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Title: Our Foreigners
A Chronicle of Americans in the Making
Author: Samuel P. Orth
Release Date: January 28, 2005 [EBook #14825]
Language: English
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TEXTBOOK EDITION
THE CHRONICLES
OF AMERICA SERIES
ALLEN JOHNSON
EDITOR
GERHARD R. LOMER
CHARLES W. JEFFERYS
ASSISTANT EDITORS
OUR FOREIGNERS
A CHRONICLE OF
AMERICANS IN THE MAKING
BY SAMUEL P. ORTH
[Illustration]
NEW HAVEN: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
TORONTO: GLASGOW, BROOK & CO.
LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
_1920, by Yale University Press_
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
CONTENTS
Page
I. OPENING THE DOOR 1
II. THE AMERICAN STOCK 21
III. THE NEGRO 45
IV. UTOPIAS IN AMERICA 66
V. THE IRISH INVASION 103
VI. THE TEUTONIC TIDE 124
VII. THE CALL OF THE LAND 147
VIII. THE CITY BUILDERS 162
IX. THE ORIENTAL 188
X. RACIAL INFILTRATION 208
XI. THE GUARDED DOOR 221
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 235
INDEX 241
OUR FOREIGNERS
CHAPTER I
OPENING THE DOOR
Long before men awoke to the vision of America, the Old World was the
scene of many stupendous migrations. One after another, the Goths, the
Huns, the Saracens, the Turks, and the Tatars, by the sheer tidal
force of their numbers threatened to engulf the ancient and medieval
civilization of Europe. But neither in the motives prompting them nor
in the effect they produced, nor yet in the magnitude of their
numbers, will such migrations bear comparison with the great exodus of
European peoples which in the course of three centuries has made the
United States of America. That movement of races--first across the sea
and then across the land to yet another sea, which set in with the
English occupation of Virginia in 1607 and which has continued from
that day to this an almost ceaseless stream of millions of human
beings seeking in the New World what was denied them in the Old--has
no parallel in history.
It was not until the seventeenth century that the door of the
wilderness of North America was opened by Englishmen; but, if we are
interested in the circumstances and ideas which turned Englishmen
thither, we must look back into the wonderful sixteenth century--and
even into the fifteenth, for; it was only five or six years after the
great Christopher's discovery, that the Cabots, John and Sebastian,
raised the Cross of St. George on the North American coast. Two
generations later, when the New World was pouring its treasure into
the lap of Spain and when all England was pulsating with the new and
noble life of the Elizabethan Age, the sea captains of the Great Queen
challenged the Spanish monarch, defeated his Great Armada, and
unfurled the English flag, symbol of a changing era, in every sea.
The political and economic thought of the sixteenth century was
conducive to imperial expansion. The feudal fragments of kingdoms were
being fused into a true nationalism. It was the day of the
mercantilists, when gold and silver were given a grotesquely
exaggerated place in the national economy and self-sufficiency was
deemed to be the goal of every great nation. Freed from the restraint
of rivals, the nation sought to produce its own raw material, control
its own trade, and carry its own goods in its own ships to its own
markets. This economic doctrine appealed with peculiar force to the
people of England. England was very far from being self-sustaining.
She was obliged to import salt, sugar, dried fruits, wines, silks,
cotton, potash, naval stores, and many other necessary commodities.
Even of the fish which formed a staple food on the English workman's
table, two-thirds of the supply was purchased from the Dutch.
Moreover, wherever English traders sought to take the products of
English industry, mostly woolen goods, they were met by
handicaps--tariffs, Sound dues, monopolies, exclusions, retaliations,
and even persecutions.
So England was eager to expand under her own flag. With the fresh
courage and buoyancy of youth she fitted out ships and sent forth
expeditions. And while she shared with the rest of the Europeans the
vision of India and the Orient, her "gentlemen adventurers" were not
long in seeing the possibilities that lay concealed beyond the
inviting harbors, the navigable rivers, and the forest-covered valleys
of North America. With a willing heart they believed their quaint
chronicler, Richard Hakluyt, when he declared that America could bring
"_as great a profit to the Realme of England as the Indes to the King
of Spain_," that "_golde, silver, copper, leade and perales in
aboundaunce_" had been found there: also "_precious stones, as
turquoises and emauraldes; spices and drugges; silke worms fairer than
ours in Europe; white and red cotton; infinite multitude of all kind
of fowles; excellent vines in many places for wines; the soyle apte to
beare olyves for oyle; all kinds of fruites; all kindes of odoriferous
trees and date trees, cypresses, and cedars; and in New-founde-lande
aboundaunce of pines and firr trees to make mastes and deale boards,
pitch, tar, rosen; hempe for cables and cordage; and upp within the
Graunde Baye excedinge quantitie of all kinde of precious furres_."
Such a catalogue of resources led him to conclude that "_all the
commodities of our olde decayed and daungerous trades in all Europe,
Africa and Asia haunted by us, may in short space and for little or
nothinge, in a manner be had in that part of America which lieth
between 30 and 60 degrees of northerly latitude_."
Even after repeated expeditions had discounted the exuberant optimism
of this description, the Englishmen's faith did not wane. While for
many years there lurked in the mind of the Londoner, the hope that
some of the products of the Levant might be raised in the fertile
valleys of Virginia, the practical English temperament none the less
began promptly to appease itself with the products of the vast
forests, the masts, the tar and pitch, the furs; with the fish from
the coast waters, the abundant cod, herring, and mackerel; nor was it
many years before tobacco, indigo, sugar, cotton, maize, and other
commodities brought to the merchants of England a great American
commerce.
The first attempts to found colonies in the country by Sir Humphrey
Gilbert and Sir Walter Raleigh were pitiable failures. But the
settlement on the James in 1607 marked the beginning of a nation. What
sort of nation? What race of people? Sir Walter Raleigh, with true
English tenacity, had said after learning of the collapse of his own
colony, "I shall yet live to see it an English nation." The new nation
certainly was English in its foundation, whatever may be said of its
superstructure. Virginia, New England, Maryland, the Carolinas, New
Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Georgia were begun by Englishmen; and New
England, Virginia, and Maryland remained almost entirely English
throughout the seventeenth century and well into the eighteenth. These
colonies reproduced, in so far as their strange and wild surroundings
permitted, the towns, the estates, and the homes of Englishmen of that
day. They were organized and governed by Englishmen under English
customs and laws; and the Englishman's constitutional liberties were
their boast until the colonists wrote these rights and privileges into
a constitution of their own. "Foreigners" began early to straggle into
the colonies. But not until the eighteenth century was well under way
did they come in appreciable numbers, and even then the great bulk of
these non-English newcomers were from the British Isles--of Welsh,
Scotch, Irish, and Scotch-Irish extraction.
These colonies took root at a time when profound social and religious
changes were occurring in England. Churchmen and dissenters were at
war with each other; autocracy was struggling to survive the
representative system; and agrarianism was contending with a newly
created capitalism for economic supremacy. The old order was changing.
In vain were attempts made to stay progress by labor laws and poor
laws and corn laws. The laws rather served to fill the highways with
vagrants, vagabonds, mendicants, beggars, and worse. There was a
general belief that the country was overpopulated. For the restive,
the discontented, the ambitious, as well as for the undesirable
surplus, the new colonies across the Atlantic provided a welcome
outlet.
To the southern plantations were lured those to whom land-owning
offered not only a means of livelihood but social distinction. As word
was brought back of the prosperity of the great estates and of the
limitless areas awaiting cultivation, it tempted in substantial
numbers those who were dissatisfied with their lot: the yeoman who saw
no escape from the limitations of his class, either for himself or for
his children; the younger son who disdained trade but was too poor to
keep up family pretensions; professional men, lawyers, and doctors,
even clergymen, who were ambitious to become landed gentlemen; all
these felt the irresistible call of the New World.
The northern colonies were, on the other hand, settled by townfolk, by
that sturdy middle class which had wedged its way socially between the
aristocracy and the peasantry, which asserted itself politically in
the Cromwellian Commonwealth and later became the industrial master of
trade and manufacture. These hard-headed dissenters founded New
England. They built towns and almost immediately developed a
profitable trade and manufacture. With a goodly sprinkling of
university men among them, they soon had a college of their own.
Indeed, Harvard graduated its first class as early as 1642.
Supplementing these pioneers, came mechanics and artisans eager to
better their condition. Of the serving class, only a few came
willingly. These were the "free-willers" or "redemptioners," who sold
their services usually for a term of five years to pay for their
passage money. But the great mass of unskilled labor necessary to
clear the forests and do the other hard work so plentiful in a pioneer
land came to America under duress. Kidnaping or "spiriting" achieved
the perfection of a fine art under the second Charles. Boys and girls
of the poorer classes, those wretched waifs who thronged the streets
of London and other towns, were hustled on board ships and virtually
sold into slavery for a term of years. It is said that in 1670 alone
ten thousand persons were thus kidnaped; and one kidnaper testified in
1671 that he had sent five hundred persons a year to the colonies for
twelve years and another that he had sent 840 in one year.
Transportation of the idle poor was another common source for
providing servants. In 1663 an act was passed by Parliament empowering
Justices of the Peace to send rogues, vagrants, and "sturdy beggars"
to the colonies. These men belonged to the class of the unfortunate
rather than the vicious and were the product of a passing state of
society, though criminals also were deported. Virginia and other
colonies vigorously protested against this practice, but their
protests were ignored by the Crown. When, however, it is recalled that
in those years the list of capital offenses was appalling in length,
that the larceny of a few shillings was punishable by death, that many
of the victims were deported because of religious differences and
political offenses, then the stigma of crime is erased. And one does
not wonder that some of these transported persons rose to places of
distinction and honor in the colonies and that many of them became
respected citizens. Maryland, indeed, recruited her schoolmasters from
among their ranks.
Indentured service was an institution of that time, as was slavery.
The lot of the indentured servant was not ordinarily a hard one. Here
and there masters were cruel and inhuman. But in a new country where
hands were so few and work so abundant, it was wisdom to be tolerant
and humane. Servants who had worked out their time usually became
tenants or freeholders, often moving to other colonies and later to
the interior beyond the "fall line," where they became pioneers in
their turn.
The most important and influential influx of non-English stock into
the colonies was the copious stream of Scotch-Irish. Frontier life was
not a new experience to these hardy and remarkable people. Ulster,
when they migrated thither from Scotland in the early part of the
seventeenth century, was a wild moorland, and the Irish were more than
unfriendly neighbors. Yet these transplanted Scotch changed the fens
and mires into fields and gardens; in three generations they had built
flourishing towns and were doing a thriving manufacture in linens and
woolens. Then England, in her mercantilist blindness, began to pass
legislation that aimed to cut off these fabrics from English
competition. Soon thousands of Ulster artisans were out of work. Nor
was their religion immune from English attack, for these Ulstermen
were Presbyterians. These civil, religious, and economic persecutions
thereupon drove to America an ethnic strain that has had an influence
upon the character of the nation far out of proportion to its
relative numbers. In the long list of leaders in American politics and
enterprise and in every branch of learning, Scotch-Irish names are
common.
There had been some trade between Ulster and the colonies, and a few
Ulstermen had settled on the eastern shore of Maryland and in Virginia
before the close of the seventeenth century. Between 1714 and 1720,
fifty-four ships arrived in Boston with immigrants from Ireland. They
were carefully scrutinized by the Puritan exclusionists. Cotton Mather
wrote in his diary on August 7, 1718: "But what shall be done for the
great number of people that are transporting themselves thither from
ye North of Ireland?" And John Winthrop, speaking of twenty ministers
and their congregations that were expected the same year, said, "I
wish their coming so over do not prove fatall in the End." They were
not welcome, and had, evidently, no intention of burdening the towns.
Most of them promptly moved on beyond the New England settlements.
The great mass of Scotch-Irish, however, came to Pennsylvania, and in
such large numbers that James Logan, the Secretary of the Province,
wrote to the Proprietors in 1729: "It looks as if Ireland is to send
all its inhabitants hither, for last week not less than six ships
arrived, and every day two or three arrive also."[1] These colonists
did not remain in the towns but, true to their traditions, pushed on
to the frontier. They found their way over the mountain trails into
the western part of the colony; they pushed southward along the
fertile plateaus that terrace the Blue Ridge Mountains and offer a
natural highway to the South; into Virginia, where they possessed
themselves of the beautiful Shenandoah Valley; into Maryland and the
Carolinas; until the whole western frontier, from Georgia to New York
and from Massachusetts to Maine, was the skirmish line of the
Scotch-Irish taking possession of the wilderness.
The rebellions of the Pretenders in Scotland in 1715 and 1745 and the
subsequent break-up of the clan system produced a considerable
migration to the colonies from both the Highlands and the Lowlands.
These new colonists settled largely in the Carolinas and in Maryland.
The political prisoners, of whom there were many in consequence of
the rebellions, were sold into service, usually for a term of fourteen
years. In Pennsylvania the Welsh founded a number of settlements in
the neighborhood of Philadelphia. There were Irish servants in all the
colonies and in Maryland many Irish Catholics joined their fellow
Catholics from England.
In 1683 a group of religious refugees from the Rhineland founded
Germantown, near Philadelphia. Soon other German communities were
started in the neighboring counties. Chief among these German
sectarians were the Mennonites, frequently called the German Quakers,
so nearly did their religious peculiarities match those of the
followers of Penn; the Dunkers, a Baptist sect, who seem to have come
from Germany boot and baggage, leaving not one of their number behind;
and the Moravians, whose missionary zeal and gentle demeanor have made
them beloved in many lands. The peculiar religious devotions of the
sectarians still left them time to cultivate their inclination for
literature and music. There were a few distinguished scholars among
them and some of the finest examples of early American books bear the
imprint of their presses.
This modest beginning of the German invasion was soon followed by more
imposing additions. The repeated strategic devastations of the Rhenish
Palatinate during the French and Spanish wars reduced the peasantry to
beggary, and the medieval social stratification of Germany reduced
them to virtual serfdom, from which America offered emancipation.
Queen Anne invited the harassed peasants of this region to come to
England, whence they could be transferred to America. Over thirty
thousand took advantage of the opportunity in the years 1708 and
1709.[2] Some of them found occupation in England and others in
Ireland, but the majority migrated, some to New York, where they
settled in the Mohawk Valley, others to the Carolinas, but far more to
Pennsylvania, where, with an instinct born of generations of contact
with the soil, they sought out the most promising areas in the
limestone valleys of the eastern part of that colony, cleared the
land, built their solid homes and ample barns, and clung to their
language, customs, and religion so tenaciously that to this day their
descendants are called "Pennsylvania Dutch."
After 1717 multitudes of German peasants were lured to America by
unscrupulous agents called "new-landers" or "soul-stealers," who, for
a commission paid by the shipmaster, lured the peasant to sell his
belongings, scrape together or borrow what he could, and migrate. The
agents and captains then saw to it that few arrived in Philadelphia
out of debt. As a result the immigrants were sold to "soul-drivers,"
who took them to the interior and indentured them to farmers, usually
of their own race. These redemptioners, as they were called, served
from three to five years and generally received fifty acres of land at
the expiration of their service.
On the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV in 1685 French
Protestants fled in vast numbers to England and to Holland. Thence
many of them found their way to America, but very few came hither
directly from France. South Carolina, Virginia, New York, Rhode
Island, and Massachusetts were favored by those noble refugees, who
included in their numbers not only skilled artisans and successful
merchants but distinguished scholars and professional men in whose
veins flowed some of the best blood of France. They readily identified
themselves with the industries and aspirations of the colonies and at
once became leaders in the professional and business life in their
communities. In Boston, in Charleston, in New York, and in other
commercial centers, the names of streets, squares, and public
buildings attest their prominence in trade and politics. Few names are
more illustrious than those of Paul Revere, Peter Faneuil, and James
Bowdoin of Massachusetts; John Jay, Nicholas Bayard, Stephen DeLancey
of New York; Elias Boudinot of New Jersey; Henry Laurens and Francis
Marion of South Carolina. Like the Scotch-Irish, these French
Protestants and their descendants have distinguished themselves for
their capacity for leadership.
The Jews came early to New York, and as far back as 1691 they had a
synagogue in Manhattan. The civil disabilities then so common in
Europe were not enforced against them in America, except that they
could not vote for members of the legislature. As that body itself
declared in 1737, the Jews did not possess the parliamentary franchise
in England, and no special act had endowed them with this right in the
colonies. The earliest representatives of this race in America came to
New Amsterdam with the Dutch and were nearly all Spanish and
Portuguese Jews, who had found refuge in Holland after their wholesale
expulsion from the Iberian peninsula in 1492. Rhode Island, too, and
Pennsylvania had a substantial Jewish population. The Jews settled
characteristically in the towns and soon became a factor in commercial
enterprise. It is to be noted that they contributed liberally to the
patriot cause in the Revolution.
While the ships bearing these many different stocks were sailing
westward, England did not gain possession of the whole Atlantic
seaboard without contest. The Dutch came to Manhattan in 1623 and for
fifty years held sway over the imperial valley of the Hudson. It was a
brief interval, as history goes, but it was long enough to stamp upon
the town of Manhattan the cosmopolitan character it has ever since
maintained. Into its liberal and congenial atmosphere were drawn Jews,
Moravians, and Anabaptists; Scotch Presbyterians and English
Nonconformists; Waldenses from Piedmont and Huguenots from France. The
same spirit that made Holland the lenient host to political and
religious refugees from every land in that restive age characterized
her colony and laid the foundations of the great city of today.
England had to wrest from the Dutch their ascendancy in New
Netherland, where they split in twain the great English colonies of
New England and of the South and controlled the magnificent harbor at
the mouth of the Hudson, which has since become the water gate of the
nation.
While the English were thus engaged in establishing themselves on the
coast, the French girt them in by a strategic circle of forts and
trading posts reaching from Acadia, up the St. Lawrence, around the
Great Lakes, and down the valley of the Mississippi, with outposts on
the Ohio and other important confluents. When, after the final
struggle between France and Britain for world empire, France retired
from the North American continent, she left to England all her
possessions east of the Mississippi, with the exception of a few
insignificant islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the West Indies;
and to Spain she ceded New Orleans and her vast claims beyond the
great river.
Thus from the first, the lure of the New World beckoned to many races,
and to every condition of men. By the time that England's dominion
spread over half the northern continent, her colonies were no longer
merely English. They were the most cosmopolitan areas in the world. A
few European cities had at times been cities of refuge, but New York
and Philadelphia were more than mere temporary shelters to every
creed. Nowhere else could so many tongues be heard as in a stroll
down Broadway to the Battery. No European commonwealths embraced in
their citizenry one-half the ethnic diversity of the Carolinas or of
Pennsylvania. And within the wide range of his American domains, the
English King could point to one spot or another and say: "Here the
Spaniards have built a chaste and beautiful mission; here the French
have founded a noble city; here my stubborn Roundheads have planted a
whole nest of commonwealths; here my Dutch neighbors thought they
stole a march on me, but I forestalled them; this valley is filled
with Germans, and that plateau is covered with Scotch-Irish, while the
Swedes have taken possession of all this region." And with a proud
gesture he could add, "But everywhere they read their laws in the
King's English and acknowledge my sovereignty."
Against the shifting background of history these many races of diverse
origin played their individual parts, each contributing its essential
characteristics to the growing complex of a new order of society in
America. So on this stage, broad as the western world, we see these
men of different strains subduing a wilderness and welding its diverse
parts into a great nation, stretching out the eager hand of
exploration for yet more land, bringing with arduous toil the ample
gifts of sea and forest to the townsfolk, hewing out homesteads in the
savage wilderness, laboring faithfully at forge and shipyard and loom,
bartering in the market place, putting the fear of God into their
children and the fear of their own strong right arm into him whosoever
sought to oppress them, be he Red Man with his tomahawk or English
King with his Stamp Act.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: In 1773 and 1774 over thirty thousand came. In the latter
year Benjamin Franklin estimated the population of Pennsylvania at
350,000, of which number one-third was thought to be Scotch-Irish.
John Fiske states that half a million, all told, arrived in the
colonies before 1776, "making not less than one-sixth part of our
population at the time of the Revolution."]
[Footnote 2: John Fiske: _The Dutch and Quaker Colonies in America_,
vol. II, p. 351.]
CHAPTER II
THE AMERICAN STOCK
In the history of a word we may frequently find a fragment, sometimes
a large section, of universal history. This is exemplified in the term
American, a name which, in the phrase of George Washington, "must
always exalt the pride of patriotism" and which today is proudly borne
by a hundred million people. There is no obscurity about the origin of
the name America. It was suggested for the New World in 1507 by Martin
Waldseemüller, a German geographer at the French college of Saint-Dié.
In that year this savant printed a tract, with a map of the world or
_mappemonde_, recognizing the dubious claims of discovery set up by
Amerigo Vespucci and naming the new continent after him. At first
applied only to South America, the name was afterwards extended to
mean the northern continent as well; and in time the whole New World,
from the Frozen Ocean to the Land of Fire, came to be called America.
Inevitably the people who achieved a preponderating influence in the
new continent came to be called Americans. Today the name American
everywhere signifies belonging to the United States, and a citizen of
that country is called an American. This unquestionably is
geographically anomalous, for the neighbors of the United States, both
north and south, may claim an equal share in the term. Ethnically, the
only real Americans are the Indian descendants of the aboriginal
races. But it is futile to combat universal usage: the World War has
clinched the name upon the inhabitants of the United States. The
American army, the American navy, American physicians and nurses,
American food and clothing--these are phrases with a definite
geographical and ethnic meaning which neither academic ingenuity nor
race rivalry can erase from the memory of mankind.
This chapter, however, is to discuss the American stock, and it is
necessary to look farther back than mere citizenship; for there are
millions of American citizens of foreign birth or parentage who,
though they are Americans, are clearly not of any American stock.
At the time of the Revolution there was a definite American
population, knit together by over two centuries of toil in the hard
school of frontier life, inspired by common political purposes,
speaking one language, worshiping one God in divers manners,
acknowledging one sovereignty, and complying with the mandates of one
common law. Through their common experience in subduing the wilderness
and in wresting their independence from an obstinate and stupid
monarch, the English colonies became a nation. Though they did not
fulfill Raleigh's hope and become an English nation, they were much
more English than non-English, and these Revolutionary Americans may
be called today, without abuse of the term, the original American
stock. Though they were a blend of various races, a cosmopolitan
admixture of ethnic strains, they were not more varied than the
original admixture of blood now called English.
We may, then, properly begin our survey of the racial elements in the
United States by a brief scrutiny of this American stock, the parent
stem of the American people, the great trunk, whose roots have
penetrated deep into the human experience of the past and whose
branches have pushed upward and outward until they spread over a whole
continent.
The first census of the United States was taken in 1790. More than a
hundred years later, in 1909, the Census Bureau published _A Century
of Population Growth_ in which an attempt was made to ascertain the
nationality of those who comprised the population at the taking of the
first census. In that census no questions of nativity were asked. This
omission is in itself significant of the homogeneity of the population
at that time. The only available data, therefore, upon which such a
calculation could be made were the surnames of the heads of families
preserved in the schedules. A careful analysis of the list disclosed a
surprisingly large number of names ostensibly English or British.
Fashions in names have changed since then, and many that were so
curious, simple, or fantastically compounded as to be later deemed
undignified have undergone change or disappeared.[3]
Upon this basis the nationality of the white population was
distributed among the States in accordance with Table A printed on
pages 26-27. Three of the original States are not represented in this
table: New Jersey, Delaware, and Georgia. The schedules of the First
Census for those States were not preserved. The two new States of
Kentucky and Tennessee are also missing from the list. Estimates,
however, have been made for these missing States.
For Delaware, the schedules of the Second Census, 1800, survived. As
there was little growth and very little change in the composition of
the population during this decade, the Census Bureau used the later
figures as a basis for calculating the population in 1790. Of three of
the missing Southern States the report says: "The composition of the
white population of Georgia, Kentucky, and of the district
subsequently erected into the State of Tennessee is also unknown; but
in view of the fact that Georgia was a distinctly English colony, and
that Tennessee and Kentucky were settled largely from Virginia and
North Carolina, the application of the North Carolina proportions to
the white population of these three results in what is doubtless an
approximation of the actual distribution."
TABLE A[4]
DISTRIBUTION OF THE WHITE POPULATION, 1790, IN EACH STATE, ACCORDING
TO NATIONALITY AS INDICATED BY NAMES OF HEADS OF FAMILIES
Note: The first column under each State gives the number of persons;
the second, the percentage. The asterisk indicates less than one-tenth
of one per cent.
-------------+-------------+--------------+-------------+--------------
NATIONALITY | MAINE | NEW HAMPSHIRE| VERMONT | MASSACHUSETTS
-------------+-------+-----+--------+-----+-------+-----+--------+-----
All | | | | | | | |
Nationalities| 96,107|100.0| 141,112|100.0| 85,072|100.0| 373,187|100.0
| | | | | | | |
English | 89,515| 93.1| 132,726| 94.1| 81,149| 95.4| 354,528| 95.0
Scotch | 4,154| 4.3| 6,648| 4.7| 2,562| 3.0| 13,435| 3.6
Irish | 1,334| 1.4| 1,346| 1.0| 597| 0.7| 3,732| 1.0
Dutch | 279| 0.3| 153| 0.1| 428| 0.5| 373| 0.1
French | 115| 0.1| 142| 0.1| 153| 0.2| 746| 0.2
German | 436| 0.5| | | 35| *| 75| *
Hebrew | 44| *| | | | | 67| *
All others | 230| 0.2| 97| 0.1| 148| 0.2| 231| *
-------------+-------+-----+--------+-----+-------+-----+--------+-----
-------------+-------------+--------------+--------------+--------------
NATIONALITY | RHODE ISLAND| CONNECTICUT | NEW YORK | PENNSYLVANIA
-------------+-------+-----+--------+-----+--------+-----+--------+-----
All | | | | | | | |
Nationalities| 64,670|100.0| 232,236|100.0| 314,366|100.0| 423,373|100.0
| | | | | | | |
English | 62,079| 96.0| 223,437| 96.2| 245,901| 78.2| 249,656| 59.0
Scotch | 1,976| 3.1| 6,425| 2.8| 10,034| 3.2| 49,567| 11.7
Irish | 459| 0.7| 1,589 | 0.7| 2,525| 0.8| 8,614| 2.0
Dutch | 19| *| 258 | 0.1| 50,600| 16.1| 2,623| 0.6
French | 88| 0.1| 512| 0.2| 2,424| 0.8| 2,341| 0.6
German | 33| 0.1| 4| *| 1,103| 0.4| 110,357| 26.1
Hebrew | 9| *| 5| *| 385| 0.1| 21| *
All others | 7| *| 6| *| 1,394| 0.4| 194| *
-------------+-------+-----+--------+-----+--------+-----+--------+-----
-------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------
NATIONALITY | MARYLAND | VIRGINIA |NORTH CAROLINA|SOUTH CAROLINA
-------------+--------+-----+--------+-----+--------+-----+--------+-----
All | | | | | | | |
Nationalities| 208,649|100.0| 442,117|100.0| 289,181|100.0| 140,178|100.0
| | | | | | | |
English | 175,265| 84.0| 375,799| 85.0| 240,309| 83.1| 115,480| 82.4
Scotch | 13,562| 6.5| 31,391| 7.1| 32,388| 11.2| 16,447| 11.7
Irish | 5,008| 2.4| 8,842| 2.0| 6,651| 2.3| 3,576| 2.6
Dutch | 209| 0.1| 884| 0.2| 578| 0.2| 219| 0.2
French | 1,460| 0.7| 2,653| 0.6| 868| 0.3| 1,882| 1.8
German | 12,310| 5.9| 21,664| 4.9| 8,097| 2.8| 2,343| 1.7
Hebrew | 626| 0.3| | | 1| *| 85| *
All others | 209| 0.1| 884| 0.2| 289| 0.1| 146| 0.1
-------------+--------+-----+--------+-----+--------+-----+--------+-----
TABLE B
COMPUTED DISTRIBUTION OF WHITE POPULATION, 1790, ACCORDING TO
NATIONALITY, IN EACH STATE FOR WHICH SCHEDULES ARE MISSING
--------------+-----------------+-----------------+----------------
NATIONALITY | NEW JERSEY | DELAWARE | GEORGIA
--------------+---------+-------+---------+-------+---------+------
All | | | | | |
Nationalities | 169,954 | 100.0 | 46,310 | 100.0 | 52,886 | 100.0
| | | | | |
English | 98,620 | 58.0 | 39,966 | 86.3 | 43,948 | 83.1
Scotch | 13,156 | 7.7 | 3,473 | 7.5 | 5,923 | 11.2
Irish | 12,099 | 7.1 | 1,806 | 3.9 | 1,216 | 2.3
Dutch | 21,581 | 12.7 | 463 | 1.0 | 106 | 0.2
French | 3,565 | 2.1 | 232 | 0.5 | 159 | 0.3
German | 15,678 | 9.2 | 185 | 0.4 | 1,481 | 2.8
All others[A] | 5,255 | 3.1 | 185 | 0.4 | 53 | 0.1
--------------+---------+-------+---------+-------+---------+------
--------------+-----------------+----------------
NATIONALITY | KENTUCKY | TENNESSEE
--------------+---------+-------+---------+------
All | | | |
Nationalities | 61,133 | 100.0 | 31,918 | 100.0
| | | |
English | 50,802 | 83.1 | 26,519 | 83.1
Scotch | 6,847 | 11.2 | 3,574 | 11.2
Irish | 1,406 | 2.3 | 734 | 2.8
Dutch | 122 | 0.2 | 64 | 0.2
French | 183 | 0.3 | 96 | 0.3
German | 1,712 | 2.8 | 894 | 2.8
All others[A] | 61 | 0.1 | 32 | 0.1
--------------+---------+-------+---------+------
[Note A: Including Hebrews.]
New Jersey presented a more complex problem. Here were Welsh and
Swedes, Finns and Danes, as well as French, Dutch, Scotch, Irish, and
English. A careful analysis was made of lists of freeholders, and
other available sources, in the various counties. The results of these
computations in the States from which no schedules of the First Census
survive are given in Table B printed on page 28.
The calculations for the entire country in 1790, based upon the census
schedules of the States from which reports are still available and
upon estimates for the others are summed up in the following manner:
_Number and per cent distribution of the white population, 1790:_
_Nationality_ _Number_ _Per Cent_
All Nationalities 3,172,444 100.0
English 2,605,699 82.1
Scotch 221,562 7.0
Irish 61,534 1.9
Dutch 78,959 2.5
French 17,619 0.6
German 176,407 5.6
All others 10,664 0.3
To this method of estimating nationality, it will at once be objected
that undue prominence is given to the derivation of the surname, an
objection fully understood by those who made the estimate and one
which deprives their conclusions of strict scientific verity. In a new
country, where the population is in a constant flux and where members
of community composed of one race easily migrate to another part of
the country and fall in with people of another race, it is very easy
to modify the name to suit new circumstances. We know, for instance
that Isaac Isaacks of Pennsylvania was not a Jew, that the Van
Buskirks of New Jersey were German, not Dutch, that D'Aubigné was
early shortened into Dabny and Aulnay into Olney. So also many a Brown
had been Braun, and several Blacks had once been only Schwartz. Even
the universal Smith had absorbed more than one original Schmidt. These
rather exceptional cases, however, probably, do not vitiate the
general conclusion here made as to the British and non-British element
in the population of America, for the Dutch, the German, the French,
and the Swedish cognomens are characteristically different from the
British. But the differentiation between Irish, Welsh, Scotch,
Scotch-Irish, and English names is infinitely more difficult. The
Scotch-Irish particularly have challenged the conclusions reached by
the Census Bureau. They claim a much larger proportion of the
original bulk of our population than the seven per cent included under
the heading Scotch. Henry Jones Ford considers the conclusions as far
as they pertain to the Scotch-Irish as "fallacious and untrustworthy."
"Many Ulster names," he says,[5] "are also common English names....
Names classed as Scotch or Irish were probably mostly those of
Scotch-Irish families.... The probability is that the English
proportion should be much smaller and that the Scotch-Irish, who are
not included in the Census Bureau's classification, should be much
larger than the combined proportions allotted to the Scotch and the
Irish."
Whatever may be the actual proportions of these British elements, as
revealed by a study of the patronymics of the population at the time
of American independence, the fact that the ethnic stock was
overwhelmingly British stands out most prominently. We shall never
know the exact ratios between the Scotch and the English, the Welsh
and the Irish blended in this hardy, self-assertive, and fecund
strain. But we do know that the language, the political institutions,
and the common law as practiced and established in London had a
predominating influence on the destinies of the United States. While
the colonists drifted far from the religious establishments of the
mother country and found her commercial policies unendurable and her
political hauteur galling, they nevertheless retained those legal and
institutional forms which remain the foundation of Anglo-Saxon life.
For nearly half a century the American stock remained almost entirely
free from foreign admixture. It is estimated that between 1790 and
1820 only 250,000 immigrants came to America, and of these the great
majority came after the War of 1812. The white population of the
United States in 1820 was 7,862,166. Ten years later it had risen to
10,537,378. This astounding increase was almost wholly due to the
fecundity of the native stock. The equitable balance between the
sexes, the ease of acquiring a home, the vigorous pioneer environment,
and the informal frontier social conditions all encouraged large
families. Early marriages were encouraged. Bachelors and unmarried
women were rare. Girls were matrons at twenty-five and grand-mothers
at forty. Three generations frequently dwelt in one homestead.
Families of five persons were the rule; families of eight or ten were
common, while families of fourteen or fifteen did not elicit
surprise. It was the father's ambition to leave a farm to every son
and, if the neighborhood was too densely settled easily to permit
this, there was the West--always the West.
This was a race of nation builders. No sooner had he made the
Declaration of Independence a reality than the eager pathfinder turned
his face towards the setting sun and, prompted by the instincts of
conquest, he plunged into the wilderness. Within a few years western
New York and Pennsylvania were settled; Kentucky achieved statehood in
1792 and Tennessee four years later, soon to be followed by
Mississippi in 1817 and Alabama in 1819. The great Northwest Territory
yielded Ohio in 1802, Indiana in 1816, Illinois in 1818, and Michigan
in 1837. Beyond the Mississippi the empire of Louisiana doubled the
original area of the Republic; Louisiana came into statehood in 1812
and Missouri in 1821. Texas, Oregon, and the fruits of the Mexican War
extended its confines to the Western Sea. Incredibly swift as was this
march of the Stars, the American pioneer was always in advance.
The pathfinders were virtually all of American stock. The States
admitted to the Union prior to 1840 were not only founded by them;
they were almost wholly settled by them. When the influx of
foreigners began in the thirties, they found all the trails already
blazed, the trading posts established, and the first terrors of the
wilderness dispelled. They found territories already metamorphosed
into States, counties organized, cities established. Schools,
churches, and colleges preceded the immigrants who were settlers and
not strictly pioneers. The entire territory ceded by the Treaty of
1783 was appropriated in large measure by the American before the
advent of the European immigrant.
Washington, with a ring of pride, said in 1796 that the native
population of America was "filling the western part of the State of
New York and the country on the Ohio with their own surplusage." And
James Madison in 1821 wrote that New England, "which has sent out such
a continued swarm to other parts of the Union for a number of years,
has continued at the same time, as the census shows, to increase in
population although it is well known that it has received but
comparatively few emigrants from any quarter." Beyond the Mississippi,
Louisiana, with its Creole population, was feeling the effect of
American migration.
A strange restlessness, of the race rather than of the individual,
possessed the American frontiers-man. He moved from one locality to
another, but always westward, like some new migratory species that
had willingly discarded the instinct for returning. He never took the
back trail. A traveler, writing in 1791 from the Ohio Valley, rather
superficially observed that "the Americans are lazy and bored, often
moving from place to place for the sake of change; in the thirty years
that the [western] Pennsylvania neighborhood has been settled, it has
changed owners two or three times. The sight of money will tempt any
American to sell and off he goes to a new country." Foreign observers
of that time constantly allude to this universal and inexplicable
restiveness. It was obviously not laziness, for pioneering was a man's
task; nor boredom, for the frontier was lonely and neighbors were far
apart It was an ever-present dissatisfaction that drove this perpetual
conqueror onward--a mysterious impulse, the urge of vague and
unfulfilled desires. He went forward with a conquering ambition in his
heart; he believed he was the forerunner of a great National Destiny.
Crude rhymes of the day voice this feeling:
So shall the nation's pioneer go joyful on his way,
To wed Penobscot water to San Francisco Bay.
The mighty West shall bless the East, and sea shall answer sea,
And mountain unto mountain call, praise God, for we are free!
Again a popular chorus of the pathfinder rang:
Then o'er the hills in legions, boys;
Fair freedom's star
Points to the sunset regions, boys,
Ha, Ha, Ha-ha!
Many a New Englander cleared a farm in western New York, Ohio, or
Indiana, before settling finally in Wisconsin, Iowa, or Minnesota,
whence he sent his sons on to Dakota, Montana, Oregon, and California.
From Tennessee and Kentucky large numbers moved into southern Ohio,
Indiana, Illinois, and across the river into Missouri, Arkansas,
Louisiana, and Texas. Abraham Lincoln's father was one of these
pioneers and tried his luck in various localities in Kentucky,
Indiana, and Illinois.
Nor had the movement ceased after a century of continental
exploitation. Hamlin Garland in his notable autobiography, _A Son of
the Middle Border_, brings down to our own day the evidence of this
native American restiveness. His parents came of New England
extraction, but settled in Wisconsin. His father, after his return
from the Civil War, moved to Iowa, where he was scarcely ensconced
before an opportunity came to sell his place. The family then pushed
out farther upon the Iowa prairie, where they "broke" a farm from the
primeval turf. Again, in his ripe age, the father found the urge
revive and under this impulse he moved again, this time to Dakota,
where he remained long enough to transform a section of prairie into
wheat land before he took the final stage of his western journeyings
to southern California. Here he was surrounded by neighbors whose
migration had been not unlike his own, and to the same sunny region
another relative found his way "by way of a long trail through Iowa,
Dakota, Montana, Oregon, and North California."
When the last frontier had vanished, it was seen that men of this
American stock had penetrated into every valley, traversed every
plain, and explored every mountain pass from Atlantic to Pacific. They
organized every territory and prepared each for statehood. It was the
enterprise of these sons and grandsons and great-grandsons of the
Revolutionary Americans, obeying the restless impulse of a pioneer
race, who spread a network of settlements and outposts over the entire
land and prepared it for the immigrant invasion from Europe. Owing to
this influx of foreigners, the American stock has become mingled with
other strains, especially those from Great Britain.
The Census Bureau estimated that in 1900 there were living in the
United States approximately thirty-five million white people who were
descended from persons enumerated in 1790. If these thirty-five
million were distributed by nationality according to the proportions
estimated for 1790, the result would appear as follows:
English 28,735,000
Scotch 2,450,000
Irish 665,000
Dutch 875,000
French 210,000
German 1,960,000
All others 105,000
In 1900 there were also thirty-two million descendants of white
persons who had come to the United States after the First Census, yet
of these over twenty million were either foreign born or the children
of persons born abroad. If this ratio of increase remained the same,
the American stock would apparently maintain its own, even in the
midst of twentieth century immigration. But the birth rate of the
foreign stock, especially among the recent comers, is much higher than
of the native American stock. Conditions have so changed that,
according to the Census, the American people "have concluded that they
are only about one-half as well able to rear children--at any rate,
without personal sacrifice--under the conditions prevailing in 1900 as
their predecessors proved themselves to be under the conditions which
prevailed in 1790."
The difficulty of ascertaining ethnic influences increases
immeasurably when we pass from the physical to the mental realm. There
are subtle interplays of delicate forces and reactions from
environment which no one can measure. Leadership nevertheless is the
gift of but few races; and in the United States eminence in business,
in statecraft, in letters and learning can with singular directness be
traced in a preponderating proportion to this American stock.
In 1891 Henry Cabot Lodge published an essay on _The Distribution of
Ability in the United States_,[6] based upon the 15,514 names in
Appleton's _Cyclopedia of American Biography_ (1887). He "treated as
immigrants all persons who came to the United States after the
adoption of the Constitution," and on this division he found 14,243
"Americans" and 1271 "immigrants" distributed racially as follows:
AMERICANS IMMIGRANTS
English 10,376 English 345
Scotch-Irish 1439 German 245
German 659 Irish 200
Huguenot 589 Scotch 151
Scotch 436 Scotch-Irish 88
Dutch 336 French 63
Welsh 159 Canadian and
Irish 109 British Colonial 60
French 85 Scandinavian 18
Scandinavian 31 Welsh 16
Spanish 7 Belgian 15
Italian 7 Swiss 15
Swiss 5 Dutch 14
Greek 3 Polish 13
Russian 1 Hungarian 11
Polish 1 Italian 10
Greek 3
Russian 2
Spanish 1
Portuguese 1
Of the total number of individuals selected, a large number were
chosen by the editors as being of enough importance to entitle them to
a small portrait in the text, and fifty-eight persons who had achieved
some unusual distinction were accorded a full-page portrait. These,
however, represented achievement rather than ability, for they
included the Presidents of the United States and other political
personages. Of the total number selected for the distinction of a
small portrait, 1200 were "Americans" and 71 "immigrants." Of the 1200
"Americans," 856 were of English extraction, 129 Scotch-Irish, 57
Huguenot, 45 Scotch, 39 Dutch, 37 German, 15 Welsh, 13 Irish, 6
French, and one each of Scandinavian, Spanish, and Swiss. Of the
"immigrants" 15 were English, 14 German, 11 Irish, 8 Scotch-Irish, 7
Scotch, 6 Swiss, 4 French, 3 from Spanish Provinces, and 1 each from
Scandinavia, Belgium, and Poland. All the 58 whose full-page portraits
are presumed to be an index to unusual prominence were found to be
"Americans" and by race extraction they were distributed as follows:
English 41, Scotch-Irish 8, Scotch 4, Welsh 2, Dutch, Spanish, and
Irish 1 each.
Whatever may be said in objection to this index of ability (and
Senator Lodge effectively answered his critics in a note appended to
this study in his volume of _Historical and Political Essays_), it is
apparent that a large preponderance of leadership in American
politics, business, art, literature, and learning has been derived
from the American stock. This is a perfectly natural result. The
founders of the Republic themselves were in large degree the children
of the pick of Europe. The Puritan, Cavalier, Quaker, Scotch-Irish,
Huguenot, and Dutch pioneers were not ordinary folk in any sense of
the term. They were, in a measure, a race of heroes. Their sons and
grandsons inherited their vigor and their striving. It is not at all
singular that every President of the United States and every Chief
Justice of the Federal Supreme Court has come from this stock, nor
that the vast majority of Cabinet members, of distinguished Senators,
of Speakers of the House, and of men of note in the House of
Representatives trace back to it their lineage in whole or in part.
After the middle of the nineteenth century the immigrant vote began to
make itself felt, and politicians contended for the "Irish vote" and
the "German vote" and later for the "Italian vote" the "Jewish vote,"
and the "Norwegian vote." Members of the immigrant races began to
appear in Washington, and the new infusion of blood made itself felt
in the political life of the country.
But, if material were available for a comprehensive analysis of
American leadership in life and thought today, a larger number of
names of non-native origin would no doubt appear than was disclosed
in 1891 by Senator Lodge's analysis. All the learned professions, for
instance, and many lines of business are finding their numbers swelled
by persons of foreign parentage. This change is to be expected. The
influence of environment, especially of free education and unfettered
opportunity, is calling forth the talents of the children of the
immigrants. The number of descendants from the American stock yearly
becomes relatively less; intermarriage with the children of the
foreign born is increasingly frequent. Profound changes have taken
place since the American pioneers pushed their way across the
Alleghanies; changes infinitely more profound have taken place even
since the dawn of the twentieth century and have put to the test of
Destiny the institutions which are called "American."
Nevertheless in a large sense every great tradition of the original
American stock lives today: the tradition of free movement, of
initiative and enterprise; the tradition of individual responsibility;
the primary traditions of democracy and liberty. These give a virile
present meaning to the name American. A noted French journalist
received this impression of a group of soldiers who in 1918 were
bivouacked in his country: "I saw yesterday an American unit in which
men of very varied origin abounded--French, Polish, Czech, German,
English, Canadian--such their names and other facts revealed them.
Nevertheless, all were of the same or similar type, a fact due
apparently to the combined influences of sun, air, primary education,
and environment. And one was not long in discovering that the
intelligence of each and all had manifestly a wider outlook than that
of the man of single racial lineage and of one country." And these men
were Americans.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 3: Among the names which have quite vanished were those
pertaining to household matters, such as Hash, Butter, Waffle, Booze,
Frill, Shirt, Lace; or describing human characteristics, as Booby,
Dunce, Sallow, Daft, Lazy, Measley, Rude; or parts of the body and its
ailments, as Hips, Bones, Chin, Glands, Gout, Corns, Physic; or
representing property, as Shingle, Gutters, Pump, Milkhouse, Desk,
Mug, Auction, Hose, Tallow. Nature also was drawn upon for a large
number of names. The colors Black, Brown, and Gray survive, but
Lavender, Tan, and Scarlet have gone out of vogue. Bogs, Hazelgrove,
Woodyfield, Oysterbanks, Chestnut, Pinks, Ragbush, Winterberry, Peach,
Walnut, Freeze, Coldair, Bear, Tails, Chick, Bantam, Stork, Worm,
Snake, and Maggot indicate the simple origin of many names. There were
many strange combinations of Christian names and surnames: Peter
Wentup, Christy Forgot, Unity Bachelor, Booze Still, Cutlip Hoof, and
Wanton Bump left little to the imagination.]
[Footnote 4: These tables and those on the pages immediately following
are taken from _A Century of Population Growth_, issued by the United
States Census Bureau in 1908.]
[Footnote 5: _The Scotch-Irish in America_ pp. 219-20.]
[Footnote 6: See _The Century Magazine_, September, 1891, and Lodge's
_Historical and Political Essays_, 1892.]
CHAPTER III
THE NEGRO
Not many years ago a traveler was lured into a London music hall by
the sign: _Spirited American Singing and Dancing_. He saw on the stage
a sextette of black-faced comedians, singing darky ragtime to the
accompaniment of banjo and bones, dancing the clog and the cakewalk,
and reciting negro stories with the familiar accent and smile, all to
the evident delight of the audience. The man in the seat next to him
remarked, "These Americans are really lively." Not only in England,
but on the continent, the negro's melodies, his dialect, and his
banjo, have always been identified with America. Even Americans do not
at once think of the negro as a foreigner, so accustomed have they
become to his presence, to his quaint mythology, his soft accent, and
his genial and accommodating nature. He was to be found in every
colony before the Revolution; he was an integral part of American
economic life long before the great Irish and German immigrations,
and, while in the mass he is confined to the South, he is found today
in every State in the Union.
The negro, however, is racially the most distinctly foreign element in
America. He belongs to a period of biological and racial evolution far
removed from that of the white man. His habitat is the continent of
the elephant and the lion, the mango and the palm, while that of the
race into whose state he has been thrust is the continent of the horse
and the cow, of wheat and the oak.
There is a touch of the dramatic in every phase of the negro's contact
with America: his unwilling coming, his forcible detention, his final
submission, his emancipation, his struggle to adapt himself to
freedom, his futile competition with a superior economic order. Every
step from the kidnaping, through "the voiceless woe of servitude" and
the attempted redemption of his race, has been accompanied by tragedy.
How else could it be when peoples of two such diverse epochs in racial
evolution meet?
His coming was almost contemporaneous with that of the white man.
"American slavery," says Channing,[7] "began with Columbus, possibly
because he was the first European who had a chance to introduce it:
and negroes were brought to the New World at the suggestion of the
saintly Las Casas to alleviate the lot of the unhappy and fast
disappearing red man" They were first employed as body servants and
were used extensively in the West Indies before their common use in
the colonies on the continent. In the first plantations of Virginia a
few of them were found as laborers. In 1619 what was probably the
first slave ship on that coast--it was euphemistically called a "Dutch
man-of-war"--landed its human cargo in Virginia. From this time onward
the numbers of African slaves steadily increased. Bancroft estimated
their number at 59,000 in 1714, 78,000 in 1727, and 263,000 in 1754.
The census of 1790 recorded 697,624 slaves in the United States. This
almost incredible increase was not due alone to the fecundity of the
negro. It was due, in large measure, to the unceasing slave trade.
It is difficult to imagine more severe ordeals than the negroes
endured in the day of the slave trade. Their captors in the jungles of
Africa--usually neighboring tribesmen in whom the instinct for
capture, enslavement, and destruction was untamed--soon learned that
the aged, the inferior, the defective, were not wanted by the trader.
These were usually slaughtered. Then followed for the less fortunate
the long and agonizing march to the seaboard. Every one not robust
enough to endure the arduous journey was allowed to perish by the way.
On the coast, the agent of the trader or the middle-man awaited the
captive. He was an expert at detecting those evidences of weakness and
disease which had eluded the eye of the captor or the rigor of the
march. "An African factor of fair repute," said a slave captain,[8]
"is ever careful to select his human cargo with consummate prudence,
so as not only to supply his employers with athletic laborers, but to
avoid any taint of disease." But the severest test of all was the
hideous "middle passage" which remained to every imported slave a
nightmare to the day of his death. The unhappy captives were crowded
into dark, unventilated holds and were fed scantily on food which was
strange to their lips; they were unable to understand the tongue of
their masters and often unable to understand the dialects of their
companions in misfortune; they were depressed with their helplessness
on the limitless sea, and their childish superstitions were fed by a
thousand new terrors and emotions. It was small wonder that, when
disease began its ravages in the shipload of these kidnaped beings,
"the mortality of thirty per cent was not rare." That this was
primarily a physical selection which made no allowance for mental
aptitudes did not greatly diminish in the eyes of the master the
slave's utility. The new continent needed muscle power; and so tens of
thousands of able-bodied Africans were landed on American soil, alien
to everything they found there.
These slaves were kidnaped from many tribes. "In our negro
population," says Tillinghast, "as it came from the Western Coast of
Africa, there were Wolofs and Fulans, tall, well-built, and very
black, hailing from Senegambia and its vicinity; there were hundreds
of thousands from the Slave Coast--Tshis, Ewes, and Yorubans,
including Dahomians; and mingled with all these Soudanese negroes
proper were occasional contributions of mixed stock, from the north
and northeast, having an infusion of Moorish blood. There were other
thousands from Lower Guinea, belonging to Bantu stock, not so black in
color as the Soudanese, and thought by some to be slightly superior to
them."[9] No historian has recorded these tribal differences. The new
environment, so strange, so ruthless, swallowed them; and, in the
welter of their toil, the black men became so intermingled that all
tribal distinctions soon vanished. Here and there, however, a careful
observer may still find among them a man of superior mien or a woman
of haughty demeanor denoting perhaps an ancestral prince or princess
who once exercised authority over some African jungle village.
Slavery was soon a recognized institution in every American colony. By
1665 every colony had its slave code. In Virginia the laws became
increasingly strict until the dominion of the master over his slaves
was virtually absolute. In South Carolina an insurrection of slaves in
1739, which cost the lives of twenty-one whites and forty-four blacks,
led to very drastic laws. Of the Northern colonies, New York seems to
have been most in fear of a black peril. In 1700 there were about six
thousand slaves in this colony, chiefly in the city, where there were
also many free negroes, and on the large estates along the Hudson.
Twice the white people of the city for reasons that have not been
preserved, believing that slave insurrections were imminent, resorted
to extreme and brutal measures. In 1712 they burned to death two
negroes, hanged in chains a third, and condemned a fourth to be
broken on the wheel. In 1741 they went so far as to burn fourteen
negroes, hang eighteen, and transport seventy-one.
In New England where their numbers were relatively small and the laws
were less severe, the negroes were employed chiefly in domestic
service. In Quaker Pennsylvania there were many slaves, the proprietor
himself being a slave owner. Ten years after the founding of
Philadelphia, the authorities ordered the constables to arrest all
negroes found "gadding about" on Sunday without proper permission.
They were to remain in jail until Monday, receiving in lieu of meat or
drink thirty-nine lashes on the bare back.
Protests against slavery were not uncommon during the colonial period;
and before the Revolution was accomplished several of the States had
emancipated their slaves. Vermont led the way in 1777; the Ordinance
of 1787 forbade slavery in the Northwest Territory; and by 1804 all
the Northern States had provided that their blacks should be set free.
The opinion prevailed that slavery was on the road to gradual
extinction. In the Federal Convention of 1787 this belief was
crystallized into the clause making possible the prohibition of the
slave trade after the year 1808. Mutual benefit organizations among
the negroes, both slave and free, appeared in many States, North and
South. Negro congregations were organized. The number of free negroes
increased rapidly, and in the Northern States they acquired such civil
rights as industry, thrift, and integrity commanded. Here and there
colored persons of unusual gifts distinguished themselves in various
callings and were even occasionally entertained in white households.
The industrial revolution in England, with its spinning jenny and
power loom, indirectly influenced the position of the negro in
America. The new machinery had an insatiable maw for cotton. It could
turn such enormous quantities of raw fiber into cloth that the old
rate of producing cotton was entirely inadequate. New areas had to be
placed under cultivation. The South, where soil and climate combined
to make an ideal cotton land, came into its own. And when Eli
Whitney's gin was perfected, cotton was crowned king. Statistics tell
the story: the South produced about 8000 bales of cotton in 1790;
650,000 bales in 1820; 2,469,093 bales in 1850; 5,387,052 bales in
1860.[10] This vast increase in production called for human muscle
which apparently only the negro could supply.
Once it was shown that slavery paid, its status became fixed as
adamant. The South forthwith ceased weakly to apologize for it, as it
had formerly done, and began to defend it, at first with some
hesitation, then with boldness, and finally with vehement
aggressiveness. It was economically necessary; it was morally right;
it was the peculiar Southern domestic institution; and, above all, it
paid. On every basis of its defense, the cotton kingdom would brook no
interference from any other section of the country. So there was
formed a race feudality in the Republic, rooted in profits, protected
by the political power of the slave lords, and enveloped in a spirit
of defiance and bitterness which reacted without mercy upon its
victims. Tighter and tighter were drawn the coils of restrictions
around the enslaved race. The mind and the soul as well as the body
were placed under domination. They might marry to breed but not to
make homes. Such charity and kindness as they experienced, they
received entirely from individual humane masters; society treated them
merely as chattels.
Attempted insurrections, such as that in South Carolina in 1822 and
that in Virginia in 1831 in which many whites and blacks were killed,
only produced harsher laws and more cruel punishments, until finally
the slave became convinced that his only salvation lay in running
away. The North Star was his beacon light of freedom. A few thousand
made their way southward through the chain of swamps that skirt the
Atlantic coast and mingled with the Indians in Florida. Tens of
thousands made their way northward along well recognized routes to the
free States and to Canada: the Appalachian ranges with their
far-spreading spurs furnished the friendliest of these highways; the
Mississippi Valley with its marshlands, forests, and swamps provided
less secure hiding places; and the Cumberland Mountains, well supplied
with limestone caves, offered a third pathway. At the northern end of
these routes the "Underground Railway"[11] received the fugitives.
From the Cumberlands, leading through the heart of Tennessee and
Kentucky, this benevolent transfer stretched through Ohio and Indiana
to Canada; from southern Illinois it led northward through Wisconsin;
and from the Appalachian route mysterious byways led through New York
and New England.
How many thus escaped cannot be reckoned, but it is known that the
number of free negroes in the North increased so rapidly that laws
discriminating against them were passed in many States. Nowhere did
the negro enjoy all the rights that the white man had. In some States
the free negroes were so restricted in settling as to be virtually
prohibited; in others they were disfranchised; in others they were
denied the right of jury duty or of testifying in court. But in spite
of this discrimination on the part of the law, a great sympathy for
the runaway slave spread among the people, and the fugitive carried
into the heart of the North the venom of the institution of which he
was the unhappy victim.
Meanwhile the slave trade responded promptly to the lure of gain which
the increased demand for cotton held out. The law of 1807 prohibiting
the importation of slaves had, from the date of its enactment, been
virtually a dead letter. Messages of Presidents, complaints of
government attorneys, of collectors and agents called attention to the
continuous violation of the law; and its nullity was a matter of
common knowledge. When the market price of a slave rose to $325 in
1840 and to $500 after 1850, the increase in profits made slave piracy
a rather respectable business carried on by American citizens in
American built ships flying the American flag and paying high returns
on New York and New England capital. Owing to this steady importation
there was a constant intermingling of raw stock from the jungles with
the negroes who had been slaves in America for several generations.
In 1860 there were 4,441,830 negroes in the United States, of whom
only 488,070 were free. About thirteen per cent of the total number
were mulattoes. Among the four million slaves were men and women of
every gradation of experience with civilization, from those who had
just disembarked from slave ships to those whose ancestry could be
traced to the earliest days of the colonies. It was not, therefore, a
strictly homogeneous people upon whom were suddenly and dramatically
laid the burdens and responsibilities of the freedman. Among the
emancipated blacks were not a few in whom there still throbbed
vigorously the savage life they had but recently left behind and who
could not yet speak intelligible English. Though there were many who
were skilled in household arts and in the useful customary
handicrafts, large numbers were acquainted only with the simplest toil
of the open fields. There were a few free blacks who possessed
property, in some instances to the value of many thousands of
dollars, but the great bulk were wholly inexperienced in the
responsibilities of ownership. There were some who had mastered the
rudiments of learning and here and there was to be found a gifted
mind, but ninety per cent of the negroes were unacquainted with
letters and were strangers to even the most rudimentary learning.
Their religion was a picturesque blend of Christian precepts and
Voodoo customs.
The Freedmen's Bureau, authorized by Congress early in 1865, had as
its functions to aid the negro to develop self-control and
self-reliance, to help the freedman with his new wage contracts, to
befriend him when he appeared in court, and to provide for him schools
and hospitals. It was a simple, slender reed for the race to lean upon
until it learned to walk. But it interfered with the orthodox opinion
of that day regarding individual independence and was limited to the
period of war and one year thereafter. It was eyed with suspicion and
was regarded with criticism by both the keepers of the _laissez faire_
faith and the former slave owners. It established a number of schools
and made a modest beginning in peasant proprietorship and free
labor.[12]
When this temporary guide was withdrawn, private organizations to some
extent took its place. The American Missionary Association continued
the educational work, and volunteers shouldered other benevolences.
But no power and no organization could take the place of the national
authority. If the Freedmen's Bureau could have been stripped of those
evil-intentioned persons who used it for private gain, been so
organized as to enlist the support of the Southern white population,
and been continued until a new generation of blacks were prepared for
civil life, the colossal blunders and criminal misfits of that bitter
period of transition might have been avoided. But political
opportunism spurned comprehensive plans, and the negro suddenly found
himself forced into social, political, and economic competition with
the white man.
The social and political struggle that followed was short-lived. There
were a few desperate years under the domination of the carpetbagger
and the Ku Klux Klan, a period of physical coercion and intimidation.
Within a decade the negro vote was uncast or uncounted, and the
grandfather clauses soon completed the political mastery of the former
slave owner. A strict interpretation of the Civil Rights Act denied
the application of the equality clause of the Constitution to social
equality, and the social as well as the political separation of the
two stocks was also accomplished. "Jim Crow," cars, separate
accommodations in depots and theaters, separate schools, separate
churches, attempted segregations in cities--these are all symbolic of
two separate races forcibly united by constitutional amendments.
But the economic struggle continued, for the black man, even if
politically emasculated and socially isolated, had somehow to earn a
living. In their first reaction of anger and chagrin, some of the
whites here and there made attempts to reduce freedmen to their former
servitude, but their efforts were effectually checked by the Fifteenth
Amendment. An ingenious peonage, however, was created by means of the
criminal law. Strict statutes were passed by States on guardianship,
vagrancy, and petty crimes. It was not difficult to bring charges
under these statutes, and the heavy penalties attached, together with
the wide discretion permitted to judge and jury, made it easy to
subject the culprit to virtual serfdom for a term of years. He would
be leased to some contractor, who would pay for his keep and would
profit by his toil. Whatever justification there may have been for
these statutes, the convict lease system soon fell into disrepute, and
it has been generally abandoned.
It was upon the land that the freedman naturally sought his economic
salvation. He was experienced in cotton growing. But he had neither
acres nor capital. These he had to find and turn to his own uses ere
he could really be economically free. So he began as a farm laborer,
passed through various stages of tenantry, and finally graduated into
land ownership. One finds today examples of every stage of this
evolution.[13] There is first the farm laborer, receiving at the end
of the year a fixed wage. He is often supplied with house and garden
and usually with food and clothing. There are many variations of this
labor contract. The "cropper" is barely a step advanced above the
laborer, for he, too, furnishes nothing but labor, while the landlord
supplies house, tools, live stock, and seed. His wage, however, is
paid not in cash but in a stipulated share of the crop. From this
share he must pay for the supplies received and interest thereon. This
method, however, has proved to be a mutually unsatisfactory
arrangement and is usually limited to hard pressed owners of poor
land.
The larger number of the negro farmers are tenants on shares or
metayers. They work the land on their own responsibility, and this
degree of independence appeals to them. They pay a stipulated portion
of the crop as rent. If they possess some capital and the rental is
fair, this arrangement proves satisfactory. But as very few negro
metayers possess the needed capital, they resort to a system of
crop-lienage under which a local retail merchant advances the
necessary supplies and obtains a mortgage on the prospective crop.
Many negro farmers, however, have achieved the independence of cash
renters, assuming complete control of their crops and the disposition
of their time. And finally, 241,000 negro farmers are landowners.[14]
By 1910 nearly 900,000 negroes had achieved some degree of rural
economic stability.
The negro has not been so fortunate in his attempts to make a place
for himself in the industrial world. The drift to the cities began
soon after emancipation. During the first decade, the dissatisfaction
with the landlordism which then prevailed, seconded by the demand for
unskilled labor in the rapidly growing cities, drew the negroes from
the land in such considerable numbers that the landowners were induced
to make more liberal terms to keep the laborers on their farms. While
there has been a large increase in the number of negroes engaged in
agriculture, there has at the same time been a very marked current
from the smaller communities to the new industrial cities of the South
and to some of the manufacturing centers of the North. In recent years
there have been wholesale importations of negro laborers into many
Northern cities and towns, sometimes as strike breakers but more
frequently to supply the urgent demand for unskilled labor. Many of
the smaller manufacturing towns of New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania,
Illinois, and Indiana are accumulating a negro population.
Very few of these industrial negroes, however, are skilled workers.
They toil rather as ordinary day laborers, porters, stevedores,
teamsters, and domestics. There has been a great deal written of the
decline of the negro artisan. Walter F. Willcox, the eminent
statistician, after a careful study of the facts concludes that
economically "the negro as a race is losing ground, is being confined
more and more to the inferior and less remunerative occupations, and
is not sharing proportionately to his numbers in the prosperity of the
country as a whole or of the section in which he mainly lives."
It appears, therefore, that the pathway of emancipation has not led
the negro out of the ranks of humble toil and into racial equality. In
order to equip him more effectively for a place in the world,
industrial schools have been established, among which the most noted
is the Tuskegee Institute. Its founder, Booker T. Washington, advised
his fellow negroes to yield quietly to the political and social
distinctions raised against them and to perfect themselves in
handicrafts and the mechanic arts, in the faith that civil rights
would ultimately follow economic power and recognized industrial
capacity. His teaching received the almost unanimous approval of both
North and South. But opinion among his own people was divided, and in
1905 the "Niagara Movement" was launched, followed five years later by
the organizing of the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People. This organization advised a more aggressive attitude
towards race distinctions, outspokenly advocated race equality,
demanded the negro's rights, and maintained a restless propaganda.
These champions of the race possibilities of the negro point to the
material advance made since slavery; to the 500,000 houses and the
221,000 farms owned by them; their 22,000 small retail businesses and
their 40 banks; to the 40,000 churches with nearly 4,000,000 members;
to the 200 colleges and secondary schools maintained for negroes and
largely supported by them; to their 100 old people's homes, 30
hospitals, 300 periodicals; to the 6000 physicians, dentists, and
nurses; the 30,000 teachers, the 18,000 clergymen. They point to the
beacon lights of their genius: Frederick Douglass, statesman; J.C.
Price, orator; Booker T. Washington, educator; W.E.B. DuBois, scholar;
Paul Laurence Dunbar, poet; Charles W. Chestnutt, novelist. And they
compare this record of 50 years' achievement with the preceding 245
years of slavery.
This, however, is only one side of the shield. There is another side,
nowhere better illustrated, perhaps, than in the neglected negro
gardens of the South. Near every negro hut is a garden patch large
enough to supply the family with vegetables for the entire year, but
it usually is neglected. "If they have any garden at all," says a
negro critic from Tuskegee, "it is apt to be choked with weeds and
other noxious growths. With every advantage of soil and climate and
with a steady market if they live near any city or large town, few of
the colored farmers get any benefit from this, one of the most
profitable of all industries." In marked contrast to these wild and
unkempt patches are the gardens of the Italians who have recently
invaded portions of the South and whose garden patches are almost
miraculously productive. And this invasion brings a real threat to the
future of the negro. His happy-go-lucky ways, his easy philosophy of
life, the remarkable ease with which he severs home ties and shifts
from place to place, his indifference to property obligations--these
negative defects in his character may easily lead to his economic doom
if the vigorous peasantry of Italy and other lands are brought into
competition with him.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 7: _History of the United States_, vol. I, p. 116.]
[Footnote 8: _Captain Canot: or Twenty Years in a Slaver_, by Brantz
Mayer. p. 94 ff.]
[Footnote 9: _The Negro in Africa and America_, p. 113.]
[Footnote 10: Coman, _Industrial History of the United States_, p.
238. Bogart gives the figures as 1,976,000 bales in 1840, and
4,675,000 bales in 1860. _Economic History of the United States_, p.
256.]
[Footnote 11: See _The Anti-Slavery Crusade_, by Jesse Macy (in _The
Chronicles of America_), Chapter VIII.]
[Footnote 12: See _The Sequel of Appomattox_, by Walter L. Fleming (in
_The Chronicles of America_), Chapter IV.]
[Footnote 13: See _The New South_ by Holland Thompson (in _The
Chronicles of America_), Chapters IV and VII.]
[Footnote 14: _Negroes in the United States_, Census Bulletin No. 129,
p. 37.]
CHAPTER IV
UTOPIAS IN AMERICA
America has long been a gigantic Utopia. To every immigrant since the
founding of Jamestown this coast has gleamed upon the horizon as a
Promised Land. America, too, has provided convenient plots of ground,
as laboratories for all sorts of vagaries, where, unhampered by
restrictions and unannoyed by inquisitive neighbors, enthusiastic
dreamers could attempt to reconstruct society. Whenever an eccentric
in Europe conceived a social panacea no matter how absurd, he said,
"Let's go to America and try it out." There were so many of these
enterprises that their exact number is unknown. Many of them perished
in so brief a time that no friendly chronicler has even saved their
names from oblivion. But others lived, some for a year, some for a
decade, and few for more than a generation. They are of interest today
not only because they brought a considerable number of foreigners to
America, but also because in their history may be observed many of the
principles of communism, or socialism, at work under favorable
conditions. While the theory of Marxian socialism differs in certain
details from these communistic experiments, the foreign-made nostrums
so brazenly proclaimed today wherever malcontents are gathered
together is in essence nothing new in America. Communism was tried and
found wanting by the Pilgrim Fathers; since then it has been tried and
found wanting over and over again. Some of the communistic colonies,
it will appear, waxed fat out of the resources of their lands; but, in
the end, even those which were most fortunate and successful withered
away, and their remnants were absorbed by the great competitive life
that surrounded them.
There were two general types of these communities, the sectarian and
the economic. Frequently they combined a peculiar religious belief
with the economic practice of having everything in common. The
sectarians professed to be neither proselyters nor propagandists but
religious devotees, accepting communism as a physical advantage as
well as a spiritual balm, and seeking in seclusion and quiet merely to
save their own souls.
The majority of the religious communists came from Germany--the home,
also, of Marxian socialism in later years--where persecution was the
lot of innumerable little sects which budded after the Reformation.
They came usually as whole colonies, bringing both leaders and
membership with them.[15] Probably the earliest to arrive in America
were the Labadists, who denied the doctrine of original sin, discarded
the Sabbath, and held strict views of marriage. In 1684, under the
leadership of Peter Sluyter or Schluter (an assumed name, his original
name being Vorstmann), some of these Labadists settled on the Bohemia
River in Delaware. They were sent out from the mother colony in West
Friesland to select a site for the entire body, but it does not appear
that any others migrated, for within fifteen years the American
colony was reduced to eight men. Sluyter evidently had considerable
business capacity, for he became a wealthy tobacco planter and slave
trader.
In 1693 Johann Jacob Zimmermann, a distinguished mathematician and
astronomer and the founder of an order of mystics called Pietists,
started for America, to await the coming of the millennium, which his
calculations placed in the autumn of 1694. But the fate of common
mortals overtook the unfortunate leader and he died just as he was
ready to sail from Rotterdam. About forty members of his brotherhood
settled in the forests on the heights near Germantown, Pennsylvania,
and, under the guidance of Johann Kelpius, achieved a unique influence
over the German peasantry in that vicinity. The members of the
brotherhood made themselves useful as teachers and in various
handicrafts. They were especially in demand among the superstitious
for their skill in casting horoscopes, using divining rods, and
carving potent amulets. Their mysterious astronomical tower on the
heights of the Wissahickon was the Mecca of the curious and the
distressed. To the gentle Kelpius was ascribed the power of healing,
but he was himself the victim of consumption. The brotherhood did not
long survive his death in 1708 or 1709. Their astrological
instruments may be seen in the collections of the Pennsylvania
Philosophical Society.
The first group of Dunkards (a name derived from their method of
baptism, _eintunken_, to immerse) settled in Pennsylvania in 1719. A
few years later they were joined by Conrad Beissel (Beizel or Peysel).
This man had come to America to unite with the Pietist group in
Germantown, but, as Kelpius was dead and his followers dispersed he
joined the Dunkards. His desires for a monastic life drove him into
solitary meditation--tradition says he took shelter in a cave--where
he came to the conviction that the seventh day of the week should be
observed as the day of rest. This conclusion led to friction with the
Dunkards; and as a result, with three men and two women, Beissel
founded in 1728 on the Cocalico River, the cloister of Ephrata. From
this arose the first communistic Eden successfully established in
America and one of the few to survive to the present century. Though
in 1900 the community numbered only seventeen members, in its prime
while Beissel was yet alive it sheltered three hundred, owned a
prosperous paper mill, a grist mill, an oil mill, a fulling mill, a
printing press, a schoolhouse, dwellings for the married members, and
large dormitories for the celibates. The meeting-house was built
entirely without metal, following literally the precedent of Solomon,
who built his temple "so that there was neither hammer nor ax nor any
tool of iron heard in the house while it was building." Wooden pegs
took the place of nails, and the laths were fastened laboriously into
grooves. Averse to riches, Beissel's people refused gifts from William
Penn, King George III, and other prominent personages. The pious
Beissel was a very capable leader, with a passion for music and an
ardor for simplicity. He instituted among the unmarried members of the
community a celibate order embracing both sexes, and he reduced the
communal life of both the religious and secular members to a routine
of piety and labor. The society was known, even in England, for the
excellence of its paper, for the good workmanship of its printing
press, and especially for the quality of its music, which was composed
largely by Beissel. His chorals were among the first composed and sung
in America. His school, too, was of such quality that it drew pupils
from Baltimore and Philadelphia. After his death in 1786, in his
seventy-second year, his successor tried for twenty-eight years to
maintain the discipline and distinction of the order. It was
eventually deemed prudent to incorporate the society under the laws of
the State and to entrust its management to a board of trustees, and
the cloistered life of the community became a memory.
A community patterned after Ephrata was founded in 1800 by Peter
Lehman at Snow Hill, in Franklin County, Pennsylvania. It consisted of
some forty German men and women living in cloisters but relieving the
monotony of their toil and the rigor of their piety with music. As in
Ephrata, there was a twofold membership, the consecrated and the
secular. The entire community, however, vanished after the death of
its founder.
When Beissel's Ephrata was in its heyday, the Moravians, under the
patronage of Count Zinzendorf of Saxony, established in 1741 a
community on the Lehigh River in Pennsylvania, named Bethlehem in
token of their humility. The colony provided living and working
quarters for both the married and unmarried members. After about
twenty years of experimenting, the communistic regimen was abandoned.
Bethlehem, however, continued to thrive, and its schools and its music
became widely known.
The story of the Harmonists, one of the most successful of all the
communistic colonies is even more interesting. The founder, Johann
Georg Rapp, had been a weaver and vine gardener in the little village
of Iptingen in Württemberg. He drew upon himself and his followers the
displeasure of the Church by teaching that religion was a personal
matter between the individual and his God; that the Bible, not the
pronouncements of the clergy, should be the guide to the true faith,
and that the ordinances of the Church were not necessarily the
ordinances of God. The petty persecutions which these doctrines
brought upon him and his fellow separatists turned them towards
liberal America. In 1803 Rapp and some of his companions crossed the
sea and selected as a site for their colony five thousand acres of
land in Butler County, Pennsylvania. There they built the new town of
Harmony, to which came about six hundred persons, all told. On
February 15, 1805 they organized the Harmony Society and signed a
solemn agreement to merge all their possessions in one common lot.[16]
Among them were a few persons of education and property, but most of
them were sturdy, thrifty mechanics and peasants, who, under the
skillful direction of Father Rapp, soon transformed the forest into a
thriving community. After a soul stirring revival in 1807, they
adopted celibacy. Those who were married did not separate but lived
together in solemn self-restraint, "treating each other as brother and
sister in Christ."[17] Their belief that the second coming of the Lord
was imminent no doubt strengthened their resolution. At this time,
also, the men all agreed to forego the use of tobacco--no small
sacrifice on the part of hard-working laborers.
The region, however, was unfavorable to the growth of the grape, which
was the favorite Württemberg crop. In 1814 the society accordingly
sold the communal property for $100,000 and removed to a site on the
Wabash River, in Indiana, where, under the magic of their industry,
the beautiful village of New Harmony arose in one year, and where many
of their sturdy buildings still remain a testimony to their honest
craftsmanship. Unfortunately, however, two pests appeared which they
had not foreseen. Harassed by malaria and meddlesome neighbors,
Father Rapp a third time sought a new Canaan. In 1825 he sold the
entire site to Robert Owen, the British philanthropic socialist, and
the Harmonists moved back to Pennsylvania. They built their third and
last home on the Ohio, about twenty miles from Pittsburgh, and called
it Economy in prophetic token of the wealth which their industry and
shrewdness would soon bring in.
The chaste and simple beauty of this village was due to the skill and
good taste of Friedrich Reichert Rapp, an architect and stone cutter,
the adopted son of Father Rapp. The fine proportions of the plain
buildings, with their vines festooned between the upper and lower
windows, the quaint and charming gardens, the tantalizing labyrinth
where visitors lost themselves in an attempt to reach the Summer
House--these were all of his creation. Friedrich Rapp was also a poet,
an artist, and a musician. He gathered a worthy collection of
paintings and a museum of Indian relics and objects of natural
history. He composed many of the fine hymns which impress every
visitor to Economy. He was likewise an energetic and skillful business
man and represented the colony in its external affairs until his death
in 1834. He was elected a member of the convention that framed the
first constitution of Indiana, and later he was made a member of the
legislature. Father Rapp, who possessed rare talents as an organizer,
controlled the internal affairs of the colony. Those who left the
community because unwilling to abide its discipline often pronounced
their leader a narrow autocrat. But there can be no doubt that eminent
good sense and gentleness tempered his judgments. He personally led
the community in industry, in prayers, and in faith, until 1847, when
death removed him. A council of nine elders elected by the members was
then charged with the spiritual guidance of the community, and two
trustees were appointed to administer its business affairs.
Economy was a German community where German was spoken and German
customs were maintained, although every one also spoke English. As
there were but few accessions to the community and from time to time
there were defections and withdrawals, the membership steadily
declined[18]; but while the community was dwindling in membership it
was rapidly increasing in wealth. Oil and coal were found on some of
its lands; the products of its mills and looms, of its wine presses
and distilleries, were widely and favorably known; and its outside
investments, chiefly in manufactories and railroads, yielded even
greater returns. These outside interests, indeed, became in time the
sole support of the community for, as the membership fell away, the
local industries had to be shut down. Then it was that communistic
methods of doing business became inadequate and the colony ran into
difficulties. An expert accountant in 1892 disclosed the debts of the
community to be about one and a half million dollars. But the outside
industrial enterprises in which the community had invested were sound;
and the vast debt was paid. The society remained solvent, with a huge
surplus, though out of prosperity not of its own making. When the
lands at Economy were eventually sold, about eight acres were reserved
to the few survivors of the society, including the Great House of
Father Rapp and its attractive garden, with the use of the church and
dwellings, so that they might spend their last days in the peaceful
surroundings that had brought them prosperity and happiness.
Lead me, Father, out of harm
To the quiet Zoar farm
If it be Thy will.
So sang another group of simple German separatists, of whom some three
hundred came to America from Württemberg in 1817, under the leadership
of Joseph Bimeler (Bäumeler) and built the village of Zoar in
Tuscarawas County, Ohio. They acquired five thousand acres of land and
signed articles of association in April, 1819, turning all their
individual property and all their future earnings into a common fund
to be managed by an elected board of directors. The community provided
its members with their daily necessities and two suits of clothes a
year. The members were assigned to various trades which absorbed all
their time and left them very little strength for amusement or
reading. Their one recreation was singing. The society was bound to
celibacy until the marriage of Bimeler to his housekeeper; thereafter
marriage was permitted but not encouraged.
In 1832 the society was incorporated under the laws of Ohio, and until
its dissolution it was managed as a corporation. A few Germans joined
the society. No American ever requested admission. Joseph Bimeler was
elected Agent General and thereby became the chosen as well as the
natural leader of the community. Like other patriarchs of that epoch
who led their following into the wilderness, he was a man of some
education and many gifts. He was the spiritual mentor; but his piety,
which was sincere and simple, did not rob him of the shrewdness
necessary to material success. His followers were loyally devoted to
him. They built for him the largest house in the community, a fine
colonial manor house, where he dwelt in comparative luxury and reigned
as their "King." When he died in 1853 he had seen the prosperity of
his colony reach its zenith. It remained small. Scarcely more than
three hundred members ever dwelt in the village which, in spite of its
profusion of vines and flowers, lacked the informal quaintness and
originality of Rapp's Economy. The Tuscarawas River furnished power
for their flour mill, whose products were widely sought. There was
also a woolen mill, a planing mill, a foundry, and a machine shop. The
beer made by the community was famous all the country round, and for a
time its pottery and tile works turned out interesting and quaint
products. But one by one these small industries succumbed to the
competition of the greater world. At last even an alien brew
supplanted the good local beer. When the railroad tapped the village,
and it was incorporated (1884) and assumed an official worldliness
with its mayor and councilmen, it lost its isolation, summer visitors
flocked in, and a "calaboose" was needed for the benefit of the
sojourners!
The third generation was now grown. A number of dissatisfied members
had left. Many of the children never joined the society but found work
elsewhere. A great deal of the work had to be done by hired help.
Under the leadership of the younger element it was decided in 1898 to
abandon communism. Appraisers and surveyors were set to work to parcel
out the property. Each of the 136 members received a cash dividend, a
home in the village, and a plot of land. The average value of each
share, which was in the neighborhood of $1500, was not a large return
for three generations of communistic experimentation. But these had
been, after all, years of moderate competence and quiet contentment,
and if they took their toll in the coin of hope, as their song set
forth, then these simple Württembergers were fully paid.
The Inspirationists were a sect that made many converts in Germany,
Holland, and Switzerland in the eighteenth century. They believed in
direct revelations from God through chosen "instruments." In 1817, a
new leader appeared among them in the person of Christian Metz, a man
of great personal charm, worldly shrewdness, and spiritual fervor.
Allied with him was Barbara Heynemann, a simple maid without
education, who learned to read the Scriptures after she was
twenty-three years of age. Endowed with the peculiar gift of
"translation," she was cherished by the sect as an instrument of God
for revealing His will.
To this pair came an inspiration to lead their harassed followers to
America. In 1842 they purchased the Seneca Indian Reservation near
Buffalo, New York. They called their new home Ebenezer, and in 1843
they organized the Ebenezer Society, under a constitution which
pledged them to communism. Over eight hundred peasants and artisans
joined the colony, and their industry soon had created a cluster of
five villages with mills, workshops, schools, and dwellings. But they
were continually annoyed by the Indians from whom they had purchased
the site and were distracted by the rapidly growing city of Buffalo,
which was only five miles away!
This threat of worldliness brought a revelation that they must seek
greater seclusion. A large tract on the Iowa River was purchased, and
to this new site the population was gradually transferred. There they
built Amana. Within a radius of six miles, five subsidiary villages
sprang up, each one laid out like a German _dorf_, with its cluster of
shops and mills, and the cottages scattered informally on the main
road. When the railway tapped the neighborhood, the community in
self-defense purchased the town that contained the railway station. So
when the good Christian Metz died in 1867, at the age of seventy-two,
his pious followers, thanks to his sagacity, were possessed of some
twenty-six thousand acres of rich Iowa land and seven thriving
villages, comfortably housing about 1400 of the faithful. Barbara
Heynemann died in 1883, and since her death no "instrument" has been
found to disclose the will of God. But many ponderous tomes of
"revelations" have survived and these are faithfully read and their
naïve personal directions and inhibitions are still generally obeyed.
The Bible, however, remains the main guide of these people, and they
follow its instructions with childish literalism. Until quite recently
they clung to the simple dress and the austere life of their earlier
years. The solidarity of the community has been maintained with rare
skill. The "Great Council of the Brethren" upon whom is laid the
burden of directing all the affairs, has avoided government by mass
meeting, discouraged irresponsible talk and criticism, and, as an
aristocracy of elders, has shrewdly controlled the material and
spiritual life of the community.
The society has received many new members. There have been accessions
from Zoar and Economy and one or two Americans have joined. The "Great
Council," in its desire to maintain the homogeneity of the group,
rejects the large number of applications for membership received every
year. Over sixty per cent of the young people who have left the
community to try the world have come back to "colony trousers" or
"colony skirts," symbols of the complete submergence of the
individual.
Celibacy has been encouraged but never enjoined, and the young people
are permitted to marry, if the Spirit gives its sanction, the Elders
their consent, and if the man has reached the age of twenty-four
years. The two sexes are rigidly separated in school, in church, at
work, and in the communal dining rooms. Each family lives in a house,
but there are communal kitchens, where meals are served to groups of
twenty or more. Every member receives an annual cash bonus varying
from $25 to $75 and a pass book to record his credits at the "store."
The work is doled out among the members, who take pride in the quality
rather than in the quantity of their product. All forms of amusement
are forbidden; music, which flourished in other German communities, is
suppressed; and even reading for pleasure or information was until
recently under the ban.
The only symbols of gayety in the villages are the flowers, and these
are everywhere in lavish abundance, softening the austere lines of the
plain and unpainted houses. No architect has been allowed to show his
skill, no artist his genius, in the shaping of this rigorous life. But
its industries flourish. Amana calico and Amana woolens are known in
many markets. The livestock is of the finest breeds; the products of
the fields and orchards are the choicest. But the modern visitor
wonders how long this prosperity will be able to maintain that
isolation which alone insured the communal solidarity. Already store
clothes are being worn, photographs are seen on the walls, "worldly"
furniture is being used, libraries, those openers of closed minds, are
in every schoolhouse, and newspapers and magazines are "allowed."
The experiences of Eric Janson and his devotees whom he led out of
Sweden to Bishop Hill Colony, in Illinois, are replete with dramatic
and tragic details. Janson was a rugged Swedish peasant, whose
eloquence and gift of second sight made him the prophet of the
Devotionalists, a sect that attempted to reëstablish the simplicity of
the primitive church among the Lutherans of Scandinavia. Driven from
pillar to post by the relentless hatred of the Established Church,
they sought refuge in America, where Janson planned a theocratic
socialistic community. Its communism was based entirely upon religious
convictions, for neither Janson nor any of his illiterate followers
had heard of the politico-economic systems of French reformers. Over
one thousand young and vigorous peasants followed him to America. The
first contingent of four hundred arrived in 1846 and spent their first
winter in untold miseries and privations, with barely sufficient food,
but with enough spiritual fervor to kindle two religious services a
day and three on Sunday. Attacking the vast prairies with their
primitive implements, harvesting grain with the sickle and grinding it
by hand when their water power gave out, sheltering themselves in
tents and caves, enduring agues and fevers, hunger and cold, the
majority still remained loyal to the leader whose eloquence fired them
with a sustaining hope. Thrift, unremitting toil, the wonderful
fertility of the prairie, the high price of wheat, flax, and broom
corn, were bound to bring prosperity. In 1848 they built a huge brick
dormitory and dining hall, a great frame church, and a number of
smaller dwellings. Improved housing at once told on the general
health, though in the next year a scourge of cholera, introduced by
some newcomer, claimed 143 members.
In the meantime John Root, an adventurer from Stockholm, who had
served in the American army, arrived at the colony and soon fell in
love with the cousin of Eric Janson. The prophet gave his consent to
the marriage on condition that, if at any time Root wished to leave
the colony, his wife should be permitted to remain if she desired. A
written agreement acknowledged Root's consent to these conditions. He
soon tired of a life for which he had not the remotest liking, and,
failing to entice his wife away with him, he kidnaped her and forcibly
detained her in Chicago, whence she was rescued by a valiant band of
the colonists. In retaliation the irate husband organized a mob of
frontiers folk to drive out the fanatics as they had a short time
before driven out Brigham Young and his Mormons. But the neighbors of
the colonists, having learned their sterling worth, came to the
rescue. Root then began legal proceedings against Janson. In May,
1850, while in court the renegade deliberately shot and killed the
prophet. The community in despair awaited three days the return to
life of the man whom they looked upon as a representative of Christ
sent to earth to rebuild the Tabernacle.
Janson had been a very poor manager, however, and the colony was in
debt. In order quickly to obtain money, he had sent Jonas Olsen, the
ablest and strongest of his followers, to California to seek gold to
wipe out the debt. Upon hearing of the tragedy, Olsen hastened back to
Bishop Hill and was soon in charge of affairs. In 1853 he obtained for
the colony a charter of incorporation which vested the entire
management of the property in seven trustees. These men, under the
by-laws adopted, became also the spiritual mentors, and the colonists,
unacquainted with democratic usages in government, submitted willingly
to the leadership of this oligarchy. A new era of great material
prosperity now set in. The village was rebuilt. The great house was
enlarged so that all the inhabitants could be accommodated in its
vast communal dining room. Trees were planted along the streets. Shops
and mills were erected, and a hotel became the means of introducing
strangers to the community.
Meanwhile Olsen was growing more and more arbitrary and, after a
bitter controversy, he imposed celibacy upon the members. This was the
beginning of the end. One of the trustees, Olaf Jansen, a good-natured
peasant who could not keep his accounts but who had a peasant's
sagacity for a bargain, wormed his way into financial control. He
wanted to make the colony rich, but he led it to the verge of
bankruptcy. He became a speculator and promoter. Stories of his
shortcomings were whispered about and in 1860 the peasant colony
revolted and deposed Olaf from office. He then had himself appointed
receiver to wind up the corporation's affairs, and in the following
year the communal property was distributed. Every member, male and
female, thirty-five years of age received a full share which
"consisted of 22 acres of land, one timber lot of nearly 2 acres, one
town lot, and an equal part of all barns, houses, cattle, hogs, sheep
or other domestic animals and all farming implements and household
utensils." Those under thirty-five received according to their age.
Had these shares been unencumbered, this would have represented a fair
return for their labor. But Olaf had made no half-way business of his
financial ambitions, and the former members who now were melting
peacefully and rather contentedly into the general American life found
themselves saddled with his obligations. The "colony case" became
famous among Illinois lawyers and dragged through twelve years of
litigation. Thus the glowing fraternal communism of poor Janson ended
in the drab discord of an American lawsuit.
In 1862 the followers of Jacob Hutter, a Mennonite martyr who was
burned at the stake in Innsbruck in the sixteenth century, founded the
Old Elmspring Community on the James River in South Dakota. During the
Thirty Years' War these saintly Quaker-like German folk had found
refuge in Moravia, whence they had been driven into Hungary, later
into Rumania, and then into Russia. As their objection to military
service brought them into conflict with the Czar's government, they
finally determined to migrate to America. In 1874 they had all reached
South Dakota, where they now live in five small communities. Scarcely
four hundred all told, they cling to their ancient ambition to keep
themselves "unspotted from the world," and so have evolved a
self-sustaining communal life, characterized by great simplicity of
dress, of speech, and of living. They speak German and refrain
entirely from voting and from other political activity. They are
farmers and practise only those handicrafts which are necessary to
their own communal welfare.
While most of these German sectarian communities had only a slight
economic effect upon the United States, their influence upon
immigration has been extensive. In the early part of the last century,
it was difficult to obtain authentic news concerning America in the
remote hamlets of Europe. All sorts of vague and grotesque notions
about this country were afloat. Every member of these communities,
when he wrote to those left behind, became a living witness of the
golden opportunities offered in the new land. And, unquestionably, a
considerable share of the great German influx in the middle of the
nineteenth century can be traced to the dissemination of knowledge by
this means. Mikkelsen says of the Jansonists that their "letters home
concerning the new country paved the way for that mighty tide of
Swedish immigration which in a few years began to roll in upon
Illinois and the Northwest."
The Shakers are the oldest and the largest communistic sect to find a
congenial home in America. The cult originated in Manchester, England,
with Ann Lee, a "Shaking Quaker" who never learned to read or write
but depended upon revelation for doctrine and guidance. "By a direct
revelation," says the Shaker Compendium, she was "instructed to come
to America." Obedient to the vision, she sailed from Liverpool in the
summer of 1774, accompanied by six men and two women, among whom were
her husband, a brother, and a niece. This little flock settled in the
forests near Albany, New York. Abandoned by her husband, the
prophetess went from place to place, proclaiming her peculiar
doctrines. Soon she became known as "Mother Ann" and was reputed to
have supernatural powers. At the time of her death in 1784 she had
numerous followers in western New England and eastern New York.
In 1787 they founded their first Shaker community at Mount Lebanon.
Within a few years other societies were organized in New York,
Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, and Connecticut. On the wave of
the great religious revival at the beginning of the nineteenth
century their doctrines were carried west. The cult achieved its
highest prosperity in the decade following 1830, when it numbered
eighteen societies and about six thousand members.
In shrewd and capable hands, the sect soon had both an elaborate
system of theology based upon the teachings of Mother Ann and also an
effective organization. The communal life, ordaining celibacy, based
on industry, and constructed in the strictest economy, achieved
material prosperity and evidently brought spiritual consolation to
those who committed themselves to its isolation. Although originating
in England, the sect is confined wholly to America and has from the
first recruited its membership almost wholly from native Americans.
Another of these social experiments was the Oneida Community and its
several ephemeral branches. Though it was of American origin and the
members were almost wholly American, it deserves passing mention. The
founder, John Humphrey Noyes, a graduate of Dartmouth and a Yale
divinity student, conceived a system of communal life which should
make it possible for the individual to live without sin. This
perfectionism, he believed, necessitated the abolition of private
property through communism, the abolition of sickness through complete
coöperation of the individual with God, and the abolition of the
family through a "scientific" coöperation of the sexes. The Oneida
Community was financially very prosperous. Its "stirpiculture,"
Noyes's high-sounding synonym for free love, brought it, however, into
violent conflict with public opinion, and in 1879 "complex marriages"
gave way to monogamous families. In the following year the communistic
holding of property gave way to a joint stock company, under whose
skillful management the prosperity of the community continues today.
The American Utopias based upon an assumed economic altruism were much
more numerous than those founded primarily upon religion but, as they
were recruited almost wholly from Americans, they need engage our
attention only briefly. There were two groups of economic communistic
experiments, similar in their general characteristics but differing in
their origin. One took its inspiration directly from Robert Owen, the
distinguished philanthropist and successful cotton manufacturer of
Scotland; the other from Fourier, the noted French social
philosopher.
In 1825 Robert Owen purchased New Harmony, Rapp's village in Indiana
and its thirty thousand appurtenant acres. When Owen came to America
he was already famous. Great throngs flocked to hear this practical
man utter the most visionary sentiments. At Washington, for instance,
he lectured to an auditory that included great senators and famous
representatives, members of the Supreme Court and of the Cabinet,
President Monroe and Adams, the President-elect. He displayed to his
eager hearers the plans and specifications of the new human order, his
glorified apartment house with all the external paraphernalia of
selective human perfection drawn to scale.
For a brief period New Harmony was the communistic capital of the
world. It was discussed everywhere and became, says its chronicler,
"the rendezvous of the enlightened and progressive people from all
over the United States and northern Europe." It achieved a sort of
motley cosmopolitanism. A "Boat Load of Knowledge" carried from
Pittsburgh the most distinguished group of scientists that had
hitherto been brought together in America. It included William
Maclure, a Scotchman who came to America, at the age of thirty-three,
ambitious to make a geological survey of the country and whose
learning and energy soon earned him the title of "Father of American
Geology"; Thomas Say, "the Father of American Zoölogy"; Charles
Alexander Lesueur, a distinguished naturalist from the _Jardin des
Plantes_ of Paris; Constantine S. Rafinesque, a scientific nomad whose
studies of fishes took him everywhere and whose restless spirit
forbade him remaining long anywhere; Gerard Troost, a Dutch scientist
who later did pioneer work in western geology; Joseph Neef, a
well-known Pestalozzian educator, together with two French experts in
that system; and Owen's four brilliant sons. A few artists and
musicians and all sorts of reformers, including Fanny Wright, an
ardent and very advanced suffragette, joined these scientists in the
new Eden. Owen had issued a universal invitation to the "industrious
and well disposed," but his project offered also the lure of a free
meal ticket for the improvident and the glitter of novelty for the
restless.
"I am come to this country," Owen said in his opening words at New
Harmony, "to introduce an entire new state of society, to change it
from the ignorant, selfish system to an enlightened social system,
which shall gradually unite all interests into one, and remove all
causes for contests between individuals."[19] But the germs of
dissolution were already present in the extreme individuality of the
members of this new society. Here was no homogeneous horde of docile
German peasants waiting to be commanded. What Father Rapp could do,
Owen could not. The sifting process had begun too late. Seven
different constitutions issued in rapid succession attempted in vain
to discover a common bond of action. In less than two years Owen's
money was gone, and nine hundred or more disillusioned persons
rejoined the more individualistic world. Many of them subsequently
achieved distinction in professional and public callings. Owen's
widely advertised experiment was fecund, however, and produced some
eleven other short-lived communistic attempts, of which the most noted
were at Franklin, Haverstraw, and Coxsackie in New York, Yellow
Springs and Kendal in Ohio, and Forestville and Macluria in Indiana.
Fourierism found its principal apostle in this country in Arthur
Brisbane, whose _Social Destiny of Man_, published in 1840, brought to
America the French philosopher's naïve, social regimen of reducing
the world of men to simple units called phalanxes, whose barrack-like
routine should insure plenty, equality, and happiness. Horace Greeley,
with characteristic, erratic eagerness, pounced upon the new gospel,
and Brisbane obtained at once a wide circle of sympathetic readers
through the _Tribune_. Thirty-four phalanxes were organized in a short
time, most of them with an incredible lack of foresight. They usually
lasted until the first payment on the mortgage was due, though a few
weathered the buffetings of fortune for several years. Brook Farm in
Massachusetts and the Wisconsin phalanx each endured six years, and
the North American phalanx at Red Bank, New Jersey, lasted thirteen
years.
Icaria is a romantic sequel to the Owen and Fourier colonies. It
antedated Brisbane's revival of Fourierism, was encouraged by Owenism,
survived both, and formed a living link between the utopianism of the
early nineteenth century and the utilitarian socialism of the
twentieth. Étienne Cabet was one of those interesting Frenchmen whose
fertile minds and instinct for rapid action made France during the
nineteenth century kaleidoscopic with social and political events.
Though educated for the bar, Cabet devoted himself to social and
political reform. As a young man he was a director in that powerful
secret order, the Carbonari, and was elected to the French chamber of
deputies, but his violent attitude toward the Government was such that
in 1834 he was obliged to flee to London to escape imprisonment. Here,
unmolested, he devoted himself for five years to social and historical
research. He returned to France in 1839 and in the following year
published his _Voyage en Icarie_, a book that at once took its place
by the side of Sir Thomas More's _Utopia_. Cabet pictured in his
volume an ideal society where plenty should be a substitute for
poverty and equality a remedy for class egoism. So great was the
cogency of his writing that Icaria became more than a mere vision to
hundreds of thousands in those years of social ferment and democratic
aspirations. From a hundred sources the demand arose to translate the
book into action. Cabet thereupon framed a constitution and sought the
means of founding a real Icaria. After consulting Robert Owen, he
unfortunately fell into the clutches of some Cincinnati land
speculators and chose a site for his colony in the northeastern part
of Texas. When the announcement was made in his paper, _Le Populaire_,
the responses were so numerous that Cabet believed that "more than a
million coöperators" were eager for the experiment.
In February, 1848, sixty-nine young men, all carefully selected
volunteers, were sent forth from Havre as the vanguard of the
contemplated exodus. But the movement was halted by the turn of great
events. Twenty days after the young men sailed, the French Republic
was proclaimed, and in the fervor and distraction of this immediate
political victory the new and distant Utopia seemed to thousands less
alluring than it had been before. The group of young volunteers,
however, reached America. After heart-rending disillusionment in the
swamps and forests of Louisiana and on the raw prairies of Texas, they
made their way back to New Orleans in time to meet Cabet and four
hundred Icarians, who arrived early in 1849. The Gallic instinct for
factional differences soon began to assert itself in repeated division
and subdivision on the part of the idealists. One-half withdrew at New
Orleans to work out their individual salvation. The remainder followed
Cabet to the deserted Mormon town of Nauvoo, Illinois, where vacant
houses offered immediate shelter and where they enjoyed an interval of
prosperity. The French genius for music, for theatricals, and for
literature relieved them from the tedium that characterized most
co-operative colonies. Soon their numbers increased to five hundred by
accessions which, with few exceptions, were French.
But Cabet was not a practical leader. His pamphlet published in German
in 1854, entitled _If I had half a million dollars_, reveals the
naïveté of his mind. He wanted to find money, not to make it. The
society soon became involved in a controversy in which Cabet's
immediate following were outnumbered. The minority petulantly stopped
working but continued to eat. "The majority decided that those who
would not work should not eat ... and gave notice that those who
absented themselves from labor would be cut off from rations."[20] As
a result, Cabet, in 1856, was expelled from his own Icaria! With 170
faithful adherents he went to St. Louis, and there a few days later he
died. The minority buried their leader, but their faith in communal
life survived this setback. At Cheltenham, a suburb of St. Louis, they
acquired a small estate, where proximity to the city enabled the
members to get work. Here they lived together six years before
division disrupted them permanently.
At Nauvoo in the meantime there had been other secessions, and the
property, in 1857, was in the hands of a receiver. The plucky and
determined remnant, however, removed to Iowa, where on the prairie
near Corning they planted a new Icaria. Here, by hard toil and in
extreme poverty, but in harmony and contentment, the communists lived
until, in 1876, the younger members wished to adopt advanced methods
in farming, in finance, and in management. The older men, with wisdom
acquired through bitter experience, refused to alter their methods.
The younger party won a lawsuit to annul the communal charter. The
property was divided, and again there were two Icarias, the "young
party" retaining the old site and the "old party" moving on and
founding New Icaria, a few miles from the old. But Old Icaria was soon
split: one faction removed to California, where the Icaria-Speranza
community was founded; and the other remained at Old Icaria. Both came
to grief in 1888. Finally in 1895 New Icaria, then reduced to a few
veterans, was dissolved by a unanimous vote of the community.
* * * * *
In 1854 Victor Considérant, the French socialist, planted a
Fourieristic phalanx in Texas, under the liberal patronage of J.B.A.
Godin, the godfather of Fourierism in France who founded at Guise the
only really successful phalanx. A French communistic colony was also
attempted at Silkville, Kansas. But both ventures lasted only a few
years. Since the subsidence of these French communistic experiments,
there have been many sporadic attempts at founding idealistic
communities in the United States. Over fifty have been tried since the
Civil War. Nearly all were established under American auspices and did
not lure many foreigners.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 15: As is usual among people who pride themselves on their
peculiarities there were variations of opinion among these sects which
led to schisms. The Mennonites contained at one time no less than
eleven distinct branches, among them the Amish, Old and New, whose
ridiculous singularity of dress, in which they discarded all ornaments
and even buttons, earned them the nickname "Hooks and Eyes." But no
matter how aloof these sects held themselves from the world, or what
asceticism they practiced upon themselves, or what spiritual and
economic fraternity they displayed to each other, they possessed a
remarkable native cunning in bargaining over a bushel of wheat or a
shoat, and for a time most of their communities prospered.]
[Footnote 16: Under the communal contract, which was later upheld by
the Supreme Court of the United States, members agreed to merge their
properties and to renounce all claims for services; and the community,
on its part, agreed to support the members and to repay without
interest, to any one desiring to withdraw, the amount he had put into
the common fund.]
[Footnote 17: _Communistic Societies of the United States_, by Charles
Nordhoff, p. 73.]
[Footnote 18: The largest membership was attained in 1827, when 522
were enrolled. There were 391 in 1836; 321 in 1846; 170 in 1864; 146
in 1866; 70 in 1879; 34 in 1888; 37 in 1892; 10 in 1897; 8 in 1902,
only two of whom were men; and in 1903, three women and one man. The
population of Economy, however, was always much larger than the
communal membership.]
[Footnote 19: _The New Harmony Movement_, by G.B. Lockwood, p. 83.]
[Footnote 20: _Icaria, A Chapter in the History of Communism_, by
Albert Shaw, p. 58.]
CHAPTER V
THE IRISH INVASION
After the Revolution, immigrants began to filter into America from
Great Britain and continental Europe. No record was kept of their
arrival, and their numbers have been estimated at from 4000 to 10,000
a year, on the average. These people came nearly all from Great
Britain and were driven to migrate by financial and political
conditions.
In 1819 Congress passed a law requiring Collectors of Customs to keep
a record of passengers arriving in their districts, together with
their age, sex, occupation, and the country whence they came, and to
report this information to the Secretary of State. This was the
Federal Government's first effort to collect facts concerning
immigration. The law was defective, yet it might have yielded valuable
results had it been intelligently enforced.[21]
From all available collateral sources it appears that the official
figures greatly understated the actual number of arrivals. Great
Britain kept an official record of those who emigrated from her ports
to the United States and the numbers so listed are nearly as large as
the total immigration from all sources reported by the United States
officials during a time when a heavy influx is known to have been
coming from Germany and Switzerland.
Inaccurate as these figures are, they nevertheless are a barometer
indicating the rising pressure of immigration. The first official
figures show that in 1820 there arrived 8385 aliens of whom 7691 were
Europeans. Of these 3614, or nearly one-half, came from Ireland. Until
1850 this proportion was maintained. Here was evidence of the first
ground swell of immigration to the United States whose subsequent
waves in sixty years swept to America one-half of the entire
population of the Little Green Isle. Since 1820 over four and a
quarter million Irish immigrants have found their way hither. In 1900
there were nearly five million persons in the United States descended
from Irish parentage. They comprise today ten per cent of our foreign
born population.
The discontent and grievances of the Irish had a vivid historical
background in their own country. There were four principal causes
which induced the transplanting of the race: rebellion, famine,
restrictive legislation, and absentee landlordism. Every uprising of
this bellicose people from the time of Cromwell onward had been
followed by voluntary and involuntary exile. It is said that
Cromwell's Government transported many thousand Irish to the West
Indies. Many of these exiles subsequently found their way to the
Carolinas, Virginia, and other colonies. After the great Irish
rebellion of 1798 and again after Robert Emmet's melancholy failure in
the rising of 1803 many fled across the sea. The Act of Union in 1801
brought "no submissive love for England," and constant political
agitations for which the Celtic Irish need but little stimulus have
kept the pathway to America populous.
The harsh penal laws of two centuries ago prescribing transportation
and long terms of penal servitude were a compelling agency in driving
the Irish to America. Illiberal laws against religious nonconformists,
especially against the Catholics, closed the doors of political
advancement in their faces, submitted them to humiliating
discriminations, and drove many from the island. Finally, the selfish
Navigation Laws forbade both exportation of cattle to England and the
sending of foodstuffs to the colonies, dealing thereby a heavy blow to
Irish agriculture. These restrictions were followed by other
inhibitions until almost every industry or business in which the Irish
engaged was unduly limited and controlled. It should, however, not be
forgotten that these restrictions bore with equal weight upon the
Ulster settlers from Scotland and England, who managed somehow to
endure them successfully.
Absentee landlordism was oppressive both to the cotter's body and to
his soul, for it not only bound him to perpetual poverty but kindled
within him a deep sense of injustice. The historian, Justin McCarthy,
says that the Irishman "regarded the right to have a bit of land, his
share, exactly as other people regard the right to live." So political
and economic conditions combined to feed the discontent of a people
peculiarly sensitive to wrongs and swift in their resentments.
But the most potent cause of the great Irish influx into America was
famine in Ireland. The economist may well ascribe Irish failure to the
potato. Here was a crop so easy of culture and of such nourishing
qualities that it led to overpopulation and all its attendant ills.
The failure of this crop was indeed an "overwhelming disaster," for,
according to Justin McCarthy, the Irish peasant with his wife and his
family lived on the potato, and whole generations grew up, lived,
married, and passed away without ever having tasted meat. When the
cold and damp summer of 1845 brought the potato rot, the little,
overpopulated island was facing dire want. But when the next two years
brought a plant disease that destroyed the entire crop, then famine
and fever claimed one quarter of the eight million inhabitants. The
pitiful details of this national disaster touched American hearts.
Fleets of relief ships were sent across from America, and many a
shipload of Irish peasants was brought back. In 1845 over 44,821 came;
1847 saw this number rise to 105,536 and in the next year to 112,934.
Rebellion following the famine swelled the number of immigrants until
Ireland was left a land of old people with a fast shrinking
population.
There is a prevailing notion that this influx after the great famine
was the commencement of Irish migration. In reality it was only the
climax. Long before this, Irishmen were found in the colonies, chiefly
as indentured servants; they were in the Continental Army as valiant
soldiers; they were in the western flux that filled the Mississippi
Valley as useful pioneers. How many there were we do not know. As
early as 1737, however, there were enough in Boston to celebrate St.
Patrick's Day, and in 1762 they poured libations to their favorite
saint in New York City, for the _Mercury_ in announcing the meeting
said, "Gentlemen that please to attend will meet with the best Usage."
On March 17, 1776, the English troops evacuated Boston and General
Washington issued the following order on that date:
Parole Boston
Countersign St. Patrick
The regiments under marching orders to march tomorrow
morning. By His Excellency's command.
Brigadier of the Day
GEN. JOHN SULLIVAN.
Thus did the Patriot Army gracefully acknowledge the day and the
people.
In 1784, on the first St. Patrick's Day after the evacuation of New
York City by the British, there was a glorious celebration "spent in
festivity and mirth." As the newspaper reporter put it, "the greatest
unanimity and conviviality pervaded" a "numerous and jovial company."
Branches of the Society of United Irishmen were formed in American
cities soon after the founding of the order in Ireland. Many veterans
of '98 found their way to America, and between 1800 and 1820 many
thousand followed the course of the setting sun. Their number cannot
be ascertained; but there were not a few. In 1818 Irish immigrant
associations were organized by the Irish in New York, Philadelphia,
and Baltimore to aid the newcomers in finding work. Many filtered into
the United States from Canada, Newfoundland, and the West Indies.
These earlier arrivals were not composed of the abjectly poor who
comprised the majority of the great exodus, and especially among the
political exiles there were to be found men of some means and
education.
America became extremely popular in Ireland after the Revolution of
1776, partly because the English were defeated, partly because of
Irish democratic aspirations, but particularly because it was a land
of generous economic and political possibilities. The Irish at once
claimed a kinship with the new republic, and the ocean became less of
a barrier than St. George's Channel.
"The States," as they were called, became a synonym of abundance. The
most lavish reports of plenty were sent back by the newcomers--of meat
daily, of white bread, of comfortable clothing. "There is a great many
ill conveniences here," writes one, "but no empty bellies." In England
and Ireland and Scotland the number of poor who longed for this
abundance exceeded the capacity of the boats. Many who would have
willingly gone to America lacked the passage money. The Irish peasant,
born and reared in extreme poverty, was peculiarly unable to scrape
together enough to pay his way. The assistance which he needed,
however, was forthcoming from various sources. Friends and relatives
in America sent him money; in later years this practice was very
common. Societies were organized to help those who could not help
themselves. Railroad and canal companies, in great need of labor,
imported workmen by the thousands and advanced their passage money.
And finally, the local authorities found shipping their paupers to
another country a convenient way of getting rid of them. England
early resorted to the same method. In 1849 the Irish poor law
guardians were given authority to borrow money for such "assistance,"
as it was called. In 1881 the Land Commission and in 1882 the
Commissioner of Public Works were authorized to advance money for this
purpose. In 1884 and 1885 over sixteen thousand persons were thus
assisted from Galway and Mayo counties.
Long before the great Irish famine of 1846-47 America appeared like a
mirage, and wondering peasants in their dire distress exaggerated its
opulence and opportunities. They braved the perils of the sea and
trusted to luck in the great new world. The journey in itself was no
small adventure. There were some sailings directly from Ireland; but
most of the Irish immigrants were collected at Liverpool by agents not
always scrupulous in their dealings. A hurried inspection at Liverpool
gained them the required medical certificates, and they were packed
into the ships. Of the voyage one passenger who made the journey from
Belfast in 1795 said: "The slaves who are carried from the coast of
Africa have much more room allowed them than the immigrants who pass
from Ireland to America, for the avarice of captains in that trade is
such that they think they can never load their vessels sufficiently,
and they trouble their heads in general no more about the
accommodation and storage of their passengers than of any other lumber
aboard." When the great immigrant invasion of America began, there
were not half enough ships for the passengers, all were cruelly
overcrowded, and many were so filthy that even American port officials
refused a landing before cleansing. Under such conditions sickness was
a matter of course, and of the hordes who started for the promised
land thousands perished on the way.[22]
Hope sustained the voyagers. But what must have been the
disappointment of thousands when they landed! No ardent welcome
awaited them, nor even jobs for the majority. Alas for the rosy dreams
of opulence! Here was a prosaic place where toil and sweat were the
condition of mere existence. As the poor creatures had no means of
moving on, they huddled in the ports of arrival. Almshouses were
filled, beggars wandered in every street, and these peasants
accustomed to the soil and the open country were congested in the
cities, unhappy misfits in an entirely new economic environment.
Unskilled in the handicrafts, they were forced to accept the lot of
the common laborer. Fortunately, the great influx came at the time of
rapid turnpike, canal, and railroad expansion. Thousands found their
way westward with contractors' gangs. The free lands, however, did not
lure them. They preferred to remain in the cities. New York in 1850
sheltered 133,000 Irish. Philadelphia, Boston, New Orleans,
Cincinnati, Albany, Baltimore, and St. Louis, followed, in the order
given, as favorite lodging places, and there was not one rapidly
growing western city, such as Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, and
Chicago, that did not have its "Irish town" or "Shanty town" where the
immigrants clung together.
Their brogue and dress provoked ridicule; their poverty often threw
them upon the community; the large percentage of illiteracy among them
evoked little sympathy; their inclinations towards intemperance and
improvidence were not neutralized by their great good nature and
open-handedness; their religion reawoke historical bitterness; their
genius for politics aroused jealousy; their proclivity to unite in
clubs, associations, and semi-military companies made them the objects
of official suspicion; and above all, their willingness to assume the
offensive, to resent instantly insult or intimidation, brought them
into frequent and violent contact with their new neighbors. "America
for Americans" became the battle cry of reactionaries, who organized
the American or "Know-Nothing" party and sought safety at the polls.
While all foreign elements were grouped together, indiscriminately, in
the mind of the nativist, the Irishman unfortunately was the special
object of his spleen, because he was concentrated in the cities and
therefore offered a visual and concrete example of the danger of
foreign mass movements, because he was a Roman Catholic and thus
awakened ancient religious prejudices that had long been slumbering,
and because he fought back instantly, valiantly, and vehemently.
Popular suspicion against the foreigner in America began almost as
soon as immigration assumed large proportions. In 1816 conservative
newspapers called attention to the new problems that the Old World
was thrusting upon the New: the poverty of the foreigner, his low
standard of living, his illiteracy and slovenliness, his ignorance of
American ways and his unwillingness to submit to them, his
clannishness, the danger of his organizing and capturing the political
offices and ultimately the Government. In addition to the alarmist and
the prejudiced, careful and thoughtful citizens were aroused to the
danger. Unfortunately, however, religious antagonisms were aroused
and, as is always the case, these differences awakened the profoundest
prejudices and passions of the human heart. There were many towns in
New England and in the West where Roman Catholicism was unknown except
as a traditional enemy of free institutions. It is difficult to
realize in these days of tolerance the feelings aroused in such
communities when Catholic churches, parochial schools, and convents
began to appear among them; and when the devotees of this faith
displayed a genius for practical politics, instinctive distrust
developed into lively suspicion.
The specter of ecclesiastical authority reared itself, and the
question of sharing public school moneys with parochial schools and of
reading the Bible in the public schools became a burning issue. Here
and there occurred clashes that were more than barroom brawls.
Organized gangs infested the cities. Both sides were sustained and
encouraged by partisan papers, and on several occasions the antagonism
spent themselves in riots and destruction. In 1834 the Ursuline
convent at Charlestown, near Boston, was sacked and burned. Ten years
later occurred the great anti-Irish riots in Philadelphia, in which
two Catholic churches and a schoolhouse were burned by a mob inflamed
to hysteria by one of the leaders who held up a torn American flag and
shouted, "This is the flag that was trampled on by Irish papists."
Prejudice accompanied fear into every city and "patented citizens"
were often subject to abuse and even persecution. Tammany Hall in New
York City became the political fortress of the Irish. Election riots
of the first magnitude were part of the routine of elections, and the
"Bloody Sixth Ward Boys" were notorious for their hooliganism on
election day.
The suggestions of the nativists that paupers and criminals be
excluded from immigration were not embodied into law. The movement
soon was lost in the greater questions which slavery was thrusting
into the foreground. When the fight with nativism was over, the Irish
were in possession of the cities. They displayed an amazing aptitude
for political plotting and organization and for that prime essential
to political success popularly known as "mixing." Policemen and
aldermen, ward heelers, bosses, and mayors, were known by their
brogue. The Irish demonstrated their loyalty to the Union in the Civil
War and merged readily into American life after the lurid prejudices
against them faded.
Unfortunately, a great deal of this prejudice was revived when the
secret workings of an Irish organization in Pennsylvania were
unearthed. Among the anthracite coal miners a society was formed,
probably about 1854, called the Molly Maguires, a name long known in
Ireland. The members were all Irish, professed the Roman Catholic
faith, and were active in the Ancient Order of Hibernians. The Church,
the better class of Irishmen, and the Hibernians, however, were
shocked by the doings of the Molly Maguires and utterly disowned them.
They began their career of blackmail and bullying by sending threats
and death notices embellished with crude drawings of coffins and
pistols to those against whom they fancied they had a grievance,
usually the mine boss or an unpopular foreman. If the recipient did
not heed the threat, he was waylaid and beaten and his family was
abused. By the time of the Civil War these bullies had terrorized the
entire anthracite region. Through their political influence they
elected sheriffs and constables, chiefs of police and county
commissioners. As they became bolder, they substituted arson and
murder for threats and bullying, and they made life intolerable by
their reckless brutality. It was impossible to convict them, for the
hatred against an informer, inbred in every Irishman through
generations of experience in Ireland, united with fear in keeping
competent witnesses from the courts. Finally the president of one of
the large coal companies employed James McParlan, a remarkably clever
Irish detective. He joined the Mollies, somehow eluded their
suspicions, and slowly worked his way into their confidence. An
unusually brutal and cowardly murder in 1875 proved his opportunity.
When the courts finished with the Mollies, nineteen of their members
had been hanged, a large number imprisoned, and the organization was
completely wiped out.
Meantime the Fenian movement served to keep the Irish in the public
eye. This was no less than an attempt to free Ireland and disrupt the
British Empire, using the United States as a fulcrum, the Irish in
America as the power, and Canada as the lever. James Stephens, who
organized the Irish Republican Brotherhood, came to America in 1858 to
start a similar movement. After the Civil War, which supplied a
training school for whole regiments of Irish soldiers, a convention of
Fenians was held at Philadelphia in 1865 at which an "Irish Republic"
was organized, with a full complement of officers, a Congress, a
President, a Secretary of the Treasury, a Secretary of War, in fact, a
replica of the American Federal Government. It assumed the highly
absurd and dangerous position that it actually possessed sovereignty.
The luxurious mansion of a pill manufacturer in Union Square, New
York, was transformed into its government house, and bonds,
embellished with shamrocks and harps and a fine portrait of Wolfe
Tone, were issued, payable "ninety days after the establishment of the
Irish Republic." Differences soon arose, and Stephens, who had made
his escape from Richmond, near Dublin, where he had been in prison,
hastened to America to compose the quarrel which had now assumed true
Hibernian proportions. An attempt to land an armed gang on the Island
of Campo Bello on the coast of New Brunswick was frustrated; invaders
from Vermont spent a night over the Canadian border before they were
driven back; and for several days Fort Erie on Niagara River was held
by about 1500 Fenians.[23] General Meade was thereupon sent by the
Federal authorities to put an end to these ridiculous breaches of
neutrality.
Neither Meade nor any other authority, however, could stop the flow of
Fenian adjectives that now issued from a hundred indignation meetings
all over the land when Canada, after due trial, proceeded to sentence
the guilty culprits captured in the "Battle of Limestone Ridge," as
the tussle with Canadian regulars near Fort Erie was called.
Newspapers abounded with tales of the most startling designs upon
Canada and Britain. There then occurred a strong reaction to the
Fenian movement, and the American people were led to wonder how much
of truth there was in a statement made by Thomas D'Arcy McGee.[24]
"This very Fenian organization in the United States," he said, "what
does it really prove but that the Irish are still an alien
population, camped but not settled in America, with foreign hopes and
aspirations, unshared by the people among whom they live?"
The Irishman today is an integral part of every large American
community. Although the restrictive legislation of two centuries ago
has long been repealed and a new land system has brought great
prosperity to his island home, the Irishman has not abated one whit in
his temperamental attitude towards England and as a consequence some
40,000 or 50,000 of his fellow countrymen come to the United States
every year. Here he has been dispossessed of his monopoly of shovel
and pick by the French Canadian in New England and by the Italian,
Syrian, and Armenian in other parts of the country. He finds work in
factories, for he still shuns the soil, much as he professes to love
the "old sod." A great change has come over the economic condition of
the second and third generation of Irish immigrants. Their remarkable
buoyancy of temperament is everywhere displayed. Bridget's daughter
has left the kitchen and is a school teacher, a stenographer, a
saleswoman, a milliner, or a dressmaker; her son is a clerk, a
bookkeeper, a traveling salesman, or a foreman. Wherever the human
touch is the essential of success, there you find the Irish. That is
why in some cities one-half the teachers are Irish; why salesmanship
lures them; why they are the most successful walking delegates,
solicitors, agents, foremen, and contractors. In the higher walks of
life you find them where dash, brilliance, cleverness, and emotion are
demanded. The law and the priesthood utilize their eloquence,
journalism their keen insight into the human side of news, and
literature their imagination and humor. They possess a positive genius
for organization and management. The labor unions are led by them; and
what would municipal politics be without them? The list of eminent
names which they have contributed to these callings will increase as
their generations multiply in the favorable American environment. But
remote indeed is the day and complex must be the experience that will
erase the memory of the ancient Erse proverb, which their racial
temperament evoked: "Contention is better than loneliness."
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 21: The immigration reports were perfunctory and lacking in
accuracy. Passengers were frequently listed as belonging to the
country whence they sailed. An Irishman taking passage from Liverpool
was quite as likely to be reported English as Irish. Large numbers of
immigrants were counted who merely landed in New York and proceeded
immediately to Canada, while many thousands who landed in Canada and
moved at once across the border into northern New York and the West
did not appear in the reports.]
[Footnote 22: According to the _Edinburgh Review_ of July, 1854,
"Liverpool was crowded with emigrants, and ships could not be found to
do the work. The poor creatures were packed in dense masses, in
ill-ventilated and unseaworthy vessels, under charge of improper
masters, and the natural results followed. Pestilence chased the
fugitive to complete the work of famine. Fifteen thousand out of
ninety thousand emigrants in British bottoms, in 1847, died on the
passage or soon after arrival. The American vessels, owing to a
stringent passenger law, were better managed, but the hospitals of New
York and Boston were nevertheless crowded with patients from Irish
estates."]
[Footnote 23: Oberholtzer, _History of the United States since the
Civil War_, vol. 1, p. 526 ff.]
[Footnote 24: Thomas D'Arcy McGee (1825-1868), one of the leaders of
the "Young Ireland" party, fled for political reasons to the United
States in 1848, where he established the _New York Nation_ and the
_American Celt_. When he changed his former attitude of opposition to
British rule in Ireland he was attacked by the extreme Irish patriots
in the United States and in consequence moved to Canada, where he
founded the _New Era_ and began to practice law. Subsequently, with
the support of the Irish Canadians, he represented Montreal in the
Parliament of United Canada (1858) and was President of the Council
(1862) in the John Sandfield Macdonald Administration. When the Irish
were left unrepresented in the reorganized Cabinet in the following
year, McGee became an adherent of Sir John A. Macdonald, and in 1864
he was made Minister of Agriculture in the Taché-Macdonald
Administration. An ardent supporter of the progressive policies of his
adopted country, he was one of the Fathers of Confederation and was a
member of the first Dominion Parliament in 1867. His denunciations,
both in Ireland (1865) and in Canada, of the policies and activities
of the Fenians led to his assassination at Ottawa on April 7, 1868.]
CHAPTER VI
THE TEUTONIC TIDE
As the Irish wave of immigration receded the Teutonic wave rose and
brought the second great influx of foreigners to American shores. A
greater ethnic contrast could scarcely be imagined than that which was
now afforded by these two races, the phlegmatic, plodding German and
the vibrant Irish, a contrast in American life as a whole which was
soon represented in miniature on the vaudeville stage by popular
burlesque representations of both types. The one was the opposite of
the other in temperament, in habits, in personal ambitions. The German
sought the land, was content to be let alone, had no desire to command
others or to mix with them, but was determined to be reliable,
philosophically took things as they came, met opposition with
patience, clung doggedly to a few cherished convictions, and sought
passionately to possess a home and a family, to master some minute
mechanical or technical detail, and to take his leisure and his
amusements in his own customary way.
The reports of the Immigration Commissioner disclose the fact that
well over five and a third millions of Germans migrated to America
between 1823 and 1910. If to this enormous number were added those of
German blood who came from Austria and the German cantons of
Switzerland, from Luxemburg and the German settlements of Russia, it
would reach a grand total of well over seven million Germans who have
sought an ampler life in America. The Census of 1910 reports "that
there were 8,282,618 white persons in the United States having Germany
as their country of origin, comprising 2,501,181 who were born in
Germany, 3,911,847 born in the United States both of whose parents
were born in Germany, and 1,869,590 born in the United States and
having one parent born in the United States and the other in
Germany."[25]
The coming of the Germans may be divided into three quite distinct
migrations: the early, the middle, and the recent. The first period
includes all who came before the radical ferment which began to
agitate Europe after the Napoleonic wars. The Federal census of 1790
discloses 176,407 Germans living in America. But German writers
usually maintain that there were from 225,000 to 250,000 Germans in
the colonies at the time of the Declaration of Independence. They had
been driven from the fatherland by religious persecution and economic
want. Every German state contributed to their number, but the bulk of
this migration came from the Palatinate, Württemberg, Baden, and
Alsace, and the German cantons of Switzerland. The majority were of
the peasant and artisan class who usually came over as redemptioners.
Yet there were not wanting among them many persons of means and of
learning.
Pennsylvania was the favorite distributing point for these German
hosts. Thence they pushed southward through the beautiful Shenandoah
Valley into Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina, and northward into
New Jersey. Large numbers entered at Charleston and thence went to the
frontiers of South Carolina. The Mohawk Valley in New York and the
Berkshires of Massachusetts harbored many. But not all of them moved
inland. They were to be found scattered on the coast from Maine to
Georgia. Boston, New York City, Baltimore, New Bern, Wilmington,
Charleston, and Savannah, all counted Germans in their populations.
However strictly these German neighborhoods may have maintained the
customs of their native land, the people thoroughly identified
themselves with the patriot cause and supplied soldiers, leaders,
money, and enthusiasm to the cause of the Revolutionary War.
Benjamin Rush, the distinguished Philadelphia physician and publicist,
one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, wrote in 1789 a
description of the Germans of Pennsylvania which would apply generally
to all German settlements at that time and to many of subsequent date.
The Pennsylvania German farmer, he says, was distinguished above
everything else for his self-denying thrift, housing his horses and
cattle in commodious, warm barns, while he and his family lived in a
log hut until he was well able to afford a more comfortable house;
selling his "most profitable grain, which is wheat" and "eating that
which is less profitable but more nourishing, that is, rye or Indian
corn"; breeding the best of livestock so that "a German horse is known
in every part of the State" for his "extraordinary size or fat";
clearing his land thoroughly, not "as his English or Irish neighbors";
cultivating the most bountiful gardens and orchards; living frugally,
working constantly, fearing God and debt, and rearing large families.
"A German farm may be distinguished," concludes this writer, "from the
farms of other citizens by the superior size of their barns, the plain
but compact form of their houses, the height of their enclosures, the
extent of their orchards, the fertility of their fields, the
luxuriance of their meadows, and a general appearance of plenty and
neatness in everything that belongs to them."[26] Rush's praise of the
German mechanics is not less stinted. They were found in that day
mainly as "weavers, taylors, tanners, shoe-makers, comb-makers, smiths
of all kinds, butchers, paper makers, watchmakers, and sugar bakers."
Their first desire was "to become freeholders," and they almost
invariably succeeded. German merchants and bankers also prospered in
Philadelphia, Germantown, Lancaster, and other Pennsylvania towns.
One-third of the population of Pennsylvania, Rush says, was of German
origin, and for their convenience a German edition of the laws of the
State was printed.
After the Revolution, a number of the Hessian hirelings who had been
brought over by the British settled in America. They usually became
farmers, although some of the officers taught school. They joined the
German settlements, avoiding the English-speaking communities in the
United States because of the resentment shown towards them. Their
number is unknown. Frederick Kapp, a German writer, estimates that, of
the 29,875 sent over, 12,562 never returned--but he fails to tell us
how many of these remained because of Yankee bullets or bayonets.
The second period of German migration began about 1820 and lasted
through the Civil War. Before 1830 the number of immigrants fluctuated
between 200 and 2000 a year; in 1832 it exceeded 10,000; in 1834 it
was over 17,000; three years later it reached nearly 24,000; between
1845 and 1860 there arrived 1,250,000, and 200,000 came during the
Civil War.
There were several causes, working in close conjunction, that impelled
these thousands to leave Germany. Economic disturbances doubtless
turned the thoughts of the hungry and harassed to the land of plenty
across the sea. But a potent cause of the great migration of the
thirties and forties was the universal social and political discontent
which followed in the wake of the Napoleonic wars. The German people
were still divided into numberless small feudalities whose petty dukes
and princes clung tenaciously to their medieval prerogatives and
tyrannies. The contest against Napoleon had been waged by German
patriots not only to overcome a foreign foe but to break the tyrant at
home. The hope for constitutional government, for a representative
system and a liberal legislation in the German States rose mightily
after Waterloo. But the promises of princes made in days of stress
were soon forgotten, and the Congress of Vienna had established the
semblance of a German federation upon a unity of reactionary rulers,
not upon a constitutional, representative basis.
The reaction against this bitter disappointment was led by the eager
German youth, who, inspired by liberal ideals, now thirsted for
freedom of thought, of speech, and of action. Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, a
German patriot, organized everywhere _Turnvereine_, or gymnastic
clubs, as a tangible form of expressing this demand. Among the
students of the universities liberal patriotic clubs called
_Burschenschaften_ were organized, idealistic in their aims and
impractical in their propaganda, where "every man with his bonnet on
his head, a pot of beer in his hand, a pipe or seegar in his mouth,
and a song upon his lips, never doubting but that he and his
companions are training themselves to be the regenerators of Europe,"
vowed "the liberation of Germany." Alas for the enthusiasms of youth!
In 1817 the _Burschenschaften_ held a mass reunion at the Wartburg.
Their boyish antics were greatly exaggerated in the conservative
papers and the governments increased their vigilance. In 1819
Kotzebue, a reactionary publicist, was assassinated by a member of the
Jena _Burschenschaft_, and the retaliation of the government was
prompt and thoroughly Prussian--gagging of the press and of speech,
dissolution of all liberal organizations, espionage, the hounding of
all suspects. There seemed to remain only flight to liberal democratic
America. But the suppression of the clubs did not entirely put out
the fires of constitutional desires. These smoldered until the storms
of '48 fanned them into a fitful blaze. For a brief hour the German
Democrat had the feudal lords cowed. Frederick William, the "romantic"
Hohenzollern, promised a constitution to the threatening mob in
Berlin; the King of Saxony and the Grand Duke of Bavaria fled their
capitals; revolts occurred in Silesia, Posen, Hesse-Cassel, and
Nassau. Then struck the first great hour of modern Prussia, as, with
her heartless and disciplined soldiery, she restored one by one the
frightened dukes and princes to their prerogatives and repressed
relentlessly and with Junker rigor every liberal concession that had
crept into laws and institutions. Strangled liberalism could no longer
breathe in Germany, and thousands of her revolutionists fled to
America, bringing with them almost the last vestige of German
democratic leadership.
In the meantime, economic conditions in Germany remained
unsatisfactory and combined with political discontent to uproot a
population and transplant it to a new land. The desire to immigrate,
stimulated by the transportation companies, spread like a fever. Whole
villages sold out and, with their pastor or their physician at their
head, shipped for America. A British observer who visited the Rhine
country in 1846 commented on "the long files of carts that meet you
every mile, carrying the whole property of these poor wretches who are
about to cross the Atlantic on the faith of a lying prospectus." But
these people were neither "poor wretches" nor dupes. They had coin in
their pockets, and in their heads a more or less accurate knowledge of
the land of their desires. At this time the German bookshops were
teeming with little volumes giving, in the methodical Teutonic
fashion, conservative advice to prospective immigrants and rather
accurate descriptions of America, with statistical information and
abstracts of American laws. Many of the immigrants had further
detailed information from relatives and friends already prospering on
western farms or in rapidly growing towns. This was, therefore, far
from a pauper invasion. It included every class, even broken-down
members of the nobility. The majority were, naturally, peasants and
artisans, but there were multitudes of small merchants and farmers.
And the political refugees included many men of substantial property
and of notable intellectual attainments.[27]
Bremen was the favorite port of departure for these German emigrants
to America. Havre, Hamburg, and Antwerp were popular, and even London.
During the great rush every ship was overcrowded and none was over
sanitary. Steerage passengers were promiscuously crowded together and
furnished their own food; and the ship's crew, the captain, the agents
who negotiated the voyage, and the sharks who awaited their arrival in
America, all had a share in preying upon the inexperience of the
immigrants. Arrived in America, these Germans were not content to
settle, like dregs, in the cities on the seacoast. They were land
lovers, and westward they started at once, usually in companies,
sometimes as whole communities, by way of the Erie Canal and the Great
Lakes, and later by the new railway lines, into Ohio, Indiana,
Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, Wisconsin, and Iowa, where their
instinct for the soil taught them to select the most fertile spots.
Soon their log cabins and their ample barns and flourishing stock
bespoke their success.
The growing Western cities called to the skilled artisan, the small
tradesman, and the intellectuals. Cincinnati early became a German
center. In 1830 the Germans numbered five per cent of its population;
in 1840, twenty-three per cent; and in 1869, thirty-four per cent.
Milwaukee, "the German Athens," as it was once called, became the
distributing point of German immigration and influence in the
Northwest. Its _Gesangvereine_ and _Turnvereine_ became as famous as
its lager beer, and German was heard more frequently than English upon
its streets. St. Louis was the center of a German influence that
extended throughout the Missouri Valley. Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit,
Buffalo, and many of the minor towns in the Middle West received
substantial additions from this migration.
Unlike the Irish, the Germans brought with them a strange language,
and this proved a strong bond in that German solidarity which
maintained itself in spite of the influence of their new environment.
In the glow of their first enthusiasm many of the intellectuals
believed they could establish a German state in America. "The
foundations of a new and free Germany in the great North American
Republic shall be laid by us," wrote Follenius, the dreamer, who
desired to land enough Germans in "one of the American territories to
establish an essentially German state." In 1833 the Giessener
Gesellschaft, a company organized in the Grand Duchy of Hesse, grew
out of this suggestion and chose Arkansas as the site for its colony.
But unfavorable reports turned the immigrants to Missouri, where
settlements were made. These, however, never grew into a German state
but merged quite contentedly into the prosperous American population.
A second attempt, also from Hesse, had a tragic dénouement. A number
of German nobles formed a company called the Mainzer Adelsverein and
in 1842 sent two of their colleagues to Texas to seek out a site. The
place chosen was ill-suited for a colony, however, and the whole
enterprise from beginning to end was characterized by princely
incompetence. Thousands of immigrants, lured by the company's liberal
offers and glowing prospectus, soon found themselves in dire want;
many perished of disease and hunger; and the company ended in
ignominious disaster. The surviving colonists in Texas, however, when
they realized that they must depend upon their own efforts, succeeded
in finding work and eventually in establishing several flourishing
communities.
Finally, Wisconsin and Illinois were considered as possible sites for
a Germany in America. But this ambition never assumed a concrete form.
Everywhere the Americans, with their energy and organizing capacity,
had preceded the incoming Germans and retained the political
sovereignty of the American state.
But while they did not establish a German state, these immigrants did
cling to their customs wherever they settled in considerable numbers.
Especially did they retain their original social life, their
_Turnvereine_, their musical clubs, their sociable beer gardens, their
picnics and excursions, their churches and parochial schools. They
still celebrated their Christmas and other church festivals with
German cookery and _Kuchen_, and their weddings and christenings were
enlivened but rarely debauched with generous libations of lager beer
and wine. In the Middle West were whole regions where German was the
familiar language for two generations.
There were three strata to this second German migration. The earlier
courses were largely peasants and skilled artisans, those of the
decade of the Civil War were mostly of the working classes, and
between these came the "Forty-eighters." Upon them all, however,
peasant, artisan, merchant, and intellectual, their experiences in
their native land had made a deep impression. They all had a
background of political philosophy the nucleus of which was individual
liberty; they all had a violent distaste for the petty tyrannies and
espionages which contact with their own form of government had
produced; and in coming to America they all sought, besides farms and
jobs, political freedom. They therefore came in humility, bore in
patience the disappointments of the first rough contacts with pioneer
America and its nativism, and few, if any, cherished the hope of going
back to Germany. Though some of the intellectual idealists at first
had indefinite enthusiasms about a _Deutschtum_ in America, these
visions soon vanished. They expressed no love for the governments they
had left, however strong the cords of sentiment bound them to the
domestic and institutional customs of their childhood.
This was to a considerable degree an idealistic migration and as such
it had a lasting influence upon American life. The industry of these
people and their thrift, even to paring economy, have often been
extolled; but other nationalities have worked as hard and as
successfully and have spent as sparingly. The special contribution to
America which these Germans made lay in other qualities. Their artists
and musicians and actors planted the first seeds of æsthetic
appreciation in the raw West where the repertoire had previously been
limited to _Money Musk_, _The Arkansas Traveler_, and _Old Dog Tray_.
The liberal tendencies of German thought mellowed the austere
Puritanism of the prevalent theology. The respect which these people
had for intellectual attainments potently influenced the educational
system of America from the kindergarten to the newly founded state
universities. Their political convictions led them to espouse with
ardor the cause of the Union in the war upon slavery; and their sturdy
independence in partisan politics was no small factor in bringing
about civil service reform. They established German newspapers by the
hundreds and maintained many German schools and German colleges. They
freely indulged their love for German customs. But while their
sentimentalism was German, their realism was American. They considered
it an honor to become American citizens. Their leaders became American
leaders. Carl Schurz was not an isolated example. He was associated
with a host of able, careful, constructive Germans.
The greatest quarrels of these German immigrants with American ways
were over the so-called "Continental Sabbath" and the right to drink
beer when and where they pleased. "Only when his beer is in danger,"
wrote one of the leading Forty-eighters, "does the German-American
rouse himself and become a berserker." The great numbers of these men
in many cities and in some of the Western States enabled them to have
German taught in the public schools, though it is only fair to say
that the underlying motive was liberalism rather than Prussian
provincialism. Frederick Kapp, a distinguished interpreter of the
spirit of these Forty-eighters, expressed their conviction when he
said that those who cared to remain German should remain in Germany
and that those who came to America were under solemn obligations to
become Americans.
The descendants of these immigrants, the second and the third and
fourth generations, are now thoroughly absorbed into every phase of
American life. Their national idiosyncrasies have been modified and
subdued by the gentle but relentless persistence of the English
language and the robust vigor of American law and American political
institutions.
After 1870 a great change came over the German immigration. More and
more industrial workers, but fewer and fewer peasants, and very rarely
an intellectual or a man of substance, now appeared at Ellis Island
for admission to the United States.[28] The facilities for migrating
were vastly increased by the great transatlantic steamship companies.
The new Germans came in hordes even outnumbering the migrations of the
fifties. From 1870 to 1910 over three and a quarter millions arrived.
The highest point of the wave, however, was reached in 1882, when
250,630 German immigrants entered the United States. Thereafter the
number rapidly subsided; the lowest ebb, in 1898, brought only 17,111,
but from that time until the Great War the number of annual arrivals
fluctuated between 25,000 and 40,000.
The majority of those who came in the earlier part of this period made
their way to the Western lands. The Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa,
and the Far West, still offered alluring opportunities. But as these
lands were gradually taken, the later influx turned towards the
cities. Here the immigrants not only found employment in those trades
and occupations which the Germans for years had virtually monopolized,
but they also became factory workers in great numbers, and many of
them went into the mining regions.
It soon became apparent that the spirit of this latest migration was
very different from that of the earlier ones. "I do not believe,"
writes a well-informed and patriotic Lutheran pastor in 1917, "that
there is one among a thousand that has emigrated on account of
dissatisfaction with the German Government during the last forty-five
years." Humility on the part of these newcomers now gradually gave way
to arrogance. Instead of appearing eager to embrace their new
opportunities, they criticized everything they found in their new
home. The contemptuous hauteur and provincial egotism of the modern
Prussian, loathsome enough in the educated, were ridiculous in the
poor immigrants. Gradually this Prussian spirit increased. In 1883 it
could still be said of the three hundred German-American periodicals,
daily, weekly, and monthly, that in their tone they were thoroughly
American. But ten or fifteen years later changes were apparent. In
1895 there were some five hundred German periodicals published in
America, and many of the newer ones were rabidly Germanophile. The
editors and owners of the older publications were dying out, and new
hands were guiding the editorial pens. Often when there was no
American-born German available, an editor was imported fresh from
Germany. He came as a German from a new Germany--that Prussianized
Germany which unmasked itself in August, 1914, and which included in
its dream of power the unswerving and undivided loyalty of all Germans
who had migrated. The traditional American indifference and good
nature became a shield for the Machiavellian editors who now began to
write not for the benefit of America but for the benefit of Germany.
Political scandals, odious comparisons of American and German methods,
and adroit criticisms of American ways were the daily pabulum fed to
the German reader, who was left with the impression that everything in
the United States was wrong, while everything in Germany was right.
Before the United States entered the Great War, there was a most
remarkable unanimity of expression among these German publications;
afterwards, Congress found it necessary to enact rigorous laws against
them. As a result, many of them were suppressed, and many others
suspended publication.
German pastors, also, were not infrequently imported and brought with
them the virus of the new Prussianism. This they injected into their
congregations and especially into the children who attended their
catechetical instruction. German "exchange professors," in addition to
their university duties, usually made a pilgrimage of the cities where
the German influence was strong. The fostering of the German language
became no longer merely a means of culture or an appurtenance to
business but was insisted upon as a necessity to keep alive the German
spirit, _der Deutsche Geist_. German parents were warned, over and
over again, that once their children lost their language they would
soon lose every active interest in _Kultur_. The teaching of German in
the colleges and universities assumed, undisguised and unashamed, the
character of Prussian propaganda. The new immigrants from Germany were
carefully protected from the deteriorating effect of American
contacts, and, unlike the preceding generations of German immigrants,
they took very little part in politics. Those who arrived after 1900
refused, usually, to become naturalized.
The diabolical ingenuity of the German propaganda was subsequently
laid bare, and it is known today that nearly every German club,
church, school, and newspaper from about 1895 onward was being
secretly marshaled into a powerful Teutonic homogeneity of sentiment
and public opinion. The Kaiser boasted of his political influence
through the German vote. The German-American League, incorporated by
Congress, had its branches in many States. Millions of dollars were
spent by the Imperial German Government to corrupt the millions of
German birth in America. These disclosures, when they were ultimately
made, produced in the United States a sharp and profound reaction
against everything Teutonic. The former indifference completely
vanished and hyphen-hunting became a popular pastime. The charter of
the German-American League was revoked by Congress. City after city
took German from its school curriculum. Teutonic names of towns and
streets were erased--half a dozen Berlins vanished overnight--and in
their places appeared the names of French, British, and American
heroes.
But though the names might be erased, the German element remained. It
had become incorporated into the national bone and sinew, contributing
its thoroughness, stolidity, and solidity to the American stock. The
power of liberal political institutions in America has been revealed,
and thousands upon thousands of the sons and grandsons of German
immigrants crossed the seas in 1917 and 1918 to bear aloft the starry
standard upon the fields of Flanders against the arrogance and
brutality of the neo-Prussians.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 25: According to the Census of 1910 the nationality of the
total number of white persons of foreign stock in the United States is
distributed chiefly as follows:
Germany 8,282,618 or 25.7 per cent
Ireland 4,504,360 or 14.0 " "
Canada 2,754,615 or 8.6 " "
Russia 2,541,649 or 7.9 " "
England 2,322,442 or 7.2 " "
Italy 2,098,360 or 6.5 " "
Austria 2,001,559 or 6.2 " "
Furthermore, the significance of the foreign born element in the
population of the United States can be gathered from the fact that, in
1910, of the 91,972,266 inhabitants of the United States, no less than
13,515,836 or 14.6 per cent were born in some other country.]
[Footnote 26: _An Account of the Manners of the German Inhabitants of
Pennsylvania._]
[Footnote 27: J.G. Häcker, a well-informed and prosperous German who
took the journey by steerage in a sailing vessel in 1849, wrote an
instructive description of his experiences. Of his fellow passengers
he said: "Our company was very mixed. There were many young people:
clerks, artists, musicians, architects, miners, mechanics, men of
various professions, peasants, one man seventy-eight years old,
another very aged Bavarian farmer, several families of Jews, etc., and
a fair collection of children."]
[Footnote 28: There were three potent reasons for this migration:
financial stringency, overpopulation, and the growing rigor of the
military service. Over ten thousand processes a year were issued by
the German Government in 1872 and 1873 for evasion of military duty.
Germans who had become naturalized American citizens were arrested
when they returned to the Fatherland for a visit on the charge of
having evaded military service. A treaty between the two countries
finally adjusted this difficulty.]
CHAPTER VII
THE CALL OF THE LAND
For over a century after the Revolution the great fact in American
life was the unoccupied land, that vast stretch of expectant acreage
lying fallow in the West. It kept the American buoyant, for it was an
insurance policy against want. When his crops failed or his business
grew dull, there was the West. When panic and disaster overtook him,
there remained the West. When the family grew too large for the old
homestead, the sons went west. And land, unlimited and virtually free,
was the magnet that drew the foreign home seeker to the American
shores.
The first public domain after the formation of the Union extended from
the Alleghanies to the Mississippi. This area was enlarged and pushed
to the Rockies by the Louisiana Purchase (1803) and was again enlarged
and extended to the Pacific by the acquisition of Oregon (1846) and
the Mexican cession (1848). The total area of the United States from
coast to coast then comprised 3,025,000[29] square miles, of which
over two-thirds were at one time or another public domain. Before the
close of the Civil War the Government had disposed of nearly four
hundred million acres but still retained in its possession an area
three times as great as the whole of the territory which had been won
from Great Britain in the Revolution.
The public domain was at first looked upon as a source of revenue, and
a minimum price was fixed by law at $2 an acre, though this rate was
subsequently (1820) lowered to $1.25 an acre. The West always wanted
liberal land laws, but the South before the Civil War, fearing that
the growth of the West would give the North superior strength, opposed
any such generosity. When the North dominated Congress, the Homestead
Law of 1862 provided that any person, twenty-one years of age, who was
a citizen of the United States or who had declared his intention of
becoming one, could obtain title to 160 acres of land by living upon
it five years, making certain improvements, and paying the entry fee
of ten dollars.
The Government laid out its vast estate in townships six miles square,
which it subdivided into sections of 640 acres and quarter sections of
160 acres. The quarter section was regarded as the public land unit
and was the largest amount permitted for individual preëmption and
later for a homestead. Thus was the whole world invited to go west.
Under the new law, 1,160,000 acres were taken up in 1865.[30] The
settler no longer had to suffer the wearisome, heart-breaking tasks
that confronted the pioneer of earlier years, for the railway and
steamboat had for some time taken the place of the Conestoga wagon and
the fitful sailboat.
But the movement by railway and by steamboat was merely a continuation
on a greater scale of what had been going on ever since the
Revolution. The westward movement was begun, as we have seen, not by
foreigners but by American farmers and settlers from seaboard and back
country, thousands of whom, before the dawn of the nineteenth century,
packed their household goods and families into covered wagons and
followed the sunset trail.
The vanguard of this westward march was American, but foreign
immigrants soon began to mingle with the caravans. At first these
newcomers who heard the far call of the West were nearly all from the
British Isles. Indeed so great was the exodus of these farmers that in
1816 the British journals in alarm asked Parliament to check the
"ruinous drain of the most useful part of the population of the United
Kingdom." Public meetings were held in Great Britain to discuss the
average man's prospect in the new country. Agents of land companies
found eager crowds gathered to learn particulars. Whole neighborhoods
departed for America. In order to stop the exodus, the newspapers
dwelt upon the hardship of the voyage and the excesses of the
Americans. But, until Australia, New Zealand, and Canada began to
deflect migration, the stream to the United States from England,
Scotland, and Wales was constant and copious. Between 1820 and 1910
the number coming from Ireland was 4,212,169, from England 2,212,071,
from Scotland 488,749, and from Wales 59,540.
What proportion of this host found their way to the farms is not
known.[31] In the earlier years, the majority of the English and
Scotch sought the land. In western New York, in Ohio, Indiana,
Michigan, and contiguous States there were many Scotch and English
neighborhoods established before the Civil War. Since 1870, however,
the incoming British have provided large numbers of skilled mechanics
and miners, and the Welsh, also, have been drawn largely to the coal
mines.
The French Revolution drove many notables to exile in the United
States, and several attempts were made at colonization. The names
Gallipolis and Gallia County, Ohio, bear witness to their French
origin. Gallipolis was settled in 1790 by adventurers from Havre,
Bordeaux, Nantes, La Rochelle, and other French cities. The colony was
promoted in France by Joel Barlow, an Ananias even among land sharks,
representing the Scioto Land Company, or Companie du Scioto, one of
the numerous speculative concerns that early sought to capitalize
credulity and European ignorance of the West. The Company had, in
fact, no title to the lands, and the wretched colonists found
themselves stranded in a wilderness for whose conquest they were
unsuited. Of the colonists McMaster says: "Some could build coaches,
some could make perukes, some could carve, others could gild with such
exquisite carving that their work had been thought not unworthy of the
King."[32] Congress came to the relief of these unfortunate people in
1795 and granted them twenty-four thousand acres in Ohio. The town
they founded never fully realized their early dreams, but, after a
bitter struggle, it survived the log cabin days and was later honored
by a visit from Louis Philippe and from Lafayette. Very few
descendants of the French colonists share in its present-day
prosperity.
The majority of the French who came to America after 1820 were factory
workers and professional people who remained in the cities. There are
great numbers of French Canadians in the factory towns of New England.
There are, too, French colonies in America whose inhabitants cannot be
rated as foreigners, for their ancestors were veritable pioneers.
Throughout the Mississippi Valley, such French settlements as
Kaskaskia, Prairie du Rocher, Cahokia, and others have left much more
than a geographical designation and have preserved an old world aroma
of quaintness and contentment.
Swiss immigrants, to the number of about 250,000 and over 175,000
Dutch have found homes in America. The majority of the Swiss came from
the German cantons of Switzerland. They have large settlements in
Ohio, Wisconsin, and California, where they are very successful in
dairying and stock raising. The Hollanders have taken root chiefly in
western Michigan, between the Kalamazoo and Grand rivers, on the deep
black bottom lands suitable for celery and market gardening. The town
of Holland there, with its college and churches, is the center of
Dutch influence in the United States. Six of the eleven Dutch
periodicals printed in America are issued from Michigan, and the
majority of newcomers (over 80,000 have arrived since 1900) have made
their way to that State. These sturdy and industrious people from
Holland and Switzerland readily adapt themselves to American life.
No people have answered the call of the land in recent years as
eagerly as have the Scandinavians. These modern vikings have within
one generation peopled a large part of the great American Northwest.
In 1850 there were only eighteen thousand Scandinavians in the United
States. The tide rose rapidly in the sixties and reached its height in
the eighties, until over two million Scandinavian immigrants have made
America their home. They and their descendants form a very substantial
part of the rural population. There are nearly half as many Norwegians
in America as in Norway, which has emptied a larger proportion of its
population into the American lap than any other country save Ireland.
About one-fourth of the world's Swedes and over one-tenth of the
world's Danes dwell in America.
The term Scandinavian is here used in the loose sense to embrace the
peoples of the two peninsulas where dwell the Danes, the Norwegians,
and the Swedes. These three branches of the same family have much in
common, though for many years they objected to being thus rudely
shaken together into one ethnic measure. The Swede is the aristocrat,
the Norwegian the democrat, the Dane the conservative. The Swede,
polite, vivacious, fond of music and literature, is "the Frenchman of
the North," the Norwegian is a serious viking in modern dress: the
Dane remains a landsman, devoted to his fields, and he is more
amenable than his northern kinsmen to the cultural influence of the
South.
The Norwegian, true to viking traditions, led the modern exodus. In
1825 the sloop _Restoration_, the _Mayflower_ of the Norse, landed a
band of fifty-three Norwegian Quakers on Manhattan. These peasants
settled at first in western New York. But within a few years most of
them removed to Fox River, Illinois, whither were drawn most of the
Norwegians who migrated before 1850. After the Civil War, the stream
rapidly rose, until nearly seven hundred thousand persons of Norwegian
birth have settled in America.
The Swedish migration started in 1841, when Gustavus Unonius, a former
student of the University of Upsala, founded the colony of Pine Lake,
near Milwaukee. His followers have been described as a strange
assortment of "noblemen, ex-army officers, merchants, and
adventurers," whose experiences and talents were not of the sort that
make pioneering successful. Frederika Bremer, the noted Swedish
traveler, has left a description of the little cluster of log huts and
the handful of people who "had taken with them the Swedish inclination
for hospitality and a merry life, without sufficiently considering how
long it could last." Their experiences form a romantic prelude to the
great Swedish migration, which reached its height in the eighties.
Today the Swedes form the largest element in the Scandinavian influx,
for well over one million have migrated to the United States.
Nearly three hundred thousand persons of Danish blood have come into
the country since the Civil War. A large number migrated from
Schleswig-Holstein, after the forcible annexation of that province by
Prussia in 1866, preferring the freedom of America to the tyranny of
Berlin.
Whatever distinctions in language and customs may have characterized
these Northern peoples, they had one ambition in common--the desire to
own tillable land. So they made of the Northwest a new Scandinavia,
larger and far more prosperous than that which Gustavus Adolphus had
planned in colonial days for his colony in Delaware. One can travel
today three hundred miles at a stretch across the prairies of the
Dakotas or the fields of Minnesota without leaving land that is owned
by Scandinavians. They abound also in Wisconsin, Northern Illinois,
Eastern Nebraska, and Kansas, and Northern Michigan. Latterly the
lands of Oregon and Washington are luring them by the thousands, while
throughout the remaining West there are scattered many prosperous
farms cultivated by representatives of this hardy race. Latterly this
stream of Scandinavians has thinned to about one-half its former size.
In 1910, 48,000 came; in 1911, 42,000; in 1912, 27,000; in 1913,
33,000. The later immigrant is absorbed by the cities, or sails upon
the Great Lakes or in the coastwise trade, or works in lumber camps or
mines. Wherever you find a Scandinavian, however, he is working close
to nature, even though he is responding to the call of the new
industry.
It is the consensus of opinion among competent observers that these
northern peoples have been the most useful of the recent great
additions to the American race. They were particularly fitted by
nature for the conquest of the great area which they have brought
under subjugation, not merely because of their indomitable industry,
perseverance, honesty, and aptitude for agriculture, but because they
share with the Englishman and the Scotchman the instinct for
self-government. Above all, the Scandinavian has never looked upon
himself as an exile. From the first he has considered himself an
American. In Minnesota and Dakota, the Norse pioneer often preceded
local government. "Whenever a township became populous enough to have
a name as well as a number on the surveyor's map, that question was
likely to be determined by the people on the ground, and such names
as Christiana, Swede Plain, Numedal, Throndhjem, and Vasa leave no
doubt that Scandinavians officiated at the christening." These people
proceeded with the organizing of the local government and, "except for
the peculiar names, no one would suspect that the town-makers were
born elsewhere than in Massachusetts or New York."[33] This, too, in
spite of the fact that they continued the use of their mother tongue,
for not infrequently election notices and even civic ordinances and
orders were issued in Norwegian or Swedish. In 1893 there were 146
Scandinavian newspapers, and their number has since greatly increased.
In politics the Norseman learned his lesson quickly. Governors,
senators, and representatives in Congress give evidence to a racial
clannishness that has more than once proven stronger than party
allegiance. Yet with all their influence in the Northwest, they have
not insisted on unreasonable race recognition, as have the Germans in
Wisconsin and other localities. Minnesota and Dakota have established
classes in "the Scandinavian language" in their state universities,
evidently leaving it to be decided as an academic question which is
_the_ Scandinavian language. Without brilliance, producing few
leaders, the Norseman represents the rugged commonplace of American
life, avoiding the catastrophes of a soaring ambition on the one hand
and the pitfalls of a jaded temperamentalism on the other. Bent on
self-improvement, he scrupulously patronizes farmers' institutes, high
schools, and extension courses, and listens with intelligent patience
to lectures that would put an American audience to sleep. This son of
the North has greatly buttressed every worthy American institution
with the stern traditional virtues of the tiller of the soil. Strength
he gives, if not grace, and that at a time when all social
institutions are being shaken to their foundations.
Among the early homesteaders in the upper Mississippi Valley there
were a substantial number of Bohemians. In Nebraska they comprise nine
per cent of the foreign born population, in Oklahoma seven per cent,
and in Texas over six per cent. They began migrating in the turbulent
forties. They were nearly all of the peasant class, neat, industrious
and intelligent, and they usually settled in colonies where they
retained their native tongue and customs. They were opposed to
slavery and many enlisted in the Union cause.
Among the Polish immigrants who came to America before 1870, many
settled on farms in Illinois, Wisconsin, Texas, and other States. They
proved much more clannish than the Bohemians and more reluctant to
conform to American customs.
Many farms in the Northwest are occupied by Finns, of whom there were
in 1910 over two hundred thousand in the United States. They are a
Tatar race, with a copious sprinkling of Swedish blood. Illiteracy is
rare among them. They are eager patrons of night schools and libraries
and have a flourishing college near Duluth. They are eager for
citizenship and are independent in politics. The glittering
generalities of Marxian socialism seem peculiarly alluring to them;
and not a few have joined the I.W.W. Drink has been their curse, but a
strong temperance movement has recently made rapid headway among them.
They are natural woodmen and wield the axe with the skill of our own
frontiersmen. Their peculiar houses, made of neatly squared logs, are
features of every Finnish settlement. All of the North European races
and a few from Southern and Eastern Europe have contributed to the
American rural population; yet the Census of 1910 disclosed the fact
that of the 6,361,502 white farm operators in the United States, 75
per cent were native American and only 10.5 per cent were foreign
born.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 29: Oberholtzer, _History of the United States since the
Civil War_, vol I, p. 275.]
[Footnote 30: Oberholtzer, _supra cit._, p. 278.]
[Footnote 31: The census of 1910 discloses the fact that of the
6,361,502 farms in the United States 75 per cent were operated by
native white Americans and only 10.5 per cent by foreign born whites.
The foreign born were distributed as follows: Austria, 33,336;
Hungary, 3827; England, 39,728; Ireland, 33,480; Scotland, 10,220;
Wales, 4110; France, 5832; Germany, 221,800; Holland, 13,790; Italy,
10,614; Russia, 25,788; Poland, 7228; Denmark, 28,375; Norway, 59,742;
Sweden, 67,453; Switzerland, 14333; Canada, 61,878.]
[Footnote 32: _History of the People of the United States_, vol. VII,
p. 203.]
[Footnote 33: K.C. Babcock, _The Scandinavian Element in the United
States_, p. 143.]
CHAPTER VIII
THE CITY BUILDERS
"What will happen to immigration when the public domain has vanished?"
was a question frequently asked by thoughtful American citizens. The
question has been answered: the immigrant has become a job seeker in
the city instead of a home seeker in the open country. The last three
decades have witnessed "the portentous growth of the cities"--and they
are cities of a new type, cities of gigantic factories, towering
skyscrapers, electric trolleys, telephones, automobiles, and motor
trucks, and of fetid tenements swarming with immigrants. The
immigrants, too, are of a new type. When Henry James revisited Boston
after a long absence, he was shocked at the "gross little foreigners"
who infested its streets, and he said it seemed as if the fine old
city had been wiped with "a sponge saturated with the foreign mixture
and passed over almost everything I remembered and might have still
recovered."[34]
Until 1882 the bulk of immigration, as we have seen, came from the
north of Europe, and these immigrants were kinsmen to the American and
for the most part sought the country. The new immigration, however,
which chiefly sought the cities, hailed from southern and eastern
Europe. It has shown itself alien in language, custom, in ethnic
affinities and political concepts, in personal standards and
assimilative ambitions. These immigrants arrived usually in masculine
hordes, leaving women and children behind, clinging to their own kind
with an apprehensive mistrust of all things American, and filled with
the desire to extract from this fabulous mine as much gold as possible
and then to return to their native villages. Yet a very large number
of those who have gone home to Europe have returned to America with
bride or family. As a result the larger cities of the United States
are congeries of foreign quarters, whose alarming fecundity fills the
streets with progeny and whose polyglot chatter on pay night turns
even many a demure New England town into a veritable babel.
There are in the United States today roughly eight or ten millions of
these new immigrants. A line drawn southward from Minneapolis to St.
Louis and thence eastward to Washington would embrace over four-fifths
of them, for most of the great American cities lie in this
northeastern corner of the land. Whence come these millions? From the
vast and mysterious lands of the Slavs, from Italy, from Greece, and
from the Levant.
The term Slav covers a welter of nationalities whose common ethnic
heritage has long been concealed under religious, geographical, and
political diversities and feuds. They may be divided into North Slavs,
including Bohemians, Poles, Ruthenians, Slovaks, and "Russians," and
South Slavs, including Bulgarians, Serbians and Montenegrins,
Croatians, Slovenians, and Dalmatians. As one writer on these races
says, "It is often impossible in America to distinguish these national
groups.... Yet the differences are there.... In American communities
they have their different churches societies, newspapers, and a
separate social life.... The Pole wastes no love on the Russian, nor
the Ruthenian on the Pole, and a person who acts in ignorance of these
facts, a missionary for instance, or a political boss, or a trade
union organizer, may find himself in the position of a host who
should innocently invite a Fenian from Cork County to hobnob with an
Ulster Orangeman on the ground that both were Irish."[35]
The Bohemians (including the Moravians) are the most venturesome and
the most enlightened of the great Slav family. Many of them came to
America in the seventeenth century as religious pilgrims; more came as
political refugees after 1848; and since 1870, they have come in
larger numbers, seeking better economic conditions. All told, they
numbered over 220,000, from which it may be estimated that there are
probably today half a million persons of Bohemian parentage in the
United States. Chicago alone shelters over 100,000 of these people,
and Cleveland 45,000. These immigrants as a rule own the neat,
box-like houses in which they live, where flower-pots and tiny gardens
bespeak a love of growing things, and lace curtains, carpets, and
center tables testify to the influence of an American environment. The
Bohemians are much given to clubs, lodges, and societies, which
usually have rooms over Bohemian saloons. The second generation is
prone to free thinking and has a weakness for radical socialism.
The Bohemians are assiduous readers, and illiteracy is almost unknown
among them. They support many periodicals and several thriving
publishing houses. They cling to their language with a religious
fervor. Their literature and the history which it preserves is their
pride. Yet this love of their own traditions is no barrier,
apparently, to forming strong attachments to American institutions.
The Bohemians are active in politics, and in the cities where they
congregate they see that they have their share of the public offices.
There are more highly skilled workmen among them than are to be found
in any other Slavic group; and the second generation of Bohemians in
America has produced many brilliant professional men and successful
business men. As one writer puts it: "The miracle which America works
upon the Bohemians is more remarkable than any other of our national
achievements. The downcast look so characteristic of them in Prague is
nearly gone, the surliness and unfriendliness disappear, and the young
Bohemian of the second or third generation is as frank and open as his
neighbor with his Anglo-Saxon heritage."[36]
The bitter, political and racial suppression that made the Bohemian
surly and defiant seem, on the other hand, to have left the Polish
peasant stolid, patient, and very illiterate. Polish settlements were
made in Texas and Wisconsin in the fifties and before 1880 a large
number of Poles were scattered through New York, Pennsylvania, and
Illinois. Since then great numbers have come over in the new
migrations until today, it is estimated, at least three million
persons of Polish parentage live in the United States.[37] The men in
the earlier migrations frequently settled on the land; the recent
comers hasten to the mines and the metal working centers, where their
strong though untrained hands are in constant demand.
The majority of the Poles have come to America to stay. They remain,
however, very clannish and according to the Federal Industrial
Commission, without the "desire to fuse socially." The recent Polish
immigrant is very circumscribed in his mental horizon, clings
tenaciously to his language, which he hears exclusively in his home
and his church, his lodge, and his saloon, and is unresponsive to his
American environment. Not until the second and third generation is
reached does the spirit of American democracy make headway against his
lethal stolidity. Now that Poland has been made free as a result of
the Great War, it may be that the Pole's inherited indifference will
give way to national aspirations and that, in the resurrection of his
historic hope of freedom, he will find an animating stimulant.
The Pole, however, is more independent and progressive than the
Slovak, his brother from the northeastern corner of Hungary. For many
generations this segment of the Slav race has been pitifully crushed.
Turks, Magyars, and Huns have taken delight in oppressing him. An
early, sporadic migration of Slovaks to America received a sudden
impulse in 1882. About 200,000 have come since then, and perhaps twice
that number of persons of Slovak blood now dwell in the mining and
industrial centers of the United States. Many of them, however, return
to their native villages. They keep aloof from things American and
only too often prefer to live in squalor and ignorance. Their social
life is centered in the church, the saloon, and the lodge. It is
asserted that their numerous organizations have a membership of over
100,000, and that there were almost as many Slovak newspapers in
America as in Hungary.[38]
Little Russia, the seat of turmoil, is the home of the Ruthenians, or
Ukranians. They are also found in southeastern Galicia, northern
Hungary, and in the province of Bukowina. They have migrated from all
these provinces and about 350,000, it is estimated, now reside in the
United States. They, too, are birds of passage, working in the mines
and steel mills for the coveted wages that shall free them from debt
at home and insure their independence. Such respite as they take from
their labors is spent in the saloon, in the club rooms over the
saloon, or in church, where they hear no English speech and learn
nothing of American ways.
It is impossible to estimate the total number of Russian Slavs in the
United States, as the census figures until recently included as
"Russian" all nationalities that came from Russia. They form the
smallest of the Slavic groups that have migrated to America. From 1898
to 1909 only 66,282 arrived, about half of whom settled in
Pennsylvania and New York. It is surprising to note, however, that
every State in the Union except Utah and every island possession
except the Philippines has received a few of these immigrants. The
Director of Emigration at St. Petersburg in 1907 characterized these
people as "hardy and industrious," and "though illiterate they are
intelligent and unbigoted."[39]
So much in brief for the North Slavs. Of the South Slavs, the
Bulgarians possess racial characteristics which point to an
intermixture in the remote past with some Asiatic strain, perhaps a
Magyar blend. Very few Bulgarian immigrants, who come largely from
Macedonia, arrived before the revolution of 1904, when many villages
in Monastir were destroyed. For some years they made Granite City,
near St. Louis, the center of their activities but, like the Serbians,
they are now well scattered throughout the country. In Seattle, Butte,
Chicago, and Indianapolis they form considerable colonies. Many of
them return yearly to their native hills, and it is too early to
determine how fully they desire to adapt themselves to American ways.
Montenegro, Serbia, and Bulgaria, countries that have been thrust
forcibly into the world's vision by the Great War, have sent several
hundred thousand of their hardy peasantry to the United States. The
Montenegrins and Serbians, who comprise three-fourths of this
migration, are virtually one in speech and descent. They are to be
found in New England towns and in nearly every State from New York to
Alaska, where they work in the mills and mines and in construction
gangs. The response which these people make to educational
opportunities shows their high cultural possibilities.
The Croatians and Dalmatians, who constitute the larger part of the
southern Slav immigration, are a sturdy, vigorous people, and splendid
specimens of physical manhood. The Dalmatians are a seafaring folk
from the Adriatic coast, whose sailors may be found in every port of
the world. The Dalmatians have possessed themselves of the oyster
fisheries near New Orleans and are to be found in Mississippi making
staves and in California making wine. In many cities they manage
restaurants. The exceptional shrewdness of the Dalmatians is in bold
contrast to their illiteracy. They get on amazingly in spite of their
lack of education. Once they have determined to remain in this
country, they take to American ways more readily than do the other
southern Slavs.
Croatia, too, has its men of the sea, but in America most of the
immigrants of this race are to be found in the mines and coke furnaces
of Pennsylvania and West Virginia. In New York City there are some
15,000 Croatian mechanics and longshoremen. The silver and copper
mines of Montana also employ a large number of these people. It is
estimated that fully one-half of the Croatians return to their native
hills and that they contribute yearly many millions to the home-folks.
From the little province of Carniola come the Slovenians, usually
known as "Griners" (from the German _Krainer_, the people of the
Krain), a fragment of the Slavic race that has become much more
assimilated with the Germans who govern them than any other of their
kind. Their national costume has all but vanished and with it the
virile traditions of their forefathers. They began coming to America
in the sixties, and in the seventies they founded an important colony
at Joliet, Illinois. Since 1892 their numbers have increased rapidly,
until today about 100,000 live in the United States. Over one-half of
these immigrants are to be found in the steel and mining towns of
Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois, where the large majority of them are
unskilled workmen. Among the second generation, however, are to be
found a number of successful merchants.
All these numerous peoples have inherited in common the impassive,
patient temperament and the unhappy political fate of the Slav. Their
countries are mere eddies left by the mighty currents of European
conquest and reconquest, backward lands untouched by machine industry
and avoided by capital, whose only living links with the moving world
are the birds of passage, the immigrants who flit between the mines
and cities of America and these isolated European villages. Held
together by national costume, song, dance, festival, traditions, and
language, these people live in the pale glory of a heroic past. Most
of those who come to America are peasants who have been crushed by
land feudalism, kept in ignorance by political intolerance, and bound
in superstition by a reactionary ecclesiasticism. The brutality with
which they treat their women, their disregard for sanitary measures,
and their love for strong drink are evidences of the survival of
medievalism in the midst of modern life, as are their notions of
class prerogative and their concept of the State. Buffeted by the
world, their language suppressed, their nationalism reviled, poor,
ignorant, unskilled, these children of the open country come to the
ugliest spots of America, the slums of the cities, and the choking
atmosphere of the mines. Here, crowded in their colonies, jealously
shepherded by their church, neglected by the community, they remain
for an entire generation immune to American influences. According to
estimates given by Emily G. Balch,[40] between four and six million
persons of Slavic descent are now dwelling among us, and their
fecundity is amazing. Equally amazing is the indifference of the
Government and of Americans generally to the menace involved in the
increasing numbers of these inveterate aliens to institutions that are
fundamentally American.
The Lithuanians and Magyars are often classed with the Slavs. They
hotly resent this inclusion, however, for they are distinct racial
strains of ancient lineage. An adverse fate has left the Lithuanian
little of his old civilization except his language. Political and
economic suppression has made sad havoc of what was once a proud and
prosperous people. Most of them are now crowded into the Baltic
province that bears their name, and they are reduced to the mental and
economic level of the Russian moujik. In 1868 a famine drove the first
of these immigrants to America, where they were soon absorbed by the
anthracite mines of Pennsylvania. They were joined in the seventies by
numbers of army deserters. The hard times of the nineties caused a
rush of young men to the western El Dorado. Since then the influx has
steadily continued until now over 200,000 are in America. They
persistently avoid agriculture and seek the coal mine and the factory.
The one craft in which they excel is tailoring, and they proudly boast
of being the best dressed among all the Eastern-European immigrants.
The one mercantile ambition which they have nourished is to keep a
saloon. Drinking is their national vice; and they measure the social
success of every wedding, christening, picnic, and jollification by
its salvage of empty beer kegs.
Over 338,000 Magyars immigrated to the United States during the decade
ending 1910. These brilliant and masterful folk are a Mongoloid blend
that swept from the steppes of Asia across eastern Europe a thousand
years ago. As the wave receded, the Magyars remained dominant in
beautiful and fertile Hungary, where their aggressive nationalism
still brings them into constant rivalry on the one hand with the
Germans of Austria and on the other with the Slavs of Hungary. The
immigrants to America are largely recruited from the peasantry. They
almost invariably seek the cities, where the Magyar neighborhoods can
be easily distinguished by their scrupulously neat housekeeping, the
flower beds, the little patches of well-swept grass, the clean
children, and the robust and tidy women. Among them is less illiteracy
than in any other group from eastern and southern Europe, excepting
the Finns, who are their ethnic brothers. As a rule they own their own
homes. They learn the English language quickly but unfortunately
acquire with it many American vices. Drinking and carousing are
responsible for their many crimes of personal violence. They are
otherwise a sociable, happy people, and the cafes kept by Hungarians
are islands of social jollity in the desert of urban strife.
In bold contrast to these ardent devotees of nationalism, the Jew, the
man of no country and of all countries, is an American immigrant still
to be considered. By force of circumstance he became a city dweller;
he came from the European city; he remained in the American city; and
all attempts to colonize Jews on the land have failed. The doors of
this country have always been open to him. At the time of the
Revolution several thousand Jews dwelt in American towns. By 1850 the
number had increased to 50,000 and by the time of the Civil War to
150,000. The persecutions of Czar Alexander III in the eighties
swelled the number to over 400,000, and the political reactions of the
nineties added over one million. Today at least one fifth of the ten
million Jews in the world live in American cities.
The first to seek a new Zion in this land were the Spanish-Portuguese
Jews, who came as early as 1655. They remain a select aristocracy
among their race, clinging to certain ritualistic characteristics and
retaining much of the pride which their long contact with the Spaniard
has engendered. They are found almost exclusively in the eastern
cities, as successful bankers, merchants, and professional men. There
next came on the wave of the great German immigration the German Jews.
They are to be found in every city, large and small, engaged in
mercantile pursuits, especially in the drygoods and the clothing
business. Nearly all of the prominent Jews in America have come from
this stock--the great bankers, financiers, lawyers, merchants, rabbis,
scholars, and public men. It was, indeed, from their broad-minded
scholars that there originated the widespread liberal Judaism which
has become a potent ethical force in our great cities.
The Austrian and Hungarian Jews followed. The Jews had always received
liberal treatment in Hungary, and their mingling with the social
Magyars had produced the type of the coffeehouse Jew, who loved to
reproduce in American cities the conviviality of Vienna and Budapest
but who did not take as readily to American ways as the German Jew.
Most of the Jews from Hungary remained in New York, although Chicago
and St. Louis received a few of them. In commercial life they are
traders, pawnbrokers, and peddlers, and control the artificial-flower
and passementerie trade.
By far the largest group are the latest comers, the Russian Jews.
"Ultra orthodox," says Edward A. Steiner, "yet ultra radical; chained
to the past, and yet utterly severed from it; with religion permeating
every act of life, or going to the other extreme and having 'none of
it'; traders by instinct, and yet among the hardest manual laborers
of our great cities. A complex mass in which great things are yearning
to express themselves, a brooding mass which does not know itself and
does not lightly disclose itself to the outside."[41] Nearly a million
of these people are crowded into the New York ghettos. Large numbers
of them engage in the garment industries and the manufacture of
tobacco. They graduate also into junk-dealers, pawnbrokers, and
peddlers, and are soon on their way "up town." Among them socialism
thrives, and the second generation displays an unseemly haste to break
with the faith of its fathers.
The Jews are the intellectuals of the new immigration. They invest
their political ideas with vague generalizations of human
amelioration. They cannot forget that Karl Marx was a Jew: and one
wonders how many Trotzkys and Lenines are being bred in the stagnant
air of their reeking ghettos. It remains to be seen whether they will
be willing to devote their undoubted mental capacities to other than
revolutionary vagaries or to gainful pursuits, for they have a
tendency to commercialize everything they touch. They have shown no
reluctance to enter politics; they learn English with amazing
rapidity, throng the public schools and colleges, and push with
characteristic zeal and persistence into every open door of this
liberal land.
From Italy there have come to America well over three million
immigrants. For two decades before 1870 they filtered in at the
average rate of about one thousand a year; then the current increased
to several thousand a year; and after 1880 it rose to a flood.[42]
Over two-thirds of these Italians live in the larger cities;
one-fourth of them are crowded into New York tenements.[43] Following
in order, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, New Orleans, Cleveland, St.
Louis, Baltimore, Detroit, Portland, and Omaha have their Italian
quarters, all characterized by overcrowded boarding houses and
tenements, vast hordes of children, here and there an Italian bakery
and grocery, on every corner a saloon, and usually a private bank with
a steamship agency and the office of the local _padrone_. Scores of
the lesser cities also have their Italian contingent, usually in the
poorest and most neglected part of the town, where gaudily painted
door jambs and window frames and wonderfully prosperous gardens
proclaim the immigrant from sunny Italy. Not infrequently an old
warehouse, store, or church is transformed into an ungainly and
evil-odored barracks, housing scores of men who do their own washing
and cooking. Those who do not dwell in the cities are at work in
construction camps--for the Italian has succeeded the Irishman as the
knight of the pick and shovel. The great bulk of these swarthy,
singing, hopeful young fellows are peasants, unskilled of hand but
willing of heart. Nearly every other one is unable to read or write.
They have not come for political or religious reasons but purely as
seekers for wages, driven from the peasant villages by overpopulation
and the hazards of a precarious agriculture.
They have come in two distinct streams: one from northern Italy,
embracing about one-fifth of the whole; the other from southern Italy.
The two streams are quite distinct in quality. Northern Italy is the
home of the old masters in art and literature and of a new
industrialism that is bringing renewed prosperity to Milan and Turin.
Here the virile native stock has been strengthened with the blood of
its northern neighbors. They are a capable, creative, conservative,
reliable race. On the other hand, the hot temper of the South has been
fed by an infusion of Greek and Saracen blood. In Sicily this strain
shows at its worst. There the vendetta flourishes; and the Camorra and
its sinister analogue, the Black Hand, but too realistically remind us
that thousands of these swarthy criminals have found refuge in the
dark alleys of our cities. Even in America the Sicilian carries a
dirk, and the "death sign" in a court room has silenced many a
witness. The north Italians readily identify themselves with American
life. Among them are found bakers, barbers, and marble cutters, as
well as wholesale fruit and olive oil merchants, artists, and
musicians. But the south Italian is a restless, roving creature, who
dislikes the confinement and restraint of the mill and factory. He is
found out of doors, making roads and excavations, railways,
skyscrapers, and houses. If he has a liking for trade he trundles a
pushcart filled with fruit or chocolates; or he may turn a jolly
hurdy-gurdy or grind scissors. In spite of his native sociability,
the south Italian is very slow to take to American ways. As a rule, he
comes here intending to go back when he has made enough money. He has
the air of a sojourner. He is picturesque, volatile, and incapable of
effective team work.
About 300,000 Greeks have come to America between 1908 and 1917,
nearly all of them young men, escaping from a country where they had
meat three times a year to a land where they may have it three times a
day. "The whole Greek world," says Henry P. Fairchild, writing in
1911, "may be said to be in a fever of emigration.... The strong young
men with one accord are severing home ties, leaving behind wives and
sweethearts, and thronging to the shores of America in search of
opportunity and fortune." Every year they send back handsome sums to
the expectant family. Business is an instinct with the Greek, and he
has almost monopolized the ice cream, confectionery, and retail fruit
business, the small florist shops and bootblack stands in scores of
towns, and in every large city he is running successful restaurants.
As a factory operative he is found in the cotton mills of New England,
but he prefers merchandizing to any other calling.
Years ago when New Bedford was still a whaling port a group of
Portuguese sailors from the Azores settled there. This formed the
nucleus of the Portuguese immigration which, in the last decade,
included over 80,000 persons. Two-thirds of these live in New England
factory towns, the remaining third, strange to say, have found their
way to the other side of the continent, where they work in the gardens
and fruit orchards of California. New Bedford is still the center of
their activity. They are a hard-working people whose standard of
living, according to official investigations "is much lower than that
of any other race," of whom scarcely one in twenty become citizens,
and who evince no interest in learning or in manual skill.
Finally, American cities are extending the radius of their magnetism
and are drawing ambitious tradesmen and workers from the Levant. Over
100,000 have come from Arabia, Syria, Armenia, and Turkey. The
Armenians and Syrians, forming the bulk of this influx, came as
refugees from the brutalities of the Mohammedan régime. The Levantine
is first and always a bargainer. His little bazaars and oriental rug
shops are bits of Cairo and Constantinople, where you are privileged
to haggle over every purchase in true oriental style. Even the
peddlers of lace and drawn-work find it hard to accustom themselves to
the occidental idea of a market price. With all their cunning as
traders, they respect learning, prize manual skill, possess a fine
artistic sense, and are law-abiding. The Armenians especially are
eager to become American citizens. Since the settlement of the
Northwestern lands, many thousands of Scandinavians and Finns have
flocked to the cities, where they are usually employed as skilled
craftsmen.[44]
Thus the United States, in a quarter of a century, has assumed a
cosmopolitanism in which the early German and Irish immigrants appear
as veteran Americans. This is not a stationary cosmopolitanism, like
that of Constantinople, the only great city in Europe that compares
with New York, Chicago, or Boston in ethnic complexity. It is a
shifting mass. No two generations occupy the same quarters. Even the
old rich move "up town" leaving their fine houses, derelicts of a
former splendor, to be divided into tenements where six or eight
Italian or Polish families find ample room for themselves and a crowd
of boarders.
Thousands of these migratory beings throng the steerage of
transatlantic ships every winter to return to their European homes.
The steamship companies, whose enterprise is largely responsible for
this flow of populations, reap their harvest; and many a decaying
village buried in the southern hills of Europe, or swept by the winds
of the great Slav plains, owes its regeneration ultimately to American
dollars.
They pay the price of their success, these flitting beings, links
between distant lands and our own. The great maw of mine and factory
devours thousands. Their lyric tribal songs are soon drowned by the
raucous voices of the city; their ancient folk-dances, meant for a
village green, not for a reeking dance-hall, lose here their native
grace; and the quaint and picturesque costumes of the European
peasant give place to American store clothes, the ugly badge of
equality.
The outward bound throng holds its head high, talks back at the
steward, and swaggers. It has become "American." The restless fever of
the great democracy is in its veins. Most of those who return home
will find their way back with others of their kind to the teeming
hives and the coveted fleshpots they are leaving. And again they will
tax the ingenuity of labor unions, political and social organizations,
schools, libraries, and churches, in the endeavor to transform
medieval peasants into democratic peers.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 34: This lament of Henry James's is cited by E.A. Ross in
_The Old World in the New_, p. 101.]
[Footnote 35: Emily Greene Balch, _Our Slavic Fellow Citizens_, p.
8-9.]
[Footnote 36: Edward A. Steiner, _On the Trail of the Immigrant_, p.
228.]
[Footnote 37: This is an estimate made by the Reverend W.X. Kruszka of
Ripon, Wisconsin, as reported by E.G. Balch in _Our Slavic Fellow
Citizens_, p. 262. Of this large number, Chicago claims 350,000; New
York City, 250,000; Buffalo, 80,000; Milwaukee, 75,000; Detroit,
75,000; while at least a dozen other cities have substantial Polish
settlements. These numbers include the suburbs of each city.]
[Footnote 38: This is accounted for by the fact that the Hungarian
Government rigorously censored Slovak publications.]
[Footnote 39: Since the Russo-Japanese War, Siberia has absorbed great
numbers of Russian immigrants. This accounts for the small number that
have come to America.]
[Footnote 40: _Our Slavic Fellow Citizens_, p. 280.]
[Footnote 41: _On the Trail of the Immigrant_, p. 27.]
[Footnote 42: The census figures show that approximately half the
Italian immigrants return to their native land. American officers in
the Great War were surprised to find so many Italian soldiers who
spoke English. In 1910 there remained in the United States only
1,343,000 Italians who were born in Italy, and the total number of
persons of Italian stock in the United States was 2,098,000.]
[Footnote 43: According to the Census of 1910 there were 544,000
Italians in New York City]
[Footnote 44: The Census of 1910 gives the following distribution of
the American white population by percentages:
------------------------+--------+-----------------+---------
| | Native born |
| Native | of Foreign or | Foreign
Location | stock | mixed parentage | born
------------------------+--------+-----------------+---------
Rural districts | 64.1 | 13.3 | 7.5
| | |
Cities 2,500- 10,000 | 57.5 | 20.6 | 13.9
" 10,000- 25,000 | 50.4 | 24.6 | 17.4
" 25,000-100,000 | 45.9 | 26.5 | 20.2
" 100,000-500,000 | 38.9 | 31.3 | 22.1
" 200,000 and over | 25.6 | 37.2 | 33.6
------------------------+--------+-----------------+---------
The native white element predominates in the country but is only a
fraction of the population in the larger cities.]
CHAPTER IX
THE ORIENTAL
America, midway between Europe and Asia, was destined to be the
meeting-ground of Occident and Orient. It was in the exciting days of
'49 that gold became the lodestone to draw to California men from the
oriental lands across the Pacific. The Chinese for the moment overcame
their religious aversion to leaving their native haunts and, lured by
the promise of fabulous wages, made their way to the "gold hills." Of
the three hundred thousand who came to America during the three
decades of free entry, the large majority were peasants from the rural
districts in the vicinity of Canton. They were thrifty, independent,
sturdy, honest young men who sought the great adventure unaccompanied
by wife or family. Chinese tradition forbade the respectable woman to
leave her home, even with her husband; and China was so isolated from
the world, so encrusted in her own traditions that out of her
uncounted millions even the paltry thousands of peasants and workmen
who filtered through the port of Canton into the great world were
bound by ancient precedent as firmly as if they had remained at home.
They invariably planned to return to the Celestial Empire and it was
their supreme wish that, if they died abroad, their bodies be buried
in the land of their ancestors.
The Chinaman thus came to America as a workman adventurer, not as a
prospective citizen. He preserved his queue, his pajamas, his
chopsticks, and his joss in the crude and often brutal surroundings of
the mining camp. He maintained that gentle, yielding, unassertive
character which succumbs quietly to pressure at one point, only to
reappear silently and unobtrusively in another place. In the wild
rough and tumble of the camp, where the outlaw and the bully found
congenial refuge, the celestial did not belie his name. He was indeed
of another world, and his capacity for patience, his native dignity
without suspicion of hauteur, baffled the loud self-assertion of the
Irish and the Anglo-Saxon.
During the first years of the gold rush, the Chinaman was welcome in
California because he was necessary. He could do so many things that
the miner disdained or found no time to do. He could cook and wash,
and he could serve. He was a rare gardener and a patient day laborer.
He could learn a new trade quickly. In the city he became a useful
domestic servant at a time when there were very few women. In all his
tasks he was neat and had a genius for noiselessly minding his own
business.
As the number of miners increased, race prejudice asserted itself.
"California for Americans" came to be a slogan that reflected their
feelings against Mexicans, Spanish-Americans, and Chinese in the
mines. Race riots, often instigated by men who had themselves but
recently immigrated to America, were not infrequent. In these
disorders the Chinese were no match for the aggressors and in
consequence were forced out of many good mining claims.
The labor of the cheap and faithful Chinese appealed to the business
instincts of the railroad contractors who were constructing the
Pacific railways and they imported large numbers. In 1866 a line of
steamships was established to run regularly between Hong Kong and San
Francisco. In 1869 the first transcontinental railway was completed
and American laborers from the East began to flock to California,
where they immediately found themselves in competition with the
Mongolian standard of living. Race rivalry soon flared up and the
anti-Chinese sentiment increased as the railroads neared completion
and threw more and more of the oriental laborers into the general
labor market. Chinese were hustled out of towns. Here and there
violence was done. For example, in the Los Angeles riots of October
24, 1871, fifteen Chinamen were hanged and six were shot by the mob.
This prejudice, based primarily upon the Chinaman's willingness to
work long hours for little pay and to live in quarters and upon fare
which an Anglo-Saxon would find impossible, was greatly increased by
his strange garb, language, and customs. The Chinaman remained in
every essential a foreigner. In his various societies he maintained to
some degree the patriarchal government of his native village. He
shunned American courts, avoided the Christian religion, rarely
learned much of the English language, and displayed no desire to
become naturalized. Instead of sympathy in the country of his sojourn
he met discrimination, jealousy, and suspicion. For many years his
testimony was not permitted in the courts. His contact with only the
rough frontier life failed to reveal to him the gentle amenities of
the white man's faith, and everywhere the upper hand seemed turned
against him. So he kept to himself, and this isolation fed the rumors
that were constantly poisoning public opinion. Chinatown in the public
mind became a synonym for a nightmare of filth, gambling,
opium-smoking, and prostitution.
Alarm was spreading among Americans concerning the organizations of
the Chinese in the United States. Of these, the Six Companies were the
most famous. Mary Roberts Coolidge, after long and careful research,
characterized these societies as "the substitute for village and
patriarchal association, and although purely voluntary and benevolent
in their purpose, they became, because of American ignorance and
prejudice, the supposed instruments of tyranny over their
countrymen."[45] They each had a club house, where members were
registered and where lodgings and other accommodations were provided.
The largest in 1877 had a membership of seventy-five thousand; the
smallest, forty-three thousand. The Chinese also maintained trade
guilds similar in purpose to the American trade union. Private or
secret societies also flourished among them, some for good purposes,
others for illicit purposes. Of the latter the Highbinders or Hatchet
Men became the most notorious, for they facilitated the importation of
Chinese prostitutes. Many of these secret societies thrived on
blackmail, and the popular antagonism to the Six Companies was due to
the outrages committed by these criminal associations.
When the American labor unions accumulated partisan power, the Chinese
became a political issue. This was the greatest evil that could befall
them, for now racial persecution received official sanction and passed
out of the hands of mere ruffians into the custody of powerful
political agitators. Under the lurid leadership of Dennis Kearney, the
Workingman's party was organized for the purpose of influencing
legislation and "ridding the country of Chinese cheap labor." Their
goal was "Four dollars a day and roast beef"; and their battle cry,
"The Chinese must go." Under the excitement of sand-lot meetings, the
Chinese were driven under cover. In the riots of July, 1877, in San
Francisco, twenty-five Chinese laundries were burned. "For months
afterward," says Mary Roberts Coolidge, "no Chinaman was safe from
personal outrage even on the main thoroughfares, and the perpetrators
of the abuses were almost never interfered with so long as they did
not molest white men's property."[46]
This anti-Chinese epidemic soon spread to other Western States.
Legislatures and city councils vied with each other in passing laws
and ordinances to satisfy the demands of the labor vote. All manner of
ingenious devices were incorporated into tax laws in an endeavor to
drive the Chinese out of certain occupations and to exclude them from
the State. License and occupation taxes multiplied. The Chinaman was
denied the privilege of citizenship, was excluded from the public
schools, and was not allowed to give testimony in proceedings relating
to white persons. Manifold ordinances were passed intended to harass
and humiliate him: for instance, a San Francisco ordinance required
the hair of all prisoners to be cut within three inches of the scalp.
Most extreme and unreasonable discriminations against hand laundries
were framed. The new California constitution of 1879 endowed the
legislature and the cities with large powers in regulating the
conditions under which Chinese would be tolerated. In 1880 a state law
declared that all corporations operating under a state charter should
be prohibited from employing Chinese under penalty of forfeiting
their charter. Chinese were also excluded from employment in all
public works. Nearly all these laws and ordinances, however, were
ultimately declared to be unconstitutional on account of their
discriminatory character or because they were illegal regulations of
commerce.
The States having failed to exclude the Chinese, the only hope left
was in the action of the Federal Government. The earliest treaties and
trade conventions with China (1844 and 1858) had been silent upon the
rights and privileges of Chinese residing or trading in the United
States. In 1868, Anson Burlingame, who had served for six years as
American Minister to China, but who had now entered the employ of the
Chinese Imperial Government, arrived at the head of a Chinese mission
sent for the purpose of negotiating a new treaty which should insure
reciprocal rights to the Chinese. The journey from San Francisco to
Washington was a sort of triumphal progress and everywhere the Chinese
mission was received with acclaim. The treaty drawn by Secretary
Seward was ratified on July 28, 1868, and was hailed even on the
Pacific coast as the beginning of more fortunate relations between the
two countries. The treaty acknowledged the "inherent and inalienable
right of man to change his home and allegiance, and also the mutual
advantage of the free migration and emigration of their citizens and
subjects respectively, from the one country to the other, for purposes
of curiosity, of trade or as permanent residents." It stated
positively that "citizens of the United States visiting or residing in
China shall enjoy the same privileges, immunities, and exemptions in
respect to travel and residence as may be enjoyed by the citizens of
the most favored nation. And, reciprocally, Chinese subjects visiting
or residing in the United States shall enjoy the same privileges,
immunities, and exemptions in respect to travel or residence." The
right to naturalization was by express statement not conferred by the
treaty upon the subjects of either nation dwelling in the territory of
the other. But it was not in any way prohibited.
The applause which greeted this international agreement had hardly
subsided before the anti-Chinese agitators discovered that the treaty
was in their way and they thereupon demanded its modification or
abrogation. They now raised the cry that the Chinese were a threat to
the morals and health of the country, that the majority of Chinese
immigrants were either coolies under contract, criminals, diseased
persons, or prostitutes. As a result, in 1879 a representative from
Nevada, one of the States particularly interested, introduced in
Congress a bill limiting to fifteen the Chinese passengers that any
ship might bring to the United States on a single voyage, and
requiring the captains of such vessels to register at the port of
entry a list of their Chinese passengers. The Senate added an
amendment requesting the President to notify the Chinese Government
that the section of the Burlingame treaty insuring reciprocal
interchange of citizens was abrogated. After a very brief debate the
measure that so flagrantly defied an international treaty passed both
houses. It was promptly vetoed, however, by President Hayes on the
ground that it violated a treaty which a friendly nation had carefully
observed. If the Pacific cities had cause of complaint, the President
preferred to remedy the situation by the "proper course of diplomatic
negotiations."[47]
The President accordingly appointed a commission, under the
chairmanship of James B. Angell, president of the University of
Michigan, to negotiate a new treaty. The commission proceeded to China
and completed its task in November, 1880. The new treaty provided
that, "whenever, in the opinion of the Government of the United
States, the coming of Chinese laborers to the United States, or their
residence therein, affects or threatens to affect the interests of
that country, or to endanger the good order of the said country or of
any locality within the territory thereof, the Government of China
agrees that the Government of the United States may regulate, limit,
or suspend such coming or residence, but may not absolutely prohibit
it." Other Chinese subjects who had come to the United States, "as
travelers, merchants, or for curiosity," and laborers already in the
United States, were to "be allowed to go and come of their own free
will," with all of the "rights, privileges, immunities, and exemptions
which are accorded to the citizens of the most favored nation." The
United States furthermore undertook to protect the Chinese in the
United States against "ill treatment" and to "devise means for their
protection."
Two years after the ratification of this treaty, a bill was introduced
to prohibit the immigration of Chinese labor for twenty years. Both
the great political parties had included the subject in their
platforms in 1880. The Democrats had espoused exclusion and were
committed to "No more Chinese immigration"; the Republicans had
preferred restriction by "just, humane, and reasonable laws." The bill
passed, but President Arthur vetoed it on the ground that prohibiting
immigration for so long a period transcended the provisions of the
treaty. A bill which was then passed shortening the period of the
restriction to ten years received the President's signature, and on
August 5, 1882, America shut the door in the face of Chinese labor.
The law, however, was very loosely drawn and administrative confusion
arose at once. Chinese laborers leaving the United States were
required to obtain a certificate from the collector of customs at the
port of departure entitling them to reëntry. Other Chinese--merchants,
travelers, or visitors--who desired to come to the United States were
required to have a certificate from their Government declaring that
they were entitled to enter under the provisions of the treaty. As
time went on, identification became a joke, trading in certificates a
regular pursuit, and smuggling Chinese across the Canadian border a
profitable business. Moreover, in the light of the law, who was a
"merchant" and who a "visitor"? In 1884 Congress attempted to remedy
these defects of phraseology and administration by carefully framed
definitions and stringent measures.[48] The Supreme Court upheld the
constitutionality of exclusion as incident to American sovereignty.
Meanwhile in the West the popular feeling against the Chinese refused
to subside. At Rock Springs, Wyoming, twenty-eight Chinese were killed
and fifteen were injured by a mob which also destroyed Chinese
property amounting to $148,000. At Tacoma and Seattle, also, violence
descended upon the Mongolian. In San Francisco a special grand jury
which investigated the operation of the exclusion laws and a committee
of the Board of Supervisors which investigated the condition of
Chinatown both made reports that were violently anti-Chinese. A state
anti-Chinese convention soon thereafter declared that the situation
"had become well-nigh intolerable." So widespread and venomous was the
agitation against Chinese that President Cleveland was impelled to
send to Congress two special messages on the question, detailing the
facts and requesting Congress to pay the Chinese claims for indemnity
which Wyoming refused to honor. The remonstrances of the Chinese
Government led to the drafting of a new treaty in 1888. But while
China was deliberating over this treaty, Congress summarily shut off
any hope for immediate agreement by passing the Scott Act prohibiting
the return of any Chinese laborer after the passage of the act,
stopping the issue of any more certificates of identification, and
declaring void all certificates previously issued. It is difficult to
avoid the conclusion that this brutal political measure was passed
with an eye to the Pacific electoral vote in the pending election. In
the next presidential year the climax of harshness was reached in the
Geary law, which required, within an unreasonably short time, the
registration of all Chinese in the United States. The Chinese, under
legal advice, refused to register until the Federal Supreme Court had
declared the law constitutional. Subsequently the time for
registration was extended.
The anti-Chinese fanaticism had now reached its highest point. While
the Government maintained its policy of exclusion, it modified the
drastic details of the law. In 1894 a new treaty provided for the
exclusion of laborers for ten years, excepting registered laborers who
had either parent, wife, or child in the United States, or who
possessed property or debts to the amount of one thousand dollars. It
required all resident Chinese laborers to register, and the Chinese
Government was similarly entitled to require the registration of all
American laborers resident in China. The treaty made optional the
clause requiring merchants, travelers, and other classes privileged to
come to the United States, to secure a certificate from their
Government vised by the American representative at the port of
departure.
In 1898 General Otis extended the exclusion acts to the Philippines by
military order, owing to the fact that the country was in a state of
war, and Congress extended them to the Hawaiian Islands. In 1904 China
refused to continue the treaty of 1894, and Congress substantially
reenacted the existing laws "in so far as not inconsistent with treaty
obligations." Thus the legal _status quo_ has been maintained, and the
Chinese population in America is gradually decreasing. No new
laborers are permitted to come and those now here go home as old age
overtakes them. But the public has come to recognize that diplomatic
circumlocution cannot conceal the crude and harsh treatment which the
Chinaman has received; that the earlier laws were based upon reports
that greatly exaggerated the evils and were silent upon the virtues of
the Oriental; and that a policy which had its conception in frontier
fears and in race prejudice was sustained by politicians and
perpetuated by demagogues.
Rather suddenly the whole drama of discrimination was re-opened by the
arrival of a considerable number of Japanese laborers in America. In
1900, there were some twenty-four thousand in the United States and a
decade later this number had increased threefold. About one-half of
them lived in California, and the rest were to be found throughout the
West, especially in Washington, Colorado, and Oregon. They were nearly
all unmarried young men of the peasant class. Unlike the Chinese, they
manifested a readiness to conform to American customs and an eagerness
to learn the language and to adopt American dress. The racial gulf,
however, is not bridged by a similarity in externals. The Japanese
possess all the deep and subtle contrasts of mentality and ideality
which differentiate the Orient from the Occident. A few are not averse
to adopting Christianity; many more are free-thinkers; but the bulk
remain loyal to Buddhism. They have reproduced here the compact trade
guilds of Japan. The persistent aggressiveness of the Japanese, their
cunning, their aptitude in taking advantage of critical circumstances
in making bargains, have by contrast partially restored to popular
favor the patient, reliable Chinaman.
At first the Japanese were welcomed as unskilled laborers. They found
employment on the railroads, in lumber mills and salmon canneries, in
mines and on farms, and in domestic service. But they soon showed a
keen propensity for owning or leasing land. The Immigration Commission
found that in 1909 they owned over sixteen thousand acres in
California and leased over one hundred and thirty-seven thousand.
Nearly all of this land they had acquired in the preceding five years.
In Colorado they controlled over twenty thousand acres, and in Idaho
and Washington over seven thousand acres each. This acreage represents
small holdings devoted to intensive agriculture, especially to the
raising of sugar beets, vegetables, and small fruits.
The hostility which began to manifest itself against the Japanese
especially in California brought that State into sharp contact with
the Federal Government. In 1906 the San Francisco authorities excluded
the Japanese from the public schools. This act was immediately and
vigorously protested by the Japanese Government. After due
investigation, the matter was finally adjusted at a conference held in
Washington between President Roosevelt and a delegation from
California. This incident served to re-awaken the ghost of Mongolian
domination on the Pacific coast, for it occurred during the notorious
regime of Mayor Schmitz. Labor politics were rampant. Isolated
instances of violence against Japanese occurred, and hoodlums, without
fear of police interference, attacked a number of Japanese
restaurants. Political candidates were pledged to an anti-Japanese
policy.
In 1907 the two governments reached an agreement whereby the details
of issuing passports to Japanese laborers who desired to return to the
United States was virtually left in the hands of the Japanese
Government, which was opposed to the emigration of its laboring
population. As a consequence of this agreement, passports are granted
only to laborers who had previously been residents of the United
States or to parents, wives, and children of Japanese laborers
resident in America. Under authority of the immigration law of 1907,
the President issued an order (March 14, 1907) denying admission to
"Japanese and Korean laborers, skilled or unskilled, who have received
passports to go to Mexico, Canada, Hawaii and come therefrom" to the
United States.
Anti-Japanese feeling was crystallized into the alien land bill of
California in 1913. So serious was the international situation that
President Wilson sent Mr. Bryan, then Secretary of State, across the
continent to confer with the California legislature and to determine
upon some action that would at the same time meet the needs of the
State and "leave untouched the international obligations of the United
States." The law subsequently passed was thought by the Californians
to appease both of these demands.[49] But the Japanese Government made
no less than five vigorous formal protests and filled a lengthy brief
which characterized the law as unfair and intentionally discriminating
and in violation of the treaty of Commerce and Navigation entered into
in 1911. While anti-Japanese demonstrations were taking place in
Washington, there was a corresponding outbreak of anti-American
feeling in the streets of Tokyo. On February 2, 1914, during the
debate on a new immigration bill, an amendment was proposed in the
House of Representatives, at the instigation of members from the
Pacific coast, excluding all Asiatics, except such as had their entry
right established by treaty. But this drastic proposal was defeated by
a decisive vote.
The oriental question in America is further complicated by the fact
that since 1905 some five thousand East Indians have come to the
United States. Of these the majority are Hindoos, the remainder being
chiefly Afghans. How these people who have lived under British rule
will adapt themselves to American life and institutions remains to be
seen.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 45: _Chinese Immigration_, p. 402.]
[Footnote 46: _Chinese Immigration_, p. 265.]
[Footnote 47: So intense was the feeling in the West that at this time
a letter purporting to have been written by James A. Garfield, the
Republican candidate, favoring unrestricted immigration, was published
on the eve of the Presidential election (1880). Though the letter was
shown to be a forgery, yet it was not without influence. In California
Garfield received only one of the six electoral votes; and in Nevada
he received none. In Denver, where only four hundred Chinese lived,
race riots occurred which cost one Chinaman his life and destroyed
Chinese property to the amount of $50,000.]
[Footnote 48: Wong Wing _vs_. U.S., 163 U.S. 235.]
[Footnote 49: The Alien Land Act of May 19, 1913, confers upon all
aliens eligible to citizenship the same rights as citizens in the
owning and leasing of real property; but in the case of other aliens
(_i.e._ Asiatics) it limits leases of land for agricultural purposes
to terms not exceeding three years and permits ownership "to the
extent and for the purposes prescribed by any treaty."]
CHAPTER X
RACIAL INFILTRATION
With the free land gone and the cities crowded to overflowing, the
door of immigration, though guarded, nevertheless remains open and the
pressure of the old-world peoples continues. Where can they go? They
are filling in the vacant spots of the older States, the abandoned
farms, stagnant half-empty villages, undrained swamps, uninviting
rocky hillsides. This infiltration of foreigners possessing themselves
of rejected and abandoned land, which has only recently begun, shows
that the peasant's instinct for the soil will reassert itself when the
means are available and the way opens. It is surprising, indeed, how
many are the ways that are opening for this movement. Transportation
companies are responsible for a number of colonies planted bodily in
cut-over timber regions of the South. The journals and the real estate
agents of the different races are always alert to spy out
opportunities. Dealing in second-hand farms has become a considerable
industry. The advertising columns of Chicago papers announce hundreds
of farms for sale in northern Michigan and Wisconsin. In all the older
States there are for sale thousands of acres of tillable land which
have been left by the restless shiftings of the American population.
In New England the abandoned farm has long been an institution.
Throughout the East there are depleted and dying villages, their
solidly built cottages hidden in the matting of trees and shrubs which
neglect has woven about them. One can see paralysis creeping over them
as the vines creep over their deserted thresholds and they surrender
one by one the little industries that gave them life. These are the
opportunities of the immigrant peasant. Wherever the new migration
swarms, there the receding tide leaves a few energetic individuals who
have made for themselves a permanent home. In the wake of construction
gangs and along the lines of railways and canals one discovers these
immigrant families taking root in the soil. In the smaller cities, an
immigrant day laborer will often invest his savings in a tumble-down
house and an acre of land, and almost at once he becomes the nucleus
for a gathering of his kind. The market gardens that surround the
large cities offer work to the children of the factory operatives, and
there they swarm over beet and onion fields like huge insects with an
unerring instinct for weeds. Now and then a family finds a forgotten
acre, builds a shack, and starts a small independent market garden.
Within a few years a whole settlement of shacks grows up around it,
and soon the trucking of the neighborhood is in foreign hands.
Seasonal agricultural work often carries the immigrant into distant
canning centers, hop fields, cranberry marshes, orchards, and
vineyards. Every time a migration of this sort occurs, some settlers
remain on land previously thought unfit for cultivation--perhaps a
swamp which they drain or a sand-hill which they fertilize and nurture
into surprising fertility by constant toil. This racial seepage is
confined almost wholly to the Italian and the Slav.
There is a vast acreage of unoccupied good land in the South, which
the negro, usually satisfied with a bare living, has neither the
enterprise nor the thrift to cultivate. The prejudice of the former
slave owner against the foreign immigration for many years retarded
the development of this land. About 1880, however, groups of Italians,
attracted by the sunny climate and the opportunities for making a
livelihood, began to seep into Louisiana. By 1900 they numbered over
seventeen thousand. When direct sailings between the Mediterranean and
the Gulf of Mexico were established, their numbers increased rapidly
and New Orleans became one of the leading Italian centers in the
United States. From the city they soon spread into the adjoining
region. Today they grow cotton, sugar-cane, and rice in nearly all the
Southern States. In the deep black loam of the Yazoo Delta they
prosper as cotton growers. They have transformed the neglected slopes
of the Ozarks into apple and peach orchards. New Orleans, Dallas,
Galveston, Houston, San Antonio, and other Southern cities are
supplied with vegetables from the Italian truck farms. At
Independence, Louisiana, a colony raises strawberries. In the black
belt of Arkansas they established Sunnyside in 1895, a colony which
has survived many vicissitudes and has been the parent of other
similar enterprises. In Texas there are a number of such colonies, of
which the largest, at Bryan, numbers nearly two thousand persons. In
California the Italian owns farms, orchards, vineyards, market
gardens, and even ranches. Here he finds the cloudless sky and mild
air of his native land. The sunny slopes invite vine culture.
In the North and the East the alert Italian has found many
opportunities to buy land. In the environs of nearly every city
northward from Norfolk, Virginia, are to be found his truck patches.
At Vineland and Hammonton, New Jersey, large colonies have flourished
for many years. In New York and Pennsylvania, many a hill farm that
was too rocky for its Yankee owner, and many a back-breaking clay
moraine in Ohio and Indiana has been purchased for a small cash
payment and, under the stimulus of the family's coaxing, now yields
paying crops, while the father himself also earns a daily wage in the
neighboring town. Where one such Italian family is to be found, there
are sure to be found at least two or three others in the neighborhood,
for the Italians hate isolation more than hunger. Often they are
clustered in colonies, as at Genoa and Cumberland in Wisconsin, where
most of them are railroad workmen paying for the land out of their
wages.
The Slavs, too, wedge into the most surprising spaces. Their colonies
and settlements are to be found in considerable numbers in every part
of the Union except the far South. They are on the cut-over timber
lands of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, usually engaged in
dairying or raising vegetables for canning. On the great prairies in
Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, and the Dakotas, the Bohemians and the Poles
have learned to raise wheat and corn, and in Texas, Oklahoma, and
Arkansas, they have shown themselves skillful in cotton raising.
Wherever fruit is grown on the Pacific slope, there are Bohemians,
Slavonians, and Dalmatians. In New England, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana,
and Maryland, the Poles have become pioneers in the neglected corners
of the land. For instance in Orange County, New York, a thriving
settlement from old Poland now flourishes where a quarter of a century
ago there was only a mosquito breeding swamp. The drained area
produces the most surprising crops of onions, lettuce, and celery.
Many of these immigrants own their little farms. Others work on shares
in anticipation of ownership, and still others labor merely for the
season, transients who spend the winter either in American factories
or flit back to their native land.
In Pennsylvania it is the mining towns which furnished recruits for
this landward movement. In some of the counties an exchange of
population has been taking place for a decade or more. The land
dwelling Americans are moving into the towns and cities. The farms
are offered for sale. Enterprising Slavic real estate dealers are not
slow in persuading their fellow countrymen to invest their savings in
land.
The Slavonic infiltration has been most marked in New England,
especially in the Connecticut Valley. From manufacturing centers like
Chicopee, Worcester, Ware, Westfield, and Fitchburg, areas of Polish
settlements radiate in every direction, alien spokes from American
hubs. Here are little farming villages ready made in attractive
settings whose vacant houses invite the alien peasant. A Polish family
moves into a sedate colonial house; often a second family shares the
place, sometimes a third or a fourth, each with a brood of children
and often a boarder or two. The American families left in the
neighborhood are scandalized by this promiscuity, by the bare feet and
bare heads, by the unspeakable fare, the superstition and credulity,
and illiteracy and disregard for sanitary measures, and by the
ant-like industry from starlight to starlight. Old Hadley has become a
prototype of what may become general if this racial infiltration is
not soon checked. In 1906 the Poles numbered one-fifth of the
population in that town, owned one-twentieth of the land, and
produced two-thirds of the babies. Dignified old streets that
formerly echoed with the tread of patriots now resound to the din of
Polish weddings and christenings, and the town that sheltered William
Goffe, one of the judges before whom Charles I was tried, now houses
Polish transients at twenty-five cents a bed weekly.
The transient usually returns to Europe, but the landowner remains.
His kind is increasing yearly. It is even probable that in a
generation he will be the chief landowner of the Connecticut Valley.
It will take more than an association of old families, determined on
keeping the ancient homes in their own hands, to check this
transformation.
The process of racial replacement is most rapid in the smaller
manufacturing towns. In the New England mills the Yankee gave way to
the Irish, the Irish gave way to the French Canadian, and the French
Canadian has been largely superseded by the Slav and the Italian.
Every one of the older industrial towns has been encrusted in layer
upon layer of foreign accretions, until it is difficult to discover
the American core. Everywhere are the physiognomy, the chatter, and
the aroma of the modern steerage. Lawrence, Massachusetts, is typical
of this change. In 1848 it had 5923 inhabitants, of whom 63.3 per cent
were Americans, 36 per cent were Irish, and about forty white persons
belonged to other nationalities. In 1910 the same city had 85,000
inhabitants, of whom only about 14 per cent were Americans, and the
rest foreigners, two-thirds of the old and one-third of the new
immigration.
A like transformation has taken place in the manufacturing towns of
New York, New Jersey, and Delaware and in the iron and steel towns of
Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and the Middle West. For forty years
after the establishment of the first iron furnace in Johnstown,
Pennsylvania, in 1842, the mills were manned exclusively by Americans,
English, Welsh, Irish, and Germans. In 1880 Slavic names began to
appear on the pay rolls. Soon thereafter Italians and Syrians were
brought into the town, and today sixty per cent of the population is
of foreign birth, largely from southeastern Europe. The native
Americans and Welsh live in two wards, and clustered around them are
settlements of Italians, Slovaks, and Croatians.
The new manufacturing towns which are dependent upon some single
industry are almost wholly composed of recent immigrants. Gary,
Indiana, built by the United States Steel Corporation, and Whiting,
Indiana, established by the Standard Oil Company for its refining
industry, are examples of new American towns of exotic populations. At
a glass factory built in 1890 in the village of Charleroi,
Pennsylvania, over ten thousand Belgians, French, Slavs, and Italians
now labor. An example of lightning-like displacement of population is
afforded by the steel and iron center at Granite City and Madison,
Illinois. The two towns are practically one industrial community,
although they have separate municipal organizations. A steel mill was
erected in 1892 upon the open prairies, and in it American, Welsh,
Irish, English, German, and Polish workmen were employed. In 1900
Slovaks were brought in, and two years later there came large numbers
of Magyars, followed by Croatians. In 1905 Bulgarians began to arrive,
and within two years over eight thousand had assembled. Armenians,
Servians, Greeks, Magyars, every ethnic faction found in the racial
welter of southeastern Europe, is represented among the twenty
thousand inhabitants that dwell in this new industrial town. In
"Hungary Hollow" these race fragments isolate themselves, effectively
insulated against the currents of American influence.
The mining communities reveal this relative displacement of races in
its most disheartening form. As early as 1820 coal was taken from the
anthracite veins of northeastern Pennsylvania, but until 1880 the
industry was dominated by Americans and north Europeans. In 1870 out
of 108,000 foreign born in this region, 105,000 or over ninety-seven
per cent came from England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and Germany. In
1880 a change began and continued until in 1910 less than one-third of
the 267,000 foreign born were of northern European extraction. In 1870
there were only 306 Slavs and Italians in the entire region; in 1890
there were 43,000; in 1909 there were 89,000; and in 1910 the number
increased to 178,000.
Today these immigrants from the south of Europe have virtually
displaced the miner from the north. They have rooted out the decencies
and comforts of the earlier operatives and have supplanted them with
the promiscuity, the filth, and the low economic standards of the
medieval peasant. There are no more desolate and distressing places in
America than the miserable mining "patches" clinging like lichens to
the steep hill sides or secluded in the valleys of Pennsylvania In the
bituminous fields conditions are no better. In the town of Windber in
western Pennsylvania, for example, some two thousand experienced
English and American miners were engaged in opening the veins in 1897.
No sooner were the mines in operation than the south European began to
drift in. Today he outnumbers and underbids the American and the north
European. He lives in isolated sections, reeking with everything that
keeps him a "foreigner" in the heart of America. The coal regions of
Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois and the ore
regions of northern Michigan and Minnesota are rapidly passing under
the same influence.
Every mining and manufacturing community is thus an ethnic pool,
whence little streams of foreigners trickle over the land. These
isolated miners and tillers of the soil are more immune to American
ideals than are their city dwelling brethren. They are not jostled and
shaken by other races; no mental contagion of democracy reaches them.
But within the towns and cities another process of replacement is
going on. Its index is written large in the signs over shops and
stores and clearly in the lists of professional men in the city
directories and in the pay roll of the public school teachers. The
unpronounceable Slavic combinations of consonants and polysyllabic
Jewish patronymics are plentiful, while here and there an Italian name
makes its appearance. The second generation is arriving. The sons and
daughters are leaving the factory and the construction gang for the
counter, the office, and the schoolroom.
American ideals and institutions have borne and can bear a great deal
of foreign infiltration. But can they withstand saturation?
CHAPTER XI
THE GUARDED DOOR
"Whosoever will may come" was the generous welcome which America
extended to all the world for over a century. Many alarms, indeed,
there were and several well-defined movements to save America from the
foreigner. The first of these attempts resulted in the ill-fated Alien
and Sedition laws of 1798, which extended to fourteen years the period
of probation before a foreigner could be naturalized and which
attempted to safeguard the Government against defamatory attacks. The
Jeffersonians, who came into power in 1801 largely upon the issue
raised by this attempt to curtail free speech, made short shrift of
this unpopular law and restored the term of residence to five years.
The second anti-foreign movement found expression in the Know-Nothing
party, which rose in the decade preceding the Civil War. The third
movement brought about a secret order called the American Protective
Association, popularly known as the A.P.A., which, like the
Know-Nothing hysteria, was aimed primarily at the Catholic Church. Its
platform stated that "the conditions growing out of our immigration
laws are such as to weaken our democratic institutions," and that "the
immigrant vote, under the direction of certain ecclesiastical
institutions," controlled politics. In 1896 the organization claimed
two and a half million adherents, and the air was vibrant with ominous
rumors of impending events. But nothing happened. The A.P.A.
disappeared suddenly and left no trace.
For over a century it was almost universally believed that the
prosperity of the country depended largely upon a copious influx of
population. This sentiment found expression in President Lincoln's
message to Congress on December 8, 1863, in which he called
immigration a "source of national wealth and strength" and urged
Congress to establish "a system for the encouragement of immigration."
In conformity with this suggestion, Congress passed a law designed to
aid the importation of labor under contract. But the measure was soon
repealed, so that it remains the only instance in American history in
which the Federal Government attempted the direct encouragement of
general immigration.[50]
It was in 1819 that the first Federal law pertaining to immigration
was passed. It was not prompted by any desire to regulate or restrict
immigration, but aimed rather to correct the terrible abuses to which
immigrants were subject on shipboard. So crowded and unwholesome were
these quarters that a substantial percentage of all the immigrants who
embarked for America perished during the voyage. The law provided that
ships could carry only two passengers for every five tons burden; it
enjoined a sufficient supply of water and food for crew and
passengers; and it required the captains of vessels to prepare lists
of their passengers giving age, sex, occupation, and the country
whence they came. The law, however good its intention, was loosely
drawn and indifferently enforced. Terrible abuses of steerage
passengers crowded into miserable quarters were constantly brought to
the public notice. From time to time the law was amended, and the
advent of steam navigation brought improved conditions without,
however, adequate provision for Federal inspection.
Indeed such supervision and care as immigrants received was provided
by the various States. Boston, New York, Baltimore, and other ports of
entry, found helpless hordes left at their doors. They were the prey
of loan sharks and land sharks, of fake employment agencies, and every
conceivable form of swindler. Private relief was organized, but it
could reach only a small portion of the needy. About three-fourths of
the immigrants disembarked at the port of New York, and upon the State
of New York was imposed the obligation of looking after the thousands
of strangers who landed weekly at the Battery. To cope with these
conditions the State devised a comprehensive system and entrusted its
enforcement to a Board of Commissioners of Immigration, erected
hospitals on Ward's Island for sick and needy immigrants, and in 1855
leased for a landing place Castle Garden, which at once became the
popular synonym for the nation's gateway. Here the Commissioners
examined and registered the immigrants, placed at their disposal
physicians, money changers, transportation agents, and advisers, and
extended to them a helping hand. The Federal Government was
represented only by the customs officers who ransacked their baggage.
In 1875 the Federal Supreme Court decided that it was unconstitutional
for a State to regulate immigration. "We are of the opinion," said the
Court, "that this whole subject has been confided to Congress by the
Constitution; that Congress can more appropriately and with more
acceptance exercise it than any other body known to our law, state or
national; that, by providing a system of laws in these matters
applicable to all ports and to all vessels, a serious question which
has long been a matter of contest and complaint may be effectively and
satisfactorily settled."[51] Congress dallied seven years with this
important question, and was finally forced to act when New York
threatened to close Castle Garden. In 1882 a Federal immigration law
assessed a head tax of fifty cents on every passenger, not a citizen,
coming to the United States, and provided that the States should share
with the Secretary of the Treasury the obligation of its enforcement.
This law inaugurated the policy of selective immigration, as it
excluded convicts, lunatics, idiots, and persons likely to become a
public charge. Three years later, contract laborers were also
excluded.
The unprecedented influx of immigrants now began to arouse public
discussion. Over 788,000 arrived in America during the first year the
new law was in operation. In 1889 both the Senate and the House
appointed standing committees on immigration. The several
investigations which were held culminated in the law of 1891, wherein
the list of ineligibles was extended to include persons suffering from
a loathsome or contagious disease, polygamists, and persons assisted
in coming by others, unless upon special inquiry they were found not
to belong to any of the excluded classes. Thus for the first time the
Federal Government assumed complete control of immigration. Now also
both the great political parties adopted planks in their national
platforms favoring the restriction of immigration. The Republicans
favored "the enactment of more stringent laws and regulations for the
restriction of criminal, pauper, and contract immigration." The
Democrats "heartily" approved "all legislative efforts to prevent the
United States from being used as a dumping ground for the known
criminals and professional paupers of Europe," and they favored the
exclusion of Chinese laborers. They favored, however, the admission of
"industrious and worthy" Europeans.
Selective immigration thus became a political issue in 1892, partly
under the stimulus of labor unions, which feared an over-supply of
labor, and partly because of the growing popular belief that many
undesirable foreigners were entering the country. No adequate and just
criteria for any process of selection have been discovered. In 1896
Senator Lodge introduced an immigration bill, which contained the
famous literacy test, excluding all persons between fourteen and sixty
years of age "who cannot both read and write the English language or
some other language." The bill was simultaneously introduced into the
House of Representatives by McCall of Massachusetts. The debate on
this measure marks a new departure in immigration policy. A senatorial
inquiry made among the States in the preceding year had disclosed a
universal preference for immigrants from northern Europe. Moreover, a
number of States through their governors, had declared that further
immigration was not desired immediately; and the opinion prevailed
that the great influx from southeastern Europe should be checked.
Fortified by such solidarity of sentiment, Congress passed the Lodge
bill with certain amendments. President Cleveland, however, returned
it with a strong veto message on March 2, 1897. He could not concur
in so radical a departure from the traditional liberal policy of the
Government; and he believed the literacy test so artificial that it
was more rational "to admit a hundred thousand immigrants who, though
unable to read and write, seek among us only a home and opportunity to
work, than to admit one of those unruly agitators and enemies of
governmental control who can not only read and write, but delights in
arousing by inflammatory speech the illiterate and peacefully inclined
to discontent and tumult." The House passed the bill over the
President's veto, but the Senate took no further action.
In 1898 the Industrial Commission was empowered "to investigate
questions pertaining to immigration" and presented a report which
prepared the way for the immigration law of 1903, approved on the 3rd
of March. This law, which was based upon a careful preliminary
inquiry, may be called the first comprehensive American immigration
statute. It perfected the administrative machinery, raised the head
tax, and multiplied the vigilance of the Government against evasions
by the excluded classes. Anarchists and prostitutes were added to the
list of excluded persons. The literacy test was inserted by the House
but was rejected by the Senate.
This law, however, did not allay the demand for a more stringent
restriction of immigration. A few persons believed in stopping
immigration entirely for a period of years. Others would limit the
number of immigrants that should be permitted to enter every year. But
it was felt throughout the country that such arbitrary checks would be
merely quantitative, not qualitative, and that undesirable foreigners
should be denied admission, no matter what country they hailed from. A
notable immigration conference which was called by the National Civic
Federation in December, 1905, and which represented all manner of
public bodies, recommended the "exclusion of persons of enfeebled
vitality" and proposed "a preliminary inspection of intending
immigrants before they embark." President Roosevelt laid the whole
matter before Congress in several vigorous messages in 1906 and 1907.
He pointed to the fact that
In the year ending June 30, 1905, there came to the United
States 1,026,000 alien immigrants. In other words, in the
single year ... there came ... a greater number of people
than came here during the one hundred and sixty-nine years of
our colonial life. ... It is clearly shown in the report of
the Commissioner General of Immigration that, while much of
this enormous immigration is undoubtedly healthy and natural
... a considerable proportion of it, probably a very large
proportion, including most of the undesirable class, does not
come here of its own initiative but because of the activity
of the agents of the great transportation companies.... The
prime need is to keep out all immigrants who will not make
good American citizens.
In consonance with this spirit, the law of 1907 was passed. It
increased the head tax to four dollars and provided rigid scrutiny
over the transportation companies. The excluded classes of immigrants
were minutely defined, and the powers and duties of the Commissioner
General of Immigration were very considerably enlarged. The act also
created the Immigration Commission, consisting of three Senators,
three members of the House, and three persons appointed by the
President, for making "full inquiry, examination, and investigation
... into the subject of immigration." Endowed with plenary power, this
commission made a comprehensive investigation of the whole question.
The President was authorized to "send special commissioners to any
foreign country for the purpose of regulating by international
agreement ... the immigration of aliens to the United States."
Here at last is congressional recognition of the fact that immigration
is no longer merely a domestic question, but that it has, through
modern economic conditions, become one of serious international
import. No treaties have been perfected under this authority. The
question, however, received serious attention in 1909 when Lieutenant
Joseph Petrosino of the New York police was murdered in Sicily by
banditti, whither he had pursued a Black Hand criminal from the East
Side.
In the meantime many measures for restricting immigration were
suggested in Congress. Of these, the literacy test met with the most
favor. Three times in recent years Congress enacted it into law, and
each time it was returned with executive disapproval: President Taft
vetoed the provision in 1913, and President Wilson vetoed the acts of
1915 and 1917. In his last veto message on January 29, 1917, President
Wilson said that "the literacy test ... is not a test of character, of
quality, or of personal fitness, but would operate in most cases
merely as a penalty for lack of opportunity in the country from which
the alien seeking admission came."
Congress, however, promptly passed the bill over the President's
objections, and so twenty years after President Cleveland's veto of
the Lodge Bill, the literacy test became the standard of fitness for
immigrant admission into the United States.[52] The law excludes all
aliens over sixteen years of age who are physically capable of reading
and yet who cannot read. They are required to read "not less than
thirty or more than eighty words in ordinary use" in the English
language or some other language or dialect. Aliens who seek admission
because of religious persecution, and certain relatives of citizens or
of admissible aliens, are exempted.
The debate upon this law disclosed the transformation that has come
over the nation in its attitude towards the alien. Exclusion was the
dominant word. Senator Reed of Missouri wished to exclude African
immigrants; the Pacific coast Representatives insisted upon exclusion
of Asiatics, in the face of serious admonitions of the Secretary of
State that such a course would cause international friction; the labor
members were scornful in their denunciation of "the pauper and
criminal classes" of Europe. The traditional liberal sympathies of the
American people found but few champions, so completely had the change
been wrought in the thirty years since the Federal Government assumed
control of immigration.
By these tokens the days of unlimited freedom in migration are
numbered. Nations are beginning to realize that immigration is but the
obverse of emigration. Its dual character constitutes a problem
requiring delicate international readjustments. Moreover, the
countries released to a new life and those quickened to a new
industrialism by the Great War will need to employ all their muscle
and talents at home.
It is an inspiring drama of colonization that has been enacted on this
continent in a relatively short period. Its like was never witnessed
before and can never be witnessed again. Thirty-three nationalities
were represented in the significant group of American pilgrims that
gathered at Mount Vernon on July 4, 1918, to place garlands of native
flowers upon the tomb of Washington and to pledge their honor and
loyalty to the nation of their adoption. This event is symbolic of the
great fact that the United States is, after all, a nation of
immigrants, among whom the word foreigner is descriptive of an
attitude of mind rather than of a place of birth.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 50: Congress has on several occasions granted aid for
specific colonies or groups of immigrants.]
[Footnote 51: Henderson et al. _vs_. The Mayor of New York City et al.
92 U.S., 259.]
[Footnote 52: The new act took effect May 1, 1917.]
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
GENERAL HISTORIES
EDWARD CHANNING, _History of the United States_, 4 vols. (1905). Vol.
II. Chapter XIV contains a fascinating account of "The Coming of the
Foreigner."
John Fiske, _Dutch and Quaker Colonies in America_, 2 vols. (1899).
The story of "The Migration of the Sects" is charmingly told.
John B. McMaster, _History of the People of the United States_, 8
vols. (1883-1913). Scattered throughout the eight volumes are copious
accounts of the coming of immigrants, from the year of American
independence to the Civil War. The great German and Irish inundations
are dealt with in volumes VI and VII.
J.H. Latané, _America as a World Power_ (1907). Chapter XVII gives a
concise summary of immigration for the years 1880-1907.
WORKS ON IMMIGRATION
_Reports of the Immigration Commission, appointed under the
Congressional Act of Feb. 20, 1907_. 42 vols. (1911). This is by far
the most exhaustive study that has been made of the immigration
question. It embraces a wide range of details, especially upon the
economic and sociological aspects of the problem.
Census Bureau, _A Century of Population Growth from the First Census
of the United States to the Twelfth, 1790-1900_ (1909). The best
analysis of the population of the United States. It contains a number
of chapters on the population at the time of the First Census in 1790.
John R. Commons, _Races and Immigrants in America_ (1907).
Prescott F. Hall, _Immigration and its Effects upon the United States_
(1906).
Henry P. Fairchild, _Immigration, a World Movement and its American
Significance_ (1913). A good historical survey of immigration as well
as a suggestive discussion of its sociological and economic bearings.
Jeremiah W. Jenks and W. Jett Lauck, _The Immigration Problem_ (1913).
A summary of the Report of the Immigration Commission.
Peter Roberts, _The New Immigration_ (1912). A discussion of the
recent influx from Southeastern Europe.
E.A. Ross, _The Old World in the New_ (1914) contains some refreshing
racial characteristics.
Richmond Mayo-Smith, _Emigration and Immigration_ (1890). This is one
of the oldest American works on the subject and remains the best
scientific discussion of the sociological and economic aspects of
immigration.
Edward A. Steiner, _On the Trail of the Immigrant_ (1906). A popular
and sympathetic account of the new immigration.
THE NEGRO
B.G. Brawley, _A Short History of the American Negro_ (1913).
W.E.B. Du Bois, _The Negro_ (1915). A small well-written volume, with
a useful bibliography and an illuminating chapter on the negro in the
United States; also, by the same author, _Suppression of the African
Slave Trade_ (1896).
Carter G. Woodson, _A Century of Negro Migration_ (1918).
J.R. Spears, _The American Slave Trade_ (1900).
A.H. Stone, _Studies in the American Race Problem_ (1908). Contains
several of Walter F. Wilcox's valuable statistical studies on this
subject.
J.A. Tillinghast, _The Negro in Africa and America_ (1902) contains a
suggestive comparison of negro life in Africa and America.
SPECIAL GROUPS
Kendrick C. Babcock, _The Scandinavian Element in the United States_
(1914). The best treatise on this subject.
Emily Greene Balch, _Our Slavic Fellow Citizens_ (1910). A
comprehensive study of the Slav in America.
J.M. Campbell, _A History of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick_ (1892).
Mary Roberts Coolidge, _Chinese Immigration_ (1909). A sympathetic and
detailed account of the Chinaman's experience in America.
A.B. Faust, _The German Element in the United States_ 2 vols. (1909).
Like some other books written to prove the vast influence of certain
elements of the population, this work is not modest in its claims.
Henry Jones Ford, _The Scotch-Irish in America_ (1915).
Lucian J. Fosdick, _The French Blood in America_ (1906). Devoted
principally to the Huguenot exiles and their descendants.
Charles A. Hanna, _The Scotch-Irish, or the Scot in North Britain,
North Ireland, and North America_. 2 vols. (1902).
Eliot Lord, John J.D. Trevor, and Samuel J. Barrows, _The Italian in
America_ (1905).
T. D'Arcy McGee, _History of the Irish Settlers in North America_
(1852).
O.N. Nelson, _History of the Scandinavians and Successful
Scandinavians in the United States_, 2 vols. (1900).
J.G. Rosengarten, _French Colonists and Exiles in the United States_
(1907). Contains an interesting bibliography of French writings on
early American conditions.
UTOPIAS
J.A. Bole, _The Harmony Society_ (1904). Besides a concise history of
the Rappists, this volume contains many letters and documents
illustrative of their customs and business methods.
W.A. Hinds, _American Communities and Cooperative Colonies_. (2d
revision 1908.) A useful summary based on personal observations.
G.B. Lockwood, _The New Harmony Communities_ (1902). It contains a
detailed description of Owen's experiment and interesting details of
the Rappists during their sojourn in Indiana.
M.A. Mikkelsen, _The Bishop Hill Colony, A Religious Communistic
Settlement in Henry County, Illinois_ (1892).
Charles Nordhoff, _The Communistic Societies of the United States_
(1875). A description of communities visited by the author.
J.H. Noyes, _History of American Socialisms_ (1870).
W.R. Perkins, _History of the Amana Society or Community of True
Inspiration_ (1891).
E.O. Randall, _History of the Zoar Society_ (2d ed. 1900).
Bertha M. Shambaugh, _Amana, the Community of True Inspiration_ (1908)
gives many interesting details.
Albert Shaw, _Icaria, a Chapter in the History of Communism_ (1884). A
brilliant account.
INDEX
A.P.A., _see_ American Protective Association
Acadia, French in, 18
Adams, J.Q., and Owen, 94
Afghans in United States, 207
Africans, Reed favors exclusion of, 232;
_see also_ Negroes
Alabama admitted as State (1819), 33
Albany, Shakers settle near, 91;
Irish in, 113
Alien and Sedition laws (1798), 221
Amana, 82-84
America, cosmopolitan character, 19-20;
American stock, 21 _et seq._;
origin of name, 21-22;
now applied to United States, 22;
Shakers confined to, 92;
"America for Americans," 114;
_see also_ United States
_American Celt_, McGee establishes, 120 (note)
American Missionary Association, work with negroes, 58
American party, 114;
_see also_ Know-Nothing party
American Protective Association, 221-22
Amish, 68 (note)
Anabaptists in Manhattan, 17
Ancient Order of Hibernians, 117
Angell, J.B., on commission to negotiate treaty with China, 198
Antwerp, German emigrants embark at, 134
Arkansas, frontiersmen in, 36;
chosen as site by Giessener Gesellschaft, 136;
Italians in, 211;
Slavs in, 213
Armenians, 184;
as laborers, 122;
at Granite City (Ill.), 217
Arthur, C.A., and Chinese exclusion act, 199
Asiatics, Pacific coast favors exclusion of, 232;
_see also_ Orientals
Australia deflects migration to United States, 150
Babcock, K.C., _The Scandinavian Element in the United States_, quoted, 158
Balch, E.G., _Our Slavic Fellow Citizens_, quoted, 164-65;
cited, 167 (note), 174
Baltimore, Ephrata draws pupils from, 71;
Irish immigrant association, 109;
Irish in, 113;
Germans in, 127;
Italians in, 180;
condition of immigrants landing in, 224
Bancroft, George, estimates number of slaves, 47
Barlow, Joel, 151
Bäumeler, _see_ Bimeler
Bayard, Nicholas, 16
Beissel, Conrad (or Beizel, or Peysel), 70, 71
Belgians in Charleroi (Penn.), 217
Berkshires, Germans in, 127
Bethlehem, communistic colony, 72
Bimeler, Joseph (or Bäumeler), 78-79
Bishop Hill Colony, 85-89
Black Hand, 182
"Boat Load of Knowledge," 94
Bogart, E.L., _Economic History of the United States_, cited, 52 (note)
Bohemians, in United States, 159-60, 165-66;
as North Slavs, 164;
on the prairies, 213;
on Pacific slope, 213
Boston, immigrants from Ireland (1714-20), 11;
French in, 16;
Irish in, 108, 113;
Germans in, 127;
Italians in, 180;
condition of immigrants landing in, 224
Boudinot, Elias, 16
Bowdoin, James, 16
Bremen, German emigrants embark at, 134
Bremer, Frederika, quoted, 155
Brisbane, Arthur, _Social Destiny of Man_, 96
Brook Farm, 97
Bryan, W.J., Secretary of State, and California Alien Land Act, 206
Bryan (Tex.) Italian colony, 211
Buffalo, Inspirationists near, 81;
Irish in, 113;
Germans in, 135;
Poles in, 167 (note)
Bulgarians, as South Slavs, 164;
in United States, 170;
in Granite City (Ill.), 170, 217
Burlingame, Anson, 195
Burlingame treaty, 195-96, 197
_Burschenschaften_, 131
Butler County (Penn.), Harmonists in, 73
Butte, Bulgarians in, 170
Cabet, Étienne, 97-98, 99, 100;
_Voyage en Icarie_, 98;
_Le Populaire_, 98
Cabinet, President's, majority of members from American stock, 42
Cabot, John, 2
Cabot, Sebastian, 2
Cahokia, French settlement, 152
California, frontiersmen in, 36, 37;
Icaria-Speranza community, 101;
Swiss in, 153;
Dalmatians in, 171;
Portuguese in, 184;
discovery of gold, 188;
Chinese in, 189-190;
"California for Americans," 190;
constitution (1879), 194;
legislation against Chinese, 194-95;
vote for Garfield (1880), 197 (note);
Japanese in, 203;
Alien Land Act (1913), 206;
Italians in, 211
Campo Bello, Island, Fenians attempt to land on, 119
Canada, fugitive slaves, 54;
Irish come through, 109;
Fenian raids, 120;
deflects migration to United States, 150
Carbonari, Cabet and, 98
Carolinas, English settle, 5;
Scotch-Irish in, 12;
Scotch in, 12;
Germans in, 14;
cosmopolitan character of, 18;
Irish in, 105;
_see also_ North Carolina, South Carolina
Castle Garden, landing place for immigrants in New York, 224, 225
Catholics, in Maryland, 13;
Irish, 114;
prejudice against, 115-16;
American Protective Association against, 222
Census (1790), 24-25, 29;
_A Century of Population Growth_ (1909), 24;
(1800), 25;
tables, 26-28;
(1900), 38-39;
slaves in United States, 47;
Bulletin No. 129, _Negroes in the United States_, cited, 61 (note);
(1910), Germans in United States, 125;
foreigners in United States, 125-26 (note);
foreign born on farms, 150-51 (note), 161;
Italians in New York City, 180 (note);
distribution of American white population, 187
Channing, Edward, _History of the United States_, quoted, 46-47
Charleroi (Penn.), foreigners in, 217
Charleston (S.C.), French in, 16;
Germans in, 127
Charlestown (Mass.), Ursuline convent burned, 116
Cheltenham, Icarians in, 100
Chestnutt, C.W., negro novelist, 64
Chicago, Irish in, 113;
Germans in, 135;
Bohemians in, 165;
Poles in, 167 (note);
Bulgarians in, 170;
Hungarian Jews in, 178;
Italians in, 180;
papers announce land for sale, 209
Chicopee, Poles in, 214
China, Burlingame treaty, 195-196, 197;
treaty (1880), 198-199;
treaty (1894), 202
Chinese, in United States, 188-203;
societies, 192;
mission to United States (1868), 195;
exclusion act, 199, 201;
Scott Act, 201;
Geary law, 201
Cincinnati, Irish in, 113;
German center, 135
Cities, immigration to, 162 _et seq._;
cosmopolitanism, 185;
racial changes in, 219-20
Civil Rights Act, 59
Civil War, German immigrants during, 130
Cleveland, Grover, messages to Congress on Chinese agitation, 201;
vetoes Lodge bill, 227-28
Cleveland, Irish in, 113;
Germans in, 135;
Bohemians in, 165;
Italians in, 180
Cocalico River, cloister of Ephrata on, 70
Colorado, Japanese in, 204
Coman, _Industrial History of the United States_, cited, 52 (note)
Communistic colonies, 67 _et seq._;
Labadists, 68-69;
Pietists, 69-70;
Ephrata, 70-72;
Snow Hill, 72;
Bethlehem, 72;
Harmonist, 72-77;
Harmony, 73;
New Harmony, 74-75, 94-96;
Economy, 75-77;
Zoar, 78-80;
Inspirationists, 80-84;
Ebenezer, 81;
Amana, 82-84;
Bishop Hill Colony, 85-89;
Old Elmspring Community, 89-90;
Shakers, 91-92;
Oneida Community, 92-93;
Robert Owen and, 94-96;
Brook Farm, 97;
Fourierism, 96-97, 101-02;
Icaria, 97-101;
bibliography, 238-39
Congress, noted members from American stock, 42;
authorizes Freedmen's Bureau (1865), 57;
immigration law (1819), 103;
laws against German newspapers, 144;
German-American League incorporated by, 145;
charter of German-American League revoked, 145;
Homestead Law (1862), 148;
grants land to French, 152;
Cleveland's special messages, 201;
Scott Act, 201;
Geary law, 201;
extends Chinese exclusion to Hawaii (1898), 202;
Lincoln's message, Dec. 8. 1863, 222;
and regulation of immigration, 225;
Lodge bill, 227-28;
Roosevelt's messages, 229
Connecticut, Shakers in, 91
Connecticut Valley, Poles in, 214-15
Considérant, Victor, 101
Constantinople, cosmopolitanism compared with American cities, 186
Constitution, Fifteenth Amendment, 59
Coolidge, M.R., _Chinese Immigration_, quoted, 192, 193-94
Cotton, effect on slavery, 52
Coxsackie (N.Y.), communistic attempt at, 96
Croatians, as South Slavs, 164;
in United States, 171, 172;
in Johnstown (Penn.), 216;
in Granite City (Ill.), 217
Cumberland (Wis.), Italian colony, 212
Cumberland Mountains, fugitive slaves in, 54
Dakotas, frontiersmen in, 36;
Germans in, 141;
Scandinavians in, 156, 157;
"Scandinavian language" in universities, 158-59;
Slavs in, 213;
_see also_ South Dakota
Dallas (Tex.), Italians in, 211
Dalmatians, as South Slavs, 164;
in United States, 171-172;
on Pacific slope, 213
Danes, in America, 154, 156;
character, 154;
_see also_ Scandinavians
DeLancey, Stephen, 16
Delaware, not represented in first census, 25;
second census (1800), 25;
Labadists in, 68-69;
Scandinavian colony, 156;
racial changes in manufacturing towns, 216
Democratic party on restriction of immigration, 226
Denver, anti-Chinese riots, 197-98 (note)
Detroit, Irish in, 113;
Germans in, 135;
Poles in, 167 (note);
Italians in, 180
Devotionalists, 85-89, 90
Douglass, Frederick, 64
DuBois, W.E.B., negro scholar, 64
Duluth, Finnish college near, 160
Dunbar, P.L., negro poet, 64
Dunkards, 70
Dunkers, 13
Dutch, in United States, 17-18;
number of immigrants, 153
Ebenezer Society, 81
Economy, Harmonists establish, 75;
Rapp as leader, 75-76;
as a communistic community, 76-77;
membership, 76 (note);
Amana gains members from, 83
Emmet, Robert, emigration from Ireland after failure of, 105
England, reasons for expansion, 2-3;
imports, 3;
social and religious changes, 6-7;
kidnaping, 8;
emigration of poor, 9, 110, 111;
criminals sent to colonies, 9;
and Ulster, 10;
French Protestants flee to, 15;
Jews in, 16;
industrial revolution and the American negro, 52;
emigration from, 150
English, in Virginia, 1;
in New World, 2-10;
serving class, 8;
Nonconformists in Manhattan, 17;
and Dutch, 17-18;
and French, 18;
on land, 151;
in Johnstown (Penn.), 216;
in Granite City (Ill.), 217;
in coal mines of Pennsylvania, 218
Ephrata, 70-72
Erie, Fort, Fenians hold, 120
Europe, migrations, 1-2;
immigration from, 103;
_see also_ names of peoples
Fairchild, H.P., quoted, 183
Faneuil, Peter, 16
Fenian movement, 118-21
Finns in America, 160, 176, 185
Fiske, John, on Scotch-Irish in colonies, 12 (note);
_The Dutch and Quaker Colonies in America_, cited, 14 (note)
Fitchburg, Poles in, 214
Fleming, W.L., _The Sequel of Appomattox_, cited, 57 (note)
Florida, fugitive slaves in, 54
Follenius quoted, 135-36
Ford, H.J., _The Scotch-Irish in America_, quoted, 31
Forestville (Ind.), communistic attempt, 96
Fourierism in United States, 93, 96-97, 101-02
Franklin, Benjamin, estimates population of Pennsylvania (1774), 12 (note)
Franklin (N.Y.), communistic attempt at, 96
Freedmen's Bureau, 57, 58
French, Protestants leave France, 15;
forts and trading posts of, 18;
in United States, 151-53;
in Charleroi (Penn.), 217;
_see also_ Huguenots
French Canadians in New England, 122, 152, 215
Frontiersmen, 34-36
Gallipolis (O.) settled by French, 151
Galveston, Italians in, 211
Garfield, J.A., and Chinese immigration, 197 (note)
Garland, Hamlin, _A Son of the Middle Border_, 36-37
Gary (Ind.), character of town, 216-17
Genoa (Wis.), Italian colony, 212
Georgia, English settle, 5;
not represented in first census, 25
German-American League, 145
Germans, in Pennsylvania, 13, 14;
lured by "soul-stealers," 15;
religious communists from, 68 _et seq._;
contrasted with Irish, 124;
immigration tide, 124 _et seq._;
first period of migration, 126-29;
second period of migration, 129-40;
causes of emigration, 130;
sailing conditions, 134;
social life, 137, 140;
laborers, 137, 141;
"Forty-eighters," 137-138;
contribution to America, 139;
newspapers, 139, 142-144;
number of immigrants (1870-1910), 141;
third period of migration, 141-46;
Prussian spirit among later immigrants, 142-44;
propaganda, 143-45;
"exchange professors," 144;
in Great War, 146;
in Johnstown (Penn.), 216;
in Granite City (Ill.), 217;
in coal mines of Pennsylvania, 218
Germantown (Penn.), founded, 13;
Pietists at, 69
Giessener Gesellschaft, 136
Gilbert, Sir Humphrey, 5
Godin, J.B.A., 102
Granite City (Ill.), Bulgarians in, 170;
racial changes in, 217
Great Britain, immigrants from, 103;
record of emigration, 104;
_see also_ England, English, Irish, Scotch, Scotch-Irish, Welsh
Great Lakes, French on, 18
Great War, German newspapers in, 143-44;
soldiers of German descent in, 146;
Poland and, 168;
effect on immigration, 233
Greeks in United States, 183, 217
Greeley, Horace, 97
Guise, only successful Fourieristic colony, 102
Häcker, J.G., quoted, 133-34 (note)
Hadley, Poles in, 214-15
Hakluyt, Richard, quoted, 4
Hamburg, German emigrants embark at, 134
Hammonton (N.J.), Italian colony at, 212
Harmonists, 72-77
Harmony, town established, 73
Harmony Society, 73
Harvard College, 8
Hatchet Men, 193
Haverstraw (N.Y.), communistic attempt at, 96
Havre, German emigrants embark at, 134
Hayes, R.B., vetoes amendment to Burlingame treaty, 197;
appoints commission to negotiate new treaty with China, 198
Hessians, settle in America, 129;
Giessener Gesellschaft, 136
Heynemann, Barbara, leader of Inspirationists, 81, 82
Highbinders, 193
Hindoos in United States, 207
Holland, French Protestants flee to, 15;
Spanish and Portuguese Jews find refuge in, 16-17;
Inspirationists, 80
Holland (Mich.), center of Dutch influence, 153
Homestead Law (1862), 148
"Hooks and Eyes," nickname for Amish, 68 (note)
Houston (Tex.), Italians in, 211
Hudson Valley, Dutch in, 17
Huguenots in Manhattan, 17;
_see also_ French
Hungarians, _see_ Jews, Magyars
Hungary, Mennonites in, 89
Hutter, Jacob, Mennonite martyr, 89
I.W.W., _see_ Industrial Workers of the World
Icaria, 97-101
Icaria-Speranza community, 101
Idaho, Japanese in, 204
Illinois, admitted as State (1818), 33;
frontiersmen in, 36;
"Underground Railway" in, 54;
negroes in, 62;
Bishop Hill Colony, 85-89;
Swedish immigration, 91;
Icarians in, 99-100;
Germans in, 134, 137;
Norwegians, 155;
Scandinavians in, 156;
Poles in, 160, 167, 213;
Slovenians in, 173;
racial changes in coal regions of, 219
Immigration (1790-1820), 32;
legislation, 201, 207, 222 _et seq._;
present opportunities, 208-10;
Lincoln on, 222;
only attempt of Federal Government to encourage, 222-23;
state regulation, 224-25;
bibliography, 235-236;
_see also_ names of peoples
Immigration Commission, created, 230;
and Japanese, 204
Independence (La.), Italians in, 211
Indiana, admitted as State (1816), 33;
western migration through, 36;
"Underground Railway" in, 54;
negroes in, 62;
New Harmony, 74-75, 94-96;
Germans in, 134;
Scotch and English in, 151;
Italian farmers in, 212;
Poles in, 213;
racial changes in coal regions, 219
Indianapolis, Bulgarians in, 170
Indians real Americans, 22
Indians, East, in America, 207
Industrial Commission, on Polish immigrants, 167;
report on immigration, 228
Industrial Workers of the World, Finns in, 160
Inspirationists, 80-84
Iowa, frontiersmen in, 36;
Inspirationists in, 82-84;
Icarians in, 101;
Germans in, 134, 141;
Slavs in, 213
Irish, in America, 6, 103 _et seq._;
half population of Ireland emigrates to America, 104;
reasons for emigration, 105-107;
in Continental Army, 108;
pauper immigrants from, 110;
travel conditions for immigrants, 111-12;
present immigration, 121;
economic advance in America, 122-23;
contrasted with Germans, 124;
number of immigrants (1820-1910), 150;
in New England mills, 215;
in Lawrence (Mass.), 216;
in Johnstown (Penn.), 216;
in Granite City (Ill.), 217;
in coal mines of Pennsylvania, 218
Irish Republican Brotherhood, 119
Isaacks, Isaac, 30
Italians, in South, 65, 210-11;
as laborers, 122;
in United States, 180-83;
on poor land, 210;
in New England mills, 215;
in Pennsylvania, 216, 217, 218
Jahn, F.L., organizes _Turnvereine_, 131
James, Henry, on foreigners in Boston, 162-63
Jansen, Olaf, 88, 89
Janson, Eric, 85-87, 89
Jansonists, 85-89, 90
Japan, agreement with (1907), 205-06
Japanese, in United States, 203-207;
hostility toward, 205-207;
order of exclusion from United States, 206
Jay, John, 16
Jews, in America, 16-17, 176-180;
Spanish-Portuguese, 177;
German, 177;
Austrian, 178;
Hungarian, 178;
Russian, 178-79
Johnstown (Penn.), racial changes in, 216
Joliet (Ill.), Slovenians in, 172
Kansas, Germans in, 141;
Scandinavians in, 156;
Slavs in, 213
Kapp, Frederick, 129, 140
Kaskaskia, French settle, 152
Kearney, Dennis, 193
Kelpius, Johann, leader of Pietists, 69
Kendal (O.), communistic attempt at, 96
Kentucky, not represented in First Census, 25;
admitted as State (1792), 33;
pioneers leave, 36
Kidnaping, labor brought to America by, 8
"Know-Nothing" party, 114, 221
Kotzebue, German publicist, 131
Kruszka, Rev. W.X., estimates number of Poles, in United States, 167 (note)
Ku Klux Klan, 58
Labadists, 68-69
Labor, kidnaping of, 8;
indentured service, 9-10;
Scotch political prisoners sold into service, 12-13;
negro, 60-63;
Irish displaced by other nationalities, 121-22;
Italian, 181;
Chinese, 190-91;
attitude toward Chinese, 193, 194;
treaty limiting Chinese,198;
bill to prohibit immigration of Chinese, 199;
Scott Act, 201;
Japanese, 204;
racial changes in, 216-17;
law to aid importation of contract labor, 222;
contract labor excluded, 225
Lafayette, Marquis de, visits Gallipolis, 152
Land, immigrants on the, 147 _et seq._;
immigrants on abandoned or rejected land, 208-214
Laurens, Henry, 16
Lawrence (Mass.), racial changes in, 215-16
Lee, Ann, founder of Shakers, 91, 92
Legislation, negro, 59-60;
Chinese immigration, 199-200, 201-03;
California Alien Land Act, 206-07;
immigration, 222 _et seq._
Lehigh River, Moravian community on, 72
Lehman, Peter, 72
Lesueur, C.A., 95
Levant, immigrants from the, 184
Limestone Ridge, Battle of, 120
Lincoln, Abraham, father a pioneer, 36;
message to Congress Dec. 8, 1863, 222
Literacy test for immigrants, in Lodge bill, 227;
rejected in law of 1903, 228-29;
executive disapproval of, 231;
bill passes over veto (1917), 232;
provisions of act, 232
Lithuanians in United States, 174-75
Liverpool, Irish immigrants at, 111, 112 (note)
Lockwood, G.B., _The New Harmony Movement_, cited, 96 (note)
Lodge, H.C., _The Distribution of Ability in the United States_, 39-41, 43;
immigration bill, 227
Logan, James, Secretary of Province of Pennsylvania, on Scotch-Irish, 11-12
London, German emigrants embark at, 134
Los Angeles, anti-Chinese riots, 191
Louis Philippe visits Gallipolis, 152
Louisiana, admitted as State (1812), 33;
American migration to, 34;
Icarians in, 99;
Italians in, 211
Louisiana Purchase (1803), 147
McCall, of Massachusetts, introduces Lodge bill in House, 227
McCarthy, Justin, quoted, 106;
cited, 107
Macedonia, Bulgarians from, 170
McGee, T. D'A., leader of "Young Ireland" party, 120-121
Maclure, William, "Father of American Geology," 94-95
Macluria (Ind.), communistic attempt, 96
McMaster, J.B., _History of the People of the United States_, quoted, 152
McParlan, James, 118
Macy, Jesse, _The Anti-Slavery Crusade_, cited, 54 (note)
Madison, James, on population of New England, 34
Madison (Ill.), racial changes in, 217
Magyars, distinct race, 174;
in United States, 175-76;
in Granite City (Ill.), 217
Maine, Shakers in, 91
Mainzer Adelsverein, 136
Manchester (England), Shakers originate in, 91
Manhattan, Jewish synagogue in (1691), 16;
Dutch in, 17;
cosmopolitan character, 17;
Norwegian Quakers land on, 155;
_see also_ New York City
Marion, Francis, 16
Marx, Karl, 179
Maryland, English settle, 5-6;
recruits schoolmasters from criminals, 9;
Scotch-Irish in, 11, 12;
Scotch in, 12;
Irish in, 13;
Germans in, 127;
Poles in, 213
Massachusetts, French in, 15;
Shakers in, 91;
Brook Farm, 97
Mather, Cotton, on Scotch-Irish, 11
Mayer, Brantz, _Captain Canot: or Twenty Years in a Slaver_, quoted, 48
Meade, General, against Fenians, 120
Mennonites, 13, 68 (note)
_Mercury_, New York, quoted, 108
Metz, Christian, leader of Inspirationists, 81, 82
Mexican War extends United States territory, 33, 148
Mexicans, feeling against, in California, 190
Michigan, admitted as State (1837), 33;
Germans in, 134;
Scotch and English in, 151;
Dutch in, 153;
Scandinavians in, 156;
farms for sale in, 209;
Slavs in, 212;
racial changes in ore regions of, 219
Mikkelsen, quoted, 90-91
Milwaukee, "the German Athens," 135;
Poles in, 167 (note)
Minnesota, frontiersmen in, 36;
Scandinavians in, 157;
"Scandinavian language" in university, 158-59;
Slavs in, 212;
racial changes in ore regions of, 219
Mississippi, admitted as State (1817), 33;
American migration to, 34;
Dalmatians in, 171
Mississippi River, French on, 18
Mississippi Valley, fugitive slaves in, 54;
Irish in, 108;
German influence, 135;
French in, 152;
Bohemians in, 159
Missouri, admitted as State (1821), 33;
frontiersmen in, 36;
Germans in, 134;
Giessener Gesellschaft in, 136
Mohawk Valley, Germans in, 127
Molly Maguires, society among anthracite coal miners, 117-118
Monroe, James, and Owen, 94
Montenegrins, as South Slavs, 164;
in United States, 171
Moravians, 13, 17, 72, 165
More, Sir Thomas, _Utopia_, 98
Mormons, 87
Mount Lebanon, Shaker community, 91
Mount Vernon, nationalities represented on July 4, 1918, at, 233
Names, disappearance of, 24-25 (note);
modifications, 30
Nantes, Edict of, revocation of, 15
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 63
National Civil Federation calls immigration conference (1905), 229
Nauvoo (Ill.), Icarians at, 99-100, 101
Navigation Laws, 106
Nebraska, Germans in, 141;
Scandinavians in, 156;
Bohemians in, 159;
Slavs in, 213
Neef, Joseph, 95
Negroes, 45 _et seq._;
identified with America, 45;
most distinctly foreign element, 46;
tribes represented among slaves, 49;
mutual benefit organizations, 51-52, 63;
population (1860), 56;
education, 57;
religion, 57;
as farmers, 59-60;
advance, 64;
characteristics shown by neglected gardens, 64-65;
bibliography, 236-37;
_see also_ Africans, Slavery, Slave trade
Nevada, vote for Garfield (1880), 197 (note)
New Amsterdam, Jews come to, 16
New Bedford, Portuguese in, 184
New Bern, Germans in, 127
New England, English settle, 5-6;
dissenters found, 8;
Scotch-Irish leave, 11;
Dutch and, 17;
Madison on population of, 34;
slavery, 51;
"Underground Railway" in, 54;
capital in slave trade, 56;
Montenegrins and Serbians in, 171;
Portuguese in, 184;
abandoned farms, 209;
Poles in, 213;
Slavs in, 214;
racial changes in mills, 215-16
_New Era_ founded by McGee, 121 (note)
New Hampshire, Shakers in, 91
New Harmony (Ind.), Rapp's colony, 74-75;
sold to Robert Owen, 75;
Owen's colony, 94-96
New Jersey, English settle, 5;
not represented in first census, 25;
census computations for 1790, 28-29;
Germans in, 127;
racial changes in manufacturing towns, 216
New Netherland, 17
New Orleans, Spain acquires, 18;
Icarians in, 99;
Irish in, 113;
Dalmatians in, 171;
Italians in, 180, 211
New York (State), Germans in, 14;
French in, 15;
Jews in, 16;
western part settled, 33;
migration through, 36;
slavery, 50-51;
"Underground Railway" in, 54;
and slave trade, 56;
negroes in, 62;
Shakers in, 91;
Scotch and English in, 151;
Norwegians in, 155;
Poles in, 167;
Russians in, 169;
Italian farmers, 212;
racial changes in manufacturing towns, 216;
State relief for immigrants, 224
New York City, French in, 16;
cosmopolitanism, 18-19;
Irish in, 108, 109, 113;
Tammany Hall, 116;
Germans in, 127;
Poles in, 167 (note);
Croatians in, 172;
Hungarian Jews, 178;
Russian Jews, 179;
Italians, 180;
_see also_ Manhattan
_New York Nation_, McGee establishes, 120 (note)
New Zealand, deflects migration to United States, 150
Newfoundland, Irish come through, 109
Newspapers, German, 139, 142-144;
Scandinavian, 158;
Slovak, 169
"Niagara Movement," 63
Norsemen, _see_ Scandinavians
North, colonies settled by townfolk, 7-8;
negroes in, 55;
negro laborers, 62
North Carolina, Germans in, 127
Northwest, Scandinavians in, 156;
_see also_ names of States
Northwest Territory, slavery forbidden in, 51
Norwegians, number in America, 154;
character, 154;
lead Scandinavian migration, 155;
_see also_ Scandinavians
Noyes, J.H., 92, 93
Oberholtzer, _History of the United States since the Civil War_,
cited, 120 (note), 148 (note), 149 (note)
Ohio, admitted as State (1802), 33;
western migration through, 36;
"Underground Railway" in, 54;
negroes in, 62;
Zoar colony, 78-80;
Germans in, 134;
Scotch and English in, 151;
French in, 151-52;
Swiss in, 153;
Slovenians in, 173;
Italian farmers, 212;
Poles in, 213;
racial changes in coal regions of, 219
Ohio River, French on, 18
Oklahoma, Bohemians in, 159;
Slavs in, 213
Old Elmspring Community, 89
Olsen, Jonas, 87, 88
Omaha, Italians in, 180
Oneida Community, 92-93
Orange County (N.Y.), Polish settlement, 213
Ordinance of 1787, 51
Oregon, acquisition of (1846), 33, 147;
Scandinavians in, 156;
Japanese in, 203
Orientals, 188 _et seq._;
_see also_ Chinese, Indians, East, Japanese
Otis, General, 202
Owen, Robert, 75, 93-96, 98
Ozark Mountains, Italians in, 211
Palatinate, peasants come to America from, 14
Penn, William, 71
Pennsylvania, English settle, 5;
Scotch-Irish in, 11-12;
Welsh in, 13;
Germans in, 13, 14, 126-27;
Dutch in, 14;
Jews in, 17;
cosmopolitan character, 19;
western part settled, 33;
slavery, 51;
negroes in, 62;
Dunkards in, 70;
Poles in, 167;
Russians in, 169;
Croatians in, 172;
Slovenians in, 173;
Lithuanians in, 175;
Italian farmers, 212;
landward movement of Slavs in, 213-14;
racial changes, 216, 218-19
Pennsylvania Philosophical Society,
Pietists' astrological instruments in collection of, 70
Petrosino, Lieutenant Joseph, murdered, 231
Peysel, _see_ Beissel
Philadelphia, Welsh near, 13;
cosmopolitan character, 18;
negroes arrested, 51;
Ephrata draws pupils from, 71;
Irish immigrant association, 109;
Irish in, 113;
Italians in, 180
Philippines, Chinese exclusion, 202
Pietists, 69-70
Pine Lake (Wis.), Swedish colony, 155
Pittsburgh, "Boat Load of Knowledge" from, 94
Poles, in America, 160, 167-69, 213, 214-15, 217;
as North Slavs, 164
Politics, foreigners in, 42;
Irish in, 116, 117;
Germans in, 139, 144;
Bohemians in, 166;
Chinese as issue, 193;
selective immigration as issue (1892), 226-27
Population, increase in, 32;
_see also_ Census
Portland, Italians in, 180
Portuguese in United States, 184
Prairie du Rocher, French settlement, 152
Presbyterians, Scotch-Irish, 10
Presidents of United States from American stock, 42
Price, J.C., negro orator, 64
Quakers, Norwegian, 155
Rafinesque, C.S., 95
Railroads, Chinese laborers on, 190
Raleigh, Sir Walter, 5
Rapp, F.R., adopted son of Father Rapp, 75-76
Rapp, J.G., founder of Harmonists, 73;
"Father Rapp," 74;
at Harmony, 73-74;
at New Harmony, 74-75;
at Economy, 75-77
Reconstruction after Civil War, 57-59
Red Bank (N.J.), communistic colony at, 97
Reed, of Missouri, wishes to exclude African immigrants, 232
Republican party on immigration restriction, 226
_Restoration_ (sloop), 155
Revere, Paul, 16
Revolutionary War, Irish in, 108;
Germans and, 127
Rhode Island, French in, 15;
Jews in, 17
Rock Springs (Wyo.), anti-Chinese riot, 200
Roosevelt, Theodore, conference with delegation from California, 205;
on restriction of immigration, 229-30
Root, John, 86-87
Ross, E.A., _The Old World in the New_, cited, 163 (note)
Rumania, Mennonites in, 89
Rush, Benjamin, _Manners of the German Inhabitants of Pennsylvania_, 127-29
Russia, Mennonites in, 89
Russians, as North Slavs, 164;
in United States, 169-70
Ruthenians (Ukranians), as North Slavs, 164;
in United States, 169
St. Lawrence River, French on, 18
St. Louis, Cabet in, 100;
Irish in, 113;
Germans in, 135;
Hungarian Jews in, 178;
Italians in, 180
St. Patrick's Day, observed in Boston (1737), 108;
in New York City (1762), 108;
(1776), 108;
(1784), 109
San Antonio, Italians in, 211
San Francisco, anti-Chinese attitude, 193, 194, 200;
Japanese excluded from public schools, 205
Savannah, Germans in, 127
Say, Thomas, "Father of American Zoölogy," 95
Scandinavians in United States, 85, 153-59, 185
Schleswig-Holstein, Danes emigrate from, 156
Schluter, _see_ Sluyter
Schmitz, Mayor of San Francisco, 205
Schurz, Carl, 139
Scioto Land Company (Companie du Scioto), 151-52
Scotch, in America, 6, 12-13;
in Manhattan, 17;
immigrants, 110, 150;
on the land, 151;
in coal mines of Pennsylvania, 218
Scotch-Irish, in America, 6, 10, 11;
in Pennsylvania, 11-12, 12 (note);
names, 30-31
Seattle, Bulgarians in, 170;
anti-Chinese feeling, 200
Seneca Indians Reservation, Inspirationists purchase (1841), 81
Serbians, as South Slavs, 164;
in United States, 171, 217
Seward, W.H., Secretary of State, treaty with China (1868), 195-96
_Shaker Compendium_ quoted, 91
Shakers, 91-92
Shaw, Albert, _Icaria, A Chapter in the History of Communism_, quoted, 100
Siberia, Russian immigrants to, 170 (note)
Sicilians, 182;
_see also_ Italians
Silkville (Kan.), French communistic colony in, 102
Six Companies, Chinese organization, 192, 193
Slavery, as recognized institution, 9, 50;
Channing on, 46-47;
protests against, 51;
influence of cotton demand on, 52-53;
fugitive slaves, 54-55;
condition when emancipated, 56-57;
Germans against, 139;
_see also_ Negroes, Slave trade
Slave trade, beginning of, 47;
capture and transportation of slaves, 47-50;
law prohibiting, 55;
effect of cotton demand on, 55-56
Slavonians on Pacific slope, 213
Slavs, use of term, 164;
on poor land, 210;
colonies, 212-213;
in New England mills, 214, 215;
in Pennsylvania, 216, 217, 218;
_see also_ Bohemians, Bulgarians, Croatians, Dalmatians,
Montenegrins, Poles, Russians, Ruthenians, Serbians, Slovaks,
Slovenians
Slovaks, as North Slavs, 164;
in United States, 168-69, 216, 217;
_see also_ Slavs
Slovenians, as South Slavs, 164;
"Griners," 172;
_see also_ Slavs
Sluyter, Peter (or Schluter), (Vorstmann), leader of Labadists, 68
Snow Hill (Penn.), community, 72
Society of United Irishmen, 109
South, plantations lure English, 7;
Scotch-Irish in, 12;
cotton production, 52-53;
Reconstruction, 57-59;
opposes liberal land laws, 148;
immigrants in cut-over timber regions, 208;
opportunities for immigrants in, 210
South Carolina, French in, 15;
slave laws, 50;
insurrection (1822), 53;
Germans in, 127
South Dakota, Old Elmspring Community, 89
Spain, England's victory over, 2;
France cedes New Orleans to, 18
Spanish-Americans in California, 190
Standard Oil Company builds Whiting (Ind.), 217
Steiner, E.A., _On the Trail of the Immigrant_, quoted, 166, 178-79
Stephens, James, 119
Sullivan, General John, order of March 17, 1776, 108
Sunnyside (Ark.), Italians establish (1895), 211
Supreme Court, Chief Justices from American stock, 42;
upholds communal contract, 73;
upholds exclusion, 200;
on state regulation of immigration, 225
Swedes, in America, 85, 154, 155-56;
"Frenchmen of the North," 154;
_see also_ Scandinavians
Switzerland, Inspirationists from, 80;
immigration from, 104;
number of immigrants, 153
Syrians, as laborers, 122;
in United States, 184;
in Johnstown (Penn.), 216
Tacoma, anti-Chinese feeling, 200
Taft, W.H. vetoes literacy test provision (1913), 231
Tammany Hall, 116
Tennessee, not represented in First Census, 25;
admitted as State (1796), 33;
pioneers leave, 36
Texas, added to United States, 33;
Icarians in, 99;
Fourieristic community in, 101-02;
Mainzer Adelsverein in, 136;
Bohemians in, 159;
Poles in, 160, 167;
Italian colonies, 211;
Slavs in, 213
Thompson, Holland, _The New South_, cited, 60 (note)
Tillinghast, _The Negro in Africa_, quoted, 49
Tokyo, anti-American feeling, 207
Tone, Wolfe, portrait on Fenian bonds by, 119
Transportation, development of, 149
_Tribune_, New York, Brisbane and, 97
Troost, Gerard, 95
Turks in United States, 184
_Turnvereine_, 131, 137
Tuskegee Institute, 63
Ukranians, _see_ Ruthenians
Ulster, Scotch in, 10
Ulstermen, _see_ Scotch-Irish
"Underground Railway," 54
United States, now called America, 22;
population at close of Revolution, 23;
American stock, 23;
census (1790), 24;
names changed or disappeared, 24-25 (note);
population (1820), 32;
Irish population, 105;
expansion, 147-48;
nation of immigrants, 233;
_see also_ America
United States Steel Corporation builds Gary (Ind.), 216-17
Unonius, Gustavus, 155
Utopias in America, 66 _et seq._;
bibliography, 238-39
Vermont, slaves emancipated, 51
Vespucci, Amerigo, claim of discovery recognized, 21
Vineland (N.J.), Italian colony at, 212
Virginia, English occupation (1607), 1;
English in, 5;
protests receiving criminals, 9;
Scotch-Irish in, 11, 12;
French in, 15;
slavery, 47, 50;
insurrection (1831), 53-54;
Irish in, 105;
Germans in, 127;
racial changes in coal regions of, 219
Vorstmann, _see_ Sluyter
Waldenses in Manhattan, 17
Waldseemüller, Martin, and name America, 21
Ward's Island, hospitals for immigrants on, 224
Ware, Poles in, 214
Washington, Booker T., 63
Washington, George, on name America, 21;
on spread of native population, 34;
order of March 17, 1776, 108
Washington (State), Scandinavians in, 156;
Japanese in, 203, 204
Washington (D.C.) Owen lectures at, 94;
anti-Japanese demonstration at, 207
Welsh, in United States, 6, 150, 151, 216, 217, 218
West, Far, Germans in, 142;
draws homeseekers, 147;
and land laws, 148;
_see also_ names of States
West Indies, French in, 18;
negro slavery, 47;
Irish transported to, 105;
Irish come through, 109
West, Middle, racial changes in, 216;
_see also_ names of States
West Virginia, Croatians in, 172;
racial changes in, 216, 219
Westfield, Poles in, 214
Whiting (Ind.), foreigners in, 217
Whitney, Eli, cotton gin, 52
Wilcox, W.F., quoted, 62-63
Wilmington, Germans in, 127
Wilson, Woodrow, and anti-Japanese feeling, 206;
on literacy test, 231
Windber (Penn.), racial changes in, 219
Winthrop, John, on immigration of Scotch-Irish, 11
Wisconsin, frontiersmen in, 36;
"Underground Railway" in, 54;
Fourieristic colony in, 97;
Germans in, 134, 137;
Swiss in, 153;
Scandinavians in, 156;
Poles in, 160, 167;
farms available in, 209;
Slavs in, 212
Worcester, Poles in, 214
Workingmen's party, 193
Wright, Fanny, 95
Wyoming, and Chinese indemnity claim, 201
Yazoo Delta, Italians in, 211
Yellow Springs (O.), communistic attempt, 96
Young, Brigham, 87
"Young Ireland" party, 120
Zimmermann, J.J., founder of Pietists, 69
Zinzendorf, Count, 72
Zoar, colony at, 78-80;
Amana gains members from, 83
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