its enlightening beams on industrial conditions in other trades, in
which, too, one race is perpetually played off against another with
the unfailing result of cuts in wages and lowering of standards of
living.
All tests of admission to secure some measure of selection among new
arrivals are but experiments in an untried field. We have no tests but
rough-and-ready ones, and even these are often inconsistent with one
another. For instance, for a good many years now the immigration
inspectors have taken such precautions as they could against the
admission of the insane, but it is only recently that modified Binet
tests have been used to check the entry of a socially far more
injurious class, the congenitally feebleminded.
Those who have worked extensively among newly arrived foreign girls
find that they arrive here with, as a rule, much less idea of what
awaits them, what will be expected of them, and the difficulties
and even dangers they may encounter, than the men. When the Chicago
Women's Trade Union League began its immigration department a few
years ago, it was found that three dollars was about the average
sum which a girl had in her pocket when she reached the city of her
destination. Ten dollars was felt to be a fortune, while I have since
heard of young girls landing alone in a great city, and without a
single cent with which to leave the depot. It is often said, why do
their mothers let them go away (sixteen and eighteen are common ages)
so young, so inexperienced? It must be remembered that many of the
Polish and Lithuanian girls, for example, come from small villages.
The mothers themselves have never seen a big city, and have not
the remotest conception of any place of more than five hundred
inhabitants, where the distances are short, and where everyone knows
everyone else. They have no idea of the value of money, when it comes
to earning and spending it in America. Three dollars a week is to
mother, as to daughter, an ample sum for the young traveler.
It often happens that many of the young immigrants have had letters
from those who had preceded them. But we know what human nature is.
The person who succeeds proudly writes home the good news. The still
more successful person is able to take a trip home and display the
visible signs of his or her wealth. The unsuccessful, as a rule,
either does not write at all, or writing, does not admit the
humiliating truth.
In the ignorance and inexperience of the young foreign girl the white
slaver finds his easiest prey, and the betrayer is too often the man
speaking her own tongue. On this terrible subject the nation, like
other nations, is beginning to wake up to its responsibilities in
relation to the immigrant girl as in relation to other girls. This
special danger to young womanhood is so linked with other social
questions that I merely allude to it here, because of the certainty
I entertain that much even of this danger would lessen if the
trade-union movement among women were so strong and so extensive that
any woman, young or old, could travel from place to place as a member
of a truly world-wide organization. Then she would have a better
chance of arriving well posted as to ways of earning her living, and
of finding friends in every city and every town and village.
It may be urged that there exist already organizations world-wide in
their scope, such as the religious associations, for the very purpose
of safeguarding wandering girlhood. There are, and they accomplish a
notable amount of good. But their appeal is not universal; they never
have money or workers enough to cope adequately with a task like this,
and they are not built upon the sound economic basis of the trade
union.
The immigrant problem was not encountered by the first factory workers
here, who were American-born. So we find the earliest leaders in the
trade organization of women were wholly drawn from the daughters of
the native settlers. They felt and spoke always as free-women, "the
daughters of freemen." When this class of girls withdrew from the
factories, they gave place to the Irish immigrant, in some respects a
less advanced type than themselves. I have briefly traced some of the
economic reasons which affected the rise, growth and eventual passing
away of the various phases of trade unionism among women in this
country. The progress of these was radically modified by the influx
into the trades of workers from one nation after another; by the
passing from a trade or a group of trades of body after body of the
old workers, starved out or giving way before the recent arrivals,
whose pitiful power to seize the jobs of the others and earn some sort
of a living, has lain in their very weakness and helplessness.
So the first Irish girls who came into the factory life of New England
were peasants, with no knowledge of city life, but quick and ready to
learn. They went into the new occupations, and picked up the new ways
of doing things. And by the time they had grasped the meaning of this
strange industrial world in which they found themselves, they were
in the relentless grasp of machine-controlled industry. Under
untold handicaps they had to begin at the very beginning, and start
rebellions on their own account. From the sixties on we can detect the
preponderance of Irish names in the annals of early trade unionism.
When they had adapted themselves to their conditions, for they quickly
became Americanized, they showed in the trade unions which they
organized the remarkable qualities for political leadership which the
Irish and Irish-Americans have ever since displayed in this country.
The important rôle which Irish and Irish-American men have played in
the councils of American trade unionism is well known, and their power
today remains very great. So as regards the women, by glancing over
the past we can readily trace the influence of the Irish girl, in the
efforts after organization, unsuccessful as these often were. It was
Maggie McNamara who led the Brooklyn Female Burnishers' Association
in 1868. It was during the sixties that Kate Mullaney was leading her
splendid body of Troy laundresses, and twenty years later we find
Leonora Barry, another Irish girl, as the leading spirit among the
women of the Knights of Labor.
Except in isolated instances, no other race has come to the front
among working-women until recently. We read of German women and
Bohemian women as faithful unionists. But Germans, Bohemians and
Scandinavians advanced or lost ground along with the others. By this
time, moreover, the nation had become more habituated to absorbing
immigrants from various nations, and the distinction between races
was less accentuated after a few years' residence. On the part of the
Germans and Scandinavians, amalgamation has been so speedy, and in the
end so complete, that most of those who have been here some time, and
invariably the children of the first-comers, are Americans through and
through.
With the foreign peoples that we have with us today, the situation
is somewhat different. Certain general principles are common to the
course of all these migrations. They originate, on the one hand, in
economic pressure, complicated not unfrequently with religious wars or
persecutions, and on the other, in the expectation of better times
in a new country. They meet the demands of a new country, asking for
labor, and are further subject to the inducements of agents. Under our
haphazard social arrangements, the newly arrived often meet wretched
conditions, and have no means of knowing how they are being used to
lower yet further wages for themselves and others.
Always, whatever their own descent and history, the older inhabitants
feel resentment, knowing no more than their unfortunate rivals what
is the underlying reason of the trouble. Milder forms of antagonism
consist in sending the immigrant workers "to Coventry," using
contemptuous language of or to them, as we hear every day in "dago"
or "sheeny," and in objections by the elders to the young people
associating together, while the shameful use that is continually made
of the immigrants as strike-breakers may rouse such mutual indignation
that there are riots and pitched battles as a consequence.
The first indignant efforts to exclude the intruders are vain. More
and more do experienced trade unionists admit this, and plead for the
acceptance of the inevitable, and turn all their energies towards the
organization of the unwelcome rivals. Scabs they must be, if
left alone. Better take them in where they can be influenced and
controlled, and can therefore do less damage. Here is where the help
of the foreign organizer is so essential to overcome the indifference
and quell the misgivings of the strangers in a situation where the
influence of the employer is almost always adverse.
At length the immigrant gains a footing; he is left in possession,
either wholly or partly, and amalgamation to a great degree takes
place. A generation grows up that knew not the sad rivalry of their
fathers, for fresh industrial rivalries on different grounds have
replaced the old, as sharply cut, but not on race lines.
Every one of these stages can be seen today in all the industrial
centers and in many rural ones, with one people or another.
While the tendency of the organized labor movement, both in the United
States and in Canada, is towards restriction, whether exercised
directly through immigration laws, or indirectly through laws against
the importation of contract labor, there exist wide differences of
opinion among trade unionists, and in the younger groups are many who
recognize that there are limits beyond which no legislation can
affect the issue, and that even more important than the conditions of
admission to this new world is the treatment which the worker receives
after he passes the entrance gate. If it is necessary in the interests
of those already in this country to guard the portals carefully, it is
equally necessary for the welfare of all, that the community through
their legislators, both state and national, should accept the
responsibility of preventing the ruthless exploitation of immigrants
in the interest of private profit. Exploited and injured themselves,
these become the unconscious instruments of hardly less ruthless
exploitation and injury to their fellows in the competitive struggle
for a bare subsistence.
Such exploitation could be in some degree checked through the
authorities assuming control, and especially by furnishing to the new
arrivals abundant information and advice, acquainting them with the
state of the labor market in different localities and at different
times. It is for the authorities also to see that the transportation
of newly arrived foreigners from place to place is rendered secure;
to encourage their early instruction in the language and laws of the
country and the ordinances of the city, along with enlightenment as to
the resources in time of trouble, which lie open to the poorest, if
they but know where to turn.
In the first number of the _Immigrants in America Review_, the editor,
Frances A. Kellor, points out what an unusual opportunity has been
granted to America to formulate a definite program with reference
to alien residents. Now is the time, she insists, to perfect laws,
establish systems and improve conditions, when, owing to the European
War, but few immigrants are arriving, and therefore, when no great
rush of people demand expedients. "Now is the time to build, to
repair, to initiate, so we may obviate the necessity for expedients."
The writer shows that efforts ought to be directed along seven lines,
and the work on these seven lines should be closely coördinated.
1. _Transportation_. The safe transportation of admitted aliens to
their destination.
2. _Employment_. Security of employment, and adequate coördinated,
regulated labor-market organization.
3. _Standards of living_. Making it possible for the immigrant
to adopt and maintain better standards of living, by removal of
discriminations in localities, housing and sanitation, and by
preventing overcrowding.
4. _Savings_. Information regarding savings banks, loan funds,
agricultural colonies, and legislation regarding the same.
5. _Education_. Reduction of illiteracy, the teaching of civics, and
extension of opportunity of education and industrial training.
6. _Citizenship_. Higher and simpler naturalization requirements, and
processes, and placing the legal status of the alien upon a just and
consistent foundation.
7. _Public Charges_. National and state coöperation in the care of any
who may become public charges.
No one can suppose that every Greek boy desires to become a shoeblack,
or that every Scandinavian girl is fitted for domestic service and for
nothing else; that every Slavic Jewess should become a garment-worker;
that every Italian man should work on the roads; that the Lithuanian
and Hungarian, no matter what their training or their ability, should
be compelled to go into the steel-rolling mills. All this because they
land speaking no English, and not knowing how to place themselves in
occupations better adapted to their inclinations and qualifications.
No one knows how many educated and trained men and women are thus
turned into hewers of wood and drawers of water, to the ruin of their
own lives and the loss of the community.
The unregulated private employment office, the padrone and the
sweat-shop are the agencies who direct the newcomers to jobs, whether
it be in the city or out in the country camp.
Many of the new arrivals would gladly take up agriculture, if they
knew where to go, and were safeguarded against imposition--having a
fee taken, for instance, and then landed several hundred miles away,
penniless, to find all the jobs gone.
The immigrant on landing is very much like the child leaving school to
go to work, and requires vocational guidance just as sorely.
The needs of the alien are closely related to the general question of
unemployment. He suffers in an acute degree from the want of system in
the regularization of industry, and the fact that we have failed
to recognize unemployment, and all irregularity of employment as
a condition to be met and provided against by industry and the
community.
Americans take credit to themselves that so many immigrants do well,
succeed, become prosperous citizens and members of society, but wish
to shoulder none of the blame when the alien falls down by the way, or
lives under such home conditions that his babies die, and his older
children fall out of their grades, drift into the street trades or
find their way into the juvenile court. Americans forget how many of
all these evil results are due to the want of social machinery to
enable the alien to fit into his new surroundings, or the neglect to
set such social machinery agoing where it already exists. In the small
towns it is not unusual for health ordinances to be strictly enforced
in the English-speaking localities, and allowed to remain a dead
letter in the immigrant districts. In Chicago it was in the stockyards
district that garbage was dumped for many years; garbage, the product
of other wards, that the residents of those other wards insisted be
removed from their back-doors. How much of the high infant death-rate
among stockyards families has been due to the garbage exposed and
decaying, so carefully brought there, from the fine residential
districts?
Legally the alien suffers under a burden of disabilities of which he
is usually wholly unaware, until he has broken some law or regulation
devised, it would appear, often for his discomfiture, rather than
for anyone's else benefit. These laws and regulations, in themselves
sometimes just and sometimes unjust, make up a mass of the most
inconsistent legislation. State laws, varying from state to state, and
city ordinances equally individual limit the employment of aliens
on public work. Peddlers' and fishers' licenses come under similar
restrictions; so with the owning of property, the right to leave
property by will, say, to a wife and children in Europe, and the right
even to protection of life, in violation of treaty rights. "The state
courts have never punished a single outrage of this kind" [violence at
the hands of a mob]. The federal government, Miss Kellor states, makes
a payment to a victim's heirs out of a secret service fund "if the
ambassador is persistent, and threatens to withdraw from Washington if
the murder of his countrymen is not to be punished."
These are all most serious handicaps, and certainly the need for
investigation of all laws, the codifying of many, and the abolition of
some is urgent.
If some of these handicaps were lifted from the immigrant, complaint
against under-cutting competition of cheap foreign labor would largely
cease, and the task of organizers among the foreign workers would be
much simplified, even while we are waiting for the day when it will be
possible for all to obtain work without turning others out of their
jobs, which can only come about when we produce intelligently for the
use of all, instead of for the profit of the exceptional few.
Here and there work on the lines sketched out is beginning, even
though much of it is as yet unrelated to the rest. The community is
making headway, in the acknowledgment by various states, headed by New
York, of the just claim of the immigrant, once he is admitted within
our borders, to the protection of the government. For long after
the Federal authorities took over the control of immigration, their
concern was limited to some degree of restriction over the entry
of foreigners, and the enforcement of deportation, when such was
considered necessary. Quite a fresh departure, however, was made
in the year 1910, when the state of New York, following the
recommendations of its State Commission on Immigration (1909),
established its Bureau of Industries and Immigration, which really
grew out of the activities of a private society. Other communities
are also realizing their responsibility. California established a
permanent Commission on Immigration and Housing in 1913, and the
Investigating Commissions of Massachusetts and New Jersey recommended
similar agencies in their reports to the legislatures in 1914.
New York has already accomplished excellent results, and more
important still, has shown the direction, in which other states may
both follow and coöperate. A few years more may see us with interstate
legislation insuring the better care and protection of immigrants all
over the country, interstate legislation being the curiously
indirect method which the United States has hit upon to overcome
the imperfections and deficiencies of its national instrument of
government. One of these days may even find the Federal House at
Washington taking over, in other lines besides that of foreign
workers, the functions outlined for it in the first instance by the
daughter states.
The United States Government has recently entered a new field in the
passage of a law, authorizing the protection of immigrants in transit
to their destination, and providing for the establishment of a station
in Chicago, where the immigrants will go on their arrival, and will
thus be protected from the gross frauds from which they have so long
suffered. The present administration also promises an experiment
in the development of the Bureau of Information in the Immigration
Department.
It is not so easy for any of us to give the same dispassionate
consideration to the problem that is with us as to that which has long
been settled, and has passed away into the calm atmosphere of history.
And truly, there are complications in the present situation which our
fathers had not to face. And first, the much greater dissimilarity in
training, mental outlook, social customs, and in the case of the
men and women from eastern Europe, not to speak of Asia, the utter
unlikeness in language, makes mutual knowledge and understanding much
more difficult, and the growth of mutual confidence, therefore, much
slower.
No one has yet analyzed the effects upon the nervous system of the
migrating worker, of the unsettlement of habits, and the change of
surroundings and social environment, working in connection with the
changed climatic conditions, and the often total change in food. This
is one phase of the immigrant problem which deserves the most careful
study. And when, as too often in the case of the Russian Jew, this
complete alteration of life is piled on top of the persecutions so
many of them have endured, and the shocks so many have sustained
before leaving their native land, the normal, usual effects of
the transition are emphasized and exaggerated, and it may take a
generation or longer before complete Americanization and amalgamation
is brought about.
The longer such a change is in being consummated, the more is the
new generation likely to retain some of their most characteristic
qualities permanently; to retain and therefore to impress these upon
the dominant race, in this case upon the American nation, through
association, and finally, through marriage. Especially is this a
probable result where we find such vitality and such intensely
prepotent power as among the Jews.
In reference to trade-union organization among women, while each
nationality presents its own inherent problem, there is equally
no doubt but that each will in the future make its own special
contribution towards the progress and increased scope of the movement
among the women workers.
As matters are developing today, the fulfillment of this promise of
the future has already begun most markedly among the Slavic Jewesses,
especially those from Russia. These young women have already brought,
and are every day bringing into the dreary sweatshop and the
speeded-up factory a spirit of fearlessness and independence both
in thought and action, which is having an amazing effect upon the
conditions of factory industry in the trades where they work. So also,
supporting and supported by the men of their own race, these Russian
Jewish girls, many of them extremely young, are inspiring their
fellow-workers and interpenetrating the somewhat matter-of-fact
atmosphere of American trade unionism with their own militant
determination and enthusiasm. With most, the strike has been their
initiation into trade unionism, often the general strike in their own
trade, the strike on a scale hitherto unparalleled in trades where
either the whole or a very considerable proportion of the workers are
women. Some again, especially among the leaders, approach unionism
through the ever open door of socialism. If I speak here of the women
of the Slavic Jewish race, it is not that I wish to ignore the men. I
have to leave them on one side, that is all.
These girls add to courage and enthusiasm, such remarkable gifts of
intellect and powers of expression as to make them a power wherever
they have become awakened to the new problems that face them here and
now, and to their own responsibilities in relation thereto. They are
essentially individualists. They do not readily or naturally either
lean upon others or coöperate with others, nor yet confide in others.
They come here with a history generations long of ill-treatment and
persecution. Many thousands of them have witnessed their dearest
tortured, outraged and killed with the narrowest possible escape from
some similar fate themselves. To most any return to their native
country is completely barred, and they do not therefore nurse the
hope, so inveterately cherished by the Italians, for instance, that
they may some day be able to go back.