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Title: The Old World in the New

Author: Edward Alsworth Ross

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE OLD
WORLD IN THE NEW ***

THE OLD WORLD
IN THE NEW

Towards the New World

THE OLD WORLD
IN THE NEW

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF PAST AND
PRESENT
IMMIGRATION TO THE AMERICAN
PEOPLE

BY
EDWARD ALSWORTH ROSS, Ph.D., LL.D.

Professor of Sociology in the University of Wisconsin
Author of "Social Control," "Social Psychology,"
"The Changing Chinese," "Changing
America," Etc.

ILLUSTRATED WITH
MANY PHOTOGRAPHS

NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1914

Copyright, 1913, 1914, by
The Century Co.
Published, October, 1914

PREFACE
"Immigration," said to me a distinguished social worker and idealist, "is a
wind that blows democratic ideas throughout the world. In a Siberian hut
from which four sons had gone forth to America to seek their fortune, I saw
tacked up a portrait of Lincoln cut from a New York newspaper. Even there
they knew what Lincoln stood for and loved him. The return flow of letters
and people from this country is sending an electric thrill through dwarfed,
despairing sections of humanity. The money and leaders that come back to
these down-trodden peoples inspire in them a great impulse toward liberty
and democracy and progress. Time-hallowed Old-World oppressions and
exploitations that might have lasted for generations will perish in our time,
thanks to the diffusion by immigrants of American ideas of freedom and
opportunity."
Rapt in these visions of benefit to belated humanity, my friend refused to
consider any possible harm of immigration to this country. He did not doubt
it so much as ignore it. How should the well-being of a nation be balanced
against a blessing to humanity?
"Think what American chances mean to these poor people!" urged a
large-hearted woman in settlement work. "Thousands make shipwreck,
other thousands are disappointed, but tens of thousands do realize
something of the better, larger life they had dreamed of. Who would
exclude any of them if he but knew what a land of promise America is to
the poor of other lands?" Her sympathy with the visible alien at the gate
was so keen that she had no feeling for the invisible children of our poor,
who will find the chances gone, nor for those at the gate of the To-be, who
might have been born, but will not be.
I am not of those who consider humanity and forget the nation, who pity
the living but not the unborn. To me, those who are to come after us stretch
forth beseeching hands as well as the masses on the other side of the globe.
Nor do I regard America as something to be spent quickly and cheerfully
for the benefit of pent-up millions in the backward lands. What if we
become crowded without their ceasing to be so? I regard it as a nation

whose future may be of unspeakable value to the rest of mankind, provided
that the easier conditions of life here be made permanent by high standards
of living, institutions and ideals, which finally may be appropriated by all
men. We could have helped the Chinese a little by letting their surplus
millions swarm in upon us a generation ago; but we have helped them
infinitely more by protecting our standards and having something worth
their copying when the time came.
Edward Alsworth Ross.
The University of Wisconsin,
Madison, Wisconsin,
September, 1914.

CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
PAGE
THE ORIGINAL MAKE-UP OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE 3
Traits of the Puritan stock—Elements in the peopling of Virginia—
The indentured servants and convicts—Purification by free land—
The Huguenots—The Germans—The Scotch-Irish—Ruling motives
in the peopling of the New World—Selective agencies—The toll of
the sea—The sifting by the wilderness—The impress of the frontier
—How an American Breed arose—Its traits.
CHAPTER II
THE CELTIC IRISH 24
The great lull—The Hibernian tide—Why it has run low—Effects on
Ireland—Irish-Americans in the struggle for existence—Their
improvidence and unthrift—Why they lacked the economic virtues—
Drink their worst foe—Their small criminality—Loyalty to wife and
child—Their occupational preferences—Their rapid rise—Their rank
in intellectual contribution—Celtic traits—Place of the Irish in
American society.
CHAPTER III
THE GERMANS 46
Volume and causes of the German freshet—Why it has ceased—
Distribution of the Germans in America—Deutschtum vs.
assimilation—The "Forty-eighters"—Influence of the Germans on
our farming, on our drinking, on our attitude toward recreation—
Political tendencies of German voters—The Germans as pathbreakers
for intellectual liberty—Their success in the struggle for existence—
Moderation in alcoholism and in crime—Preferred occupations—
Teutonic traits—Effect of the German infusion on the temper of the
American people.
CHAPTER IV
THE SCANDINAVIANS 67

The size of the Scandinavian wave—Distribution of this element in
the United States—Social characteristics—Crime and alcoholism—
Occupational choices—Readiness of assimilation—Reaction to
America—National contrasts among Scandinavians—Intellectual
rating—Race traits—Moral and political significance of the
Scandinavians.
CHAPTER V
THE ITALIANS 95
Causes of the Italian outflow—Distribution of Italians—Social
characteristics—Broad contrast between North Italians and South
Italians—Occupations—Agricultural settlements—Freedom from
alcoholism—Gaming—Addiction to violence—Camorra and Mafia
in America—Difficulties in dealing with Italian immigrants—Their
mental rating—Traits of character—The Italians as a social
element.
CHAPTER VI
THE SLAVS 120
Place of the Slavs in history—Lateness of their awakening—Size of
the Slav groups in America—Occupational tendencies of the Slavic
immigrants—Distribution—Alcoholism—Criminality—Subjection of
women—Extraordinary fecundity—Displacement of other elements
—Resistance to Americanization—Clannishness—Social
characteristics of Slav settlements—Industrial segregation—Mental
rating—Prospects of Slavic immigration.
CHAPTER VII
THE EAST EUROPEAN HEBREWS 143
One-fifth of the Hebrew race in America—"The Promised Land"—
Hebrew interest in free immigration—Waves of Russo-Hebrew
immigration—Occupational preferences—Morals—Crime—Race
traits—Intellectuality—Persistence of will—Growth of Anti-
Semitism in America—Causes—Prospects—Why America is a
powerful solvent of Judaism—Signs of Assimilation.
CHAPTER VIII
THE LESSER IMMIGRANT GROUPS 168
African, Saracen and Mongolian blood in our immigrants—The Finns
—Motives and characteristics—Political aptitude—Patriotism—The

Magyars—Social condition and traits—The Portuguese—Origin and
volume of the Portuguese influx—Distribution—Industrial and social
characteristics—Resistance to assimilation—The Greeks—
Immigration from Greece purely economic—Distribution and
occupational preferences—Serfdom of Greek bootblacks—The
Levantines—Racial and social characteristics.
CHAPTER IX
ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF IMMIGRATION 195
Stimulators of migration—The commercial interests behind the
movement—The new immigrant as an industrial tool—How tariff
protection coupled with the open door augment the manufacturer's
profits—Effect of the new immigration upon the cost of living, upon
agricultural methods—Shall the penniless immigrant be helped to get
upon the land—The utilization of foreign labor to break strikes—The
foreign laborer as a hindrance to unionism—Effect upon wages and
conditions—Is the foreigner indispensable—Immigrant women doing
men's work—Fate of the displaced American—Immigration and
crises—The inevitable rise of social pressure—Who bears the brunt?
CHAPTER X
SOCIAL EFFECTS OF IMMIGRATION 228
Immigration and social atavism—Community reversions to the
Middle Ages—Immigrant illiteracy and ignorance—New readers of
the yellow press—The spread of white peonage—Caste cleavage—
Attitude of the foreign-born toward the claims of women—Split-
family immigration and the social evil—How immigration makes
acute the housing problem—Why overgrown cities—Immigrants who
discount our charities—The wayward child of the immigrant—
Insanity among the foreign-born—Obstructions to the operation of
the public school—Signs of social decline—Peasantism vs. social
progress.
CHAPTER XI
IMMIGRANTS IN POLITICS 259
The Hibernian domination of Northern cities—Political psychology
of the Celts—Practical consequences—Immigration as foe to party
traditionalism—Citizenship of the new immigrants compared with
the old—Accumulation of voteless men—How this lessens the

political strength of labor—Psychology of the ignorant naturalized
immigrants—How the cunning boss acquires "influence"—Feudal
relation between the boss and his humble constituents—
Naturalization frauds—The Tammany way—The political machine—
The liquor interest and the foreign-born voter—The foreign press in
politics—The cost of losing political like-mindedness—Political
mysticism vs. common sense.
CHAPTER XII
AMERICAN BLOOD AND IMMIGRANT BLOOD 282
Submergence of the pioneering breed—Growing heterogeneity—
Primitive types among the foreign-born—How immigration will
affect good looks in this country—Effect of crossing on personal
beauty—Stature and physique of the newer immigrants—Do they
revitalize the American people—Race morals of the South European
stocks—Are the immigrants good samples of their own people—
Appraisal of the different ethnic strains in the American people—
Rating of present immigrant streams—How immigration has affected
the fecundity of Americans—Evading a degrading competition by
race suicide—The triumph of the low-standard elements over the
high-standard elements.
APPENDIX 307
INDEX 321

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
Towards the New World Frontispiece
Immigrant Women in Line for Inspection at Ellis Island 6
Slovaks, Ellis Island 15
Distribution of Irish and Natives of Irish Parentage—1910 38
Distribution of Germans and Natives of German Parentage—
55
1910
Distribution of Scandinavians and Natives of Scandinavian
78
Parentage—1910
Typical Norwegian Boy 87
Typical Swedish Girl 87
Distribution of Italians and natives of Italian Parentage—
94
1910
Italian Gypsy Mother and Child 100
Italian Woman of Greek or Albanian Ancestry 100
Group of Italian Immigrants Lunching in Old Railroad
109
Waiting Room, Ellis Island
Board of Special Inquiry, Ellis Island 115
Utter Weariness—Bohemian Woman on East Side, New York,
115
after the Day's Work
Slav Sisters 122
Slovak Girl 122
Slav Woman and Italian Husband 131
Slovak Girls 131
Russian Jews, Ellis Island 142
Hindoo Immigrants 142
Slovak Woman and Jewish Man, Ellis Island 151
Jewish Girl in Chicago Sweat-Shop 151
Jewish Runner Soliciting Immigrants for the Steamship
162
Company

Magyar 171
Croatian 171
Roumanian 171
Croatians Celebrating Their Going Home to the "Old
178
Country"
Roumanian Couple in Gala Attire, Youngstown, Ohio 178
Magyar Peasant Woman 186
Molokan from Russia 186
A Finnish Woman by Her Cabin of Hewn Logs in Northern
191
Wisconsin near Lake Superior
Some of Syracuse's Newer Citizens—A Greek and Two Turks 191
Sunday Group of Roumanian Steel Workers, Youngstown,
199
Ohio
Sunday Roumanians, Youngstown, Ohio 199
The Unemployed—Middle of the Morning, Chicago 206
"Shack" of a Polish Iron Miner, Hibbing, Minn. 211
Cabin of an Austrian Iron Miner, Virginia, Minn. 211
Immigrant Girls Coming to Work in the Early Morning at the
217
Union Stockyards
Polish Girls Washing Dishes Under the Sidewalk in a
217
Chicago Restaurant
Roumanian Shepherds in Native Costume, Ellis Island 224
Distribution of Foreign-born Whites in the United States—
241
1910
Dependent Italian Family, Cleveland 248
Dependent Slovak Family, Cleveland 248
Italian Men's Civic Club, Rochester, N. Y. 257
A Civic Banquet to "New Citizens," July 4th 268
Y. M. C. A. Class of Slovenes in English Visiting a Session of
277
the City Council of Cleveland
Class of Foreign-born Women (Carinthians) at the Cleveland
Hardware Co., Cleveland, O., Meeting for Instruction in 277
English in the Factory, Twice a Week from 5 to 6.30
Distribution of Foreign Stock in the United States—1910 284

Distribution of Native White Stock in the United States—
301
1910

THE OLD WORLD IN THE NEW

CHAPTER I
THE ORIGINAL MAKE-UP OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE

"God sifted a whole nation that He might send choice grain into the
wilderness." So thought the seventeenth century of the migration to
Massachusetts Bay in the evil years of Charles I; but what are we to think of
it? There is to-day so little sympathy with that remote, narrow New England
theocracy that it is well to state again in living terms what part the coming
of the best of the English Puritans bore in building up the American people.
As history makers, those who will suffer loss and exile rather than give
up an ideal that has somehow taken hold of them are well nigh as unlike
ordinary folk as if they had dropped from Mars. In every generation those
who are capable of heroic devotion to any ideal whatsoever are only a
remnant. Nine persons out of ten incline to the line of least resistance or of
greatest profit, and will no more sacrifice themselves for an ideal than lead
will turn to a magnet.
That the ideal should be final is of small consequence. It matters little
whether it is a religious tenet, a mode of worship, a method of life, or a state
of society. The essential thing is that it stands apart from the appetites,
passions, and petty aims that govern most of us. Those who will face
panther and tomahawk for the sake of their ideal are not to be swayed by
the sordid motives and fitful passions that lord it over commonplace lives.
Holding themselves to be instruments for the fulfilment of some larger
purpose, men of this type make their mark upon the world. The fathers
dedicate themselves to establishing godliness in the community. Their
posterity fly to arms in behalf of the principle of "No taxation without
representation." Their posterity, in turn, war upon the liquor traffic, slavery,
or imperialism. As surely as one quarter of us are still of the blood of the
twenty thousand Puritans who sought the wilderness between 1618 and
1640, so surely are there ideals not yet risen above the horizon that will
inspire Americans in the generations to come.

The Dutch settled New Amsterdam from practical motives, although
some of them were Walloons fleeing oppression in the Spanish Netherlands.
Gain prompted the peopling of Virginia, and that colony received its share
of human chaff. The Council of Virginia early complained that "it hurteth to
suffer Parents to disburden themselves of lascivious sonnes, masters of bad
servants and wives of ill husbands, and so clogge the business with such an
idle crue, as did thrust themselves in the last voiage, that will rather starve
for hunger, than lay their hands to labor."

Photograph by Hine

Immigrant Women in Line for Inspection at Ellis Island
In 1637 the collector of the port of London averred that "most of those
that go thither ordinarily have no habitation ... and are better out than within
the kingdom." After the execution of Charles I, a number of Royalist
families removed to Virginia rather than brook the rule of Cromwell. This
influx of the well-to-do registers itself in an abrupt increase in the size of
the land-grants and in a sudden rise in the number of slaves. From this
period one meets with the names of Randolph, Madison, Monroe, Mason,

Marshall, Washington and many others that have become household words.
On the whole, however, the exodus of noble "Cavaliers" to Virginia is a
myth; for it is now generally admitted that the aristocracy of eighteenth-
century Virginia sprang chiefly from "members of the country gentry,
merchants and tradesmen and their sons and relatives, and occasionally a
minister, a physician, a lawyer, or a captain in the merchant service,"
fleeing political troubles at home or tempted by the fortunes to be made in
tobacco.
Less promising was the broad substratum that sustained the prosperity of
the colony. For fifty years indentured servants were coming in at a rate from
a thousand to sixteen hundred a year. No doubt many an enterprising wight
of the English or Irish laboring-class sold himself for a term into the
tobacco-fields in order to come within reach of beckoning Opportunity; but
we know, too, that the slums and alleys were raked for material to stock the
plantations. Hard-hearted men sold dependent kinsfolk to serve in the
colonies. Kidnappers smuggled over boys and girls gathered from the
streets of London and Bristol. About 1670, no fewer than ten thousand
persons were "spirited" from England in one year. The Government was
slow to strike at the infamous traffic, for, as was urged in Parliament, "the
plantations cannot be maintained without a considerable number of white
servants."
Dr. Johnson deemed the Americans "a race of convicts," who "ought to
be content with anything we allow them short of hanging." In the first
century of the colonies, gallows'-birds were often given the option of
servitude in the "plantations." Some prayed to be hanged instead. In 1717
the British Government entered on the policy of penal transportation, and
thenceforth discharged certain classes of felons upon the colonies until the
Revolution made it necessary to shunt the muddy stream to Botany Bay.
New England happily escaped these "seven-year passengers," because she
would pay little for them and because she had no tobacco to serve as a
profitable return cargo. It is estimated that between 1750 and 1770 twenty
thousand British convicts were exported to Maryland alone, so that even the
school-masters there were mostly of this stripe. The colonies bitterly
resented such cargoes, but their self-protective measures were regularly
disallowed by the selfish home government. American scholars are coming

to accept the British estimate that about 50,000 convicts were marketed on
this side the water.
It is astonishing how quickly this "yellow streak" in the population faded.
No doubt the worst felons were promptly hanged, so that those transported
were such as excited the compassion of the court in an age that recognized
nearly three hundred capital offenses. Then, too, the bulk were probably the
unfortunate, or the victims of bad surroundings, rather than born
malefactors. Under the regenerative stimulus of opportunity, many persons
reformed and became good citizens. A like purification of sewage by free
land was later witnessed in Australia. The incorrigible, when they did not
slip back to their old haunts, forsook the tide-water belt to lead half-savage
lives in the wilderness. Here they slew one another or were strung up by
"regulators," so that they bred their kind less freely than the honest. Thus
bad strains tended to run out, and in the making of our people the criminals
had no share at all corresponding to their original numbers. Blended with
the dregs from the rest of the population, the convicts who were lazy and
shiftless rather than criminal became progenitors of the "poor whites,"
"crackers," and "sandhillers" that still cumber the poorer lands of the
southern Appalachians.

THE FRENCH HUGUENOTS

Probably no stock ever came here so gifted and prepotent as the French
Huguenots. Though only a few thousand all told, their descendants
furnished 589 of the fourteen thousand and more Americans deemed worthy
of a place in "Appletons' Cyclopedia of American Biography." In 1790 only
one-half of one per cent. of our people bore a French name; yet this element
contributed 4.2 per cent. of the eminent names in our history, or eight times
their due quota. Like the Puritans and the Quakers, the Huguenots were of
an element that meets the test of fire and makes supreme sacrifices for
conscience' sake. They had the same affinity for ideals and the same
tenacity of character as the founders of New England, but in their French
blood they brought a sensibility, a fervor, and an artistic endowment all
their own.
It was likewise a sturdy stock, and in the early days of the settlement it
was no unusual thing for parties to walk from New Rochelle to church in

lower New York, a distance of twenty-three miles. As a rule they walked
this distance with bare feet, carrying their shoes in their hands.

THE GERMANS

When seeking settlers for his new colony, William Penn gained much
publicity for it in Germany, where he had a wide acquaintance. The German
Pietists responded at once, and a stream of picked families mingled with the
English Quakers who founded the City of Brotherly Love. The first
Germans to come were well-to-do people. Nearly all had enough money left
on arrival to pay for the land they took up. In 1710, however, there arose in
parts of Germany a veritable furor to reach the New World. The people of
the ravaged Palatinate became agitated over the lure of America, and ship
after ship breasted the Delaware, black with Palatines, Hanoverians,
Saxons, Austrians, and Swiss. The cost of passage from the upper Rhine
was equal to $500 to-day; but a vast number of penniless Germans got over
the barrier by contracting with the ship-owner to sell themselves into
servitude for a term of years. These were known as "redemptioners," and
their service was commonly for from four to six years. Before the
Revolution not fewer than 60,000 Germans had debarked at Philadelphia, to
say nothing of the thousands that settled in the South.
Although not without a sectarian background, this great immigration
bears clearly an economic impress. The virtues of the Germans were the
economic virtues; invariably they are characterized as "quiet, industrious,
and thrifty." Although Franklin wrote, "Those who come to us are the most
stupid of their own nation," he spoke of them later, before a committee of
the House of Commons, as "a people who brought with them the greatest of
all wealth—industry and integrity, and characters that have been
superpoised and developed by years of persecution." It is likely that the
intellectual stagnation of the Pennsylvania Germans and the smallness of
their contribution to American leadership has been due to pietistic contempt
for education rather than to the natural qualities of the stock.

THE SCOTCH-IRISH

The flailing of the clans after the futile rising of 1745 made the Scots
restless, and in the last twelve years of the colonial era 20,000 Highlanders
sought homes in America. But most of our Scottish blood came by way of
Ireland. Early in the eighteenth century the discriminations of Parliament
against the woolen industry of Ireland, and against Presbyterianism,
provoked the largest immigration that occurred before the Revolution. The
Ulster Presbyterians were descended from Scotsmen and English who had
been induced between 1610 and 1618 to settle in the north of Ireland, and
who were, in Macaulay's judgment, "as a class, superior to the average of
the people left behind them." They cared for ideas, and at the beginning of
the outflow there was probably less illiteracy in Ulster than anywhere else
in the world. Entire congregations came, each headed by its pastor. "The
whole North is in a ferment," lamented an Irish archbishop in 1728. "It
looks as if Ireland were to send all her inhabitants hither," complained the
governor of Pennsylvania. About 200,000 came over, and on the eve of the
Revolution the stock was supposed to constitute a sixth of the population of
the colonies. They settled along the frontier, and bore the brunt of the
warfare with the savage. It was owing chiefly to them that the Quakers and
Germans of Pennsylvania were left undisturbed to live up to their ideals of
peace and non-resistance. In eminence, the lead of the Scotch-Irish has been
in government, exploration, and war, although they have not been lacking in
contributors to education and invention. In art and music they have had
little to offer.
The outstanding trait of the Scotch-Irish was will. No other element was
so masterful and contentious. In a petition directed against their
immigration, the Quakers characterized them as a "pernicious and
pugnacious people" who "absolutely want to control the province
themselves." The stubbornness of their character is probably responsible for
the unexampled losses in the battles of our Civil War. They fought the
Indian, fought the British with great unanimity in two wars, and were in the
front rank in the conquest of the West. More than any other stock has this
tough, gritty breed, so lacking in poetry and sensibility, molded our national
character. If to-day a losing college crew rows so hard that they have to be
lifted from their shell at the end of the boat-race, it is because the never-say-
die Scotch-Irish fighters and pioneers have been the picturesque and
glowing figures in the imagination of American youth.

Looked at broadly, the first peopling of this country owes at least as
much to the love of liberty as to the economic motive. In the seventeenth
century the peoples of the Old World seemed to be at odds with one another.
Race trampled on race, and the tender new shoots of religious yearning
were bruised by an iron state and an iron church. The rumor of a virgin land
where the oppressed might dwell in peace drew together a population
varied, but rich in the spirited and in idealists. What a contrast between the
English colonies and those of the orthodox powers! For the intellectual
stagnation of the French in Canada, thank Louis XIV, who would not allow
Huguenots to settle in New France. Spain barred out the foreigner from her
colonies, and even the Spaniard might not go thither without a permit from
the Crown. Heretics were so carefully excluded that in nearly three
centuries the Inquisition in Mexico put to death "only 41 unreconciled
heretics, a number surpassed in some single days [in Spain] in Philip II's
time." No wonder Spanish-American history shows men swayed by greed,
ambition, pride, or fanaticism, but very rarely by a moral ideal.
Let no one suppose, however, that, as were the original settlers, so must
their descendants be. When you empty a barrel of fish fry into a new stream
there is a sudden sharpening of their struggle for existence. So, when people
submit themselves to totally strange conditions of life, Death whets his
scythe, and those who survive are a new kind of "fittest."

Photograph by Hine

Slovaks, Ellis Island

THE TOLL OF THE SEA

Were the Atlantic dried up to-day, one could trace the path between
Europe and America by cinders from our steamers; in the old days it would
have revealed itself by human bones. The conditions of over-sea passage
then brought about a shocking elimination of the weaker. The ships were
small and crowded, the cabins close, and the voyage required from six to
ten weeks. "Betwixt decks," writes a colonist, "there can hardlie a man fetch
his breath by reason there ariseth such a funke in the night that it causeth
putrifacation of the blood and breedeth disease much like the plague."
In a circular, William Penn urged those who came to keep as much upon
deck as may be, "and to carry store of Rue and Wormwood, or often sprinkle
Vinegar about the Cabbin." The ship on which he came over lost a third of
its passengers by smallpox. In 1639 the wife of the governor of Virginia

writes that the ship on which she had come out had been "so pestered with
people and goods ... so full of infection that after a while they saw little but
throwing people overboard." One vessel lost 130 out of 150 souls. One
sixth of the three thousand Germans sent over in 1710 perished in a voyage
that lasted from January to June. No better fared a shipload of Huguenot
refugees in 1686. A ship that left Rotterdam with 150 Palatines landed
fewer than fifty after a voyage of twenty-four weeks. In 1738 "malignant
fever and flux" left only 105 out of 400 Palatines. In 1775 a brig reached
New York, having lost a hundred Highlanders in passage. It was estimated
that in the years 1750 and 1755 two thousand corpses were thrown
overboard from the ships plying out of Rotterdam. In 1756, Mittelberger
thus describes the horrors of the passage:

During the voyage there is aboard these ships terrible misery,
stench, fumes, vomiting, many kinds of sickness, fever, dysentery,
scurvy, mouth-rot, and the like, all of which come from old and
sharply salted food and meat, also from very bad and foul water, so
that many die miserably.... Many hundred people necessarily perish in
such misery and must be cast into the sea. The sighing and crying and
lamenting on board the ship continues night and day.

Thus many poor-conditioned or ill-endowed immigrants succumbed en
route. Those of greater resolution stood the better chance; for there was a
striking difference in fate between those who lay despairing in the cabins
and those who dragged themselves every day to the life-giving air of the
deck.

THE SIFTING BY THE WILDERNESS

Even after landing, the effects of the voyage pursued the unfortunates. In
1604, De Monts lost half his colony at St. Croix the first winter. More than
half the Pilgrims were dead before the Mayflower left for home, four
months after reaching Plymouth. Of the Puritans who came to
Massachusetts Bay in 1629, a fifth were under ground within a year. Of the
1500 who came over in the summer of 1630, 200 died before December. In
1754, a Philadelphia sexton testified that up to November 14 he had buried
that year 260 Palatines.

In the South lay in wait the Indian and the malaria-bearing mosquito, and
the latter slew more. The whites might patch a truce with the redskin, but
never with the mosquito. They died as die raw Europeans to-day along the
lower Niger or in the delta of the Amazon. In June, 1610, only 150 persons
were living on the banks of the James River out of 900 who had been
landed there within three years. By 1616, 1650 persons altogether had been
sent out; of these 300 had returned, and about 350 were living in Virginia.
During a twelvemonth in 1619-20, 1200 left England, but only 200 were
alive in April, 1620. Fifty years later, Governor Berkeley stated: "There is
not oft seasoned hands (as we term them) that die now, whereas heretofore
not one out of five escaped the first year." A "seasoned" servant, having
only one more year to serve, brought a better price than a new-comer, with
seven and a half years to serve. Surely the survivors of such a shock had a
tough fiber to pass on to their descendants. It is such selection that explains
in part the extraordinary blooming of the colonies after the cruel initial
period was over.

THE IMPRESS OF THE FRONTIER

No doubt the iron hardihood of the South African Boers was built up by
the succumbing of physical and moral weaklings amid a wilderness
environment. In the same way our frontier made it hard for the soft
basswood type to survive. Of the 380 persons whom Robertson collected in
North Carolina in 1779 to found what is now Nashville, only 134 were alive
at the end of a year, although not one natural death had occurred. Six
months later only seventy were left alive. If there had been any weaklings
in the party, by this time surely the tomahawk would have found them. No
wonder, then, that when the vote was cast on the question of staying or
going back, no one voted for going back. The less hardy, too, succumbed to
the fever and ague, which decimated the settlers of the wooded country
until they had cleared the forests and drained the marshes.
In the early days there streamed over the Wilderness Road that led to the
settlements in Kentucky two tides, an outgoing tide of stout-hearted
pioneers, seeking farms in the lovely blue-grass land, and a return flow of
timid or shiftless people, affrighted by the horrors of Indian warfare or tired
of the grim struggle for subsistence amid the stumps. The select character of

those who built up these exposed settlements explains the wonderful
forcefulness of the people of Kentucky and Ohio, especially before they had
given so many of their blood to found the commonwealths farther west.
Thanks to the protecting frontier garrisons, the settlers of the trans-
Mississippi States were perhaps not so rigorously selected as the trans-
Alleghany pioneers; but, on the other hand, they were themselves largely of
pioneer stock.
No doubt the "run of the continent" has improved the fiber of the
American people. Of course the well established and the intellectuals had
no motive to seek the West; but in energy and venturesomeness those who
sought the frontier were superior to the average of those in their class who
stayed behind. It was the pike rather than the carp that found their way out
of the pool. Now, in the main, those who pushed through the open door of
opportunity left more children than their fellows who did not. Often
themselves members of large families, they had fecundity, as it were, in the
blood. With land abundant and the outlook encouraging, they married
earlier. In the narrow life of the young West, love and family were stronger
interests than in the older society; hence all married. Thanks to cheap living
and to the need of helpers, the big family was welcomed. Living by
agriculture, the West knew little of cities, manufactures, social rivalry,
luxury, and a serving class, all foes of rapid multiplication.
In 1802, Michaux found the families of the Ohio settlers "always very
numerous," and of Kentucky he wrote: "There are few houses which
contain less than four or five children." Traveling in the Ohio Valley in
1807, Cumings observed: "Throughout this whole country, whenever you
see a cabin you see a swarm of children"; and Woods wrote in 1819: "The
first thing that strikes a traveler on the Ohio is the immense number of
children." But there is solider proof of frontier prolificacy. The census of
1830 showed the proportion of children under five years in the States west
of the Alleghanies to be a third to a half greater than in the seaboard region.
The proportion of children to women between fifteen and fifty was from
fifty to a hundred per cent. greater. In 1840, children were forty per cent.
more numerous among the Yankees of the Western Reserve than among
their kinsmen in Connecticut. The next half-century took the edge off the
fecundity of the people of the Ohio Valley; but their sons and daughters
who had pushed on into Kansas, Nebraska, and Minnesota, showed families

a fifth larger. In 1900, the people of the agricultural frontier—Texas,
Oklahoma, and the Dakotas—had a proportion of children larger by twenty-
eight per cent. than that of the population between Pittsburgh and Omaha.
If the frontier drew from the seaboard population a certain element, and
let it multiply more freely than it would have multiplied at home, the
frontier must have made that element more plentiful in the American
people, taken as a whole; and this, indeed, appears to be what actually
occurred. No one ventures to assert that the Americans are differentiated
from the original immigrating stocks by superiority in any form of talent or
in any kind of sensibility; but they impress all foreign observers with their
high endowment of energy, tenacity of purpose, and willingness to take
risks, and these are just the qualities that are fostered and made more
abundant by the wilderness. I do not maintain that life in America has added
any new trait to the descendants of transplanted Europeans, nor has it filled
them all with the pioneer virtues. What I do mean is that, owing to the
progressive peopling of the fertile wilderness, certain valuable strains that
once were represented in, say, a sixth of the population, might come to be
represented in a quarter of it; and the timid, inert sort might shrivel from a
fifth of the population to a tenth. Such a shifting in the numerical strength
of types would account both for the large contingent of the forceful in the
normal American community, and for the prevalence of the ruthless, high-
pressure, get-there-at-any-cost spirit which leaves in its wake achievement,
prosperity, neurasthenia, Bright's disease, heart failure, and shattered moral
standards.

CHAPTER II
THE CELTIC IRISH

From the outbreak of the Revolution until the fourth decade of the
nineteenth century there was a lull in immigration. In a lifetime fewer aliens
came than now debark in a couple of months. During these sixty years
powerful forces of assimilation were rapidly molding a unified people out
of the motley colonial population. In the fermenting West, the meeting-
place of men from everywhere, elements of the greatest diversity were
blending into a common American type which soon began to tinge the
streams of life that ran distinct from one another in the seaboard States.
Then came another epoch of vast immigration, which has largely
neutralized the effect of the nationalizing forces, and has brought us into a
state of heterogeneity like to that of the later colonial era.

THE HIBERNIAN TIDE

After the great lull, the Celtic Irish were the first to come in great
numbers. From 1820 to 1850 they were more than two-fifths of all
immigrants, and during the fifties more than one-third. More than a seventh
of our 30,000,000 immigrants have brought in their aching hearts memories
of the fresh green of the moist island in the Northern sea. The registered
number is about 4,250,000, but the actual number is larger, for many of the
earlier Irish, embarking in English ports, were counted as coming from
England. No doubt the Irish who have suffered the wrench of expatriation
to America outnumber the present population of the Green Isle, which is
only a little more than one-half of what it was before the crisis of famine,
rebellion, and misery that came about the middle of the nineteenth century.
It is, indeed, a question whether there is not more Irish blood now on this
side of the Atlantic than on the other. It is possible that during Victoria's
reign more of her subjects left Ireland in order to live under the Stars and
Stripes than left England in order to build a Greater Britain under the Union
Jack.

In his "Coronation Ode," William Watson sees Ireland as

... the lonely and the lovely Bride
Whom we have wedded, but have never won.

The truth of this shows in the way the wandering Irish still shun the lands
under the British crown. Most of the inviting frontier left on our continent
lies in western Canada. Already the opportunities there have induced land-
hungry Americans to renounce their flag at the rate of a hundred thousand
in a single year. Yet the resentful Irish turn to the narrower opportunities of
what they regard as their land of emancipation. During a recent nine-year
period, while the English and the Scotch emigrants preferred Canada to "the
States," eleven times as many Irish sought admission in our ports as were
admitted to Canada, although Canada's systematic campaign for immigrants
is carried on alike in England, Scotland, and Ireland.
Very likely the Irish exodus is a closed chapter of history. Ireland's
population has been shrinking for sixty years, and she has now fewer
inhabitants than the State of Ohio. People are leaving the land of heather
twice as fast as they are abandoning the land of the shamrock. The early
marriage and blind prolificacy that had overpopulated the land until half the
people lived on potatoes, and two-fifths dwelt in one-room mud cabins, are
gone forever, and Ireland has now one of the lowest birth-rates in Europe.
Gradually the people are again coming to own the ground under their feet;
native industries and native arts are reviving, and a wonderful rural
coöperative movement is in full swing. The long night of misgovernment,
ignorance, and superfecundity seems over, the star of home rule is high, and
the day may soon come when these home-loving people will not need to
seek their bread under strange skies.
During its earlier period, Irish immigration brought in a desirable class,
which assimilated readily. Later, the enormous assisted immigration that
followed the famine of 1846-48 brought in many of an inferior type, who
huddled helplessly in the poorer quarters of our cities and became men of
the spade and the hod. After the crisis was past, there again came a type that
was superior to those who remained behind. Of course the acquiescent
property-owning class never emigrated, and those rising in trade or in the
professions rarely came unless they had fallen into trouble through their

patriotism. But of the common people there is evidence that the more
capable part leaked away to America. The Earl of Dunraven testifies:

Those who have remained have, for the most part, been the least
physically fit, the most mentally deficient, and those who correspond
to the lowest industrial standard.... For half a century and more the best
equipped, mentally and physically, of the population have been leaving
Ireland. The survival of the unfittest has been the law, and the
inevitable result, deterioration of the race, statistics abundantly prove.

Owing to this exodus of the young and energetic, Ireland has become the
country of old men and old women. An eighth of her people are more than
sixty-five years old as against an eleventh in England. In half a century the
proportion of lunatics and idiots in the population of Ireland rose from one
in 657 to one in 178. In 1906 the inspector of lunatics reported:

The emigration of the strong and healthy members of the
community not alone increases the ratio of the insane who are left
behind to the general population, but also lowers the general standard
of mental and bodily health by eliminating many of the members of
the community who are best fitted to survive and propagate the race.

He may not have known that, compared with the rest of our immigrants,
the Irish have twice their share of insanity. The commissioners of national
education, after pointing with pride to half a century's great reduction of
illiteracy, add:

The change for the better is remarkable when it is remembered that
it was the younger and better educated who emigrated ... during this
period, while the majority of the illiterate were persons who were too
old to leave their homes.

THE IRISH IN THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE

A close study of two hundred workingmen's families in New York City
showed the average German family thirty dollars ahead at the end of the
year while the average Irish family of about the same income had spent ten

dollars more than it had earned. Charity visitors know that the Irish are
often as open-handed and improvident as the Bedouins. A Catholic educator
accounts for the scarcity of Irish millionaires by declaring that his people
are too generous to accumulate great fortunes. They are free givers, and no
people are more ready to take into the family the orphans of their relatives.
In a county of mixed nationalities there will be more mortgages and stale
debts against Irish farmers than against any others. In a well-paid class of
workers there will be more renters and fewer home-owners among the Irish
than among any other nationality of equal pay. Less habitually than others
do the Irish make systematic provision for old age. They depend on the
earnings of their children, who, indeed, are many and loyal enough. But if
the children die early or scatter, the day-laborer must often eat the bread of
charity. A decade ago the Irish were found to be relatively thrice as
numerous in our almshouses as other non-native elements. In the Northeast,
where they formed a quarter of the foreign-born population, they furnished
three-fifths of the paupers. In Massachusetts, and in Boston as well, they
were four times as common in the almshouses as out of them, although, to
be sure, a part of this bad showing is due to more of them being aged. Nor
do their children provide much better for the future. In Boston, those of
Irish parentage produce two and one-half times their quota of paupers. In
both first and second generations the frugal and fore-looking Germans there
have less than a tenth of the pauperism of the Irish, while in 1910 in the
country at large the tendency of the Irish toward the almshouse was nearly
three times that of the Germans. Dr. Bushee, who has investigated the
conditions in Boston, says:

It cannot be said that the ordinary Irishman is of a provident
disposition; he lives in the present and worries comparatively little
about the future. He is not extravagant in any particular way, but is
wasteful in every way; it is his nature to drift when he ought to plan
and economize. This disposition, combined with an ever-present
tendency to drink too much, is liable to result in insecure employment
and a small income. And, to make matters worse, in families of this
kind children are born with reckless regularity.

In extenuation, let it not be forgotten that at home the earlier Irish
immigrants had lived under perhaps a more demoralizing social condition

than that from which any other of our immigrants have come. Fleeing from
plague and starvation, great numbers were dumped at our ports with no
means of getting out upon the land. What was there for them to do but to
rush their labor into the nearest market and huddle sociably together in
wretched slums, where, despite their sturdy physique, they fell an easy prey
to sickness and died off twice as fast as they should? They lived as poorly
as do the Russian Jews when first they come; but, being a green country-
folk, they understood less than do the town-bred Jews how to withstand the
noxious influences of cities and slums.
Certainly, along with their courage and loyalty, the Irish did not bring the
economic virtues. Straight from the hoe they came, without even the thrift
of the farmer who owns the land he tills. Many of them were no better fitted
to succeed in the modern competitive order than their ancestors of the septs
in the days of Strongbow. In value-sense and foresight, how far they stand
behind Scot, Fleming, or Yankee! In the acquisitive mêlée most of them are
as children compared with the Greek or the Semite. An observant settlement
worker has said:

The Irish are apt to make their occupation a secondary matter. They
remain idle if no man hires them; but not so the Jew. If he can get no
regular employment, it is possible to gather rags and junk and sell
them.... If employed under a hard master, he still works on under
conditions that would drive the Irishman to drink and the American to
suicide until finally he sees an opportunity to improve his condition.

We must not forget that Irish development had been forcibly arrested by
the selfish policy of their conquerors. In the latter part of the seventeenth
century the English Parliament, at the behest of English graziers and
farmers, put an end to Ireland's cattle-trade to England, then to her
exportation of provisions to the colonies. Afterward came export duties on
Irish woolens, and, later, complete prohibition of the exportation of woolens
to foreign countries. "Cotton, glass, hats, iron manufactures, sugar refining
—whatever business Ireland turned her hand to, and always with success—
was in turn restricted." The result was that the natural capacity of the people
was repressed, the growth of industrial habits was checked, and the country
was held down to simple agriculture under a blighting system of absentee
landlordism. Still, we cannot overlook the success of the Scottish

Lowlanders in Ulster under the same strangling discriminations, nor forget
that the 3500 German Protestant refugees who were settled in Munster in
1709 prospered as did their brother refugees in Pennsylvania, and became
in time much wealthier than their Celtic neighbors.
A thousand years ago an Irish scholar, teaching at Liège, acknowledged
his love for the cup in his invocation to the Muses, and addressed a poem to
a friend who, being the possessor of a great vineyard, understood "how to
awaken genius through the inspiration of the heavenly dew."

ALCOHOLISM THE FREQUENT CAUSE OF POVERTY

It is this same "heavenly dew"—whose Erse name usquebaugh, we have
pronounced "whisky"—that, more than anything else, has held back the
Irish in America. The Irishman is no more a craver of alcohol than other
men, but his sociability betrays him to that beverage which is the seal of
good fellowship. He does not sit down alone with a bottle, as the
Scandinavian will do, nor get his friends round a table and quaff lager, as
the German does. No "Dutch treat" for him. He drinks spirits in public, and,
after a dram or two, his convivial nature requires that every stranger in the
room shall seal friendship in a glass with him. His temperament, too, makes
liquor a snare to him. Where another drinker becomes mellow or silent or
sodden, the Celt becomes quarrelsome and foolish.
Twenty years ago an analysis of more than seven thousand cases of
destitution in our cities showed that drink was twice as frequent a cause of
poverty among the Irish cases as among the Germans, and occurred half
again as often among them as among the native American cases. Among
many thousands of recent applications for charity, "intemperance of the
bread-winner" crops out as a cause of destitution in one case out of twelve
among old-strain Americans; but it taints one case out of seven among the
Irish and one case out of six among the Irish of the second generation. In
the charity hospitals of New York alcoholism is responsible for more than a
fifth of all the cases. Drink is the root of the trouble in a quarter of the
native Americans treated, in a third of the Irish patients, and in two-fifths of
the cases among the native-born of Irish fathers. Contrast this painful
showing with the fact that one Italian patient out of sixty, one Magyar

patient out of seventy, one Polish patient out of eighty, and one Hebrew
patient out of one hundred is in the hospital on account of drink!

IRISH NEAR THE FOOT OF THE LIST IN CRIME

In the quality of their crimes our immigrants differ more from one
another than they do in complexion or in the color of their eyes. The
Irishman's love of fighting has made Donnybrook Fair a byword; yet it is a
fact that personal violence is six or seven times as often the cause of
confinement for Italian, Magyar, or Finnish prisoners in our penitentiaries
as for the Irish. Patrick may be quarrelsome, but he fights with his hands,
and in his cups he is not homicidal, like the South Italian, or ferocious, like
the Finn. Three-fifths of the Hebrew convicts are confined for gainful
offenses, but only one-fifth of the Irish. Among a score or more of
nationalities, the Irish stand nearly at the foot of the list in the commission
of larceny, burglary, forgery, fraud, or homicide. Rape, pandering, and the
white-slave traffic are almost unknown among them. What could be more
striking than the fact that more than half of the Irish convicts have been sent
up for "offenses against public order," such as intoxication and vagrancy!
One cannot help feeling that the Celtic offender is a feckless fellow, enemy
of himself more than of any one else. It is usually not cupidity nor brutality
nor lust that lodges him in prison, but conviviality and weak control of
impulses.
It is certain that no immigrant is more loyal to wife and child than the
Irishman. Out of nearly ten thousand charity cases in which a wife was the
head of the family, the greatest frequency of widowhood and the least
frequency of desertion or separation is among the Irish. In only eighteen per
cent. of the Irish cases is the husband missing; whereas among the
Hebrews, Slovaks, Lithuanians, and Magyars he is missing in from forty to
fifty per cent. of the cases. But the sons of Irish, with that ready adaptation
to surroundings characteristic of the Celt, desert their wives with just about
the same frequency as men of pure American stock; namely, thirty-six per
cent., or twice that of their fathers.

GREAT CHANGES IN OCCUPATION AMONG THE IRISH

Thirty years ago, when the Irish and the Germans in America were nearly
equal in number, there were striking contrasts in the place they took in
industry. As domestic servants, laborers, mill-hands, miners, quarrymen,
stone-cutters, laundry workers, restaurant keepers, railway and street-car
employees, officials and employees of government, the Irish were two or
three times as numerous as the Germans. On the other hand, as farmers,
saloon-keepers, bookkeepers, designers, musicians, inventors, merchants,
manufacturers, and physicians, the Germans far outnumbered the Irish.
Where artistic skill is required, as in confectionery, cabinet-making, wood-
carving, engraving, photography, and jewelry-making; where scientific
knowledge is called for, as in brewing, distilling, sugar-refining, and iron
manufacture, the Irish were hopelessly beaten by the trained and plodding
Germans.
For a while, the bulk of Irish formed a pick-and-shovel caste, claiming
exclusive possession of the poorest and least honorable occupations, and
mobbing the Chinaman or the negro who intruded into their field. But the
record of their children proves that there is nothing in the stock that dooms
it forever to serve at the tail-end of a wheelbarrow. Take, for instance, those
workers known to the statistician as "Female bread-winners." Of the first
generation of Irish, fifty-four per cent. are servants and waitresses; of the
second generation, only sixteen per cent. Whither have these daughters
gone? Out of the kitchen into the factory, the store, the office, and the
school. In the needle trades they are twice as frequent as Bridget or Nora
who came over in the steerage. Five times as often they serve behind the
counter, seven times as often they work at the desk as stenographer or
bookkeeper, five times as frequently they teach. One native girl out of
twelve whose fathers were Irish is a teacher, as against one girl out of nine
with American fathers. The Irish girls of the second generation are twice as
well represented as the native-born German girls. Evidently it will not be
long before they have their full share of school positions. In thirty leading
cities eighteen per cent. of the teachers are second-generation Irish; and
there are cities where these swift climbers constitute from two-fifths to a
half of the teaching force.
'Tonio or Ivan now wields the shovel while Michael's boy escapes
competition with him by running nimbly up the ladder of occupations. As
compared with their immigrant fathers, the proportion of laborers among

the sons of Irishmen is halved, while that of professional men and salesmen
is doubled, and that of clerks, copyists, and bookkeepers is trebled. The
quota of saloon-keepers remains the same. There is no drift into agriculture
or into mercantile pursuits. In the cities the Irish suffer little from the
competition of the later immigrants because, thanks to their political
control, they divide among themselves much of the work carried on by the
municipality as well as the jobs under the great franchise-holding
corporations. So far, the strength of the Irish has been in personal relations.
They shine in the forum, in executive work, in public guardianship, and in
public transportation, but not in the more monotonous branches of
manufacture. In the colleges it has been noted that the students of Irish
blood are strong for theology and law, but show little taste for medicine,
engineering, or technology.

Distribution of Irish and natives of Irish Parentage—1910
Among the first thousand men of science in America the Irish are only a
fourth as well represented as the Germans, a fifteenth as well as the English
and Canadians, and a twentieth as well as the Scotch. This backwardness is
in part due to the overhang of bad conditions; and the compilers of the table
very properly suggest that "the native-born sons of Irish-born parents may

not be inferior in scientific productivity to other classes of the community."
The same comment may be made on the fact that of the persons listed in
"Who's Who in America," two per cent. were German-born, another two per
cent. were English-born, but only one per cent. came from the land of Erin.

IRISH INTELLECT AND MENTAL ABILITY

No doubt the peaks of Celtic superiority are poetry and eloquence. Their
gifts of emotion and imagination give the Irish the key to human hearts.
They are eloquent for the same reason that they are poor technicians and
investigators, for the typical Celt sees things not as they really are, but as
they are to him.
The Irishman still leans on authority and shows little tendency to think
for himself. In philosophy and science he is far behind the head of the
procession. Even when well-educated, he thinks within the framework
formed by certain conventional ideas. Unlike the educated German or Jew,
he rarely ventures to dissect the ideas of parental authority, the position of
woman, property, success, competition, individual liberty, etc., that lie at the
base of commonplace thought. Here, again, this limitation by sentiment and
authority derives doubtless from the social history of the Irish rather than
from their blood. They have been engrossed with an old-fashioned problem
—that of freeing their country. Meanwhile, the luckier peoples have swept
on to ripen their thinking about class relations, industrial organization, and
social institutions.

TRAITS OF THE CELT

With his Celtic imagination as a magic glass, the Irishman sees into the
human heart and learns how to touch its strings. No one can wheedle like an
Irish beggar or "blarney" like an Irish ward boss. Not only do the Irish
furnish stirring orators, persuasive stump-speakers, moving pleaders, and
delightful after-dinner speech-makers, but they give us good salesmen and
successful traveling-men. Then, too, they know how to manage people. The
Irish contractor is a great figure in construction work. The Irish mine "boss"
or section foreman has the knack of handling men. The Irish politician is an
adept in "lining up" voters of other nationalities. More Germans than Irish

enlisted in the Union armies, but more of the Irish rose to be officers. In the
great corporations Americans control policy and finance, Germans are used
in technical work, and Irishmen are found in executive positions. The Irish
are well to the fore in organizing labor and in leading athletics. "Of two
applicants," says a city school superintendent, "I take the teacher with an
Irish name, because she will have less trouble in discipline, and hits it off
better with the parents and the neighborhood."
Whatever is in the Irish mind is available on the instant, so that the Irish
rarely fail to do themselves justice. They keep their best foot forward, and if
they fall, they light on their feet. They succeed as lawyers not only because
they can play upon the jury, but because they are quick in thrust and parry.
They abound in newspaper offices because their imagination enables them
to keep "in touch" with the public mind. The Irishman rarely attains the
thorough knowledge of the German physician; but he makes his mark as
surgeon, because he is quick to perceive and to decide when the knife
discloses a grave, unsuspected condition.
The Irishman accepts the Erse proverb, "Contention is better than
loneliness." "His nature goes out to the other fellow all the time," declares a
wise priest. The lodge meeting of a Hibernian benevolent association is a
revelation of kindness and delicacy of feeling in rough, toil-worn men. A
great criminal lawyer tells me that if he has a desperate case to defend, he
keeps the cold-blooded Swede off the jury and gets an Irishman on,
especially one who has been "in trouble." Bridget becomes attached to the
family she serves, and, after she is married, calls again and again "to see
how the childher are coming on." Freda, after years of service, will leave
you off-hand and never evince the remotest interest in your family. The
Irish detest the merit system, for they make politics a matter of friendship
and favor. In their willingness to serve a friend they are apt to lose sight of
the importance of preparation, fitness and efficiency in the public servant.
Hence they warm to a reform movement only when it becomes a fight on
law-breakers. Then the Hibernian district attorney goes after the "higher-
ups" like a St. George. When the Irish do renounce machine politics, they
become broad democrats rather than "good government" men.
Imaginative and sensitive to what others think of him, the Celt is greatly
affected by praise and criticism. Unlike the Teuton, he cannot plod patiently
toward a distant goal without an appreciative word or glance. He does his

best when he is paced, for emulation is his sharpest stimulus. The grand
stand has something to do with the Irish bent for athletic contests. Irish
school-children love the lime-light, and distinguish themselves better on the
platform than in the classroom. Irish teachers with good records in the
training-school are less likely than other teachers to improve themselves by
private study.
"The Irish are wilder than the rest in their expression of grief," observes
the visiting nurse, "but they don't take on for long." The Irishman is less
persistent than others in keeping up the premiums on his insurance policy,
the payments on his building-and-loan association stock. He is quick to
throw up his job or change his place in order to avoid sameness. "My will is
strong," I heard a bright-eyed Kathleen say, "but it keeps changing its
object; Gunda [her Norwegian friend] is so determined and fixed in
purpose!" There is a proverb, "The Irishman is no good till he is kicked,"
meaning that he is unstable till his blood is up. Once his fighting spirit is
roused, he proves to be a "last ditcher." As a soldier, he is better in a charge
than in defense, and if held back, he frets himself to exhaustion.
A professor compares his Celtic students to the game trout, which makes
one splendid dash for the fly, but sulks if he misses it. A bishop told me how
his prize-man, an Irish youth, sent to Paris to study Hebrew, was amazed at
the prodigious industry of his German and Polish chums. "I never knew
before," he wrote, "what study is." A settlement worker comments on the
avidity with which night-school pupils in Irish neighborhoods select classes
with interesting subjects of instruction, and the rapidity with which they
drop off when the "dead grind" begins. Their temperament rebels at close,
continuous application. The craftsman of Irish blood is likely to be a little
slapdash in method, and he rarely stands near the top of his trade in skill.
The Irishman succeeds best in staple farming—all wheat, all cotton, or all
beets. With the advent of diversified farming, he is supplanted by the
painstaking German, Scandinavian, or Pole. Work requiring close attention
to details—like that of the nurseryman, the florist, or the breeder—falls into
the hands of a more patient type. In banking and finance, men of a colder
blood control.

FUTURE OF THE IRISH-AMERICAN

The word "brilliant" is oftener used for the Irish than for any other aliens
among us save the Hebrews. Yet those of Irish blood are far from manning
their share of the responsible non-political posts in American society. Their
contribution by no means matches that of an equal number of the old
American breed. But, in sooth, it is too soon yet to expect the Irish strain to
show what it can do. Despite their schooling, the children of the immigrant
from Ireland often become infected with the parental slackness, unthrift,
and irresponsibility. They in turn communicate some of the heritage to their
children; so that we shall have to wait until the fourth generation before we
shall learn how the Hibernian stock compares in value with stocks that have
had a happier social history.

Immigration from Ireland 1821-1910

CHAPTER III
THE GERMANS

More than 5,250,000 people have been contributed to our population by
Germany in the last ninety years. Deducting the Poles from eastern Prussia,
and counting Germans from Russia, Austria, Bohemia, and eastern
Switzerland, we have, no doubt, received more than 7,000,000 whose
mother-tongue was the speech of Luther and Goethe. It is probable that
German blood has come to be at least a fourth part of the current in the
veins of the white people of this country, so that this infusion alone equals
the total volume of Spanish and Portuguese blood in South America.
From its rise in the thirties until after our Civil War, the stream of
immigrants from Germany fluctuated with religious and political conditions
on the other side of the Atlantic rather than with economic conditions on
this side. Between 1839 and 1845 numerous Old Lutherans, resenting the
attempt of their king to unite the Lutheran and the Reformed faiths,
migrated hither from Pomerania and Brandenburg. The political reaction in
the German states after the revolution of 1830, and again after the
revolution of 1848, brought tens of thousands of liberty-lovers. In 1851, in a
book of advice to intending immigrants, Pastor Bogen of Boston set forth as
the chief inducement to migrate the freedom the Germans would enjoy in
America—freedom from oppression and despotism, from privileged orders
and monopolies, from intolerable imposts and taxes, from constraint in
matters of conscience, from restrictions on settling anywhere in this country
of "exhaustless resources."
The political exiles famous as the "Forty-eighters" included many men of
unusual attainments and character, who almost at once became leaders of
the German-Americans, exercising an influence quite out of proportion to
their numbers. These university professors, physicians, journalists, and even
aristocrats, aroused many of their fellow-countrymen to feel a pride in
German culture, and they left a stamp of political idealism, social
radicalism, and religious skepticism which is slow to be effaced.

Thanks to the Hausfrau ideal for women and to the militarist demand for
recruits, the German people has until recently persevered in a truly
medieval fecundity. Despite an outflow of 6,500,000 between 1820 and
1893, population has doubled in seventy years and trebled in a hundred.
Prince Bülow complains that "the Poles of eastern Prussia multiply like
rabbits, while we Germans multiply like hares." The fact is, a generation
ago the Germans, too, were multiplying like rabbits. This is the reason why
during the seventies and eighties, although political conditions had much
improved, great numbers of farm-laborers, female servants, handicraftsmen,
small tradesmen, and other members of the humbler classes, streamed out
of crowded Germany in the hope of improving their material condition. The
peasant living on black bread and potatoes heard of and longed for the
white bread and fleshpots of the American West. Although the
overwhelming majority of the 1,500,000 Germans who immigrated during
the eighties represented the lower economic strata, they came in with fair
schooling, considerable industrial skill, and, on an average, three times as
much money as the Slav, Hebrew, or South European shows to-day at Ellis
Island.
The German influx dropped sharply as soon as the panic of 1893 broke
out, and when, after four and a half years of economic submergence, this
country struggled to the surface, the tide of Teutons was not ready to flow
again. America's free land was gone, and ruder peoples, with lower
standards of living, were crowding into her labor markets. In the meantime,
Germany's extraordinary rise as a manufacturing country, her successes in
foreign trade, and her wonderful system of protection and insurance for her
labor population, had made her sons and daughters loath to migrate oversea.
The immigration from Germany into the United States is virtually a closed
chapter, and has been so for twenty years. Such Germans as now arrive hail
chiefly from Austria and Russia.

DISTRIBUTION THROUGHOUT THE STATES

No other foreign element is so generally distributed over the United
States as the Germans. A third of them are between Boston and Pittsburgh,
fifty-five per cent. live between Pittsburgh and Denver, seven per cent. are
in the South, and five per cent. are in the far West.

In the South they are more numerous than any other non-native element.
They predominate, except in New England, where the Irish abound; in
States along the northern border, into which filter many Canadians; in the
Dakotas, where the Scandinavians lead; in the Mormon States, with their
many converts from England; and in Louisiana and Florida, with their
Italians and Cubans. In Milwaukee nearly half the people are of German
parentage, in Cincinnati a quarter, in St. Louis a fifth. A third of the
Germans are in the rural districts, whereas all but a sixth of the Irish are in
cities. Whether one considers their distribution among the States, their
partition between city and country, or their dispersion among the callings,
the Germans will be found to be the most pervasive element so far added to
our people.

ASSIMILATION WITH NEW NEIGHBORS

Unlike the Irish immigrants, the Germans brought a language, literature,
and social customs of their own; so that, although when scattered they
Americanized with great rapidity, wherever they were strong enough to
maintain churches and schools in their own tongue they were slow to take
the American stamp. For the sake of their beloved Deutschtum, about the
middle of the last century the promoters of this migration dreamed of
creating in the West a German state where Germans should hold sway and
hand down their culture in all its purity. Missouri, Illinois, Texas, and later
Wisconsin, seemed to hold out such a hope. But the immigrants would not
remain massed, the Yankees pushed in, and "Little Germany" never found a
place on the map.
After 1870 the Teutonic overflow was prompted by economic motives,
and such a migration shows little persistence in flying the flag of its
national culture. Numbers came, little instructed, or else bringing a
knowledge of Old Testament worthies rather than of German poets,
musicians, and artists. In the words of a German-American, Knortz: "Nine-
tenths of all German immigrants come from humble circumstances and
have had only an indifferent schooling. Whoever, therefore, expects pride in
their German descent from these people, who owe everything to their new
country and nothing to their fatherland, simply expects too much."

The "Forty-eighters" had given a great stimulus to all German forms of
life,—schools, press, stage, festivals, choral societies, and gymnastic
societies,—but since the passing of these leaders and the subsidence of the
Teutonic freshet, Deutschtum has been on the wane. German newspapers
are disappearing, German-American books and journals become fewer,
German book stores are failing, German theaters are closing, and the
surviving German private schools may be counted on the fingers. Probably
not more than ten per cent. of the children of German parentage hear
anything but English spoken at home. Champions of Deutschtum admit
sadly that nothing but a strong current of immigration can preserve it here.
The spreading German-American National Alliance is bringing about a
marked revival, but hardly will it succeed in persuading the majority of its
people to lay upon their children the burden of a bi-lingual education. It is
the apparent destiny of the descendants of the myriads of Germans who
have settled here to lose themselves in the American people, and to take the
stamp of a culture which is, in origin at least, eighty per cent. British.
It is no small tribute to the solvent power of American civilization that
the stable and conservative Germans, who, as settlers in Transylvania, in
Chili, or in Palestine, among the Russians on the lower Volga, or among the
Portuguese in southern Brazil, are careful to keep themselves unspotted
from the people about them, have proved, on the whole, easy to
Americanize. Years ago, Prof. James Bryce, just back from Ararat, after
noting the purity of the German culture preserved by the Swabian colony in
Tiflis, added:

It was very curious to contrast this complete persistence of
Teutonism here with the extremely rapid absorption of the Germans
among other citizens which one sees going on in those towns of the
Western States of America, where—as in Milwaukee, for instance—
the inhabitants are mostly Germans, and still speak English with a
markedly foreign accent.... Here they are exiles from a higher
civilization planted in the midst of a lower one; there they lose
themselves among a kindred people, with whose ideas and political
institutions they quickly come to sympathize.

INFLUENCE OF THE GERMANS IN AMERICA

The leanness of his home acres taught the German to make the most of
his farm in the New World. The immigrant looked for good land rather than
for land easy to subdue. Knowing that a heavy forest growth proclaims rich
soil, he shunned the open areas, and chopped his homestead out of the
densest woods. While the American farmer, in his haste to live well, mined
the fertility out of the soil, the German conserved it by rotating crops and
feeding live stock. In caring for his domestic animals, he set an example.
Just as the county agricultural fair, and the state fair as well, is the
development of the Pennsylvania-German Jahrmarkt, and the "prairie
schooner" is the lineal descendant of the "Conestoga wagon," so the
capacious red barns of the Middle West trace their ancestry back to the big
barn which the Pennsylvania "Dutchman" provided at a time when most
farmers let their stock run unsheltered.
Thanks partly to good farming and frugal living, and partly to the un-
American practice of working their women in the fields, the German
farmers made money, bought choice acres from under their neighbors' feet,
and so kept other nationalities on the move. This is the reason why a
German settlement spreads on fat soil and why in time the best land in the
region is likely to come into German hands. Unlike the restless American,
with his ears ever pricked to the hail of distant opportunity, the phlegmatic
German identifies himself with his farm, and feels a pride in keeping it in
the family generation after generation. Taking fewer chances in the lottery
of life than his enterprising Scotch-Irish or limber-minded Yankee neighbor,
he has drawn from it fewer big prizes, but also fewer blanks.
In quest of vinous exhilaration, our grandfathers stood at a bar pouring
down ardent spirits. It is owing to our German element that the mild lager
beer has largely displaced whisky as the popular beverage, while sedentary
drinking steadily gains on perpendicular drinking. Because the toping of
beer has from time immemorial been interwoven with their social
enjoyments, and because beer, unlike whisky, makes wassailers fraternal
rather than wild and quarrelsome, the Germans, supported by the
Bohemians, have offered, in the name of "personal liberty," the most
determined opposition to liquor legislation. They may renounce the bowl,
but taken away it shall not be! In their loyalty to beer, these Teutons out-
German their cousins in the Fatherland, who are of late turning from the
national beverage at an astonishing rate. At the World's Fair in St. Louis a

number of American scholars who had studied of yore in German
universities gave a luncheon to the visiting German economists. Out of
respect for their guests, the hosts all filled the mugs of their student days;
but, to their astonishment, the Germans called unanimously for iced tea!
The influence of the Germans in spreading among us the love of good
music and good drama is acknowledged by all. But there is a more subtle
transformation that they have wrought on American taste. The social
diversions of the Teutons, and their affirmance of the "joy of living," have
helped to clear from our eyes the Puritan jaundice that made all physical
and social enjoyment look sinful. If "innocent recreation" and "harmless
amusement" are now phrases to conjure with, it is largely owing to the
Germans and Bohemians, with their love of song and mirth and "having a
good time." Few of the present generation realize that fifty years ago the
principal place of amusement in the American town, although as innocent
of opera as a Kaffir kraal, called itself the "opera-house," in order to avoid
the damning stigma the reigning Puritanism had attached to the word
"theater."
As voters, the Germans have shown little clannishness. Their
partizanship has not been bigoted, and by their insistence on independent
voting they have perplexed and disgusted the politicians. Before 1850, they
saw in the Democratic party the champion of the liberties for the sake of
which they had expatriated themselves. But when the slavery issue came to
be overshadowing, the "Forty-eighters" were able to swing them to the
newly formed Republican party, to which, on the whole, they have
remained faithful, although in some States their loyalty has been much
shaken by prohibition. On money questions the Germans have been
conservative. Bringing with them the notion of an efficient civil service,
they have despised office-mongering and have befriended the merit system.
No immigrants have been more apt to look at public questions from a
common-welfare point of view and to vote for their principles rather than
for their friends. If by "political aptitude" is meant the skill to use politics
for private advantage, then in this capacity the German must be ranked low
among our foreign-born.

Distribution of Germans and natives of German Parentage—1910
In the way of civil and political liberty, the Germans added nothing to the
old-English heritage they found here; but in freedom of thought their
contribution has been invaluable. Where there is no church, state, or upper
class to hold it in check, the community is likely to show itself imperious
toward the nonconformist. The New England Puritan, who was oak to any
civil authority that he had not helped to constitute, was a reed before the
pressure of community opinion. The sturdy Germans flouted this tyranny
sans tyrant. At a time when the would-be-respectable American stifled
under a pall of conventionality in regard to religion and manners, they
asserted the right to think and speak for themselves without incurring loss
or ostracism. Then, too, the scholarly German immigrant imparted to us his
sense of the dignity of science and its right to be free, although, to be sure,
this spirit has been fostered among us chiefly by Americans who have
studied in German universities. On the whole, in the way of intellectual
liberty, the university-bred Liberals of 1848 had as much to offer as they
gained in the way of political liberty.

THE GERMANS IN THE CIVIL WAR

At the outbreak of the Civil War the Germans, with their deep detestation
of slavery, played no small rôle. In the South, those of later immigration
opposed the Confederacy; in the North their leaders lined them up solidly in
support of the Union. About 200,000 Germans enlisted in the Union army,
more than there were of Irish volunteers, although the Irish were more
numerous in the population of the loyal States. The militia companies
formed among the Germans in Missouri, especially in St. Louis, were
pivotal in saving that State for the Union. The military knowledge of
Prussians who had seen service in the old country was valued, sometimes
over-valued, in the earlier stage of the conflict. The all-German divisions of
Steinwehr and Schurz, after being roundly, perhaps unjustly, abused for not
holding Jackson at Chancellorsville, fought well at Gettysburg and
distinguished themselves in the "battle among the clouds."

THE GERMANS IN THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE

Probably no compliment has ever been bestowed on the Germans in
America that did not contain the words "industrious and thrifty." Nor is it
surprising that the members of a race so forelooking and reflective rarely
sink into the mire of poverty. In 1900, the Germans were 25.8 per cent. of
our foreign-born, and three years later it was found that only 23.3 per cent.
of the foreign-born in our almshouses were Germans. For the country at
large, we have no means of comparing the German with the American in his
ability to take care of himself; but studies made in Boston showed that the
proportion of Boston Germans in the city almshouse was half that of the
English in that city, one-sixth of that of the Scotch, and only one-tenth of
that of the Irish. In the state charitable institutions of Massachusetts,
Germans make a better showing than Celts, but not so good a showing as
Scandinavians and Americans.
To the various relief agencies in Boston, Germans apply less often than
any other of the English-speaking immigrants. The analyst of Boston's
foreign-born is struck by the small number of Germans and Scandinavians
who seek aid, and says:

Occasionally, it is true, idle and shiftless families are found among
both these peoples; but on the whole they are industrious and thrifty,

and less hopeless poverty is found among them than among almost any
of the other foreign immigrants.... The Germans are without doubt the
best type of immigrants which has settled in Boston.

In our cities, no other element has so large a proportion of home-owners,
and in the care of the home they surpass all other nationalities save the
Swedes.

ALCOHOLISM AMONG THE GERMANS

The saturation of the social life of our Germans with the amber beverage,
as well as their hostility to prohibition, prepares us to find alcoholism very
common among the disciples of St. Gambrinus. The fact is, however, that in
point of sobriety hardly any North European makes so good a record as the
German. A few years ago an analysis of 2075 charity cases showed that
drink as the cause of poverty occurred only one-half as often among the
German cases as among the Irish, and two-thirds as often as among native
American cases. In the charity hospitals of New York, the proportion of
German patients treated for alcoholism is only half as large as that of the
English and the native Americans, and only a third as great as that of the
Irish. The charity workers in our cities report that "intemperance of the
bread-winner" is less often found to be the cause of destitution among the
German applicants than among those of any other North-European
nationality. Among alien prisoners only one German of twenty-two was
committed for intoxication as against one out of three Irish, one out of four
French Canadians, one out of five Scotch, and one out of eight
Scandinavians. On the other hand, the victims of drink are far more
numerous among them than among the Italians, Magyars, Jews, and
Syrians. These peoples, vine-growers and wine-bibbers from time
immemorial, have had the chance to get drunk many thousand years longer
than the Celts and Teutons; hence they have been more completely purged
of their alcoholics. While a light beverage like beer produces fewer sots and
wrecks than the "water of life" so grateful to the Northern palate, it
produces a vast unreported stupefying and deterioration; so there is good
reason why the German drinking customs are being sloughed off in the
Fatherland at the very moment they are being warmly defended in America.

AMOUNT OF CRIME NORMAL AMONG GERMANS

The striking thing about the abnormality of the Germans is its normality
in amount. Among the foreign-born, the Germans have just about their due
share of insanity, neither less nor more. Likewise, the marked feature of
German crime in this country is simply its featurelessness. Among the
twelve thousand-odd aliens in our prisons, the German prisoners run a little
above the average in their bent for gainful offenses and a little below the
average in their crimes of violence. In their leaning to other offenses they
come close to the mean. Among the twenty nationalities that figure in the
police arrests of Chicago, the German stands, with respect to almost every
form of misconduct, near the middle of the list. The French and the
Hebrews stand out in bad eminence as offenders against chastity, the
Italians lead in murder and blackmail, the Americans in burglary, the
Greeks in kidnapping, the Lithuanians in assault, the Irish in disorderly
conduct. But the German lacks distinction in evil, never coming near either
the top or the bottom of the scale in predilection for any form of crime. On
the whole, his criminal bent is very close to that of the native American.

WIDE VARIETY OF OCCUPATION

The Germans brought us much more in the way of industrial skill and
professional training than the Irish; besides, they were much more
successful in planting themselves upon the soil. They tended far more to
farming and manufacturing, far less to domestic and personal service and
transportation. The second generation shows no marked drift away from the
farm. In 1900, three-fifths of all brewers in the country were Germans, a
third of the bakers and cabinet-makers, a fifth of the saloon-keepers and
butchers, a sixth of the hatters, tailors, and coopers, and a seventh of the
musicians and teachers of music. Yet only one male bread-winner out of
nineteen was a German.
The sons of Germans are a sixteenth of our male labor force; but they
furnish a quarter of the trunk-and-satchel makers, a fifth of the bottlers,
stovemakers, and engravers, and a sixth of the upholsterers, bookbinders,
paper-box makers, butchers, brewers, and brass-workers. In our cities the
German baker, tailor, butcher, cabinet-maker, or engraver is quite as

characteristic and familiar a figure as the Irish drayman, fireman, brakeman,
section boss, street-car conductor, plumber, or policeman.
The immigrant German women begin rather higher in the scale of
occupation than the Irish, but their daughters do not rise in life with such
amazing buoyancy as do the daughters of the Irish. Between the first-
generation and the second-generation Germans the proportion of servants
and waitresses falls from a third of all female bread-winners to a quarter.
For the Irish the drop is from fifty-four per cent. to sixteen per cent. The
second-generation Germans do not show such an advance on their parents
as do the second-generation Irish, who bob up like corks released at the
bottom of a stream.

TEUTONIC TRAITS

Physically the German is strong, but often too stocky for grace. A blend
with the taller and thinner American is likely to give good results in figure.
Being slow in response, he makes a poor showing in competitive sports. His
forte is gymnastics rather than athletics, and he is to be found in the indoor,
sedentary trades rather than in the active, outdoor callings. Not often will
you come upon him riveting trusses far up on the skyscraper or the railway
bridge. His pleasures he takes sitting rather than moving, so that he haunts
summer-garden and picnic-ground rather than base-ball diamond and
bowling-alley. For all his traditional domesticity, he is a sociable soul, and
will lug off his entire family to a public resort, when an American would
prefer a pipe by the fireside. He is fond of the table, and loves to enjoy talk,
music, or drama while eating and drinking. In comparison with the native
Americans, or the Celts from the British Isles, the Germans in America
have the name of being materialistic. If this be true, it is doubtless due to
the small representation among them of that noble leavening type that has
made the spiritual greatness of Germany. Any one who has lived in the old
country knows that there is a kind of German that one rarely sees among
our fellow-citizens. Of such were the "Forty-eighters"; but as their influence
fades, the idealism they fanned dies down, and visitors from the Fatherland
complain that America has stamped its dollar-mark all over the souls of
their kinsmen here. Professor Hugo Münsterberg, an impartial observer,

judges that "the average German-American stands below the level of the
average German at home."
But if he chases the dollar, let us grant that he does it in his own way.
Honest and stable, he puts little faith in short-cuts to riches, such as
"scream" advertising, commercial humbug, "faked" news, thimblerig
finance, or political graft. He does not count on skipping many rungs in the
ladder of success. German business enterprises grow slowly, but if you
probe them, you find a solid texture. The German is hard-headed, and is not
easily borne off his feet by the contagion of example. To speculative fever
and to made panic he is rather immune. Because he is less mobile than the
American and does not shift from one thing to another, he is more apt to
gain skill and turn out good work. Then, too, he is not so keen to get on that
he does not find the artist's enjoyment and pride in the practice of his craft.
In a word, the Germans act in American society as a neutral substance
moderating the action of an overlively ferment. For the universal eagerness
to be "wide awake" and "up to date" has deposed habit, tradition, and
external authority as lords of life among us.
The German is lasting in his sympathies and his antipathies and leisurely
in his mental processes. It takes him long to make up his mind and longer to
get an idea out of his head. In his thinking he tries to grasp more things at a
time than does the Celt. Not for him the simple logic that proceeds from one
or two outstanding factors in a situation and ignores all the rest. He wants to
be comprehensive and final where the Latin aims to be merely clear and
precise. It is this very complexity of thought that makes the German often
silent, his speech heavy or confused. But just this relish for details and this
passion for thoroughness make him a born investigator. This is why, on the
practical side, the German-American has most distinguished himself in
work that calls for long and close observation, such as gardening,
viticulture, breeding, forestry, brewing, and the chemical industries.
Thirty years ago there was an outcry that the Germans were introducing
into this country the virus of anarchism and socialism. It is now clear that
German socialism, instead of being a shattering type of thought, is in fact
highly constructive. However bold and iconoclastic he may be in his
thinking, the German, with his respect for authority, his slow reaction to
wrong, and his love of order and system, is a conservative by nature. The

children of revolutionary immigrants are milder than their fathers were; and
the German-Americans are now very far from leading the van of radicalism.

Immigration from Germany, Netherlands, and Switzerland, 1826-
1910

CHAPTER IV
THE SCANDINAVIANS

Although Leif Ericson discovered America in the year 1000 A.D., his
countrymen made no serious use of his find until the latter part of the
nineteenth century. It is only sixty-four years since the memorable visit of
"the Swedish Nightingale," Jenny Lind, opened our eyes to the existence of
the Northern peoples. In fact, the few thousands that about this time began
to filter in were first known as "Jenny Lind men." Now there are among us
a million and a quarter born in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, and,
counting those of Scandinavian parentage and grandparentage, it is safe to
say that a quarter of all this blood in the world is west of the Atlantic.
In 1874 the Icelanders celebrated the millennial anniversary of the
settlement of Iceland, and only year before last certain of our fellow-
citizens were commemorating the millennial anniversary of the cession of
Normandy to Rollo the Dane. In all the thousand years since these
colonizations, there has been no diffusion of Gothic blood to compare with
the settlement in this country of nearly two million Scandinavian
immigrants. Sweden has sent the most, but Norway has contributed a larger
proportion of her people than any other country save Ireland. There are
certainly half as many of Norse blood here as there are in the fatherland,
and they own six times as much farming land. A Norwegian economist
estimates that the property owned by his compatriots in this country
corresponds in value to the entire national economy of Norway.
The crest of the Scandinavian wave passed thirty years ago. The current
runs still, but it is a flow of job-seekers rather than of home-seekers.
America is no longer so attractive to the land-hungry; besides, their home
conditions have greatly improved. By their wonderful development of rural
coöperation, the Danes have made themselves the most envied of European
peasant farmers. By harnessing their waterfalls, the Norwegians have
gained a basis for new industries. The Swedes have drawn the power of half

a million horses from their streams, and their multiplying factories take on
about ten thousand new hands every year.

DISTRIBUTION OF SCANDINAVIAN BLOOD

The old Northwest, stretching from Detroit to Omaha, and thence north
to the boundary, has been the Scandinavian's "land of Goshen." Here is the
"New Sweden" that Gustavus Adolphus dreamed of when he planned a
Swedish colony on the Delaware. In 1850, when there were only thirteen
thousand of her race in that region, Frederika Bremer then in St. Paul had
the vision of a Cumæan sibyl:

What a glorious new Scandinavia might not Minnesota become!
Here would the Swede find again his clear, romantic lakes, the plains
of Scania rich in corn, and the valleys of Norrland; here would the
Norwegian find his rapid rivers, his lofty mountains, for I would
include the Rocky Mountains and Oregon in the new kingdom; and
both nations their hunting-fields and their fisheries. The Danes might
here pasture their flocks and herds and lay out their farms on less misty
coasts than those of Denmark.... The climate, the situation, the
character of the scenery agree with our people better than that of any
other of the American States.

It is a striking fulfilment of her prophecy that to-day a fifth of the
Scandinavian blood in the world is in this very region. Fifty years ago
Wisconsin led, with her great Norwegian contingent; then Minnesota passed
her, and later Illinois, with Chicago as the lodestone. To-day two-fifths of
the people of Minnesota are of Scandinavian strain. Northern Iowa has a
strong infusion of the blood, while the Dakotas are deeply tinged. In 1870
four-fifths of all our Scandinavians were in this region. The proportion fell
slowly to three-fourths in 1880, five-sevenths in 1890, two-thirds in 1900,
and three-fifths in 1910. Of late many have dropped into the ranks of
clanging industrialism between Pawtucket and Pittsburgh, while the current
of home-seekers into the new Northwest has given Washington and Oregon
as many Scandinavians as there are in the Dakotas.

SOCIAL CHARACTERISTICS

Like the immigrants from Great Britain, the Scandinavians came with a
male preponderance of about three-fifths. About a quarter of them were
servants at home, a third were common laborers, and a sixth were skilled
laborers. They have brought far less skill than the British, and distinctly less
than the Germans and the Bohemians.
In point of literacy they lead the world. One finds an illiterate among
every twenty German immigrants of more than fourteen years of age. Of
immigrants from other nations, one may find an illiterate among every
twenty-three Dutch, thirty-eight Irish, fifty-two Welsh, fifty-nine
Bohemians, seventy-seven Finns, one hundred English, and one hundred
and forty-three Scotch; but the proportion among those who come from
Scandinavia is one in two hundred and fifty. What a contrast between these
and the Lithuanians and South Italians, half of whom are unable to read any
language!
It is perhaps the strain of melancholy lurking in Northern blood that gives
our Scandinavians a tendency toward insanity slightly in excess of the
foreign-born as a whole, and decidedly greater than that of Americans. In
susceptibility to tuberculosis they make a worse showing than any others
among our foreign-born save the Irish. They die of it oftener than do their
children born in this country, but even these suffer twice the losses of their
American neighbors. But the scourge is still worse in the old country; so
very likely we have here not a race weakness, but a penalty for unhygienic
conditions. In the bitter North, with the forests disappearing, people came to
dread fresh air, and the trouble began as soon as the open hearth gave way
to the tight stove.
In our Northwest many Scandinavians board up or nail down their
windows for the winter, and in such homes one appreciates the mot evoked
by the query, "Why is the country air so pure?" The answer is, "Because the
farmers keep all the bad air shut up in their houses." The second generation
are taking to ventilation, and in their children very likely the Hyperboreans'
horror of fresh air will have wholly disappeared, and with it their special
susceptibility to the white plague.
The study of several thousand mixed marriages in Minneapolis has led
Professor Albert Jenks of the University of Minnesota to this conclusion:
"The Irish blood tends to increase fecundity, and the Scandinavian blood

tends to decrease fecundity, of other peoples in amalgamation." Is this
contrast due to the Scandinavians being so fore-looking, whereas the Irish
give little heed to the future; to the fact that the Scandinavians are the purest
Protestants, while the Irish are the purest Roman Catholics; or to the
coming together in the Scandinavians of prudence and Protestantism with a
high status of women? At any rate, such caution in family is startling when
one recalls that old Scandinavia was the mother hive of the swarms of
barbarians that kept South Europeans in dread a thousand years, or notes
what William Penn found among the Swedes on the Delaware two hundred
and thirty years ago: "They have fine children and almost every house full;
rare to find one of them without three or four boys and as many girls; some
six, seven, or eight sons."
The primitive man commits crime from passion; the developed man
commits more of his crimes from cupidity. Proverbially honest, the
Scandinavian is less prone than the American to seek his living by
crookedness. The gamut of exploit that reaches from the Artful Dodger to
Colonel Sellers is alien to him. Nor is he subject to the wild impulses that
often crop out in the Italian or the Slav. Much of his crime springs from
disorderly conduct, and drink must bear most of the blame, for on the
Scandinavian nature liquor has a disastrous effect.

ALCOHOLISM AMONG THE SCANDINAVIANS

Pytheas of Marseilles, the explorer who about the time of Alexander the
Great gave the world its first news of Norway, said that the people of Thule
made from honey "a very pleasant drink." This beverage could hardly have
touched the right spot, for when the product of the still reached the Thulites
they fell upon it with the joyous abandon of the inexperienced. A century
ago Scandinavia was the home of hard drinkers. Even yet, in our cities, the
"toughest" saloons are kept by old-time Norsemen, who left the fatherland
before it began to dry out. One hears a proverb which runs, "What won't the
German do for money and the Swede for whisky!" As charity seekers and
hospital patients, our Scandinavians are not so alcoholic as the British, but
more so than the Teutons. More and more, however, they come to us
temperate, and strong believers in sumptuary legislation; for within a
generation Scandinavia has become the Sahara whence issue the desiccating

simooms—Gothenburg system, samlag system, etc.,—which have taken
much "wet" territory off the map.

FAVORITE OCCUPATIONS

Rugged Norway freezes into the souls of her sons a sense of the
preciousness of level, fertile land, and there are no great cities to infect the
imagination of her country dwellers. What wonder, then, that in 1900 nearly
four-fifths of our Norwegians were outside the cities, most of them sticking
to the soil like limpets to a rock! In 1900 half of them were tillers, and
sixty-three per cent. of their grown sons. For the rest, they are to be found
in the forecastles of the great lakes, in the copper and iron mines of upper
Michigan, in the coal-mines of Iowa, in Northern lumber-camps, where
they wield another pattern of ax than did their forbears, who, eight centuries
ago, were known as "ax-bearers" in the Eastern emperor's body-guard. They
work in the building trades, on the railroads, in the flour-mills of the wheat
centers, and in the furniture-mills, the plow-wagon-and-implement factories
of the hardwood belt. From his vast new circle of opportunities, the
Norwegian immigrant chooses those that enable him to continue his life at
home. He insists on getting his living in connection with soil, water, and
wood. In the East he shuns mill drudgery, but shines as a builder. A fourth
part of the Norwegian wage-earners in New York are carpenters, while none
are on the farms. In Iowa two-thirds are on the farms, and only seven per
cent. are in the building trades.
Through the occupational choices of our Danes, one can catch a glimpse
of the lush meadows of Jutland. Forty per cent. of them are on the farm, ten
per cent. are laborers, and four per cent. are carpenters. In butter-making
and dairying they are six times as numerous as in the general work of the
country; in cabinet-making and before the mast they are three and one-half
times as strong. As stock-raisers and drovers, the second generation are five
and one-half times as strong as they are in other lines.
Coming from an industrial country, the Swedes bring skill, and show no
marked bent for agriculture. Only thirty per cent. of them are at the plow-
tail; of their sons, forty-three per cent. The rest will be carpenters, miners,
and quarrymen, railroad employees, machinists, iron- and steel-workers,
tailors, and teamsters. Although they form only an eightieth of the army of

bread-winners, one out of twelve iron-workers, one out of fourteen cabinet-
makers, one out of twenty-one boatmen and sailors, and one out of twenty-
five tailors is a Swede. The Swedish aristocratic view of callings is perhaps
responsible for the fact that the immigrants' sons are three times as
successful in getting "white-handed" jobs as the immigrants, and are much
keener for such work than the sons of our Norwegians.
A like difference is visible in the choices of the daughters. Between the
first generation and the second the proportion in the "ladylike" jobs
increases from 3 per cent. to 13.5 per cent. among the Swedes; from 4.2 per
cent. to 9.8 per cent. among the Norwegians. While the proportion of
servants and waitresses falls from 61.5 per cent. to 44.5 per cent. among the
Swedes, it actually rises from 46 per cent. to 48 per cent. among the
Norwegians. Among the former there is a more eager flight from kitchen to
factory. On the other hand, the affinity of a democratic people for education
reveals itself in the fact that in both generations the Norwegian women are
decidedly more likely to be teachers than the Swedish women.

ASSIMILATION

It may be true that "every Sunday Norwegian is preached in more
churches in America than in Norway," still, no immigrants of foreign speech
assimilate so quickly as the Scandinavians. They never pullulate in slums or
stagnate in solid rural settlements. Of 10,200 families that have been
studied in seven of our great cities, it was found that the 148 Swedish
families had the most dwellings of five and six rooms, the largest incomes,
the best housekeeping, the best command of English, and the highest
proportion of voters among the men. The Scandinavians have not braced
themselves against assimilation, as have the Germans, with their
Deutschtum. Not being beer-bibbers, and warned by their desperate home
struggle, they will not stand with the Teutons for "personal liberty" on the
question of drink. The anti-liquor sentiment is very strong among them, and
in the Minnesota legislature nearly all the support for county option is
Scandinavian. Politically, the Norwegians are more active than the Swedes,
and they have been insurgent ever since they formed in the Northwest the
backbone of so American a movement as Populism.

Among the Scandinavians the spirit of self-improvement is very strong.
No other foreign-born people respond so eagerly to night-school
opportunities. Farmers' institutes command better attendance and attention
where they abound than in straight-American neighborhoods. On a holiday
celebration the address attracts more Scandinavians, the ball-game or the
fireworks, more natives. As patient listeners, they match our Puritan
forefathers. No other people take more pride in giving their children a
chance. In the words of a Minnesota schoolman, "They are the best people
in the State to appreciate education and to want it improved." Unlike the
Germans, they have left no mark on American culture. Our ideas and
institutions have not been changed by their coming. What they have done is
to quicken our interest in the literature of the North, and to win for it
academic recognition. A department of Scandinavian is found not only in
Harvard and Yale, but also in a dozen universities all the way from Chicago
to Seattle. Even the high schools in Minneapolis and elsewhere find place
for Scandinavian.

Distribution of Scandinavians and natives of Scandinavian
Parentage—1910.

REACTION TO AMERICA

The commonplace Knud or Swen brings us a mind pinched by the petty
parochialism of little countries on the world's byways. Coming from some
valley-closet in a mountainous country, only three per cent. of which is fit
for the plow, the Norse immigrant is here spiritually enlarged, like the
native of a box-cañon let out into a plain, or the cove-dweller who comes to
live by the open sea. In a log hut by a lonely fjord in Trondhjem, or on a
dreary moor in Finmark, the story of a Norse peasant lad rising to be
governor or senator in this country thrills as did, near a thousand years ago,
the romantic tale of some Varangian back from service in the emperor's
guard at Constantinople.
In the home-land, a distinguished Norwegian-American, Dr. Wergeland,
finds:

Such an oppressive spiritual atmosphere of narrow-minded
intolerance, of unloving readiness to raise teacup storms, of insolence,
private and political, of clerical and æsthetic arrogance, that the
Norseman, though scarcely knowing why, longs to get away from it all
and to breathe a fresher, sweeter air. No wonder the people emigrate.
There is a peculiar hardness and inflexibility in the Norseman's nature,
and the mild virtues of forbearance grow but sparsely in his
surroundings. This is perhaps the reason why the Norse immigrant
brings to his new homestead for the first four or five years nothing but
an open mouth and a silent tongue—speechless astonishment. And this
is the reason that to come back to Norway, after spending some years
abroad, is so often like coming from open fields into narrow alleys.

In this strain writes a North Dakota pioneer:

What of change the new-comer notices in us American Norsemen is
good manners; the respect shown to women; the small class
distinctions between rich and poor, high and low; and, finally, the
quickness and practical insight into work and business.

Another pioneer, after revisiting Norway, writes:

I was often surprised to find that persons who had never seen me
before took me at once for an American. It seems that even the
expression of one's face is greatly changed here. During this visit I
discovered that my mode of thinking and my spiritual life had changed
so much during my thirteen years in America that I did not feel quite at
home with my childhood friends.... The Norwegian who has lived a
while in America is more civilized than if he had not been here. He has
seen more, experienced more, thought more, and all this has opened
his eyes and broadened his view. He is more wide-awake, lives a richer
life, and is in a closer correspondence with his surroundings. His
sympathies are widened, and he takes more interest in what is going on
in the world.

CONTRASTS AMONG SCANDINAVIANS

It will not do to shuffle all our Scandinavians into one deck. The Danes
are courteous and pleasure-loving, though moody, and they run to
moderation in virtues as in vices. The Swedes bear the impress of a society
that has long known aristocracy, refinement, and industrialism. They are
more polished in manner than the Norwegians, although the humble betray
a servility which grates upon Americans. Many show a sociability and a
love of pleasure worthy of "the French of the North." They bring, too, a
love of letters, and I am told that most of the servant-girls write verse. The
editor of a Swedish weekly receives very well written poems and
contributions from his readers. Learning stands high with the Swedes, and
since John Ericsson they have sent us many fine technical men. Only lately
their great chemist Arrhenius hazarded the prediction that, owing to the
tendency of American men of ability to go into business, our university
chairs will some day be filled with scholars of German and Scandinavian
blood.
The Swede is more melancholy than the Norseman, and his letters to
friends in the old country are full of the expression of feeling. He has the
temperament for pietism, which has always been marked among the
Swedish-Americans because they have been dissenters rather than
adherents of the state church. Formerly the Swedes came from the country,

and were conservative; but of late they have been coming from the cities,
and are of a radical and even socialistic spirit.
The Norwegian bears the stamp of a more primitive life. Squeezed into
the few roods betwixt mountains and fjord, he has eked out the scanty yield
of his farm by grazing the high glacier-fed meadows and gleaning the spoil
of the sea. The need which ten centuries ago drove the Vikings to harry
Europe, to-day forces their descendants into all the navies of the world.
Granite and frost have made the Norse immigrant rough-mannered,
reserved, and undemonstrative, cautious in speech, austere in church life,
and little given to recreation. German Gemüthlichkeit is not in him, nor has
he the Irishman's sociability. Often he is as taciturn as an Indian, and the
lonely farm-houses on the prairie, where not a needless word is uttered the
livelong day, contribute many young people to the city maëlstrom.
The Norwegian immigrant has the high spirit of a people that has never
known the steam-roller of feudalism, of peasants who held their farms by
allodial tenure, and could order the king himself off their land. He has more
pride of nationality than the Swede, gets into our politics sooner, and is
more aggressive in improving his opportunities. He has the name of being
truer to his friends and to his word. Firms declare that they lose less by his
bad debts. "The Swede," remarks an educator, "will show the white feather
and desert you in a pinch; but not the Norwegian." A mine "boss" thinks he
can distinguish Scandinavians by type. "The smooth, white-haired fellows,"
he says, "have a yellow streak in them; but the dark, or sandy-haired
fellows, with a rough skin and rugged features, are reliable." In the
Northwest, the nickname "Norsky" is more apt to be used in a good-natured
way than the term "Swede."

INTELLECTUAL ABILITY

Since our editors and public men tender each nationality of immigrants—
as soon as they have money and votes—nothing but lollipops of
compliment, one is loth to proffer the pungent olive of truth. But it is a fact
that many who have to do with the Americans of Scandinavian parentage
question whether marked ability so often presents itself among them as
among certain other strains. The weight of testimony indicates that
resourcefulness and intellectual initiative are rarer among them than among

those of German descent. Teachers find their children "rather slow,"
although few fall behind. Scandinavian students do well, but they are
"plodders." They beat the Irish in close application, but less often are they
called "brilliant."
Of 19,000 Americans recognized in "Who's Who in America," 332 were
born in Germany, 151 in Ireland, 68 in France, 54 in Sweden, 42 in Russia,
41 in the Netherlands, 34 in Switzerland, 33 in Austria, 30 in Norway, 28 in
Italy, and 14 in Denmark. The Scandinavians have reached prominence far
less often than the French, Dutch, and Swiss Americans, and not so often
even as the Germans. To the first thousand men of science in America, our
Swedish fellow-citizens contribute at the rate of 5.2 per million as against
1.8 for the Irish, 7.1 for the Germans, 7.4 for those born in Russia, and 10.4
for those born in Austria-Hungary.
It is a fair question, then, whether our Scandinavians represent the flower
of their people as well as the root and stalk. No doubt in venturesomeness
they surpass those in like circumstances who stayed at home. No doubt they
brought in full measure the forceful character of the race; but, thanks to our
bland, syrupy way of appraising the naturalized foreign-born, the question
of comparative brain power never comes up.
Now, oppression or persecution had very little to do with the outflow
from Scandinavia. The immigrants came for a better living, for, in the main,
they have been servants and common laborers, with a sprinkling of small
farmers and a fair contingent of craftsmen. We have had very few
representatives of the classes enjoying access to higher education, business,
the professions, and the public service. Having fair prospects at home, the
more capable families very likely contributed fewer emigrants than the rest.
A professor of Swedish parentage tells me that he has noticed that the
successful Swedes he meets traveling in this country are wholly different in
physiognomy from the immigrants. The faces here strike him as duller and
less regular than the faces of people in Sweden. Other Swedish-Americans,
however, contend that formerly caste barriers in the fatherland so blocked
the rise of gifted commoners that the immigrant stream is as rich in natural
ability as is the Swedish people at home. Rugged Norway has less to hold at
home the more capable stocks; but still one meets with candid Norwegian-
Americans who think our million of Norse blood represent the brawn rather
than the brain of their folk.

MENTAL AND PRACTICAL TRAITS

Norse mythology is to Celtic mythology what a Yukon forest is to an
Orinoco jungle. In the Sagas of Iceland the fancy never runs riot as it does
in the legends of Connemara or Brittany. It is not surprising, then, that our
Scandinavians are not distinguished for visual imagination. Professors
notice that the lads of this breed are slow to grasp the principle of the
machinery about the college of agriculture, and need a diagram to
supplement oral description of a ventilating system. To them even a
drawing is a maze of lines rather than a picture. A physical director working
among Scandinavians labored in vain to get his trustees to imagine from the
blue prints how the new gymnasium would look. Not until the scaffolding
was down were his gymnasts satisfied that there would be "room to do the
giant swing." His boy scouts had no faith in a selected camp-site till the
brush was actually cleared from it. They lacked "the mind's eye."
"It is not enough," remarks a settlement head, "to show rich Nils or Lars
'how the other half lives'; you've got to clinch your appeal by showing him
how the other half ought to live." Says a social worker, "I picture to the
poor Slovak an eight-room, steam-heated house as a goal, and he will work
for it; but the poor Swede can't imagine such a house as his own, so I have
to talk to him of the four-room house he will one day possess."
It is said that, as merchant, the Scandinavian puts little visualizing into
his advertisements, and is slow to catch the vision of a community
prosperity through team-work. As business man, he is a "stand-patter," able
to run a going concern, but without the American's power to anticipate
developments and to plant a business where none exists. As farmer, he is
not so far-sighted as the German. He will burn off the growth on his cut-
over land till the humus has been consumed, or wear out his fields with
some profitable but exhausting crop, like tobacco. As investor, he is the
opposite of the imaginative, speculative American, for large, remote profits
do not appeal to him. As labor leader, he lacks vision and idealism. On the
stump he does not address the imagination as does the Hibernian
spellbinder. As advocate, he makes a hard-headed plea without sentiment,
and as after-dinner speaker he lacks in wit and fancy.

Typical Norwegian Boy

Typical Swedish Girl
So little sociable are the Scandinavians that it is said "ice-water runs in
their veins." Even liquor will not start the current of fraternal feeling. They
care little for the social side of their labor-unions, and neglect the regular
meetings. They do not warm up to an employer who treats them "right."
Without the happy art of mixing and fraternizing, these sons of the North do
not shine as bar-tenders, salesmen, canvassers, commercial travelers, or
life-insurance solicitors. As street-car conductors in Minneapolis they are
said to be less helpful and polite than the American or the Irish conductors
of St. Paul. Teachers of this blood do not easily attach their pupils to them;

while the children, instead of being inspired by an audience, as are the Irish,
become tongue-tied. Often one hears a teacher lament, "I can't get anything
out of them."
There is sweetness in the Scandinavian nature, but you reach it deep
down past flint. The late Governor Johnson of Minnesota drew people
because he had imagination and tenderness—traits none too common
among his people. They are undemonstrative in the family, and it is not
surprising that their youth on the farms are restless from heart-hunger.
Besides, there is dearth of recreation. The Norwegian has his violin, but the
Swedish folk-dances we hear so much about were not brought in by the
immigrants. They lack the German Männerchor, Turnverein, and
Schuetzenfest. It is unusual to find them organizing athletic sports. Their
social gatherings center in the church, which of course acts as a damper on
the spirits of the young. They love fun, to be sure, but have not the knack of
making it. Shut up within themselves, hard to reach, slow to kindle, and
dominated by an austere hell-fire theology, they are too often the prey of
somber moods and victims of suicide and insanity.
An experienced social worker finds selfishness the besetting sin of the
Scandinavians he deals with. If a settlement class get a room or a camp,
they object to any others using it. In any undertaking they have in common
with other nationalities they try to get the best for themselves. They
withhold aid from the distressed of another nationality, while the Irish will
respond generously to the same appeal. A labor leader notices that the
Scandinavian working-men are "hard givers." A kindergartener who sent
out Christmas gifts to twenty poor Scandinavian families received thanks
from only one. A society gave relief to 260 such families during the winter,
and the number who expressed gratitude could be counted on the fingers of
one hand. One clergyman declared that his people are not generous in
supporting their own charities.
On the other hand, an observer remarks: "For a suffering person,
circulate your subscription paper among the Irish; for a good cause,
circulate it among the Scandinavians." In other words, the goodness of
these people is from the head rather than from the heart. "If I can get him to
see it as his duty," testifies a charity worker, "the Scandinavian will go
almost any length." Credit men rank them with the Germans as the surest
pay. Insurance agents say no other people are so faithful in paying their

premiums "on the nail." If there is a suspicious fire in a store, the owner's
name never ends in "son." In Minnesota there are more coöperative stores,
creameries, and elevators in the Scandinavian communities than in the
American.
The Norwegians have been virile politically, and their politics has
reflected moral ideas. They look upon public office as a trust, not a means
of livelihood. In the days of Populism they were more open-minded than
the Americans. In Wisconsin they have furnished a stanch support for the
constructive policies which have drawn upon that State national attention.
In the critical roll-calls in the Minnesota legislature all but one or two of the
Scandinavian members are found on the "right side." The "interests" have
the Germans,—brewing being an "interest,"—the Irish, and many
Americans.
The truth is, their slow reaction gives these people the right psychology
for self-government. In politics they are "good losers." They are not to be
stampeded by fiery rhetoric or mass hysteria. They have the self-control to
right abuses by orderly constitutional methods. In the Chicago anarchist
trials the defense was careful to keep Scandinavians out of the jury-box.
Among the Scandinavian peoples riots, barricades, and street turbulence
have played no part in the redress of political grievances. Ideas of right lie
at the base of their social order, while habit and sentiment count for less
than they do among South Europeans. So, while our Scandinavian strain
may lack the qualities for political leadership, it provides an excellent, cool-
blooded, self-controlled citizenship for the support of representative
government.

Immigration from Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, 1841-1910

Distribution of Italians and natives of Italian Parentage—1910

CHAPTER V
THE ITALIANS

The immigration from Italy has shot up like Jonah's gourd. During the
last decade a fourth of our immigrants have been Italians, and from being a
twentieth part of our foreign-born, they have risen to be a tenth. This freshet
is not born of religious or political oppression, for Italy enjoys a
government on modern lines, created by the efforts of patriots like Mazzini,
Cavour, and Garibaldi. The impulse that every year prompts from a quarter
to a half of a million Italians to wander oversea is purely economic.
Ignorance and the subjection of women cause blind multiplication, with the
result that the Italians are wresting their food from narrower plots than any
other European people. A population approximating that of all our Atlantic
States is trying to live from a space little greater than the combined areas of
New York and Georgia. Although Argentina seconds the United States in
absorbing the overflow, still, Italy's population continually swells, her birth-
rate is not sinking so rapidly as her death-rate, and one sees no reason why
the Italian dusk should not in time quench what of the Celto-Teutonic flush
lingers in the cheek of the native American.

DISTRIBUTION THROUGHOUT THE UNITED STATES

Of our one and one-third million of Italians, the Northeast down to
Washington holds about three-fourths, while south and southwest of the
Capitol there are only three and a half per cent. The middle West has sixteen
per cent., and the quota of the Far West is seven and a half per cent. For the
most part, they are greatly concentrated in cities. Roughly speaking, five-
sixths of the Italians in Delaware are in Wilmington; in Maryland, three-
sevenths are in Baltimore; in Illinois, three-eights are in Chicago; in
Nebraska, two-thirds are in Omaha; in Missouri, three-fifths are in St.
Louis; in Oregon, one-half are in Portland; in Pennsylvania, one-half are in
Philadelphia; in Louisiana, two-fifths are in New Orleans; in Michigan, a
third are in Detroit; and in Ohio, a quarter are in Cleveland. In New York

city are massed a third of a million of Italians, one-fourth of all in the
country. Although a slow percolation into the rural districts is going on, this
current distributes immigrants very differently from the older streams that
debouched on the advancing frontier.

SOCIAL CHARACTERISTICS

Migratory job-hunters rather than home-seekers, the Italians are loath to
encumber themselves with their women. The women are only a little more
than one-fifth of the whole, nor do they come here more freely as time goes
on. A natural consequence of leaving families behind is a huge return
current to Italy, amounting to a third of the arrivals from Italy.
More than half of our British immigrants are skilled. Of the Italian
arrivals, one out of eight is skilled, one out of four is a farm-laborer, one out
of three is a common laborer, and one in two hundred and fifty has a
profession. In a word, two-thirds are of rural origin. The illiteracy of the
Italian immigrants more than fourteen years of age is forty-seven per cent.;
so that of the two million illiterates admitted to this country 1899-1909,
nearly one-half hailed from Italy.

NORTH ITALIANS AND SOUTH ITALIANS

The fact that the emigrants from the north of Italy wander chiefly to
South America, where industrially they dominate, while the emigrants from
central and southern Italy come to this country, where they are dominated,
makes it important to remember that in race advancement the North Italians
differ from the rest of their fellow-countrymen. In the veins of the
broadhead people of Piedmont, Lombardy, and Venetia runs much Northern
blood—Celtic, Gothic, Lombard, and German. The other Italians are of the
long-head, dark, Mediterranean race, with no small infusion of Greek,
Saracen, and African blood in the Calabrians and Sicilians. Rarely is there
so wide an ethnic gulf between the geographical extremes of a nation as
there is between Milan and Palermo.
The Italians themselves have set forth these contrasts in the sharpest
relief. In an elaborate treatise, Professor Niceforo shows that blue eyes and
fair hair occur twice as often among the North Italians as among the people

south of Rome; that their understatured are eight per cent. of the whole as
against twenty per cent. for the South Italians; and that they show a greater
frequency of high foreheads and a smaller frequency of low brows. They
have a third of the illiteracy of the South, twice the school attendance, thrice
the number of higher students; and while a clear third of the southern
students fail in their examinations, less than a quarter of the northerners fail.
Northern Italy is twice as well off in teachers and libraries, five times as
productive in book publishing, has twice as many voters to the hundred
inhabitants, and buys half as many lottery-tickets as the South. The
astonishing dearth of literary and artistic production in the South ought to
confound those optimists who, identifying "Italian" with "Venetian" and
"Tuscan," anticipate that the Italian infusion will one day make the
American stock bloom with poets and painters. The figures of Niceforo
show that the provinces that contribute most to our immigration have been
utterly sterile in creators of beauty.
In nothing are the two peoples so unlike as in their crimes. While
northern Italy leads in fraud and chicane, southern Italy reveals a rank
growth of the ferocious crimes that go with a primitive stage of civilization.
The contrast is between force and fraud, violence and cunning. The South
produces five times as much homicide as the North, four times as much
brigandage, three times as many assaults, and five times as many seizures
or destructions of property. On the whole, it has from three to four times the
violence of the North, while its obscene crimes, which constitute an index
of sensuality, are thrice as numerous. As for Sicilians, they are scourged by
seven times the homicide, four times the brigandage, and four times the
obscene crime suffered by an equal number of North Italians.

Photograph by Hine

Italian Gypsy Mother and Child

Photograph by Hine

Italian Woman of Greek or Albanian Ancestry
Although less advanced, the Italians from the valley of the Po are racially
akin to the Swiss and the South Germans. As immigrants, their superiority
to other Italians is generally recognized. I have yet to meet an observer who
does not rate the North Italian among us as more intelligent, reliable, and
progressive than the South Italian. We know from statistics that he is less
turbulent, less criminal, less transient; he earns more, rises higher, and
acquires citizenship sooner. Yet only a fifth of our Italians are from the

North. It is the backward and benighted provinces from Naples to Sicily
that send us the flood of "gross little aliens" who gave Henry James, on
revisiting Boston, the melancholy vision "of a huge applied sponge—a
sponge saturated with the foreign mixture and passed over almost
everything I remembered and might still have recovered."

VARIETY OF OCCUPATIONS

Being new-comers, the Italians are doing the heavy, unskilled work
which was once the prerogative of the Irish. The shovel is now as firmly
associated in our minds with 'Tonio as formerly with Barney. The North
Italians go much into mine and quarry and silk-mill, but the others stick
close to railroad, street, and construction work. Of our railroads it has been
said that "Italians build them, Irish run them, and Jews own them." Nearer
to the truth, perhaps, is the New York mot, "Houses nowadays are built by
Italians, owned by Jews, and paid for by Irish tenants." Being small and
vegetarian, the Italians are not preferred in earthwork for their physical
strength, but because of their endurance of heat, cold, wet, and muck. As
one contractor puts it, "they can stand the gaff."
Although the South Italians are numerous in the manufacture of boots
and shoes, cigars, glass, woolen goods, and clothing, some employers
refuse the males for "inside work" because they have the reputation of being
turbulent. Their noteworthy absence from the rolling-mills is attributed to
the fact that they lack the nervous stability needed for seizing a white-hot
piece of iron with a pair of tongs. The phlegmatic Slav stands up to such
work.
In the trades, the Italians crop up numerously as bakers, barbers,
cobblers, confectioners, tailors, street musicians, scissors-grinders and
marble-cutters. A great number become hucksters and peddlers of such
characteristic wares as fruits and plaster casts. It is the Italian from the
North, especially the Genoese, who brings native commercial capacity and
becomes a wholesale or commission merchant in fruits and vegetables,
while the Neapolitan is still fussing with his banana-stand. Thanks to their
race genius, the Italian musicians and teachers of music among us bid fair
to break the musical monopoly of the German-Americans.

In one province of southern Italy not a plow exists, and the women wield
the hand implements beside the men. It is not strange that immigrants with
such experience do well here in truck-farming and market-gardening. Those
who engage in real agriculture settle chiefly in colonies, for the voluble,
gregarious Italians cannot endure the chill loneliness of the American
homestead. They follow their bent for intensive farming, and would hardly
know how to handle more than fifteen or twenty acres. Few of them are up
to ordinary extensive farming. As one observer says, "They haven't the head
for it."
Although Italians are making a living on the cut-over pine-lands of
northern Wisconsin, the rocky hills of New England, the sandy barrens of
New Jersey, and the muck soil of western New York, their love of sunshine
is not dead. The cane, cotton, and tobacco fields of the South attract them.
More than half of the Italians in Louisiana are on the plantations. Half of
the sixty thousand in California are in vineyard and orchard. The famed
Italian-Swiss colony at Asti employs a thousand men to help it make wine
under a cielo sereno like that of Italy. Many a fisherman who has cast his
net in the Gulf of Genoa now strains the waters of San Francisco Bay.
There are two-score rural colonies of Italians in the South, and the
settlements at Bryan, Texas, and Sunnyside and Tontitown, Arkansas, are
well known. Italians have been welcomed to the South by planters
dissatisfied with negro labor or desirous of deriving a return from their raw
land. As a cotton raiser, the Italian has excelled the negro at every point.
When it was found, however, that thrifty Pietro insisted on buying land after
his second crop as tenant, whereas the black tenant will go on forever
letting his superintending white landlord draw an income from him, the
enthusiasm of the planters cooled. Then, too, a fear has sprung up lest the
Italians, being without the southern white man's strong race feeling, should
mix with the negroes and create a hybrid. The South, therefore, is less eager
for Italian immigrants than it was, and the legislatures of North Carolina,
South Carolina, and Virginia have recorded their sense of the
undesirableness of this element.

CHARACTERISTIC VICES

The peoples from the Azores to Armenia are well-nigh immune to the
seduction of alcohol; so that if this be the test of desirableness, it will be
easy to part the sheep from the goats. Certain American sentimentalists go
into raptures over the "sobriety" of the new immigrants, and to such we may
as well concede first as last that there would be no liquor problem here if
abstemious Portuguese had landed at Jamestown instead of hard-drinking
English; if temperate Rumanians had settled the colonies instead of thirsty
Germans and Scotch-Irish; and if sober, coffee-drinking Turks had peopled
the West instead of bibulous Hibernians and Scandinavians. The proportion
of Italian charity cases due to drink is only a sixth of that for foreign-born
cases, and a seventh of that for cases among native Americans. Alcoholics
occur among the Italians in the charity hospitals from a tenth to a twentieth
as often as among North Europeans. Still, American example and American
strain are telling on the habits of the Italians, and in the Italian home the
bottle of "rock and rye" is seen with increasing frequency by the side of the
bottle of Chianti.
Bachelors in the pick-and-shovel brigade will have their diversions, so it
is not surprising that the Italians, like the abstemious Chinese, are addicted
to gambling. Games of chance flourish in their saloons, and many a knife-
thrust has come out of a game of cards. At home the state lottery has
whetted the taste for gambling. In the Neapolitan the intoxication of the
lottery takes the place occupied by alcoholic intoxication in the Anglo-
Saxon. When one learns that on an average the Neapolitan risks $3.15 a
year in the lottery, six times as much as the average Italian, one does not
wonder that the immigrant hankers to put his money on something.

VIOLENCE IN CRIME

For all the great majority of the Italian immigrants are peaceable and
industrious, no other element matches them in propensity for personal
violence. In homicide, rape, blackmail, and kidnapping they lead the
foreign-born. Says the Immigration Commission: "The Italian criminals are
largest in numbers and create most alarm by the violent character of their
offenses in this country." Among moderns, gainful offenses occur from
three to seven times as frequently as crimes of violence. The medievalism

of the South Italians appears from the fact that they commit more deeds of
personal violence than gainful offenses.
Browning, who knew the Italians, expresses this cheerful alacrity in
murder when, in "The Ring and the Book," the Pope tells of the four
"bright-eyed, black-haired boys" Count Guido hired for his bloody work:

Murder me some three people, old and young,
Ye never heard the names of—and be paid
So much. And the whole four accede at once.
Demur? Do cattle bidden march or halt?

................

All is done purely for the pay—which earned,
And not forthcoming at the instant, makes
Religion heresy, and the lord o' the land
Fit subject for a murder in his turn.
The patron with cut throat and rifled purse,
Deposited i' the roadside ditch, his due,
Naught hinders each good fellow trudging home
The heavier by a piece or two in poke,
And so with new zest to the common life,
Mattock and spade, plow-tail and wagon-shaft
Till some such other piece of luck betide.

It was frequently stated to the members of the Immigration Commission
in southern Italy that crime had greatly diminished in many communities
because most of the criminals had gone to America. One Italian official at
Messina stated that several years ago southern Italy was a hot-bed of crime,
but that now very few criminals were left. When asked as to their
whereabouts, he replied, "Why, they are all in the United States." From the
Camorra, that vast spider-web of thieves and prostitutes by whom life and
politics in Naples are controlled, have come thousands who find the hard-
working Italian immigrants a richer field of exploitation than any field open
at home. Still more harassing is the Mafia, by means of which Sicilians
contrive to ignore police and courts and to secure justice in their own way.

A legacy of Spanish domination and Spanish arrogance is the sense of
omertà, or manliness, which holds it dastardly to betray to justice even
one's deadliest foe. To avenge one's wrongs oneself, and never to appeal to
law, is a part of Sicilian honor.
In an Italian quarter are men who never work, yet who have plenty of
money. "No," they say, "we do not work. Work does not agree with us. We
have friends who work and give us money. Why not?" It is these parasites
who commit most of the crime. Their honest fellow-countrymen shrink
from them, yet, if one of them is arrested, some make it a point of honor to
swear him off, while all scrupulously forget anything against him. Thanks
to this perverse idea of "honor," an Italian murder may be committed in the
street in broad daylight, with dozens looking on, yet a few minutes later
every spectator will deny to the police that he has seen anything. This
highbinder contempt for law is reinforced by sheer terrorism. It is said that
often in our courts the sudden wilting of a promising Italian witness has
been brought about by the secret giving of the "death-sign," a quick passing
of the hand across the throat as if cutting.
The American, with his ready resort to the vigilance committee, is
amazed that a whole community should let itself thus be bullied by a few
miscreants known to all. Nothing of the sort has ever been tolerated by
North European immigrants. The secret lies in the inaptness of the South
Italians for good team work. Individualistic to the marrow, they lack the gift
of pulling together, and have never achieved an efficient cooperating unit
larger than the family.
General Theodore E. Bingham, former Police Commissioner of New
York, estimated that there are in that city not less than 3000 desperadoes
from southern Italy, "among them as many ferocious and desperate men as
ever gathered in a modern city in time of peace—medieval criminals who
must be dealt with under modern law." In 1908 he stated: "Crimes of
blackmailing, blowing up of shops and houses, and kidnapping of their
countrymen have become prevalent among Italian residents of the city to an
extent that cannot be much longer tolerated." It is obvious that if our legal
system is called upon to cope with a great volume of such crime for a long
time, it will slough off certain Anglo-Saxon features and adopt the methods
which alone avail in Italy, namely, state police, registry system, "special
surveillance" and "admonition."

Photograph by Hine

Group of Italian Immigrants Lunching in Old Railroad Waiting-
Room, Ellis Island

ASSIMILATION WITH AMERICANS

Not being transients, the North Italians do not resist Americanizing
influences. The Genoese, for example, come not to earn wages, but to
engage in business. They shun the Italian "quarter," mix with Americans,
and Anglicize their names. Mariani becomes Merriam; Abata turns to
Abbey; Garberino softens to Gilbert; while Campana suffers a "sea change"
into Bell. In the produce-markets they deal with Americans, and as high-
class saloon-keepers they are forging past Michael and Gustaf.
But the South Italians remain nearly as aloof as did the Cantonese who
built the Central Pacific Railway. Navvies who leave for Naples when the
ground freezes, and return in April, who huddle in a "camp" or a box-car, or
herd on some "Dago Flat," are not really in America. In a memorial to the

acting mayor of New York, the Italian-American Civic League speaks of the
"great civically inert mass" of their countrymen in New York, and declares,
"By far the largest part of the Italians of this city have lived a life of their
own, almost entirely apart from the American environment." "In one street,"
writes Signor Pecorini, "will be found peasants from one Italian village; in
the next street the place of origin is different, and distinct are manners,
customs, and sympathies. Entire villages have been transplanted from Italy
to one New York street, and with the others have come the doctor, the
grocer, the priest, and the annual celebration of the local patron saint."
Among the foreign-born, the Italians rank lowest in adhesion to trade-
unions, lowest in ability to speak English, lowest in proportion naturalized
after ten years' residence, lowest in proportion of children in school, and
highest in proportion of children at work. Taking into account the
innumerable "birds of passage" without family or future in this country, it
would be safe to say that half, perhaps two-thirds, of our Italian immigrants
are under America, not of it. Far from being borne along with our onward
life, they drift round and round in a "Little Italy" eddy, or lie motionless in
some industrial pocket or crevice at the bottom of the national current.

LACK OF MENTAL ABILITY

Steerage passengers from a Naples boat show a distressing frequency of
low foreheads, open mouths, weak chins, poor features, skew faces, small
or knobby crania, and backless heads. Such people lack the power to take
rational care of themselves; hence their death-rate in New York is twice the
general death-rate and thrice that of the Germans. No other immigrants
from Europe, unless it be the Portuguese or the half-African Bravas of the
Azores, show so low an earning power as the South Italians. In our cities
the head of the household earns on an average $390 a year, as against $449
for the North Italian, $552 for the Bohemian, and $630 for the German. In
silk-mill and wollen-mill, in iron-ore mining and the clothing trade, no
other nationality has so many low-pay workers; nor does this industrial
inferiority fade out in the least with the lapse of time.
Their want of mechanical aptitude is often noticed. For example, in a
New England mill manned solely by South Italians only one out of fifteen
of the extra hands taken on during the "rush" season shows sufficient

aptitude to be worth keeping. The operatives require closer supervision than
Americans, and each is given only one thing to do, so as to put the least
possible strain on his attention.
If it be demurred that the ignorant, superstitious Neapolitan or Sicilian,
heir to centuries of Bourbon misgovernment, cannot be expected to prove
us his race mettle, there are his children, born in America. What showing do
they make? Teachers agree that the children of the South Italians rank
below the children of the North Italians. They hate study, make slow
progress, and quit school at the first opportunity. While they take to drawing
and music, they are poor in spelling and language and very weak in abstract
mathematics. In the words of one superintendent, "they lack the
conveniences for thinking." More than any other children, they fall behind
their grade. They are below even the Portuguese and the Poles, while at the
other extremity stand the children of the Scandinavians and the Hebrews.
The explanation of the difference is not irregularity of attendance, for
among pupils attending three fourths of the time, or more, the percentage of
South Italians retarded is fifty-six as against thirty-seven and a half per cent.
for the Russian-Hebrew children and twenty-nine per cent. for the German.
Nor is it due to the father's lack of American experience, for of the children
of South Italians who have been in this country ten or more years sixty per
cent. are backward, as against about half that proportion among the
Hebrews and the Germans. After allowing for every disturbing factor, it
appears that these children, with the dusk of Saracenic or Berber ancestors
showing in their cheeks, are twice as apt to drop behind other pupils of their
age as are the children of the non-English-speaking immigrants from
northern Europe.

Photograph by Hine

Board of Special Inquiry, Ellis Island

Photograph by Hine Courtesy of The Survey

Utter Weariness
Bohemian Woman on East Side, New York, after the Day's Work

TRAITS OF ITALIAN CHARACTER

The South Italian is volatile, unstable, soon hot, soon cool. Says one
observer, "The Italian vote here is a joke. Every candidate claims it because
they were 'for' him when he saw them. But the man who talks last to them
gets their vote." A charity worker declares that they change their minds
"three steps after they have left you." It is not surprising that such people
are unreliable. Credit men pronounce them "very slippery," and say that the
Italian merchants themselves do not extend credit to them. It is generally
agreed that the South Italians lie more easily than North Europeans, and
utter untruth without that self-consciousness which makes us awkward liars.
"Most of my countrymen," says an educated Italian in the consular service
of his country, "disregard their promises unless it is to their advantage to

keep them." The man who "sweareth to his own hurt and changeth not" is
likely to be a German with his ideal of Treue, an Englishman with his ideal
of truth, or an American with his ideal of squareness.
The Italians are sociable. Who can forget the joyous, shameless
gregariousness of Naples? As farmers they cluster, and seem to covet the
intimacies of the tenement-house. The streets of an Italian quarter are lively
with chatter and stir and folks sitting out in front and calling to one another.
In their family life they are much less reserved than many other
nationalities. With instinctive courtesy they make the visitor welcome, and
their quick and demonstrative response to kindly advances makes them
many friends. Visiting nurses comment on the warm expressions of
gratitude they receive from the children of Italians whom they have helped.
Before the boards of inquiry at Ellis Island their emotional instability
stands out in the sharpest contrast to the self-control of the Hebrew and the
stolidity of the Slav. They gesticulate much, and usually tears stand in their
eyes. When two witnesses are being examined, both talk at once, and their
hands will be moving all the time. Their glances flit quickly from one
questioner to another, and their eyes are the restless, uncomprehending eyes
of the desert Bedouin between walls. Yet for all this eager attention, they
are slow to catch the meaning of a simple question, and often it must be
repeated.
Mindful of these darting eyes and hands, one does not wonder that the
Sicilian will stab his best friend in a sudden quarrel over a game of cards.
The Slavs are ferocious in their cups, but none is so ready with his knife
when sober as the South Italian. In railroad work other nationalities shun
camps with many Italians. Contractors are afraid of them because the whole
force will impulsively quit work, perhaps flare into riot, if they imagine one
of their number has suffered a wrong.
The principal of a school with four hundred Sicilian pupils observes that
on the playground they are at once more passionate and more vindictive
than other children. Elsewhere, once discipline has been established, "the
school will run itself"; but in this school the teacher "has to sit on the lid all
the time." Their restlessness keeps the truant officer busy, and their darting,
flickering attention denies them concentration and the steady, telling stroke.

For all their apparent brightness, when at fourteen they quit school, they are
rarely beyond the third or fourth grade.
As grinding rusty iron reveals the bright metal, so American competition
brings to light the race stuff in poverty-crushed immigrants. But not all this
stuff is of value in a democracy like ours. Only a people endowed with a
steady attention, a slow-fuse temper, and a persistent will can organize itself
for success in the international rivalries to come. So far as the American
people consents to incorporate with itself great numbers of wavering,
excitable, impulsive persons who cannot organize themselves, it must in the
end resign itself to lower efficiency, to less democracy, or to both.

Immigration from Italy, 1866-1910

CHAPTER VI
THE SLAVS

In the dim east of Europe, far from the vertical beams of civilization, lies
the melancholy Slavic world, with its 150,000,000 of human beings
multiplying twice as fast and dying twice as fast as the peoples of the West.
Since the curtain of history rose, the Slavs have been anvil rather than
hammer. Subjugated by the Gauls in the first century B. C., by the Germans
early in the Christian era, and by the Avars in the sixth century, they have
played no master rôle in history and their very name is a conqueror's insult.
In the temper of this race there appears to be something soft and yielding.
For all their courage, these peaceful agriculturists have shown much less of
the fighting, retaliating instinct than the Britons and the Norsemen.
At a time when western Europe was sending forth armies to rescue the
Holy Sepulcher much of Slavland lay still in heathen darkness. Human
sacrifices and the practice of suttee did not disappear until the adoption of
Christianity. Helmold, a priest of Lübeck, who in 1158 was sent to
Christianize the Slavs, speaks of them as a "depraved and perverse nation,"
and their country is to him "a land of horror and a vast solitude." In 1108
the Archbishop of Magdeburg writes in a pastoral letter, "These cruel
people, the Slavs, have risen against us."... "They have cut off the heads of
Christians and offered them as sacrifices."

Photograph by Hine

Slav Sisters

Photograph by Hine

Slovak Girl
Unlike the maritime peoples of the West, the Slavs had no easement from
the colonizing of the New World. When the era of machine industry
dawned, they were not able, as were the English, the French, and the
Germans, to get into the sunshine by catering to the world's demand for
cheap manufactured goods. Moreover, they have had to bear the brunt of
Oriental onslaught. The South Slavs—of Servia, Bulgaria, Herzegovina,
and Macedonia—fell under those Comanches of Asia, the Turks, so that

only within the last thirty-five years have the spires and turrets of their
submerged civilization reappeared above the receding Ottoman flood.
While the Bohemians and the Moravians, thanks to a great intellectual
awakening, have come nearly abreast of the Germans, the bulk of the Slavs
remain on a much lower plane of culture. In ignorance and illiteracy, in the
prevalence of superstition and priestcraft, in the harshness of church and
state, in the subservience of the common people to the upper classes, in the
low position of woman, in the subjection of the child to the parent, in
coarseness of manner and speech, and in low standards of cleanliness and
comfort, a large part of the Slavic world remains at the level of our English
forefathers in the days of Henry the Eighth.
According to mother-tongue, there were in this country in 1910, 941,000
Poles, 228,000 Bohemians and Moravians, 165,000 Slovaks from the
southern slopes of the Carpathians, 123,000 Slovenes from the head of the
Adriatic, 78,000 Croatians and Dalmatians, 56,000 Russians, 40,000
Bulgarians, Servians, and Montenegrins, 30,000 Slavonians, 25,000
Ruthenians, to say nothing of 140,000 Lithuanians and Letts, who insist that
they are a race apart. All told, there are 2,000,000 Slavs among us, and, if
we heed the estimates of the leaders of the Slav groups, we should reckon at
least 3,000,000. No doubt, between five and six per cent. of the whites in
this country are of Slavic blood.
Of the Slav arrivals since 1899 nearly three-fourths are males. Among the
immigrants from the Balkans, the men are from ten to twenty times as
numerous as the women. Thirty-two per cent. have been illiterates, the
proportion ranging from 1.7 per cent. among the Bohemians to 53.4 per
cent. among the Ruthenians. Excepting the Bohemians, few of them have
had any industrial experience or bring any valuable skill. It is as if great
numbers of the English of the sixteenth century had suddenly appeared
among us.

OCCUPATIONS OF THE SLAVIC IMMIGRANTS

When, about fifteen years ago, the great Slav invasion began, the
American frontier was remote, shrunken, and forbidding. The newcomers
were not in quest of cheap land, with independence, so much as of paying

jobs from which they might hoard "big money" and return well off to their
homes. They gravitated, therefore, to the mining, metal-working, and
packing centers, where there is a demand for unlimited quantities of raw
labor, provided always it be cheap. So these sturdy peasant lads came to be
Nibelungs, "sons of the gloom," haunting our coal-pits, blast-furnaces,
coke-ovens, smelters, foundries, steel-mills, and metal refineries, doing
rough, coarse work under skilled men who, as one foreman put it to me,
"don't want them to think, but to obey orders."
What irony that these peasants, straight from ox-goad and furrow, should
come to constitute, so far as we can judge from official figures, three-fifths
of the force in sugar refining, two-fifths of the force in meat-packing, three-
eighths of the labor in tanneries and in oil refineries, one-third of the coal-
miners and of the iron- and steel-workers, one-fourth of the workers in
carpet-mills, and one-fifth of the hands in the clothing trade! On the other
hand, they are but one-seventh of the labor force in the glass-factories and
in the cotton-mills, one-ninth of the employees in copper-mining and
smelting (who are largely Finns), one-twelfth of our railway labor, and only
a handful in the silk and woolen industries.
For these manful Slavs, no work is too toilsome and dangerous. Their
fatalistic acceptance of risk has much to do with the excessive blood-cost of
certain of our industries. They are not "old clo'" men, junk-dealers,
hucksters, peddlers, and snappers-up of unconsidered trifles, as are some of
the people among us. They have no nose for the small, parasitic trades, but
with a splendid work courage they tackle the heavy, necessary tasks. Large
of body, hard-muscled, and inexpert in making his head save his heels, the
Slav inevitably becomes the unskilled laborer in the basic industries.
Unlike the Teutons and Scandinavians of the eighties, whose chief
location was the country beyond Chicago, the later Slavs have been drawn
to Pennsylvania, in the hard-coal fields and the Pittsburgh district, and
thence they have spread to the rising mining and metal-working centers
throughout the country. So many are single men that they form an
extraordinarily mobile labor force, willing to go anywhere for an extra two
cents an hour. Although they do not build homes, and hence are dependent
upon such housing as they can find, they do not stagnate in slums, save as
the conditions of their employment impose congestion.

Bohemians and Poles come here to stay, so it is they who furnish the
farmers. The Bohemian current began as far back as the fifties, and in 1900
a quarter of all the Bohemian-Americans were on the land. The Poles came
later, and with less money, so that only one-tenth were then in agriculture.
The immigrants of the seventies sought wild, cheap land, and therefore the
Slav settlements are thickest in the Northwest and the Southwest. One-third
of all the Polish farmers are in Wisconsin, while in Texas Bohemian cotton-
growers are so numerous that in some localities even the negroes speak
Bohemian! Of late raw Poles, working up through farm labor and tenancy,
are coming to own "abandoned farms" in the Connecticut Valley. Crowded
with several other families in an old Yankee farm-house, the Pole is raising,
with the aid of his numerous progeny, incredible crops of onions and
tobacco. "In old Hadley," reports Professor Emily Balch of Wellesley
College, "all up and down the beautiful elm-shaded street the old colonial
mansions are occupied by Poles." In one year these Poles, who were but
one-fifth of the population, accounted for two-thirds of the births.

EXCESSIVE ALCOHOLISM AMONG THE SLAVS

Coming from an Elizabethan world, the Slav is as frankly vinous as
Falstaff with his "cup o' sack." He is a Bacchus worshiper unashamed, and
our squeamishness about liquor strikes him as either hypocrisy or prudery.
He thinks, too, that without stimulant he cannot stand up to the grueling
work of mill and mine. A steel-worker, when besought to give up drink,
replied, "No beer, no whisky, me no work." Hence an incredible amount of
his wages goes to line the till of the saloon-keeper. In a steel town of 30,000
population, $60,000 are left with the saloon-keepers the Saturday and
Sunday after pay-day. The Saturday brewery-wagon makes the rounds, and
on a pleasant Sunday one sees in the yard of each boarding-house a knot of
broad-shouldered, big-faced men about a keg of liquid comfort.
It is at celebrations that the worst excesses show themselves. What with
caring for their large families and their boarders, the women usually lose
their attractiveness early, and therewith their power to exercise a refining
influence upon their men-folk. A wedding or a christening-feast lasts an
entire day, and toward the end men beastly drunk bellow and fight in the
presence of the terrified women and children. During festivals, too, old

feuds, rekindled by drink, flare up in brutal and bloody rows. At such times
one realizes that the poet Kollár's famous phrase "the dove-blood of the
Slav" does not apply to the exhilarated.
Still, their heavy drinking is spasmodic, and they are said to lose less
time from work on account of intoxication than certain other nationalities.
Says a Jersey City doctor practising among the Ruthenians, "They drink,
but few die drunkards or hurt their health with alcohol. If a man does get
drunk he is likely to be violent. If he strikes his wife she defends herself if
she can, but she does not complain, for she knows he has 'a right to hit her'
and that makes a great difference." In Slavic neighborhoods, American
influence first shows itself in the rise of a community sentiment against
alcoholic excess and in a growing refinement in festal customs.

CRIMES OF THE PRIMITIVE PASSIONS

For crime the Slav betrays no such bent as the South Italian. Aside from
petty thieving—noted in some cases—the complaints of people near a Slav
settlement center upon the affrays that follow in the wake of convivial
drinking. The Bohemians have about the same criminal tendencies as the
Germans. The other Slavs reveal the propensities of a rude, undeveloped
people of undisciplined primitive passions. Animosity rather than cupidity
is the motive of crime. When the Slav seeks illicit gain he takes the direct
path of violence rather than the devious path of chicane; he commits
robbery or burglary rather than theft or fraud or extortion. From crimes
against chastity, and the loathsome knaveries that center in the social evil,
he is singularly free. Morally, the stock is better than one would judge from
the police records and from its reputation. No doubt if the descendants of
these immigrants have the proper training and surrounding they will prove
as orderly as the old American stock.

SLAVIC BRUTALITY AND RECKLESS FECUNDITY

Among the South Slavs "every married man," says Vrčević, as quoted by
Professor W. I. Thomas, "strikes his wife black and blue at least once a
month, or spreads a box on the ear over her whole face, or else people are
likely to say that he is afraid of his wife." Their popular proverbs

corroborate this, as for example: "He who does not beat his wife is no man."
"Strike a wife and a snake on the head." "One devil is afraid of the cross,
the other (the wife) of a stick." "The dog may howl, but the wife must hold
her tongue." In one wedding-song the bride begs her husband: "Strike your
wife only with good cause and when she has greatly vexed you." In another
folk-song the young wife sings: "What sort of husband are you to me? You
do not pull my hair, nor do you strike me!"
Although beating the wife with a wet rope is going out of practice, the
Galician peasant, says Von Hupka, "still regards her as a thing belonging to
him, which was made in the first place for his service." No wonder the Slav
mother averages eight children! No wonder there is an appalling infant
mortality, while a childbed death is too often the fate of the forspent mother.
Little cares the stolid peasant. What is the woman there for? Nor is this
view strange in the New World. In Hungary the Slovak women "bear a child
a year—'always either bearing or nursing,' is the saying." But the annual
child arrives likewise in the Slovak families of New York. The Slav wife in
this country bears from two to two and a half times as fast as the wife of
American parentage. Her daughter born under the Stars and Stripes is
seven-eighths as prolific as her barefoot immigrant mother. The average
Slavic charity case involves five persons, the German or Scandinavian case
four persons, the American case three and one-half persons. A drunken Pole
said with pride to the agent of a charitable society that was supporting his
family: "Just think what I've done for the State! I've given it ten children!"

Courtesy of The Survey

Slav Woman and Italian Husband

Photograph by Hine

Slovak Girls
The Middle Ages are beginning to show among us. In twenty-one rural
counties of Minnesota the Polish women have borne, on an average, seven
children in the course of fourteen and a half years of married life. The full
tale, no doubt, will come to nine or ten. Thanks to our child-pitying, child-
saving civilization, the Polish mother will keep her brood nearly as well as
her American neighbor with four or five. "The Irish for children," runs the
proverb; and yet one Irish-American wife out of thirteen is childless, and

one English-American wife out of twelve. But on the Minnesota farms only
one Polish-American wife out of fifty-eight is barren!
In a county where the Poles, although but a third of the population,
register 58 per cent. of the births, an old farmer said to me: "The Yankees
here are too lazy to have kids. The Poles have from ten to fifteen in a
family, and in a hundred years the people here will all be Poles." A hundred
years? Even fourteen years ago Father Kruszka reckoned that there were in
this country 700 such Polish communities, averaging a hundred families
each. So there are hundreds of centers from which the Middle Ages spread.
Farm by farm, township by township, the displacement of the American
goes on—a quiet conquest, without spear or trumpet, a conquest made by
child-bearing women. The fathers forage, but it is the mothers who have to
face anguish, exhaustion, and even death in the campaign to possess the
land. Spending their women brutally, the Slavs advance; pitying their
women, the Americans retreat.
How can woman-worth go on rising as this country fills with people who
have the brood-mare idea of woman? Yet leaders in the cause of
womanhood are doing their best to hold the door open for the very tribes
who most despise and misuse their sex! On the other hand, the new
immigration may well find favor in the eyes of those who look upon the
bearing of ten children as woman's best lot, and are complacent at seeing
the stocks with low standards outbreed and crowd into oblivion the stocks
with high standards.

SLOW ASSIMILATION

Eastern Europe is full of half-drowned nationalities, which only of late
are regaining self-consciousness. Bohemians, Slovaks, Poles, Lithuanians,
Servians, and Bulgarians—each have had an "awakening," in which
language revival and the study of national literature and history have played
a great part. The immigrants who come with this quickened sense of
nationality make it a point of honor not to drift selfishly with the American
current and so lose touch with their struggling brethren in the old home.
After refusing to be Germanized, Russified, or Magyarized in the old
country, the patriotic Bohemian or Pole is bound to resist absorption here. It
was the Irish-Americans who got the leverage for freeing Ireland. Now the

Bohemians here are hoping to win home rule for Bohemia; while the
Polish-Americans expect to find on this side of the water the fulcrum for the
lever that shall free Poland. What, then, more natural than to cling to their
own speech and traditions in home and church and parish school?
The vernacular press, of course, harps ever on the chord of "the national
speech," so that the second generation may not drift away to the reading of
American newspapers. The church, too, which carries matters with a high
hand among the Poles, holds the immigrants away from Americanization.
The good priests fear lest some of their flock should turn away from
religion, while the greedy priests dread lest the flock should become restless
under priestly dictation.
Our million Poles outnumber all the rest of the Slavs in America, and the
Poles are very clannish. When they settle in groups there is little association
between them and their neighbors. "In the communities visited," reports the
Industrial Commission, "farmers of German, Scandinavian, Irish,
Bohemian, Belgian, Swiss, and American origin were found living in
juxtaposition to Poles. In virtually every instance the Pole was considered
one degree lower than his neighbors." "Neither the Poles as a body nor the
others desire to fuse socially, and the Bohemians felt well above their Slavic
brethren." The farmers look down on the Poles as uncleanly, intemperate,
quarrelsome, ignorant, priest-ridden, and hard on women and children.
When a few Poles have come into a neighborhood, the other farmers
become restless, sell out, and move away. Soon a parish is organized,
church and parish school arise, the public school decays, and Slavdom has a
new outpost.
The core of the large settlement is likely to be a rancid bit of the Old
World. Clerical domination to a degree not tolerated among other Roman
Catholics, a stately church overlooking mean farm-houses, numerous
church holidays, a tiny public school, built wholly out of State grant, with a
sister in the garb of her order as schoolmistress, a big parish school, using
only Polish and teaching chiefly the catechism, a high illiteracy and a dense
ignorance among lads born on American soil, crimes of violence rather than
crimes of cunning, horror of water applied inside or outside, aversion to
fresh air, barefoot women at work in the fields, with wretched housekeeping
as the natural result, saloons patronized by both sexes, the priest frequently
urging his flock to "have as many children as God will give them," much

loth motherhood, early death from excessive child-bearing, large families
brought up by the third, fourth, or fifth wife, harsh discipline of children,
political apathy, a controlled vote, and an open contempt for Americans and
their principles.
Little better off are the Slavs clustered by themselves in some "mining-
patch" in the coal-fields or in the industrial quarter of a metal town. The
general population does not associate with them, and they have their own
church, school, customs, and festivals. The men pick up a little English, the
women none at all. It is really the children that are the battle-ground of old
and new. Let them mingle freely with Young America, and no pressure from
their parents can make them remain different from their playmates. They
dread the nickname of "Hun," "Hunkie," or "Bohunk" as if it were poison,
and nothing will induce them to use their home tongue or take part in the
organized life of their nationality.
In the big rural settlement, however, the children can be kept from
outsiders, and the parents, who want them to settle on the farm, usually
have their way. A few of the more restless dive off the island into
circumambient America. For a little time the second generation appears
progressive; it dresses flashily and shows itself "sporty." But after it marries
it loses spirit, settles down, and obeys priest and parent. Whether the system
can hold the third generation remains to be seen.
Obviously, the bird-of-passage Slovak or Croat who has left a wife at
home, and who roughs it with his compatriots in a "stag" boarding-house in
a dreary "black country," is a poor subject for assimilation. His life is
bounded by the "boarding boss," the saloon-keeper, the private banker, and
the priest—all of them of his own folk. Aside from the foreman's cursing,
American life reaches him only through the eye, and then only the worst
side of it. But for the good pay, he would hate his life here; and he goes
back home with little idea of America save that it is a land of big chances to
make money.

SMALL ABILITY OF IMMIGRANT SLAVS

Without calling in question the worth of the Slavic race, one may note
that the immigrant Slavs have small reputation for capacity. Many

observers, after allowing for their illiteracy and lack of opportunity, still
insist that they have little to contribute to our people. "These people haven't
any natural ability to transmit," said a large employer of Slavs. "You may
grind and polish dull minds all you want to in the public schools, but you
never will get a keen edge on them because the steel is poor." "They aren't
up to the American grade," insisted the manager of a steel-works. "We have
a 'suggestion box,' and we reward valuable suggestions from our men, but
precious few ever come from immigrant labor." The labor agent of a great
implement-works rates the immigrant 75 in ability as compared with the
American. A Bohemian leader puts his people above the Americans in
music and the fine arts, but concedes the superiority of the Americans in
constructive imagination, organizing ability, and tenacity of purpose. "The
Czechs," he says, "are strong in resistance but are not aggressive."
A steel-town superintendent of schools finds the bulk of the children of
the Slavs "rather sluggish intellectually." They do well in the lower grades,
where memory counts most; but in the higher grades, where association is
called for, they fall behind. Of 23,000 pupils of non-English-speaking
fathers, 43.4 per cent. were found to be behind their grade; the percentage
of retardation for the children of Bohemian fathers was only 35.6 per cent.;
but for Poles, the retardation was 58.1 per cent., and for Slovaks 54.5 per
cent. While this showing is poor, there are good school men who stoutly
maintain that it is still too soon to judge what the Slav-American can do.

THE ALARMING PROSPECT OF SLAVIC IMMIGRATION

An outflow of political exiles comes to an end when there is a turn of the
political wheel; but a stream squeezed out by population pressure may flow
on forever. So long as the birth-rate remains high, the mother-country is not
depleted by the hemorrhage. "What has been the effect of emigration to
America upon conditions in Bohemia?" I asked of an intelligent Czech.
"Bohemia," he replied, with emphasis, "is just as crowded to-day; the
struggle is just as hard as if never a Bohemian had left for America." "Will
Polish emigration remain large?" I asked a leader of the Polish-Americans.
"Yes," he replied, "it will continue for a long time. The Poles multiply at an
extreme rate, and there is no room for them to expand in Poland."

Still, these minor currents may be lost in the flood that is likely to roll in
upon us, once the great central Slavic mass of 80,000,000 "true Russians" is
tapped. "This," observes the Immigration Commission, "affords a
practically unlimited source of immigration, and one which may reasonably
be expected to contribute largely to the movement from Europe to the
United States in the future." "The economic conditions which in large part
impel the emigration of these races (Russian Hebrews, Poles, Lithuanians
and Finns) prevail also among true Russians, and already they are
beginning to seek relief through emigration."
So the tide from Slavland may swell, and the superfecund Slavs may
push to the wall the Anglo-Americans, the Irish-Americans, the Welsh-
Americans, the German-Americans, and the rest, until the invasion of our
labor market by hordes of still cheaper West Asiatics shall cause the Slav,
too, to lose interest in America, even as the Briton, the Hibernian, the
Teuton, and the Scandinavian have lost interest in America.

Photograph by Hine

Russian Jews, Ellis Island

Courtesy of The Survey

Hindoo Immigrants

CHAPTER VII
THE EAST EUROPEAN HEBREWS

In his defense of Flaccus, a Roman governor who had "squeezed" his
Jewish subjects, Cicero lowers his voice when he comes to speak of the
Jews, for, as he explains to the judges, there are persons who might excite
against him this numerous, clannish and powerful element. With much
greater reason might an American lower his voice to-day in discussing two
million Hebrew immigrants united by a strong race consciousness and
already ably represented at every level of wealth, power, and influence in
the United States.
At the time of the Revolution there were perhaps 700 Jewish families in
the colonies. In 1826 the number of Jews in the United States was estimated
at 6000; in 1840, at 15,000; in 1848, at 50,000. The immigration from
Germany brought great numbers, and at the outbreak of the Civil War there
were probably 150,000 Jews in this country. In 1888, after the first wave
from Russia, they were estimated at 400,000. Since the beginning of 1899,
one and one-third millions of Hebrews have settled in this country.
Easily one-fifth of the Hebrews in the world are with us, and the freshet
shows no signs of subsidence. America is coming to be hailed as the
"promised land," and Zionist dreams are yielding to the conviction that it
will be much easier for the keen-witted Russian Jews to prosper here as a
free component in a nation of a hundred millions than to grub a living out of
the baked hillsides of Palestine. With Mr. Zangwill they exult that:
"America has ample room for all the six millions of the Pale; any one of her
fifty states could absorb them. And next to being in a country of their own,
there could be no better fate for them than to be together in a land of civil
and religious liberty, of whose Constitution Christianity forms no part and
where their collective votes would practically guarantee them against future
persecution."
Hence the endeavor of the Jews to control the immigration policy of the
United States. Although theirs is but a seventh of our net immigration, they

led the fight on the Immigration Commission's bill. The power of the
million Jews in the metropolis lined up the Congressional delegation from
New York in solid opposition to the literacy test. The systematic campaign
in newspapers and magazines to break down all arguments for restriction
and to calm nativist fears is waged by and for one race. Hebrew money is
behind the National Liberal Immigration League and its numerous
publications. From the paper before the commercial body or the scientific
association to the heavy treatise produced with the aid of the Baron de
Hirsch Fund, the literature that proves the blessings of immigration to all
classes in America emanates from subtle Hebrew brains. In order to admit
their brethren from the Pale the brightest of the Semites are keeping our
doors open to the dullest of the Aryans!
Migrating as families the Hebrews from eastern Europe are pretty evenly
divided between the sexes. Their illiteracy is 26 per cent., about the
average. Artisans and professional men are rather numerous among them.
They come from cities and settle in cities—half of them in New York.
Centuries of enforced Ghetto life seem to have bred in them a herding
instinct. No other physiques can so well withstand the toxins of urban
congestion. Save the Italians, more Jews will crowd upon a given space
than any other nationality. As they prosper they do not proportionately
enlarge their quarters. Of Boston tenement-house Jews Dr. Bushee testifies:
"Their inborn love of money-making leads them to crowd into the smallest
quarters. Families having very respectable bank accounts have been known
to occupy cellar rooms where damp and cold streaked the walls." "There are
actually streets in the West End where, while Jews are moving in, negro
housewives are gathering up their skirts and seeking a more spotless
environment."
The first stream of Russo-Hebrew immigrants started flowing in 1882 in
consequence of the reactionary policy of Alexander III. It contained many
students and members of scholarly families, who stimulated intellectual
activity among their fellows here and were leaders in radical thought. These
idealists established newspapers in the Jewish-German Jargon and thus
made Yiddish (Jüdisch) a literary language. The second stream reached us
after 1890 and brought immigrants who were not steeped in modern ideas
but held to Talmudic traditions and the learning of the rabbis. The more
recent flow taps lower social strata and is prompted by economic motives.

These later arrivals lack both the idealism of the first stream and the
religious culture of the second.
Besides the Russian Jews we are receiving large numbers from Galicia,
Hungary, and Roumania. The last are said to be of a high type, whereas the
Galician Jews are the lowest. It is these whom Joseph Pennell, the
illustrator, found to be "people who, despite their poverty, never work with
their hands; whose town ... is but a hideous nightmare of dirt, disease and
poverty" and its misery and ugliness "the outcome of their own habits and
way of life and not, as is usually supposed, forced upon them by Christian
persecutors."

OCCUPATIONS

The Hebrew immigrants rarely lay hand to basic production. In tilling the
soil, in food growing, in extracting minerals, in building, construction and
transportation they have little part. Sometimes they direct these operations,
often they finance them, but even in direst poverty they contrive to avoid
hard muscular labor. Under pressure the Jew takes to the pack as the Italian
to the pick.
In the '80's numerous rural colonies of Hebrews were planted, but,
despite much help from outside, all except the colonies near Vineland, New
Jersey, utterly failed. In New York and New England there are more than a
thousand Hebrew farmers, but most of them speculate in real estate, keep
summer boarders, or depend on some side enterprise—peddling, cattle
trading or junk buying—for a material part of their income. The Hebrew
farmers, said to number in all 6000, maintain a federation and are provided
with a farmers' journal. New colonies are launched at brief intervals, and
Jewish city boys are being trained for country life. Still, not over one
Hebrew family in a hundred is on the land and the rural trend is but a trickle
compared with the huge inflow.
Perhaps two-fifths of the Hebrew immigrants gain their living from
garment-making. Naturally the greater part of the clothing and dry goods
trade, the country over, is in their hands. They make eighty-five per cent. of
the cigars and most of the domestic cigarettes. They purchase all but an
insignificant part of the leaf tobacco from the farmers and sell it to the

manufacturers. They are prominent in the retailing of spirits, and the Jewish
distiller is almost as typical as the German brewer.
None can beat the Jew at a bargain, for through all the intricacies of
commerce he can scent his profit. The peddler, junk dealer, or pawn broker
is on the first rung of the ladder. The more capable rise in a few years to be
theatrical managers, bankers or heads of department stores. Moreover great
numbers are clerks and salesmen and thousands are municipal and building
contractors. Many of the second generation enter the civil service and the
professions. Already in several of the largest municipalities and in the
Federal bureaus a large proportion of the positions are held by keen-witted
Jews. Twenty years ago under the spoils system the Irish held most of the
city jobs in New York. Now under the test system the Jews are driving them
out. Among the school teachers of the city Jewesses outnumber the women
of any other nationality. Owing to their aversion to "blind-alley"
occupations Jewish girls shun housework and crowd into the factories,
while those who can get training become stenographers, bookkeepers,
accountants and private secretaries. One-thirteenth of the students in our
seventy-seven leading universities and colleges are of Hebrew parentage.
The young Jews take eagerly to medicine and it is said that from seven
hundred to nine hundred of the physicians in New York are of their race.
More noticeable is the influx into dentistry and especially into pharmacy.
Their trend into the legal profession has been pronounced, and of late there
is a movement of Jewish students into engineering, agriculture and forestry.

MORALS

The Jewish immigrants cherish a pure, close-knit family life and the
position of the woman in the home is one of dignity. More than any other
immigrants they are ready to assume the support of distant needy relatives.
They care for their own poor, and the spirit of coöperation among them is
very noticeable. Their temper is sensitive and humane; very rarely is a Jew
charged with any form of brutality. There is among them a fine élite which
responds to the appeal of the ideal and is found in every kind of
ameliorative work.
Nevertheless, fair-minded observers agree that certain bad qualities crop
out all too often among these eastern Europeans. A school principal remarks

that his Jewish pupils are more importunate to get a mark changed than his
other pupils. A settlement warden who during the summer entertains
hundreds of nursing slum mothers at a country "home" says: "The Jewish
mothers are always asking for something extra over the regular kit we
provide each guest for her stay." "The last thing the son of Jacob wants,"
observes an eminent sociologist, "is a square deal." A veteran New York
social worker cannot forgive the Ghetto its littering and defiling of the
parks. "Look at Tompkins Square," he exclaimed hotly, "and compare it
with what it was twenty-five years ago amid a German population!" As for
the caretakers of the parks their comment on this matter is unprintable.
Genial settlement residents, who never tire of praising Italian or Greek,
testify that no other immigrants are so noisy, pushing and disdainful of the
rights of others as the Hebrews. That the worst exploiters of these
immigrants are sweaters, landlords, employers and "white slavers" of their
own race no one gainsays.
The authorities complain that the East European Hebrews feel no
reverence for law as such and are willing to break any ordinance they find
in their way. The fact that pleasure-loving Jewish business men spare
Jewesses but pursue Gentile girls excites bitter comment. The insurance
companies scan a Jewish fire risk more closely than any other. Credit men
say the Jewish merchant is often "slippery" and will "fail" in order to get rid
of his debts. For lying the immigrant has a very bad reputation. In the North
End of Boston "the readiness of the Jews to commit perjury has passed into
a proverb." Conscientious immigration officials become very sore over the
incessant fire of false accusations to which they are subjected by the Jewish
press and societies. United States senators complain that during the close of
the struggle over the immigration bill they were overwhelmed with a torrent
of crooked statistics and misrepresentations by the Hebrews fighting the
literacy test.
Graver yet is the charge that these East European immigrants lower
standards wherever they enter. In the boot and shoe trade some Hebrew
jobbers who, after sending in an order to the manufacturer, find the market
taking an unexpected downward turn, will reject a consignment on some
pretext in order to evade a loss. Says Dr. Bushee: "The shame of a variety
of underhanded methods in trade not easily punishable by law must be laid
at the door of a certain type of Jew." It is charged that for personal gain the

Jewish dealer wilfully disregards the customs of the trade and thereby
throws trade ethics into confusion. Physicians and lawyers complain that
their Jewish colleagues tend to break down the ethics of their professions. It
is certain that Jews have commercialized the social evil, commercialized the
theatre, and done much to commercialize the newspaper.

Photograph by Hine

Slovak Woman and Jewish Man, Ellis Island

Courtesy of The Survey

Jewish Girl in a Chicago Sweat-Shop
The Jewish leaders admit much truth in the impeachment. One accounts
for the bad reputation of his race in the legal profession by pointing out that
they entered the tricky branches of it, viz., commercial law and criminal
law. Says a high minded lawyer: "If the average American entered law as
we have to, without money, connections or adequate professional education,
he would be a shyster too." Another observes that the sharp practice of the
Russo-Jewish lawyer belongs to the earlier part of his career when he must

succeed or starve. As he prospers his sense of responsibility grows. For
example, some years ago the Bar Association of New York opposed the
promotion of a certain Hebrew lawyer to the bench on the ground of his
unprofessional practices. But this same lawyer made one of the best judges
the city ever had, and when he retired he was banqueted by the Association.
The truth seems to be that the lower class of Jews of eastern Europe
reach here moral cripples, their souls warped and dwarfed by iron
circumstance. The experience of Russian repression has made them haters
of government and corrupters of the police. Life amid a bigoted and hostile
population has left them aloof and thick-skinned. A tribal spirit intensified
by social isolation prompts them to rush to the rescue of the caught rascal of
their own race. Pent within the Talmud and the Pale of Settlement, their
interests have become few, and many of them have developed a monstrous
and repulsive love of gain. When now, they use their Old-World shove and
wile and lie in a society like ours, as unprotected as a snail out of its shell,
they rapidly push up into a position of prosperous parasitism, leaving scorn
and curses in their wake.
Gradually, however, it dawns upon this twisted soul that here there is no
need to be weazel or hedgehog. He finds himself in a new game, the rules
of which are made by all the players. He himself is a part of the state that is
weakened by his law-breaking, a member of the profession that is degraded
by his sharp practices. So smirk and cringe and trick presently fall away
from him, and he stands erect. This is why, in the same profession at the
same time, those most active in breaking down standards are Jews and those
most active in raising standards are Jews—of an earlier coming or a later
generation. "On the average," says a Jewish leader, "only the third
generation feels perfectly at home in American society." This explains the
frequent statement that the Jews are "the limit"—among the worst of the
worst and among the best of the best.

CRIME

The Hebrew immigrants usually commit their crimes for gain; and
among gainful crimes they lean to gambling, larceny, and the receiving of
stolen goods rather than to the more daring crimes of robbery and burglary.
The fewness of the Hebrews in prison has been used to spread the

impression that they are uncommonly law-abiding. The fact is it is harder to
catch and convict criminals of cunning than criminals of violence. The chief
of police of any large city will bear emphatic testimony as to the trouble
Hebrew law-breakers cause him. Most alarming is the great increase of
criminality among Jewish young men and the growth of prostitution among
Jewish girls. Says a Jewish ex-assistant attorney-general of the United
States in an address before the B'nai B'rith: "Suddenly we find appearing in
the life of the large cities the scarlet woman of Jewish birth." "In the
women's night court of New York City and on gilded Broadway the
majority of street walkers bear Jewish names." "This sudden break in
Jewish morality was not natural. It was a product of cold, calculating,
mercenary methods, devised and handled by men of Jewish birth." Says the
president of the Conference of American Rabbis: "The Jewish world has
been stirred from center to circumference by the recent disclosures of the
part Jews have played in the pursuance of the white slave traffic." On May
14, 1911, a Yiddish paper in New York said, editorially:
"It is almost impossible to comprehend the indifference with which the
large New York Jewish population hears and reads, day after day, about the
thefts and murders that are perpetrated every day by Jewish gangs—real
bands of robbers—and no one raises a voice of protest, and no demand is
made for the protection of the reputation of the Jews of America and for the
life and property of the Jewish citizens."
"A few years ago when Commissioner Bingham came out with a
statement about Jewish thieves, the Jews raised a cry of protest that reached
the heavens. The main cry was that Bingham exaggerated and
overestimated the number of Jewish criminals. But when we hear of the
murders, hold-ups and burglaries committed in the Jewish section by Jewish
criminals, we must, with heartache, justify Mr. Bingham."
Two weeks later the same paper said: "How much more will Jewish
hearts bleed when the English press comes out with descriptions of
gambling houses packed with Jewish gamblers, of the blind cigar stores
where Jewish thieves and murderers are reared, of the gangs that work
systematically and fasten like vampires upon the peaceable Jewish
population, and of all the other nests of theft, robbery, murder, and
lawlessness that have multiplied in our midst."

This startling growth reflects the moral crisis through which many
immigrants are passing. Enveloped in the husks of medievalism, the
religion of many a Jew perishes in the American environment. The
immigrant who loses his religion is worse than the religionless American
because his early standards are dropped along with his faith. With his clear
brain sharpened in the American school, the egoistic, conscienceless young
Jew constitutes a menace. As a Jewish labor leader said to me, "the non-
morality of the young Jewish business men is fearful. Socialism inspires an
ethics in the heart of the Jewish workingman, but there are many without
either the old religion or the new. I am aghast at the consciencelessness of
the Luft-proletariat without feeling for place, community or nationality."

RACE TRAITS

If the Hebrews are a race certainly one of their traits is intellectuality. In
Boston the milk station nurse gets far more result from her explanations to
Jewish mothers than from her talks to Irish or Italian mothers. The Jewish
parent, however grasping, rarely exploits his children, for he appreciates
how schooling will add to their earning capacity. The young Jews have the
foresight to avoid "blind alley" occupations. Between the years of fourteen
and seventeen the Irish and Italian boys earn more than the Jewish lads; but
after eighteen the Jewish boys will be earning more, for they have selected
occupations in which you can work up. The Jew is the easiest man to sell
life insurance to, for he catches the idea sooner than any other immigrant.
As philanthropist he is the first to appreciate scientific charity. As voter he
is the first to repudiate the political leader and rise to a broad outlook. As
exploited worker he is the first to find his way to a theory of his hard lot,
viz., capitalism. As employer he is quick to respond to the idea of "welfare
work." The Jewish patrons of the libraries welcome guidance in their
reading and they want always the best; in fiction, Dickens, Tolstoi, Zola; in
philosophy, Darwin, Spencer, Haeckel. No other readers are so ready to
tackle the heavy-weights in economics and sociology.
From many school principals comes the observation that their Jewish
pupils are either very bright or distinctly dull. Among the Russo-Jewish
children many fall behind but some distinguish themselves in their studies.
The proportion of backward pupils is about the average for school children

of non-English-speaking parentage; but the brilliant pupils indicate the
presence in Hebrew immigration of a gifted element which scarcely shows
itself in other streams of immigration. Teachers report that their Jewish
pupils "seem to have hungry minds." They "grasp information as they do
everything else, recognizing it as the requisite for success." Says a
principal: "Their progress in studies is simply another manifestation of the
acquisitiveness of the race." Another thinks their school successes are won
more by intense application than by natural superiority, and judges his Irish
pupils would do still better if only they would work as many hours.
The Jewish gift for mathematics and chess is well known. They have
great imagination, but it is the "combinative" imagination rather than the
free poetic fancy of the Celt. They analyze out the factors of a process and
mentally put them together in new ways. Their talent for anticipating the
course of the market, making fresh combinations in business, diagnosing
diseases, and suggesting scientific hypotheses is not questioned. On the
other hand, an eminent savant thinks the best Jewish minds are not strong in
generalization and deems them clever, acute and industrious rather than able
in the highest sense. On the whole, the Russo-Jewish immigration is richer
in gray matter than any other recent stream, and it may be richer than any
large inflow since the colonial era.
Perhaps abstractness is another trait of the Jewish mind. To the Hebrew
things present themselves not softened by an atmosphere of sentiment, but
with the sharp outlines of that desert landscape in which his ancestors
wandered. As farmer he is slovenly and does not root in the soil like the
German. As poet he shows little feeling for nature. Unlike the German
artisan who becomes fond of what he creates, the Jew does not love the
concrete for its own sake. What he cares for is the value in it. Hence he is
rarely a good artisan, and perhaps the reason why he makes his craft a mere
stepping-stone to business is that he does not relish his work. The Jew
shines in literature, music and acting—the arts of expression—but not often
is he an artist in the manipulation of materials. In theology, law and
diplomacy—which involve the abstract—the Jewish mind has distinguished
itself more than in technology or the study of nature.
The Jew has little feeling for the particular. He cares little for pets. He
loves man rather than men, and from Isaiah to Karl Marx he holds the
record in projects of social amelioration. The Jew loves without romance

and fights without hatred. He is loyal to his purposes rather than to persons.
He finds general principles for whatever he wants to do. As circumstances
change he will make up with his worst enemy or part company with his
closest ally. Hence his wonderful adaptability. Flexible and rational the
Jewish mind cannot be bound by conventions. The good will of a Southern
gentleman takes set forms such as courtesy and attentions, while the kindly
Jew is ready with any form of help that may be needed. So the South looked
askance at the Jews as "no gentlemen." Nor have the Irish with their strong
personal loyalty or hostility liked the Jews. On the other hand the Yankees
have for the Jews a cousinly feeling. Puritanism was a kind of Hebraism
and throve most in the parts of England where, centuries before, the Jews
had been thickest. With his rationalism, his shrewdness, his inquisitiveness
and acquisitiveness, the Yankee can meet the Jew on his own ground.

Jewish Runner Soliciting Immigrants for the Steamship Company
Like all races that survive the sepsis of civilization, the Hebrews show
great tenacity of purpose. Their constancy has worn out their persecutors

and won them the epithet of "stiff-necked." In their religious ideas our
Jewish immigrants are so stubborn that the Protestant churches despair of
making proselytes among them. The sky-rocket careers leading from the
peddler's pack to the banker's desk or the professor's chair testify to rare
singleness of purpose. Whatever his goal—money, scholarship, or
recognition—the true Israelite never loses sight of it, cannot be distracted,
presses steadily on, and in the end masters circumstance instead of being
dominated by it. As strikers the Jewish wage earners will starve rather than
yield. The Jewish reader in the libraries sticks indomitably to the course of
reading he has entered on. No other policy holder is so reliable as the Jew in
keeping up his premiums. The Jewish canvasser, bill collector, insurance
solicitor, or commercial traveler takes no rebuff, returns brazenly again and
again, and will risk being kicked down stairs rather than lose his man.
During the Civil War General Grant wrote to the war department regarding
the Jewish cotton traders who pressed into the South with the northern
armies: "I have instructed the commanding officer to refuse all permits to
Jews to come South, and I have frequently had them expelled from the
department, but they come in with their carpet sacks in spite of all that can
be done to prevent it." Charity agents say that although their Hebrew cases
are few, they cost them more than other cases in the end because of the
unblushing persistence of the applicant. Some chiefs of police will not
tolerate the Hebrew prostitute in their city because they find it impossible to
subject her to any regulations.

THE RACE LINE

In New York the line is drawn against the Jews in hotels, resorts, clubs,
and private schools, and constantly this line hardens and extends. They cry
"Bigotry" but bigotry has little or nothing to do with it. What is disliked in
the Jews is not their religion but certain ways and manners. Moreover, the
Gentile resents being obliged to engage in a humiliating and undignified
scramble in order to keep his trade or his clients against the Jewish invader.
The line is not yet rigid, for the genial editor of Vorwaerts, Mr. Abram
Cahan, tells me that he and his literary brethren from the Pale have never
encountered Anti-Semitism in the Americans they meet. Not the socialist
Jews but the vulgar upstart parvenus are made to feel the discrimination.

This cruel prejudice—for all lump condemnations are cruel—is no
importation, no hang-over from the past. It appears to spring out of
contemporary experience and is invading circle after circle of broad-
minded. People who give their lives to befriending immigrants shake their
heads over the Galician Hebrews. It is astonishing how much of the
sympathy that twenty years ago went out to the fugitives from Russian
massacres has turned sour. Through fear of retaliation little criticism gets
into print; in the open the Philo-semites have it all their way. The situation
is: Honey above, gall beneath. If the Czar, by keeping up the pressure which
has already rid him of two million undesired subjects, should succeed in
driving the bulk of his six million Jews to the United States, we shall see
the rise of a Jewish question here, perhaps riots and anti-Jewish legislation.
No doubt thirty or forty thousand Hebrews from eastern Europe might be
absorbed by this country each year without any marked growth of race
prejudice; but when they come in two or three or even four times as fast, the
lump outgrows the leaven, and there will be trouble.
America is probably the strongest solvent Jewish separatism has ever
encountered. It is not only that here the Jew finds himself a free man and a
citizen. That has occurred before, without causing the Jew to merge into the
general population. It is that here more than anywhere else in the world the
future is expected to be in all respects better than the past. No civilized
people ever so belittled the past in the face of the future as we do. This is
why tradition withers and dies in our air; and the dogma that the Jews are a
"peculiar people" and must shun intermarriage with the Gentiles is only a
tradition. The Jewish dietary laws are rapidly going. In New York only one-
fourth of the two hundred thousand Jewish workmen keep their Sabbath and
only one-fifth of the Jews belong to the synagogue. The neglect of the
synagogue is as marked as the falling away of non-Jews from the church.
Mixed marriages, although by no means numerous in the centers, are on the
increase, and in 1909 the Central Conference of Jewish Rabbis resolved that
such marriages "are contrary to the tradition of the Jewish religion and
should therefore be discouraged by the American Rabbinate." Certainly
every mixed marriage is, as one rabbi puts it, "a nail in the coffin of
Judaism," and free mixing would in time end the Jews as a distinct ethnic
strain.

The "hard shell" leaders are urging the Jews in America to cherish their
distinctive traditions and to refrain from mingling their blood with Gentiles.
But the liberal and radical leaders insist that in this new, ultra-modern
environment nothing is gained by holding the Jews within the wall of
Orthodox Judaism. As a prominent Hebrew labor leader said to me: "By
blending with the American the Jew will gain in physique, and this with its
attendant participation in normal labor, sports, athletics, outdoor life, and
the like, will lessen the hyper-sensibility and the sensuality of the Jew and
make him less vain, unscrupulous and pleasure-loving."
It is too soon yet to foretell whether or not this vast and growing body of
Jews from eastern Europe is to melt and disappear in the American
population just as numbers of Portuguese, Dutch, English, and French Jews
in our early days became blent with the rest of the people. In any case the
immigrant Jews are being assimilated outwardly. The long coat, side curls,
beard and fringes, the "Wandering Jew" figure, the furtive manner, the
stoop, the hunted look, and the martyr air disappear as if by magic after a
brief taste of American life. It would seem as if the experience of Russia
and America in assimilating the Jews is happily illustrated by the old story
of the rivalry of the wind and the sun in trying to strip the traveler of his
cloak.

CHAPTER VIII
THE LESSER IMMIGRANT GROUPS

The immigration question is a live wire and whoever handles it may look
for tingling surprises. One is a bit startled on realizing that through the
"Bravas" from the Cape Verde Islands we are getting a new dash of black
from the Senegambian tar-brush. How few are aware that a third of Sicily,
from which so many immigrants come, is chiefly Saracen in stock, so that
the heredity of the Bedouin tribes of Mohamet's time is to be blent with the
heredity of our pioneering breed! Who reflects that, with Chinese and
Japanese, Finns and Magyars, Bulgars and Turks, about a half a million
more or less Mongolian in blood have cast in their lot with us and will leave
their race stamp upon the American people of the future?

THE FINNS

Our 130,000 immigrants from Finland should be counted to the Finno-
Tartar branch of the Mongolian race, although since the dawn of history the
western Finns have intermingled with the Swedes until their blondness and
cast of countenance bespeak the North European. Nevertheless, here and
there among the Finns one notices that inward and downward slant of the
eyes which proclaims the Asiatic.
Ever since the heavy paw of the Russian bear descended on Finland,
these people have been seeping into the United States. They come for
liberty's sake, bring their families and expect to remain. Lovers of wood and
water, they keep to the North and the Northwest and are willing to tackle
the roughest land in order to become independent. As farmers they are
thrifty but, if left to themselves, not particularly skillful or progressive.
Among them survive Old-World ways, such as reaping by handfuls with a
sickle and hauling hay from the field on a sleigh. With a sharp ax in his
hand the Finn turns artist and will hew out a log house so beautiful as to put
an American pioneer to the blush. One of the first things he builds is an air-

tight bath-house in which he may steam himself by dashing water on hot
stones.
Practically all these immigrants are literate and they are eager patrons of
night schools. In acquiring English they are rather slow. Their native ability
is good, but is not considered to be equal to that of the Swedes. They are
quiet and law-abiding, but litigious. With his grim intensity of character the
Finn cannot bear to compromise his wrongs, but insists on all he thinks is
due him. It is needless to add that a man with so much iron in his blood is
honest.
Like the drunken Magyar or Lithuanian the "loaded" Finn is a terrible
fellow. Liquor seems to let loose in him fell and destructive impulses which
had been held in the leash by moral ideas. The immigrants realize their
danger and the total abstinence movement is very strong amongst them. A
rival current is Socialism for, strange to say, thousands of Finns, since
coming to this country, have utterly lost faith in the existing social order.
The mining company praises the "temperance" Finns but makes haste to get
rid of the Socialists, although they are earnest people of a peaceable temper.
Such movements reveal a thinking mood. Thanks to the long struggle
with Russia, the Finnish mind is awake and open to ideas. Our Finns have a
real thirst for education and, besides supporting the best of public schools,
they maintain near Duluth a college of their own of 1,200 students. In all
their discussions the women take an equal share with the men and, when the
Northwest adopts equal suffrage, the wives of the Finns will be among the
first to vote. The Finns are prompt to acquire citizenship and they do not
abuse the ballot. They will not vote for a fellow countryman unless he is the
fittest candidate for the office.
Their civic attitude is revealed by an incident that occurred at the
outbreak of the Spanish-American war. A community of agricultural Finns
near Carlton, Minnesota, who had settled there in the eighties, came
together after the call for volunteers and considered what they ought to do.
After deliberation they concluded that in token of their gratitude for their
good fortune under the stars and stripes they ought to send one of their
number to the war. So they picked out as their representative a stalwart,
comely farm lad of twenty-three and he served through the Cuban campaign
as Finnish champion of American institutions!

Magyar

Croatian

Roumanian

THE MAGYARS

In the school of Western civilization the Finns and the Magyars sit nearer
the front than any other people of Mongol speech and blood. In
progressiveness the quarter of a million Magyars in our midst are as
American as any immigrants we receive. A thousand years ago the
Magyars, invading from Asia, conquered the Slavs in Hungary and settled
down as a dominant race. Although a minority in the land, they have

remained masters and rulers. Hence the Magyar immigrant, however
poverty-pinched, feels the constant prick of the spur of race pride. His sense
of honor is high. He will not seek charity unless he really needs it. In a
Magyar quarter squalor and degeneration are not to be seen. The grass and
flowers about the cottages, the clean yard and the clean children proclaim
the presence of a race that cannot bear to be looked down on.
While the Magyars have been political and military leaders in Hungary,
the masses are familiar with the struggle for existence. They are exploited
in many ways by the Jews, who in Hungary have been treated more
liberally than anywhere else in Europe. It is not surprising, then, that few
immigrants land here with so little money as the Magyars. Lacking the
means to acquire land, they are little known in agriculture. They go straight
into the industries and four-fifths of them are to be found in the workplaces
of Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio and New Jersey. They constitute a
floating labor supply shifting constantly back and forth between Fiume and
New York. In recent years four Magyars have departed for every five that
arrived.
Their illiteracy is 11.4 per cent., a better showing than is made by any
immigrants from eastern or southern Europe, save their cousins the Finns.
They bring more industrial skill than the average Slav and their earning
power is greater than that of most of the Slavic nationalities. They are loth
to remain renters and in their endeavor to acquire a home they will assume
burdens heavier than they can carry. Their race pride plays into the hands of
the hurry-up American bosses with the result that, more than other
immigrants, the Magyars injure themselves by overwork.
In the Magyar stream the men are nearly three times as numerous as the
women and two out of five of the men have left wives in the old country.
This means boarding-house life, shocking congestion and a rich harvest for
saloon and bawdy house. The Pittsburgh Magyar who earns $1.80 a day
will spend ten cents of it for lodging, forty cents for food, and thirty cents
for beer. The Magyars are a wine-drinking people and the immigrants come
from the farms and know nothing of the corrosion of cities. Being high-
spirited, however, they want to become American quickly, with the result
that often they acquire our vices before they acquire our virtues. In the mill
towns they learn to guzzle beer, carouse and leave their earnings with the
caterers to appetite.

Their crime record is bad. No alien is more dreaded by the police than a
vengeful or drink-maddened Magyar. The proportion of alien Magyar
prisoners who have been committed for murder is 35.6 per cent., higher
than of any other nationality save the Russians. Their hot-headed and
quarrelsome disposition causes personal violence to bulk very large in their
crime. In offenses against chastity their showing is bad, but their bent for
gainful crime is slight.
Most Magyars come to America with the expectation of returning
eventually to Hungary to live. For this reason few have acquired citizenship
and scarcely any immigrants from southeastern Europe show less interest in
the ballot. After a trip or two home and a vain effort to settle down to life in
the old country, many return to America reconciled, to the prospect of
ending their days here.

THE PORTUGUESE

Mongrelism and social decay have hurt the southwest of Europe even
more than the Turk has hurt the southeast. This is why the 60,000
Portuguese in the United States are, in point of culture, behind even the
Servians and the Macedonians. In the growing army of foreign born
illiterates they constitute the van. Not even the Turks, Syrians or East
Indians can vie with them. On arrival not a third are able to read and write.
As we find them in the cotton mills 55 per cent. of them cannot speak
English. Even after ten years or more in our midst two Portuguese out of
five cannot manage the speech of the country.
There are two centers of Portuguese distribution—southeastern New
England and central California. California has 23,000 Portuguese
immigrants, Massachusetts 26,000, Rhode Island 6,000. In Boston are
1,225, in Cambridge 2,000, in Providence 2,200, in Lowell 2,200, in New
Bedford 4,000, in Fall River 14,000. We understand why Portuguese should
settle in California but what brings these olive-skinned people to chilly New
England? The answer takes us into the realm of Chance. In the beginning of
a stream of immigration there is often romance. Then, if ever, accident
counts and the venturesome individual. Just as a fallen tree on the
Continental Divide may turn certain snow waters from the Pacific to the
Gulf, so a practice of New Bedford whalers a lifetime ago caused the

crowded Azores to overflow into Massachusetts instead of Brazil. In the old
days the whalers, after a summer cruise, touched at the Azores and took on
each from 25 to 35 natives. When after two or three years of whaling they
returned to New Bedford, some of these Azoreans remained and a
settlement grew up. To-day their quarter of New Bedford, known as
"Fayal," is very prosperous.

Courtesy of The Survey

Croatians Celebrating their Going Home to the "Old Country"

Roumanian Couple in Gala Attire, Youngstown, O.
All down Cape Cod these fishermen have well nigh replaced the sea-
faring Yankees. Provincetown, the spot where the Pilgrims first landed and
which was settled by the purest English, seems to-day a South European
town. Handsome dark-skinned Azoreans man the fishing boats, Correa,
Silva, Cabral, and Manta are the names on the shops and the Roman
Catholics outnumber those of any other denomination.
When the bottom fell out of whaling the New Bedford Portuguese went
into the cotton mills and their countrymen began coming in larger numbers.
Besides the "White Portuguese" have come in multitudes of "Black
Portuguese" from the Cape Verde islands. Three thousand of them work
during the season in the cranberry bogs of Massachusetts and all other
pickers flee before them. They are obviously negroid, lack foresight and are
so stupid they cannot follow a straight line.
The real Portuguese immigrate in families and show very little money on
landing. At home 70 per cent. of them were farmers or farm laborers. They
know sea and soil but bring no industrial skill. If they cannot farm or fish
they become day laborers, mill hands, dockers, teamsters, draymen,

stationary engineers or firemen. Many of their women are in the needle
trades.
In the mills the Portuguese do not shine. The men earn $8.00 a week,
while the rest of the foreign born average $12.00. Their sons and daughters
earn $9.50, whereas the second generation of other immigrants average
$14.00. They put wife and daughters into the mill and stay out of labor
unions. In eight cases out of nine they sleep three or more in a room. In
Lowell, according to the government investigator, "The standard of living
of the Portuguese, as judged by the number of persons per apartment, room
and sleeping room, is much lower than that of any other race."
In Boston, "Among the Portuguese poverty is greater and more hopeless
than it is among the Jews and Italians, although there are no Portuguese in
the almshouses. Few of the Portuguese are really well to do while many are
partially dependent because the labor of the women, who are often obliged
to support the family, is too unremunerative to ensure their independence.
Portuguese women who have shown their low moral sense by rearing a
family of fatherless children exhibit their courage and industry by sewing
early and late to gain a meager living for their little ones."
Although unskilled, ignorant and segregated, the Portuguese commit very
little crime. Nevertheless, their moral standard is in some respects
exceedingly low. Says Dr. Bushee: "The idea of family morality among
them is almost primitive, resembling that of the negroes of the South. Not
only are elopements made and repaid in kind without involving further
complications, but also what anthropologists call 'sexual hospitality' is not
unknown among the Portuguese." They "are not free from drunkenness and
thieving, but these faults are more carefully concealed among them and
fewer arrests result than would be the case with other nationalities. Many of
the Portuguese men are idle and thriftless, and some of the women are
suspected of having been public women in the Azore Islands from which
they come."
In California the Portuguese live like the Italians, but while the Italians
coöperate in leasing land, the Portuguese are so individualistic that they
seldom rent or own land in partnership. This has handicapped them in
agricultural competition with the Italians and the Japanese.

Their interest in education is of the feeblest. In the mill towns the
percentage of Portuguese children at home is much larger than that of the
English; although in this respect the showing of the Fall River Poles is
much worse. No other mill people have so large a proportion of their
children in the primary grades. The retardation of Portuguese school
children is high. In California their children are taken out of school early
and the few who go on are sent to "business college" rather than to high
school.
No immigrants care so little for citizenship as the Portuguese. Of the men
whose term of residence entitles them to claim citizenship only 3.2 per cent.
have become naturalized. At New Bedford only one in twenty entitled to
citizenship has sought it; whereas, of the other foreign born, over half have
taken steps to gain citizenship. The Portuguese farmers of California,
although prosperous, care nothing for public affairs and not half of them
take a newspaper. They are interested only in making money, saving, and
buying land.
Owing to their extreme clannishness assimilation is slow. In the city they
live in a quarter by themselves; in the country they form a colony. They
have their church life apart and their societies center about their church.
Although the thriving farmers are improving their housing and standard of
living, they are "inclined to be clannish, partly because Americans do not
care for their society." The chief agents of assimilation are the children.
Having mingled with other children in the public schools, the young people
are taken into fraternal orders and share the social life of the community.
Moreover, the parents unconsciously raise their standard of living through
their efforts to gratify the wants inspired in their children by contact with
schoolmates coming from better homes. If the second generation are soon
to be segregated in parochial schools, as are the children of the Poles and
the French Canadians, this happy assimilation of the Portuguese through
their children will be checked.

THE GREEKS

Practically all our 150,000 Greeks have joined us in the course of a
decade and a half. The immigrants are mostly young men and the
proportion of females is negligible. Fugitives from oppression always bring

their families; so that this stream almost without women is the clearest
proof that the immigration from Hellas is purely economic. The Hellenic
Government is democratic and popular, military service is slight and there
is no religious or political oppression. What has happened is that the huge
American orb has swum within the ken of a little people about as numerous
as the population of New Jersey and the larger mass is exerting its solar
attraction. The peasant living on greens boiled in olive oil, who eats meat
three times a year and keeps without noticing it the 150 fasting days in the
Greek calendar, has sniffed the flesh pots of America. Hence a wild-fire
exodus which has devastated whole villages and threatens to deplete the
labor force of the kingdom.
Says the emigrant when questioned as to his motive: "It is hard to make a
living here. America is rich, I can make more money there. It is the money."
"Money" is the keynote of Greek immigration. Flashy strangers have gone
about talking with the peasant in his furrow and the shepherd on the
hillside, exciting their imagination as to the wonders of America and
smoothing out the difficulties in the way of migrating. In the earlier days of
the movement one man made $50,000 a year from his network of agencies
selling tickets and advancing passage money on a mortgage. The letter to
the home folks, written by the Greek who has found footing in Lowell or
Chicago and which is read by or to every one in the village, has been seized
upon by money-lenders and they have lost no opportunity to encourage both
the writing and the wide circulation of such epistles. The result is that, in
the words of Professor Fairchild the closest student of this immigration,
"The whole Greek world may be said to be in a fever of emigration. From
the highlands and the lowlands of the Morea, from Attica, Thessaly and
Euboea, from Macedonia, Asia Minor and the Islands, 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." "America is a household word in almost every Greek family."
"Greek immigrants know to just what place in the United States they are
going and have a very definite idea of what work they are going to do."
Although there are 10,000 Greek mill hands in Lowell, there is a strong
tendency for the Greeks in America to take to certain lines of business, such
as candy-kitchens and confectionery stores, ice-cream parlors, fruit carts,
stands and stores, florist shops and boot-blacking establishments. This is

due to the fact that this catering to the minor wants of the public admits of
being started on the curb with little capital and no experience. Once his foot
is on the first rung, the saving and commercial-minded Greek climbs. From
curb to stand, from stand to store, from little store to big store, to the chain
of stores, and to branch stores in other cities—such are the stages in his
upward path. As the Greeks prosper, they do not venture out into untried
lines, but scatter into the smaller cities and towns in order to follow there
the few businesses in which they have become expert.

Magyar Peasant Woman

Note own embroidery on apron: "If I am pure and good, I
expect to be honored"

Molokan from Russia
From a semi-wild tribe, members of which eat no
meat
If the immigration from Hellas keeps up, in twenty years the Greeks will
own the candy trade of the country, the soda fountains and perhaps the fruit
business. Born epicures and cooks the Greeks are going into the catering of
food. In Atlanta they have 35 restaurants, in St. Louis 26, in Pittsburgh 25,
in Birmingham 12 hotels and 14 restaurants.

Although Greeks are very rarely farmers, we hear of them as fruit raisers
in California, miners in Utah, laborers on the railroads and fishers on both
our coasts. In the cotton mills the Greeks are on a level with the more
backward nationalities. They show little mechanical ability and few have
reached responsible posts. They are sober and amenable to discipline, but
some employers find them too excitable and unsteady to be good workers.
The ugliest thistle patch we owe to Old-World seed is the serfdom of
thousands of Greek boys in the shoe-shining parlors that have sprung up
everywhere. In some parts of Greece the peasant sets his children early to
work in order that their earnings may leave him free to loaf the livelong day
in a coffee-house. Upon them, too, he saddles the burden of providing
dowries for their sisters. Accordingly, in certain districts, the poor send
away their boys to the cities of Greece and Turkey, where they are hired out
to peddlers, grocers and restaurant keepers, who treat them badly and work
them unconscionably long hours. From such parents the Greek in America
has no difficulty in recruiting boys whom he exploits under conditions that
savor of slavery.
In thousands of Greek shoe-shining shops are working bound boys who
are miserably fed and lodged by their masters, paid $3.00 or $4.00 a week
and required to turn over all tips. Often the tips alone cover the boy's wages
and keep, so that his labor costs the master nothing. Seeing that from each
boy the padrone makes from $100 to $200 a year, a chain of such
establishments yields him a princely income. No wonder the negro
bootblack and the Italian bootblack have been forced to the wall.
The bound boys are on duty 15 or 16 hours a day and work every day in
the year. They get in their eating and sleeping as best they can. They know
no recreation. Late at night, completely exhausted, they drop with their
clothes on into a bed that must suffice for four or five. Boys who have been
in a city several years may learn nothing of it save the shop, their living
quarters and the streets between. Since the padrone's game is to keep his
boys dumb and blind, they are not allowed to talk freely with Greek
customers. The moment a customer talks with a boy, "trusties" crowd round
to listen. No truth can be gotten from the boys, concerning their age, their
work or their pay. To avoid the arm of the truant officer, no Greek bound
boy confesses to less than seventeen years. They are ignorant of the rights

and rewards of labor in this country and are told that, if they leave their
work, they will be arrested. Even their letters home are read and censored.
The effects of this servitude on the boys are shocking. They miss all
schooling and years may elapse before they get their eyes open. The study
of English is the first step towards emancipation; but where work is
constant they miss even this chance and young men will be found who have
been shining shoes for years and feel no ambition for anything else. The
physical ravages of such work and confinement are appalling. In their
memorial to the Immigration Commission the Greek physicians of Chicago
say:

"Young immigrants laboring in shoeshining places for a period of
upwards of two years become afflicted with chronic gastritis and
hepatitis. These diseases undermine their constitutions, so that if they
continue longer at the same work they become afflicted with
pulmonary tuberculosis. Being too ignorant to take precautionary
measures, the disease is communicated to others by contagion."

They go on to ask the Government not to allow such bound boys to land.
Through this peep hole we glimpse one secret of the immigrant's sky-
rocket commercial rise. Behold Stephanos, who landed ten years ago
without a drachma and now draws a cool thousand a month from his
business and is one of our solid men! "Wonderful!" exclaims the innocent
American. "What stuff there must be in him! Shows, too, that the country is
still full of good chances." The fact is the worthy Stephanos lolls on the
backs of a hundred unseen bootblacks who are being ruined that he may
prosper. When one considers how mercilessly the immigrant landlord,
banker, saloon keeper, contractor or employment agent hoodwinks and
fleeces his helpless fellow countrymen, certain of the "successes" one hears
of do not seem so remarkable after all.

THE LEVANTINES

One hundred thousand immigrants from Asiatic Turkey introduce us to
certain very marked differences between the European civilization and the
Asiatic. In general, these Syrians, Armenians, Arabs and Turks eschew

alcohol, shun violence and give little trouble to the police. They are thrifty,
acquisitive and self supporting. Their women folk are hedged and virtuous.
Their native intelligence is beyond question, they respect learning and they
appreciate educational opportunities for their children.
On the other hand, they tend to crowd, their standards of cleanliness are
low and they are greatly afflicted with trachoma, an excludable eye disease.
Their narrow range of interests throws out in ugly relief their lust of gain,
especially gain without sweat. The Oriental attitude toward females shows
itself in a great difference between the sexes in illiteracy, and in the
betrothal of young girls to mature men whom they scarcely know. These
people love trade, particularly the individual bargain, which offers scope for
what is amiably called "a contest of wits" but is really the ensnaring of the
unsuspecting by the spider type. At a time when our retail commerce has
happily come to the "one-price" system, the lustrous-eyed peddlers from the
Levant bring in again the odious haggling trade with its deceit and trickery.

A Finnish Woman by her Cabin of
Hewn Logs in Northern Wisconsin near
Lake Superior

Courtesy of The Survey

Some of Syracuse's Newer Citizens—a Greek
and Two Turks
That these immigrants lack physical and moral courage is conceded even
by their friends. They do not settle their quarrels on the spot face to face but
revenge themselves treacherously from behind when they get a safe chance.
Their feeling that truth is a luxury not to be brought out on common
occasions gives them an advantage in a commercial system which takes for
granted a good deal of Anglo-Saxon straightforwardness. It needs but half

an eye to see that the "business ability" attributed to the prospering dealer is
often nothing but the practice of Oriental craft among the unsuspicious. As
the Romans found these people at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, so
we find them to-day, good looking, pliant, clever, sometimes brilliant, but
shifty and wanting in character.
When two peoples find that their standards repel like oil and water, they
do not care to associate. Naturally, then, the Oriental immigrants tend to
huddle in colonies in which they may live in the old way, keep their pride
and spare themselves the pains of adjustment to American ideals. Not only
do such colonies check the assimilation of those who most need it, but they
are apt to be nests of congestion, disease and depravity, as well as hot-beds
for the propagation of false and impractical ideas of political and social
freedom.

CHAPTER IX
ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF IMMIGRATION

More and more immigration is an economic matter, a flow of men rather
than of families, seeking gain rather than religious and political liberty.
Those who bring anything but their hands are a very small and diminishing
contingent. Most of the money the immigrant shows on landing has been
supplied him for that purpose. In 1882, when the old immigration reached
its height, the public domain was being carved up at a tremendous rate, and
the home-seeker predominated. When the crest of the new immigration
arrived, in 1907, a quarter of a century later, free land was gone forever, and
the job-seeker predominated. Formerly the idea of wandering oversea
sprang up naturally among the intelligent and restless; now the idea is sown
broadcast by thousands of steamship agents and their runners. In the tavern,
knee to knee with the yokels, sits the runner, and paints an El Dorado. The
poor fellows will believe him if he tells them the trees of America bear
golden leaves. When the "American fever" seizes upon the peasant, it is the
obliging runner who suggests mortgaging his home for the passage-money
or who finds a buyer for his cows.
Common laborers who have been in America are hired to go about
among the peasants, flash money, clink glasses, and tell of the wonderful
wages awaiting them. The decoy thus gets together a group who elect him
leader and pay him so much per head to guide them to America. Little do
the poor sheep suspect that their bell-wether is paid by the steamship agent
for forming the group and by the employer to whom he delivers them. A
forwarding business exists for sending penniless laborers to America as if
they were commercial ware. Each leaves at home some relative under
bonds that the laborer will within a year pay a certain sum as cost and profit
of bringing him here, Parties, through-billed from their native village by a
professional money-lender, are met at the right points by his confederates,
coached in three lessons on what answers to make at Ellis Island, and
delivered finally to the Pittsburgh "boarding-boss," or the Chicago saloon-

keeper, who is recruiting labor on commission for a steel mill or a
construction gang.
The emigration of 5,000 Rumanian Jews between January and August,
1900, was brought about by steamship agents, who created great excitement
in Rumania by distributing glowing circulars about America. One authority
stated to the Immigration Commission that two of the leading steamship
lines had five or six thousand ticket-agents in Galicia alone, and that there
was "a great hunt for emigrants" there. Selling steerage tickets to America is
the chief occupation of large numbers of persons in Austria-Hungary,
Greece and Russia, the main sources of undesirable aliens. In 1908 and
1909 the inflow and outflow of steerage-passengers through our ports
amounted to about a million and a half a year. Allowing an average outlay
of $50 a head, we have a movement furnishing $75,000,000 of annual
business to the foreign railway and steamship companies. That a monster of
this size grows dragon claws with which to defend itself goes without
saying.

CHEAP LABOR A RAIN OF MANNA

Still, it is not as cargo that the immigrant yields his biggest dividends.
But for him we could not have laid low so many forests, dug up so much
mineral, set going so many factories, or built up such an export trade as we
have. In most of the basic industries the new immigrants constitute at least
half the labor force. Although millions have come in, there is no sign of
supersaturation, no progressive growth of lack of employment. Somehow
new mines have been opened and new mills started fast enough to swallow
them up. Virtually all of them are at work and, what is more, at work in an
efficient system under intelligent direction. Ivan produces much more than
he did at home, consumes more, and, above all, makes more profit for his
employer than the American he displaces. Thanks to him, we have bigger
outputs, tonnages, trade-balances, fortunes, tips, and alimonies; also bigger
slums, red-light districts, breweries, hospitals, and death-rates.
To the employer of unskilled labor this flow of aliens, many of them used
to dirt floors, a vegetable diet, and child labor, and ignorant of
underclothing, newspapers, and trade unions, is like a rain of manna. For, as
regards foreign competitors, his own position is a Gibraltar. When the

European sends his capital hither, he puts it into railroad securities yielding
from four to seven per cent., thereby releasing American capital for
investment in the enterprises that pay from ten to thirty per cent. The
foreign capitalist dares not put up mill or refinery here, because he cannot
well run such concerns at long range. He may not invade the American
market with the products of his mill over there, because our tariff has been
designed to prevent just that thing.

ENDLESS INFLOW OF THE NEEDIEST

Thus, so long as he stays in his home market, the American mill-owner is
shielded from foreign competition, while the common labor he requires is
cheapened for him by the endless inflow of the neediest meekest laborers to
be found within the white race. If in time they become ambitious and
demanding, there are plenty of "greenies" he can use to teach them a lesson.
The "Hunkies" pay their "bit" to the foreman for the job, are driven through
the twelve-hour day, and in time are scrapped with as little concern as one
throws away a thread-worn bolt. One steel-mill superintendent received
official notice to hire no man over thirty-five and keep no man over forty-
five. A plate-mill which had experienced no technical improvement in ten
years doubled its production per man by driving the workers. No wonder,
then, that in the forty years the American capitalist has had Aladdin's lamp
to rub, his profits from mill and steel works, from packing-house and glass
factory, have created a sensational "prosperity," of which a constantly
diminishing part leaks down to the wage-earners. Nevertheless, the system
which allows the manufacturer to buy at a semi-European wage much of the
labor that he converts into goods to sell at an American price has been
maintained as "the protection of American labor"!

Sunday Group of Roumanian Steel Workers, Youngstown, O.

Sunday Roumanians, Youngstown, O.

THE NEW IMMIGRATION AND THE HIGH COST OF LIVING

Between 1900 and 1910, although population grew twenty-one per cent.,
the output of the ten principal crops of the country increased only nine per
cent. Between 1899 and 1911 the value of the average acre's output of such
crops increased seventy per cent., while its power to purchase the things the
farmer buys was greater by forty-two per cent. There has been a general
upheaval of prices, to be sure, but the price of farm produce has risen much
faster and farther than the price of other commodities. This is "the high cost
of living," and it is immigration that has made this imp shoot up faster in
the United States than anywhere else.
As long as good land lasted, our Government stimulated agriculture by
presenting a quarter-section to whoever would undertake to farm wild land.
This bounty overdid farming, until, in the middle of the nineties, the cost of
living had reached a minimum. With the ending of free land, the upward
turn was bound to come, but the change was made more dramatic by the
inpouring of ten millions of immigrants without the knowledge, the means,
or the inclination to engage in farming. Among us there is one American
white farmer for fourteen American whites, one Scandinavian farmer for
eight Scandinavians, one German farmer for eleven Germans, one Irish
farmer for forty Irish; but it takes 130 Poles, Hungarians, or Italians in this
country to furnish one farmer. Failing to contribute their due quota to the
production of food, these late-comers have ruptured the equilibrium
between field and mill, and made the high cost of living a burning question.
Just as the homestead policy overstimulated the growth of farms, the new
immigration has overstimulated the growth of factories.

IMMIGRANTS AND AGRICULTURE

Nevertheless, certain of the South Europeans who are upon the soil have
something to show American farmers facing the problems of intensive
agriculture. Italians are teaching their neighbors how to extract three crops a
year from a soil already nourishing orchard or vineyard. The Portuguese
raise vegetables in their walnut groves, grow currants between the rows of
trees in the orchard, and beans between the currant rows. They know how to
prevent the splitting of their laden fruit-trees by inducing a living brace to

grow between opposite branches. The blackbeetle problem they solve by
planting tomato slips inclosed in paper. From the slopes looking out on the
Adriatic the Dalmatian brings a horticultural cunning which the American
fruit-grower should be eager to acquire.
The conversion of New Jersey barrens into berry farms, vineyards, and
pepper fields, the reclamation of muck soil in western New York, which
Americans were not willing to touch, the transmutation of wild Ozark lands
into apples and peaches, are Italian exploits which constitute clear gain for
the country. But there are other immigrant farmers whose labors count on
the wrong side of the national ledger. Not a few Slav colonies are clearing
and tilling land so poor or so steep that it ought never to have been brought
under the plow. The soil they have deforested will presently wash into the
rivers, leaving stripped rocky slopes to grin, like a Death's-head, in the
landscape. The nation will have to pay for it, just as France paid for the
reckless ax work that went on under the First Republic.

HELPING THE IMMIGRANT TO GET UPON THE SOIL

When confronted with the undeniable evils resulting from the crowding
of old-world peasants into American slums and factories, the opponents of
restriction urge that the trouble is with the distribution of the immigrants,
there are not really too many of them, but they are congested in certain
centers and industries. Then let the state or the nation take the immigrant in
hand and settle him upon the soil, where there is room for him and where he
yearns to be. Supply him with the best of information, guidance and
supervision and lend him a little money until he has gotten upon his feet.
Successful state colonization would, no doubt, restore the balance between
agriculture and manufactures and prevent the heartbreaking waste and
misery resulting from the present hap-hazard, catch-as-catch-can
distribution of immigrants among American opportunities.
Two other consequences ought, however, to be evident; First, the policy
would tend to use up the agricultural opportunities Americans may prefer to
hold open for their children and grandchildren. Second, State help to the
immigrant would furnish splendid advertising matter to the steamship
companies endeavoring to fill more steerages and might soon swell the
number of arrivals to a million and a half or two millions a year. If we wish

to have more immigrants and to fill up this country in the briefest possible
time, state colonization is just the way to go about it. On the other hand,
once the volume of immigration has been brought under effective control,
the policy of aiding the immigrant to get upon the land is heartily to be
commended.

Photograph by Hine Courtesy of The Survey

The Unemployed—Middle of the Morning, Chicago

INDUSTRIAL DISPLACEMENT

The facts assembled by the Immigration Commission shatter the rosy
theory that foreign labor is drawn into an industry only when native labor is
not to be had. The Slavs and Magyars were introduced into Pennsylvania
forty-odd years ago by mine-operators looking for more tractable miners.
Agents were sent abroad to gather up labor, and frequently foreigners were
brought in when a strike was on. The first instance seems to have occurred
in Drifton in 1870, and resulted in the importation of two ship-loads of

Hungarians. The process of replacing the too-demanding American, Welsh,
and Irish miners with labor from Austria-Hungary went on so rapidly that
by the middle of the nineties, the change was accomplished. In 1904, during
a strike in the coal-fields near Birmingham, Alabama, many South
Europeans were brought in. In 1908 "the larger companies imported a
number of immigrants," so that the strike was broken and unionism
destroyed in that region. In 1880, in the first strike in the coal-mines of
Kansas, "the first immigrants from Italy were brought into the fields as
strike-breakers."
Poles were introduced into South Cleveland in 1882 to replace strikers in
the wire-mills. The meat-packing strike of 1904 in Chicago was broken
with trainloads of negroes, Italians and Greeks. In 1883 the largest oil-
refining company at Bayonne, New Jersey, "in order to break the strike
among the Irish and American coopers, ... introduced great numbers of
Slovaks, Ruthenians, and Poles." In 1887 a coal-dockers' strike was broken
with Magyars, and in 1904 striking boiler-makers were replaced by Poles.
The striking glass-workers in 1904 were beaten by the introduction of
Slovaks, Italians, Poles and Magyars. During the 1907 strike in the iron-
mines of northern Minnesota, "one of the larger companies imported large
numbers of Montenegrins and other Southeastern races as strike-breakers,
while a few of the smaller companies brought into the region a number of
German-Austrians." "One mining company imported as many as 1300 of
these strike-breakers."
The hejira of the English-speaking soft-coal miners shows what must
happen when low-standard men undercut high-standard men. The miners of
Pennsylvania and West Virginia, finding their unions wrecked and their lot
growing worse under the floods of men from southern and eastern Europe,
migrated in great numbers to the Middle West and the Southwest. But of
late the coal-fields of the Middle West have been invaded by multitudes of
Italians, Croatians, Poles, and Lithuanians, so that even here American and
Americanized miners have their backs to the wall. As for the displaced
trade-unionists who sought asylum in the mines of Oklahoma and Kansas,
the pouring in of raw immigrants has weakened their bargaining power, and
many have gone on to make a last stand in the mines of New Mexico and
Colorado.

Each exodus left behind an inert element which accepted the harder
conditions that came in with the immigrants, and a strong element that rose
to better posts in the mines or in other occupations. As for the displaced, the
Iliad of their woes has never been sung—the loss of homes, the shattering
of hopes, the untimely setting to work of children, the struggle for a new
foothold, and the turning of thousands of self-respecting men into day
laborers, odd-job men, down-and-out-ers, and "hoboes."

IMMIGRANTS AND LABOR ORGANIZATIONS

The dramatic unionization of the garment industries in our large cities
has misled the public as to the actual effect of recent immigration upon
trade-unions. The fact is that the immigrants from the backward parts of
Europe tend to weaken, if not to shatter, labor organizations in the fields
they enter. They arrive needy and eager to get any work at almost any pay.
Having had no industrial experience in the old country, they lack the trade-
union idea. Without our speech, and often illiterate, they are very hard to
reach and to bring into line. So far as they are transients, who are not
staking their future on the industry, they are loath to pay union dues and to
run the risk of having to strike. It is true that the labor organizer evangelizes
the alien workers with his union gospel; but by the time one batch has been
welded into a fighting force, another batch is on his hands. His work, like
Penelope's web, is raveled out about as fast as it is woven. No wonder that
in the cotton industry unionism has been wrecked, while, of the iron miners,
less than two per cent. belong to unions. In 1901 the United States Steel
Corporation's constituent companies signed agreements with two-thirds of
their 125,000 workmen, among whom the English-speaking held a
dominant place. Ten years later the company signed not a single agreement
with its beaten mass of Slav-Latins. There was no union with which to sign.
The organizing, organizable Americans had been deleted from the works.
No wonder that organized labor demands restriction of immigration. While
the inrush continues, the lines of labor will be weak, forming, breaking, and
reforming in the face of the intrenchments of capital.

IMMIGRANTS AND WAGES

During the last fifteen years the flood of gold has brought in a spring-tide
of prices. Since 1896 the retail cost to Americans of their fifteen principal
articles of food has risen seventy per cent. Wages should have risen in like
degree if the workman is to retain his old standard, to say nothing of
keeping his place in a social procession which is continually mounting to
higher economic levels. We know that by 1907 wages had risen twenty-
eight per cent., while retail prices were rising twenty-six per cent. Evidently
the working man was falling behind in the social procession. In the soft-
coal field of Pennsylvania, where the Slav dominates, the coal-worker
receives forty-two cents a day less than the coal-worker in the mines of the
Middle West and Southwest, where he does not dominate. In meat-packing,
iron and steel, cotton manufacture, and other foreignized industries the
inertia of wages has been very marked. The presence of the immigrant has
prevented a wage advance which otherwise must have occurred.

"Shack" of a Polish Iron Miner, Hibbing, Minn.

Cabin of an Austrian Iron Miner, Virginia, Minn.
What a college man saw in a copper-mine in the Southwest gives in a
nutshell the logic of low wages.
The American miners, getting $2.75 a day, are abruptly displaced without
a strike by a trainload of five hundred raw Italians brought in by the
company and put to work at from $1.50 to $2 a day. For the Americans
there is nothing to do but to "go down the road." At first the Italians live on
bread and beer, never wash, wear the same filthy clothes night and day, and
are despised. After two or three years they want to live better, wear decent
clothes, and be respected. They ask for more wages, the bosses bring in
another trainload from the steerage, and the partly Americanized Italians
follow the American miners "down the road." No wonder that the estimate
of government experts as to the number of our floating casual laborers
ranges up to five millions!

IMMIGRANTS AND CONDITIONS OF WORK

"The best we get in the mill now is greenhorns," said the superintendent
of a tube mill. "When they first come, they put their heart into it and give a
full day's work. But after a while they begin to shirk and do as little as they

dare." It is during this early innocence that the immigrant accepts conditions
he ought to spurn. This same mill had to break up the practice of selling
jobs by foremen. In one concern the boss who sold a job would dismiss the
man after a fortnight and sell the job again, while another boss in the same
works would take on the dismissed man for a fee. On the Great Northern
Railroad the bosses mulcted each Greek laborer a dollar a month for
"interpreter." The "bird of passage," who comes here to get ahead rather
than to live, not only accepts, the seven-day week and the twelve-hour day,
but often demands them. Big earnings blind him to the physiological cost of
overwork. It is the American or the half-Americanized foreigner who rebels
against the eighty-four-hour schedule.
When capital plays lord of the manor, the Old World furnishes the serfs.
In some coal districts of West Virginia the land, streets, paths, roads, the
miners' cabins, the store, the school, and the church are all owned and
controlled by the coal company. The company pays the teacher, and no
priest or clergyman objectionable to it may remain on its domain. One may
not step off the railroad's right of way, pass through the streets, visit mine or
cabin, without permission. There is no place where miners meeting to
discuss their grievances may not be dispersed as trespassers. Any miner
who talks against his boss or complains of conditions is promptly
dismissed, and ejected from the 35,000 acres of company land. Hired
sluggers, known as the "wrecking-gang," beat up or even murder the
organizer who tries to reach the miners. No saloon, gambling-hall, or
bawdy-house is tolerated on company land. Even the beer wagon may not
deliver beer at houses to which the superintendent objects.
It is needless to add that the miners are all negroes or foreigners.

IS THE FOREIGNER INDISPENSABLE?

After an industry has been foreignized, the notion becomes fixed in the
minds of the bosses that without the immigrants the industry would come to
a standstill.
"If is wasn't for the Slavs," say the superintendents of the Mesaba Mines,
"we couldn't get out this ore at all, and Pittsburgh would be smokeless. You

can't get an American to work here unless he runs a locomotive or a steam-
shovel. We've tried it; brought 'em in, carloads at a time, and they left."
"Wouldn't they stay for three dollars a day?" I suggested, "even if two
dollars and ten cents isn't enough?"
"No, it's not a matter of pay. Somehow Americans nowadays aren't any
good for hard or dirty work."
Hard work! And I think of Americans I have seen in that last asylum of
the native born, the Far West, slaving with ax and hook, hewing logs for a
cabin, ripping out boulders for a road, digging irrigation-ditches, drilling the
granite, or timbering the drift—Americans shying at open-pit, steam-shovel
mining!
The secret is that with the insweep of the unintelligible bunk-house
foreigner there grows up a driving and cursing of labor which no self-
respecting American will endure. Nor can he bear to be despised as the
foreigner is. It is not the work or the pay that he minds, but the stigma. This
is why, when a labor force has come to be mostly Slav, it will soon be all
Slav. But if the supply of raw Slavs were cut off, the standards and status of
the laborers would rise, and the Americans would come into the industry.
Some bosses argue for a continuous supply of green foreigners because
the sons of the immigrants are "above their fathers' jobs." A strange industry
this! Britain's iron industry is manned by Britons, Germany's by Germans,
but we are to believe that America's iron industry is an exotic which can
attract neither native Americans nor the sons of immigrants. The truth is
that the school and other civilizing agencies have turned Michael's boy not
against hard work, but against the contempt with which his father's kind of
work is tainted. But for the endless stream of transients with their pigsty
mode of life, their brawls and their animal pleasures, the stigma on the work
would vanish, and the son of the immigrant would be willing to inherit his
father's job.

Photograph by Burke & Atwell. Courtesy of The Survey

Immigrant Girls Coming to Work in the Early Morning at the
Union Stockyards

Photograph by Townsend. Courtesy of The Survey

Polish Girls Washing Dishes under the Sidewalk in a Chicago
Restaurant. The only Light is Artificial

IMMIGRANT WOMEN DOING MEN'S WORK

While millions of women are being drawn from the home into industry,
the popular ideal of womanhood serves as a precious safeguard, turning
them away from coarsening occupations which might rob them of health or
youth or refinement. But this ideal, which is higher among the American
working-men than among the workers of any other people, is menaced by
the new immigrants, with their peasant notions of womanhood. The Slavs
and the Italians are not in the least queasy about putting their women into
heavy and dirty work, such as core-making, glass-grinding, and hide-
scraping, which self-respecting American girls will not touch. The employer
realizes this, and continually tries these women in male occupations, with
the object of substituting them for men, beating down men's wages or

breaking a men's strike. Engaging in such masculine work not only prevents
immigrant women from rising to the American woman's sense of self-
respect, but it hinders their men from developing the American man's spirit
of chivalry. What is more, the extension of woman's sphere on the wrong
side underlines the native standard of womanliness, so that native girls are
perhaps being drawn into work that denies them refinement and romance.

WHAT BECOMES OF DISPLACED AMERICANS

Does the man the immigrant displaces rise or sink? The theory that the
immigrant pushes him up is not without some color of truth. In Cleveland
the American, German, and Bohemian iron-mill workers displaced within
the last fifteen years seem to have been reabsorbed into other growing
industries. They are engineers and firemen, bricklayers, carpenters, slaters,
structural iron-workers, steam-fitters, plumbers and printers. Leaving pick
and wheelbarrow to Italian and Slav, the Irish are now meter-readers, wire-
stringers, conductors, motormen, porters, janitors, caretakers, night-
watchmen, and elevator-men. I find no sign that either the displaced
workman or his sons have suffered from the advent of Pole and Magyar.
Some may have migrated, but certainly those left have easier work and
better pay. It is as though the alien tide had passed beneath them and lifted
them up. On the other hand, in Pittsburgh and vicinity the new immigration
has been like a flood sweeping away the jobs, homes, and standards of great
numbers, and obliging them to save themselves by accepting poorer
occupations or fleeing to the West. The cause of the difference is that
Pittsburgh held to the basic industries, while in Cleveland numerous high-
grade manufactures started up which absorbed the displaced workmen into
the upper part of their labor force.

OUR STANDARD OF LIVING CRUMBLES

Unless there is some such collateral growth of skill-demanding
industries, the new immigrants bring disaster to many of the working-men
they undercut. The expansion of the industry will create some good jobs,
but not enough to reabsorb the Americans displaced. Thus in the iron-ore-
mines of Minnesota, out of seventy-five men kept busy by one steam-

shovel, only thirteen get $2.50 a day or more, and $2.50 is the least that will
maintain a family on the American standard. It is plain that the advent of
sixty-two cheap immigrants might displace sixty-two Americans or Irish,
while the setting up of an additional steam shovel would create only
thirteen decent-wage jobs for them. Scarcely any industry can grow fast
enough to reabsorb into skilled or semi-skilled positions the displaced
workmen.
Employers observe a tendency for employment to become more
fluctuating and seasonal because of access to an elastic supply of aliens,
without family or local attachments, ready to go anywhere or do anything.
In certain centers, immigrant laborers form, as it were, visible living pools
from which the employer can dip as he needs. Why should he smooth out
his work evenly through the year in order to keep a labor force composed of
family men with local roots when he can always take on "ginnies" without
trouble and drop them without compunction? Railroad shops are coming to
hire and to "fire" men as they need them instead of relying on the
experienced regular employees. In a concern with 30,000 employees, the
rate of change is a hundred per cent. a year, and is increasing! Labor leaders
notice that employment is becoming more fluctuating, there are fewer
steady jobs, and the proportion of men who are justified in founding a home
constantly diminishes.

IMMIGRATION AND CRISES

The fact that during an acute industrial depression in this country the
immigrant stream not only runs low, but the departures may exceed the
arrivals (as in the eight months following the 1907 panic, when there was a
decrease of 124,124 in our alien population), has been made the foundation
for the argument that surplus immigrant labor, by promptly taking itself off
when times are bad here, relieves the labor market and hastens the return to
normal conditions. It is overlooked that only the prosperous go, leaving
upon us the burden of the weak unemployed aliens. Moreover, at the first
sign of returning prosperity, a freshet of immigrants starts up, thereby
checking sharply the good-times tendency toward higher wages and better
working conditions.

THE RISE OF SOCIAL PRESSURE

Free land, coupled with high individual efficiency, has made this country
a low-pressure area. It ought to remain such, because individualistic
democracy forbids a blind animal-like increase of numbers. By causing the
population to accommodate itself to opportunities, our democracy solves
the Sphinx's riddle and opens a bright prospect of continuous social
progress. But of late that prospect has been clouded. The streaming in from
the backward lands is sensibly converting this country from a low-pressure
area into a high-pressure area. It is nearly a generation since the stress,
registered in the labor-market, caused the British working-man to fight shy
of America. It is twenty years since it reached the point at which the
German working-man, already on the up-grade at home, ceased to be drawn
to America. As the saturation of our labor-market by cheaper and ever
cheaper human beings raises the pressure-gage, we fail to attract as of yore
such peoples as the North Italians and the Magyars.

Roumanian Shepherds in Native Costume, Ellis Island

In 1898 few came to us from east of Hungary. Now we are receiving
them from Asiatic Turkey, Circassia, Syria, and Arabia. An immigration has
started up from Persia, and conditions are ripe for a heavy influx from
western Asia. These remote regions, which have had only twilight from
Europe's forenoon, are high-pressure areas. Their peoples are too many in
relation to the opportunities they know how to use. Until education,
democratic ideas, and the elevation of women restrict their increase, or
machine industry widens their opportunities, these regions will continue to
produce a surplus of people, which the enterprising avarice of steamship
companies will make ever more mobile and more threatening to the wage-
earners of an advanced country. Only lately comes the announcement that
one of the trans-Atlantic lines is about to run its steamships through the
Dardanelles and Bosphorus into Black Sea ports in order to bring
immigrants direct to America from southeastern Europe without the
expense of the long haul overland to Hamburg.
If an air-chamber be successively connected by pipes with a large number
of tanks of compressed air, the pressure within the chamber must rise.
Similarly, if a low-pressure society be connected by cheap steam-
transportation with several high-pressure societies, and allows them freely
to discharge into it their surplus population, the pressure in that society
must rise. But for Chinese exclusion we should by this time have six or
eight million Celestials in the far West, and mud villages and bamboo huts
would fill the noble valleys of California. Something like this must occur as
we go on draining away surplus people from larger and larger areas of high-
pressure.
Immigration raises the pressure-gage at once for laborers, but only
gradually for other classes. It is the children of the immigrants who
communicate the pressure to all social levels. The investor, landowner, or
contractor profits by the coming in of bare-handed men, and can well afford
to preach world-wide brotherhood. The professional man, sitting secure
above the arena of struggle, can nobly rebuke narrowness and race hatred.
Throughout our comfortable classes one finds high-sounding
humanitarianism and facile lip-sympathy for immigrants coexisting with
heartless indifference to what depressive immigration is doing and will do
to American wage-earners and their children. If the stream of immigration
included capitalists with funds, merchants ready to invade all lines of

business, lawyers, doctors, engineers, and professors qualified to compete
immediately with our professional men, even judges and officials able to
lure votes away from our own candidates for office, the pressure would be
felt all along the line, and there might be something heroic in these groups
standing for the equal right of all races to American opportunities. But since
actually the brunt is borne by labor, it is easy for the shielded to indulge in
generous views on the subject of immigration.

CHAPTER X
SOCIAL EFFECTS OF IMMIGRATION

There is a certain anthracite town of 26,000 inhabitants in which are writ
large the moral and social consequences of injecting 10,000 sixteenth-
century people into a twentieth-century community. By their presence the
foreigners necessarily lower the general plane of intelligence, self-restraint,
refinement, orderliness, and efficiency. With them, of course, comes an
increase of drink and of the crimes from drink. The great excess of men
among them leads to sexual immorality and the diffusion of private
diseases. A primitive midwifery is practised, and the ignorance of the poor
mothers fills the cemetery with tiny graves. The women go about their
homes barefoot, and their rooms and clothing reek with the odors of
cooking and uncleanliness. The standards of modesty are Elizabethan. The
miners bathe in the kitchen before the females and children of the
household, and women soon to become mothers appear in public
unconcerned. The foreigners attend church regularly, but their noisy
amusements banish the quiet Sunday. The foreign men, three-eighths of
whom are illiterate, pride themselves on their physical strength rather than
on their skill, and are willing to take jobs requiring nothing but brawn.
Barriers of speech, education, and religious faith split the people into
unsympathetic, even hostile camps. The worst element in the community
makes use of the ignorance and venality of the foreign-born voters to
exclude the better citizens from any share in the control of local affairs. In
this babel no newspaper becomes strong enough to mold and lead public
opinion. On account of the smallness of the English-reading public,—the
native born men number slightly over two thousand and those of American
parentage less than a thousand—the single English daily has so few
subscribers that it cannot afford to offend any of them by exposing
municipal rottenness. The chance to prey on the ignorant foreigner tempts
the cupidity and corrupts the ethics of local business and professional men.
The Slavic thirst, multiplying saloons up to one for every twenty-six
families, is communicated to Americans, and results in an increase of liquor

crimes among all classes. In like manner familiarity with the immodesties
of the foreigners coarsens the native-born.
With the basest Americans and the lowest foreigners united by thirst and
greed, while the decent Americans and the decent foreigners understand one
another too little for team-work, it is not surprising that the municipal
government is poor and that the taxpayers are robbed. Only a few of the
main streets are paved; the rest are muddy and poorly guttered. Outside the
central portion of the city one meets with open sewage, garbage, dung-
heaps, and foul odors. Sidewalks are lacking or in bad repair. The police
force, composed of four Lithuanians, two Poles, one German, and one
Irishman, is so inefficient that "pistol-toting" after nightfall is common
among all classes. At times hold-ups have been so frequent that it was not
considered safe for a well-dressed person to show himself in the foreign
sections after dark. In the words of a prominent local criminal lawyer:

We have a police force that can't speak English. Within the last few
years there have been six unavenged murders in this town. Why, if
there were anybody I wanted to get rid of, I'd entice him here, shoot
him down in the street, and then go around and say good-by to the
police.

Here in a nutshell are presented the social effects that naturally follow the
introduction into an advanced people of great numbers of backward
immigrants. One need not question the fundamental worth of the
immigrants or their possibilities in order to argue that they must act as a
drag on the social progress of the nation that incorporates them.

ILLITERACY

Among us there are now two million foreign-born illiterates, while the
number of foreign-born men of voting age unable to read and write has
passed the million mark. The confessed illiteracy of the multitudes coming
from southern and eastern Europe is 35.8 per cent., as against 2.7 per cent.
for the dwindling streams from the North and West. We know that the actual
state is somewhat worse than these figures indicate, because many
unlettered aliens fearing rejection falsely declare themselves able to read
and write. If the lands of ignorance continue to discharge unhindered their

surplus into our country, we must resign ourselves to having numbers of
fellow-citizens who, in the words of the Commissioner of Immigration at
New York, "do not know the days of the week, the months of the year, their
own ages, or the name of any country in Europe outside their own." Or, as
another official puts it:

In our daily official duties we come to know as belonging to a
normal human adult type the individual who cannot count to twenty
every time correctly; who can tell the sum of two and two, but not of
nine and six; name the days of the week, but not the months of the
year; who knows that he has arrived at New York or Boston, as the
case may be, but does not know the route he followed from his home
or how long it took to reach here; who says he is destined to America,
but has to rely on showing a written address for further particulars;
who swears he paid his own passage, but is unable to tell what it cost,
and at the same time shows an order for railroad transportation to
destination prepaid in this country.

While sister countries are fast nearing the goal of complete adult literacy,
deteriorating immigration makes it very hard to lift the plane of popular
intelligence in the United States. The foreign-born between twenty and
thirty-four years of age, late-comers of course, show five times the illiteracy
of native whites of the same age. But those above forty-five years of age,
mostly earlier immigrants, have scarcely twice the illiteracy of native
whites above forty-five. This shows how much wider is the gulf between
the Americans of to-day and the new immigrants than that between the
Americans of a generation ago and the old immigrants.
Thanks to extraordinary educational efforts, the illiteracy of native white
voters dropped a third during the last decade; that is, from 4.9 per cent. to
3.5 per cent. But the illiteracy of the foreign-born men rose to 12 per cent.;
so that the proportion of white men in this country unable to read and write
any language declined only 9 per cent. when, but for the influx of illiterates,
it would have fallen 30 per cent.
In the despatches of August 16, 1912, is an account of a gathering of ten
thousand afflicted people at a shrine at Carey, Ohio, reputed to possess a
miraculous healing virtue. Special trains brought together multitudes of

credulous, and at least one "miracle" was reported. As this country fills up
with the densely ignorant, there will be more of this sort of thing. The
characteristic features of the Middle Ages may be expected to appear
among us to the degree that our population comes to be composed of
persons at the medieval level of culture.

YELLOW JOURNALISM

In accounting for yellow journalism, no one seems to have noticed that
the saffron newspapers are aimed at a sub-American mind groping its way
out of a fog. The scare-heads, red and green ink, pictures, words of one
syllable, gong effects, and appeal to the primitive emotions, are apt to jar
upon the home-bred farmer or mechanic. "After all," he reflects, "I am not a
child." Since its success in the great cities, this style of newspaper has been
tried everywhere; but it appears there are soils in which the "yellows" will
not thrive. When a population is sixty per cent. American stock, the editor
who takes for granted some intelligence in his readers outlasts the howling
dervish. But when the native stock falls below thirty per cent. and the
foreign element exceeds it, yellowness tends to become endemic. False
simplicity, distortion, and crude emotionalism are the resources of
newspapers striving to reach and interest undeveloped minds. But the arts
that win the immigrant deprave the taste of native readers and lower the
intelligence of the community.

PEONAGE

The friendless, exploitable alien by his presence tends to corrupt our laws
and practices respecting labor. In 1908 the House of Representatives
directed the Immigration Commission to report on the treatment and
conditions of work of immigrants in certain Southern States "and other
States." The last phrase was introduced merely to avoid the appearance of
sectionalism, for no congressman dreamed that peonage existed anywhere
save in the South. The investigation disclosed, however, the startling fact
that immigrant peonage exists in every State but Oklahoma and
Connecticut. In the West the commission found "many cases of involuntary
servitude," but no prosecutions. It was in the lumber-camps of Maine that

the commission found "the most complete system of peonage in the
country."

CASTE SPIRIT

The desire to cure certain ills has been slow to develop among us because
the victims are aliens who, we imagine, don't mind it very much. On
learning that the low pay of the Italian navy forbids meat, we recall that all
Italians prefer macaroni, anyhow. With downtrodden immigrants we do not
sympathize as we would with downtrodden Americans. The foreign-born
laborers are "wops" and don't count; the others are "white men." After a
great mine disaster a Pittsburgh newspaper posted the bulletin: "Four
hundred miners killed. Fifteen Americans." Of late a great split has opened
between the American and Americanized working-men and the foreigners,
with their new sense of being exploited and despised. The break shows
itself sensationally in the bitter fight between the American Federation of
Labor and the Industrial Workers of the World. The former denounces the
red-flag methods of the latter, ignores I. W. W. strikes, and allows its
members to become strike-breakers. When the latter precipitates a strike in
some industry in which the Federationists are numerous, we shall see an
unprecedented warfare between native and foreign groups of working-men.
It is significant of the coming cleavage that the mother of the I. W. W., the
Western Federation of Miners, at once the most American and the most
radical of the great labor-unions, has disowned the daughter organization
since its leaders sought to rally inflammable and irresponsible immigrants
with the fierce cry, "Sabotage. No Truce."

THE POSITION OF WOMEN

Perhaps the most sensitive index of moral advancement is the position
assigned to woman. Never is there a genuine advance that does not leave
her more planet and less satellite. Until recently nowhere else in the world
did women enjoy the freedom and encouragement they received in
America. It is folly, however, to suppose that their lot will not be affected
by the presence of six millions from belated Europe and from Asia, where

consideration for the weaker sex is certainly not greater than that of the
English before the Puritan Reformation.
With most of our Slavic nationalities, it is said, the boy may strike his
sister with impunity, but the girl who strikes her brother is likely to be
chastised. Few of the later immigrants think of giving the daughter as good
a chance as the son. Among the American students in our colleges there are
three young men to one young woman. For the native students of foreign
fathers the ratio is four to one, and for the foreign-born eight to one.
The Italians keep their daughters close, and marry them off very early. In
the 1909 strike of the New York shirt-waist makers, all the nationalities
responded to the union ideal save the Italian girls. More than that, hundreds
of them slipped into the strikers' jobs. Mystified by the strange, stolid
resistance of the brown-eyed girls to all entreaties, the strike-leaders visited
their homes. There they found that the Italian woman, instead of being a
free moral agent, is absolutely subject to the will of her nearest male
relative, and the man would not take the wife, sister, or daughter out of the
shop unless he was well paid for it.
East European peasants are brutal in the assertion of marital rights, so
when the poor immigrant woman, noticing the lot of the American wife,
comes to the point of rebelling against the overlarge family, she runs the
risk of rough treatment. Some nationalities are almost Oriental in the way
they seclude their women. It is significant that the Ruthenian, Polish,
Portuguese, South Italian, and Greek female employees who have lived
here from five to ten years are further behind their men-folk in speaking
English than the women from northern and western Europe.
That the woman's movement in America is to meet with hard sledding
cannot be doubted. The yielding conservatism of our East has been
buttressed of late by the incorporation of millions of immigrants bred in the
coarse peasant philosophy of sex. It may be long before women win in the
East the recognition they have won in the more American parts of the
country. Recently the school board of New York, on motion of
Commissioner Abraham Stern, refused even to allow discussion of a
woman teacher's petition for a year's leave of absence without pay in order
to have a baby. This moved "The Independent," which has been a Mark
Tapley on the immigration question, to remark: "The wave of recent

immigration has brought with it the Oriental conception of woman's status.
A man whose religion requires him every morning to thank God that he was
not born a woman is likely to treat women so that they will wish they had
been born men. We must not shut our eyes to the fact that in the future the
Christian conception of womanhood is not to be maintained in this country
without a struggle."

THE SOCIAL EVIL

From a half to three-fifths of the immigration of the period 1868-88 was
male, but the new immigration shows a male preponderance of about three
to one. Among those from Austria there are 155 males to 100 females.
Among those from Hungary the proportion is 161 to 100; from Italy, 191;
from Asiatic Turkey, 210; from European Turkey, 769; from the Balkan
States, 1107; from Greece, 1192. A quarter of the Polish husbands in
industry, a third of the married Slovak and Italian men, nearly half of the
Magyars and Russians, three-fifths of the Croatians, three-fourths of the
Greeks and Rumanians, and nine-tenths of the Bulgarians, have left their
wives in the old country!
Two million more immigrant men than immigrant women! Can any one
ask what this leads to? In colonial times the consequences of split-family
immigration were so bad that Massachusetts and Connecticut passed laws
requiring spouses to return to their mates in England unless they were
"come over to make way for their families." We are broader-minded, and
will interfere with nothing that does not wound prosperity. The testimony of
foreign consuls and leaders among the foreign-born leaves no doubt that in
some instances the woman cook of the immigrant boarding-house is
common to the inmates.

HOUSING

In the South Side of Pittsburgh there are streets lined with the decent
homes of German steel-workers. A glance down the paved passage leading
to the rear of the house reveals absolute cleanliness, and four times out of
five one glimpses a tree, a flower garden, an arbor, or a mass of vines. In
Wood's Run, a few miles away, one finds the Slavic laborers of the Pressed

Steel Car Company huddled in dilapidated rented dwellings so noisome and
repulsive that one must visit the lower quarters of Canton to meet their like.
One cause of the difference is that the Slavs are largely transients, who do
nothing to house themselves because they are saving in order to return to
their native village.
The fact that a growing proportion of our immigrants, having left
families behind them, form no strong local attachments and have no desire
to build homes here is one reason why of late the housing problem has
become acute in American industrial centers.

OVERGROWTH OF CITIES

Not least among the multiplying symptoms of social ill health in this
country is the undue growth of cities. A million city-dwellers create ten
times the amount of "problem" presented by a million on the farms. Now, as
one traverses the gamut that leads from farms to towns, from towns to
cities, and from little cities to big, the proportion of American stock steadily
diminishes while the foreign stock increases its representation until in the
great cities it constitutes nearly three-fourths of the population. In 1910 the
percentage distribution of our white population was as follows:—
NATIVE
WHITE FOREIGN FOREIGN-
STOCK STOCK BORN
Rural districts 64.1 20.8 7.5
Cities 2,500-10,000 57.5 34.5 13.9
Cities 10,000-25,000 50.4 42. 14.4
Cities 25,000-100,000 45.9 46.7 20.2
Cities 100,000-500,000 38.9 53.4 22.1
Cities 500,000 and over 25.6 70.8 33.6
It is not that the immigrants love streets and crowds. Two-thirds of them
are farm bred, but they are dropped down in cities, and they find it easier to
herd there with their fellows than to make their way into the open country.
Our cities would be fewer and smaller had they fed on nothing but country-
bred Americans. The later alien influx has rushed us into the thick of urban

problems, and these are gravest where Americans are fewest. Congestion,
misliving, segregation, corruption, and confusion are seen in motley groups
like Pittsburgh, Jersey City, Paterson, and Fall River rather than in native
centers like Indianapolis, Columbus, Nashville, and Los Angeles.

PAUPERISM

Ten years ago two-fifths of the paupers in our almshouses were foreign-
born, but most of them had come over in the old careless days when we
allowed European poorhouses to send us their inmates. Now that our
authorities turn back such as appear likely to become a public charge, the
obvious pauper is not entering this country. We know that virtually every
Greek in America is self-supporting. The Syrians are said to be singularly
independent. The Slavs and the Magyars are sturdy in spirit, and the
numerous indigent Hebrews are for the most part cared for by their own
race.

Distribution of Foreign-Born Whites in the United States—1910

Nevertheless, dispensers of charity agree that many South Italians are
landing with the most extravagant ideas of what is coming to them. They
apply at once for relief with the air, "Here we are. Now what are you going
to do for us?" They even insist on relief as a right. At home it had been
noised about that in foolish America baskets of food are actually sent in to
the needy, and some are coming over expressly to obtain such largess.
Probably none are so infected with spiritual hookworm as the immigrants
from Naples. It will be recalled that when Garibaldi and his thousand were
fighting to break the Bourbon tyranny in the South, the Neapolitans would
hurrah for them, but would not even care for the wounded.
Says the Forty-seventh Annual Report of the New York Juvenile Asylum:

It is remarkable that recently arrived immigrants who display small
adaptability in American standards are by no means slow in learning
about this and other institutions where they may safely leave their
children to be fed, clothed, and cared for at the public expense. This is
one of the inducements which led them to leave their native land.

Charity experts are very pessimistic as to what we shall see when those
who come in their youth have passed their prime and met the cumulative
effects of overwork, city life, drink, and vice. Still darker are their
forebodings for a second generation, reared too often by ignorant,
avaricious rustics lodging in damp cellars, sleeping with their windows
shut, and living on the bad, cheap food of cities. Of the Italians in Boston
Dr. Bushee writes:

They show the beginnings of a degenerate class, such as has been
fully developed among the Irish.... If allowed to continue in
unwholesome conditions, we may be sure that the next generation will
bring forth a large crop of dependents, delinquents and defectives to
fill up our public institutions.

Says a charity superintendent working in a huge Polish quarter:

It is the second generation that will give us trouble. The parents
come with rugged peasant health, and many of them keep their
strength even in the slum. But their children often start life weakened

physically and mentally by the conditions under which they were
reared. They have been raised in close, unsanitary quarters, in
overlarge families, by parents who drunk up or saved too much, spent
too little on the children, or worked them too soon. Their sole salvation
is the open country, and they can't be pushed into the country. All of us
are aghast at the weak fiber of the second generation. Every year I see
the morass of helpless poverty getting bigger. The evil harvest of past
mistakes is ripening, but it will take twenty years before we see the
worst of it. If immigration were cut off short to-day, the burden from
past neglect and exploitation would go on increasing for years.

THE WAYWARD CHILD OF THE IMMIGRANT

In 1908 nine-tenths of the 2600 complaints of children going wrong
made to the Juvenile Protective Association of Chicago related to the
children of immigrants. It is said that four-fifths of the youths brought
before the Juvenile Court of Chicago come from the homes of the foreign-
born. In Pittsburgh the proportion is at least two-thirds. However startling
these signs of moral breakdown in the families of the new immigrants, there
is nothing mysterious about it. The lower the state from which the alien
comes, the more of a grotesque he will appear in the shrewd eyes of his
partly Americanized children. "Obedience to parents seems to be dying out
among the Jews," says a Boston charity visitor. "The children feel it isn't
necessary to obey a mother who wears a shawl or a father who wears a full
beard." "Sometimes it is the young daughter who rules the Jewish family,"
observes a Pittsburgh settlement head, "because she alone knows what is
'American.' But see how this results in a great number of Jewish girls going
astray. Since the mother continues to shave her head and wear a wig as she
did in Poland, the daughter assumes that mother is equally old-fogyish
when she insists that a nice girl doesn't paint her face or run with boys in
the evening."
Through their knowledge of our speech and ways, the children have a
great advantage in their efforts to slip the parental leash. The bad boy tells
his father that whipping "doesn't go" in this country. Reversing the natural
order, the child becomes the fount of knowledge, and the parents hang on
the lips of their precocious offspring. If the policeman inquires about some

escapade or the truant officer gives warning, it is the scamp himself who
must interpret between parent and officer. The immigrant is braced by
certain Old-World loyalties, but his child may grow up loyal to nothing
whatever, a rank egoist and an incorrigible who will give us vast trouble
before we are done with him.
Still, the child is not always to blame. "Often the homes are so crowded
and dirty," says a probation officer, "that no boy can go right. The Slavs
save so greedily that their children become disgusted with the wretched
home conditions and sleep out." One hears of foreign-born with several
boarders sending their children out to beg or to steal coal. In one city
investigation showed that only a third of the Italian children taken from
school on their fourteenth birthday were needed as bread-winners. Their
parents thought only of the sixty cents a week. In another only one-
fourteenth of the Italian school children are above the primary grades, and
one-eleventh of the Slavic, as against two-fifths of the American school
children in grammar grades or high school. Miss Addams tells of a young
man from the south of Italy who was mourning the death of his little girl of
twelve. In his grief he said quite simply: "She was my oldest kid. In two
years she would have supported me, and now I shall have to work five or
six years longer until the next one can do it." He expected to retire
permanently at the age of thirty-four.

Dependent Italian Family, Cleveland. (Two Children Absent)

Dependent Slovak Family, Cleveland

INSANITY AMONG THE FOREIGN-BORN

Not only do the foreign-born appear to be more subject to insanity than
the native-born, but when insane they are more likely to become a public
charge. Of the asylum population they appear to constitute about a third. In
New York during the year ending September 30, 1911, 4218 patients who
were immigrants or of immigrant parents were admitted to the insane
hospitals of the State. This is three-quarters of the melancholy intake for
that year. Only one out of nine of the first admissions from New York City
was of native stock. The New York State Hospital Commission declares that
"the frequency of insanity in our foreign population is 2.19 times greater
than in those of native birth." In New York City it "is 2.48 times that of the
native-born."
Excessive insanity is probably a part of the price the foreign-born pay for
the opportunities of a strange and stimulating environment, with greater
strains than some of them are able to bear. America calls forth powerful
reactions in these people. Here they feel themselves in the grasp of giant

forces they can neither withstand nor comprehend. The passions and the
exertions, the hopes and the fears, the exultations and the despairs, America
excites in the immigrant are likely to be intenser than anything he would
have experienced in his natal village.
In view of the fact that every year New York cares for 15,000 foreign-
born insane at a cost of $3,500,000 and that the State's sad harvest of
demented immigrants during the single year 1911 will cost about
$8,000,000 before they die or are discharged, there is some offset to be
made to the profits drawn from the immigrants by the transporting
companies, landlords, real-estate men, employers, contractors, brewers, and
liquor-dealers of the State. Besides, there is the cost of the paupers and the
law-breakers of foreign origin. All such burdens, however, since they fall
upon the public at large, do not detract from or qualify that private or
business-man's prosperity which it is the office of the true modern
statesman to promote.

IMMIGRATION AND THE SEPARATE SCHOOL

In a polyglot mining town of Minnesota is a superintendent who has
made the public school a bigger factor in Americanization than I have found
it anywhere else. The law gives him the children until they are sixteen, and
he holds them all. His school buildings are civic and social centers. Through
the winter, in his high school auditorium, which seats 1200 persons, he
gives a course of entertainment which is self-supporting, although his
"talent" for a single evening will cost as much as $200. By means of the 400
foreigners in his night schools he has a grip on the voters which his foes
have learned to dread. Under his lead the community has broken the mine-
boss collar and won real self-government. The people trust him and bring
him their troubles. He has jurisdiction over everything that can affect the
children of the town, and his conception is wide. Wielding both legal and
moral authority, he is, as it were, a corporation president and a medieval
bishop rolled into one.
This man sets no limit to the transforming power of the public school. He
insists that the right sort of schooling will not only alter the expression, but
will even change the shape of the skull and the bony formation of the face.
In his office is a beautiful tabouret made by a "wild boy" within a year after

he had been brought in kicking and screaming. He scoffs at the fear of a
lack of patriotism in the foreign-born or their children. He knows just how
to create the sentiment. He has flag drills and special programs, and in the
Fourth of July parade and the Decoration day procession the schools have
always a fine float. He declares he can build human beings to order, and
will not worry about immigration so long as the public school is given a
chance at the second generation.
But is the public school to have this chance?
Multitudes of the new immigrants adhere to churches which do not
believe in the public schools. "Their pupils," observed a priest to me, "are
like wild children." Said a bishop: "No branches can be safely taught
divorced from religion. We believe that geography, history, and even
language ought to be presented from our point of view." Hence with great
rapidity the children of Roman Catholics are being drawn apart into
parochial schools. In Cleveland one-third of the population is supposed to
be Catholic, and the 27,500 pupils in the parochial schools are nearly one-
third of all school children. In Chicago there are 112,000 in the parish
schools to 300,000 in the public schools. In New York the proportion is
about one-sixth. In twenty-eight leading American cities the attendance of
the parish schools increased sixty per cent. between 1897 and 1910, as
against an increase of from forty-five to fifty per cent. in the attendance of
the public schools. The total number of children in the parochial schools is
about 1,400,000. Separate education is a settled Catholic policy, and the
bishops say they expect to enroll finally the children of all their people.
To bring this about, the public schools are denounced from the pulpit as
"Godless" and "immoral," their product as mannerless and disobedient. "We
think," says a Slovak leader, "that the parochial school pupils are more
pious, more respectful toward parents and toward all persons in authority."
The Polish, Lithuanian, or Slovak priest, less often the German or
Bohemian, says bluntly: "If you send your children to the public school,
they will go to hell." Sometimes the priest threatens to exclude from the
confessional parents who send their children to the public school. An
archbishop recently decreed that parents who without permission send their
children to the public school after they have made their first communion
"commit a grievous sin and cannot receive the sacraments of the church."
Within the immigrant groups there is active opposition, but it appears to be

futile. In the soft-coal mining communities of Pennsylvania 9 per cent. of
the children of native white parentage attend the parochial schools, whereas
24 per cent. of the Polish children and 48 per cent. of the Slovak children
are in these schools. In a certain district in Chicago where the public-school
teachers had felt they could hold their own, the foreign mothers came at last
to take away their children's school-books, weeping because they were
forced to transfer their children to the parish school.
Now, the parish school tends to segregate the children of the foreign-
born. Parishes are formed for groups of the same speech, so a parish school
will embrace children of only one nationality—German, Polish, Bohemian,
Lithuanian, Croatian, Slovak, Magyar, Portuguese, or French Canadian, as
the case may be. Often priest and teachers have been imported, and only the
mother-tongue is used. "English," says a school superintendent, "comes to
be taught as a purely ornamental language, like French in the public high
school." Hence American-born children are leaving school not only unable
to read and write English, but scarcely able to speak it. The foreign-speech
school, while it binds the young to their parents, to their people, and to the
old country, cuts them off from America. Says a Chicago Lithuanian leader:
"There are 3000 of our children in the parochial schools here. The teachers
are ignorant, illiterate spinsters from Lithuania who have studied here two
or three years. When at fourteen the pupils quit school, they are no more
advanced than the public-school pupils of ten. This is why 50,000
Lithuanians here have only twenty children in the high school."
When, now, to the removal of the second generation from the public
school there is added, as is often the case, the endeavor to keep them away
from the social center, the small park field-house, the public playground,
the social settlement, the secular American press and welfare work in the
factories, it is plain that those optimists who imagine that assimilation of the
immigrant is proceeding unhindered are living in a fool's paradise.

SOCIAL DECLINE

"Our descendants," a social worker remarked to me, "will look back on
the nineteenth century as our Golden Age, just as we look back on Greece."
Thoughtful people whose work takes them into the slime at the bottom of
our foreignized cities and industrial centers find decline actually upon us. A

visiting nurse who has worked for seven years in the stock-yards district of
Chicago reports that of late the drinking habit is taking hold of foreign
women at an alarming rate. In the saloons there the dignified stein has given
way to the beer pail. In the Range towns of Minnesota there are 356
saloons, of which eighty-one are run by native-born, the rest chiefly by
recent immigrants. Into a Pennsylvania coal town of 1,800 people, mostly
foreign-born, are shipped each week a car-load of beer and a barrel of
whisky. Where the new foreign-born are numerous, women and children
frequent the saloons as freely as the men. In the cities family desertion is
growing at a great rate among foreign-born husbands. Facts are justifying
the forecast made ten years ago by H. G. Wells: "If things go on as they are
going, the great mass of them will remain a very low lower class—will
remain largely illiterate, industrialized peasants."
The continuance of depressive immigration will lead to nothing
catastrophic. Riots and labor strife will oftener break out, but the country
will certainly not weaken nor collapse. Of patriotism, of the military type
there will be no lack. Scientific and technical advance will go on the same.
The spread of business organization and efficiency will continue. The only
thing that will happen will be a mysterious slackening in social progress.
The mass will give signs of sluggishness, and the social procession will be
strung out.
We are engaged in a generous rivalry with the West Europeans and the
Australians to see which can do the most to lift the plane of life of the
masses. Presently we shall be dismayed by the sense of falling behind. We
shall be amazed to find the Swiss or the Danes or the New Zealanders
making strides we cannot match. Stung with mortification at losing our
erstwhile lead in the advancement of the common people, we shall cast
about for someone to blame. Ultimate causes, of course, will be overlooked;
only proximate causes will be noticed. There will be loud outcry that
mothers, or teachers, or clergymen, or editors, or social workers are not
doing their duty. Our public schools, solely responsible as they obviously
are for the intellectual and moral characteristics of the people, will be
roundly denounced; and it will be argued that church schools must take
their place. There will be trying of this and trying of that, together with
much ingenious legislation. As peasantism spreads and inertia proves
unconquerable, the opinion will grow that the old American faith in the

capacity and desire of the common people for improvement was a delusion,
and that only the superior classes care for progress. Not until the twenty-
first century will the philosophic historian be able to declare with scientific
certitude that the cause of the mysterious decline that came upon the
American people early in the twentieth century was the deterioration of
popular intelligence by the admission of great numbers of backward
immigrants.

Italian Men's Civic Club. Rochester. N. Y.

CHAPTER XI
IMMIGRANTS IN POLITICS

On a single Chicago hoarding, before the spring election of 1912, the
writer saw the political placards of candidates with the following names:
Kelly, Cassidy, Slattery, Alschuler, Pfaelzer, Bartzen, Umbach, Andersen,
Romano, Knitckoff, Deneen, Hogue, Burres, Short. The humor of calling
"Anglo-Saxon" the kind of government these gentlemen will give is
obvious. At that time, of the eighteen principal personages in the city
government of Chicago, fourteen had Irish names, and three had German
names. Of the eleven principal officials in the city government of Boston,
nine had Irish names, and of the forty-nine members of the Lower House
from the city of Boston, forty were obviously of Hibernian extraction. In
San Francisco, the mayor, all the heads of the municipal departments, and
ten out of eighteen members on the board of supervisors, bore names
reminiscent of the Green Isle. As far back as 1871, of 112 chiefs of police
from twenty-two States who attended the national police convention,
seventy-seven bore Irish names, and eleven had German names. In 1881, of
the chiefs of police in forty-eight cities, thirty-three were clearly Irish, and
five were clearly German.
In 1908, on the occasion of a "home-coming" celebration in Boston, a
newspaper told how the returning sons of Boston were "greeted by Mayor
Fitzgerald and the following members of Congress: O'Connell, Kelihar,
Sullivan, and McNary—following in the footsteps of Webster, Sumner,
Adams, and Hoar. They were told of the great work as Mayor of the late
beloved Patrick Collins. At the City Hall they found the sons of Irish exiles
and immigrants administering the affairs of the metropolis of New England.
Besides the Mayor, they were greeted by John J. Murphy, Chairman of the
board of assessors; Commissioner of Streets Doyle; Commissioner of Baths
O'Brien. Mr. Coakley is the head of the Park Department, and Dr. Durgan
directs the Health Department. The Chief of the Fire Department is John A.
Mullen. Head of the Municipal Printing Plant is Mr. Whelan.
Superintendent of the Street Cleaning is Cummings; Superintendent of

Sewers Leahy; Superintendent of Buildings is Nolan; City Treasurer,
Slattery; Police Commissioner, O'Meara."
The Irish domination of our Northern cities is the broadest mark
immigration has left on American politics; the immigrants from Ireland, for
the most part excessively poor, never got their feet upon the land as did the
Germans and the Scandinavians, but remained huddled in cities. United by
strong race feelings, they held together as voters, and, although never a
clear majority, were able in time to capture control of most of the greater
municipalities. Now, for all their fine Celtic traits, these Irish immigrants
had neither the temperament nor the training to make a success of popular
government. They were totally without experience of the kind Americans
had acquired in the working of democratic institutions. The ordinary
American by this time had become tinctured with the spirit of legalism.
Many voters were able to look beyond the persons involved in a political
contest and recognize the principles at stake. Such popular maxims as: "No
man should be a judge in his own case," "The ballot a responsibility,"
"Patriotism above party," "Measures, not men," "A public office is a public
trust," fostered self-restraint and helped the voters to take an impersonal,
long-range view of political contests.
Warm-hearted, sociable, clannish, and untrained, the naturalized Irish
failed to respect the first principles of civics. "What is the Constitution
between friends?" expresses their point of view. In their eyes, an election is
not the decision of a great, impartial jury, but a struggle between the "ins"
and the "outs." Those who vote the same way are "friends." To scratch or to
bolt is to "go back on your friends." Places and contracts are "spoils." The
official's first duty is to find berths for his supporters. Not fitness, but party
work, is one's title to a place on the municipal pay-roll. The city employee
is to serve his party rather than the public that pays his salary. Even the
justice of courts is to become a matter of "pull" and "stand in," rather than
of inflexible rules.
A genial young Harvard man who has made the Good Government
movement a power in a certain New England city said to me: "The
Germans want to know which candidate is better qualified for the office.
Among the Irish I have never heard such a consideration mentioned. They
ask, 'Who wants this candidate?' 'Who is behind him?' I have lined up a
good many Irish in support of Good Government men, but never by setting

forth the merits of a matter or a candidate. I approach my Irish friends with
the personal appeal, 'Do this for me!' Nearly all the Irish who support our
cause do it on a personal loyalty basis. The best of the Irish in this city have
often done as much harm to the cause of Good Government as the worst.
Mayor C., a high-minded Irishman desiring to do the best he could for the
city, gave us as bad a government as Mayor F., who thought of nothing but
feathering his own nest. Mayor C. 'stood by his friends.'"
The Hibernian domination has given our cities genial officials, brave
policemen, and gallant fire-fighters. It has also given them the name of
being the worst-governed cities in the civilized world. The mismanagement
and corruption of the great cities of America have become a planetary
scandal, and have dealt the principle of manhood suffrage the worst blow it
has received in the last half-century. Since the close of the Civil War,
hundreds of thousands of city-dwellers have languished miserably or
perished prematurely from the bad water, bad housing, poor sanitation, and
rampant vice in American municipalities run on the principles of the Celtic
clan.
On the other hand, it is likely that our British, Teutonic, Scandinavian,
and Jewish naturalized citizens—still more our English-Canadian voters—
have benefited American politics. In politics men are swayed by passion,
prejudice, or reason. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the
average American had come to be on his guard against passion in politics,
but not yet had he reached the plane of reason. This left him the prey of
prejudice. Men inherited their politics, and bragged of having always "voted
straight." They voted Democratic for Jefferson's sake, or Republican from
love of Lincoln. The citizens followed ruts, while the selfish interests
"followed the ball." Now, the intelligent naturalized foreigner, having
inherited none of our prejudices, would not respond to ancient cries or war-
time issues. He inquired pointedly what each party proposed to do now. The
abandonment of "waving the bloody shirt" and the sudden appearance of
the politics of actuality in the North, in the eighties, came about through the
naturalization of Karl and Ole. The South has few foreign-born voters, and
the South is precisely that part of the country in which the reign of
prejudice in politics has longest delayed the advent of efficient and
progressive government.

In 1910 there were certainly three million naturalized citizens in the
United States. In southern New England and New York they constitute a
quarter of all the white voters. The same is true of Illinois and the Old
Northwest. In Providence, Buffalo, Newark, St. Paul, and Minneapolis,
there are two foreign voters to three native white voters. In Milwaukee,
Detroit, Cleveland, and Boston, the ratio is about one to two. In Paterson,
Chicago, and New York, the ratio is nearer three to five, and in Fall River it
is three to four. When the foreigners are intelligent and experienced in the
use of the ballot, their civic worth does not suffer by comparison with that
of the natives. Indianapolis and Kansas City, in which the natives
outnumber the naturalized ten to one, do not overshadow in civic excellence
the Twin Cities of Minnesota, with three natives to two naturalized.
Cleveland, in which the naturalized citizens constitute a third, is politically
superior to Cincinnati, in which they are less than a sixth. Chicago, with
thrice the proportion of naturalized citizens Philadelphia has, was roused
and struggling with the python of corruption while yet the city by the
Delaware slept.

THE NEW IMMIGRATION AND CITIZENSHIP

Between 1895 and 1896 came the great shift in the sources of
immigration. In the former year, 55 per cent. of the aliens came from
northwestern Europe; in the next year, southern and southeastern Europe
gained the upper hand, and have kept it ever since. With the change in
nationalities came a great change in the civic attitude of the immigrants.
The Immigration Commission found that from 80 to 92 per cent. of the
immigrants from northwestern Europe, resident five years or more in this
country, have acquired citizenship or have taken out first papers. Very
different are the following figures, which show the interest in citizenship of
the newer immigrants:
PER CENT.
NATURALIZED
Russian Hebrews 57
Austrians 53
North Italians 46
Bulgarians 37

Poles 33
Lithuanians 32.5
South Italians 30
Russians 28
Magyars 27
Slovaks 23
Rumanians 22
Syrians 21
Greeks 20
Portuguese 5.5
In 1890 and in 1900, 58 per cent. of the qualified foreign-born men were
voters; by 1910 the proportion had fallen to 45.6 per cent. The presence of
multitudes of floating laborers who have no intention of making this
country their home, a marked indifference to citizenship on the part of some
nationalities, and the stiffer requirements for naturalization imposed under
the act of 1906, have caused the number of non-naturalized qualified
foreigners in this country to swell from approximately 2,000,000 in 1900 to
3,500,000 in 1910. As things are going, we may expect a great increase in
the number of the unenfranchised. No doubt the country is better off for
their not voting. Nevertheless, let it not be overlooked that this growth in
the proportion of voteless wage-earners subtracts from the natural political
strength of labor. The appeal of labor in an industry like the cotton
manufacture of the North, in which, besides the multitude of women and
children, 70 per cent. of the foreign-born men remain aliens after five years
of residence, is likely to receive scant consideration by the ordinary
legislature. Nor will such labor fare better at the hands of local authorities.
The anti-strike animus of the police in Lawrence, Little Falls, and Paterson
was voiced by the official who gave to the press the statement: "We have
kept the foreign element in subjection before, and will continue to do so as
long as I am chief of Little Falls' police." Thus, without intending it, some
of our commonwealths are accumulating voteless workers, like those
conservative European states which restrict manhood suffrage in the
industrial classes.

THE NATURALIZED IMMIGRANTS AND THEIR LEADERS

"Come over here quick, Luigi," writes an Italian to his friend in Palermo.
"This is a wonderful country. You can do anything you want to, and,
besides, they give you a vote you can get two dollars for!" This Italian was
an ignorant man, but not necessarily a bad man. It would not be just to look
upon the later naturalized citizens as caring less for the suffrage than the
older immigrants. Some of them appreciate the ballot all the more from
having been denied it in the old country. For the Declaration of
Independence and the Fourth of July they show a naïve enthusiasm which
we Americans felt a generation ago, before our muck had been raked. "The
spirit of revolt against wrong," says a well-known worker among
immigrants, "is stronger in the foreign-born than in the natives, because
they come here expecting so much democracy, and they are shocked by the
reality they find. It is they who insist upon the complete program of social
justice." Granting all this, there is no denying, however, that many of the
later immigrants have only a dim understanding of what the ballot means
and how it may be used.

Photograph by Lodder

A Civic Banquet to "New Citizens," July 4th
Thirty years ago we knew as little of the ways of the ward boss as we
knew of the megatherium or the great auk. The sources of his power were
as mysterious as were the sources of the Nile before Speke and Baker. Now,
thanks to Miss Addams and other settlement-workers who have studied him
in action from close at hand, we have him on a film. The ward boss was the
discoverer of the fact that the ordinary immigrant is a very poor, ignorant,
and helpless man, in the greatest need of assistance and protection.
Nevertheless, this man has, or soon will have, one thing the politician
greatly covets, namely, a vote. The petty politician soon learned that by
befriending and aiding the foreigners at the right time, he could build up an
"influence" which he might use or sell to his own enrichment. So the ward
politicians became pioneers in social work. For the sake of controlling
votes, they did many things that the social settlement does for nothing.
It is Alderman Tim who gets the Italian a permit for his push-cart or fruit-
stand, who finds him a city-hall job, or a place with a public-service
corporation, who protects him if he violates law or ordinance in running his
business, who goes his bail if he is arrested, and "fixes things" with the
police judge or the state's attorney when he comes to trial. Even before
Giuseppe is naturalized, it is Tim who remembers him at Christmas with a
big turkey, pays his rent at a pinch, or wins his undying gratitude by saving
his baby from a pauper burial or sending carriages and flowers to the
funeral.
All this kindness and timely aid is prompted by selfish motives. Amply is
Tim repaid by Giuseppe's vote on election day. But at first Giuseppe misses
the secret of the politician's interest in him, and votes Tim-wise as one
shows a favor to a friend. Little does he dream of the dollar-harvest from
the public-service companies and the vice interests Tim reaps with the
"power" he has built up out of the votes of the foreigners. If, however,
Giuseppe starts to be independent in the election booth, he is startled by the
Jekyll-Hyde transformation of his erstwhile friend and patron. He is
menaced with loss of job, withdrawal of permit or license. Suddenly the
current is turned on in the city ordinances affecting him, and he is horrified
to find himself in a mysterious network of live wires. With the connivance
of a corrupt police force, Tim can even ruin him on a trumped-up charge.

The law of Pennsylvania allows any voter who demands it to receive
"assistance" in the marking of his ballot. So in Pittsburgh, Tim expects
Giuseppe to demand "assistance" and to take Tim with him into the booth to
mark his ballot for him. Sometimes the election judges let Tim thrust
himself into the booth despite the foreigner's protests, and watch how he
marks his ballot. In one precinct 92 per cent. of the voters received
"assistance." Two Italians who refused it lost their jobs forthwith. The high-
spirited North Italians resent such intrusion, and some of them threaten to
cut to pieces the interloper. But always the system is too strong for them.
Thus the way of Tim is to allure or to intimidate, or even combine the
two. The immigrant erecting a little store is visited by a building inspector
and warned that his interior arrangements are all wrong. His friends urge
the distracted man to "see Tim." He does so, and kind Tim "fixes it up,"
gaining thereby another loyal henchman. The victim never learns that the
inspector was sent to teach him the need of a protector. So long as the
immigrant is "right," he may put an encroaching bay-window on his house
or store, keep open his saloon after midnight, or pack into his lodging-house
more than the legal number of lodgers. Moved ostensibly by a deep concern
for public health or safety or morals, the city council enacts a great variety
of health, building, and trades ordinances, in order that Tim may have
plenty of clubs to hold over the foreigner's head.
So between boss and immigrant grows up a relation like that between a
feudal lord and his vassals. In return for the boss's help and protection, the
immigrant gives regularly his vote. The small fry get drinks or jobs, or help
in time of trouble. The padrone, liquor-dealer, or lodging-house keeper gets
license or permit or immunity from prosecution, provided he "delivers" the
votes of enough of his fellow-countrymen. The ward boss realizes perfectly
what his political power rests on, and is very conscientious in looking after
his supporters. Of the Irish "gray wolves" in the Chicago council I was told,
"Each of them is a natural ward leader, and will go through hell-fire for his
people and they for him."
To the boss with a hold on the immigrant the requirement that the poor
fellow shall live five years in this country before voting presents itself as an
empty legal formality. In 1905 a special examiner of the Federal
Department of Justice reported: "Naturalization frauds have grown and
spread with the growth and spread of the alien population of the United

States, until there is scarcely a city or county-seat town ... where in some
form these frauds have not from time to time been committed." In 1845 a
Louisiana judge was impeached and removed for fraud, the principal
evidence being that he had issued certificates to 400 aliens in one day. The
legislature might have been more lenient could it have foreseen that in 1868
a single judge in New York would issue 2500 of such certificates in one
day! The gigantic naturalization frauds committed in the Presidential
campaign of 1868 resulted in an investigation by Congress and in the
placing of congressional elections under Federal supervision. During the
month of October two New York judges issued 54,000 certificates. An
investigation in 1902 showed about 25,000 fraudulent certificates of
naturalization in use in that city.
There is hardly need nowadays to recount what Tim and his kind have
done with the power they filched through the votes of Giuseppe and Jan and
Michael. They have sold out the city to the franchise-seeking corporations.
They have jobbed public works and pocketed a "rake-off" on all municipal
supplies. They have multiplied jobs and filled them with lazy henchmen. By
making merchandise of building laws or health ordinances, they have
caused an unknown number of people to be crushed, or burned, or
poisoned. Worst of all, by selling immunity from police interference to the
vice interests, they have let the race be preyed on and consumed in the bud.
Thanks to their "protection," a shocking proportion of the inhabitants of our
cities of mixed population are destroyed by drinking, dissipation, and
venereal diseases.
It is in the cities with many naturalized foreigners or enfranchised
negroes that the vice interests have had the freest hand in exploiting and
degrading the people. These foreigners have no love for vice, but
unwittingly they become the corner-stone of the system that supports it. The
city that has had the most and the rawest foreign-born voters is the city of
the longest and closest partnership of the police with vice. Tammany Hall
first gained power by its "voting gangs" of foreigners, and ever since its Old
Guard has been the ignorant, naturalized immigrants. Exposed again and
again, and thought to be shattered, Tammany has survived all shocks,
because its supply of raw material has never been cut off. Not the loss of its
friends has ever defeated it; only the union of its foes. The only things it
fears are those that bore from within—social settlements, social centers, the

quick intelligence of the immigrant Hebrew, stricter naturalization, and
restriction of immigration.
In every American city with a large pliant foreign vote have appeared the
boss, the machine, and the Tammany way. Once the machine gets a grip on
the situation, it broadens and entrenches its power by intimidation at the
polls, ballot frauds, vote purchase, saloon influence, and the support of the
vicious and criminal. But its tap-root is the simple-minded foreigner or
negro, and without them no lasting vicious political control has shown itself
in any of our cities.
The machine in power uses the foreigner to keep in power. The Italian
who opens an ice-cream parlor has to have a victualer's license, and he can
keep this license only by delivering Italian votes. The Polish saloon-keeper
loses his liquor license if he fails to line up his fellow-countrymen for the
local machine. The politician who can get dispensations for the foreigners
who want their beer on a Sunday picnic is the man who attracts the foreign
vote. Thus, until they get their eyes open and see how they are being used,
the foreigners constitute an asset of the established political machine,
neutralizing the anti-machine ballots of an equal number of indignant
intelligent American voters.
The saloon is often an independent swayer of the foreign vote. The
saloon-keeper is interested in fighting all legal regulation of his own
business, and of other businesses—gambling, dance-halls, and prostitution
—which stimulate drinking. If "blue" laws are on the statute-book, these
interests may combine to seat in the mayor's chair a man pledged not to
enforce them. Even if the saloon-keeper has no political ax of his own to
grind, his masters, the brewers, will insist that he get out the vote for the
benefit of themselves or their friends. Since liberal plying with beer is a
standard means of getting out the foreign vote, the immigrant saloon-keeper
is obliged to become the debaucher and betrayer of his fellow-countrymen.
In Chicago the worthy Germans and Bohemians are marshaled in the
"United Societies," ostensibly social organizations along nationality lines,
but really the machinery through which the brewers and liquor-dealers may
sway the foreign-born vote not only in defense of liquor, but also in defense
of other corrupt and affiliated interests.

The foreign press is another means of misleading the naturalized voters.
These newspapers—Polish, Bohemian, Italian, Greek, Yiddish, etc.,—while
they have no small influence with their readers, are poorly supported, and
often in financial straits. Many of them, therefore, can be tempted to sell
their political influence to the highest bidder, which is, of course, the party
representing the special interests. Thus the innocent foreign-born readers
are led like sheep to the shambles, and Privilege gains another intrenching-
tool.

THE LOSS OF POLITICAL LIKE-MINDEDNESS

If the immigrant is neither debauched nor misled, but votes his opinions,
is he then an element of strength to us?
When a people has reached such a degree of political like-mindedness,
that fundamentals are taken for granted, it is free to tackle new questions as
they come up. But if it admits to citizenship myriads of strangers who have
not yet passed the civic kindergarten, questions that were supposed to be
settled are reopened. The citizens are made to thresh over again old straw—
the relation of church to state, of church to school, of state to parent, of law
to the liquor trade. Meanwhile, ripe sheaves ready to yield the wheat of
wisdom under the flails of discussion lie untouched. Pressing questions—
public hygiene, conservation, the control of monopoly, the protection of
labor, go to the foot of the docket, and public interests suffer.

Y. M. C. A. Class of Slovenes in English Visiting a Session of the
City Council of Cleveland

Class of Foreign-Born Women (Carinthians) at the Cleveland
Hardware Co., Cleveland, O., Meeting for Instruction in English in
the Factory, Twice a Week from 5 to 6:30
Some are quite cheerful about the confusion, cross-purposes, and delay
that come with heterogeneity, because they think the variety of views
introduced by immigration is a fine thing, "keeps us from getting into a rut."
The plain truth is, that rarely does an immigrant bring in his intellectual
baggage anything of use to us. The music of Mascagni and Debussy, the
plays of Ibsen and Maeterlinck, the poetry of Rostand and Hauptmann, the
fiction of Jókai and Sienkiewicz were not brought to us by way of Ellis
Island. What we want is not ideas merely, but fruitful ideas, fructifying
ideas. By debating the ideas of Nietzsche, Ostwald, Bergson, Metchnikoff,
or Ellen Key, American thought is stimulated. But should we gain from the
introduction of old Asiatic points of view, which would reopen such
questions as witchcraft, child-marriage, and suttee? The clashings that arise
from the presence among us of many voters with medieval minds are sheer
waste of energy. While we Americans wrangle over the old issues of
clericalism, separate schools, and "personal liberty," the little homogeneous

peoples—Norwegians and Danes and New Zealanders—are forging ahead
of us in rational politics and learning to look pityingly upon us as a chaos
rather than a people.

POLITICAL MYSTICISM VS. COMMON SENSE

If you should ask an Englishman whether the tone of political life in his
country would remain unaffected by the admission to the electorate of a
couple of million Cypriotes, Vlachs, and Bessarabians after five years'
residence, he would take you for a madman. Suggest to the German that the
plane of political intelligence in reading and thinking Germany would not
be lowered by the access to the ballot-box of multitudes of Serbs,
Georgians, and Druses of Lebanon, and he will consign you to bedlam.
Assure the son of Norway that the vote of the Persian or Yemenite, of sixty
months' residence in Norway, will be as often wise and right as his own,
and he will be insulted. It is only we Americans who assume that the voting
of the Middle Atlantic States, with their million of naturalized citizens, or of
the East North Central States, with their million, is as sane, discriminating,
and forward-looking as it would be without them.
The Italian historian and sociologist Ferrero, after reviewing our
immigration policy, concludes that the Americans, far from being
"practical," are really the mystics of the modern world. He says: "To confer
citizenship each year upon great numbers of men born and educated in
foreign countries—men who come with ideas and sympathies totally out of
spirit with the diverse conditions in the new country; to grant them political
rights they do not want, and of which they have never thought; to compel
them to declare allegiance to a political constitution which they often do not
understand; to try to transform subjects of old European monarchies into
free citizens of young American republics over night—is not all this to do
violence to common sense?"

CHAPTER XII
AMERICAN BLOOD AND IMMIGRANT BLOOD

As I sought to show, near the end of my initial chapter, the conditions of
settlement of this country caused those of uncommon energy and
venturesomeness to outmultiply the rest of the population. Thus came into
existence the pioneering breed; and this breed increased until it is safe to
estimate that fully half of white Americans with native grandparents have
one or more pioneers among their ancestors. Whatever valuable race traits
distinguish the American people from the parent European stocks are due to
the efflorescence of this breed. Without it there would have been little in the
performance of our people to arrest the attention of the world. Now we
confront the melancholy spectacle of this pioneer breed being swamped and
submerged by an overwhelming tide of latecomers from the old-world hive.
In Atlanta still seven out of eight white men had American parents; in
Nashville and Richmond, four out of five; in Kansas City, two out of three;
and in Los Angeles, one out of two; but in Detroit, Cleveland, and Paterson
one man out of five had American parents; in Chicago and New York, one
out of six; in Milwaukee, one out of seven; and in Fall River, one out of
nine. Certainly never since the colonial era have the foreign-born and their
children formed so large a proportion of the American people as at the
present moment. I scanned 368 persons as they passed me in Union Square,
New York, at a time when the garment-workers of the Fifth Avenue lofts
were returning to their homes. Only thirty-eight of these passers-by had the
type of face one would find at a county fair in the West or South.

The Distribution of Foreign Stock in the United States—1910
In the six or seven hundred thousand strangers that yearly join
themselves to us for good and all, there are to be found, of course, every
talent and every beauty. Out of the steerage come persons as fine and noble
as any who have trodden American soil. Any adverse characterization of an
immigrant stream implies, then, only that the trait is relatively frequent, not
that it is universal.
In this sense it is fair to say that the blood now being injected into the
veins of our people is "sub-common." To one accustomed to the aspect of
the normal American population, the Caliban type shows up with a
frequency that is startling. Observe immigrants not as they come travel-wan
up the gang-plank, nor as they issue toil-begrimed from pit's mouth or mill
gate, but in their gatherings, washed, combed, and in their Sunday best. You
are struck by the fact that from ten to twenty per cent. are hirsute, low-
browed, big-faced persons of obviously low mentality. Not that they
suggest evil. They simply look out of place in black clothes and stiff collar,
since clearly they belong in skins, in wattled huts at the close of the Great
Ice Age. These oxlike men are descendants of those who always stayed
behind. Those in whom the soul burns with the dull, smoky flame of the

pine-knot stuck to the soil, and are now thick in the sluiceways of
immigration. Those in whom it burns with a clear, luminous flame have
been attracted to the cities of the home land and, having prospects, have no
motive to submit themselves to the hardships of the steerage.
To the practised eye, the physiognomy of certain groups unmistakably
proclaims inferiority of type. I have seen gatherings of the foreign-born in
which narrow and sloping foreheads were the rule. The shortness and
smallness of the crania were very noticeable. There was much facial
asymmetry. Among the women, beauty, aside from the fleeting, epidermal
bloom of girlhood, was quite lacking. In every face there was something
wrong—lips thick, mouth coarse, upper lip too long, cheek-bones too high,
chin poorly formed, the bridge of the nose hollowed, the base of the nose
tilted, or else the whole face prognathous. There were so many sugar-loaf
heads, moon-faces, slit mouths, lantern-jaws, and goose-bill noses that one
might imagine a malicious jinn had amused himself by casting human
beings in a set of skew-molds discarded by the Creator.
Our captains of industry give a crowbar to the immigrant with a number
nine face on a number six head, make a dividend out of him, and imagine
that is the end of the matter. They overlook that this man will beget children
in his image—two or three times as many as the American—and that these
children will in turn beget children. They chuckle at having opened an
inexhaustible store of cheap tools and, lo! the American people is being
altered for all time by these tools. Once before, captains of industry took a
hand in making this people. Colonial planters imported Africans to hoe in
the sun, to "develop" the tobacco, indigo, and rice plantations. Then, as
now, business-minded men met with contempt the protests of a few idealists
against their way of "building up the country."
Those promoters of prosperity are dust, but they bequeathed a situation
which in four years wiped out more wealth than two hundred years of
slavery had built up, and which presents to-day the one unsolvable problem
in this country. Without likening immigrants to negroes, one may point out
how the latter-day employer resembles the old-time planter in his blindness
to the effects of his labor policy upon the blood of the nation.

IMMIGRATION AND GOOD LOOKS

It is reasonable to expect an early falling off in the frequency of good
looks in the American people. It is unthinkable that so many persons with
crooked faces, coarse mouths, bad noses, heavy jaws, and low foreheads
can mingle their heredity with ours without making personal beauty yet
more rare among us than it actually is. So much ugliness is at last bound to
work to the surface. One ought to see the horror on the face of a fine-
looking Italian or Hungarian consul when one asks him innocently, "Is the
physiognomy of these immigrants typical of your people?" That the new
immigrants are inferior in looks to the old immigrants may be seen by
comparing, in a Labor Day parade, the faces of the cigar-makers and the
garment-workers with those of the teamsters, piano-movers and steam-
fitters.
Even aside from the pouring in of the ill-favored, the crossing of the
heterogeneous is bound to lessen good looks among us. It is noteworthy that
the beauty which has often excited the admiration of European visitors has
shown itself most in communities of comparative purity of blood. New
England, Virginia, and Kentucky have been renowned for their beautiful
women, but not the commonwealths with a mixed population. It is in the
less-heterogeneous parts of the Middle West, such as Indiana and Kansas,
that one is struck by the number of comely women.
Twenty-four years ago the greatest living philosopher advised inquiring
Japanese statesmen to interdict marriages of Japanese with foreigners, on
the ground that the crossings of the too-unlike produce human beings with a
"chaotic constitution." Herbert Spencer went on to say, "When the varieties
mingled diverge beyond a certain slight degree, the result is inevitably a bad
one." The greatest students of hybridism to-day confirm Spencer's surmise.
The fusing of American with German and Scandinavian immigrants was
only a reblending of kindred stocks, for Angles, Jutes, Danes, and Normans
were wrought of yore into the fiber of the English breed. But the human
varieties being collected in this country by the naked action of economic
forces are too dissimilar to blend without producing a good many faces of a
"chaotic constitution." Just as there is a wide difference in looks between
Bretons and Normans, Dutch and Hanoverians, the Chinese of Hu-peh and
the Chinese of Fukien, so broad contrasts in good looks may in time appear
between the pure-blood parts of our country and those which have absorbed
a motley assortment of immigrants.

STATURE AND PHYSIQUE

Although the Slavs stand up well, our South Europeans run to low
stature. A gang of Italian navvies filing along the street present, by their
dwarfishness, a curious contrast to other people. The Portuguese, the
Greeks, and the Syrians are, from our point of view, undersized. The
Hebrew immigrants are very poor in physique. The average of Hebrew
women in New York is just over five feet, and the young women in the
garment factories, although well developed, appear to be no taller than
native girls of thirteen.
On the physical side the Hebrews are the polar opposite of our pioneer
breed. Not only are they undersized and weak-muscled, but they shun
bodily activity and are exceedingly sensitive to pain. Says a settlement
worker: "You can't make boy scouts out of the Jews. There's not a troop of
them in all New York." Another remarks: "They are absolute babies about
pain. Their young fellows will scream with a hard lick." Students observe
that husky young Hebrews on the foot-ball team lack grit, and will "take
on" if they are bumped into hard. A young Ontario miner noticed that his
Hebrew comrades groaned and wept over the hardships of the trail. "They
kept swapping packs with me, imagining my pack must be lighter because I
wasn't hollering."
Natural selection, frontier life, and the example of the red man produced
in America a type of great physical self-control, gritty, uncomplaining,
merciless to the body through fear of becoming "soft." To this roaming,
hunting, exploring, adventurous breed what greater contrast is there than the
denizens of the Ghetto? The second generation, to be sure, overtop their
parents and are going in for athletics. Hebrews under Irish names abound in
the prize-ring, and not long ago a sporting editor printed the item, "Jack
Sullivan received a letter in Yiddish yesterday from his sister." Still, it will
be long before they produce the stoical type who blithely fares forth into the
wilderness, portaging his canoe, poling it against the current, wading in the
torrents, living on bacon and beans, and sleeping on the ground, all for
"fun" or "to keep hard."

VITALITY

"The Slavs," remarks a physician, "are immune to certain kinds of dirt.
They can stand what would kill a white man." The women do not have
puerperal fever, as our women would under their conditions. The men
violate every sanitary law, yet survive. The Slavs come from a part of the
world in which never more than a third of the children have grown up. In
every generation, dirt, ignorance, superstition, and lack of medical attention
have winnowed out all but the sturdiest. Among Americans, two-thirds of
the children grow up, which means that we keep alive many of the tenderer,
who would certainly have perished in the Slavic world. There is, however,
no illusion more grotesque than to suppose that our people is to be
rejuvenated by absorbing these millions of hardy peasantry, that, to quote a
champion of free immigration, "The new-comers in America will bring
fresh, vigorous blood to a rather sterile and inbred stock." The fact is that
the immigrant stock quickly loses here its distinctive ruggedness. The
physicians practising among rural Poles notice a great saving of infant life
under American conditions. Says one: "I see immigrant women and their
grown daughters having infants at the same time, and the children of the
former will die of the things that the children of the latter get well of. The
same holds when the second generation and the third bear at the same time.
The latter save their children better than the former." The result is a marked
softening of fiber between the immigrant women and the granddaughters.
Among the latter are many of a finer, but frailer, mold, who would be
ruined in health if they worked in the field the third day after confinement,
as grandmother did. In the old country there were very few of this type who
survived infancy in a peasant family.
There is, then, no lasting revitalization from this tide of life. If our people
has become weak, no transfusion of peasants will set it on its feet again; for
their blood too, soon thins. The trouble, if you call it that, is not with the
American people, but with the wide diffusion among us of a civilized
manner of life. Where the struggle for existence is mitigated not merely for
the upper quarter of society, as formerly in the Old World, but for the upper
three-quarters, as in this and other democratic countries, the effects of
keeping alive the less hardy are bound to show. The remedy for the alleged
degeneration of our stock is simple, but drastic. If we want only
constitutions that can stand hardship and abuse, let us treat the young as
they are treated in certain poverty-stricken parts of Russia. Since the mother
is obliged to pass the day at work in distant fields, the nursling of a few

months is left alone, crawling about on the dirt floor of the hut and
comforting itself, when it cries from hunger, by sucking poultices of
chewed bread tied to its hands and feet.

MORALITY

That the Mediterranean peoples are morally below the races of northern
Europe is as certain as any social fact. Even when they were dirty, ferocious
barbarians, these blonds were truth-tellers. Be it pride or awkwardness or
lack of imagination or fair-play sense, something has held them back from
the nimble lying of the southern races. Immigration officials find that the
different peoples are as day and night in point of veracity, and report vast
trouble in extracting the truth from certain brunet nationalities.
Some champions of immigration have become broad-minded enough to
think small of the cardinal virtues. The Syrians, on Boston testimony, took
"great pains to cheat the charitable societies" and are "extremely
untrustworthy and unreliable." Their defender, however, after admitting
their untruthfulness, explains that their lying is altruistic. If, at the fork of a
road, you ask a Syrian your way, he will, in sheer transport of sympathy,
study you to discover what answer will most please you. "The Anglo-Saxon
variety of truthfulness," she adds, "is not a Syrian characteristic"; but, "if
truthfulness includes loyalty, ready self-denial to promote a cause that
seems right, the Syrian is to that extent truthful." Quoting a Syrian's
admission that his fellow-merchants pay their debts for their credit's sake,
but will cheat the customer, she comments, "This, however, does not seem
to be exclusively a Syrian vice." To such miserable paltering does a sickly
sentimentality lead.

In southern Europe, team-work along all lines is limited by selfishness
and bad faith. Professor Fairchild notes "the inveterate factionalism and
commercial dishonesty so characteristic of the [Greek] race," "the old
dishonesty and inability to work together." "One of the maxims of Greek
business life, translated into the American vernacular, is 'Put out the other

fellow's eye.'" "These people seemed incapable of carying on a large
coöperative business with harmony and success."
Nothing less than verminous is the readiness of the southern Europeans
to prey upon their fellows. Never were British or Scandinavian immigrants
so bled by fellow-countrymen as are South Italian, Greek and Semitic
immigrants. Their spirit of mutual helpfulness saved them from padrone,
"banker," and Black Hand. Among our South Italians this spirit shines out
only when it is a question of shielding from American justice some cut-
throat of their own race. The Greek is full of tricks to skin the greenhorn. A
grocer will warn fellow-countrymen who have just established themselves
in his town that he will have the police on them for violating municipal
ordinances unless they buy groceries from him. The Greek mill-hand sells
the greenhorn a job, and takes his chances on the foreman giving the man
work. A Greek who knows a little English will get a Greek peddler arrested
in order that he may get the interpreter's fee. The Greek boot-black who has
freed himself from his serfdom, instead of showing up the system, starts a
place of his own, and exploits his help as mercilessly as ever he was
exploited.
The Northerners seem to surpass the southern Europeans in innate ethical
endowment. Comparison of their behavior in marine disasters shows that
discipline, sense of duty, presence of mind, and consideration for the weak
are much more characteristic of northern Europeans. The southern
Europeans, on the other hand, are apt, in their terror, to forget discipline,
duty, women, children, everything but the saving of their own lives. In
shipwreck it is the exceptional Northerner who forgets his duty, and the
exceptional Southerner who is bound by it. The suicide of Italian officers on
board the doomed Monte Tabor, the Notice, and the Ajace, is in striking
contrast to the sense of responsibility of the Northerners in charge of the
Cimbria, the Geiser, the Strathcona, and the City of Paris. Compare the
mad struggle for the boats among the southern Europeans on La Bourgogne,
the Ailsa, and the Utopia, with the self-possession of the Scandinavian
emigrants on the Waesland and the Danmark, and the consideration for
women and children shown on the sinking Mohegan, the Waesland, and the
Titanic. Among all nationalities the Americans bear the palm for coolness,
orderly saving of life, and consideration for the weak in shipwreck, but they

will lose these traits in proportion as they absorb excitable mercurial blood
from southern Europe.

NATURAL ABILITY

The performance of the foreign-born and their children after they have
had access to American opportunities justifies the democrat's faith that
latent capacity exists all through the humbler strata of society. On the other
hand, it also confirms the aristocrat's insistence that social ranks correspond
somewhat with the grades of natural ability existing within a people. The
descendants of Europe's lowly are to be met in all the upper levels of
American society, but not so frequently as the descendents of those who
were high or rising in the land they left.
In respect to the value it contains, a stream of immigrants may be
representative, super-representative, or sub-representative of the home
people. When it is a fair sample, it is representative; when it is richer in
wheat and poorer in chaff, it is super-representative; when the reverse is the
case, it is sub-representative. What counts here, of course, is not the value
the immigrants may have acquired by education or experience, but that
fundamental worth which does not depend on opportunity, and which may
be transmitted to one's descendants. Now, in the present state of our
knowledge, it is perhaps risky to make a comparison in ability between the
races which contributed the old immigration and those which are supplying
the new immigration. Though backward, the latter may contain as good
stuff. But it is fair to assume that a super-representative immigration from
one stock is worth more to us than a sub-representative immigration from
another stock, and that an influx which sub-represents a European people
will thin the blood of the American people.
Many things have decided whether Europe should send America cream
or skimmed milk. Religious or political oppression is apt to drive out the
better elements. Racial oppression cannot be evaded by mere conformity;
hence the emigration it sets up is apt to be representative. An unsubdued
and perilous land attracts the more bold and enterprising. The seekers of
homesteads include men of better stuff than the job-seekers attracted by
high wages for unskilled labor. Only economic motives set in motion the
sub-common people, but even in an economic emigration the early stage

brings more people of initiative than the later. The deeper, straighter, and
smoother the channels of migration, the lower the stratum they can tap.
It is not easy to value the early elements that were wrought into the
American people. Often a stream of immigration that started with the best
drained from the lower levels after it had worn itself a bed. It is therefore
only in a broad way that I venture to classify the principal colonial
migrations as follows:
Super-representative: English Pilgrims, Puritans, Quakers, Catholics,
Scotch Covenanters, French Huguenots, German sectaries.
Representative: English of Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas, Scotch-
Irish, Scotch Highlanders, Dutch, and Swedes.
Sub-representative: English of early Georgia, transported English,
eighteenth-century Germans.
In our national period the Germans of 1848 stand out as a super-
representative flow. The Irish stream has been representative, as was also
the early German migration. The German inflow since 1870 has brought us
very few of the élite of their people, and I have already given reasons for
believing that the Scandinavian stream is not altogether representative. Our
immigration from Great Britain has distinctly fallen off in grade since the
chances in America came to be less attractive than those in the British
Empire. However, no less an authority than Sir Richard Cartwright thinks
that "between 1866 and 1896 one-third at least of the whole male
population of Canada between the ages of twenty and forty found their way
to the United States," and this "included an immense percentage of the most
intelligent and adventurous." To-day we reciprocate by sending Western
farmers with capital into the Canadian Northwest. Our loss has amounted to
as many as 100,000 in a single year.
Oppression is now out of fashion over most of Europe, and our public
lands are gone. Economic motives more and more bring us immigrants, and
such motives will not uproot the educated, the propertied, the established,
the well connected. The children of success are not migrating, which means
that we get few scions from families of proved capacity. Europe retains
most of her brains, but sends multitudes of the common and the sub-
common. There is little sign of an intellectual element among the Magyars,

Russians, South Slavs, Italians, Greeks, or Portuguese. This does not hold,
however, for currents created by race discrimination or oppression. The
Armenian, Syrian, Finnish, and Russo-Hebrew streams seem representative,
and the first wave of Hebrews out of Russia in the eighties was superior.
The Slovaks, German Poles, Lithuanians, Esthonians, and other restive
subject groups probably send us a fair sample of their quality.

RACE SUICIDE

The fewer brains they have to contribute, the lower the place immigrants
take among us, and the lower the place they take, the faster they multiply. In
1890, in our cities, a thousand foreign-born women could show 565
children under five years of age to 309 children shown by a thousand native
women. By 1900 the contribution of the foreign women had risen to 612,
and that of the American women had declined to 296. From such figures
some argue that the "sterile" Americans need the immigrants in order to
supply population. It would be nearer the truth to argue that the competition
of low-standard immigrants is the root cause of the mysterious "sterility" of
Americans. Certainly their record down to 1830 proved the Americans to be
as fertile a race as ever lived, and the decline in their fertility coincides in
time and in locality with the advent of the immigrant flood. In the words of
General Francis A. Walker, "Not only did the decline in the native element,
as a whole, take place in singular correspondence with the excess of foreign
arrivals, but it occurred chiefly in just those regions"—"in those States and
in the very counties," he says elsewhere—"to which those newcomers most
frequently resorted."
"Our immigrants," says a superintendent of charities, "often come here
with no standards whatever. In their homes you find no sheets on the bed,
no slips on the pillows, no cloth on the table, and no towels save old rags.
Even in the mud-floor cabins of the poorest negroes of the South you find
sheets, pillow-slips, and towels, for by serving and associating with the
whites the blacks have gained standards. But many of the foreigners have
no means of getting our home standards after they are here. No one shows
them. They can't see into American homes, and no Americans associate
with them." The Americans or Americanized immigrants who are obliged to
live on wages fixed by the competition of such people must cut somewhere.

If they do not choose to "live in a pig-pen and bring up one's children like
pigs," they will save their standards by keeping down the size of the family.
Because he keeps them clean, neatly dressed, and in school, children are an
economic burden to the American. Because he lets them run wild and puts
them to work early, children are an asset to the low-standard foreigner.

Distribution of Native White Stock in the United States—1910
When a more-developed element is obliged to compete on the same
economic plane with a less-developed element, the standards of cleanliness
or decency or education cherished by the advanced element act on it like a
slow poison. William does not leave as many children as 'Tonio, because he
will not huddle his family into one room, eat macaroni off a bare board,
work his wife barefoot in the field, and keep his children weeding onions
instead of at school. Even moral standards may act as poison. Once the
women raisin-packers at Fresno, California, were American-born. Now the
American women are leaving because of the low moral tone that prevails in
the working force by reason of the coming in of foreigners with lax notions
of propriety. The coarseness of speech and behavior among the packers is
giving raisin-packing a bad name, so that American women are quitting the

work and taking the next best job. Thus the very decency of the native is a
handicap to success and to fecundity.
As they feel the difficulty of keeping up their standards on a Slav wage,
the older immigrant stocks are becoming sterile, even as the old Americans
became sterile. In a generation complaint will be heard that the Slavs, too,
are shirking big families, and that we must admit prolific Persians, Uzbegs,
and Bokhariots, in order to offset the fatal sterility that attacks every race
after it has become Americanized. Very truly says a distinguished
economist, in praise of immigration: "The cost of rearing children in the
United States is rapidly rising. In many, perhaps in most cases, it is simpler,
speedier, and cheaper to import labor than to breed it." In like vein it is said
that "a healthy immigrant lad of eighteen is a clear $1000 added to the
national wealth of the United States."
Just so. "The Roman world was laughing when it died." Any couple or
any people that does not feel it has anything to transmit to its children may
well reason in such fashion. A couple may reflect, "It is simpler, speedier,
and cheaper for us to adopt orphans than to produce children of our own." A
nation may reason, "Why burden ourselves with the rearing of children? Let
them perish unborn in the womb of time. The immigrants will keep up the
population." A people that has no more respect for its ancestors and no more
pride of race than this deserves the extinction that surely awaits it.

APPENDIX
TABLE I

ANNUAL IMMIGRATION 1820-1913

Year ending Sept. 30
1820 8,385
1821 9,127
1822 6,911
1823 6,354
1824 7,912
1825 10,199
1826 10,837
Year ending Sept. 30
1827 18,875
1828 27,382
1829 22,520
1830 23,322
1831 22,633
15 months ending Dec. 31
1832 60,482
Year ending Dec. 31
1833 58,640
1834 65,365
1835 45,374
1836 76,242
1837 79,340
1838 38,914
1839 68,069
1840 84,066
1841 80,289
1842 104,565
9 months ending Sept. 30
1843 52,496
Year ending Sept. 30
1844 78,615
1845 114,371
1846 154,416
1847 234,968
1848 226,527
1849 297,024
1850 310,004
3 months ending Dec. 31
1850 59,976
Year ending Dec. 31
1851 379,466
1852 371,603
1853 368,645
1854 427,833

1855 200,877
1856 200,436
1857 251,306
1858 123,126
1859 121,282
1860 153,640
1861 91,918
1862 91,985
1863 176,282
1864 193,418
1865 248,120
1866 318,568
1867 315,722
6 months ending June 30
1868 138,840
Year ending June 30
1869 352,768
1870 387,203
1871 321,350
1872 404,806
1873 459,803
1874 313,339
1875 227,498
1876 169,986
1877 141,857
1878 138,469
1879 177,826
1880 457,257
1881 669,431
1882 788,992
1883 603,322
1884 518,592
1885 395,346
1886 334,203
1887 490,109
1888 546,889
1889 444,427
1890 455,302
1891 560,319
1892 623,084
1893 439,730
1894 285,631
1895 258,536
1896 343,267

1897 230,832
1898 229,299
1899 311,715
1900 448,572
1901 487,918
1902 648,743
1903 857,046
1904 812,870
1905 1,026,499
1906 1,100,735
1907 1,285,349
1908 782,870
1909 751,786
1910 1,041,570
1911 878,587
1912 838,172
1913 1,197,892
1914 (11 months) 1,254,548

TABLE II

TOTAL NUMBER OF IMMIGRANTS, BY DECADES
1821-1830 143,439
1831-1840 599,125
1841-1850 1,713,251
1851-1860 2,598,214
1861-1870 2,314,824
1871-1880 2,812,191
1881-1890 5,246,613
1891-1900 3,687,564
1901-1910 8,795,386

TABLE III

INCREASE OF FOREIGN-BORN IN POPULATION BY DECADES
Population. Increase. Increase.
Census Year. Foreign-Born Percentage
1850 2,244,602
1860 4,138,697 1,894,095 84.4
1870 5,567,229 1,428,532 34.5
1880 6,679,943 1,112,714 20.0
1890 9,249,560 2,569,617 38.5
1900 10,341,276 1,091,716 11.8

1910 13,343,583 3,129,766 30.6

TABLE IV

FOREIGN-BORN IN UNITED STATES IN 1910
Per cent
Country of Birth. Number. of total.
Total foreign born. 13,515,886 100.0
Europe 11,791,841 87.2
Northwestern Europe 6,740,400 49.9
Great Britain 1,221,283 9.0
England 877,719 6.5
Scotland 261,076 1.9
Wales 82,488 0.6
Ireland 1,352,251 10.0
Germany 2,501,333 18.5
Scandinavian countries 1,250,733 9.3
Norway 403,877 3.0
Sweden 665,207 1.9
Denmark 181,649 1.3
Netherlands (Holland), Belgium,
and Luxemburg 172,534 1.3
Netherlands 120,063 0.9
Belgium 49,400 0.4
Luxemburg 3,071
France 117,418 0.9
Switzerland 124,848 0.9
Southern and Eastern Europe 5,048,583 37.4
Portugal 59,360 0.4
Spain 22,108 0.2
Italy 1,343,125 9.9
Russia and Finland 1,732,462 12.8
Russia 1,602,782 11.9
Finland 129,680 1.0
Austria-Hungary 1,670,582 12.4
Austria 1,174,973 8.7
Hungary 495,609 3.7
Balkan peninsula 220,946 1.6
Roumania 65,923 0.5
Bulgaria 11,498 0.1
Servia 4,639
Montenegro 5,374
Greece 101,282 0.7
Turkey in Europe 32,230 0.2

Country not specified 2,858
Asia 191,484 1.4
China 56,756 0.4
Japan 67,744 0.5
India 4,664
Turkey in Asia 59,729 0.4
All other countries 2,591
America 1,489,231 11.0
Canada and Newfoundland 1,209,717 9.0
Canada—French 385,083 2.8
Canada—Other 819,554 6.1
Newfoundland 5,080
West Indies 47,635 0.4
Mexico 221,915 1.6
Central and South America 9,964 0.1
All other 43,330 0.3

TOTAL FOREIGN BORN, 1910: 13,515,886 TOTAL FOREIGN BORN, 1900:
10,341,276

COUNTRY OF ORIGIN
FOREIGN-BORN POPULATION, BY PRINCIPAL COUNTRIES OF BIRTH: 1910 AND
1900

TABLE V

PER CENT. OF IMMIGRANTS FROM NORTHERN AND WESTERN EUROPE AND
FROM SOUTHERN AND EASTERN EUROPE, 1820 TO 1910

Northern Southern Total Other
and and from specified
Period. Western. Eastern. Europe. countries.
1820-1830 87.0 2.9 89.9 10.1
1831-1840 92.5 1.1 93.7 6.3
1841-1850 95.9 .3 96.2 3.8
1851-1860 94.6 .8 95.5 4.5
1861-1870 88.5 1.5 89.9 10.1
1871-1880 73.7 7.1 80.8 19.2
1881-1890 72.0 18.3 90.3 9.7
1891-1900 44.8 52.8 97.5 2.5
1901-1910 21.8 71.9 93.7 6.3

TABLE VI

OLD AND NEW IMMIGRATION COMPARED WITH RESPECT TO ABILITY OF THE
FOREIGN-BORN TO READ, BY RACE[1] (STUDY OF EMPLOYEES)
Per cent.
able to
Old Immigration. read.
Canadian, French 88.1
Canadian, other 98.9
Dutch 97.6
English 98.8
German 98.0
Irish 95.8
Scotch 99.5
Swedish 99.8
Welsh 98.1
New Immigration.
Bulgarian 78.1
Croatian 70.9
Greek 80.5
Hebrew, Russian 93.1
Hebrew, other 92.5
Italian, North 83.3
Italian, South 67.5
Lithuanian 77.3
Magyar 91.0
Polish 79.9
Portuguese 47.5
Roumanian 82.6
Russian 74.5
Ruthenian 65.8

Servian 71.3
Slovak 84.4
Slovenian 87.5
Spanish 98.1
Syrian 63.6

TABLE VII

OLD AND NEW IMMIGRATION COMPARED WITH RESPECT TO
FOREIGN-BORN HUSBANDS REPORTING WIFE
ABROAD, BY RACE.[2]
(STUDY OF EMPLOYEES)
Per cent
Reporting
Wife
Old Immigration. Abroad.
Canadian, French 1.5
Dutch 3.8
English 3.4
German 4.3
Irish 1.2
Scotch 3.2
Swedish 2.9
Welsh 1.4
New Immigration.
Bulgarian 90.0
Croatian 59.3
Greek 74.7
Hebrew, Russian 12.5
Italian, North 31.6
Italian, South 36.9
Lithuanian 23.3
Magyar 43.3
Polish 23.0
Portuguese 15.9
Roumanian 73.9
Russian 45.5
Servian 64.5
Slovak 34.2
Slovenian 33.7

TABLE VIII

OLD AND NEW IMMIGRATION COMPARED WITH RESPECT TO
ABILITY TO SPEAK ENGLISH.[3]
(STUDY OF EMPLOYEES)
Old Immigration.
Nationality. Per cent.
Danish 96.5
Dutch 86.1
French 68.6
German 87.5
Norwegian 96.9
Swedish 94.7
Average 82.2
New Immigration.
Bulgarian 20.3
Croatian 50.9
Greek 33.5
South Italian 48.7
Lithuanian 51.3
Macedonian 21.1
Magyar 46.4
Montenegrin 38.0
Polish 43.5
Roumanian 33.3
Ruthenian 36.8
Russian 43.6
Servian 41.2
Slovak 55.6
Slovenian 51.7
Syrian 54.6
Turkish 22.5
Average 40.8

TABLE IX

FOREIGN-BORN IN URBAN AND RURAL COMMUNITIES, 1910
Old Immigration.
Per Per
Country Cent Cent
of Birth. Urban. Rural.
Belgium 59.6 40.4
Denmark 48.3 51.7
England 72.6 27.4
France 69.9 30.1

Germany 66.7 33.3
Holland 54.9 45.1
Ireland 84.7 15.3
Norway 42.2 57.8
Scotland 72.4 27.6
Sweden 60.6 39.4
Switzerland 53.9 46.1
New Immigration.
Austria 72.4 27.6
Balkan States 50.9 49.1
Finland 50. 50.
Greece 71.4 28.6
Hungary 77.3 22.7
Italy 78.1 21.9
Portugal 69.6 30.4
Roumania 91.9 8.1
Russia 87. 13.
Turkey, in Asia 86.7 13.3
Turkey, in Europe 79.5 20.5

FOREIGN WHITE STOCK, BY PRINCIPAL COUNTRIES OF
ORIGIN: 1910.

INDEX
Ability, natural, 10, 12, 13;
Irish, 40-44;
Germans, 50, 58, 64;
Scandinavians, 83-85;
Italians, 113, 114;
Slavs, 138, 139;
Hebrews, 157-164;
Finns, 169;
Portuguese, 176;
Levantines, 190, 193;
foreign-born, 285-287, 296-299.

Abstractness, Hebrew, 159-160.

Agriculture, German immigrants in, 52-53, 62;
Scandinavians, 73-74, 86;
Italians, 103-104;
Slavs, 126-127;
Hebrews, 147, 160;
Finns, 169;
Magyars, 174;
Portuguese, 181;
foreign-born, 195, 202-204.

Alcoholism, Irish, 32-33;
German, 60-61;
Scandinavian, 72-73;
comparative, 104-105;
Slavic, 127-128, 229;
Finnish, 169-170;
Magyar, 175;
Levantine, 190;
foreign-born, 215, 229, 255.

American traits, 23, 290, 295-296.

Americanism, origins of, 22-23.

Anti-semitism, 164, 165.

Assimilation, of Germans, 49-52;
of Scandinavians, 75-81;
of Italians, 111-112, 213;

of Slavs, 134-138;
of Hebrews, 154, 165-167;
of Finns, 170;
of Magyars, 175;
of Portuguese, 182;
of Levantines, 194;
of foreign-born, 245, 250-254, 279-281, 300-303.

"Assistance" for naturalized voters, 271.

Attention to details, comparative, 44, 66.

Avarice, 34, 150-155, 182-183, 188-193, 244, 246, 303.

Azorean immigrants, 176, 179, 181.

Balch, Professor, quoted, 127.

Bankruptcy, fraudulent, 150.

Bar, immigrants at the, 39, 40, 41, 89, 153.

Bargain, the individual, 193.

Bath houses, Finnish, 169.

Bingham, Gen., quoted, 108-111.

Bohemian immigrants, 123, 124, 126, 134, 135, 138, 139, 220, 252, 253.

"Boss," methods of the, 269-275.

Boston, 29, 244, 260.

Bound boys, Greek, 187-190.

Bremer, Frederika, quoted, 69.

Browning, quoted, 106.

Bryce, James, quoted, 51.

Bushee, Dr., quoted, 29, 145, 180, 244.

Cahan, Abram, cited, 164.

Camorra, the, 107.

Canadian immigrants, 182, 253, 298.

Cape Cod Portuguese, 179.

Cape Verde immigrants, 168, 179.

Capitalists and immigration, 198, 201, 210, 213-219, 286, 287.

Cartwright, Sir Richard, quoted, 298.

Caste spirit, growth of, 216, 219, 234-235.

Caterers, Greek immigrants as, 184, 187.

"Cavaliers," in Virginia, 7.

Celtic race traits, 39-44, 64, 85-89.

Charity-seekers, immigrants as, Irish, 29;
Germans, 59;
Italians, 117, 243;
Hebrews, 149;
Magyars, 173;
Syrians, 293;
foreign-born, 105, 240-245.

Child delinquency, 245-246.

Child exploitation, 112, 127, 137, 157, 180, 181, 187-190, 244, 246, 247, 303.

Children, proportion of, 22.

Chinese immigrants, 111, 226.

Cicero, on the Jews, 143.

Cities, immigrants in, 76, 112, 126, 145, 182, 202, 239-240, 244, 260, 282.

Citizenship, interest of immigrants in acquiring, 101, 112, 136, 170, 175, 181-182, 264-266, 269-
273.

Civil War, the, 13, 41, 58.

Clannishness of immigrants, Germans, 54, 57;
Italians, 112;
Slavs, 136-137;

Hebrews, 154, 166-167;
Portuguese, 182;
Levantines, 193-194;
Irish, 260-263;
foreign-born, 253.

Clericalism, 123, 135, 136, 252-253, 279-280.

Coal miners, wages of, 213.

Colonies, Hebrew agricultural, 147.

Colonization, of immigrants, 203-204.

Commercialization, 153, 238, 250.

Commercialized immigration, 183-4, 195-197, 204, 226.

Congestion, of Irish, 30;
of Germans, 60;
of Scandinavians, 76;
of Italians, 112, 117-118;
of Slavs, 126;
of Hebrews, 145;
of Magyars, 173-174;
of Portuguese, 180;
of Levantines, 194;
of foreign-born, 238-240, 244, 300-303.

Convict element in the Colonies, 8-9.

Cost of living, causes of high, 201-202.

Courage, 30, 125-126, 262, 295.

Crises and immigration, 222.

Cranberry pickers, 179.

Criminality, Irish, 33, 34;
German, 61;
Greek, 62;
Scandinavian, 72;
Italian, 98, 101, 106-111;
Slavic, 129;
Hebrew, 34, 62, 155-157;
Finnish, 33, 169;
Magyar, 175;

Portuguese, 175-176.

Criminals, elimination of, in the Colonies, 9.

Crossing, effects of, 288-289.

Cumings, quoted, 22.

Dalmatians in horticulture, 203.

Danish immigrants, 74, 81.

Deforestation, 203.

Democracy, immigrants and, 42, 54-57, 76, 91-92, 119, 136, 158, 256, 263, 264, 269, 276-281.

Deutschtum in America, 50-51, 76.

Displacement, industrial, 207-209.

Dutch immigrants, 4, 70, 298.

Economic character of present immigration, 183-184, 195-197, 225, 298, 299.

Education, interest of immigrants in, 79, 98, 112, 136, 148, 157-159, 170, 181, 189, 190, 236, 246,
251-254.

Elimination, 16-20, 290-292.

Emigration-promoting, 195-197, 226.

Emigration to Canada, 298.

Emotional instability of Italians, 118-119.

English immigrants, 3-9, 297, 298.

English, ability to speak, 76, 112, 136-137, 169, 176, 236-237, 253-254.

Ethical endowment, race contrasts in, 293-295.

Fairchild, Professor, quoted, 184, 294.

Family size, 21-23, 30, 47, 71-72, 127, 130-134, 136, 139, 236, 244, 287, 292, 299-304.

Fecundity, early American, 21-23;
Irish, 26, 29;
Scandinavian, 71-72;
Italian, 95;
Slavic, 130-134, 136, 139-140;
Portuguese, 180;
foreign-born, 236, 287, 299-304.

Ferrero, quoted, 280.

Feudalism, industrial, 214, 215;
political, 269-272.

Finnish immigrants, 168, 173, 299.

Foreign stock, proportion of, 239-240, 282-285.

"Forty-eighters," the, 47, 50, 57, 64.

Franklin, Benjamin, quoted, 11.

French immigrants, 10, 14, 62, 298.

Frontier, selective influence of the, 20-23.

Galician Jews, degradation of, 146, 165.

Gambling, 98, 105, 156.

Genoese, 111.

German immigrants, 10, 17, 46-66;
numbers, 46-48;
motives of emigration, 46-48;
distribution, 49;
assimilation, 49, 52;
influence, 52-58, 79;
drinking customs, 53;
conviviality, 54;
politics, 54-55, 259, 262, 263, 276;
free-thinking, 57-58, 252;
economic condition, 59-60;
alcoholism, 60-61;
criminality, 61-62;
occupations, 35, 36, 41, 62-63;
traits, 29, 32, 63-66, 73, 81, 83, 91, 149, 160, 238;
illiteracy, 70;

in science, 39, 84;
in agriculture, 44, 52, 53, 62, 86, 202, 260;
race affinities, 101;
in music, 103;
mortality, 113;
displacement, 220;
quality, 298.

Germany, conditions in, 48, 225, 280.

Ghetto, the, 145, 149, 290.

Good looks, among immigrants, 85, 113, 179, 193, 285, 286-289.

Grant, Gen., quoted, 164.

Greek immigrants, 62, 182-190, 214, 236, 238, 243, 289, 294, 299.

Greek physicians, memorial of, 189.

Gregariousness, Italian, 117-118;
Hebrew, 145;
Levantine, 194.

Hebrew immigrants, numbers, 143, 196;
sobriety, 61;
poverty, 30, 180;
quality, 145, 146, 299;
occupation, 146-148;
morals, 149-155;
crime, 34, 62, 155-157;
children, 114, 245;
traits, 31, 118, 157-164, 289-290, 294;
in politics, 148, 158, 263, 274;
prospects, 164-167.

Helmold, quoted, 120-121.

Heterogeneity, effects of, 229, 276-280.

Horticulture, immigrants in, 104, 187, 202, 203.

Honesty, German, 64-65;
Scandinavian, 72, 83, 91;
Finnish, 169;
Magyar, 173;
North European, 294.

Housing of immigrants, 26, 30, 60, 76, 112, 117, 126, 145, 169, 173, 174, 180, 216-222, 244, 300,
301.

Huguenot immigrants, 10, 14, 298.

Hungarian Jews, 173.

Iceland, 67.

Idealism, 3-4, 50, 57, 64, 81, 91, 149, 170, 269.

Illiteracy, immigrant, 70;
Italian, 98;
Slavic, 124, 136, 138;
Hebrew, 145;
Magyar, 174;
Portuguese, 176;
foreign-born, 228, 230-233.

Imagination, Celtic, 40-41;
Slavic, 138;
Hebrew, 159;
Scandinavian lack of, 85-89.

Immigration Commission, quoted, 107, 135, 140, 189.

Immigration policy, Jewish efforts to control, 144-145, 150.

Immodesty, 228.

Independent, the, quoted, 237.

Industry, immigrants in, 35, 62-63, 75, 125-126, 148, 174, 179-201, 207-209, 215-216.

Infant mortality, 130, 133, 228, 201, 292.

Inquisition, the, in Mexico, 14.

Insanity, Irish, 28;
German, 61;
Scandinavian, 70;
among the foreign-born, 249-250.

Instability of employment, growing, 221, 222.

Ireland, conditions in, 26-28;

early discrimination against, 31.

Irish immigrants, 24-45;
numbers, 24-25;
motives to emigrate, 25-26;
quality, 26-28, 298;
economic condition, 28-32;
pauperism, 29-30;
unthrift, 29-31;
alcoholism, 32-33, 60;
criminality, 33-34;
loyalty, 34;
occupations, 35-39, 220;
progress, 35-39, 63;
gifts, 40-45;
traits, 40-5, 64, 89, 158, 159;
fecundity, 71, 133;
illiteracy, 70;
skill, 62;
in agriculture, 202;
displacement, 207;
in politics, 41, 42, 91, 135, 148, 259-263, 272;
in science, 84;
assimilation, 49.

Italian-American Civic League, 112.

Italian immigrants, distribution, 96;
social characteristics, 61, 70, 97, 234, 236, 238;
types, 97-101;
occupations, 102-104, 207, 208, 213, 220;
vices, 104-106;
crime, 33-34, 62, 72, 106-111, 129;
assimilation, 111-112;
ability, 113-117;
traits, 117-119, 150, 219, 243;
poverty, 180, 244;
in agriculture, 103-104, 181, 202-203;
in politics, 271, 275, 276;
quality, 289, 293-295, 299.

Job-buying, by immigrants, 198, 214.

Journalism, immigrants in, 41, 81, 135, 146, 276.

Judaism, 165-167.

Kidnapping, for the Colonies, 8.

Kollar, quoted, 128.

Labor organizations, 41, 89, 209-210, 235.

Labor, political weight of, 266.

Lawlessness, 106-111, 150-157.

Levantine immigrants, 190-194, 299.

Like-mindedness, value of political, 276-280.

Lithuanian immigrants, 62, 70, 124, 134, 140, 208, 230, 252, 254.

Litigiousness, Finnish, 169.

Log houses, Finnish, 168.

Lottery-gambling, 98, 105, 106.

Love of liberty as motive for emigration, 14, 46, 47, 145, 169, 297-299.

Lying, Italians, 117;
Hebrews, 150;
Levantines, 193;
South Europeans, 293.

Macedonians, 123, 175.

Machine, the political, 229, 261-263, 269-275.

Mafia, the, 107.

Magyar, immigrants, 33, 34, 61, 168, 169, 173-175, 198, 202, 207, 208 220, 225, 238, 243.

Malaria, ravages of, 19-20.

Male ascendency, 129-134, 180, 193, 219, 235-237.

Manners, Irish, 40;
Germans, 53-54, 64;
Scandinavians, 80, 82-83, 89;
Italians, 118;

Hebrews, 149-150;
Slavs, 228.

Marine disasters, race behavior in, 295-296.

Maryland, convicts transported to, 8.

Mechanical aptitude, want of in Italian immigrants, 113;
in Greeks, 187.

Medicine, immigrants in, Irish, 35, 39, 41;
Germans, 35, 41;
Hebrews, 148.

Mediterranean race, the, 97-101, 293-295.

Merit system, the, 42, 57, 261-262.

Michaux, quoted, 21.

Middle Ages, our, 133-136, 228-230, 232, 254-255, 279-280.

Mining, immigrants in, 35, 74, 125, 207, 208, 213, 214-216, 228.

Mining conditions in West Virginia, 214-215.

Mittelberger, quoted, 18.

Mixed marriages, 166.

Mongolian immigrants, 168-175.

Morals, 34, 64-65, 72, 90-91, 101, 105-106, 117, 129, 149-155, 169, 180-181, 193, 238, 255, 293-
295.

Mortality, immigrant, 17-20, 30, 71, 113, 126, 130-134, 136, 189, 234, 244, 263, 273-274, 291-
292.

Municipal Government, 229;
Irish in, 259-263;
foreign-born in, 269-275.

Music, immigrant contribution to, 50, 54, 62, 90, 103, 138, 279.

Naturalization, extent of, 264-266.

Naturalization frauds, 272-273.

Natural selection, 14-23, 61, 145, 290, 292.

Neapolitans, 98-101, 105-106, 107, 113, 117-118, 243.

New Bedford whalers, 176, 179.

New York, insane of, 249, 250.

New York State Hospital Commission, quoted, 249.

Niceforo, Professor, cited, 98-101.

Norwegian immigrants, 68, 69, 73, 74, 75, 76, 80, 82-83.

Nationalism, revival of Slavic, 134-135.

Occupational preferences, Irish, 35-36;
German, 62-63;
Scandinavian, 73-75;
Italian, 102-104;
Slavic, 124-127;
Hebrew, 31, 146-148;
Finnish, 169;
Magyar, 174;
Portuguese, 179-180;
Greek, 184-188;
Levantine, 193;
foreign-born, 202-203.

Oriental traits, 190, 193, 237.

Oversea passage, conditions of, 17-18, 196.

Padrone, the, 188-190, 272.

Parks, abuse of, 149.

Parties, immigrants and political, 54-57, 66, 76, 91, 117, 158, 170, 261-263.

Patriotism, 136, 170, 251, 269.

Pauperism, Irish, 29;
Germans, 59;
Scandinavians, 59;
Hebrew, 149;

Portuguese, 180;
natives, 209;
foreign-born, 240-245.

Peasantism, 135-137, 181-182, 228-233, 237, 254-256, 286, 292.

Pecorini, quoted, 112.

Penal transportation, 8.

Penn, William, 10, 17.

Pennell, Joseph, quoted, 146.

Pennsylvania Germans, 10-12, 52, 298.

Peonage among immigrants, 233-234.

"Personal liberty," 53, 76, 276, 279.

Physiognomy of immigrants, 85, 113, 285-289.

Pioneer breed, the, 20-23, 282, 290, 300.

Polish immigrants, 124, 126, 127, 133, 135-137, 139-140, 181, 207, 208, 220, 230, 236, 238, 244,
252, 253, 275, 291.

Political mysticism, 280-281.

Political psychology of races, 40-42, 66, 91-92, 119, 194, 261-262, 294-296.

Political tendencies of naturalized immigrants;
of Irish, 39, 41, 42;
of Germans, 47, 54-55, 66;
of Scandinavians, 76, 83, 91-92;
of Italians, 119;
of Slavs, 136;
of Hebrews, 144, 148, 158, 279;
of Finns, 170;
of Levantines, 194;
of foreign-born, 229-230, 232, 255-256, 259-281.

Polyandry, 180-181, 238.

Portuguese immigrants, 105, 175-182, 202, 236, 289.

Prejudice in politics, 263.

Presbyterian immigrants, 12-13.

Press, the foreign, 50, 135, 146, 156, 276.

Pride, Magyar, 173, 174.

Prostitutes, immigrant, 155, 156, 164.

Public service, Irish in the, 35-39, 259-262;
Hebrews, 148.

Puritans, 3-4, 19, 54, 57, 76, 163, 238, 297.

Pytheas, quoted, 72.

Quakers, 10, 11, 13.

Race suicide, 133-134, 299-304.

Raisin packers, displacement of American, 303.

Religion, immigrants and, 39, 46, 47, 57, 71, 82, 90, 135, 137, 157, 166, 182, 237, 252, 253.

Retardation of school children, 98, 114, 119, 139, 158, 181.

Roman Catholic policy, 136, 182, 251-254.

Royalists, migration of, to Virginia, 7.

Russia, as source of immigrants, 140, 144-145, 169.

Russo-Jewish immigration, 144-146.

Ruthenian immigrants, 124, 128, 236.

Sabbath keeping, 166.

Saloon keepers, foreign-born, 35, 36, 73, 111, 127, 137, 255, 272, 275-276.

Saracen blood, 97, 168.

Scandinavian immigrants, 67-92;
numbers, 67;
distribution, 68, 69;
social characteristics, 70-72;

criminality, 72;
alcoholism, 72-73;
occupations, 44, 73-75, 202, 260;
assimilation, 75-79;
reaction to America, 79-81;
national contrasts, 81-83;
intellectual ability, 83-85, 298;
traits, 32, 42, 43, 85-92, 263, 294.

School, immigrants and the church, 136, 137, 182, 251-254, 256, 279, 280.

School, immigrants and the public, 79, 93, 112, 114, 119, 136, 139, 158, 159, 170, 181, 182, 246,
250-254, 256, 279-280, 303.

Science, immigrants in, 39, 58, 66, 81, 148.

Scotch immigrants, 12, 70, 298.

Scotch-Irish immigrants, 12-13, 298.

Servants, indentured, 7-8.

Servians, 123, 124, 134, 175.

Servitude of Greek bootblacks, 188-190.

Sexes, proportion of the, 70, 96, 124, 145, 169, 174, 179, 183, 237-238.

"Sexual hospitality," 180-181.

Shoe-shining parlors, Greek, 187-190.

Shrine, a miracle-working, 232.

Sicilian immigrants, 101, 107, 118, 119.

Slavic immigrants;
race, 120-123, 173;
groups, 123-124;
quality, 174, 299;
occupations, 124-127, 207, 208, 210, 213, 215, 216, 220;
alcoholism, 33, 127-129, 229;
crime, 72, 129;
fecundity, 129-134, 303;
assimilation, 134-138, 239;
in agriculture, 126, 127, 203;
ability, 138-139, 246;
future, 139-140;

traits, 34, 219, 243, 244, 252, 254, 289, 291, 292.

Slovak immigrants, 86, 124, 130, 137, 208, 238, 252, 253.

Sociability, 32, 40-42, 64, 82, 89-90, 117-118, 194, 261-262.

Social decline, 127, 133-138, 145, 155-157, 228-230, 254-256.

Social evil, the, 34, 107, 129, 150, 153, 155-157, 164, 174, 175, 180-181, 228, 237-238, 245, 274.

Socialism, 40, 66, 82, 159, 160, 170.

Social pressure, rise of, 222-226.

South, the;
Germans in, 49;
attitude toward Italians, 104;
political spirit, 263.

Spanish-American colonies, 14.

Spencer, Herbert, quoted, 288.

Split-family immigration, 96, 124, 137, 174, 238.

Sports, immigrants in athletic, 43, 63, 90, 289, 290.

Standards, contrast of, 216, 300-303.

Stature of immigrants, 63, 98, 101, 102, 126, 289.

Steerage traffic, volume of, 197.

"Sterility," American, 299-304.

Strike-breakers, immigrants as, 207, 208, 219, 236.

Survival of the fittest, 17-21, 290-292.

Swedish immigrants, 68, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 81, 82, 83, 85, 168, 169.

Syrian immigrants, 61, 176, 190-194, 243, 289, 293.

Tammany Hall, 274.

Tariff, the protective, 198, 201.

Teachers of foreign stock, 36, 43, 75, 89, 148, 254.

Team work, 108, 294, 295.

Temperance Finns, 170.

Thomas, Professor, quoted, 129.

Trachoma, 190.

Trade, immigrants in, 65, 86, 103, 144-148, 150-153, 159, 184-187, 190, 193.

Trade immorality, 150-153.

Trade unionism, 209-210.

Trickiness, 150-155.

Tuberculosis, among the Scandinavian immigrants, 71.

Teutonic traits, 29, 32, 35, 41, 42, 44, 63-66, 81, 91, 160, 262, 293, 295.

"United Societies," the, 276.

United States Steel Corporation, 210.

Universities, immigrants' children in, 39, 79, 81, 148, 170, 236.

Veracity, Norwegians, 83;
North Europeans, 293.

Violence, tendency to, 33, 98-99, 105-111, 118-119, 128, 129, 136, 169-70, 175, 193.

Virginia, peopling of, 4-9.

Von Hupka, quoted, 130.

Wages, effect of immigrants on, 210-213.

Walker, Francis A., quoted, 300.

Wells, H. G., quoted, 255.

Wergeland, Dr., quoted, 80.

West, influence of the, 21-23.

Wife desertion, 34, 255.

Will, strength of, 13, 163.

Women, position of immigrant, 40, 47, 52, 103, 128, 129-134, 136, 149, 170, 180, 190, 193, 219,
235-237, 255, 295, 303.

Woods, quoted, 22.

Wood's Run, 239.

Work conditions, immigrants and, 214-219.

Yellow journalism and immigration, 233.

Zangwill, quoted, 144.

FOOTNOTES:
[1] Vol. I, p. 443. Abstracts of Reports of the Immigration Commission.
[2] Vol. I, p. 460. Abstracts of Reports of the Immigration Commission.
[3] Vol. I, p. 477. Abstracts of Reports of the Immigration Commission.

Transcriber's note:

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