are as careless in business as the Slavs, and the supremacy which they
maintained in politics has slipped into the hands of the Jews in
economics. In no other modern country has the Jew been so liberally
treated, and in no other country have public and private finance come
more completely under his control. Profiting by the Magyars' suppression
of the Slavs, the Jew has monopolized the business opportunities denied
to the Slovak and the Croatian, and with this leverage has quietly
elbowed out the Magyar himself. No longer is the Magyar the dominant
race, and in the past year he has contributed to America more immigrants
than any branch of his conquered Slavs. In the Austrian dominions of
former Poland the Jew likewise has become the financier, and both the
Ruthenian and the Pole, unable to rise under their burden of debt,
contribute their more enterprising peasants to America.
By a perverse system of representative government, based on
representation of classes both in Austria and in Hungary, the great
landowners and wealthy merchants have heretofore elected three-fourths
of the parliaments, but recently in both countries the emperor has
granted universal manhood suffrage. The peasant Slavs will henceforth be
on equal footing with the German, the Magyar, and the Jew, and whether
out of the belated equality of races there will come equality of
economic opportunity remains to be seen. For the past few years the
emigration from the unfortunate dual empire has amazingly increased.
With all of this confusing medley of races, with this diversity of Greek
and Roman Catholicism and Judaism, with this history of race oppression
and hatred, it is not surprising that the immigrants should break out
into factions and feuds wherever thrown together among us. It is the
task of America to lift them to a patriotism which hitherto in their
native land they could not know.
The earliest migration from Austria-Hungary was that of the Bohemians,
the most highly educated and ardently patriotic of the Slavic people.
After the revolution of 1848, when the Germans suppressed their
patriotic uprising, students, professional men, and well-to-do peasants
came to America and settled in New York, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Chicago,
and in the rural districts of Texas, Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, and
California. Again, after the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, skilled
laborers were added to the stream, and they captured a large part of the
cigar-making industry of New York and the clothing trade of Chicago.
Latterly recruits from the peasants and unskilled laborers sought the
sections where the pioneers had located, learned the same trades, or
joined the armies of common labor. In Chicago the Bohemian section is
almost a self-governing city, with its own language, industries,
schools, churches, and newspapers. After a slight decline there is again
an increasing flow of immigrants, the number in 1906 being 13,000. Those
who come bring their families, and few return. In these earlier days the
Polish and Hungarian Jews also began their migration, following the
steps of their German precursors.
In the decade of the eighties the increase of immigration from
Austria-Hungary was first that of the Poles, now numbering 44,000, then
the Magyars, now 43,000, then the Slovaks, now 37,000. In the latter
part of the nineties the Southern Slavs--Croatians and Slovenians--suddenly
took up their burden, and 43,000 of them came in 1906. Following them
came the Ruthenians from the North, numbering 16,000 in 1906. Last of
all, the Latinized Slavs, the Roumanians, began their flight from the
Magyar, to the number of less than 400 in the year 1900, but swelling
to 11,000 in 1906. Only 300 additional came from their own proper
kingdom--Roumania. During all this period there has been also a
considerable migration of Germans, reaching 35,000 in 1906.
In the face of this swollen migration the Hungarian government has at
last taken alarm. They see even their own people, the Magyars, escaping.
Recently the government has attempted to restrict the unrest by
prohibiting advertisements or public speeches advocating emigration, by
prohibiting the sale of tickets or solicitation by any one not holding a
government license for the purpose, by contracting with a steamship line
from their own Adriatic part of Fiume in order to reduce migration
across the German and Italian frontiers. This may account for the
decline of ten thousand immigrants from Austria-Hungary in 1906.
Practically the entire migration of the Slavic elements at the present
time is that of peasants. In Croatia the forests have been depleted, and
thousands of immigrant wood-choppers have sought the forests of our
South and the railway construction of the West. The natural resources of
Croatia are by no means inadequate, but the discriminating taxes and
railway freight rates imposed by Hungary have prevented the development
of these resources. The needed railways are not obtainable for the
development of the mines and minerals of Croatia, and the peasants,
unable to find employment at home, are allured by the advertisements of
American steamships and the agents of American contractors.
So it is with the Slovak peasants and mine workers of the northern
mountains and foothills. With agricultural wages only eighteen cents a
day, they find employment in the American mines, rolling-mills,
stock-yards, and railroad construction at $1.50 a day.
In addition to race discrimination, the blight of Austria-Hungary is
landlordism. Considerable reforms, indeed, have been made in certain
sections. The free alienation of landed property was adopted in the
Austrian dominions in 1869, and in the following twelve years 42,000 new
holdings were carved out of the existing peasant proprietorships in
Bohemia. Similar transfers have occurred elsewhere, but even where this
peasant ownership has gained, the enormous prices are an obstacle to
economic independence. They compel the land-owning peasant to content
himself with five to twelve acres, the size of four-fifths of the farms
in Galicia. His eagerness to own land is his dread of the mere
wage-earner's lot, which he no longer dreads when he lands in America.
"The fear of falling from the social position of a peasant to that,
immeasurably inferior, of a day laborer, is the great spur which drives
over the seas alike the Slovak, the Pole, and the Ruthenian."[49] These
high rentals and fabulous values can exist only where wages and
standards of living are at the bare subsistence level, leaving a heavy
surplus for capitalization. They also exist as a result of most
economical and minute cultivation, so that, with this training, the
Bohemian or Polish farmer who takes up land in America soon becomes a
well-to-do citizen.
Taxation, too, is unequal. For many years the government suffered
deficits, the military expenses increased, and worst of all, the
nobility were exempt from taxation. The latter injustice, however, was
remedied by the revolution of 1848, and yet at the present time the
great landowners pay much less than their proportionate share of the
land-tax, to say nothing of the heavy taxes on consumption and industry.
As in other countries of low standards, the number of births is large in
proportion to the inhabitants. For every one thousand persons in
Hungary, there are forty-three births each year,[50] a number exceeded
by but one great country of Europe, Russia. Yet, with this large number
of births, because the economic conditions are so onerous and the
consequent deaths so frequent, the net increase is less than that of any
other country except France. In Austria the births and deaths are less
and the net increase greater, and they run close to those of prolific
Italy.
In each of these countries the figures for births and deaths stand near
those of the negroes in America, and like the negroes, two-fifths of the
mortality is that of children under five years of age, whereas with
other more favored countries and races this proportion is only one-fifth
or one-fourth. It is not so much the overpopulation of Austria-Hungary
that incites emigration as it is the poverty, ignorance, inequality, and
helplessness that produce a seeming overpopulation. While these
conditions continue, emigration will continue to increase, and the
efforts of the Hungarian government to reduce it will not succeed.
=Russia.=--The Russian Empire is at the present time the third in the rank
of contributors to American immigration. Russian immigration, like that
of Italy and Austria-Hungary, is practically limited to the past two
decades. In 1881 it first reached 10,000. In 1893 it was 42,000, and in
1906, 216,000.
The significant fact of this immigration is that it is only 2 per cent
Russian and 98 per cent non-Russian. The Russian peasant is probably the
most oppressed of the peasants of Europe, and though his recent uprising
has aroused his intellect and disabused the former opinion of his
stupidity, yet he has been so tied to the soil by his system of
communism, his burden of taxes and debt and his subjection to landlords,
that he is as yet immune to the fever of migration. In so far as he has
moved from his native soil he has done so through the efforts of a
despotic government to Russianize Siberia and the newly conquered
regions of his own vast domain. On the other hand, the races which have
abandoned the Russian Empire have been driven forth because they refused
to submit to the policy which would by force assimilate them to the
language or religion of the dominant race. Even the promises of the
aristocracy under the fright of recent revolution have not mitigated the
persecutions, and the number taking refuge in flight has doubled in four
years. Foremost are the Jews, 125,000 in 1906, an increase from 37,000
four years ago; next the Poles, 46,000 in 1906; next 14,000 Lithuanians,
13,000 Finns, and 10,000 Germans. The Poles and Lithuanians are Slavic
peoples long since conquered and annexed by the Russians. The Finns are
a Teutonic people with a Mongol language; the Germans are an isolated
branch of that race settled far to the east on the Volga River by
invitation of the Czar more than one hundred years ago, or on the Baltic
provinces adjoining Germany; while the Jews are the unhappy descendants
of a race whom the Russians found in territory conquered during the past
two centuries.
=The Jews.=--Russia, at present, sends us five-sixths of the Jewish
immigration, but the other one-sixth comes from adjoining territory in
Austria-Hungary and Roumania. About six thousand temporarily sojourn in
England, and the Whitechapel district of East London is a reduced
picture of the East Side, New York. During American history Jews have
come hither from all countries of Europe. The first recorded immigration
was that of Dutch Jews, driven from Brazil by the Portuguese and
received by the Dutch government of New Amsterdam. The descendants of
these earliest immigrants continue at the present time in their own
peculiar congregation in lower New York City. Quite a large number of
Portuguese and Spanish Jews, expelled from those countries in the time
of Columbus, have contributed their descendants to America by way of
Holland. The German Jews began their migration in small numbers during
colonial times, but their greatest influx followed the Napoleonic wars
and reached its height at the middle of the century. Prior to the last
two decades so predominant were the German Jews that, to the ordinary
American, all Jews were Germans. Strangely enough, the so-called Russian
Jew is also a German, and in Russia among the masses of people the words
"German" and "Jew" also mean the same thing. Hereby hangs a tale of
interest in the history of this persecuted race. Jews are known to have
settled at the site of the present city of Frankfort in Southern Germany
as early as the third century, when that town was a trading post on the
Roman frontier. At the present time the region about Frankfort,
extending south through Alsace, contains the major part of the German
and French Jews. To this centre they flocked during the Middle Ages, and
their toleration in this region throws an interesting light on the
reasons for their persecution in other countries.
Under the Catholic polity following the crusades the Jew had no rights,
and he could therefore gain protection only through the personal favor
of emperor, king, or feudal lord. This protection was arbitrary and
capricious, but it was always based on a pecuniary consideration.
Unwittingly the Catholic Church, by its prohibition of usury to all
believers, had thrown the business of money lending into the hands of
the Jews, and since the Jew was neither inclined toward agriculture nor
permitted to follow that vocation, his only sources of livelihood were
trade and usury. The sovereigns of Europe who protected the Jews did so
in view of the large sums which they could exact from their profits as
usurers and traders. They utilized the Jews like sponges to draw from
their subjects illicit taxes. When, therefore, the people gained power
over their sovereigns, and the spirit of nationality arose, the Jew,
without his former protector, was the object of persecution. England was
the first country where this spirit of nationality emerged and the first
to expel the Jews (1290); France followed a century later (1395); and
Spain and Portugal two centuries later (1492 and 1495). But in Germany
and other parts of the Holy Roman Empire political confusion and anarchy
prevailed, and the emperor and petty sovereigns were able to continue
their protection of the Jews.
[Illustration: NORWEGIAN ITALIAN ARABIC (From _The Home Missionary_)]
The Russian people, at that time, were confined to the interior
surrounding Moscow, but even before the crusades they had expelled the
Jews. As rapidly as they conquered territory to the south from Turkey,
or to the west from Poland, they carried forward the same hostility.
There was only one country, Poland, in the centre of Europe, where the
kings, desiring to build up their cities, invited the Jews, and hither
the persecuted race fled from the East before the Russians, and latterly
from the West, driven out by the Germans. When finally, a hundred years
ago, the remnant of the Polish Empire was divided between Russia,
Prussia, and Austria, the Jewish population in this favored area had
become the largest aggregation of that people since the destruction of
Jerusalem. To-day in certain of these provinces belonging to Russia the
Jews number as high as one-sixth of the entire population, and more than
half of that of several cities. Fifteen provinces taken from Poland and
Turkey, extending 1500 miles along the border of Germany and
Austria-Hungary and 240 miles in width, constitute to-day the "Pale of
Settlement," the region where Jews are permitted to live. Here are found
one-third of the world's 11,000,000 Jews.[51] Here they formerly engaged
in all lines of industry, including agriculture.
Now we come to the last great national uprising, like that which began
in England six hundred years ago. The Russian serfs had been freed in
1861. But they were left without land or capital and were burdened by
high rents and enormous taxes. The Jews became their merchants,
middlemen, and usurers. Suddenly, in 1881, the peasants, oppressed and
neglected by landlord and government, turned in their helplessness upon
the intermediate cause of their misery, the Jew. The anti-Semitic riots
of that year have perhaps never been exceeded in ferocity and
indiscriminate destruction. Then began the migration to America. The
next year the Russian government took up the persecution, and the
notorious "May Orders" of 1882 were promulgated. These, at the
instigation of the Greek Church, have been followed by orders more
stringent, so that to-day, unless relieved by the terrorized promises of
the Czar, the Jew is not permitted to foreclose a mortgage or to lease
or purchase land; he cannot do business on Sundays or Christian
holidays; he cannot hold office; he cannot worship or assemble without
police permit; he must serve in the army, but cannot become an officer;
he is excluded from schools and universities; he is fined for conducting
manufactures and commerce; he is almost prohibited from the learned
professions. While all other social questions are excluded from
discussion, the anti-Semitic press is given free play, and the popular
hatred of the Jew is stirred to frenzy by "yellow" journals. Only when
this hatred breaks out in widespread riots does the news reach America,
but the persecution is constant and relentless. The government and the
army join with the peasants, for, true to the character of this
versatile race, the Jews are leaders of the revolutionary and
socialistic patriots who seek to overthrow the government and restore
the land to the people.
Nor is this uprising confined to Russia. Galician Jews in the Austrian
possessions of former Poland, where the Slavs bitterly complain of them
as saloon-keepers and money-lenders,[52] have suffered the persecutions
of their race, and in the last ten years Roumania, a country of peasants
adjoining Hungary and Russia, has adopted laws and regulations even more
oppressive than those of her neighbor.
Thus it is that this marvellous and paradoxical race, the parent of
philosophers, artists, reformers, martyrs, and also of the shrewdest
exploiters of the poor and ignorant, has, in two decades, come to
America in far greater numbers than in the two centuries preceding.
It should not be inferred that the Jews are a race of pure descent.
Coming as they do from all sections and nations of Europe, they are
truly cosmopolitan, and have taken on the language, customs, and modes
of thought of the people among whom they live. More than this, in the
course of centuries, their physical characteristics have departed from
those of their Semitic cousins in the East, and they have become
assimilated in blood with their European neighbors. In Russia,
especially in the early centuries, native tribes were converted to
Judaism and mingled with their proselyters. That which makes the Jew a
peculiar people is not altogether the purity of his blood, but
persecution, devotion to his religion, and careful training of his
children. Among the Jews from Eastern Europe there are marked
intellectual and moral differences. The Hungarian Jew, who emigrated
earliest, is adventurous and speculative: the Southern Russian keeps few
of the religious observances, is the most intellectual and socialistic,
and most inclined to the life of a wage-earner; the Western Russian is
orthodox and emotional, saves money, becomes a contractor and retail
merchant; the Galician Jew is the poorest, whose conditions at home were
the harshest, and he begins American life as a pedler. That which unites
them all as a single people is their religious training and common
language.
The Hebrew language is read and written by all the men and half of the
women, but is not spoken except by a few especially orthodox Jews on
Saturday. Hebrew is the language of business and correspondence, Yiddish
the language of conversation, just as Latin in the Middle Ages was the
official and international language, while the various peoples spoke
each its own vernacular. The Yiddish spoken by the Russian Jews in
America is scarcely a language--it is a jargon without syntax,
conjugation, or declension. Its basis is sixty per cent German of the
sixteenth century, showing the main origin of the people, and forty per
cent the language of the countries whence they come.
That which most of all has made the Jew a cause of alarm to the peasants
of Eastern Europe is the highest mark of his virtue, namely, his rapid
increase in numbers. A high birth-rate, a low death-rate, a long life,
place the Jew as far above the average as the negro is below the
average. These two races are the two extremes of American race vitality.
Says Ripley:[53]--
"Suppose two groups of one hundred infants each, one Jewish, one of
average American parentage (Massachusetts), to be born on the same day.
In spite of the disparity of social conditions in favor of the latter,
the chances, determined by statistical means, are that one-half of the
Americans will die within forty-seven years; while the first half of the
Jews will not succumb to disease or accident before the expiration of
seventy-one years. The death-rate is really but little over half that of
the average American population."
While the negro exceeds all races in the constitutional diseases of
consumption and pneumonia, the Jew excels all in immunity from these
diseases. His vitality is ascribed to his sanitary meat inspection, his
sobriety, temperance, and self-control. Of the Jew it might be said more
truly than of any other European people that the growth of population
has led to overcrowding and has induced emigration. Yet of no people is
this less true, for, were it not for the discrimination and persecution
directed against them, the Jews would be the most prosperous and least
overcrowded of the races of Europe.
=The Finns.=--Until the year 1901 Finland was the freest and best governed
part of the Russian Empire. Wrested from Sweden in 1809, it became a
grand duchy of the Czar, guaranteed self-government, and confirmed by
coronation oath of each successor. It was the only section of the
Russian Empire with a constitutional government in which the laws,
taxes, and army were controlled by a legislature representing the
people. Here alone in all his empire was the Czar compelled to ask the
consent of parliament in order to enact laws. But these free
institutions within the past seven years were by his decree abrogated.
The Czar claimed the right to put into force such laws as he chose
without discussion or acceptance by the Finnish diet. The Russian
language took the place of Swedish and Finnish as the official medium, a
severe censorship of the press was introduced, the Lutheran religion,
devoutly adhered to, was subordinated to the "orthodox," the independent
Finnish army was abolished and Finns were distributed throughout the
armies of the empire, and a Russian governor with absolute powers was
placed over all. Thus have 2,000,000 of the sturdiest specimens of
humanity been suddenly reduced to the level of Asiatic despotism. They
had managed by industry and thrift to extort a livelihood from a sterile
soil, and had developed a school system with universal education,
culminating in one of the noblest universities of Europe. Their peasants
are healthy, intelligent, honest, and sober. In one year, 1900, their
emigration increased from 6000 to 12,000, and it continues at 14,000,
notwithstanding the repentance of the Czar and his restoration of
their stolen rights. Compared with the population of the country, the
present immigration from Finland is proportionately greater than that of
any race except the Jews; and famine, adding its horrors to the loss of
their liberties, has served to augment the army of exiles.
[Illustration: SLAV JEWISH POLACK LITHUANIAN (From _The Home Missionary_)]
Much dispute has arisen respecting the racial relations of the Finns.
Their language is like that of the Magyars, an agglutinative tongue with
tendencies towards inflections, but their physical structure allies them
more nearly to the Teutons. Their Lutheran religion also separates them
from other peoples of the Russian Empire. Their sober industriousness
and high intelligence give them a place above that of their intolerant
conquerors; and the futile attempts of the Slav to "Russify" them drove
to America many of our most desirable immigrants.
=The French Canadians.=--When Canada was conquered by England in 1759, it
contained a French population of 65,000. Without further immigration the
number had increased in 1901 to 2,400,000, including 1,600,000 in Canada
and 800,000 emigrants and their children in the United States. Scarcely
another race has multiplied as rapidly, doubling every twenty-five
years. The contrast with the same race in France, where population is
actually declining, is most suggestive. French Canada is, as it were, a
bit of mediæval France, picked out and preserved for the curious student
of social evolution. No French revolution broke down its old
institutions, and the English conquest changed little else than the
oath of allegiance. Language, customs, laws, and property rights
remained intact. The only state church in North America is the Roman
Catholic Church of Quebec, with its great wealth, its control of
education, and its right to levy tithes and other church dues. With a
standard of living lower than that of the Irish or Italians, and a
population increasing even more rapidly, the French from Canada for a
time seemed destined to displace other races in the textile mills of New
England. Yet they came only as sojourners, intending by the work of
every member of the family to save enough money to return to Canada,
purchase a farm, and live in relative affluence. Their migration began
at the close of the Civil War, and during periods of prosperity they
swarmed to the mill towns, while in periods of depression they returned
to their Northern homes. Gradually an increasing proportion remained in
"the States," and the number in 1900 was 395,000 born in Canada, and
436,000 children born on this side of the line.
=The Portuguese.=--A diminutive but interesting migration of recent years
is that of the Portuguese, who come, not from Portugal, but from the
Cape Verde and Azores Islands, near equatorial Africa. These islands are
remarkably overpopulated, and the emigration, nearly 9000 souls in 1906,
is a very large proportion of the total number of inhabitants. By two
methods did they find their way to America. One was almost accidental,
for it was the wreck of a Portuguese vessel on the New England coast
that first directed their attention to that section. They have settled
mainly at New Bedford, Massachusetts, where they follow the fisheries in
the summer and enter the mills in the winter. The other method was
solicitation, which took several thousand of them to Hawaii as contract
laborers on the sugar plantations. Unlike the Oriental importations to
these islands the Portuguese insisted that their families be imported,
and then as soon as their contracts expired they left the planters to
become small farmers, and are now the backbone of the coffee industry.
They and their children are nearly half of the "Caucasian" element of
30,000. In Massachusetts they are of two distinct types, the whites from
the Azores and the blacks from the Cape Verde Islands, the latter
plainly a blend of Portuguese and Africans. Their standards of living
are similar to those of the Italians, though they are distinguished by
their cleanliness and the neatness of their homes.
=Syrians and Armenians.=--That the recruiting area of American immigration
is extending eastward is no more clearly evident than in the recent
migration of Syrians and Armenians. These peoples belong to the
Christian races of Asiatic Turkey, whence they are escaping the
oppressions of a government which deserves the name of organized robbery
rather than government. Within the past thirty years many thousand
Syrians of Mount Lebanon have emigrated to Egypt and other
Mediterranean countries, to the dependencies of Great Britain and South
America. Six thousand of them came to the United States in 1906. They
belong mainly to the Greek Church or the Maronite branch of the Roman
Catholic Church, and it is mainly American missionary effort that has
diverted them to the United States. Unlike other immigrants, they come
principally from the towns, and are traders and pedlers. Broadly
speaking, says an agent of the Charity Organization Society of New York,
"the well-intentioned efforts of the missionaries have been abused by
their protégés.... It is these alleged proselytes who have contributed
largely to bring into relief the intrinsically servile character of the
Syrian, his ingratitude and mendacity, his prostitution of all ideals to
the huckster level.... As a rule they affiliate themselves with some
Protestant church or mission, abandoning such connections when no longer
deemed necessary or profitable."[54]
The Armenian migration began with the monstrous Kurdish atrocities of
recent years, instigated and supported by the Turkish government.
Armenians are a primitive branch of the Christian religion, and at an
early date became separated from both the Greek and Roman churches. They
are among the shrewdest of merchants, traders, and money-lenders of the
Orient, and, like the Jews, are hated by the peasantry and persecuted by
the government. Like the Jews also, religious persecution has united
them to the number of five million in a racial type of remarkable purity
and distinctness from the surrounding races.
=Asiatic Immigration.=--Utterly distinct from all other immigrants in the
nineteenth century are the Chinese. Coming from a civilization already
ancient when Europe was barbarian, the Chinaman complacently refuses to
assimilate with Americans, and the latter reciprocate by denying him the
right of citizenship. His residence is temporary, he comes without his
family, and he accumulates what to him is a fortune for his declining
years in China. The gold discoveries of California first attracted him,
and the largest migration was 40,000 in 1882, the year when Congress
prohibited further incoming. In 1906, 3015 Chinamen tried to get in, and
2732 were admitted, mainly as United States citizens, returning
merchants and returning laborers. One-half of the 1448 admitted as
"exempt" were believed by the immigration officials to have been coolies
in disguise.[55] Within the past ten years the Japanese have taken his
place, and 14,000 of his Mongolian cousins arrived in 1906.
The immigration of the Japanese has taken a peculiar turn owing to the
annexation of Hawaii. While these islands were yet a kingdom in 1868
this immigration began, and in 1886 a treaty was concluded with Japan
for the immigration of Japanese contract laborers for the benefit of
the sugar planters. Many thousand were imported under this arrangement,
and "the fear that the islands would be annexed to Japan was one of the
prime factors in the demand for annexation to the United States."[56]
With annexation in 1900 contract labor was abolished, and the Japanese,
freed from servitude, indulged in "an epidemic of strikes." The Japanese
government retained paternal oversight of its laborers migrating to
foreign lands, which is done through some thirty-four emigrant companies
chartered by the government. Since opening up Korea for settlement Japan
has granted but a limited number of passports to its citizens destined
for the mainland of America, so that almost the entire immigration comes
first to Honolulu through arrangements made between the emigrant
companies and the planters. But the planters are not able to keep them
on the island on account of the higher wages on the Pacific coast. Since
the alien contract-labor law does not apply to immigrants from Hawaii, a
_padroni_ system has sprung up for importing Japanese from that island.
As a result, the arrivals at Honolulu are equalled by the departures to
the mainland, and Hawaii becomes the American side entrance for the
Japanese.[57] This evasion has been stopped by the law of February 20,
1906.
Hawaii also is showing another Asiatic race the opening to America. The
growing independence of the Japanese led the planters to seek Koreans,
since the Chinese exclusion law came into force with annexation. In this
effort to break down Japanese solidarity some eight thousand Koreans
have been mixed with them during the past five years, and these also
have begun the transit to California.
Although the Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans are the familiar examples
often cited of low standards of living, yet their wages in their native
countries are higher than those of the South Italians and equal to those
of the Slavs. They earn $4 or $5 a month and spend $2 or $3 for living.
In Hawaii they get $18 to $20 a month, and on the Pacific coast $35 to
$50.
In the past two or three years a tiny dripping of immigration has found
its way from another vast empire of Asiatic population--India. Some two
hundred are admitted each year. The populations of that land are growing
discontented as they see Indians returned from Natal, where they earned
$20 to $35 a month, while at home they get only $3 to $7 under a penal
contract system. The American consul at Calcutta reports ten sturdy
Punjab Mohammedans inquiring the way to America and telling of their
friends at work on American dairy farms. In his judgment they are
stronger and more intelligent than the Chinese coolies and are
preferable for work on the Panama Canal. The self-governing British
colonies have educational restrictions designed to prevent Asiatic
immigration, whether of British subjects or aliens;[58] other colonies
have contract labor. The unrest of India therefore turns the native eyes
towards America.
While America has been welcoming the eastward and backward races she has
begun to lose her colonial stock and her Americanized Teutonic stock.
These pioneer elements have kept in front of the westward movement, and
now that the American frontier is gone they seek a new frontier in
Canada. The Canadian government for several years has sought to fill its
vast Western plains with Teutonic races and to discourage others. It has
expended many thousand dollars for advertising and soliciting in the
British Isles, and has maintained twenty to thirty immigration agents in
our Western states. The opportunities of British Columbia are now well
known, and the American farmers, with agricultural land rising
enormously in value, sell out to the newcomer or the acclimated
immigrant and betake themselves to double or treble the area for
cultivation under the flag of England. They push onward by rail and by
wagon, and the ingress of millions of immigrants is reflected in the
egress of thousands of Americans.[59]
=Indigenous Races.=--It is not enough that we have opened our gates to the
millions of divergent races in Europe, Asia, and Africa; we have in
these latter days admitted to our fold new types by another
process--annexation.
The Hawaiians are the latest of these oversea races to be brought under
our flag, although in the course of eighty years they have been brought
under our people. Nowhere else in the world has been seen such finished
effect on an aboriginal race of the paradoxes of Western
civilization--Christianity, private property, and sexual disease. With a
population of some 300,000 at the time of discovery they had dwindled by
domestic wars and imported disease to 140,000 when the missionaries came
in 1820, then to 70,000 in 1850 when private property began its hunt for
cheap labor, and now they number but 30,000. A disease eliminating the
unfit of a race protected by monogamy decimates this primitive people on
a lower stage of morals. Missionaries from the most intellectual type of
American Protestantism converted the diminishing nation to Christianity
in fifty years. A soil and climate the most favorable in the world for
sugar-cane inspired American planters and sons of missionaries to
displace the unsteady Hawaiians with industrious coolies, and finally to
overthrow the government they had undermined and then annex it to
America. Although acquiring American citizenship and sharing equally the
suffrage with Caucasians, the decreasing influence of the Hawaiians is
further diminished by the territorial form of government.
The Spanish War added islands on opposite sides of the globe, with
races resulting from diametrically opposite effects of three centuries
of Spanish rule. From Porto Rico the aboriginal Carib had long
disappeared under the slavery of his conquerors, and his place had been
filled by the negro slave in sugar cultivation and by the Spaniard and
other Europeans in coffee cultivation. To-day the negro and mulatto are
two-fifths of the million population and the whites three-fifths.[60] In
the Philippine Islands the native races have survived under a theocratic
protectorate and even their tribal and racial subdivisions have been
preserved. Two-fifths of their population of 7,600,000 belong to the
leading tribe, the Visayans, and one-fifth to another, the Tagalogs. Six
other tribes complete the list of "civilized" or Christianized peoples,
while 10 per cent remain pagan in the mountains and forests. Four-fifths
of the population are illiterate, a proportion the same as in Porto
Rico, compared with less than half of the negroes and only one-sixteenth
of the whites in the United States.[61]
CHAPTER V
INDUSTRY
In preceding chapters we have seen the conditions in their foreign homes
which spurred the emigrants to seek America. We have seen religious
persecution, race oppression, political revolution, militarism,
taxation, famine, and poverty conspiring to press upon the unprivileged
masses and to drive the more adventurous across the water. But it would
be a mistake should we stop at that point and look upon the migration of
these dissatisfied elements as only a voluntary movement to better their
condition. In fact, had it been left to the initiative of the emigrants
the flow of immigration to America could scarcely ever have reached
one-half its actual dimensions. While various motives and inducements
have always worked together, and it would be rash to assert dogmatically
the relative weight of each, yet to one who has carefully noted all the
circumstances it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that even more
important than the initiative of immigrants have been the efforts of
Americans and ship-owners to bring and attract them. Throughout our
history these efforts have been inspired by one grand, effective
motive,--that of making a profit upon the immigrants. The desire to get
cheap labor, to take in passenger fares, and to sell land have probably
brought more immigrants than the hard conditions of Europe, Asia, and
Africa have sent. Induced immigration has been as potent as voluntary
immigration. And it is to this mercenary motive that we owe our manifold
variety of races, and especially our influx of backward races. One
entire race, the negro, came solely for the profit of ship-owners and
landowners. Working people of the colonial period were hoodwinked and
kidnapped by shippers and speculators who reimbursed themselves by
indenturing them to planters and farmers. The beginners of other races
have come through similar but less coercive inducements, initiated,
however, by the demand of those who held American property for
speculation or investment. William Penn and his lessees, John Law, the
Dutch East India Company, and many of the grantees of lands in the
colonies, sent their agents through Western Europe and the British Isles
with glowing advertisements, advanced transportation, and contracts for
indentured service by way of reimbursement. In the nineteenth century
new forms of induced migration appeared. Victims of the Irish famine
were assisted to emigrate by local and general governments and by
philanthropic societies, and both the Irish and the Germans, whose
migration began towards the middle of the century, were, in a measure,
exceptions to the general rule of induced immigration for profit.
Several Western states created immigration bureaus which advertised
their own advantages for intending immigrants, and Wisconsin,
especially, in this way settled her lands with a wide variety of races.
After the Civil War, induced migration entered upon a vigorous revival.
The system of indenturing had long since disappeared, because
legislatures and courts declined to recognize and enforce contracts for
service. Consequently a new form of importation appeared under the
direction of middlemen of the same nativity as that of the immigrant.
Chinese coolies came under contract with the Six Companies, who advanced
their expenses and looked to their own secret agents and tribunals to
enforce repayment with profit.[62] Japanese coolies, much later, came
under contract with immigration companies chartered by the Japanese
government.[63] Italians were recruited by the _padroni_, and the bulk
of the new Slav immigration from Southeastern Europe is in charge of
their own countrymen acting as drummers and middlemen.
INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS OF IMMIGRANTS--1906[64]
===============+========+=========+==================+==========================
| | SEXES | AGES | OCCUPATIONS[65]
| +----+----+-----+-----+-----+-------+----+----+----+----
| TOTAL, | | | | | | TOTAL,|Professional
RACE OR PEOPLE | 100 | | |Under|14-45|Over | 100 | |Commercial
|PER CENT| M | F | 14 |years| 45 | PER | | |Skilled
| | | |years| |years| CENT | | | |Unskilled
---------------+--------+----+----+-----+-----+-----+-------+----+----+----+----
African (black)| 3,786|62.2|37.8| 9.1| 86.8| 4.1| 2,921| 3.0| 2.6|45.6|48.8
Armenian | 1,895|75.1|24.9| 11.8| 84.3| 3.9| 1,390| 3.4| 5.1|38.5|53.0
Bohemian and | | | | | | | | | | |
Moravian | 12,958|57.3|42.8| 20.7| 73.9| 5.4| 7,985| 1.3| 1.2|43.6|53.9
Bulgarian, | | | | | | | | | | |
Servian, and | | | | | | | | | | |
Montenegrin | 11,548|96.2| 3.8| 1.9| 96.2| 1.9| 11,025| 0.1| 0.3| 3.7|95.9
Chinese | 1,485|94.1| 5.9| 4.5| 81.5| 14.0| 1,261| 6.9|66.0| 1.5|25.6
Croatian and | | | | | | | | | | |
Slovenian | 44,272|86.5|13.5| 3.8| 94.1| 2.1| 40,125| 0.1| 0.1| 3.7|96.1
Cuban | 5,591|67.4|32.6| 17.2| 73.2| 9.6| 2,842|10.3|19.1|55.9|14.7
Dalmatian, | | | | | | | | | | |
Bosnian, and | | | | | | | | | | |
Herzegovinian| 4,568|95.1| 4.9| 1.7| 96.3| 2.0| 4,373| 0.1| 0.3| 7.7|91.9
Dutch and | | | | | | | | | | |
Flemish | 9,735|67.0|33.0| 17.6| 76.4| 6.0| 5,849| 5.2| 7.9|30.1|56.8
East Indian | 271|93.0| 7.0| 5.5| 90.5| 4.0| 222| 9.9|52.7| 5.4|32.0
English | 45,079|62.1|37.9| 13.5| 75.3| 11.2| 28,249|10.8|13.5|51.3|24.4
Finnish | 14,136|67.4|32.6| 7.1| 90.8| 2.1| 11,959| 0.4| 0.3| 7.2|92.1
French | 10,379|57.1|42.9| 8.6| 81.7| 9.7| 6,823|16.5|12.9|31.3|39.3
German | 86,813|59.2|40.8| 15.1| 78.6| 6.3| 55,095| 4.3| 6.7|29.7|59.3
Greek | 23,127|96.3| 3.7| 3.1| 95.9| 1.0| 21,615| 0.5| 2.6| 9.4|87.5
Hebrew | 153,748|52.1|47.9| 28.3| 66.3| 5.4| 76,605| 1.4| 5.6|66.7|26.3
Irish | 40,959|50.9|49.1| 4.6| 90.9| 4.5| 35,387| 1.7| 2.9|15.1|80.3
Italian (North)| 46,286|78.9|21.1| 8.6| 87.9| 3.5| 36,980| 1.4| 2.3|19.4|76.9
Italian (South)| 240,528|79.4|20.6| 11.1| 84.3| 4.6|190,105| 0.4| 1.3|16.0|82.3
Japanese | 14,243|89.6|10.4| 1.0| 97.1| 1.9| 11,797| 2.2|10.3| 2.8|84.7
Korean | 127|81.1|18.9| 16.5| 81.1| 2.4| 80| 6.3|15.0| 2.5|76.2
Lithuanian | 14,257|66.1|33.9| 8.9| 89.5| 1.6| 11,568| 0.2| 0.2| 9.2|90.4
Magyar | 44,261|71.8|28.2| 9.0| 87.5| 3.5| 34,559| 0.6| 0.5| 9.3|89.6
Mexican | 141|66.0|34.0| 14.9| 74.5| 10.6| 65|23.1|35.4|24.6|16.9
Pacific | | | | | | | | | | |
Islander | 13|76.9|23.1| 7.7| 76.9| 15.4| 9|33.3| 0.0|66.7| 0.0
Polish | 95,835|69.3|30.7| 9.3| 88.5| 2.2| 77,437| 0.2| 0.2| 7.7|91.9
Portuguese | 8,729|58.4|41.6| 20.9| 70.7| 8.4| 5,815| 0.5| 1.1| 4.8|93.6
Roumanian | 11,425|92.5| 7.5| 2.0| 94.0| 4.0| 10,759| 0.2| 0.2| 2.5|97.1
Russian | 5,814|81.7|18.3| 10.0| 86.8| 3.2| 4,591| 3.2| 2.4|10.8|83.6
Ruthenian | 16,257|75.7|24.3| 3.6| 93.9| 2.5| 14,899| 0.1|[66]| 2.7|97.2
Scandinavian | 58,141|62.1|37.9| 9.1| 86.4| 4.5| 47,352| 1.8| 1.6|23.5|73.1
Scotch | 16,463|66.1|33.9| 12.9| 78.8| 8.3| 11,207| 5.7| 9.9|62.8|21.6
Slovak | 38,221|69.6|30.4| 8.9| 88.4| 2.7| 29,817|[66]| 0.1| 4.9|95.0
Spanish | 5,332|83.6|16.4| 7.1| 84.6| 8.3| 4,211| 5.7|19.2|44.4|30.7
Spanish | | | | | | | | | | |
American | 1,585|69.7|30.3| 17.0| 74.4| 8.6| 790|23.7|37.1|21.1|18.1
Syrian | 5,824|70.4|29.6| 15.2| 80.9| 3.9| 4,023| 1.1|11.1|19.9|67.9
Turkish | 2,033|95.7| 4.3| 1.9| 96.0| 2.1| 1,914| 1.5| 4.4| 8.3|85.8
Welsh | 2,367| 7.1|29.9| 12.5| 78.2| 9.3| 1,639| 4.9| 6.7|62.4|26.0
West Indian | | | | | | | | | | |
(except | | | | | | | | | | |
Cuban) | 1,476|58.9|41.1| 14.8| 76.1| 9.1| 900| 7.6|15.0|49.4|28.0
Other Peoples | 1,027|94.5| 5.5| 2.6| 96.0| 1.4| 932| 1.2| 4.1|18.0|76.7
---------+----+----+-----+-----+-----+-------+----+----+----+----
Total 1,100,735|69.5|30.5| 12.4| 83.0| 4.6|815,275| 1.8| 3.1|21.7|73.4
===============+========+====+====+=====+=====+=====+=======+====+====+====+====
These labor speculators have perfected a system of inducements and
through billing as effective as that by which horse and cattle buyers in
Kentucky or Iowa collect and forward their living freight to the markets
of Europe. A Croatian of the earlier immigration, for example, sets up a
saloon in South Chicago and becomes an employment bureau for his
"greener" countrymen, and also ticket agent on commission for the
steamship companies. His confederates are stationed along the entire
route at connecting points, from the villages of Croatia to the saloon
in Chicago. In Croatia they go among the laborers and picture to them
the high wages and abundant work in America. They induce them to sell
their little belongings and they furnish them with through tickets. They
collect them in companies, give them a countersign, and send them on to
their fellow-agent at Fiume, thence to Genoa or other port whence the
American steerage vessel sails. In New York they are met by other
confederates, whom they identify by their countersign, and again they
are safely transferred and shipped to their destination. Here they are
met by their enterprising countryman, lodged and fed, and within a day
or two handed over to the foreman in a great steel plant, or to the
"boss" of a construction gang on a railway, or to a contractor on a
large public improvement. After they have earned and saved a little
money they send for their friends, to whom the "boss" has promised jobs.
Again their lodging-house countryman sells them the steamship ticket and
arranges for the safe delivery of those for whom they have sent. In this
way immigration is stimulated, and new races are induced to begin their
American colonization. Eventually the pioneers send for their families,
and it is estimated that nearly two-thirds of the immigrants in recent
years have come on prepaid tickets or on money sent to them from
America.[67]
The significance of this new and highly perfected form of inducement
will appear when we look back for a moment upon the legislation
governing immigration.
=Immigration Legislation.=--At the close of the Civil War, with a vast
territory newly opened to the West by the railroads, Congress enacted a
law throwing wide open our doors to the immigrants of all lands. It gave
new guaranties for the protection of naturalized citizens in renouncing
allegiance to their native countries, declaring that "expatriation is a
natural and inherent right of all people, indispensable to the enjoyment
of the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."[68]
In the same year, 1868, the famous Burlingame treaty was negotiated with
China, by which Americans in China and Chinese in America should enjoy
all the privileges, immunities, and exemptions enjoyed by citizens of
the most favored nation. These steps favorable to immigration were in
line with the long-continued policy of the country from the earliest
colonial times.
But a new force had come into American politics--the wage-earner. From
this time forth the old policies were violently challenged. High wages
were to be pitted against high profits. The cheap labor which was
eagerly sought by the corporations and large property owners was just as
eagerly fought by the unpropertied wage-earners. Of course neither party
conceded that it was selfishly seeking its own interest. Those who
expected profits contended that cheap foreign labor was necessary for
the development of the country; that American natural resources were
unbounded, but American workmen could not be found for the rough work
needed to turn these resources into wealth; that America should be in
the future, as it had been in the past, a haven for the oppressed of all
lands; and that in no better way could the principles of American
democracy be spread to all peoples of the earth than by welcoming them
and teaching them in our midst.
The wage-earners have not been so fortunate in their protestations of
disinterestedness. They were compelled to admit that though they
themselves had been immigrants or the children of immigrants, they were
now denying to others what had been a blessing to them. Yet they were
able to set forward one supreme argument which our race problems are
every day more and more showing to be sound. The future of American
democracy is the future of the American wage-earner. To have an
enlightened and patriotic citizenship we must protect the wages and
standard of living of those who constitute the bulk of the citizens.
This argument had been offered by employers themselves when they were
seeking a protective tariff against the importation of "pauper-made"
goods. What wonder that the wage-earner should use the same argument to
keep out the pauper himself, and especially that he should begin by
applying the argument to those races which showed themselves unable
rapidly to assimilate, and thereby make a stand for high wages and high
standards of living. Certain it is that had the white wage-earners
possessed the suffrage and political influence during colonial times,
the negro would not have been admitted in large numbers, and we should
have been spared that race problem which of all is the largest and most
nearly insoluble.
For it must be observed in general that race antagonism occurs on the
same competitive level. What appear often to be religious, political,
and social animosities are economic at bottom, and the substance of the
economic struggle is the advantage which third parties get when
competitors hold each other down. The Southern planter was not hostile
to the negro slave--he was his friend and protector. His nurse was the
negro "mammy," his playmates were her children, and the mulatto throws
light on his views of equality. It was the poor white who hated the
negro and fled from his presence to the hills and the frontier, or sank
below his level, despised by white and black. In times of freedom and
reconstruction it is not the great landowner or employer that leads in
the exhibition of race hostility, but the small farmer or
wage-earner.[69] The one derives a profit from the presence of the
negro--the other loses his job or his farm. With the progress of white
democracy in place of the old aristocracy, as seen in South Carolina,
hostility to the negro may be expected to increase. With the elimination
of the white laborer, as seen in the black counties, the relations of
negro and planter are harmonious.[70]
So it is in the North. The negro or immigrant strike breaker is
befriended by the employer, but hated by the employee. The Chinaman or
Japanese in Hawaii or California is praised and sought after by the
employer and householder, but dreaded by the wage-earner and domestic.
Investors and landowners see their properties rise in value by the
competition of races, but the competitors see their wages and jobs
diminish. The increase of wealth intensifies the difference and raises
up professional classes to the standpoint of the capitalists. With both
of them the privilege of leisure depends on the presence of servants,
but the wage-earners do their own work. As the immigrant rises in the
scale, the small farmer, contractor, or merchant feels his competition
and begins to join in measures of race protection.
This hostility is not primarily racial in character. It is the
competitive struggle for standards of living. It appears to be racial
because for the most part races have different standards. But where
different races agree on their standards the racial struggle ceases, and
the negro, Italian, Slav, and American join together in the class
struggle of a trade-union. On the other hand, if the same race has
different standards, the economic struggle breaks down even the
strongest affinities of race. The Russian Jew in the sweat-shop turns
against the immigrant Jew, fleeing from the very persecution that he
himself has escaped, and taking his place in the employment of the
capitalist German Jew.[71] It is an easy and patriotic matter for the
lawyer, minister, professor, employer, or investor, placed above the
arena of competition, to proclaim the equal right of all races to
American opportunities; to avow his own willingness to give way should
even a better Chinaman, Hindu, or Turk come in to take his place; and to
rebuke the racial hatred of those who resist this displacement. His
patriotism and world-wide brotherhood cost him and his family nothing,
and indeed they add to his profits and leisure. Could he realize his
industrial position, and picture in imagination that of his
fellow-citizens, their attitude would not appear less disinterested than
his own. The immigrant comes as a wage-earner, and the American
wage-earner bears the initial cost of his Americanization. Before he
acquired the suffrage his protest was unheard--after he gained political
power he began to protect himself.
The first outbreak of the new-found strength of the American wage-earner
was directed against a race superior even to the negro immigrants in
industry, frugality, intelligence, and civilization--the Chinese. And
this outbreak was so powerful that, in spite of all appeals to the
traditions and liberties of America, the national government felt driven
to repudiate the treaty so recently signed with the highest
manifestations of faith, good-will, and international comity.
Very early in the settlement of California the Chinaman had encountered
hostile legislation. The state election had been carried by the
Knownothings as early as 1854. Discriminating taxes, ordinances, and
laws were adopted, and even immigration was regulated by the state
legislature. But the state and federal courts declared such legislation
invalid as violating treaties or interfering with international
relations. Then the wage-earning element of California joined as one man
in demanding action by the federal government, and eventually, by the
treaty of 1880 and the law of 1888, Chinese laborers were excluded.[72]
Thus did the Caucasian wage-earner score his first and signal victory
in reversing what his opponents proclaimed were "principles coeval with
the foundation of our government."
The next step was the Alien Contract Labor law of 1885 and 1888, placed
on the statute books through the efforts of the Knights of Labor and the
trades-unions. As early as 1875 Congress had prohibited the immigration
of paupers, criminal, and immoral persons, but the law of 1885 went to
the other extreme and was designed to exclude industrial classes. The
law is directed against prepayment of transportation, assistance, or
encouragement of foreigners to immigrate _under contract_ to perform
labor in the United States, and provides for the prosecution of the
importer and deportation of the contract immigrant. This law has been
enforced against skilled labor, which comes mainly from northwestern
Europe, but, owing to the new system of _padroni_ and middlemen above
described, it cannot be enforced against the unskilled laborers of
Southern and Eastern Europe, since it cannot be shown that they have
come under contract to perform labor. By the amendment and revised law
adopted in 1903, after considerable discussion, and an effort on the
part of the labor unions to strengthen the law, it was extended so as to
exclude not only those coming under contract but also those coming under
_offers_ and _promises_ of employment.[73]
From what precedes we see that there are two exactly opposite points of
view from which the subject of immigration is approached. One is the
production of wealth; the other is the distribution of wealth. He who
takes the standpoint of production sees the enormous undeveloped
resources of this country--the mines to be exploited, railroads and
highways to be built and rebuilt, farms to be opened up or to be more
intensively cultivated, manufactures to be multiplied, and the markets
of the world to be conquered by our exports, while there are not enough
workmen, or not enough willing to do the hard and disagreeable work at
the bottom.
He who takes the standpoint of distribution sees the huge fortunes, the
low wages, the small share of the product going to labor, the
sweat-shop, the slums, all on account of the excessive competition of
wage-earner against wage-earner.
Consider first the bearing of immigration on the production of wealth.
[Illustration: AGE GROUPS, FOREIGN AND NATIVE-BORN]
=Immigration and Wealth Production.=--Over four-fifths of the immigrants
are in the prime of life--the ages between fourteen and forty-five. In
the year 1906 only 12 out of every 100 were under fourteen years of age,
and only 4.5 out of every 100 over forty-five years of age. The census
of 1900 offers some interesting comparisons between the native-born and
the foreign-born in this matter of age distribution. It shows quite
plainly that a large proportion of the native-born population is below
the age of industrial production, fully 39 per cent, or two-fifths,
being under fifteen years of age, while only 5 per cent of the
foreign-born are of corresponding ages. On the other hand, the ages
fifteen to forty-four include 46 per cent of the native and 58 per cent
of the foreign-born. This is shown in the diagram based on five-year age
periods. The native born are seen to group themselves in a symmetrical
pyramid, with the children under five as the wide foundation, gradually
tapering to the ages of eighty and eighty-four, but for the foreign-born
they show a double pyramid, tapering in both directions from the ages of
thirty-five to thirty-nine, which include the largest five-year group.
Thus, immigration brings to us a population of working ages unhampered
by unproductive mouths to be fed, and, if we consider alone that which
produces the wealth of this country and not that which consumes it, the
immigrants add more to the country than does the same number of native
of equal ability. Their home countries have borne the expense of rearing
them up to the industrial period of their lives, and then America,
without that heavy expense, reaps whatever profits there are on the
investment.
[Illustration: PROPORTION OF SEXES. NATIVE AND FOREIGN-BORN WHITES,
1900, AND IMMIGRANTS 1906]
In another respect does immigration add to our industrial population
more than would be done by an equal increase in native population,
namely, by the large excess of men over women. In 1906, over two-thirds
of the immigrants were males and less than one-third were females. This
is shown on the accompanying diagram, as well as the fact based on the
census statistics that among the foreign-born the men predominate over
the women in the ratio of 540 to 460, while among the native-born
population the sexes are about equal, being in the proportion of 507
males to 493 females.
This small proportion of women and children shows, of course, that it is
the workers, not the families, who seek America. Yet the proportions
widely vary for different nationalities. Among the Jews 48 per cent are
females and 28 per cent children. This persecuted race moves in a body,
expecting to make America its home. At the other extreme the Greeks send
only 4 per cent females and 3 per cent children, the Croatians 13 per
cent females and 4 per cent children, the South Italians 21 per cent
females and 11 per cent children. These are races whose immigration has
only recently begun, and naturally enough the women and children, except
in the case of the Jews, do not accompany the workmen. A race of longer
migration, like the Germans, has 41 per cent females and 15 per cent
children. The Irish have a peculiar position. Alone of all the races do
the women equal the men, but only 5 per cent are children. Irish girls
seeking domestic service explain this preponderance of women.
Significant and interesting facts regarding other races may be seen by
studying the table entitled "Industrial Relations of Immigrants."
[Illustration: SWEDEN GREECE GERMANY RUSSIA CHINA SCOTLAND AUSTRIA
AUSTRALIA CANADA ENGLAND ITALY ROUMANIA AMERICAN SCHOOL BOYS (From
_World's Work_)]
Such being the proportions of industrial energy furnished by
immigration, what is the quality? Much the larger proportion of
immigrants are classed as unskilled, including laborers and servants.
Omitting those who have "no occupation," including mainly women and
children, who are 30.5 per cent of the total, only 21.7 per cent of the
remainder who are working immigrants are skilled, and 73.4 per cent are
unskilled. The proportions vary greatly among the different races. The
largest element of skilled labor is among the Jews, a city people,
two-thirds of whom are skilled workmen. Nearly the same proportion of
the Scotch and Welsh and over one-half of the English and Bohemians are
skilled mechanics. Nearly one-third of the Germans and Dutch are
skilled, and one-fourth of the Scandinavians. At the other extreme, only
3 to 5 per cent of the Ruthenians, Croatians, Roumanians, and Slovaks
are skilled, and 8 to 10 per cent of the Magyars, Lithuanians, and
Poles. One-fifth of the North Italians and one-sixth of the South
Italians are skilled. These and other proportions are shown in the
statistical table.
The skilled labor which comes to America, especially from Northern and
Western Europe, occupies a peculiar position in our industries. In the
first place, the most capable workmen have permanent places at home,
and it is, in general, only those who cannot command situations who seek
their fortunes abroad. The exceptions to this rule are in the beginnings
of an industry like that of tin plate, when a large proportion of the
industry moved bodily to America, and the highly skilled tin workers of
Wales brought a kind of industrial ability that had not hitherto existed
in this country. As for the bulk of skilled immigrants, they do not
represent the highest skill of the countries whence they come.
On the other hand, the European skilled workman is usually better
trained than the American, and in many branches of industry, especially
machinery and ship-building, the English and Scotch immigrants command
those superior positions where an all-round training is required.
This peculiar situation is caused by the highly specialized character of
American industry. In no country has division of labor and machinery
been carried as far as here. By division of labor the skilled trades
have been split up into simple operations, each of which in itself
requires little or no skill, and the boy who starts in as a beginner is
kept at one operation so that he does not learn a trade. The old-time
journeyman tailor was a skilled mechanic who measured his customer, cut
the cloth and trimmings, basted, sewed, and pressed the suit. Now we
have factories which make only coats, others which make only vests,
others trousers, and there are children's knee-pants factories and even
ladies' tailor establishments where the former seamstress sees her
precious skill dissipated among a score of unskilled workers. Thus the
journeyman tailor is displaced by the factory, where the coat passes
through the hands of thirty to fifty different men and women, each of
whom can learn his peculiar operation in a month or two. The same is
true in greater or less degree in all industries. Even in the building
trades in the larger cities there are as many kinds of bricklayers as
there are kinds of walls to be built, and as many kinds of carpenters as
there are varieties of woodwork.
So it is with machinery. The American employer does not advertise for a
"machinist"--he wants a "lathe hand" or a "drill-press hand," and the
majority of his "hands" are perhaps only automatic machine tenders. The
employer cannot afford to transfer these hands from one job to another
to enable them to "learn the trade." He must keep them at one operation,
for it is not so much skill that he wants as cheap labor and speed.
Consequently, American industry is not producing all-round mechanics,
and the employers look to Europe for their skilled artisans. In England
the trade-unions have made it their special business to see that every
apprentice learns every part of his trade, and they have prevented
employers from splitting up the trades and specializing machinery and
thereby transforming the mechanic into the "hand." Were it not for
immigration, American industries would ere now have been compelled to
give more attention to apprenticeship and the training of competent
mechanics. The need of apprenticeship and trade schools is being more
seriously felt every year, for, notwithstanding the progress of division
of labor and machinery, the all-round mechanic continues to play an
important part in the shop and factory. American trade-unions are
gaining strength, and one of their most insistent demands is the
protection of apprenticeship. The bricklayers' and carpenters' unions of
Chicago even secure from their employers instruction for apprentices in
school. Not much headway in this line, however, has yet been made, and
American industry has become abnormal, we might almost say suicidal, or
at any rate, non-self-supporting. By extreme division of labor and
marvellous application of machinery it makes possible the wholesale
employment in factories of the farm laborers of Europe and their
children, and then depends on Europe for the better-trained types of the
skilled mechanic, who, on account of the farm laborer, have not been
able to learn their trade in America.
Not only does immigration bring to America the strongest, healthiest,
and most energetic and adventurous of the work-people of Europe and
Asia, but those who come work much harder than they did at home.
Migration tears a man away from the traditions, the routine, the social
props on which he has learned to rely, and throws him among strangers
upon his own resources. He must swim or drown. At the same time he
earns higher wages and eats more nourishing food than he had ever
thought within reach of one in his station. His ambition is fired, he is
stirred by the new tonic of feeling himself actually rising in the
world. He pictures to himself a home of his own, he economizes and saves
money to send to his friends and family, or to return to his beloved
land a person of importance. Watch a gang of Italians shovelling dirt
under an Irish boss, or a sweat-shop of Jewish tailors under a small
contractor, and you shall see such feverish production of wealth as an
American-born citizen would scarcely endure. Partly fear, partly hope,
make the fresh immigrant the hardest, if not the most intelligent,
worker in our industries.
=Industrial Capacities of Different Races.=--But, however hard one may
work, he can only exercise the gifts with which nature has endowed him.
Whether these gifts are contributed by race or by civilization, we shall
inquire when we come to the problems of amalgamation and assimilation.
At present we are concerned with the varying industrial gifts and
capacities of the various races as they actually exist at the time when
immigration, annexation, or conquest takes place.
The mental and moral qualities suited to make productive workers depend
upon the character of the industry. It is not conceivable that the
immigrants of the present day from Southern Europe and from Asia could
have succeeded as frontiersmen and pioneers in the settlement of the
country. In all Europe, Asia, and Africa there was but one race in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that had the preliminary training
necessary to plunge into the wilderness, and in the face of the Indian
to establish homes and agriculture. This was the English and the
Scotch-Irish. The Spaniards and the French were pioneers and
adventurers, but they established only trading stations. Accustomed to a
paternal government they had not, as a people, the self-reliance and
capacity for sustained exertion required to push forward as individuals,
and to cut themselves off from the support of a government across the
ocean. They shrank from the herculean task of clearing the forests,
planting crops among the stumps, and living miles away from their
neighbors. True, the pioneers had among their number several of German,
French, and Dutch descent, but these belonged to the second and third
generations descended from the immigrants and thrown from the time of
childhood among their English-Scotch neighbors. The French trappers and
explorers are famous, and have left their names on our map. But it was
the English race that established itself in America, not because it was
first to come, not because of its armies and navies, but because of its
agriculture. Every farm newly carved out of the wilderness became a
permanent foothold, and soon again sent out a continuous colony of sons
and daughters to occupy the fertile land. Based on this self-reliant,
democratic, industrial conquest of the new world the military conquest
naturally, inevitably followed.
But at the present day the character of industry has entirely changed.
The last quarter of the nineteenth century saw the vacant lands finally
occupied and the tribe of frontiersmen coming to an end. Population now
began to recoil upon the East and the cities. This afforded to
manufactures and to the mining industries the surplus labor-market so
necessary for the continuance of large establishments which to-day need
thousands of workmen and to-morrow hundreds. Moreover, among the
American-born workmen, as well as the English and Scotch, are not found
that docility, obedience to orders, and patient toil which employers
desire where hundreds and thousands are brought like an army under the
direction of foremen, superintendents, and managers. Employers now turn
for their labor supply to those eastern and southern sections of Europe
which have not hitherto contributed to immigration. The first to draw
upon these sources in large numbers were the anthracite coal operators
of Pennsylvania. In these fields the English, Scotch, Welsh, and Irish
miners, during and following the period of the Civil War, had effected
an organization for the control of wages, and the outrages of a secret
society known as the Molly Maguires gave occasion for the importation of
new races unaccustomed to unionism, and incapable, on account of
language, of coöperation with English-speaking miners. Once introduced
in the mining industry, these races rapidly found their way into the
unskilled parts of manufactures, into the service of railroads and large
contractors. On the construction of the Erie Canal in 1898, of 16,000
workmen, 15,000 were unnaturalized Italians.[74] The census of 1900
showed that while the foreign-born males were one-fourteenth of the
laborers in agriculture, they were three-fourths of the tailors, more
than one-half of the cabinet makers, nearly one-half of the miners and
quarrymen, tannery workers, marble and stonecutters, more than
two-fifths of the boot and shoe-makers and textile workers, one-third of
the coopers, iron and steel workers, wood-workers and miscellaneous
laborers, one-fourth of the carpenters, painters, and plasterers, and
one-fifth of the sawmill workers.[75] The foreign-born females numbered
nearly two-fifths of the female cotton-mill operatives and tailors,
one-third of the woollen-mill operatives, one-fourth of the tobacco and
silk-mill operatives.
On the Pacific slope the Chinese and Japanese immigrants have filled the
place occupied by the southeast European in the East and the negro in
the South. They were the workmen who built the Pacific railroads, and
without them it is said that these railroads could not have been
constructed until several years after their actual completion.
The immigration of the Chinese reached its highest figures prior to the
exclusion laws of 1882, and since that time has been but an
insignificant contribution. In their place have come the Japanese, a
race whose native land, in proportion to its cultivable area, is more
densely populated than any other country in the world. The Chinese and
Japanese are perhaps the most industrious of all races, while the
Chinese are the most docile. The Japanese excel in imitativeness, but
are not as reliable as the Chinese. Neither race, so far as their
immigrant representatives are concerned, possesses the originality and
ingenuity which characterize the competent American and British
mechanic. In the Hawaiian Islands, where they have enjoyed greater
opportunities than elsewhere, they are found to be capable workmen of
the skilled trades, provided they are under the direction of white
mechanics.[76] But their largest field of work in Hawaii is in the
unskilled cultivation of the great sugar plantations. Here they have
been likened to "a sort of agricultural automaton," and it becomes
possible to place them in large numbers under skilled direction, and
thus to secure the best results from their docility and industry.
In the United States itself the plantation form of agriculture, as
distinguished from the domestic form, has always been based on a supply
of labor from backward or un-Americanized races. This fact has a bearing
on the alleged tendency of agriculture toward large farms. Ten years
ago it seemed that the great "bonanza" farms were destined to displace
the small farms, just as the trust displaces the small manufacturer. But
it is now recognized that the reverse movement is in progress, and that
the small farmer can compete successfully with the great farmer. It has
not, however, been pointed out that the question is not merely an
economic one and that it depends upon the industrial character of the
races engaged in agriculture. The thrifty, hard-working and intelligent
American or Teutonic farmer is able to economize and purchase his own
small farm and compete successfully with the large undertaking. He is
even beginning to do this in Hawaii since the compulsory labor of his
large competitors was abolished.[77] But the backward, thriftless, and
unintelligent races succeed best when employed in gangs on large
estates. The cotton and sugar fields of the South with their negro
workers have their counterpart in the plantations of Hawaii with their
Chinese and Japanese, and in the newly developed sugar-beet fields of
Nebraska, Colorado, and California, with their Russians, Bohemians,
Japanese, and Mexicans. In the domestic or small form of agriculture the
bulk of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe are not greatly
desired as wage-earners, and they do not succeed as proprietors and
tenants because they lack oversight and business ability. Where they are
located in colonies under favorable auspices the Italians have achieved
notable success, and in the course of Americanization they will
doubtless rival older nationalities. But in the immigrant stage they are
helpless, and it is the immigrants from Northwestern Europe, the Germans
and Scandinavians, whose thrift, self-reliance, and intensive
agriculture have made them from the start the model farmers of America.
The Jewish immigrant, particularly, is unfitted for the life of a
pioneer. Remarkably individualistic in character, his field of
enterprise is society, and not the land. Of the thirty thousand families
sent out from New York by industrial and agricultural removal societies,
nine-tenths are located in industry and trade, and the bulk of the
remainder, who are placed on farms, succeed by keeping summer boarders.
Depending on boarders, they neglect agriculture and buy their
food-stuff. Their largest colony of hoped-for agriculturists, Woodbine,
New Jersey, has become a clothing factory.[78] Yet the factory system,
with its discipline and regular hours, is distasteful to the Jew's
individualism. He prefers the sweat-shop, with its going and coming. If
possible, he rises through peddling and merchandising.
These are a few of the many illustrative facts which might be set forth
to show that the changing character of immigration is made possible by
the changing character of industry; and that races wholly incompetent
as pioneers and independent proprietors are able to find a place when
once manufactures, mines, and railroads have sprung into being, with
their captains of industry to guide and supervise their semi-intelligent
work.
CHAPTER VI
LABOR
We have seen that the character of the immigrants for whom a place can
be found depends upon the character of the industry. It also depends
upon the laws governing property in labor. Here the industrial problem
widens out into the social problem.
There are four variations in the treatment of labor as property in the
United States, each of which has had its peculiar effect on the
character of immigration, or has grown out of the relations between
races. They are slavery, peonage, contract labor, and free labor. Under
slavery the laborer and his children are compelled by law throughout
their lifetime to work for an owner on terms dictated and enforced by
him. Under peonage the laborer is compelled by law to pay off a debt by
means of his labor, and under contract labor he is compelled by law to
carry out a contract to work. To enforce peonage and contract labor the
offence of "running away" is made punishable by imprisonment at forced
labor, or by extension of the period of service. Under freedom the law
refuses to enforce a contract to work, making this an exception to the
sacredness of contracts, and refuses to enforce the payment of a debt
by specific service. This leaves to the contractor or creditor the
usually empty relief of suing for damages. The significance of these
varying degrees of servile, semi-servile, and free labor will be seen in
the following discussion of the social relations of the superior and
inferior races.
In the entire circuit of the globe those races which have developed
under a tropical sun are found to be indolent and fickle. From the
standpoint of survival of the fittest, such vices are virtues, for
severe and continuous exertion under tropical conditions bring
prostration and predisposition to disease. Therefore, if such races are
to adopt that industrious life which is a second nature to races of the
temperate zones, it is only through some form of compulsion. The negro
could not possibly have found a place in American industry had he come
as a free man, and at the present time contract labor and peonage with
the crime of "running away" are recognized in varying degrees by the
laws of Southern states. These statutes have been held unconstitutional
by the Supreme Court,[79] under an act of Congress passed in 1867, but
the condition of peonage which they contemplate is considered by many
planters as essential to the continuance of the cotton industry. One of
them, in southwestern Georgia, a graduate of Columbia College, with five
years of business training in the Northern states, is quoted in an
interview as follows:[80]--
"We have two ways of handling our plantations. We rent small sections of
forty acres each, and with these go a plough and the mule. In addition,
I have about 450 hands who work on wages. These men are paid nine
dollars a month, in addition to a fixed rate of food, which amounts to
four pounds of meat a week, a certain percentage of vegetables, tobacco,
sugar, flour, and some other commodities.
"These negroes live on the plantation, are given a roof over their
heads, have garden patches, and several other more or less valuable
privileges. They invariably come to me for small advances of money.
"These advances of money and rations and clothing, although there is not
much of the latter, are frequently sufficient to put the negro in debt
to us. The minute he finds he is in debt he naturally conceives it to be
easier to go to work somewhere else and begin all over again, instead of
paying his debts.
"Now, when a negro runs away and violates his contract, leaving us in
the lurch, not only short of his labor, but short of the advances we
have made to him in money and goods, what would happen if we depended
simply and solely on our right to sue? In the first place, with 450
hands we would have 450 suits before the season is out, and if we won
them all we would not be able to collect forty-five cents.
"The result is, that in Georgia and Alabama, and I believe in other
states, the law recognizes the right of the planter to reclaim the
laborer who has left in violation of his contract, whether he be
actually in debt or not.
"Whether Judge Jones has declared this law constitutional or not, the
planters in the black belt will have to maintain their right to claim
their contract labor, or else they will have to go out of the business.
Under any other system you would find it impossible to get in your
cotton, because the negroes at the critical time would simply sit down
and refuse to work. When they are well, we compel laborers to go to the
field by force. This is the truth, and there is no use lying about it."
This reasoning is entirely logical from the business standpoint. If
production of wealth is the standard, contracts must be fulfilled and
debts must be paid. Otherwise capital will not embark in business. But
the reasoning does not stop with the negro. Once established, the
practice spreads to other races. Instances are cited of white men held
in peonage, negroes holding other negroes, and Italians forced to work
in a phosphate mine.[81] It is an easy matter to get working men in
debt. Many thousand rural justices keeping no records of convictions,
hundreds of constables with fees depending on convictions, scores of
petty crimes with penalties not usually enforced, contractors and
planters eager for labor at the convict's rating of 35 cents a
day--neither the negro nor the poor white is safe. Immigrants avoid a
country with such a record. Not only the dread of forced labor for
themselves but the dread of competition with the low wages that the
forced labor of others implies, keep the immigrants away from the South.
The fame of peonage is spread among them before they leave their native
land. The business that rests on coerced labor damages the whole
community for its own temporary gain. The right to quit work is as
sacred for the workman as the right to enforce contracts for the
capitalist. It is just as necessary to get energetic labor as it is to
get abundant capital to embark in business. By recognizing the right of
workmen to violate contracts, the employer learns to content himself
with contracts that will not hurt when violated. He learns to appeal to
the workman's motive to industry by methods that are not coercive.
Admitting that the bulk of what is said about the negro's fickleness is
true, he nevertheless is indiscriminately maligned. The thousands that
are unreliable furnish a cloak for suppressing the hundreds that are
industrious. I have made comparisons of the pay-rolls of two gas works
in Southern cities--the one employing negro stokers at 11 cents an hour,
the other whites at 22 cents an hour, and both working 12 hours a day
seven days a week. The negroes put in as many hours between pay-days as
did the whites, and if they "laid off" after pay-day it is no more than
any class of white workmen would do after two weeks of such exhausting
work. The negro in Southern cities can scarcely hope to rise above 12
cents an hour, and white mechanics have a way of working with negro
helpers at 10 cents an hour in order to lift their own wages to 20 cents
an hour. White wage-earners and white employers in the South speak of
the negroes' efforts to get higher wages in the same words and tones as
employers in the North speak of white wage-earners who have organized
unions and demanded more pay. A foreman condemned his "niggers" for
instability when they were leaving him at 10 cents an hour for a
railroad job at 12-1/2 cents an hour. Praising the Italians in
comparison with the negro, he could not think of paying 17-1/2 cents an
hour for pick-and-shovel work, which Italians were said to be getting in
another section of the state. The right to quit work is the right to get
higher wages. If the higher wages are paid and proper treatment
accorded, a process of natural selection ensues. The industrious and
steady workmen of all races retain the jobs. The gas company referred to
above, by a system of graded pay advancing with years of service, had
sorted out a more steady and reliable force of negroes than they could
have secured of whites at the rate of wages paid. The test is indeed a
severe one where a race has always been looked upon as servile. With
high wages regarded as "white man's wages," the process of individual
selection does not work out, and the dominant race excuses its resort
to whipping, beating, and peonage on the ground of the laziness which
its methods of remuneration have not learned to counterbalance. Even the
industrious Italians treated in this way would not be industrious--they
would leave for other states.
The Malay races, to which the Filipinos belong, are, like the negroes,
careless, thriftless, and disinclined to continuous exertion. In order
to induce the Javanese to work, the Dutch government of Java sets aside
a certain tract of government land for coffee planting, and compels each
head of a household to set out and keep in order a certain number of
coffee trees. On private estates in Java and in other Malay and Indian
colonies, such as Burma, Ceylon, British India, where the government
does not compel the native to take a contract to work, it nevertheless
enforces contracts voluntarily made. In certain provinces of the
Philippines "the tenants are usually in debt, and the old law which
permits the creditor to imprison the debtor for non-payment of debt is
still in force.... Landowners of a district frequently come together
shortly before the crops are sold and agree among themselves how much
interest to charge the tenants on their debts. This is for the purpose
of charging the highest possible rate and at the same time retain
tenants, who then could not leave, finding the same conditions
prevailing throughout the district."[82] In densely populated countries
like Java and Southern India, where the native cannot set up for
himself, he has no alternative except to work under these contracts, and
this is also true in the more thickly populated districts of the
Philippine Islands. But the case is different in sparsely settled
countries like Burma, East Sumatra, and the greater part of the
Philippines, where wages are so high that natives are not compelled by
necessity to work continuously. "Speaking generally," says Professor
Jenks, "the unskilled Filipino laborer, while intelligent enough, is
careless and thriftless. He in most cases wishes to take two or three
days a week, on the average, to celebrate as feast days. In individual
cases, where his wages have been increased, he has been known to lessen
correspondingly the number of days per month which he would work. His
income being sufficient to satisfy his modest needs, he could see no
reason why he should toil longer than was necessary to earn his
income."[83]
Hence in these sparsely settled countries the Dutch and English
governments have adopted, and Professor Jenks, in his report to the War
Department, has recommended a limited use of the system of contract
labor, not, however, for the native, but for imported Chinese. This
system has existed in another of our newly acquired possessions, Hawaii,
since 1852, where it applied to Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, and
German immigrants, and whence it was abolished by the act of
annexation in 1898.[84]
[Illustration: FILIPINO GOVERNORS (From Census of the Philippine Islands)]
Contract labor of this kind is quite different from the peonage and
contract labor of the non-industrial races. It is similar to the
indentured service of colonial times, in that the term of each contract
is limited to a few years, and the contract is made by way of
compensation for advanced expenses of immigration. The object is not, as
in the case of slavery and peonage, to compel a shiftless race to work,
but it is to develop the country by the introduction of an industrious
race. The Chinese, after the expiration of their contracts, often become
skilled laborers and merchants, and in the latter position their
frugality and wiliness make them dangerous neighbors for the native
Malay and Filipino races.[85] For this reason Professor Jenks recommends
that employers be placed under bonds to return each contract Chinese
coolie to China at the expiration of the period of contract, not to
exceed three years, unless the government gives special permission for
renewal of the contract. Governor Taft, in his report for the year 1902,
while advocating a limited employment of Chinese contract coolies, said,
"the truth is that, from a political standpoint, the unlimited
introduction of the Chinese into these islands would be a great mistake.
I believe the objection on the part of the Filipinos to such a course to
be entirely logical and justified. The development of the islands by
Chinamen would be at the expense of the Filipino people, and they may
very well resent such a suggestion."[86]
Governor Taft's opinion is strongly supported by the special
commissioner of the American Federation of Labor, who, after inquiries
in the district surrounding Manila, reports as follows:--
"Their reluctance to work, continually harped upon by many employers, is
simply the natural reluctance of a progressive people to work for low
wages under bad treatment. When wages rise above the level of the barest
and poorest necessaries of life, and where treatment is fair, there
Filipinos are at work in any numbers required."[87]
The situation here is similar to that of the negroes. In order to get
two hundred steady workers at high wages it is necessary to try out a
thousand or more. But the reports of the Philippine Commission show that
with the process of selection which their engineers can pursue by means
of the high wages on government work the results are satisfactory.[88]
"Of course," continues Mr. Rosenberg in his report, "the Filipino worker
cannot successfully compete--cheap as he can live--with the Chinese
standard of living, hence the unceasing vilification of the Filipino
workers by those employers and their following, who, seeing near by the
unlimited supply of cheap Chinese labor, wish these islands to be
thrown open to such labor, not only for the purpose of reducing the
small wages of the Filipinos, but also to reduce that of the Chinese
laborers now here. As one employer stated to me, 'We want more Chinese,
to keep them here for one or two years, then ship them back and get
another lot, for the Chinese I have here now are becoming too
independent and want more pay.'"
=Free Labor.=--The free laborer is not compelled by law to work. Then why
should he work? Why does he work? The answer is found within himself. He
wants something that he cannot get without working. Though this may seem
a trifling question and a self-evident answer, the question and answer
are the foundation of all questions of free institutions. For the
non-working races and classes or the spasmodic and unreliable workers
are the savages, paupers, criminals, idiots, lunatics, drunkards, and
the great tribe of exploiters, "grafters," despots, and "leisure
classes," who live on the work of others. Nearly every question of
social pathology may be resolved to this, Why does he not work? And
nearly every social ill would be cured if the non-workers could be
brought voluntarily to work.
There are just two grand motives which induce the freeman to
work--necessity and ambition. Necessity is the desire for quantity,
quality, and variety of things to be used. The term is elastic. It is
psychological, not material. It includes, of course, the wants of mere
animal existence--food, clothing, shelter. But this is a small part. The
cost of the mere quantity needed to support life is less than the added
cost needed to secure the quality and variety that satisfy the taste and
habits. A pig enjoys raw corn, but a man requires corn cake at five
times the cost. Tastes and habits depend on one's childhood, one's
training, one's associations, and kind of work. The necessities of a
Chinese coolie, Italian immigrant, or negro plantation hand are less,
and cost less, than those of a skilled mechanic or a college graduate,
because his associations have been different, and his present work is
different. But necessity goes farther. It includes the wants of the
family considered as a unit, and not merely the wants of the single man
or woman, else the race would not continue to increase. Furthermore,
social obligations impose added necessity. Compulsory education of
children compels parents to support their children instead of living on
their wages. Laws regulating sanitation and tenements compel the tenant
to pay more rent. The necessities of a farm-hand on the estates of Italy
are less than those of the same hand in the cities of America.
Ambition is the desire for an improved position for one's self and
family--for better quality and greater variety of material things. It
demands a style of clothing and living suitable to the improved position
aspired to. It demands an education for one's children superior to the
minimum set by compulsory schooling. It demands thrift and economy for
the sake of independence or the ability to hold on until one's demands
are conceded. Ambition looks to the future--necessity is based on the
past. The negro or the Malay works three days and loafs three because
three days' wages procure his necessities. The Chinaman, or Italian, or
Jewish immigrant works six days and saves the wages of three because the
future is vivid to his imagination. With similar necessities one is
ambitious, the other is content.
The scope and possibility of evoking ambition depend upon the
institution of private property. Property in human beings suppresses it,
unless occasionally a slave is permitted to purchase his freedom. The
wage system evokes ambition if the way is open for promotion or for
escape by becoming an owner. Tenancy is on a still higher level, but
most of all, for the masses of men, the ownership of his own small
property is the keenest spur to ambition, for it rewards the worker with
all of his product. This motive is the surest test of an individual's or
a race's future. Compare the negro and the Italian cotton grower as
tenants in the new vocation opening up to the latter. "It is always
difficult," says the observant planter, Mr. Stone,[89] "to get a negro
to plant and properly cultivate the outer edges of his field--the
extreme ends of his rows, his ditch banks, etc. The Italian is so
jealous of the use of every foot for which he pays rent that he will
cultivate with a hoe places too small to be worked with a plough, and
derive a revenue from spots to which a negro would not give a moment's
thought. I have seen them cultivate right down to the water's edge the
banks of bayous that had never been touched by the plough. I have seen
them walk through their fields and search out every skipped place in
every row and carefully put in seed to secure a perfect stand. I have
seen them make more cotton per acre than the negro on the adjoining cut,
gather it from two to four weeks earlier, and then put in the extra time
earning money by picking in the negro's field."
But ambition has its penalty. It is equivalent to an increase in the
supply of labor. As an ambitious proprietor the increase goes into his
permanent property, but the ambitious wage-earner accepts a lower rate
of pay. His fellows see the reduction and go still lower. The see-saw
continues until wages reach the level of necessities, and there is
nothing left for ambition. The Jewish sweat-shop is the tragic penalty
paid by that ambitious race. In the Illinois coal mines the wages were
reduced one-third during twelve years of Italian and Slav immigration.
The ambitious races are the industrial races. But their ambition and
their industry bring the momentous problem of destructive competition.
It might seem that this evil would correct itself--that an increase in
the products of one industry would be offset by an increase in other
industries; that therefore the increased supply in one would not be
forced upon the market at lower prices, but would be exchanged on the
same terms as before for the increased supply in others. This is indeed
the case in prosperous times. All industries advance together, and the
increasing supply of one is merely an increasing demand for others. But
for some reason, industries do not always harmoniously advance together.
And when the disproportion appears, the workers who are blindly but
ambitiously pushing ahead endeavor to overcome, by increasing the
quantity of output, what they lose by reducing the price. There is but
one immediate and practical remedy--the organization of labor to
regulate competition. The method of organization is to do in concert
through self-sacrifice what the non-industrial races do individually for
self-indulgence; namely, refuse to work. Where the one loafs the other
strikes. While the necessities of the workers set the minimum below
which wages cannot fall, and their physical endurance sets the maximum
hours beyond which they cannot work, the labor-union, by means of the
strike or the threat to strike, sets a higher minimum of wages and a
lower maximum of hours, which leaves room for ambition. Eventually the
higher wage and the shorter hours become habitual and become a higher
level of necessities. Gifted individuals may, indeed, rise above the
wage-earning class by their own efforts, but labor organization alone
can raise the class as a whole.
The organization of workmen in labor unions has been more difficult in
this than in other free countries, owing to the competition of races.
Heretofore it has been the easiest possible matter for a manager,
apprehensive of agitators in forming a union, to introduce a new race
and a new language into his works. Indeed, almost the only device and
symptom of originality displayed by American employers in disciplining
their labor force has been that of playing one race against another.
They have, as a rule, been weak in methods of conciliation and feelings
of consideration for their employees, as well as in the means of
safeguarding life and health, but they have been strong with the weapon
"divide and conquer." The number of races they have drawn upon is often
amazing. The anthracite mine workers comprise nineteen languages and
dialects. The employees of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company belong to
thirty-two nationalities and speak twenty-seven languages. Such a medley
of races offers indeed a disheartening prospect to the union organizer.
And therefore when these races finally organize, the change in their
moral character must be looked upon as the most significant of the
social and industrial revolutions of our time. The United Mine Workers
of America, with 300,000 members, is very largely composed of recent
immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. So with the Longshoremen,
the United Garment Workers, and the Butcher Workmen. These are or have
been among the strongest and best disciplined of American labor-unions.
The newest races of the past twenty years have been coming long enough
to have members who speak the English language and act as interpreters
and leaders, and this is essential where the speeches at a union meeting
must be translated often into four or five languages before the subject
can be voted upon. Furthermore, the recruiting area for new races has
been nearly exhausted, and the races now coming find their
fellow-countrymen already in the unions. In the anthracite coal field I
saw a dozen Slovaks just arrived from Hungary, but persuaded by their
unionized precursors not to take the places of strikers. In New York a
shipload of Italians in time of strike has been taken directly into the
union. Such a sight would have been unlikely a dozen years ago.
The competition of races is the competition of standards of living. The
reason the Chinaman or the Italian can save three days' wages is because
wages have been previously fixed by the greater necessities of more
advanced races. But competition has no respect for superior races. The
race with lowest necessities displaces others. The cotton textile
industry of New England was originally operated by the educated sons and
daughters of American stock. The Irish displaced many of them, then the
French Canadians completed the displacement; then, when the children of
the French had begun to acquire a higher standard, contingents of
Portuguese, Greeks, Syrians, Poles, and Italians entered to prevent a
rise, and latterly the Scotch-Irish from the Appalachian Mountains came
down to the valleys of the South, and with their low wages, long hours,
and child labor, set another brake on the standard of living. Lastly,
Italians are beginning to be imported to supplement the "poor whites."
Branches of the clothing industry in New York began with English and
Scotch tailors, were then captured by Irish and Germans, then by Russian
Jews, and lastly by Italians, while in Boston the Portuguese took a
share, and in Chicago the Poles, Bohemians, and Scandinavians. Almost
every great manufacturing and mining industry has experienced a similar
substitution of races. As rapidly as a race rises in the scale of
living, and through organization begins to demand higher wages and
resist the pressure of long hours and overexertion, the employers
substitute another race and the process is repeated. Each race comes
from a country lower in the scale than that of the preceding, until
finally the ends of the earth have been ransacked in the search for low
standards of living combined with patient industriousness. Europe has
been exhausted, Asia has been drawn upon, and there remain but three
regions of the temperate zones from which a still lower standard can be
expected. These are China, Japan, and India. The Chinese have been
excluded by law, the Japanese and Koreans are coming in increasing
numbers, and the Indian coolies remain to be experimented upon. That
employers will make strenuous efforts to bring in these last remaining
races in the progressive decline of standards, to repeal the Chinese
prohibitive laws and to prevent additions to these laws, naturally
follows from the progress toward higher standards and labor
organization already made by the Italian and the Slav.
The trade-union is often represented as an imported and un-American
institution. It is true that in some unions the main strength is in the
English workmen. But the majority of unionists are immigrants and
children of immigrants from countries that know little of unionism.
Ireland and Italy have nothing to compare with the trade-union movement
of England, but the Irish are the most effective organizers of the
American unions, and the Italians are becoming the most ardent
unionists. Most remarkable of all, the individualistic Jew from Russia,
contrary to his race instinct, is joining the unions. The American
unions, in fact, grow out of American conditions, and are an American
product. Although wages are two or three times as high as in his
European home, the immigrant is driven by competition and the pressure
of employers into a physical exertion which compels him to raise his
standard of living in order to have strength to keep at work. He finds
also that the law forbids his children to work, and compels him to send
them to school to maintain a higher standard and to support his children
he must earn more wages. This he can do in no other way than by
organizing a union. The movement is of course aided by English-speaking
outsiders or "agitators," especially by the Irish, but it finds a prompt
response in the necessities of the recruits. Labor organization is
essentially the outcome of American freedom, both as a corrective to the
evils of free competition and as an exercise of the privilege of free
association.
When once moved by the spirit of unionism, the immigrants from
low-standard countries are the most dangerous and determined of
unionists. They have no obligations, little property, and but meagre
necessities that compel them to yield. The bituminous coal miners were
on strike four months in 1897 and the anthracite mine workers five
months in 1902. Unionism comes to them as a discovery and a revelation.
Suddenly to find that men of other races whom they have hated are really
brothers, and that their enmity has been encouraged for the profit of a
common oppressor, is the most profound awakening of which they are
capable. Their resentment toward employers who have kept them apart,
their devotion to their new-found brothers, are terrible and pathetic.
With their emotional temperament, unionism becomes not merely a fight
for wages but a religious crusade. It is in the nature of retribution
that, after bringing to this country all the industrial races of Europe
and Asia in the effort to break down labor organizations, these races
should so soon have wiped out race antagonism and, joining together in
the most powerful of labor-unions, have wrenched from their employers
the greatest advances in wages.
There is but one thing that stands in the way of complete unionization
in many of the industries; namely, a flood of immigration too great
for assimilation. With nearly a million immigrants a year the pressure
upon unions seems almost resistless. A few of the unions which control
the trade, like the mine workers and longshoremen, with high initiation
fees and severe terms of admission, are able to protect themselves by
virtue of strength already gained. But in the coast states and on
miscellaneous labor this strategic advantage does not exist, and the
standards are set by the newest immigrants.
[Illustration: GOVERNOR JOHNSON OF MINNESOTA.--SWEDE (From _The World
To-Day_)]
=Profits and Wages.=--We have now stated at some length in this and the
preceding chapter the two standpoints from which the immigration of
industrial races is viewed. One standpoint is that of the production of
wealth, the other the distribution of wealth. One is the development of
our natural resources, the other is the elevation of our working
population. If we inquire somewhat more critically and take into account
all of the circumstances, we shall find that the motives animating this
difference of policy are not really the above distinction between
production and distribution, but the distinction between two opposing
interests in distribution; namely, profits and wages. Unfortunately it
is too readily assumed that whatever increases profits does so by
increasing production. As a matter of fact it is only secondarily the
production of wealth and development of resources that is sought by one
of the interests concerned--it is primarily increase of profits at the
expense of wages. Cheap labor, it is asserted, is needed to develop the
less productive resources of the country--what the economists call the
margin of production. It is needed to develop the less productive
industries, like sugar beet, and the less productive branches of other
industries, like the construction of railways in undeveloped regions or
the reconstruction of railways in older regions, or the extension of a
coal mine into the narrow veins, and so on. Without cheap labor these
marginal resources, it is asserted, could not profitably be exploited,
and would therefore not be developed.
This argument, within limits, is undoubtedly true, but it overlooks the
part played by machinery and inventions where wages are high. The
cigar-making machine cannot extensively be introduced on the Pacific
coast because Chinese cheap labor makes the same cigars at less cost
than the machines. High wages stimulate the invention and use of
machinery and scientific processes, and it is machinery and science,
more than mere hand labor, on which reliance must be placed to develop
the natural resources of a country.
But machinery and science cannot be as quickly introduced as cheap
immigrant labor. Machinery requires accumulation of capital in advance
of production, but labor requires only the payment of daily wages in the
course of production. Consequently in the haste to get profits the
immigrant is more desired than machinery. But excessive profits secured
in this way bring reaction and a period of business depression which
check the production of wealth even more than the period of prosperity
has stimulated production. Consider the extreme vacillations of
prosperity and depression which characterize American industry. In a
period of prosperity the prices of commodities rise rapidly, but the
wages of labor, especially unorganized labor, follow slowly, and do not
rise proportionately as high as prices. This means an enormous increase
in profits and production of commodities. But commodities are produced
to be sold, and if the market falls off, then production comes to a
standstill with what is known as "overproduction." Now, wage-earners are
the mass of consumers. If their wages do not rise in proportion to
prices and profits, they cannot purchase as large a proportion of the
country's products as they did before the period of prosperity began.
"Overproduction" is mainly the "underconsumption" of wage-earners.
Immigration intensifies this fatal cycle of "booms" and "depressions." A
natural increase in population by excess of births over deaths,
continues at practically the same rate year after year, in good times
and bad times, but an artificial increase through immigration falls off
in hard times and becomes excessive in good times. Thus, in 1879, at the
lowest point of depression, the number of immigrants was 177,826, but
three years later, in the "boom" culminating in 1882, it rose to
788,992. In nine years following the depression of 1897 the number
increased from 230,000 to 1,100,000.
Even this does not tell the story complete, for the effects of free
immigration are intensified by the opposite policy of a protective
tariff on imports. While labor is admitted practically free, the
products of labor are taxed to prevent free ingress. The following table
shows the extreme points in the rise and fall of immigration and
imports:--
CULMINATING POINTS OF IMMIGRATION AND IMPORTS OF MERCHANDISE
=================+=========================+=======================
| IMMIGRATION | IMPORTS
YEAR ENDING +----------+----------+--------------+------------
JUNE 30 |Prosperity|Depression| Prosperity | Depression
-----------------+----------+----------+--------------+------------
1873 | 459,803 | | $642,000,000|
1879 and 1878[90]| | 177,826 | |$437,000,000
1882 | 788,992 | | 725,000,000|
1886 and 1885[90]| | 334,203 | | 578,000,000
1893 | 439,307 | | 866,000,000|
1897 and 1898[90]| | 230,832 | | 616,000,000
1906 |1,100,735 | | 1,226,000,000|
-----------------+----------+----------+--------------+------------
By comparing the two sets of columns it will be seen that, owing to the
protective tariff, the imports of merchandise vary but slightly in
periods of prosperity and depression compared with the variation in
number of immigrants. Thus in the recent period of prosperity, the
imports increased twofold above the lowest point of the preceding
depression, while the number of immigrants increased nearly fivefold.
The swell of immigration in the above-mentioned periods of prosperity
increases the supply of labor, but the protective tariff prevents a
similar increase in the supply of products. Thus immigration and the
tariff together prevent wages from rising with the rise in prices of
commodities and cost of living. This permits profits to increase more
than wages, to be followed by overproduction and stoppage of business.
Furthermore, when once the flow of immigrants is stimulated it continues
for some time after the pinnacle of prosperity has been reached. In 1903
the boom met a check at the beginning of the year, but the number of
immigrants continued to increase during the summer and fall at the rate
of 20,000 per month in excess of the number during the high period of
prosperity in 1902. This makes it possible for great corporations to
continue their investments by means of cheap labor beyond the probable
demands of the country, with the result of overproduction, loss of
profits, inability to pay fixed charges, and consequent panics. Thus it
is that immigration, instead of increasing the production of wealth by a
steady, healthful growth, joins with other causes to stimulate the
feverish overproduction, with its inevitable collapse, that has
characterized the industry of America more than that of any other
country. It helps to create fortunes during a period of speculation, and
intensifies the reaction during a period of stagnation.
CHAPTER VII
CITY LIFE, CRIME, AND POVERTY
Statistics are considered by many people as dry and uninteresting, and
the fact that a book is statistical is a warning that it should not be
read, or that the statistical paragraphs should be passed over for the
narrative and historical parts. This is a dilettante and lazy attitude
to take, and especially so in the study of social subjects, for in these
subjects it is only statistics that tell us the true proportions and
relative importance of our facts. The study of statistics leads us to a
study of social causes and forces, and when we see that in the year 1790
three per cent of our population lived in cities, and in the year 1900
thirty-three per cent lived in cities of 8000 population and over, we
are aroused to the importance of making a serious inquiry into the
reasons for this growth of cities and the effects of city life on the
future of democracy and the welfare of the nation. More impressive to
the student of race problems becomes the inquiry when we realize that
while one-fifth of our entire population lives in the thirty-eight
cities of over 100,000 population, two-fifths of our foreign-born
population, one-third of our native offspring of foreign parents, and
only one-tenth of our people of native parentage live in such cities.
That is to say, the proportion of the foreign-born in great cities is
four times as great, and the proportion of the children of foreign
parents is three and one-third times as great as that of the colonial
and older native stock. These proportions appear in the accompanying
table and the upper diagram on page 162.
POPULATION IN THE UNITED STATES AND LARGE CITIES: 1900
=======================+===================+===========================
| | IN 38 CITIES OF 100,000
| IN UNITED STATES | POPULATION AND OVER
+-----------+-------+------------+--------------
TOTAL FOR UNITED STATES| | | | Per cent of
| | Per | | total of
| Number | cent | Number | corresponding
| | | | class
-----------------------+-----------+-------+------------+--------------
Population |75,994,575 | 100.0 | 14,208,347 | 18.7
Native white, native | | | |
parents |40,958,216 | 53.9 | 4,245,817 | 10.3
Native white, foreign | | | |
parents |15,637,063 | 20.6 | 5,280,186 | 33.2
Foreign white |10,213,817 | 13.4 | 3,972,324 | 39.7
Negroes | 8,833,994 | 11.6 | 668,324 | 7.6
Indian and Mongolians | 351,385 | .5 | 32,696 | 9.3
-----------------------+-----------+-------+------------+--------------
If we present the matter in another form in order to show the full
extent of foreign influence in our great cities, we have another
diagram, which shows that 59 per cent of the population outside, and
only 30 per cent of the population within these cities is of native
parentage, while 27 per cent of the population outside, and 65 per cent
of the population within these cities is of foreign parentage. The
census enumeration carries us back only to the parents, but if we had
knowledge of the grandparents we should probably find that the
immigrant element of the nineteenth century contributed a goodly portion
of those set down as of native parentage.
[Illustration: DISTRIBUTION OF POPULATION: 1900]
[Illustration: PERCENTAGE OF POPULATION IN CITIES: 1900]
[Illustration: CONSTITUENTS OF THE POPULATION OF CITIES OF MORE THAN
100,000 INHABITANTS: 1900]
Still more significant becomes the comparison when we take each of these
cities separately, as is done in the chart reproduced on page 163 from
the Statistical Atlas of the Twelfth Census.
Here it appears that the extreme is reached in the textile manufacturing
city of Fall River, where but 14 per cent of the population is of native
extraction, while in the two greatest cities, New York and Chicago, the
proportion is 21 per cent, and the only large cities with a predominance
of the native element are St. Joseph, Columbus, Indianapolis, and Kansas
City, with Denver equally divided. As already stated, grandparents would
still further diminish the proportion of native element.
If we carry our comparison down to the 160 cities of 25,000 population,
we shall find that in such cities is one-half of the foreign-born
population,[91] and we shall also see marked differences among the
races. At one extreme, three-fourths of those born in Russia, mainly
Jews, live in these principal cities, and at the other extreme,
one-fifth of the Norwegians.
The other Scandinavian countries and the Welsh and Swiss have about
one-third, while the English and Scotch are two-fifths, Germany,
Austria, Bohemia, and Poland, one-half to three-fifths, Ireland and
Italy nearly two-thirds.
Individual cities suggest striking comparisons. In New York,
computations based on the census show 785,035 persons of German
descent, a number nearly equal to the population of Hamburg, and larger
than the native element in New York (737,477). New York has twice as
many Irish (710,510) as Dublin, two and one-half times as many Jews as
Warsaw, half as many Italians as Naples, and 50,000 to 150,000 first and
second generations from Scotland, Hungary, Poland, Austria, and
England.[92] Chicago has nearly as many Germans as Dresden, one-third as
many Bohemians as Prague, one-half as many Irish as Belfast, one-half as
many Scandinavians as Stockholm.[93]
The variety of races, too, is astonishing. New York excels Babel. A
newspaper writer finds in that city sixty-six languages spoken,
forty-nine newspapers published in foreign languages, and one school at
Mulberry Bend with children of twenty-nine nationalities. Several of the
smaller groups live in colonies, like the Syrians, Greeks, and Chinese.
But the colonies of the larger groups are reservoirs perpetually filling
and flowing.[94]
The influx of population to our cities, the most characteristic and
significant movement of the present generation, has additional
significance when we classify it according to the motives of those who
seek the cities, whether industrial or parasitic. The transformation
from agriculture to manufactures and transportation has designated city
occupations as the opportunities for quick and speculative accumulation
of wealth, and in the cities the energetic, ambitious, and educated
classes congregate. From the farms of the American stock the sons leave
a humdrum existence for the uncertain but magnificent rewards of
industrialism. These become the business men, the heads of great
enterprises, and the millionaires whose example hypnotizes the
imagination of the farm lads throughout the land. Many of them find
their level in clerical and professional occupations, but they escape
the manual toil which to them is the token of subordination. These
manual portions are the peculiar province of the foreign immigrant, and
foreign immigration is mainly a movement from the farms of Europe to the
cities of America. The high wages of the industries and occupations
which radiate from American cities are to them the magnet which
fortune-seeking is to the American-born. The cities, too, furnish that
choice of employers and that easy reliance on charitable and friendly
assistance which is so necessary to the indigent laborer looking for
work. Thus it is that those races of immigrants the least self-reliant
or forehanded, like the Irish and the Italians, seek the cities in
greater proportions than those sturdy races like the Scandinavians,
English, Scotch, and Germans. The Jew, also, coming from the cities of
Europe, seeks American cities by the very reason of his racial distaste
for agriculture, and he finds there in his coreligionists the necessary
assistance for a beginning in American livelihood.
At this point we gradually pass over from the industrial motives of city
influx to the parasitic motives. The United Hebrew Charities of New York
have asserted that one-fourth of the Jews of that city are applicants
for charity, and the other charitable societies make similar estimates
for the population at large. These estimates must certainly be
exaggerated, and a careful analysis of their methods of keeping
statistics will surely moderate such startling statements, but we must
accept them as the judgment of those who have the best means of knowing
the conditions of poverty and pauperism in the metropolis. However
exaggerated, they indicate an alarming extent of abject penury brought
on by immigration, for it is mainly the immigrant and the children of
the immigrant who swell the ranks of this indigent element in our great
cities.
Those who are poverty-stricken are not necessarily parasitic, but they
occupy that intermediate stage between the industrial and the parasitic
classes from which either of these classes may be recruited. If through
continued poverty they become truly parasitic, then they pass over to
the ranks of the criminal, the pauper, the vicious, the indolent, and
the vagrant, who, like the industrial class, seek the cities.
The dangerous effects of city life on immigrants and the children of
immigrants cannot be too strongly emphasized. This country can absorb
millions of all races from Europe and can raise them and their
descendants to relatively high standards of American citizenship in so
far as it can find places for them on the farms. "The land has been our
great solvent."[95] But the cities of this country not only do not raise
the immigrants to the same degree of independence, but are themselves
dragged down by the parasitic and dependent conditions which they foster
among the immigrant element.
[Illustration: DR. ORONHYATEKHA MOHAWK INDIAN, LATE CHIEF OF ORDER OF
FORESTERS]
=Crime.=--This fact is substantiated by a study of criminal and pauper
statistics. Great caution is needed in this line of inquiry, especially
since the eleventh census in 1890 promulgated most erroneous inferences
from the statistics compiled under its direction. It was contended by
the census authorities that for each million of the foreign-born
population there were 1768 prisoners, while for each million of the
native-born there were only 898 prisoners, thus showing a tendency to
criminality of the foreign-born twice as great as that of the white
native-born. This inference was possible through oversight of the
important fact that prisoners are recruited mainly from adults, and that
the proportion of foreign-born adults to the foreign-born population is
much greater than that of the native-born adults to the native
population. If comparison be made of the number of male prisoners with
the number of males of voting age, the proportions are materially
different and more accurate, as follows:--
NUMBER OF MALE PRISONERS PER MILLION OF VOTING POPULATION, 1890 (OMITTING
"UNKNOWN")[96]
Native white, native parents 3,395
Native white, foreign parents 5,886
Native white, total 3,482[97]
Foreign white 3,270
Negro 13,219
Here the foreign-born show actually a lower rate of criminality (3270)
than the total native-born (3482). This inference harmonizes with our
general observations of the immigrants, namely, that they belong to the
industrial classes, and that our immigration laws are designed to
exclude criminals.
But this analysis brings out a fact far more significant than any yet
adverted to; namely, that the native-born children of immigrants show a
proportion of criminality (5886 per million) much greater than that of
the foreign-born themselves (3270 per million), and 70 per cent greater
than that of the children of native parents.
This significant fact is further brought out, and with it the obverse of
the census mistake above referred to, when we examine the census
inferences respecting juvenile criminals. The census calculations show
that there are 250 juvenile offenders for every million of the
native-born population, and only 159 such offenders for every million of
the foreign-born population; but if we remember that the proportion of
foreign-born children is small, and then proceed to compare the number
of boys who are offenders with the number of boys 10 to 19 years of age
rather than with the number of persons of all ages, we shall have the
following results, confining our attention to the North Atlantic states,
where juvenile reformatories are more liberally provided than in other
sections:--
MALE JUVENILE OFFENDERS PER MILLION OF MALE POPULATION TEN TO NINETEEN
YEARS OF AGE, NORTH ATLANTIC STATES, 1890 (OMITTING "UNKNOWN")[98]
Native white, native parents 1,744
Native white, foreign parents 3,923
Foreign white 3,316
Colored 17,915
This table throws a different light on the situation, for it shows that
the tendency towards crime among juveniles, instead of being less for
the foreign-born than for the native-born, is nearly twice as great as
that of the children of American parentage, and that the tendency among
native children of foreign parentage (3923 per million) is more than
twice as great as that among children of American parents (1744 per
million).
This amazing criminality of the children of immigrants is almost wholly
a product of city life, and it follows directly upon the incapacity of
immigrant parents to control their children under city conditions. The
boys, especially, at an early age lose respect for their parents, who
cannot talk the language of the community, and who are ignorant and
helpless in the whirl of the struggle for existence, and are shut up
during the daytime in shops and factories. On the streets and alleys, in
their gangs and in the schools, the children evade parental discipline,
and for them the home is practically non-existent. Says a well-informed
student of race problems in New York,[99] "Example after example might
be given of tenement-house families in which the parents--industrious
peasant laborers--have found themselves disgraced by idle and vicious
grown sons and daughters. Cases taken from the records of charitable
societies almost at random show these facts again and again." Even the
Russian Jew, more devoted and self-sacrificing in the training of his
children than any other race of immigrants, sees them soon earning more
money than their parents and breaking away from the discipline of
centuries.
Far different is it with those foreigners who settle in country
districts where their children are under their constant oversight, and
while the youngsters are learning the ways of America they are also held
by their parents to industrious habits. Children of such immigrants
become substantial citizens, while children of the same race brought up
in the cities become a recruiting constituency for hoodlums, vagabonds,
and criminals.
The reader must have observed in the preceding statistical estimates
the startling preëminence of the negro in the ranks of criminals. His
proportion of prisoners for adult males (13,219 per million) seems to be
four times as great as that of the native stock, and more than twice as
great as that of foreign parentage, while for boys his portion in the
North Atlantic states (17,915 per million) is ten times as great as that
of the corresponding native stock, and four times as great as that of
foreign parentage.
The negro perhaps suffers by way of discrimination in the number of
arrests and convictions compared with the whites, yet it is significant
that in proportion to total numbers the negro prisoners in the Northern
states are nearly twice as many as in the Southern states. Here, again,
city life works its degenerating effects, for the Northern negroes are
congregated mainly in towns and cities, while the Southern negroes
remain in the country.
Did space permit, it would prove an interesting quest to follow the
several races through the various classes of crime, noticing the
relative seriousness of their offences, and paying attention to the
female offenders. Only one class of offences can here be noted in
detail; namely, that of public intoxication. Although classed as a
crime, this offence borders on pauperism and the mental diseases, and
its extreme prevalence indicates that the race in question is not
overcoming the degenerating effects of competition and city life.
Statistics from Massachusetts seem to show that drunkenness prevails to
the greatest extent in the order of preëminence among the Irish, Welsh,
English, and Scotch, and least among the Portuguese, Italians, Germans,
Poles, and Jews. The Italians owe their prominence in the lists of
prisoners to their crimes of violence, and very slightly to
intoxication, though the latter is increasing among them. In the
Southern states the ravages of drink among the negroes have been so
severe and accompanied with such outbreaks of violence that the policy
of prohibition of the liquor traffic has been carried farther than in
any other section of the country. Probably three-fourths of the Southern
negroes live in prohibition counties, and were it not for the paternal
restrictions imposed by such laws, the downward course of the negro race
would doubtless have outrun considerably the speed it has actually
attained.
Besides the crimes which spring from racial tendencies, there is a
peculiar class of crimes springing largely from race prejudice and
hatred. These are lynchings and mob violence. The United States presents
the paradox of a nation where respect for law and constitutional forms
has won most signal triumphs, yet where concerted violations of law have
been most widespread. By a queer inversion of thought, a crime committed
jointly by many is not a crime, but a vindication of justice, just as a
crime committed by authority of a nation is not a crime, but a virtue.
Such crimes have not been continuous, but have arisen at times out of
acute racial antagonisms. The Knownothing agitation of 1850 to 1855,
which prevailed among religious and patriotic Americans, was directed
against the newly arrived flood of immigrants from Europe and Asia, and
was marked by a state of lawlessness and mob rule such as had never
before existed, especially in the cities of Boston, New York, Pittsburg,
Cincinnati, Louisville, and Baltimore.[100] These subsided or changed
their object under the oncoming slavery crisis, and the Civil War itself
was a grand resort to violence by the South on a question of race
domination. Beginning again with the Kuklux and White-cap uprisings in
the seventies, mob rule drove the negroes back to a condition of
subordination, but the lawless spirit then engendered has continued to
show itself in the annual lynching of fifty to one hundred and fifty
negroes suspected or convicted of the more heinous crimes.[101] Nor has
this crime of the mob been restricted to the South, but it has spread to
the North, and has become almost the accepted code of procedure
throughout the land wherever negroes are heinously accused. In the
Northern instances this vengeance of the mob is sometimes wreaked on the
entire race, for in the North the negro is more assertive, and defends
his accused brother. But in the South the mob usually, though not
always, stops with vengeance on the individual guilty, or supposedly
guilty, since the race in general is already cowed.
Other races suffer at the hands of mobs, such as the Chinese in Wyoming
and California at the hands of American mine workers, Italians in
Louisiana and California at the hands of citizens and laborers, Slovaks
and Poles in Latimer, Pennsylvania, at the hands of a mob militia. With
the rise of organized labor these race riots and militia shootings
increased in number, often growing out of the efforts of older races of
workmen to drive newer and backward races from their jobs, or the
efforts of employers to destroy newly formed unions of these immigrant
races. Many strikes are accompanied by an incipient race war where
employers are endeavoring to make substitution, one race for another, of
Irish, Germans, native whites, Italians, negroes, Poles, and so on. Even
the long series of crimes against the Indians, to which the term "A
Century of Dishonor" seems to have attached itself without protest, must
be looked upon as the mob spirit of a superior race bent on despoiling a
despised and inferior race. That the frenzied spirit of the mob, whether
in strikes, panicky militia, Indian slaughter, or civil war, should so
often have blackened the face of a nation sincerely dedicated to law and
order is one of the penalties paid for experimenting on a problem of
political and economic equality with material marked by extreme racial
inequality.
=Poverty and Pauperism.=--Prior to year 1875 the laws of the United States
imposed no prohibition upon the immigration of paupers from foreign
countries, and not until the federal government took from the states
the administration of the law in 1891 did the prohibitions of the
existing law become reasonably effective. Since that year there have
been annually debarred, as likely to become public charges, 431 to 7898
arrivals, the latter number being debarred in the year 1905. In addition
to those debarred at landing, there have been annually returned within
one to three years after landing, 177 to 845 immigrants, many of whom
had meantime become public charges. From these statements it will be
seen that, prior to 1891, it was possible and quite probable that many
thousand paupers and prospective paupers were admitted by the
immigration authorities, and consequently the proportion of paupers
among the foreign-born should appear larger than it would in later
years. In the earlier years systematic arrangements were in force in
foreign countries, especially Great Britain, to assist in the
deportation of paupers to the United States, and therefore it is not
surprising that, apart from race characteristics, there should have come
to this country larger numbers of Irish paupers than those from any
other nationality. Since these exportations have been stopped, it is not
so much the actual pauper as the prospective pauper who gets admission.
96 per cent of the paupers in almshouses have been in this country ten
years or more, showing that the exclusion laws are still defective, in
that large numbers of poor physique are admitted. Taking the census
reports for 1904, and confining our attention to the North Atlantic
states, where children are generally provided for in separate
establishments, we are able to compute the following as the relative
extent of pauperism among males:--
MALE PAUPERS IN ALMSHOUSES PER MILLION VOTING POPULATION, NORTH ATLANTIC
STATES, 1904.
Native white, native parents 2,360
Native white, foreign parents 2,252
Foreign white 5,119
Colored 4,056
Here we see the counterpart of the estimates on crime, for the natives
of foreign parentage show a smaller proportion of paupers than the
natives of native parentage, while the foreign-born themselves show more
than double the relative amount of pauperism of the native element, and
the colored paupers are nearly twice the native stock.
The census bureau also furnishes computations showing the contributions
of the different races and nationalities to the insane asylums and
benevolent institutions.[102] In general it appears that the
foreign-born and the negroes exceed the native classes in their burden
on the public. A report of the Department of Labor of great value and
significance, incidentally bearing on this subject, shows for the
Italians in Chicago their industrial and social conditions. According to
this report the average earnings of Italians in that city in 1896 while
at work were $6.41 per week for men and $2.11 per week for women, and
the average time unemployed by the wage-earning element was over seven
months. In another report of the Department of Labor it appears that the
slum population of the cities of Baltimore, Chicago, New York, and
Philadelphia in 1893 was unemployed three months each year. With wages
one dollar a day, and employment only five months during the year, it is
marvellous that the Italians of Chicago, during the late period of
depression, were not thrown in great numbers upon public relief. Yet,
with the strict administration of the exclusion laws leading to the
deportation of over 2000 Italians a year as liable to become public
charges, it is likely that the immigrants of that race, although low in
physique, poverty, and standards of living, are fairly well screened of
actual paupers.
CHAPTER VIII
POLITICS
American democracy was ushered in on a theory of equality. And no word
has been more strangely used and abused. There is the monarchical idea
of equality, and Mr. Mallock begs the question when he gives the title
"Aristocracy and Evolution" to a book on the necessary part played by
great men. Doubtless, in Greek, aristocracy means "government by the
best," but in history it means government by the privilege of birth and
landed property. Democracy may be in philology "government by the mob,"
but in politics and industry it has been opportunity for great men
without blood or property. Mr. Münsterberg, too, sees the breakdown of
American democracy and the reaction towards aristocracy in the
prominence of civil-service reform, the preëminence conceded to business
ability, the deference to wealth, and the conquest of the
Philippines.[103] But civil-service reform is only a device for opening
the door to merit that has been shut by privilege. In England it was the
means by which the mercantile classes broke into the offices preëmpted
by the younger sons of aristocracy.[104] In America it is an awkward
means of admitting ability wherever found to positions seized upon by
political usurpers. It appealed to the American democracy only when its
advocates learned to call it, not "civil-service reform," but "the merit
system." As for the astonishing power of mere wealth in American affairs
the testimony of another English observer is based on wider observation
when he says, "Even the tyranny of trusts is not to be compared with the
tyranny of landlordism; for the one is felt to be merely an unhappy and
(it is hoped) temporary aberration of well-meant social machinery, while
the other seems bred in the very bone of the national existence."[105]
A feeling of disappointment holds true of the conquest and treatment of
the Philippines. That a war waged out of sympathy for an oppressed
island nearby should have shaken down an unnoticed archipelago across
the ocean was taken in childlike glee as the unexpected reward of
virtue. But serious thinking has followed on seeing that these islands
have added another race problem to the many that have thwarted
democracy. Only a plutocracy sprung from race divisions at home could
profit by race-subjection abroad, and the only alternative to
race-subjection is equal representation in Congress. But to admit
another race to partnership without the hope of assimilation is to
reject experience. Independence or cession to Japan is the
self-preservation of American democracy.
Another idea of equality is the socialist idea. Infatuated by an
"economic interpretation of history," they overlook the racial
interpretation. Permitting and encouraging plutocracy, they hope to see
the dispossessed masses take possession when conditions become
intolerable. But the "masses" would not be equal to the task. Privileged
wealth knows too well how to buy up or promote their leaders, how to
weaken them by internal dissensions, how to set race against race. Most
of all, the inexperienced despotism of the masses is worse than the
smooth despotism of wealth. The government of the South by the negro,
the government of San Francisco by "labor," fell into the hands of the
"carpet-bagger" and the "boss." Once in power, internal strife and
jealousy, struggle for office, or racial antagonism disrupt the rulers,
and a reaction throws them back more helpless than before. Men are not
equal, neither are races or classes equal. True equality comes through
equal opportunity. If individuals go forward, their race or class is
elevated. They become spokesmen, defenders, examples. No race or class
can rise without its own leaders. If they get admitted on equal terms
with other leaders, whether it be in the councils of the church, the
law-making bodies of the city, state, and nation, or the wage
conferences of employers, they then can command the hearing which their
abilities justify. They secure for their followers the equal
opportunity to which they are entitled.
This is exactly the political problem that grows out of the presence of
races and immigrants. With these admitted to the suffrage on the basis
of mere manhood inspired by a generosity unknown to the people of any
other land, the machinery of representative government inherited from
England does not, for some reason, permit the free choice of leaders.
The difficulties may be seen in cities where the system first broke
down. A variety of races and nationalities living in the same ward are
asked to elect aldermen and other officers by majority vote. No one
nationality has a majority, but each sets up its list of candidates. The
nationality with a mere plurality elects all of its candidates, and the
other nationalities--a majority of the voters--are unrepresented. This
is an extreme case, and has not often been allowed to happen. But the
only means of preventing it is the "ward boss." The boss emerges from
the situation as inevitably as the survival of the fittest. And the
fittest is the Irishman. The Irishman has above all races the mixture of
ingenuity, firmness, human sympathy, comradeship, and daring that makes
him the amalgamator of races. He conciliates them all by nominating a
ticket on which the offices are shrewdly distributed; and out of the
Babel his "slate" gets the majority.
The boss's problem is not an easy one. His ward may contain business men
on the hill and negroes along the canal. To nominate a business man
would lose the negro vote--to nominate a negro would lose the business
vote. He selects a nondescript somewhere between, and discards him for
another at the next election. The representative becomes a tool in the
hands of the boss. The boss sells his power to corporations, franchise
speculators, and law-evaders. Representative democracy becomes
bossocracy in the service of plutocracy. The ward system worked well
when the suffrage was limited. Then the business men elected their
business man unimpeded. But a system devised for restricted suffrage
breaks down under universal suffrage. Could the ward lines be abolished,
could the business men come together regardless of residence and elect
their choice without the need of a majority vote, could the negroes and
other races and classes do the same, then each would be truly
represented by their natural leaders. So it is, not only in cities, but
in county, state, and nation. Universal suffrage, clannish races, social
classes, diversified interests, seem to explain and justify the presence
of the party "machine" and its boss. Otherwise races, classes, and
interests are in helpless conflict and anarchy. But the true explanation
is an obsolete ward and district system of plurality representation
adopted when but one race, class, or interest had the suffrage. Forms of
government are the essence of government, notwithstanding the poet. An
aristocratic form with a democratic suffrage is a plutocratic
government. Belgium and Switzerland have shown that a democratic form
is possible and practicable. Proportional representation instead of
district representation is the corollary of universal suffrage which
those countries have worked out as a model for others.[106] The model is
peculiarly adapted to a country of manifold nationalities, interests,
and classes. Races and immigrants in America have not disproved
democracy--they have proved the need of more democracy.
This is seen also in the distinction between men and measures. It often
has been noted that in American elections the voters are more interested
in voting for candidates than they are in voting on issues. The
candidate arouses a personal and concrete interest--the issue is
abstract and complicated. The candidate calls out a full vote--the issue
is decided by a partial vote.
This difference is partly the result of organization. The candidate has
a political party, campaign funds, and personal workers to bring out the
vote. The issue has only its merits and demerits. Equally important
under American conditions is the race or nationality of the candidate.
This feature is often concealed by the ingenuity of political managers
in nominating a ticket on which the several nationalities are
"recognized." But with the recent progress of the movement to abolish
party conventions and to nominate candidates directly at the primaries
the racial prejudices of the voters show themselves. The nationalities
line up for their own nationality, and the political and economic issues
are thrown in the background. It is different when they vote on the
issues directly. The vital questions of politics, industry,
corporations, and monopoly which menace the country, unless rightly
answered, cut across the lines of nationality. The German farmer,
manufacturer, wage-earner, merchant, capitalist, and monopolist may all
unite to elect a popular German to office, but they do not unite to give
a corporation a monopoly. The same is true of other nationalities.
Wherever the referendum has been fairly tested, in Chicago, Detroit,
Oregon, and elsewhere, the sound judgment of all races has prevailed
over bias, prejudice, or racial jealousy. There none can claim
preëminence, for all have shown their share of patriotism, intelligence,
and regard for equal rights. By an automatic self-disfranchisement the
ignorant, the corrupt, and the indifferent of all races eliminate
themselves by failing to vote. Instead of being dismissed on the ground
that voters care mainly for men and less for measures, the referendum
should be adopted on the ground that it permits those interested in
measures to decide the question. Those who are not interested enough to
vote do thereby proclaim that they are satisfied whichever side wins.
The initiative and referendum are, above all other forms of government,
the specific remedy for the ills of universal suffrage and conflicting
nationalities. Race antagonism springs from personalities, race
coalescence from community of interest. A vote for candidates
intensifies antagonism--a vote on measures promotes community.
There are, indeed, some kinds of measures which stir up race antagonism.
But the keenest of these have happily been eliminated. More intense than
any other source of discord is religious belief. Religious differences
in America are not so much theological as racial in character. The
Judaism of the Jew, the Protestantism of the British and colonial
American, the Lutheranism of the German, the Roman Catholicism of the
Irish, Italian, and Slav, the Greek Catholicism of other Slavs, all
testify to the history and psychology of races. Far-sighted indeed were
our fathers who separated Church and State. Were the people taxed to
support religion, every election would be a contest of races. All other
questions would be subordinate, and democracy impossible. But with
religion relegated to private judgment, each race is free to cultivate
at will that one of its own peculiarities most fanatically adhered to,
but most repellent to other races, while uniting with the others on what
is most essential to democracy. Religious freedom is more than a private
right--it is an American necessity.
[Illustration: CHINESE STUDENTS, HONOLULU (From _The Independent_)]
Another class of measures running partly along race lines are sumptuary
laws, especially those regulating saloons and Sunday observance. In
the Southern states saloon prohibition is largely a race
discrimination and a race protection. In the North it often is American
puritanism of the country against European liberalism of the cities.
Here the referendum shows itself as the conciliator of nationalities.
Upon no other issue has the popular vote been so generally resorted to.
This issue comes close to the habits and passions of the masses. It
takes precedence of all others except religion, but cannot be evaded
like religion. If legislative bodies and executive officials decide the
question, then the German or the Irishman adds to his zeal for the
election of a conationalist his thirst for the election of a candidate
with habits like his own. But when left to a popular vote, the saloon
question is separated from the choice of candidates, and other issues
come forward. A majority vote, too, pacifies the minority of all races,
where the act of a legislative body leaves the suspicion of unfair
advantage taken by unrepresentative politicians. By the exigencies of
the situation the referendum has been invoked to take both the saloon
problem and its share of the race problem "out of politics." The lesson
is applicable wherever race or nationality conflicts with democracy.
With questions of religious belief eliminated by the constitution, and
questions of personal habits eliminated by the referendum, other
questions of race antagonism will be eliminated by the initiative and
the referendum.[107]
=Suffrage.=--The climax of liberality in donating the suffrage to all
races and conditions was reached with the fifteenth amendment in 1869.
At that time not only had the negro been enfranchised; but nearly a
score of Western and Southern states and territories had enfranchised
the alien. So liberal were these states in welcoming the immigrant that
they allowed him to vote as soon as he declared his intention to take
out naturalization papers. This declaration, under the federal law, is
made at least two years before the papers are granted, and it may be
made as soon as the immigrant has landed. Thus in some of those states
he could vote as soon as he acquired a legal residence, that is, four or
four and one-half years before he acquired citizenship. Several of these
states have recently changed these laws, but there remain nine that
continue to accept the alien as a voter.
In the Eastern states such generosity was not granted by law but was
practised by fraud. Naturalization papers are issued by federal courts
and by state courts of record. The law gives the judge much discretion,
for he is required to refuse the certificate if he is not satisfied that
the alien is of good moral character, attached to the Constitution, and
well disposed. But so careless or crowded are the judges that seldom
have they examined the applicants. Indeed the political managers have
had the option of judges and could take their immigrants to the court
that would shut its eyes. Many thousands of fraudulent papers have been
secured in this way, beginning at the very time when the naturalization
law was enacted in 1802, but increasing enormously during the past forty
years.[108]
Finally, in 1906, Congress enacted a law giving to the Bureau of
Immigration control over naturalization. The object is to bring all of
the courts under a uniform practice, to provide complete records and
means of identification, to establish publicity, to enable the
government to appear in court and resist fraudulent naturalization, and
to impose severe penalties.[109] The law also adds something to the
qualifications required of the alien. He must not be an anarchist or a
polygamist, nor a believer of such doctrines; he must be able to speak
the English language, and must intend to reside permanently in the
United States.[110] The language restriction affects but few, since in
1900 only 3.3 per cent of the naturalized foreign-born males of voting
age could not speak English.[111] The intention of permanent residence,
as well as the entire measure, is designed to remove the abuse of
foreigners' acquiring citizenship in order to return to their native
land and defy their rightful government. On the administrative side this
law is of great significance. It marks a serious beginning on the part
of the federal government of protecting the citizenship that a
generation before it had so liberally bestowed.
There are certain races which by law are prohibited from naturalization.
For nearly seventy years the law on the subject enacted in 1802 admitted
to citizenship only free white persons. This was amended in 1870 to
admit "aliens of African nationality and persons of African descent."
But other colored races were not admitted, so that the Chinese,
Japanese, or Malay immigrant has never been eligible to citizenship. His
children, however, born in this country are citizens, and cannot be
excluded from voting on account of race or color. Indians living in
tribes are foreigners, but if they recognize allegiance by paying taxes
or dividing up their land in severalty they are citizens and voters.
Of the immigrant races eligible to citizenship their importance as
possible voters is greater than their importance in the population. This
is because men and boys come in greater numbers than women and children.
Ten million foreign-born population furnishes 5,000,000 males of voting
age, but 66,000,000 native population furnishes only 16,000,000 males of
voting age. In other words, one-half of the foreign-born, and only
one-fourth of the native-born, are potential voters. But not all of the
potential voters are actual voters. With a grand total in the year 1900
of 21,000,000 of the proper sex and age, only 15,000,000 went to the
polls. The ratio is five out of seven. Two million negroes were
excluded, and 1,400,000 foreign-born had not yet naturalized. This
leaves 2,600,000 natives and foreign-born who might have voted but did
not. The foreigner who takes out his citizenship papers does it mainly
to vote. Two-thirds of them had done so or declared their intention in
1900.[112] Probably the proportion of native whites who did not vote was
15 per cent of their total number, and the proportion of foreign-born
who did not, or could not, was over 40 per cent.
But this proportion differs greatly among the several races. It is not
so much a difference in willingness as a difference in opportunity. Five
years are required for naturalization, and while 40 per cent of those
who have been here six to nine years have not declared their intention
nor taken out their papers, only 7 per cent of those who have been here
twenty years retain their allegiance to foreign governments.[113] This
increases relatively the political weight of the Teutonic and Celtic
races which are oldest in point of immigration, and reduces relatively
the weight of the Italian, Slav, and Jewish races. The figures below
make this quite plain. The table shows the proportion of foreign-born
who remain aliens, in the sense that they have neither taken out
citizenship papers nor declared their intention of doing so. Only 7 to
13 per cent of the foreigners from Northwestern Europe are aliens,
compared with 35 to 60 per cent of those from Eastern and Southern
Europe. In course of time these differences will diminish, and the
Italian and Slav will approach the Irishman and German in their share of
American suffrage:--
PER CENT OF ALIENS AMONG FOREIGN-BORN MALES OF VOTING AGE[114]
Wales 7.1
Germany 8.3
Norway 9.7
Ireland 10.1
Denmark 10.3
Holland 11.6
Sweden 11.9
Scotland 12.5
Bohemia 12.6
England 12.9
Canada, English 21.1
Russia (mainly Jews) 35.2
Canada, French 38.5
Finland 38.6
Austria (largely Slavs) 44.6
Portugal 51.6
Italy 53.0
Hungary (mainly Slavs) 53.1
Greece 57.8
Austria, Poland 61.6
The right to vote is not "inalienable," neither is the right to life or
liberty. Governments give them, refuse them, and take them away. In
America this means the state governments. The federal government only
declares that the states must follow the "due process of law," and not
discriminate on account of race, religion, or servitude. In allowing the
right to vote they may and do discriminate on other grounds, such as
morals, illiteracy, intelligence, property, and sex. This may result in
race or immigrant discrimination, and does so in the case of illiteracy
and intelligence. After the Irish immigration of the forties,
Connecticut in 1855 and Massachusetts in 1857 refused thenceforth to
enfranchise those who could not read the Constitution. Since 1889 six
other Northern and Western states--Wyoming, Maine, California,
Washington, Delaware, and New Hampshire, in the order named--have
erected barriers against those who cannot read or write the English
language or the Constitution.[115] Six Southern states have done the
same, but one of them, Mississippi, has added another permanent
barrier,--intelligence. This is supposed to be measured by ability to
"understand" the Constitution as read by a white man. Southern states
have also added vagrancy, poll tax, and property clauses even more
exclusive than reading and writing.[116] The federal courts have refused
to interfere because these restrictions in their legal form bear alike
on white and black. If in practice they bear unequally, that is a matter
for the state courts.[117]
To take away the suffrage from many of those who enjoy it is peacefully
impossible under our system. But voters who hold fast to the privilege
for themselves may be induced to deny it to the next generation. It was
in this way usually that the foregoing restrictions were introduced.
Massachusetts set the example by retaining all who could vote when the
test was adopted, and making the exclusion apply only to those who came
after. The Southern states did the same by "grandfather" and
"understanding" clauses. By either method, in course of time, the
favored voters disappear by death or removal, and the restrictions apply
in full to the succeeding generation.[118]
The effect of the educational test on the suffrage of the foreign-born
is not as great as might be supposed. Naturalization itself is almost an
educational test. Only 6.3 per cent of the naturalized foreigners are
illiterate, but 28 per cent of those who remain aliens are unable to
read. In Boston only 2 per cent are excluded from voting through
inability to read English, although the corresponding aliens are 22 per
cent. Probably the educational qualification in Massachusetts affects
these proportions by lessening the inducement to naturalize, but in
Chicago and New York, where that qualification is not required, scarcely
more than 5 per cent of those who get naturalized would be unable to
vote under such a law, compared with less than 1 per cent of the native
voters.[119] In the country at large the disproportion is not so great.
Five and eight-tenths per cent of the sons of native parents would be
excluded by an educational test against 6.3 per cent of the naturalized
foreigners, and only 2 per cent of the native sons of foreigners. In the
several Southern states the test, if equally applied, will exclude 6 to
20 per cent of the white voters and 35 to 60 per cent of the colored
voters.[120] In a Southern city like Memphis it would exclude 1 per cent
of the white and 38 per cent of the colored.
Tested by the standards of democracy, the ability to read and write the
English language is a proper qualification. It is perhaps the maximum
that can be required, for to test the ability to understand what is read
and written is to open the door to partisanship and race discrimination.
Yet it is intelligence that makes the suffrage an instrument of
protection, and it is not a denial of rights to refuse such an
instrument to one who injures himself with it. The literacy
qualification is one that can be acquired by effort. Other tests,
especially the property qualification, are an assertion of inequality.
Yet it is not strange that with the corrupt and inefficient governments
that have accompanied universal suffrage there should have occurred a
reaction. This has not always expressed itself in the policy of
restricting the suffrage, for that can with difficulty be accomplished.
It has shown itself rather in withdrawing government as far as possible
from the control of the voters. The so-called "business theory" which
has so generally been applied to the reform of city governments has
converted the city as far as possible to the model of a private
corporation, with its general manager, the mayor. The city has been
denied its proper functions, and these have been turned over to private
parties. But this reaction seems to have reached its limit. It is now
understood to have been simply the legal recognition of an incipient
plutocracy establishing itself under the forms of democracy. The return
movement has begun, and the rescue of democracy is sought, as stated
above, in forms and functions of government still more democratic.
The way plutocracy looks when it has passed the incipient stage may be
seen in Hawaii.[121] It is as though we had annexed those islands in
order to watch in our own back yard the fruit of excessive immigration.
A population of 154,000 furnishes 65,000 Hawaiians, Portuguese, and
other Caucasians. The Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans have 87,000
population and no votes. The American contingent is some 17,000 souls
and 3000 votes. The latter represent four classes or interests: the
capitalist planters owning two-thirds of the property; superintendents,
engineers, and foremen managing the plantation labor; skilled mechanics;
small employers, merchants, and farmers. In order to get plantation
labor and to keep the supply too large and diversified for concerted
wage demands the planters imported contract Chinese in place of
Hawaiians, then Japanese, then Koreans. As each race rises in standards
and independence it leaves the plantations to enter trades,
manufactures, and merchandising. It drives out the wage-earners from the
less skilled occupations, then from the more skilled, then the small
manufacturers, contractors, and merchants. The American middle classes
disappear, partly by emigration to California, partly by abandoning
business and relying on the values of real estate which rise through the
competition of low standards of wages and profits, and partly by
attaching themselves to the best-paid positions offered by the planters.
In proportion as they move up in the scale through the entrance of
immigrants in the lower positions, they transfer their allegiance from
democracy to plutocracy. The planters themselves are caught in a circle.
The rising values of their land absorb the high tariff on sugar and
prevent rising wages if the values are to be kept up. The Japanese, with
contract labor abolished, have shown a disposition to strike for higher
wages. This has led to advances at the expense of profits, and the
resulting "scarcity of labor" compels the planters again to ask for
contract Chinese coolies. Immigration is thus only a makeshift remedy
for the exactions of unions and the undevelopment of resources. More
immigration requires perpetually more and still more, till the resulting
plutocracy seeks to save itself by servile labor. A moderate amount of
immigrant labor, assimilated and absorbed into the body politic,
stimulates industry and progress, but an excessive and indigestible
amount leads to the search for coercive remedies and ends in the
stagnation of industry. The protective tariff was supposed to build up
free American labor, but in Hawaii, with unrestricted immigration, it
has handed us American plutocracy.
CHAPTER IX
AMALGAMATION AND ASSIMILATION
A German statistician,[122] after studying population statistics of the
United States and observing the "race suicide" of the native American
stock, concludes: "The question of restriction on immigration is not a
matter of higher or lower wages, nor a matter of more or less criminals
and idiots, but the exclusion of a large part of the immigrants might
cost the United States their place among the world powers."
Exactly the opposite opinion was expressed in 1891 by Francis A.
Walker,[123] the leading American statistician of his time, and
superintendent of the censuses of 1870 and 1880. He said: "Foreign
immigration into this country has, from the time it first assumed large
proportions, amounted not to a reinforcement of our population, but a
replacement of native by foreign stock.... The American shrank from the
industrial competition thus thrust upon him. He was unwilling himself to
engage in the lowest kind of day labor with these new elements of
population; he was even more unwilling to bring sons and daughters into
the world to enter into that competition.... The more rapidly
foreigners came into the United States, the smaller was the rate of
increase, not merely among the native population separately, but
throughout the population of the country as a whole," including the
descendants of the earlier foreign immigrants.
Walker's statements of fact, whatever we may say of his explanations,
are easily substantiated. From earliest colonial times until the census
of 1840 the people of the United States multiplied more rapidly than the
people of any other modern nation, not excepting the prolific French
Canadians. The first six censuses, beginning in 1790, show that, without
appreciable immigration, the population doubled every twenty years, and
had this rate of increase continued until the present time, the
descendants of the colonial white and negro stock in the year 1900 would
have numbered 100,000,000 instead of the combined colonial, immigrant,
and negro total of 76,000,000. Indeed, if we take the total immigration
from 1820 to 1900, exceeding 19,000,000 people, and apply a slightly
higher than the average rate of increase from births, we shall find that
in the year 1900 one-half of the white population is derived from
immigrant stock, leaving the other half, or but 33,000,000 whites,
derived from the colonial stock.[124] This is scarcely more than
one-third of the number that should have been expected had the colonial
element continued to multiply from 1840 to 1900 as it had multiplied
from 1790 to 1840.
An interesting corroboration of these speculations is the prediction
made in the year 1815, thirty years before the great migration of the
nineteenth century, by the mathematician and publicist, Elkanah
Watson.[125] On the basis of the increase shown in the first three
censuses he made computations of the probable population for each census
year to 1900, and I have drawn up the following table, showing the
actual population compared with his estimates. Superintendent Walker, in
the essay above quoted, uses Watson's figures, and points out the
remarkable fact that those predictions were within less than one per
cent of the actual population until the year 1860, although, meanwhile,
there had come nearly 5,000,000 immigrants whom Watson could not have
foreseen. Thus the population of 1860, notwithstanding access of the
millions of immigrants, was only 310,000, or one per cent less than
Watson had predicted. And the falling off since 1860 has been even
greater, for, notwithstanding the immigration of 20,000,000 persons
since 1820, the population in 1900 was 75,000,000, or 25 per cent less
than Watson's computations.
POPULATION AND IMMIGRATION
------+------------+---------------+-------------+-----------
| POPULATION | WATSON'S | WATSON'S | FOREIGN
| (CENSUS) | ESTIMATE | ERROR |IMMIGRATION
| | | |FOR DECADE
------+------------+---------------+-------------+-----------
1790 | 3,929,214 | | |
1800 | 5,308,483 | | | 50,000
1810 | 7,239,881 | | | 70,000
1820 | 9,633,822 | 9,625,734 | -8,088 | 114,000
1830 | 12,866,020 | 12,833,645 | -32,375 | 143,439
1840 | 17,069,453 | 17,116,526 | +47,073 | 599,125
1850 | 23,191,876 | 23,185,368 | -6,508 | 1,713,251
1860 | 31,443,321 | 31,753,825 | +310,503 | 2,598,214
1870 | 38,558,371 | 42,328,432 | +3,770,061 | 2,314,824
1880 | 50,155,783 | 56,450,241 | +6,294,458 | 2,812,191
1890 | 62,622,250 | 77,266,989 | +14,644,739 | 5,246,613
1900 | 75,559,258 | 100,235,985 | +24,676,727 | 3,687,564
------+------------+---------------+-------------+-----------
Total immigration 1820-1900 19,229,224
-------------------------------------------------------------
This question of the "race suicide" of the American or colonial stock
should be regarded as the most fundamental of our social problems, or
rather as the most fundamental consequence of our social and industrial
institutions. It may be met by exhortation, as when President Roosevelt
says, "If the men of the nation are not anxious to work in many
different ways, with all their might and strength, and ready and able to
fight at need, and anxious to be fathers of families, and if the women
do not recognize that the greatest thing for any woman is to be a good
wife and mother, why that nation has cause to be alarmed about its
future."[126]
The anxiety of President Roosevelt is well grounded; but if race suicide
is not in itself an original cause, but is the result of other causes,
then exhortation will accomplish but little, while the removal or
amelioration of the other causes will of itself correct the resulting
evil. Where, then, shall we look for the causes of race suicide, or,
more accurately speaking, for the reduced proportion of children brought
into the world? The immediate circumstances consist in postponing the
age of marriage, in limiting the number of births after marriage, and in
an increase in the proportion of unmarried people. The reasons are
almost solely moral and not physical. Those who are ambitious and
studious, who strive to reach a better position in the world for
themselves and their children, and who have not inherited wealth, will
generally postpone marriage until they have educated themselves, or
accumulated property, or secured a permanent position. They will then
not bring into the world a larger number of children than they can
provide for on the basis of the standing which they themselves have
attained; for observation shows that those who marry early have large
families, and are generally kept on a lower station in life. The real
problem, therefore, with this class of people, is the opportunities for
earning a living. In the earlier days, when the young couple could take
up vacant land, and farming was the goal of all, a large family and the
coöperation of wife and children were a help rather than a hindrance.
To-day the couple, unless the husband has a superior position, must go
together to the factory or mill, and the children are a burden until
they reach the wage-earning age. Furthermore, wage-earning is uncertain,
factories shut down, and the man with a large family is thrown upon his
friends or charity. To admonish people living under these conditions
to go forth and multiply is to advise the cure of race suicide by race
deterioration.
[Illustration: FACULTY OF TUSKEGEE INSTITUTE (From _World's Work_)]
Curiously enough, these observations apply with even greater force to
the second generation of immigrants than to the native stock, for among
the daughters of the foreign-born only 19 per cent of those aged 15 to
24 years are married, while among daughters of native parents 30 per
cent are married; and for the men of 20 to 29 only 26.8 per cent of the
native sons of foreigners are married and 38.5 per cent of the sons of
natives.[127] These figures sustain what can be observed in many large
cities, that the races of immigrants who came to this country
twenty-five or more years ago are shrinking from competition with the
new races from Southern Europe.
Boston, for example, with its large Irish immigration beginning two
generations ago, shows a similar disproportion. Of the American
daughters of foreign parents 15 to 24 years of age, only 12 per cent are
married, but of the daughters of native parents 17 per cent are married;
of the sons of foreign parents 20 to 29 years of age, only 20 per cent
are married, but of the sons of native parents 26 per cent are married.
The contrast with the immigrants themselves is striking. In Boston, 24
per cent of the foreign-born women aged 15 to 24 are married, and 35 per
cent of the foreign-born men aged 20 to 29.[128] In other words, the
early marriages of immigrant men and women are nearly twice as many as
those of the American-born sons and daughters of immigrants, and only
one-third more than those of the sons and daughters of native stock.
With such a showing as this it would seem that our "place among the
world powers" depends indeed on immigration, for the immigrants'
children are more constrained to race suicide than the older American
stock.[129]
The competition is not so severe in country districts where the native
stock prevails; but in the cities and industrial centres the skilled and
ambitious workman and workwoman discover that in order to keep
themselves above the low standards of the immigrants they must postpone
marriage. The effect is noticeable and disastrous in the case of the
Irish-Americans. Displaced by Italians and Slavs, many of the young men
have fallen into the hoodlum and criminal element. Here moral causes
produce physical causes of race destruction, for the vicious elements of
the population disappear through the diseases bequeathed to their
progeny, and are recruited only from the classes forced down from above.
On the other hand, many more Irish have risen to positions of
foremanship, or have lived on their wits in politics, or have entered
the priesthood. The Irish-American girls, showing independence and
ambition, have refused to marry until they could be assured of a husband
of steady habits, and they have entered clerical positions, factories,
and mills. Thus this versatile race, with distinct native ability, is
meeting in our cities the same displacement and is resorting to the same
race suicide which itself inflicted a generation or two earlier on the
native colonial stock. But the effect is more severe, for the native
stock was able to leave the scenes of competition, to go West and take
up farms or build cities, but the Irish-American has less opportunity to
make such an escape.
Great numbers of Irishmen, together with others of English, Scotch,
German, and American descent, remaining in these industrial centres,
have sought to protect themselves and maintain high standards through
labor-unions and the so-called "closed shop," by limiting the number of
apprentices, excluding immigrants, and giving their sons a preference of
admission. But even with the unions they find it necessary also to limit
the size of their families, and I am convinced from personal
observation, that, were the statistics on this point compiled from the
unions of skilled workmen, there would be found even stronger evidences
of race suicide than among other classes in the nation.
To the well-to-do classes freedom from the care of children is not a
necessity, but an opportunity for luxury and indulgence. These include
the very wealthy, whose round of social functions would be interrupted
by home obligations. To them, of course, immigration brings no need of
prudence--it rather helps to bring the enormous fortunes which distract
their attention from the home. But their numbers are insignificant
compared with the millions who determine the fate of the nation. More
significant are the well-to-do farmers and their wives who have
inherited the soil redeemed by their fathers, and whose desire to be
free for enjoying the fruits of civilization lead them to the position
so strongly condemned by President Roosevelt. This class of farmers, as
shown in the census map of the size of private families,[130] may be
traced across the Eastern and Northern states, running through New
England, rural New York, Northern Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan,
parts of Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Iowa. In the rich counties of
southern Michigan, settled and occupied mainly by native stock from New
York, the average size of families is less than four persons, as it is
in a large area of Central New York, whereas for the country at large it
is 4.7, and for counties in the mining sections of Michigan occupied by
immigrants it rises as high as 5.8 persons.
The census figures showing the size of families do not, however, reveal
the number of children born to a family, since they show only those
living together and not those who have moved away or died. This
especially affects the large-sized families, and does not reveal, for
example, a fact shown by Kuczynski from the state census of
Massachusetts that the average number of children of the foreign-born
women in that state is 4.5, while for native women it is only 2.7.[131]
This also affects the showing for a state like West Virginia, composed
almost entirely of native Americans of colonial stock, with only 2 per
cent foreign-born and 5 per cent colored, where the average size of
families is 5.1 persons, the highest in the United States, but where in
the Blue Ridge Mountains I have come upon two couples of native white
Americans who claimed respectively eighteen and twenty-two children.
Throughout the South the reduction in size of families and the
postponement of marriage have not occurred to any great extent either
among the white or colored races, and these are states to which
immigration has contributed less than 3 per cent of their population.
Yet, if Superintendent Walker's view is sound in all respects, the
Southern whites should shrink from competition with the negro in the
same way that the Northern white shrinks from competition with the
immigrant. He does not do so, and the reasons are probably found in the
fact that the South has been remote from the struggle of modern
competition, and that ignorance and proud contentment fail to spur the
masses to that ambitious striving which rises by means of what Malthus
called the prudential restraints on population. It is quite probable
that in the South, with the spread of the factory system and universal
education, the growth in numbers through excess of births over deaths
will be retarded.
On the whole it seems that immigration and the competition of inferior
races tends to dry up the older and superior races wherever the latter
have learned to aspire to an improved standard of living, and that among
well-to-do classes not competing with immigrants, but made wealthier by
their low wages, a similar effect is caused by the desire for luxury and
easy living.[132]
=Americanization.=--A line on the chart opposite page 63 shows the
proportions between the number of immigrants and the existing
population. From this it appears that the enormous immigration of 1906
is relatively not as large as the smaller immigration of the years 1849
to 1854, or the year 1882. Three hundred thousand immigrants in 1850 was
as large an addition to a population of 23,000,000 as 1,000,000 in 1906
to a population of 85,000,000. Judged by mere numbers, the present
immigration is not greater than that witnessed by two former periods.
Judged by saturation it may be greater, for the former immigrants were
absorbed by colonial Americans, but the present immigrants enter a
solution half colonial and half immigrant. The problem of
Americanization increases more than the number to be Americanized. What
is the nature of this problem, and what are the forces available for its
solution?
The term amalgamation may be used for that mixture of blood which unites
races in a common stock, while assimilation is that union of their minds
and wills which enables them to think and act together. Amalgamation is
a process of centuries, but assimilation is a process of individual
training. Amalgamation is a blending of races, assimilation a blending
of civilizations. Amalgamation is beyond the organized efforts of
government, but assimilation can be promoted by social institutions and
laws. Amalgamation therefore cannot attract our practical interest,
except as its presence or absence sets limits to our efforts toward
assimilation.
Our principal interest in amalgamation is its effect on the negro race.
The census statisticians discontinued after 1890 the inquiry into the
number of mulattoes, but the census of 1890 showed that mulattoes were
15 per cent of the total negro population. This was a slightly larger
proportion than that of preceding years. The mulatto element of the
negro race is almost a race of itself. Its members on the average differ
but little if at all from those of the white race in their capacity for
advancement, and it is the tragedy of race antagonism that they with
their longings should suffer the fate of the more contented and
thoughtless blacks.[133] In their veins runs the blood of white
aristocracy, and it is a curious psychology of the Anglo-Saxon that
assigns to the inferior race those equally entitled to a place among the
superior. But sociology offers compensation for the injustice to
physiology. The mulatto is the natural leader, instructor, and spokesman
of the black. Prevented from withdrawing himself above the fortunes of
his fellows, he devotes himself to their elevation. This fact becomes
clear in proportion as the need of practical education becomes clear.
The effective work of the whites through missionary schools and colleges
has not been the elevation of the black, but the elevation of mulattoes
to teach the blacks. A new era for the blacks is beginning when the
mulatto sees his own future in theirs.
Apart from the negro we have very little knowledge of the amalgamation
of races in America. We only know that for the most part they have
blended into a united people with harmonious ideals, and the English,
the German, the Scotch-Irish, the Dutch, and the Huguenot have become
the American.
We speak of superior and inferior races, and this is well enough, but
care should be taken to distinguish between inferiority and
backwardness--between that superiority which is the original endowment
of race and that which results from the education and training which we
call civilization. While there are superior and inferior races, there
are primitive, mediæval, and modern civilizations, and there are certain
mental qualities required for and produced by these different grades of
civilization. A superior race may have a primitive or mediæval
civilization, and therefore its individuals may never have exhibited the
superior mental qualities with which they are actually endowed, and
which a modern civilization would have called into action. The adults
coming from such a civilization seem to be inferior in their mental
qualities, but their children, placed in the new environments of the
advanced civilization, exhibit at once the qualities of the latter. The
Chinaman comes from a mediæval civilization--he shows little of those
qualities which are the product of Western civilization, and with his
imitativeness, routine, and traditions, he has earned the reputation of
being entirely non-assimilable. But the children of Chinamen, born and
reared in this country, entirely disprove this charge, for they are as
apt in absorbing the spirit and method of American institutions as any
Caucasian.[134] The race is superior but backward.
The Teutonic races until five hundred years after Christ were primitive
in their civilization, yet they had the mental capacities which made
them, like Arminius, able to comprehend and absorb the highest Roman
civilization. They passed through the mediæval period and then came out
into the modern period of advanced civilization, yet during these two
thousand years their mental capacities, the original endowment of race,
have scarcely improved. It is civilization, not race evolution, that
has transformed the primitive warrior into the philosopher, scientist,
artisan, and business man. Could their babies have been taken from the
woods two thousand years ago and transported to the homes and schools of
modern America, they could have covered in one generation the progress
of twenty centuries. Other races, like the Scotch and the Irish, made
the transition from primitive institutions to modern industrial habits
within a single century, and Professor Brinton, our most profound
student of the American Indian, has said,[135] "I have been in close
relations to several full-blood American Indians who had been removed
from an aboriginal environment and instructed in this manner [in
American schools and communities], and I could not perceive that they
were either in intellect or sympathies inferior to the usual type of the
American gentleman. One of them notably had a refined sense of humor as
well as uncommon acuteness of observation."
The line between superior and inferior, as distinguished from advanced
and backward, races appears to be the line between the temperate and
tropical zones. The two belts of earth between the tropics of Capricorn
and Cancer and the arctic and antarctic circles have been the areas
where man in his struggle for existence developed the qualities of mind
and will--the ingenuity, self-reliance, self-control, strenuous
exertion, and will power--which befit the modern industrial
civilization. But in the tropics these qualities are less essential, for
where nature lavishes food, and winks at the neglect of clothing and
shelter, there ignorance, superstition, physical prowess, and sexual
passion have an equal chance with intelligence, foresight, thrift, and
self-control. The children of all the races of the temperate zones are
eligible to the highest American civilization, and it only needs that
they be "caught" young enough. There is perhaps no class of people more
backward than the 3,000,000 poor whites of the Appalachian Mountains,
but there is no class whose children are better equipped by heredity to
attain distinction in any field of American endeavor. This much cannot
be said for the children of the tropical zones. Amalgamation is their
door to assimilation.
Before we can intelligently inquire into the agencies of Americanization
we must first agree on what we mean by the term. I can think of no
comprehensive and concise description equal to that of Abraham Lincoln:
"Government of the people, by the people, for the people." This
description should be applied not only to the state but to other
institutions. In the home it means equality of husband and wife; in the
church it means the voice of the laity; in industry the participation of
the workmen.
Unhappily it cannot be said that Lincoln's description has ever been
attained. It is the goal which he and others whom we recognize as true
Americans have pointed out. Greater than any other obstacle in the road
toward that goal have been our race divisions. Government for the people
depends on government by the people, and this is difficult where the
people cannot think and act together. Such is the problem of
Americanization.
In the earlier days the most powerful agency of assimilation was
frontier life. The pioneers "were left almost entirely to their own
resources in this great struggle. They developed a spirit of
self-reliance, a capacity for self-government, which are the most
prominent characteristics of the American people."[136] Frontier life
includes pioneer mining camps as well as pioneer farming.
Next to the frontier the farms of America are the richest field of
assimilation. Here the process is sometimes thought to be slower than it
is in the cities, but any one who has seen it under both conditions
cannot doubt that if it is slower it is more real. In the cities the
children are more regularly brought under the influence of the public
schools, but more profound and lasting than the education of the schools
is the education of the street and the community. The work of the
schools in a great city like New York cannot be too highly praised, and
without such work the future of the immigrant's child would be dark. In
fact the children of the immigrant are better provided with school
facilities than the children of the Americans. Less than 1 per cent of
their children 10 to 14 years of age are illiterate, but the proportion
of illiterates among children of native parents is over 4 per cent. This
is not because the foreigner is more eager to educate his child than is
the native, but because nearly three-fourths of the foreigners' children
and only one-sixth of the natives' children live in the larger cities,
where schools and compulsory attendance prevail. Were it not for
compulsory education, the child of the peasant immigrant would be, like
the child of the Slav in the anthracite coal fields, "the helpless
victim of the ignorance, frugality, and industrial instincts of his
parents."[137] As it is, they drop out of the schools at the earliest
age allowed by law, and the hostility of foreigners to factory
legislation and its corollary compulsory school legislation is more
difficult to overcome than the hostility of American employers, both of
whom might profit by the work of their children. The thoroughness with
which the great cities of the North enforce the requirements of primary
education leaves but little distinction between the children of natives
and the children of foreigners, but what difference remains is to the
advantage of the natives. In Boston in 1900 only 5 children of native
parents were illiterate, and 22 native children of foreign parents, a
ratio of one-twentieth of 1 per cent for the natives and one-tenth of 1
per cent for the foreigners. In New York 68 of the 83,000 children of
native parents were illiterate, and 311 of the 166,000 native children
of foreign parents, a ratio insignificant in both cases, but more than
twice as great for the foreigners as for the natives.[138] Taking all of
the cities of at least 50,000 population, more than one-fourth of the
foreign-born children 10 to 15 years of age are bread-winners, and only
one-tenth of the children of native parents. The influence of residence
in America is shown by the fact that of the children of foreigners born
in this country the proportion of bread-winners is reduced to
one-seventh.[139]
But it is the community more than the school that gives the child his
actual working ideals and his habits and methods of life. And in a great
city, with its separation of classes, this community is the slums, with
its mingling of all races and the worst of the Americans. He sees and
knows surprisingly little of the America that his school-books describe.
The American churches, his American employers, are in other parts of the
city, and his Americanization is left to the school-teacher, the
policeman, and the politician, who generally are but one generation
before him from Europe. But on the farm he sees and knows all classes,
the best and the worst, and even where his parents strive to isolate
their community and to preserve the language and the methods of the old
country, only a generation or two are required for the surrounding
Americanism to permeate. Meanwhile healthful work, steady, industrious,
and thrifty habits, have made him capable of rising to the best that
his surroundings exemplify.
[Illustration: SLAVIC HOME MISSIONARIES (From _The Home Missionary_)]
Since the year 1900 the Immigration Bureau has not inquired as to the
religious faith of the immigrants. In that year, when the number
admitted was 361,000, one-fifth were Protestants, mainly from Great
Britain, the Scandinavian countries, Germany, and Finland. One-tenth
were Jews, 4 per cent were Greek Catholics, and 52 per cent were Roman
Catholics. With the shifting of the sources toward the east and south of
Europe the proportion of Catholic and Jewish faith has increased. During
this transition the Protestant churches of America have begun to awaken
to a serious problem confronting them. The three New England states
which have given their religion and political character to Northern and
Western states are themselves now predominantly Catholic. In all of the
Northern manufacturing and industrial states and in their great cities
the marvellous organization and discipline of the Roman Catholic Church
has carefully provided every precinct, ward, or district with chapels,
cathedrals, and priests even in advance of the inflow of population,
while the scattered forces of Protestantism overlap in some places and
overlook other places. Two consequences have followed. The Protestant
churches in much the larger part of their activities have drawn
themselves apart in an intellectual and social round of polite
entertainment for the families of the mercantile, clerical,
professional, and employing classes, while the Catholic churches
minister to the laboring and wage-earning classes. In a minor and
relatively insignificant part of their activities the Protestant
churches have supported missionaries, colporters, and chapels among the
immigrants, the wage-earners, and their children. Their home missionary
societies, which in the earlier days followed up their own believers on
the frontier and enabled them to establish churches in their new homes,
have in the past decade or two become foreign missionary societies
working at home. Nothing is more significant or important in the history
of American Protestantism than the zeal and patriotism with which a few
missionaries in this unaccustomed field have begun to lead the way. By
means of addresses, periodicals, books, study classes, they are
gradually awakening the churches to the needs of the foreigner at
home.[140] Among certain nationalities, especially the Italians and
Slavs, they find an open field, for thousands of those nationalities,
though nominally Catholic, are indifferent to the church that they
associate with oppression at home. Among these nationalities already
several converts have become missionaries in turn to their own people,
and with the barrier of language and suspicion thus bridged over, the
influence of the Protestant religion is increasing. Perhaps more than
anything else is needed a federation of the Protestant denominations
similar to that recently arranged in Porto Rico. That island has been
laid out in districts through mutual agreement of the home missionary
societies, and each district is assigned exclusively to a single
denomination.
While the Protestant churches have been withdrawing from the districts
invaded by the foreigners, the field has been entered by the "social
settlement." This remarkable movement, eliminating religious propaganda,
is essentially religious in its zeal for social betterment. Its
principal service has been to raise up Americans who know and understand
the life and needs of the immigrants and can interpret them to others.
In the "institutional church" is also to be found a similar adaptation
of the more strictly religious organization to the social and
educational needs of the immigrants and their children.
More than any other class in the community, it is the employers who
determine the progress of the foreigner and his children towards
Americanization. They control his waking hours, his conditions of
living, and his chances of advancement. In recent years a few employers
have begun to realize their responsibilities, and a great corporation
like the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company establishes its "sociological"
department with its schools, kindergartens, hospitals, recreation
centres, and model housing, on an equal footing with its engineering and
sales departments. Other employers are interesting themselves in various
degrees and ways in "welfare work," or "industrial betterment," and
those who profit most by this awakening interest are the foreign-born
and their families. This interest has not yet shown itself in a
willingness to shorten the hours of labor, and this phase of welfare
work must probably be brought about by other agencies.
The influence of schools, churches, settlements, and farming communities
applies more to the children of immigrants than their parents. The
immigrants themselves are too old for Americanization, especially when
they speak a non-English language. To them the labor-union is at present
the strongest Americanizing force. The effort of organized labor to
organize the unskilled and the immigrant is the largest and most
significant fact of the labor movement. Apart from the labor question
itself, it means the enlistment of a powerful self-interest in the
Americanization of the foreign-born. For it is not too much to say that
the only effective Americanizing force for the Southeastern European is
the labor-union. The church to which he gives allegiance is the Roman
Catholic, and, however much the Catholic Church may do for the ignorant
peasant in his European home, such instruction as the priest gives is
likely to tend toward an acceptance of their subservient position on the
part of the workingmen. It is a frequently observed fact that when
immigrants join a labor-union they almost insolently warn the priest to
keep his advice to himself.
Universal suffrage admits the immigrant to American politics within one
to five years after landing. But the suffrage is not looked upon to-day
as the sufficient Americanizing force that a preceding generation
imagined. The suffrage appeals very differently to the immigrant voter
and to the voter who has come up through the American schools and
American life. The American has learned not only that this is a free
government, but that its freedom is based on constitutional principles
of an abstract nature. Freedom of the press, trial by jury, separation
of powers, independence of the judiciary, equality of opportunity, and
several other governmental and legal principles have percolated through
his subconscious self, and when he contemplates public questions these
abstract principles have more or less influence as a guide to his
ballot. But the immigrant has none of these. He comes here solely to
earn a better living. The suffrage is nothing to him but a means of
livelihood. Not that he readily sells his vote for money--rather does he
simply "vote for his job." He votes as instructed by his employer or his
political "boss," because it will help his employer's business or
because his boss will get him a job, or will, in some way, favor him and
others of his nationality. There is a noticeable difference between the
immigrant and the children of the immigrant in this regard. The young
men, when they begin to vote, can be appealed to on the ground of public
spirit; their fathers can be reached only on the ground of private
interest.
Now it cannot be expected that the labor-union or any other influence
will greatly change the immigrant in this respect. But the union does
this much: it requires every member to be a citizen, or to have declared
his intention of taking out naturalization papers. The reasons for doing
this are not political; they are sentimental and patriotic. The union
usually takes pride in showing that its members are Americans, and have
foregone allegiance to other countries. In a union like the musicians'
the reasons for requiring citizenship are also protective, since they
serve to exclude transient musical immigrants from American audiences.
Again, the union frees its members from the dictation of employers,
bosses, and priests. Politicians, of course, strive to control the vote
of organized labor, but so disappointing has been the experience of the
unions that they have quite generally come to distrust the leader who
combines labor and politics. The immigrant who votes as a unionist has
taken the first step, in casting his ballot, towards considering the
interests of others, and this is also the first step towards giving
public spirit and abstract principles a place alongside private interest
and his own job.
But there is another way, even more impressive, in which the union
asserts the preëminence of principles over immediate self-interest. When
the foreigner from Southern Europe is inducted into the union, then for
the first time does he get the idea that his job belongs to him by
virtue of a right to work, and not as the personal favor or whim of a
boss. These people are utterly obsequious before their foremen or
bosses, and it is notorious that nearly always they pay for the
privilege of getting and keeping a job. This bribery of bosses, as well
as the padrone system, proceed from the deep-seated conviction that
despotism is the natural social relation, and that therefore they must
make terms with the influential superior who is so fortunate as to have
favor with the powers that be.
The anthracite coal operators represented such men, prior to joining the
union, as disciplined and docile workmen, but in doing so they
disregarded the fact that outside the field where they were obsequious
they were most violent, treacherous, and factional. Before the
organization of the union in the coal fields these foreigners were given
over to the most bitter and often murderous feuds among the ten or
fifteen nationalities and the two or three factions within each
nationality. The Polish worshippers of a given saint would organize a
night attack on the Polish worshippers of another saint; the Italians
from one province would have a knife for the Italians of another
province, and so on. When the union was organized the antagonisms of
race, religion, and faction were eliminated. The immigrants came down to
an economic basis and turned their forces against their bosses. "We
fellows killed this country," said a Polish striker to Father Curran,
"and now we are going to make it." The sense of a common cause, and,
more than all else, the sense of individual rights as men, have come to
these people through the organization of their labor unions, and it
could come in no other way, for the union appeals to their necessities,
while other forces appeal to their prejudices. They are even yet far
from ideal Americans, but those who have hitherto imported them and
profited by their immigration should be the last to cry out against the
chief influence that has started them on the way to true
Americanism.[141]
=Agricultural Distribution of Immigrants.=--The congestion and colonizing
of immigrants in the cities and their consequent poverty and the
deterioration of the second generation have brought forth various
proposals for inducing them to settle upon the farms. The commissioners
of immigration[142] at various times have advocated an industrial museum
at Ellis Island, wherein the resources and opportunities of the several
states could be displayed before the eyes of the incoming thousands.
They and others have gone further and advocated the creation of a bureau
of immigrant distribution to help the immigrants out of the crowded
cities into the country districts. Still others have urged the
establishment of steamship lines to Southern ports and the Gulf of
Mexico, so that immigrants may be carried directly to the regions that
"need them." Very little can be expected from projects of this
kind,[143] for the present contingent of immigrants from Southeastern
Europe is too poor in worldly goods and too ignorant of American
business to warrant an experiment in the isolation and self-dependence
of farming. The farmers of the South and West welcome the settler who
has means of purchase, but they distrust the newly arrived immigrant.
Scandinavians and Germans in large numbers find their way to their
countrymen on the farms, but the newer nationalities would require the
fostering care of government or of wealthy private societies. The Jews
have, indeed, taken up the matter, and the Jewish Agricultural and
Industrial Aid Society of New York, by means of subventions from the
Baron de Hirsch fund, has distributed many families throughout the
country, partly in agriculture, but more generally in trade. The Society
for the Protection of Italian Immigrants is doing similar work. Great
railway systems and land companies in the South and West have their
agricultural and industrial agents on the lookout for eligible settlers.
All of the Southern states have established bureaus of immigration, and
they are advertising the North and Europe for desirable immigrants. But
these agencies seek mainly those immigrants who have resided in the
country for a time, and have learned the language and American
practices, and, in the case of the railroad and land companies, those
who have accumulated some property.
The immigration bureaus of the Southern states and railways, the most
urgent applicants at the present time for immigrants, are strongly
opposed to the plan of federal distribution. They want farmers who will
do their own work. From the standpoint of the immigrant himself this
position is correct. To find a place as an agriculturist he must find a
place as a farmer and not a harvest hand.[144] Speaking for the Southern
bureaus, Professor Fleming says,[145] "The South decidedly objects to
being made the government dumping-ground for undesirable immigrants. It
does not want the lower class foreigners who have swarmed into the
Northern cities. It wants the same sort of people who settled so much of
the West." The state board of South Carolina officially invites
immigration of "white citizens of the United States, citizens of
Ireland, Scotland, Switzerland, and France, and all other foreigners of
Saxon origin."
As for those without money who must depend on their daily labor for
wages, they must go where employment is most regular and the best wages
are paid. This is not on the farms, with a few months' work in summer
and no homes in winter. It is unmistakably in the great cities and
industrial centres. The commissioner of immigration at Ellis Island,
speaking of the cordon established by his bureau along the Canadian
frontier from Halifax to Winnipeg in order to catch those who tried to
escape inspection at New York, said, "All those immigrants who had New
York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Cleveland, or Cincinnati in mind as a
destination when they left Europe and came to Quebec, went all the way
around that wall to its western end at Winnipeg, and then took trains
and came back to the very places they had in mind when they left Europe;
and if you were to land all the ships that now come to New York at
Galveston, New Orleans, or Charleston, every one of the immigrants would
come to the place he had in mind when he decided to emigrate."[146]
Professor Wilcox contends that the immigrants already distribute
themselves according to their economic advantage as completely as do the
natives. They seem to congest in the cities because the cities are
necessarily their places of first arrival. "Our foreign-born arrive, in
at least nine-tenths of the cases, at some city. Our native citizens
arrive by birth, in at least three-fourths of the cases, in the country.
The foreign-born arrive mainly at seaport cities, and disperse gradually
from those cities to and through other interior cities, ultimately
reaching in many cases the small towns or open country. It is in no
sense surprising, or an evidence of imperfect distribution, that the
foreign-born should be massed in the cities when nine-tenths of them
arrive there, and the native population massed in the country districts
when three-fourths of them arrive there."[147] Artificial distribution
would not relieve the pressure as long as the character and amount of
immigration continue--it can only be relieved by creating greater
economic inducements in the country. Natives and foreigners both crowd
to the cities because wages and profits are higher than they are in the
country.
Even supposing the congestion in the cities could be relieved by making
the inducements in the country greater, the relief could not continue,
for it would only invite more immigration. Emigration has not relieved
the pressure of population in Europe. In no period of their history,
with the exception of Ireland, have the populations of Europe increased
at a greater rate than during the last half century of migration to
America. It is not emigration but improved standards of living that
lessens the pressure of numbers, and France with the widest diffusion of
property has little emigration and no increase in population. With the
redundant millions of Europe, increasing thousands would migrate if they
got word from their friends that the American government is finding jobs
for them. Just as we have already seen that the tide of immigration
rises with a period of prosperity in America, so would it rise with
agricultural distribution of immigrants. Both are simply more openings
for employment, and the knowledge of such opportunities is promptly
carried to the waiting multitudes abroad.
Consider also the political jeopardy of an administration at Washington
conducting a bureau for the distribution of immigrants. If it refused
to direct immigrants to one section of the country because it found that
the wages were low, it would arouse the hostility of employers. If it
directed them to another section, where the wages offered were high
because the employers were preparing for a lockout, or the unions were
on strike, it would lose the votes of workingmen. The administration
would soon learn that safely to conduct such a bureau it must not
conduct it at all.
Far better is it that the federal government should leave the
distribution of immigrants to private employment agencies. It might then
license all such agencies that conduct an interstate business. With the
power to take away the license on proof of fraud and misrepresentation,
and with the prosecution of agencies and employers that deceive and
enslave the immigrant, the government would accomplish all that it could
directly do for better distribution. Unquestionably the employment
agencies, with their _padroni_, their bankers, and their false promises,
are the source of miserable abuse to thousands of immigrants.[148] They
require interstate as well as state regulation. By weeding out the
dishonest agencies the field would be occupied by the honest ones, and
the immigrant could trust himself to their assistance. But such
regulation would not be merely for the sake of the immigrant. It would,
as it should, aid the American as well.
This suggests to us the true nature of the problem of city congestion
and the nature of its solution. It is not to be found in special efforts
on behalf of the immigrant, but in efforts to better the condition of
both Americans and immigrants. The congestion of cities is owing to
discriminations in favor of cities. If the government gives aid to
agriculture as it does to manufactures, if it provides better
communication, equalizes taxes, reduces freight rates to the level
enjoyed by cities, then agriculture and the small towns will be more
attractive. Americans will not crowd to the cities, and the more
provident of the immigrants will find their way to the country. The
proposition of federal distribution of immigrants is merely a clever
illusion kept up to lead Congress astray from the restriction of
immigration.
=Higher Standards of Immigration.=--As for the inferior, defective, and
undesirable classes of immigrants, there is no protection except
stringent selection. The Commissioner of Immigration at New York
estimates that 200,000 of the million immigrants in 1903 were an injury
instead of a benefit to the industries of the country,[149] and he
advocates a physical examination and the exclusion of those who fall
below a certain physical standard. During the past ten years the
educational, or rather, illiteracy test, has come to the front, and the
advantages of this test are its simplicity and its specific application
to those races whose standards are lowest.
[Illustration: ALIENS AWAITING ADMISSION AT ELLIS ISLAND]
Much discussion has been carried on respecting this test, and there has
been considerable misunderstanding and misrepresentation as to its
probable effects. The principal mistake has been the assumption that it
is designed to take the place of other tests of admission, and that
therefore it would permit, for example, the most dangerous
criminals--those who are intelligent--to enter this country. If we
examine existing laws, and seek to understand the real nature of
immigration restriction, we can see the character of this mistake. All
of our legislation governing immigration should be described as
_improvement_ of immigration rather than _restriction_ of immigration.
The object has always been to raise the average character of those
admitted by excluding those who fall below certain standards. And higher
standards have been added from time to time as rapidly as the lawmakers
perceived the need of bettering the quality of our future citizenship.
Although in 1862 Congress had enacted a law prohibiting the shipment of
Chinese coolies in American vessels,[150] it was not until 1875 that the
lawmakers first awoke to the evil of unrestricted immigration. In that
year a law was enacted to exclude convicts and prostitutes. This law
made an exception in favor of those who had been convicted of political
offences. Next, in 1882, Congress added lunatics, idiots, paupers, and
Chinese. In 1885 laborers under contract were for the first time to be
excluded, but an exception was made in order to admit actors, artists,
lecturers, singers, domestics, and skilled workmen for new industries.
In 1891 the list of ineligibles was again extended so as to shut out not
only convicts but persons convicted of crime, also "assisted"
immigrants, polygamists, and persons with loathsome or dangerous
contagious diseases. In 1903 the law added epileptics, persons who have
had two or more attacks of insanity, professional beggars, and
anarchists. Notwithstanding these successive additions of excluded
classes, the number of immigrants has continually increased until it is
greater to-day than in any preceding period, and while the standards
have been raised in one direction, the average quality has been lowered
in other directions. The educational and physical tests, while not
needed for the races from Northwestern Europe, are now advocated as
additions to the existing tests on account of the flood of races from
Southeastern Europe.
The question of "poor physique" has come seriously to the front in
recent reports of immigration officials. The decline in the average of
physical make-up to which they call attention accompanies the increase
in numbers of Southern and Eastern Europeans. While the commissioner at
Ellis Island estimates that 200,000 immigrants are below the physical
standards that should be required to entitle them to admission, the
number certified by the surgeons is much less than this. Yet nine-tenths
of even that smaller number are admitted, since the law excludes them
only if other grounds of exclusion appear. That the physical test is
practicable is shown by the following description of the qualities taken
into account by the medical examiners at the immigrant stations;
qualities which would be made even more definite if they were authorized
to be acted upon:[151]--
"A certificate of this nature implies that the alien concerned is
afflicted with a body not only but illy adapted to the work necessary to
earn his bread, but also but poorly able to withstand the onslaught of
disease. It means that he is undersized, poorly developed, with feeble
heart action, arteries below the standard size; that he is physically
degenerate, and as such not only unlikely to become a desirable citizen,
but also very likely to transmit his undesirable qualities to his
offspring should he, unfortunately for the country in which he is
domiciled, have any.
"Of all causes for rejection, outside of those for dangerous,
contagious, or loathsome diseases, or for mental disease, that of 'poor
physique' should receive the most weight, for in admitting such aliens
not only do we increase the number of public charges by their inability
to gain their bread through their physical inaptitude and their low
resistance to disease, but we admit likewise progenitors to this country
whose offspring will reproduce, often in an exaggerated degree, the
physical degeneracy of their parents."
The history of the illiteracy test in Congress is a curious comment on
lobbying. First introduced in 1895, it passed the House by a vote of 195
to 26, and the Senate in another form by a vote of 52 to 10. Referred to
a conference committee, an identical bill again passed both Houses by
reduced majorities. But irrelevant amendments had been tacked on and the
President vetoed it. The House passed it over his veto by 193 to 37, but
it was too late in the session to reach a vote in the Senate. Introduced
again in 1898, it passed the Senate by 45 to 28, but pressure of the
Spanish War prevented a vote in the House. The bill came up in
subsequent Congresses but did not reach a vote.[152] The lobby is
directed by the steamship companies, supported by railway companies, the
Hawaiian Sugar Planters' Association, and other great employers of
labor. By misrepresentation, these interested agencies have been able at
times to arouse the fears of the older races of immigrants not affected
by the measure. Their fears were groundless, for the illiteracy test is
not a test of the English language, but a test of any language, and it
applies only to those who are 15 years of age and over, but does not
apply to wife, children, parents, or grandparents of those who are
admitted. With these reasonable limitations it would exclude only 1 in
200 of the Scandinavians, 1 in 100 of the English, Scotch, and Finns, 2
or 3 in 100 of the Germans, Irish, Welsh, and French; but it would
exclude one-half of the South Italians, one-seventh of the North
Italians, one-third to two-fifths of the several Slav races, one-seventh
of the Russian Jews, altogether one-fifth or one-fourth of the total
immigration.[153] But these proportions would not long continue.
Elementary education is making progress in Eastern and Southern Europe,
and a test of this kind would stimulate it still more among the
peasants. Restrictive at first, it is only selective; it would not
permanently reduce the number of immigrants, but would raise their level
of intelligence and their ability to take care of themselves.
The foregoing principles do not apply to Chinese immigration. There the
law is strictly one of exclusion and not selection. This distinction is
often overlooked in the discussion of the subject. Respecting European,
Japanese, and Korean immigration, the law _admits_ all except certain
classes definitely described, such as paupers, criminals, and so on.
Respecting Chinese immigration the law _excludes_ all except certain
classes described, such as teachers, merchants, travellers, and
students. In the case of European immigration the burden of proof is
upon the immigration authorities to show that the immigrant should be
excluded. In the case of the Chinese, the burden of proof is on the
immigrant to show that he should be admitted. In the administration of
the law the difference is fundamental. If the Chinese law is liberalized
so as to admit doctors, lawyers, and other professional classes,
against whom there is no objection, it can be done in one of two ways.
It can name and specify the additional classes to be admitted. To this
there is little objection, for it retains the existing spirit of the
law. Or it can be reversed, and can admit all classes of Chinese except
coolies, laborers, and the classes now excluded by other laws. If this
were done, the enforcement of the law would break down, for the burden
of proof would be lifted from the immigrant and placed on the examining
board. The law is with great difficulty enforced as it is, but the
evasions bear no comparison in number with those practised under the
other law. European immigration is encouraged, provided it passes a
minimum standard. Chinese immigration is prohibited unless it exceeds a
maximum standard. One is selection, the other is exclusion. One should
be amended by describing new classes _not_ to be admitted, the other by
describing classes which _may_ be admitted.
This difference between the two laws may be seen in the effects of the
restrictions which have from time to time been added to the immigration
laws. Each additional ground of restriction or selection has not
decreased the total amount of immigration, nor has it increased the
proportion of those debarred from admission. In 1898, 3200 aliens were
sent back, and this was 1.4 per cent of those who arrived. In 1901, 3900
were sent back, but this was only three-fourths of 1 per cent of those
arriving. In 1906, 13,000 sent back were 1.2 per cent of the arrivals.
Intending immigrants as well as steamship companies learn the standards
of exclusion and the methods of evasion, so that the proportion who take
their chances and fail in the attempt is very small. Nevertheless, this
deportation of immigrants, though averaging less than 1 per cent, is a
hardship that should be avoided. It has often been proposed that this
should be done through examination abroad by American consuls or by
agents of the Immigration Bureau. Attractive and humane as this proposal
appears, the foreign examination could not be made final. It would
remove the examiners from effective control, and would require a large
additional force as well as the existing establishment to deport those
who might evade the foreign inspection. It does not strike at the root
of the evil, which is the business energy of the steamship companies in
soliciting immigration, and their business caution in requiring doubtful
immigrants to give bonds in advance to cover the cost of carrying them
back.[154] It is not the exclusion law that causes hardship, but the
steamship companies that connive at evasions of the law. The law of 1903
for the first time adopted the correct principle to meet this evasion,
but with a limited application. Since 1898, the Bureau had debarred
increasing numbers on account of loathsome and contagious diseases. But
these had already done the injury which their deportation was designed
to prevent. In the crowded steerage the entire shipload was exposed to
this contagion. Congress then enacted the law of 1903, not only
requiring the steamship companies to carry them back, as before, but
requiring the companies to pay a fine of $100 for every alien debarred
on that account. In 1906, the companies paid fines of $24,300 on 243
such deportations. The principle should be extended to all classes
excluded by law, and the fine should be raised to $500. Then every agent
of the steamship companies in the remotest hamlets of Europe would be an
immigration inspector. Their surgeons and officials already know the law
and its standards of administration as thoroughly as the immigration
officials. It only needs an adequate motive to make them cooperators
with the Bureau instead of evaders of the law. Already the law of 1903
has partly had that effect. One steamship company has arranged with the
Bureau to locate medical officers at its foreign ports of embarkation.
However, the penalty is not yet heavy enough, and the Commissioner-General
recommends its increase to $500. By extending the law to all grounds of
deportation in addition to contagious diseases, the true source of
hardship to debarred aliens will be dried up.[155]
INDEX
A
Advertising, 26, 29, 84, 85, 104, 108, 109.
Age Composition of Immigrants, 119.
Agriculture, 130, 131, 132, 133.
Alien Contract Labor Law, 118.
American Federation of Labor, 144.
Americanization, 208.
Armenians, 65, 99.
Asiatic Immigration, 101-104.
Assimilation, 17-21, 113, 198.
Atlanta University, 58, 59, 61.
Australia, 6, 19.
Austria-Hungary, 18, 65, 79-87.
B
Births, 57, 86, 94.
Bohemians, 80, 82, 132.
Boston, 203, 215.
Brinton, Daniel G., 212.
Burlingame Treaty, 111.
Butcher Workmen, 150.
C
California, 101, 103, 117.
Canada, 104. (See "French Canadians.")
Carib, 106.
Castes, 8.
Charity, 108.
Charity Organization Society of New York, 100.
Chicago, 47, 110, 165, 178.
Child Labor, 152.
Chinese, 101, 109, 111, 114, 117, 130, 131, 132, 143, 144, 146, 156,
231. (See "Coolies.")
Chinese Exclusion, 117, 152, 235.
Cities, 54, 55, 164, 165, 166, 215.
Civil War, 3, 63, 64, 98, 111, 129, 175.
Classes in America, 8, 12.
Closed Shop, 205.
Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, 150, 219.
Colored Farmers' Alliance, 50.
Competition, Race, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 148, 149, 151, 204, 208.
Contract Labor, 99, 102, 104, 108, 109, 110, 118, 135, 138, 141, 142,
143, 231. (See "Coolies," "Peonage.")
Coolies, 109, 152. (See "Chinese," "Japanese.")
Coöperation, 49, 50.
Cost of Living, 73. (See also "Standard of Living.")
Crime, 26, 168-175.
Croatians, 80, 81, 83, 84, 109, 122, 123.
Curran, Father, 223.
D
Death-rate, 58, 60, 61, 86, 95. (See "Infant Mortality.")
Distribution of Immigrants, 130, 224-230.
Drunkenness, 172.
Dutch, 24, 88, 89, 123.
Dutch East India Company, 108.
E
Education, 45, 46, 52, 146, 214. (See "Illiteracy.")
Educational Tests, 44, 45, 52, 194, 231, 232, 234. (See "Negro.")
Eminence of Races in America, 23-27, 31, 32.
Employment Agencies, 229.
English Race, 17, 23, 25, 128.
Erie Canal, 130.
F
Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, 42, 44, 188.
Filipinos, 140, 142, 143, 144.
Finns, 95-97.
Fleming, Professor W. L., 226.
Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, 42, 44, 45.
French, 25, 128.
French Canadians, 25, 97, 151, 199.
G
Galicia, 93. (See also "Austria-Hungary.")
Germans, 24, 30, 65, 67-68, 84, 122, 132, 152.
Greeks, 47, 122.
H
Hampton Institute, 49.
Hawaii, 99, 101, 102, 103, 105, 131, 132, 142, 196.
Hawaiian Sugar Planters' Association, 234.
Heredity, 5.
Hoffman, Fred L., 55, 57.
Huguenots, 24-25.
I
Illiteracy, 76, 79, 194.
Immigration, 22-38, 63-106.
Immigration Bureaus, 225, 237.
Incentives to Immigration, 27-31, 63-68, 72, 76, 77, 80, 84-87, 88, 95,
96, 99, 100, 101, 107, 108.
India, 9, 10, 103, 141, 142.
Indigenous Races, 104.
Industrial Capacity of Races, 127-134.
Industrial Education, 46, 47, 48. (See "Negro.")
Industrial Prosperity and Depression, 63, 68, 72, 157.
Infant Mortality, 60, 62, 87. (See "Death-rate.")
Initiative and Referendum, 185-187.
Irish, 24, 34, 65, 66, 67, 122, 151, 153, 204, 205.
Italians, 70-79, 109, 122, 123, 127, 130, 132, 140, 141, 147, 151, 153.
J
Japanese, 101, 102, 109, 114, 130, 131, 132.
Jefferson, Thomas, 1.
Jenks, J. W., 142.
Jews, 65, 81, 83, 87-95, 115, 122, 123, 127, 132, 133, 152, 153, 164.
K
Kelsey, Carl, 54, 55.
Knights of Labor, 118.
Knownothings, 117, 173.
Koreans, 103.
Kuczynski, R. R., 198, 207.
L
Labor, 124, 125, 126, 131, 134-159. (See "Wage Earners," "Trade Unions.")
Labor, Department of, 177, 178.
Landlordism, 64, 66, 72, 85, 87, 180.
Languages, 20, 94, 97.
Law, John, 108.
Leadership, 52.
Legislation, 111, 117, 118, 136, 231, 234, 236.
Lincoln, Abraham, 43, 213.
Lodge, Henry Cabot, 22-25.
Longshoremen, 150.
M
Machinery, 125, 156.
Magyars, 81, 82, 83, 84, 123.
Malay Races, 140, 142.
Mallock, W. H., 179.
Marriage, 203.
Mexicans, 132.
Military Duties, 75.
Miners, 129, 130, 150, 154.
Mob Violence, 173, 174, 175.
Molly Maguires, 129.
Morality, 61, 62, 204. (See "Prostitution.")
Münsterberg, Hugo, 179.
N
Naturalization, 111, 188, 189, 190, 194.
Negro, 3, 12, 16, 39-62, 106, 108, 112, 113, 114, 136, 137, 139, 140,
147, 172, 209.
New York, 164, 214, 215.
Norwegians, 164. (See "Scandinavians.")
P
Padroni, 102, 103, 109, 118, 229.
"Pale of Settlement," 91.
Penn, William, 29, 108.
Pennsylvania, 29, 30, 31.
Peonage, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 141.
Philippine Commission, 144.
Philippine Islands, 106, 141, 179, 180.
Poles, 83, 123, 152.
Political Boss, The, 182.
Political Exiles, 68.
Population, 53-58, 76, 157, 160. (See "Births" and "Death-rates.")
Porto Rico, 106, 218.
Portuguese, 98, 152.
Poverty and Pauperism, 26, 66, 76, 167, 175-178.
Primaries, Direct, 185.
Profits, 108, 155.
Prohibition, 173.
Proportional Representation, 184.
Prostitution, 57.
Protective Tariff, 158.
Q
Quakers, 28, 29.
R
Race Problem, 4, 8, 40, 42, 43, 44, 113. (See "Negro.")
Races, 3, 5, 7, 8, 12-17, 87, 88, 104-106, 108, 211. (See individual
name of race.)
Race Suicide, 198, 200.
Railroads, 130, 156, 225.
Reconstruction, 43, 50.
Religion, 28, 186, 217-219. (See "Incentives to Immigration.")
Restriction of Immigration, 116 n., 117, 118, 175, 230, 231.
Ripley, W. Z., 95.
Roosevelt, Theodore, 201, 206.
Rosenberg, Edward, 144.
Roumanians, 83, 84, 123.
Russia, 87, 92, 93, 132.
Ruthenians, 80, 83, 123.
S
Scandinavians, 24, 132, 152. (See "Norwegians.")
Scotch Irish, 23-24, 31-38, 128, 151. (See "Irish.")
Self-government, 2-4, 42, 43, 49, 53.
Seymour, Governor Horatio, 29.
Shaler, Professor N. S., 10.
Slavs, 14, 65, 80, 82, 83, 152.
Slovaks, 81, 83, 151.
Social Settlements, 219.
Socialism, 181.
Spaniards, 128.
Standard of Living, 112, 115, 151, 153, 208.
Statistics, 119, 130, 158, 160-178, 198. (See "Population," "Births,"
"Death-rate.")
Steamship Lines, 84, 85, 107, 110, 237, 238.
Stone, A. H., 147.
Strikes, 102, 149.
Suffrage, 2, 42, 43, 44, 51, 52, 117, 182, 183, 188, 220. (See also
"Educational Tests.")
Sweatshops, 115, 133, 148.
Swedes, 47.
Syrians, 99, 151.
T
Taft, Governor, 143.
Taxation, 74, 75, 84, 86.
Temporary Immigration, 77, 98, 101.
Test Act, 35.
Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, 42.
Trade Unions, 50, 51, 115, 129, 149, 150, 152, 154, 205, 220, 221, 222,
223, 224. (See "Labor" and "Wage Earners.")
Triple Alliance, 75.
Tuskegee Institute, 49.
U
United Garment Workers of America, 115 n., 150.
United Hebrew Charities of New York, 167.
United Mine Workers of America, 150.
W
Wage Earners, 111-118, 157.(See "Labor.")
Wages, 112, 113, 129, 140, 148, 152, 153, 155, 157, 159. (See "Labor.")
Wage System, The, 147.
Walker, Francis A., 198, 200, 207.
Watson, Elkanah, 200.
Wealth Production and Immigration, 119, 159.
Welfare Work, 219.
Wilcox, Professor, 227.
Footnotes:
[1] Bluntschli, "Theory of the State," pp. 108-181.
[2] _Atlantic Monthly_, May, 1903, p. 649.
[3] Shaler, p. 651.
[4] Ripley, "The Races of Europe."
[5] Ripley, Chs. XVII and XVIII.
[6] See the interesting series of articles by H. N. Casson, _Munsey's_,
1906.
[7] Lodge, p. 138.
[8] "History and Topography of New York," Address at Cornell University,
June 30, 1870.
[9] These figures are probably exaggerated, but authorities agree upon
the magnitude of the migration. Fiske, "Old Virginia," Vol. II, p. 594.
[10] Hanna, "The Scotch-Irish," Vol. II, p. 2.
[11] Tillinghast, "The Negro in Africa and America."
[12] Burgess, pp. 45, 225; Fleming, pp. 380, 433.
[13] Burgess, p. 207.
[14] See Ch. VIII, "Politics."
[15] Commission of Education _Report_, 1900-1901, Vol. I, p. ci.
[16] Hugh M. Browne, A.M.E., _Zion Church Quarterly_, April, 1894,
quoted by Tillinghast, p. 186.
[17] Fannie B. Williams, _Charities_, October 7, 1905, p. 43.
[18] _Atlanta University Publications_, No. 7, p. 188.
[19] Bureau of Labor, _Bulletin_, No. 35.
[20] _Atlanta University Publications_, Nos. 3 and 8.
[21] _Atlanta University Publications_, No. 3, pp. 153-178.
[22] Twelfth Census, _Supplementary Analysis_, p. 203.
[23] Willcox, "Census Statistics of the Negro," _Yale Review_, 13:279
(1904).
[24] "The Negro Farmer," p. 90.
[25] Pp. 9, 10.
[26] Dabney, Commissioner of Education, _Report_, 1902, Vol. I, p. 797.
[27] Twelfth Census, _Supplementary Analysis_, pp. 305, 307.
[28] _Supplementary Analysis_, p. 204.
[29] Pp. 16, 17; Wood, "American in Process," p. 218.
[30] Twelfth Census, Vol. III, p. lxix.
[31] _Atlanta University Publications_, No. 1, p. 24.
[32] _Atlanta University Publications_, No. 2, p. 9.
[33] Twelfth Census, Vol. III, p. lxxxii.
[34] P. clxxvi.
[35] P. ccxviii.
[36] Pp. cxix, cxxiii, cxxvii.
[37] Hoffman, p. 70.
[38] Twelfth Census, _Supplementary Analysis_, pp. 496, 497.
[39] _Atlanta University Publications_, No. 1, p. 26.
[40] Figures for 1883.
[41] Less than one-tenth of one per cent.
[42] This is the number according to race; the table gives the number
according to last place of residence.
[43] _Review of Reviews_, 33:491 (1906).
[44] Statistics mainly from King and Okey, "Italy To-day."
[45] _Review of Reviews_, 33:491 (1906).
[46] Twelfth Census, _Supplementary Analysis_, p. 27.
[47] _Review of Reviews_, 33:491 (1906).
[48] King and Okey, pp. 316-318.
[49] Balch, _Charities_, May, 1906, p. 179.
[50] Marshall, "Principles of Economics," p. 248.
[51] "Jewish Encyclopedia," 2:532.
[52] Balch, _Charities_, May, 1906, p. 180.
[53] P. 380.
[54] "Industrial Commission," 15:442.
[55] Commissioner-General, 1906, p. 85.
[56] Coman, "History of Contract Labor," etc., p. 47.
[57] Reports on Hawaii; Commissioner-General of Immigration. See Index.
[58] Report of the Royal Commission on Alien Immigration, 1903. Cd.
1741.
[59] Semple, "American History," etc., p. 332.
[60] Rowe, Chapter V.
[61] Census of the Philippine Islands.
[62] Lalor's "Cyclopedia of Political Economy, Political Science, and
United States History," article on "Chinese Immigration."
[63] Industrial Commission, 19:679.
[64] Computed from Table VIII, p. 28 _et seq._, Report of
Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1906. "Commercial" includes agents,
bankers, hotel-keepers, manufacturers, merchants, and dealers, and other
miscellaneous. "Unskilled" includes draymen, hackmen, and teamsters,
farm laborers, farmers, fishermen, laborers, and servants.
[65] Two hundred and eighty-five thousand four hundred and sixty
immigrants set down as "no occupation," including mainly women and
children, are omitted from this computation.
[66] Less than one-tenth of one per cent.
[67] Industrial Commission, Vol. XV, see index, "Prepaid Tickets," p.
818.
[68] United States Revised Statutes, 1901, Section 1999, Act of July 28,
1868.
[69] Fleming, pp. 692, 693.
[70] "If I were asked what one factor makes most for the amicable
relations between the races in the Delta, I should say, without
hesitation, the absence of a white laboring class, particularly of field
laborers."--Stone, "The Negro in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta," p. 241.
"There is comparatively little crime in the Black Belt and in the White
Belt. It is in the counties where the races meet on something like
numerical equality and in economic competition that the maximum of crime
is charged against negroes."--_Atlanta University Publications_, No. 9,
p. 48.
[71] In 1905, after losing a strike in New York, the General Executive
Board of the United Garment Workers of America, consisting with one
exception of Russian Jews, adopted the following resolutions:--
Resolved, That the unprecedented movement of the very poor in America
from Europe in the last three years has resulted in wholly changing the
previous social, political, and economic aspects of the immigration
question. The enormous accessions to the ranks of our competing
wage-workers, being to a great extent unemployed, or only partly
employed at uncertain wages, are lowering the standard of living among
the masses of the working people of this country, without giving promise
to uplift the great body of immigrants themselves. The overstocking of
the labor market has become a menace to many trade-unions, especially
those of the lesser skilled workers. Little or no benefit can possibly
accrue to an increasing proportion of the great numbers yet coming; they
are unfitted to battle intelligently for their rights in this republic,
to whose present burdens they but add others still greater. The fate of
the majority of the foreign wage-workers now here has served to
demonstrate on the largest possible scale that immigration is no
solution of the world-wide problem of poverty.
Resolved, That we call on American trade unionists to oppose
emphatically the proposed scheme of government distribution of
immigrants, since it would be an obvious means of directly and cheaply
furnishing strike breakers to the combined capitalists now seeking
destruction of the trade-unions.
Resolved, That we condemn all forms of assisted immigration, through
charitable agencies or otherwise.
Resolved, That we warn the poor of the earth against coming to America
with false hopes; it is our duty to inform them that the economic
situation in this country is changing with the same rapidity as the
methods of industry and commerce.
Resolved, That with respect to immigration we call on the government of
the United States for a righteous relief of the wage-workers now in
America. We desire that Congress should either (1) suspend immigration
totally for a term of years; or (2) put into force such an illiteracy
test as will exclude the ignorant, and also impose such a head tax as
will compel immigrants to pay their full footing here and be sufficient
to send back all those who within a stated period should become public
dependants.
[72] Smith, "Emigration and Immigration," pp. 238-263.
[73] Act of March 3, 1903, Sec. 2.
[74] New York Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1898, p. 1155.
[75] Twelfth Census, "Occupations," p. clxxxvii.
[76] Report on Hawaii, _Bulletin_ No. 47, pp. 780-783.
[77] Report on Hawaii, _Bulletin_ No. 66, pp. 441-447.
[78] Jewish Agricultural and Industrial Aid Society, _Annual Reports_.
[79] Clyatt _v._ U.S., 97 U.S., 207 (1903); Peonage Cases, 123 Fed. 671.
[80] New York _Herald_, June 24, 1903.
[81] _The Nation_, 83:379 (1906); Durand, Herbert, "Peonage in America,"
_Cosmopolitan_, 39:423 (1905).
[82] Rosenberg, _American Federationist_, October, 1903, p. 1026.
[83] Jenks, "Certain Economic Questions," etc., p. 157.
[84] Coman, and "Reports on Hawaii."
[85] Jenks, pp. 47, 54, 55, 158.
[86] United States Philippine Commission, 1902, Part I, p. 22.
[87] Rosenberg, p. 1021.
[88] Philippine Commission, 1902, index, "The Labor Situation."
[89] "The Italian Cotton Grower," p. 45.
[90] Where two years are given, the first is for Immigration and the
second for Imports.
[91] Twelfth Census, Vol. I, p. clxxvi.
[92] See _Federation_, June 1902, p. 40.
[93] Twelfth Census, Vol. I, pp. 878-881.
[94] New York _Sun_, Nov. 29, 1903.
[95] Semple, 312.
[96] Prisoners having one parent foreign are apportioned in the ratio of
native and foreign parentage.
[97] Includes native-born, parentage unknown.
[98] Offenders having one parent foreign are apportioned in the ratio of
native and foreign parentage.
[99] Kate Holladay Claghorn, "The Tenement House Problem," Vol. II, p.
79.
[100] John B. McMaster, "The Riotous Career of the Knownothings,"
_Forum_, July, 1894, p. 524.
[101] Cutler, "Lynch Law"; Bishop, "Lynching," _International
Quarterly_, September, 1903.
[102] Bureau of the Census, Special Reports, "Paupers in Almshouses,
1904," "Benevolent Institutions, 1904," "Insane and Feeble-minded in
Hospitals and Institutions, 1904."
[103] Münsterberg, "American Traits," p. 225 ff.
[104] Eaton, "The Civil Service in Great Britain," p. 160 ff.
[105] Muirhead, "The Land of Contrasts," p. 274.
[106] See description of the Belgium system by the author, _Review of
Reviews_, May, 1900; also, "Representation of Interests," _Independent_,
June, 1900; "Proportional Representation."
[107] Commons, "Proportional Representation," Appendix. Publications of
the Federation for Majority Rule, Washington, D.C.
[108] Hunt, Gaillard, "Federal Control of Naturalization," _World's
Work_, 11:7095 (1906).
[109] "Report to the President on Naturalization."
[110] "Naturalization Laws and Regulations of October, 1906," published
by the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization.
[111] Twelfth Census, Vol. I, p. 929.
[112] Twelfth Census, "Abstract," p. 18.
[113] Twelfth Census, "Abstract," p. 19.
[114] Twelfth Census, Vol. I, p. ccxvii.
[115] Phillips, J. B., "Educational Qualifications of Voters,"
_University of Colorado Studies_, Vol. III, No. 2 (1906).
[116] Caffey, Francis G., "Suffrage Limitations at the South,"
_Political Science Quarterly_, 20:53 (1905). Report on Political Reform,
Union League Club, New York, 1903.
[117] Williams _v._ Mississippi, 170 U.S., 213; Giles _v._ Harris, 189
U.S., 475; Giles _v._ Teasley, 193 U.S., 146.
[118] This does not apply to the "understanding" clause in Mississippi,
which is permanent.
[119] Twelfth Census, Vol. I, pp. ccxiii, ccxv.
[120] Twelfth Census, Vol. I, pp. cciv, ccv.
[121] See "Reports on Hawaii."
[122] Kuczynski, "Einwanderungspolitik," p. 35.
[123] _Forum_, 11:634-743 (1891). Reprinted in "Discussions," etc., pp.
417-426.
[124] Professor Smith, for the year 1888, estimated the colonial element
at 29,000,000 and the immigrant element at 26,000,000, applying to the
immigrants the average rate of increase from births. "Emigration and
Immigration," pp. 60-61.
[125] Watson, p. 522.
[126] Van Vorst, "The Woman Who Toils," p. viii.
[127] Computed from the Twelfth Census, Vol. II, p. lxxxvii, ff.
[128] Computed from the Twelfth Census, Vol. II, p. 312.
[129] Kuczynski concludes from his study of Massachusetts statistics
that "the native population cannot hold its own. It seems to be dying
out." Could he have separated the two elements of the native population,
he would have found that the immigrant element is dying out faster than
the older native element. "The Fecundity of the Native and Foreign Born
Population in Massachusetts," p. 186.
[130] Twelfth Census, "Statistical Atlas," plate 98.
[131] "Fecundity," etc., p. 157.
[132] Ross, "Causes of Race Superiority."
[133] See Du Bois, "The Souls of Black Folk."
[134] Report on Hawaii, _Bulletin_ No. 47, p. 715.
[135] "Religions of Primitive People," p. 15.
[136] Smith, "Assimilation of Nationalities," p. 440.
[137] Lovejoy, "The Slav Child," _Charities_, July, 1905, p. 884.
[138] Twelfth Census, _Supplementary Analysis_, p. 374.
[139] "Child Labor in the United States," p. 15, Bureau of the Census.
[140] Grose, "Aliens or Americans?"
[141] See also Stewart and Huebner.
[142] Report, 1903, p. 60; 1904, p. 44; 1905, p. 58; 1906, p. 64.
[143] Industrial Commission, 15:492-646; 19:971-977.
[144] Tosti, Gustavo, "The Agricultural Possibilities of Italian
Immigration," _Charities_, May 5, 1904, p. 472.
[145] "Immigration to the Southern States," _Political Science
Quarterly_, 20:276 (1905).
[146] "Facts about Immigration," p. 11.
[147] _Ibid._, p. 119.
[148] Kellor, "Out of Work," pp. 17, 50-53, 70; _Charities_, Feb. 6,
1904, p. 151.
[149] Commissioner-General, 1903, p. 70.
[150] Chapter 27, Laws of 1862.
[151] Commissioner-General, 1906, p. 62.
[152] For details of the several measures, see Hall, "Immigration."
[153] "Industrial Commission," 19:1001-1003. Hall, "Immigration."
[154] Commissioner-General, 1904, p. 41.
[155] The National Immigration Conference, December 8, 1905, adopted the
following resolution: "That the penalty of $100, now imposed on the
steamship companies for bringing diseased persons to the United States,
be also imposed for bringing in any person excluded by law." _National
Civic Federation Review_, January, 1906, p. 19.
POVERTY
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