usually turns out to be rather a spurious and sentimental homage.
Political orators easily grow tearful over her misfortunes. For
generations after the Civil War, the Republican Party throve on a
pension-system which gathered in the youngest widow of the oldest
veteran, and Tammany has always understood how to profit from its
ostentatious alms-giving to widows and orphans. From my earliest
childhood, I can recollect how the town-beautifiers, who wanted to
take down the crazy board fences, were utterly routed by the aldermen
who said the widow’s cow must range and people must therefore keep
up their fences. Similarly, the Southern States have never been able
to put through adequate child labour laws because the widow’s child
had to be allowed to earn in order to support his mother. All this
sentimentalism proved to be in time an excellent springboard for a
genuine economic reform--the widow’s pension systems of the several
states which would be more accurately described as children’s pensions.
The legislatures were in no position to resist an appeal on behalf of
the poor widow and so nicely narcotized were they by their traditional
tender-heartedness that they failed to perceive the socialistic
basis of this new kind of widow’s pensions. Consequently America has
achieved the curious honour of leading in a socialistic innovation
which European States are now only just beginning to copy. Maternity
insurance, on the other hand, has made no headway in America although
adopted years and even decades ago in European countries. With us the
obstacle seems to be prudishness rather than capitalism--it makes a
legislator blush to hear childbirth spoken of in public while it only
makes him cry to hear of widowhood.
One aspect of widowhood is seldom touched upon and that is its
prevention. Aged widows, on the whole, in spite of their soap-boxing
and their wage-earning, are a very lonely race. Why must they bring
it on themselves by marrying men whose expectation of life is so much
less than theirs? And yet so anxious are the marrying people to observe
this conventional disparity of age, that if the bride happens to be
but by three months the senior of the bridegroom, they conceal it
henceforth as a sort of family disgrace. Even if this convention should
prove to be immutable, is there nothing to be done about the lesser
longevity of the American male? There is a life extension institute
with an ex-president at the head but, as far as I am aware, it has
never enlisted the support of the millions reported by the census as
widows, who surely, if anybody, should realize the importance of such
a movement. It is commonly assumed that the earlier demise of husbands
is due to the hazardous life they lead in business and in industry;
but domestic life is not without its hazards, and child-bearing is an
especially dangerous trade in the United States, which has the highest
maternal death-rate of seventeen civilized countries. If American
husbands were less philosophical about the hardships of child-bed--the
judgment of Eve and all that sort of thing--and American wives were
less philosophical about burying their husbands--the Lord hath given
and the Lord hath taken away and so on--it might result in greater
health and happiness for all concerned.
But the main trouble with American marriage, as all the world knows, is
that divorce so often separates the twain before death has any chance
to discriminate between them. The growing prevalence of divorce is
statistically set forth in a series of census investigations. In 1890,
there was one divorce to every sixteen marriages; in 1900, there was
one to every twelve marriages; and in 1916, there was one to every nine
marriages. The number of marriages in proportion to the population
has also increased during the same period, though not at a rate equal
to that of divorce. But divorce, being so much younger than marriage,
has had more room to grow from its first humble scared beginnings of
fifty years ago. Queen Victoria’s frown had a very discouraging effect
on divorce in America; and Mrs. Humphry Ward, studying the question
among us in the early 20th century, lent her personal influence
towards the arrest of the American evil. We also have raised up on
this side of the water our own apostles against divorce, among whom
Mr. Horace Greeley perhaps occupies the first and most distinguished
place. But in spite of all heroic crusades, divorce has continued to
grow. One even suspects that the marked increase in the marriage rate
is partly--perhaps largely--due to the remarriage of the divorced. At
any rate, they constitute new and eligible material for marriage which
formerly was lacking.
The true cause of the increase of divorce in America is not easy to
come by. Commissions and investigations have worried the question to
no profitable end, and have triumphantly come out by the same door by
which they went in. That seems to be the test of a successful divorce
inquiry; and no wonder, for the real quest means a conflict with
hypocrisy and prejudice, fear and taboo, which only the intrepid spirit
of a John Milton or a Susan B. Anthony is able to sustain. The people
who want divorces and who can pay for them seem to be able to get them
nowadays, and since it is the truth only that suffers the situation has
grown more tolerable.
In the meantime, there are popular impressions and assumptions which
do not tally with the known facts. It is assumed that divorce is
frequent in America because it is easy, and that the logical way to
reduce it would be to make it difficult. Certain States of the West
have lenient divorce laws but other States have stringent laws, while
South Carolina abolished divorce entirely in 1878. On the whole, our
laws are not so lenient as those of Scandinavia, whose divorce rate is
still far behind that of the United States. Neither is divorce cheap
in America; it is enormously expensive. Therefore for the poor it is
practically inaccessible. The Domestic Relations Courts do not grant
divorce and the Legal Aid Societies will not touch it. The wage-earning
class, like the inhabitants of South Carolina, just have to learn to
get along without it. Then there is another belief, hardly justified by
the facts, that most divorced wives get alimony. Among all the divorces
granted in 1916, alimony was not even asked for by 73 per cent. of the
wives and it was received altogether by less than 20 per cent. of them.
The statistics do not tell us whether the actual recipients of alimony
were the mothers of young children or whether they were able-bodied
ladies without offspring. The average American divorce court could not
be trusted to see any difference between them.
The war has naturally multiplied the actions for divorce in every
country. It was not for nothing that the British government called the
stipends paid to soldiers’ wives “separation allowances.” The war-time
conditions had a tendency to unmake marriages as well as to make them.
The momentary spread of divorce has revived again the idea of a uniform
divorce law embodied in an amendment to the Federal Constitution. As
no reasonable law can possibly be hoped for, the present state of
confusion is infinitely to be preferred as affording at least some
choice of resources to the individual who is seeking relief. If
there were any tendency to take divorce cases out of the hands of the
lawyers, as has been done with industrial accidents, and to put it into
domestic relations courts where it belongs; if there were the least
possibility of curbing the vested interest of the newspapers in divorce
news; if there were any dawning appreciation of the absurdity of
penalizing as connivance the most unanswerable reason for divorce, that
is, mutual consent; if there were any likelihood that the lying and
spying upon which divorce action must usually depend for its success
would be viewed as the grossest immorality in the whole situation;
if there were any hope whatever that a statesman might rise up in
Congress and, like Johan Castberg of Norway, defend a legal measure
which would help ordinary men and women to speak the truth in their
personal relationships--if there were any prospect that any of these
influences would have any weight in the deliberations of Congress,
one might regard the possibilities of Federal action with a gleam of
hope. But since nothing of the kind can be expected, the best that
can happen in regard to divorce in the near future is for Congress to
leave it alone. There is a strong tradition in the historical suffrage
movement of America which favours liberal divorce laws and which makes
it improbable that a reactionary measure could gain sufficient support
from the feminine electorate. Since the majority of those who seek
divorce in this country are women, it seems to put them logically on
the side of dissoluble marriage.
Though home is a sacred word in America, it is a portable affair.
Migration is a national habit, handed down and still retained from
the days when each generation went out to break new ground. The
disasters of the Civil War sent Southern families and New England
families scurrying to the far West. The development of the railway
and express systems produced as a by-product a type of family life
that was necessarily nomadic. The men of the railway “Brotherhoods”
have always been marrying men, and their families acquired the art of
living on wheels, as it were. Rich farmers of the Middle West retire
to spend their old age in a California cottage surrounded by an orange
grove--and the young farmers move to the city. The American family
travels on any and every excuse. The neurotic pursuit of health has
built up large communities in Colorado, Arizona, and other points West.
Whole families “picked up,” as the saying goes, and set out for the
miraculous climate that was to save one of its members from the dreaded
tuberculosis--and then later had to move again because somebody’s
heart couldn’t stand the “altitude.” The extreme examples of this
nomadic habit are found among the families of the very poor and the
very rich, who have regular seasonal migrations. The oyster canners
and strawberry-pickers have a mobility which is only equalled by that
of the Palm Beachers. And finally there is the curious practice of New
England which keeps boarders in the summer-time in order that it may be
boarded by Florida in the winter-time.
By contrast with all this geographical instability, the stable sway
of convention and custom stands out impressively. With each change
of environment, family tradition became more sacred. Unitarians who
moved to Kansas were more zealous in the faith than ever, and F.F.V.’s
who settled in Texas were fiercely and undyingly loyal to the memory
of Pocahontas. Families that were always losing their background,
tried to fixate in some form the ancestral prestige which threatened
always to evaporate. Organizations composed of the Sons and Daughters
of the Revolution, of the descendants of the Pilgrims, of Civil War
Veterans, of the Scions of the Confederacy, and so on, sprang up and
flourished on the abundant soil of family pride. All of which means
that pioneering brought no spiritual independence or intellectual
rebirth, and that new conditions were anxiously reformulated under
the sanction of the old. Above all, sanction was important. That
incredible institution, the “society column” of the local newspaper,
took up the responsibility where the Past laid it down. Stereotyped
values of yesterday gave way to stereotyped values of to-day. This
was the commercial opportunity of a multitude of home journals and
women’s magazines which undertook--by means of stories, pictures, and
advertisements--to regiment the last detail of home life. But the
perforated patterns, the foods “shot from guns,” and all the rest
of the labour-saving ingenuities which came pouring into the home
and which were supposed to mean emancipation for mothers and their
families, brought little of the real spirit of freedom in their wake.
Our materialistic civilization finds it hard to understand that liberty
is not achieved through time-saving devices but only through the love
of it.
But the notorious spoiling of the American child--some one says--is
not that a proper cradle of liberty for the personality? A spoilt
child may be a nuisance, but if he is on the way towards becoming a
self-reliant, self-expressive adult, the “American way” of bringing
up children may have its peculiar advantages. But a spoilt child is
really a babyish child, and by that token he is on the way towards
becoming a childish adult. Neither is his case disposed of simply by
adjudging him a nuisance; the consequence of his spoiling carry much
further than that. They are seen, for instance, in malnutrition of
the children of the American rich--a fact which has but recently been
discovered and which came as a great surprise to the experts. “In
Chicago,” one of them tells us, “it was found that a group of foreign
children near the stockyards were only 17 per cent. underweight, while
in the all-American group near the University of Chicago they were 57
per cent. below normal.” The same condition of things was found in a
select and expensive boarding school in the neighbourhood of Boston.
A pathetic commentary--is it not?--on a country which leads the world
in food-packing and food-profits, that it should contain so many
parents who, with all the resources of the earth at their command, do
not know how to feed their own children. Surely, the famous American
spoiling has something to do with this. Whether it may not also be
behind the vast amount of mental disturbance in the population may well
be considered. The asylums are suddenly over-crowded. The National
Committee for Mental Hygiene suggests for our consolation that this may
be because the asylums are so much more humane than they used to be and
the families of the sufferers are more willing than formerly to consign
them to institutions.
It is the fashion to attribute all these mental tragedies to the strain
of business life and industry, and more recently to war-shock. But if
we are to accept the results of the latest psychological research,
the family must receive the lion’s share of blame. The groundwork
for fatal ruptures in the adult personality is laid in childhood and
in the home which produced the victim. For many years the discussion
of American nerves has hinged on the hectic haste of business and
industrial life, on the noise and bustle and lack of repose in the
national atmosphere. But we have neglected to accuse the family to its
face of failing to protect the child against the cataclysms of the
future while it had the chance.
The tremendous influence of the family on the individuals, old and
young, composing it is not merely a pious belief. We are, alas,
what our families make us. This is not a pleasant thought to many
individuals who have learned through bitter experience to look on
family relationships as a form of soul imprisonment. Yet it seems to be
an incontestable fact that personality is first formed--or deformed--in
the family constellation. The home really does the job for which the
school, the press, the church, and the State later get the credit.
It is a smoothly articulated course from the cradle onward, however,
in which the subjugated parent produces a subjugated child, not so
much by the rod of discipline--which figures very little in American
family life--but by the more powerful and pervasive force of habit and
attitude. Parents allow themselves to be a medium for transmitting the
incessant pressure of standards which allow no room for impulse and
initiative; they become the willing instrument of a public mania for
standardization which tries to make every human soul into the image
of a folded pattern. The babe is moulded in his cradle into the man
who will drop a sentimental tear, wear a white carnation, and send a
telegram on Mother’s Day--that travesty of a family festival which
shames affection and puts spontaneous feeling to the blush.
As the family itself grows smaller, this pressure of mechanistic and
conventional standards encroaches more closely upon the child. A
sizeable group of brothers and sisters create for themselves a savage
world which is their best protection against the civilization that
awaits them. But with one or two children, or a widely scattered
series, this natural protection is lost. The youngster is prematurely
assimilated to the adult world of parents who are nowadays, owing to
later marriage, not even quite so young as formerly they were. It
is a peculiarity of parents, especially of mothers, that they never
entertain a modest doubt as to whether they might be the best of all
possible company for their children. And obviously the tired business
man cannot properly substitute in the evenings for a roistering,
shouting brother who never came into the world at all; nor can all the
concentrated care of the most devoted mother take the place of the
companionship and discipline which children get from other children.
These considerations deserve more attention than they usually receive
in connection with the falling birth-rate. The figures mean that the
environment of the young child is being altered in a fundamental
respect. Parents of small families need to take effective steps to
counteract the loss. Practical things, like nursery schools, would be a
help. But, chiefly, if parents will insist on being companions of their
children, they need themselves to understand and practise the art of
common joy and happiness.
KATHARINE ANTHONY
THE ALIEN
The immigrant alien has been discussed by the Anglo-Saxon as
though he were an Anglo-Saxon “problem.” He has been discussed by
labour as though he were a labour “problem”; by interpreters of
American institutions as though man existed for institutions and for
institutions which the class interpreting them found advantageous
to its class. Occasionally the alien has been discussed from the
point of view of the alien and but rarely from the point of view of
democracy. The “problem” of the alien is largely a problem of setting
our own house in order. It is the “problem” of Americanizing America.
The outstanding fact of three centuries of immigration is that the
immigrant alien ceases to be an alien when economic conditions are such
as properly to assimilate him.
There is something rather humorous about the way America discusses “the
alien.” For we are all aliens. And what is less to our liking we are
almost all descended from the peasant classes of Europe. We are here
because our forebears were poor. They did not rule over there. They
were oppressed; they were often owned. And with but few exceptions
they came because of their poverty. For the rich rarely emigrate. And
in the 17th and 18th centuries there was probably a smaller percentage
of immigrants who could pass the literacy test than there are to-day.
Moreover, in the early days only suffering could drive the poor of
Europe from their poverty. For the conditions of travel were hazardous.
The death toll from disease was very high. It required more fortitude
to cross the Atlantic and pass by the ring of settlers out onto the
unbroken frontier than it does to pass Ellis Island and the exploiters
round about it to-day.
The immigration question has arisen because America, too, has created a
master class, a class which owns and employs and rules. And the alien
in America is faced by a class opinion, born of the change which has
come over America rather than any change in the alien himself. America
has changed. The alien remains much the same. And the most significant
phase of the immigration problem is the way we treat the alien and the
hypocrisy of our discussion of the subject.
Sociologists have given us a classification of the immigrant alien.
They speak of the “old immigration” and the “new immigration.”
The former is the immigration of the 17th and 18th and the first
three-quarters of the 19th centuries. It was English, Scotch, Irish,
German, Scandinavian with a sprinkling of French, Swiss, and other
nationalities. From the beginning, the preponderance was British.
During the 18th century there was a heavy Scotch inflow and during the
first half of the 19th a heavy Irish and German immigration. The Irish
came because of the famine of 1848, the Scotch in large part because of
the enclosure acts and the driving of the people from the land to make
way for deer preserves and grazing lands for the British aristocracy.
Most of the British immigration was the result of oppressive land laws
of one kind or another. The population of Ireland was reduced from
eight million to slightly over four million in three-quarters of a
century. The British immigrant of the 17th century, like the recent
Russian immigration, was driven from home by economic oppression. Only
a handful came to escape religious oppression or to secure political
liberty. The cause of immigration has remained the same from the
beginning until now.
The “old immigration” was from the North of Europe. It was of Germanic
stock. It was predominantly Protestant. But the most important fact
of all and the fact most usually ignored is an economic fact. The
early immigrant found a broad continent awaiting him, peopled only
by Indians. He became a free man. He took up a homestead. He ceased
to belong to any one else. He built for himself. He paid no rent, he
took no orders, he kept what he produced, and was inspired by hope and
ambition to develop his powers. It was economic, not political, freedom
that distinguishes the “old immigration” from the “new.”
The “new immigration” is from Southern and Central Europe. It is
Latin and Slavic. It is largely Catholic. It, too, is poor. It, too,
is driven out by oppression, mostly economic and for the most part
landed. Almost every wave of immigration has been in some way related
to changes for the worse in the landed systems of Europe. Wherever
the poverty has been the most distressing, there the impulse to move
has been the strongest. It has been the poverty of Europe that has
determined our immigration from the 17th century until now.
The ethnic difference is secondary. So is the religious. The
fundamental fact that distinguishes the “old immigration” from the
“new” is economic. The “new immigration” works for the “old.” It
found the free land all taken up. The public domain had passed into
the hand of the Pacific railroads, into great manorial estates. Land
thieves had repeated the acts of the British Parliament of the 18th
century. The Westward movement of peoples that had been going on from
the beginning of time came to an end when the pioneer of the 80’s and
90’s found only the bad lands left for settlement. That ended an era.
It closed the land to settlement and sent the immigrant to the city.
The peasant of Europe has become the miner and the mill worker. He left
one kind of serfdom to take up another. It is this that distinguishes
the “old immigrant” from the “new.” It is this that distinguishes the
old America from the America of to-day. And the problem of immigration,
like the problem of America, is the re-establishment of economic
democracy. The protective tariff bred exotic industry. The employer
wanted cheap labour. The mine owners and mill owners combined with the
steamship companies to stimulate immigration. They sent agents abroad.
They brought in gangs from Southern and Central Europe. They herded
them in mining camps, in mill towns, in the tenements. The closing of
the public domain and the rise of monopoly industry marks the turning
point in immigration. It marks the beginning of the immigration
“problem.” It is partly ethnic, but largely economic.
The “new immigration” from Southern and Central Europe began to
increase in volume about 1890. It came from Southern rather than
Northern Italy, from Poland, Hungary, Bohemia, Russia, the Balkans,
and the Levant. There was a sprinkling of Spanish and Portuguese
immigrants. In 1914 South and Central European immigration amounted
to 683,000, while the North European immigration was but 220,000. Of
the former 296,000 came from Italy, 123,000 from Poland, 45,000 from
Russia, and 45,000 from Hungary. These figures do not include Jewish
immigrants, who numbered 138,000. Of the North European immigrants
105,000 came from the British Isles, 80,000 came from Germany, and
36,000 from the Scandinavian countries.
Of the 14,000,000 persons of foreign birth now in the country, a very
large percentage is of South and Central European stock.