saloons where he sometimes gets too much of his native wine and then he
can be a really bad fellow.
In his native village he is as chaste as the women, but in America he
has a bad name and the neighbourhood in which he lives is not regarded
as the safest for unprotected women. The Chicago police especially, has
an eye upon his candy stores which are supposed to be as immoral as they
often are uninviting. The fact that in the Chicago colony, 10,000 Greeks
live, practically without their wives, explains this situation, and it
is just possible that 10,000 Americans under the same conditions would
not act differently.
The police in New Greece is not on a good footing with the inhabitants,
and occasionally shooting and stabbing occur. At such times it is
difficult to know who is more to blame; the police or the supposed
culprits.
The modern Greek is still punctiliously pious, his church and priest
follow him into every settlement, and he is loyal to the forms of his
religion. It is doubtful whether here or in the Old World, it discloses
to him the ethical teachings of Jesus; but in this, we are in a poor
condition to “cast the first stone” at him. His priest is not servilely
revered or feared, and the relation between them is too often that of
buyer and seller. The priest has the means of grace, the Greek is in
need of them for salvation, and he pays for what he gets,--sometimes
reluctantly.
At present it would fare ill with any one who would try to wean him from
his Church; for loyalty to it is loyalty to Greece, and the Greek has
never been a turn-coat.
No more patriotic people ever came to us than these modern Greeks, and
although that patriotism is centred upon their native country, they will
ultimately make good citizens, and even before that day, make splendid
politicians; for in the craft of politics every Greek is an adept, and
he is a “Mighty (place) hunter before the Lord.”
The only trouble with the government of modern Greece is, that it has
not enough offices for all the aspirants for them, and this learned
proletariat is a fair sized menace in this little country. In governing
themselves the modern Greeks have not been a conspicuous success, and
the only things we can teach them in this line are, the willingness to
acknowledge failure and the eagerness with which we seek the better way.
The New Greece of Chicago, a few blocks in a busy thoroughfare, is not a
large world, yet it is more Greek than the Ghetto is Russian or Little
Sicily is Italian. Homes in the true sense there are but few, because
the women have not yet come; the housing conditions of the Greeks are
bad and likely to remain so for a long time. There are grocery stores
containing little or no American food; saloons, by far too many, but
providing food and drink at the same time as is the custom in Greece; a
Greek bank, the front windows of which are covered by the advertisements
of steamship transportation companies; clothing and dry-goods stores,
whose proprietors are Greeks, although their stock in trade is
necessarily American; and the Greek church with a double cross to mark
its orthodoxy;--this is New Greece.
Out of it some of our newly arrived immigrants will go in the morning,
to the railroad tracks, to do the digging and the ditching. They will
be “bossed” by “Big Pete,” whose size is exceeded only by the length of
his oaths, and who boasts of being able to handle his countrymen easily,
because: “The Greeks can be handled only by a man who can show them that
he is a better man, and that I am; and if you don’t believe it, feel my
muscle. I pay them $1.50 a day and I treat them like Greeks.”
I watched “Big Pete” treat them like Greeks for half a day, and I did
not discover that such treatment saved a man from being geared to the
highest notch and made to work incessantly, while “Big Pete” watched and
cursed to help the pace.
The same night that they arrived, some of the young boys were looked
over by the men of the Greek colony, who had assisted them to come, and
whose labour was theirs until the passage money was paid, and paid with
interest. The next morning they began their tutelage in blacking boots
in so-called parlours, whose walls are covered by chromos depicting
Greek wars in which the Greeks are always the victors and the Turks are
slaughtered like sheep at the stockyards; there are also one or two
pictures of classic ruins.
In such surroundings, and seemingly unconscious of the life about them,
these boys will blacken boots for eighteen hours a day, with heart, mind
and soul in Greece; and their fingers in America only when they handle
our coin. They will attempt no conversation, even after they know our
speech, literally obeying the Scriptural injunction to say “Yea, yea and
nay, nay,” and not much else if they can help it. They are not nearly so
communicative as the Italians, and although a smile sits well on a Greek
face, I have rarely seen one there.
The confectionery stores which are outside of New Greece, are open all
the time, at least so long as a customer may be expected, and although
these customers are nearly all Americans, the Greeks have few friends
among them. They all return to New Greece as often as possible, and
there their virtues unfold, and “their soul delights itself in fatness.”
They are not exceeded even by the Chinese in that loyalty to native food
which I call the patriotism of the stomach, and a Greek grocery store is
filled from one end to the other with food from the classic isles. There
are dried vegetables whose present form does not betray their natural
shape, but which taste luscious, because the flavour of the native soil
clings to them; fish, dried, pickled and preserved in some form, and
cheese made from the milk of goats whose horns butted broken classic
vases instead of modern tin cans.
The smells seem ancient, too; but in these the Greek revels, and here he
is at home.
New Greece in Chicago is fortunate in having as one of its boundaries,
Hull House, one of the numerous activities of which consists in trying
to discover the possible point of contact between the home-born and the
stranger.
A Greek play given at Hull House opened the eyes of many American people
to the fact that the past is alive in the modern Greek, and at a
banquet, also at Hull House, where Americans and Greeks vied with each
other in extolling the glory of Athens, the wealth of the past was again
richly displayed. How near the American and the Greek have come to each
other through these two notable events, it is difficult to tell; but I
am sure that they have increased the pride of the Greeks, and have given
us an added respect for them.
But after all, they will be judged by the way they live to-day and by
the measure in which these small, dark-haired traders and workers
exemplify in their lives the virtues of those men of old, whose names
they have inherited and whose fame they are eager to preserve.
XX
THE NEW AMERICAN AND THE NEW PROBLEM
The miracle of assimilation wrought upon the older type of immigration,
gives to many of us, at least the hope, that the Slavs, Jews, Italians,
Hungarians and Greeks will blend into our life as easily as did the
Germans, the Scandinavians and the Irish.
The new immigrant, or the new American, as I call him, is however in
many respects, more of an alien than that older class which was related
to the native stock by race, speech, or religious ties. Therefore, I
recognize the fact that it is easy to be too optimistic about this
assimilation, and to regard the Americanizing of the stranger
accomplished, when he discards his picturesque native garb and speech,
to disappear in the commonplaceness of our attire; or when he has
mastered the intricacies of American idioms.
Outwardly the changes will be the same as those which have taken place
among the older immigrants, accomplished with the same dispatch, even
where the foreigners are segregated in their own quarters. I have in
mind a Polish colony of some six thousand souls in a New England town
where there are Polish churches, Polish schools, Polish “butchers,
bakers, and candlestick-makers”; and yet if you walk through that
section of the city you will see the women who a few years ago, when
they landed, wore the numberless short skirts and picturesque waists of
their own making, now sweeping the dust with long trailing skirts, their
ample forms encased in corsets and shirt-waists; while here and there
you will hear even the rustle of the silk lining.
The boys who upon landing wore coarse linen trousers and shirts have
long ago rebelled against these marks of their Old Country lineage, and
their fathers have bought them the short trousers and shirt-waists,
which make them look like young Americans.
If you are careful to observe, you will see that the children wear
stockings and underwear; luxuries undreamed of in the Old World, where
boots and shoes were the signs of manhood or womanhood, and where
stockings were unknown to the peasantry, being the marks of a high
calling and fine breeding.
Especially on Sunday that quarter of the town looks resplendent in its
newness, and the latest American fashions are reflected by the women who
are never a season behind in expanding or reducing to proper
proportions, their sleeves, which they wear short or long, very nearly
as the ladies do, who at that moment have entered the portals of the
great meeting house, the bulwark of American ideals in New England. It
is true that they all still eat black bread, drink vodka, and say:
“Pshas creff” when angry; but in eating, drinking and swearing, the
whole colony is on the way to complete Americanization, and one need
have no fear that externally the Slav, Italian and Jew will not “eat of
the fruit of the tree of the garden and become like one of us.”
The same thing is a fact in the matter of external racial
characteristics. The things which seem to us the most ineradicable and
written as if by an “iron pen upon the rock” are in most cases but chalk
marks on a blackboard, so easily are they washed away.
These things created by long ages of neglect, hunger, persecution and
climate, are often lost within one generation. The crowd on Rivington
Street in New York looks less Jewish than that in Warsaw, and the
Bohemians in Chicago look so like “us,” that in spite of the fact that I
have some training in detecting racial marks, I am often puzzled and
mistaken.
[Illustration: IN AN EVENING SCHOOL. NEW YORK.
American, Armenian, Austrian, Bohemian, Cuban, Dane, Dutch, Finlander,
French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Mexican,
Negro, Norwegian, Pole, Roumanian, Russian, Scotch, Slovak, Spanish,
Swede, Swiss. Can you tell them apart?]
Give me the immigrant on board of ship, and I will distinguish without
hesitation the Bulgarian from the Servian, the Slovak from the Russian,
and the Northern Italian from the Sicilian; but as I have said, I often
have the greatest difficulty in accomplishing such a feat, two or
three years after the men have landed. It is true that in the first
generation, the old racial marks still lie in the foreground, and that
even in the second generation, the blood will speak out here and there;
but it will require a very sharp scrutiny to detect this, and in the
most cases there will be no hint of the past.
In Chicago, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, St. Louis and St. Paul I have addressed
audiences composed of Slavs and of native Americans; and I have vainly
tried to distinguish them one from the other in the mass, although of
course when I had a very close and long look, I could make my
differentiation. These racial marks are most tenacious among certain
Orientals where strange strains of blood have accentuated the
difference; but I have seen some Armenians, people bearing the mark of
their race most strongly, who after ten years of life in America, had
lost the peculiar sharpness of their features and were in that stage of
transition where the American image was being imprinted upon them.
Scarcely a foreigner returns home after a long sojourn in America
without hearing at every step that he looks different. The Jew on board
of ship, to whom I have previously referred, who was warned not to wear
an American flag because it might cost him money in Europe, was right
when he said: “They will see it in mine face that I am from America.”
I do not wish to be as dogmatic in my assertions as Mr. Prescott F.
Hall, the Secretary of the Restriction Immigration League is in his. He
believes that we shall be the inheritors of all the disagreeable racial
characteristics which the immigrant brings with him. It is still too
early to foretell; the new American has not been long enough with us,
and moreover the whole question of racial characteristics is still an
open one.
Nevertheless in face of the undisputed fact that these outward racial
marks disappear, may we not also believe that with them go the peculiar
racial qualities which mark and mar the life of the stranger?
Mr. Hall has many figures with which to prove his side of the case; I
have but a few facts gathered from rather intimate association with
certain groups of foreigners.
Take for instance the Polish peasant. It is a fact that in the Old World
he is known for his inability to distinguish between “mine and thine,”
and between truth and falsehood. The Polish proverb says: “The peasant
will steal anything except millstones and hot iron,” and I know of
instances where the only thing untrue about the saying was the last
saving clause. In this country I have been in nearly every one of the
Polish communities and neither thieving nor lying is laid to their
charge. The little town of Marblehead, Ohio, located in a peninsula in
Lake Erie is peopled largely by Poles and Slovaks who find employment
in the large stone quarries. Around them are prosperous farms, large
orchards and vineyards. I took pains to inquire especially what was the
attitude of these Slavs towards stock, chickens, and fruit which did not
belong to them; and not one of the neighbouring farmers complained of
having had anything stolen from his premises, although these Slavs have
lived in that neighbourhood nearly twenty years.
In the Old World pigs had to be locked in their sties; they were not
safe even after they were butchered. Grain disappeared, even when it was
vigilantly guarded from the time it was a blade of grass until it was in
the barn. The Polish and Slovak peasants were thievish in the Old
Country because they were hungry, and their wage was not sufficient to
buy enough bread. In Marblehead they have bread enough and to spare, as
well as meat and fruit for little money--they do not have to steal.
In the Old World they lied and stole because they were driven by
necessity. When a Polish regiment came to any town in Austria, women had
to be especially guarded against their lust; but no such charge has been
brought against the regiments of young labourers who have come to
American cities, and who are everywhere regarded as chaste as their
American brothers. In the matter of intemperance they have so far
remained as bad as their reputation; but the average mining camp is
rarely in a Prohibition district and the example set by the Americans
they meet is not conducive to sobriety.
The Jew is certainly distinctive; his faith and fate alike have guarded
his racial qualities; yet he must be blind indeed, who does not see a
vast change going on, within as well as without. The Jew is still a
sharp bargainer, but in that peculiarity the Yankee is giving him
“pointers,” and he will have to grow sharper still if he wishes to keep
up in the race. His business talent is likely to increase because he is
in a business atmosphere; but his business methods will change and have
changed, because his inner being is undergoing a transformation. Subtle
as these changes are I have traced them and can detect them even in the
crowd which is a far different mass from that of the Jews of Europe, a
fact which recently I saw very clearly illustrated.
It was the Jewish anniversary of the death of the great Zionist leader,
Theodore Hertzl. In front of the Grand Opera House in Hartford, Conn.,
were large Yiddish placards announcing the fact, and all the evening
crowds of men, women and children passed into the building filling every
available space on floor and in galleries. The dignitaries of Hartford’s
Jewry sat in the boxes, and young men and women passed through the
crowd, securing members for the various Jewish societies. It was an
orderly assembly, more orderly than any synagogue meeting I ever
attended in Russia. America had toned them down, they were less excited,
although even here a policeman had quite a hard task in disposing of one
man who insisted upon entering, in spite of the fact that he had lost
his ticket.
These people had learned the first lesson in
self-government--self-control; or rather, they were in the way of
learning it. They still swayed to and fro with the movement of the
speaker, a habit acquired in the Talmud schools and practiced at their
worship; but one could see the younger element holding the older in
check, and the older keeping itself in check for the sake of its
children who had learned American ways. There was an indescribable gain
in their looks, in those faces where greed, suffering and brutal hate
had left their deep traces.
It was a look of hope akin to joy, some such triumphant gladness as the
Jew would feel if the portals of his New Jerusalem were to open again to
the King of Glory. My own heart throbbed gladly when I beheld them for I
saw the gain they had made in manhood and womanhood.
The program was also a hopeful thing. It was long enough for the meeting
of one of our learned societies and the men had the habit of stealing
one another’s text and time; but whether they were apt learners or had
imported the habit I do not know. The first address was by the mayor of
the city and he was greeted like a friend and spoke like one. It was not
the flattering speech of a politician but a scholarly, sympathetic
address, of one who knew Israel’s past and who sympathized with her
aspirations. He knew all about the Zionist movement and about Dr. Hertzl
and spoke as one who was thoroughly acquainted with his subject. After
he had finished speaking the chairman said, “Whenever I hear a Christian
speak of Israel as this man has spoken, I feel like saying, ‘Almost thou
persuadest me to be a Christian.’”
On the whole it may be said that these new Americans are in that stage
of cultural development or undevelopment, which makes it probable that
so strong and virile a people as that among whom their lot is cast, will
impress them so forcibly, that those things which we call racial
characteristics will after a while disappear.
Whether we shall enrich this New American by our own ideals, whether we
shall implant in him the broad culture of our own spiritual and
intellectual heritage, is a real problem whose solving may puzzle even
future generations.
I do not believe that any of the people who come to us, speaking of
races and nationalities as a whole, are degenerate, or so hardened that
they are not capable of assimilation and transformation. Although as I
have said, this cannot yet be proved by our own experience, we can
reason with some assurance from the experience of countries in which
these strangers who come to us are also regarded as aliens and subjects;
and where their way upward is retarded rather than helped as it is on
this side of the great sea.
Let me take as an example the Slovak, one of the crudest Slavic types,
who bears all the marks of the Slav in his features and in all his inner
being. In his own home he belonged to a subject race; for the Magyar
being more powerful and more warlike, was his ruler. In the villages
where this Slovak lives he has been in touch with the Magyar and also
with the Germanic element, to a greater or less degree. I have noticed
this: That wherever he has had a chance, wherever political and economic
difficulties were not too great, he grew into the full stature of the
man above him; and in the long struggle for racial supremacy in Hungary,
the Slav has not yet said the last word. Physically, morally and
spiritually, he equals the Magyar or the German; that is, wherever the
opportunity is not taken from him by wrong economic and political
adjustment.
I hold no brief for the Slovak or for any Slav; there are many things in
his nature which are repellent. He is too much of a realist by nature
for my taste, and there is a certain kind of crudeness and cruelty in
his make up, from both of which I have had occasion to suffer. Yet in
spite of these handicaps I believe that, given the proper environment
and the proper example, or if you please the proper masters, he will
develop into that kind of American which we, the average, are. He
usually takes more than he leaves behind; he inherits more than he
bequeaths; he is human material in the rough; very, very rough but human
material nevertheless. Made of as good clay as any of us, although
perhaps not yet fashioned into the best mould. The moulding will be the
problem; for the New American is more Slavic than anything else.
The Jews, a subject race everywhere, have suffered so much from friends
and foes alike, that to defend or accuse them would be a work of
supererogation. It is, however, undeniably true, that Judaism in America
faces a greater crisis than it faced in the captivity of Babylon. There
Judaism was made, here it is being unmade; there foes tried to make the
Jews forget Jerusalem, here their friends have difficulty in making them
remember it; there a hope of the Messiah grew up within them, here the
term is so strange to them that it needs reiteration and interpretation.
The loss to Judaism in America amounts to a catastrophe, and from the
present outlook its complete dissolution is merely a matter of time,
only retarded by the constant influx of immigrants from Russia and
Poland. The average Jew in America has become so American that he does
not remember the hole from which he was dug, or that Abraham was his
father and that Sarah bore him.
A certain vague racial fealty holds one Jew to the other; but a strong
and mighty passion holds him to America, making him so much an American
and so little a Jew. It may be true that the leopard does not change his
spots; but even the leopard may lose his spots when he does not need
them. Many of the racial marks of Jew and Gentile alike will disappear
when the need of them passes away; and they will take on readily other
marks which fit them for a better environment.
The problem with the Jew is not how to make him less a Jew; but how to
make him a better Jew, and consequently a better American; for Judaism
properly interpreted has in it all the elements to make of men good
citizens, good neighbours and good friends.
At the conclusion of a lecture recently, a rather stupid but zealous man
asked me regarding the Jews. “Can we trust them with the Constitution?”
It was a stupid question asked by a stupid man. God trusted them with
the oracles, the Commandments and the prophecies; the richest spiritual
gifts in the keeping of the Deity. To be sure, they broke nearly all the
Commandments and killed their prophets; but we have done the same
thing; and the Constitution is as safe in the hands of the Jew, as the
Bible is in the hands of the Gentile.
Granting that each one of these races will bequeath us something evil,
let us take the standpoint of the secretary of the Immigration
Restriction League and see to what we shall fall heir. We shall get from
the Slav his crudity, from the Jew his sharpness, from the Italian his
mobility, from the Armenian his Oriental shrewdness, which is akin to
lying, from the Magyar a fiery temper; from each of them something which
we call ill. When these disagreeable qualities are properly proportioned
and balanced, they may so counteract one another, that in the sum total
we may after all be the gainers. It seems absurd to go about this matter
mathematically, whether one traces the possible gain or loss.