status and competition regarding the part that each should play in the
social system. Generally speaking the advantage of status is in its
power to give order and continuity. As Gibbon informs us, "The superior
prerogative of birth, when it has obtained the sanction of time and
popular opinion, is the plainest and least invidious of all distinctions
among mankind," and he is doubtless right in ascribing the confusion of
the later Roman Empire largely to the lack of an established rule for
the transmission of imperial authority. The chief danger of status is
that of suppressing personal development, and so of causing social
enfeeblement, rigidity, and ultimate decay. On the other hand,
competition develops the individual and gives flexibility and animation
to the social order, its danger being chiefly that of disintegration in
some form or other. The general tendency in modern times has been toward
the relative increase of the free or competitive principle, owing to the
fact that the rise of other means of securing stability has diminished
the need for status. The latter persists, however, even in the freest
countries, as the method by which wealth is transmitted, and also in
social classes, which, so far as they exist at all, are based chiefly
upon inherited wealth and the culture and opportunities that go with it.
The ultimate reason for this persistence--without very serious
opposition--in the face of the obvious inequalities and limitations
upon liberty that it perpetuates is perhaps the fact that no other
method of transmission has arisen that has shown itself capable of
giving continuity and order to the control of wealth.
2. Personal Competition and the Evolution of Individual Types[236]
The ancient city was primarily a fortress, a place of refuge in time of
war. The modern city, on the contrary, is primarily a convenience of
commerce and owes its existence to the market place around which it
sprang up. Industrial competition and the division of labor, which have
probably done most to develop the latent powers of mankind, are possible
only upon condition of the existence of markets, of money and other
devices for the facilitation of trade and commerce.
The old adage which describes the city as the natural environment, of
the free man still holds so far as the individual man finds in the
chances, the diversity of interests and tasks, and in the vast
unconscious co-operation of city life, the opportunity to choose his own
vocation and develop his peculiar individual talents. The city offers a
market for the special talents of individual men. Personal competition
tends to select for each special task the individual who is best suited
to perform it.
The difference of natural talents in different men is, in
reality, much less than we are aware of; and the very different
genius which appears to distinguish men of different
professions, when grown up to maturity, is not upon many
occasions so much the cause, as the effect of the division of
labour. The difference between the most dissimilar characters,
between a philosopher and a common street porter, for example,
seems to arise not so much from nature, as from habit, custom
and education. When they came into the world, and for the first
six or eight years of their existence, they were perhaps very
much alike, and neither their parents nor playfellows could
perceive any remarkable difference. About that age, or soon
after, they come to be employed in different occupations. The
difference of talents comes then to be taken notice of, and
widens by degrees, till at last the vanity of the philosopher
is willing to acknowledge scarce any resemblance. But without
the disposition to truck, barter, and exchange, every man must
have procured to himself every necessary and conveniency of
life which he wanted. All must have had the same duties to
perform, and the same work to do, and there could have been no
such difference of employment as could alone give occasion to
any great difference of talent.
As it is the power of exchanging that gives occasion to the
division of labour, so the extent of this division must always
be limited by the extent of that power, or, in other words, by
the extent of the market.... There are some sorts of industry,
even of the lowest kind, which can be carried on nowhere but in
a great town.
Success, under conditions of personal competition, depends upon
concentration upon some single task, and this concentration stimulates
the demand for rational methods, technical devices, and exceptional
skill. Exceptional skill, while based on natural talent, requires
special preparation, and it has called into existence the trade and
professional schools, and finally bureaus for vocational guidance. All
of these, either directly or indirectly, serve at once to select and
emphasize individual differences.
Every device which facilitates trade and industry prepares the way for a
further division of labor and so tends further to specialize the tasks
in which men find their vocations.
The outcome of this process is to break down or modify the older
organization of society, which was based on family ties, on local
associations, on culture, caste, and status, and to substitute for it an
organization based on vocational interests.
In the city every vocation, even that of a beggar, tends to assume the
character of a profession, and the discipline which success in any
vocation imposes, together with the associations that it enforces,
emphasizes this tendency.
The effect of the vocations and the division of labor is to produce, in
the first instance, not social groups but vocational types--the actor,
the plumber, and the lumber-jack. The organizations, like the trade and
labor unions, which men of the same trade or profession form are based
on common interests. In this respect they differ from forms of
association like the neighborhood, which are based on contiguity,
personal association, and the common ties of humanity. The different
trades and professions seem disposed to group themselves in classes,
that is to say, the artisan, business, and professional classes. But in
the modern democratic state the classes have as yet attained no
effective organization. Socialism, founded on an effort to create an
organization based on "class consciousness," has never succeeded in
creating more than a political party.
The effects of the division of labor as a discipline may therefore be
best studied in the vocational types it has produced. Among the types
which it would be interesting to study are: the shopgirl, the policeman,
the peddler, the cabman, the night watchman, the clairvoyant, the
vaudeville performer, the quack doctor, the bartender, the ward boss,
the strike-breaker, the labor agitator, the school teacher, the
reporter, the stockbroker, the pawnbroker; all of these are
characteristic products of the conditions of city life; each with its
special experience, insight, and point of view determines for each
vocational group and for the city as a whole its individuality.
3. Division of Labor and Social Solidarity[237]
The most remarkable effect of the division of labor is not that it
accentuates the distinction of functions already divided but that it
makes them interdependent. Its rôle in every case is not simply to
embellish or perfect existing societies but to make possible societies
which, without it, would not exist. Should the division of labor between
the sexes be diminished beyond a certain point, the family would cease
to exist and only ephemeral sexual relations would remain. If the sexes
had never been separated at all, no form of social life would ever have
arisen. It is possible that the economic utility of the division of
labor has been a factor in producing the existing form of conjugal
society. Nevertheless, the society thus created is not limited to merely
economic interests; it represents a unique social and moral order.
Individuals are mutually bound together who otherwise would be
independent. Instead of developing separately, they concert their
efforts; they are interdependent parts of a unity which is effective not
only in the brief moments during which there is an interchange of
services but afterward indefinitely. For example, does not conjugal
solidarity of the type which exists today among the most cultivated
people exert its influence constantly and in all the details of life? On
the other hand, societies which are created by the division of labor
inevitably bear the mark of their origin. Having this special origin, it
is not possible that they should resemble those societies which have
their origin in the attraction of like for like; the latter are
inevitably constituted in another manner, repose on other foundations,
and appeal to other sentiments.
The assumption that the social relations resulting from the division of
labor consist in an exchange of services merely is a misconception of
what this exchange implies and of the effects it produces. It assumes
that two beings are mutually dependent the one on the other, because
they are both incomplete without the other. It interprets this mutual
dependence as a purely external relation. Actually this is merely the
superficial expression of an internal and more profound state. Precisely
because this state is constant, it provokes a complex of mental images
which function with a continuity independent of the series of external
relations. The image of that which completes us is inseparable from the
image of ourselves, not only because it is associated with us, but
especially because it is our natural complement. It becomes then a
permanent and integral part of self-consciousness to such an extent that
we cannot do without it and seek by every possible means to emphasize
and intensify it. We like the society of the one whose image haunts us,
because the presence of the object reinforces the actual perception and
gives us comfort. We suffer, on the contrary, from every circumstance
which, like separation and death, is likely to prevent the return or
diminish the vivacity of the idea which has become identified with our
idea of ourselves.
Short as this analysis is, it suffices to show that this complex is not
identical with that which rests on sentiments of sympathy which have
their source in mere likeness. Unquestionably there can be the sense of
solidarity between others and ourselves only so far as we conceive
others united with ourselves. When the union results from a perception
of likeness, it is a cohesion. The two representations become
consolidated because, being undistinguished totally or in part, they are
mingled and are no more than one, and are consolidated only in the
measure in which they are mingled. On the contrary, in the case of the
division of labor, each is outside the other, and they are united only
because they are distinct. It is not possible that sentiments should be
the same in the two cases, nor the social relations which are derived
from them the same.
We are then led to ask ourselves if the division of labor does not play
the same rôle in more extended groups; if, in the contemporaneous
societies where it has had a development with which we are familiar, it
does not function in such a way as to integrate the social body and to
assure its unity. It is quite legitimate to assume that the facts which
we have observed reproduce themselves there, but on a larger scale. The
great political societies, like smaller ones, we may assume maintain
themselves in equilibrium, thanks to the specialization of their tasks.
The division of labor is here, again, if not the only, at least the
principal, source of the social solidarity. Comte had already reached
this point of view. Of all the sociologists, so far as we know, he is
the first who has pointed out in the division of labor anything other
than a purely economic phenomenon. He has seen there "the most essential
condition of the social life," provided that one conceives it "in all
its rational extent, that is to say, that one applies the conception to
the ensemble of all our diverse operations whatsoever, instead of
limiting it, as we so often do, to the simple material usages."
Considered under this aspect, he says:
It immediately leads us to regard not only individuals and
classes but also, in many respects, the different peoples as
constantly participating, in their own characteristic ways and
in their own proper degree, in an immense and common work whose
inevitable development gradually unites the actual co-operators
in a series with their predecessors and at the same time in a
series with their successors. It is, then, the continuous
redivison of our diverse human labors which mainly constitutes
social solidarity and which becomes the elementary cause of the
extension and increasing complexity of the social organism.
If this hypothesis is demonstrated, division of labor plays a rôle much
more important than that which has ordinarily been attributed to it. It
is not to be regarded as a mere luxury, desirable perhaps, but not
indispensable to society; it is rather a condition of its very
existence. It is this, or at least it is mainly this, that assures the
solidarity of social groups; it determines the essential traits of their
constitution. It follows--even though we are not yet prepared to give a
final solution to the problem, we can nevertheless foresee from this
point--that, if such is really the function of the division of labor, it
may be expected to have a moral character, because the needs of order,
of harmony, of social solidarity generally, are what we understand by
moral needs.
Social life is derived from a double source: (a) from a similarity of
minds, and (b) from the division of labor. The individual is
socialized in the first case, because, not having his own individuality,
he is confused, along with his fellows, in the bosom of the same
collective type; in the second case, because, even though he possesses a
physiognomy and a temperament which distinguish him from others, he is
dependent upon these in the same measure in which he is distinguished
from them. Society results from this union.
Like-mindedness gives birth to judicial regulations which, under the
menace of measures of repression, impose upon everybody uniform beliefs
and practices. The more pronounced this like-mindedness, the more
completely the social is confused with the religious life, the more
nearly economic institutions approach communism.
The division of labor, on the other hand, gives birth to regulations and
laws which determine the nature and the relations of the divided
functions, but the violation of which entails only punitive measures not
of an expiatory character.
Every code of laws is accompanied by a body of regulations purely moral.
Where the penal law is voluminous, moral consensus is very extended;
that is to say, a multitude of collective activities is under the
guardianship of public opinion. Where the right of reparation is well
developed, there each profession maintains a code of professional
ethics. In a group of workers there invariably exists a body of opinion,
diffused throughout the limits of the group, which, although not
fortified with legal sanctions, still enforces its decrees. There are
manners and customs, recognized by all the members of a profession,
which no one of them could infringe without incurring the blame of
society. Certainly this code of morals is distinguished from the
preceding by differences analogous to those which separate the two
corresponding kinds of laws. It is, in fact, a code localized in a
limited region of society. Furthermore, the repressive character of the
sanctions which are attached to it is sensibly less accentuated.
Professional faults arouse a much feebler response than offenses against
the mores of the larger society.
Nevertheless, the customs and code of a profession are imperative. They
oblige the individual to act in accordance with ends which to him are
not his own, to make concessions, to consent to compromises, to take
account of interests superior to his own. The consequence is that, even
where the society rests most completely upon the division of labor, it
does not disintegrate into a dust of atoms, between which there can
exist only external and temporary contacts. Every function which one
individual exercises is invariably dependent upon functions exercised by
others and forms with them a system of interdependent parts. It follows
that, from the nature of the task one chooses, corresponding duties
follow. Because we fill this or that domestic or social function, we are
imprisoned in a net of obligations from which we do not have the right
to free ourselves. There is especially one organ toward which our state
of dependencies is ever increasing--the state. The points at which we
are in contact with it are multiplying. So are the occasions in which it
takes upon itself to recall us to a sense of the common solidarity.
There are then two great currents in the social life, collectivism and
individualism, corresponding to which we discover two types of structure
not less different. Of these currents, that which has its origin in
like-mindedness is at first alone and without rival. At this moment it
is identified with the very life of the society; little by little it
finds its separate channels and diminishes, whilst the second becomes
ever larger. In the same way, the segmentary structure of society is
more and more overlaid by the other, but without ever disappearing
completely.
III. INVESTIGATIONS AND PROBLEMS
1. Forms of Accommodation
The literature upon accommodation will be surveyed under four heads;
(a) forms of accommodation; (b) subordination and superordination;
(c) accommodation groups; and (d) social organization.
The term accommodation, as has been noted, developed as a
differentiation within the field of the biological concept of
adaptation. Ward's dictum that "the environment transforms the animal,
while man transforms the environment"[238] contained the distinction.
Thomas similarly distinguished between the animal with its method of
adaptation and man with his method of control. Bristol in his work on
_Social Adaptation_ is concerned, as the subtitle of the volume
indicates, "with the development of the doctrine of adaptation as a
theory of social progress." Of the several types of adaptation that he
proposes, however, all but the first represent accommodations. Baldwin,
though not the first to make the distinction, was the first student to
use the separate term accommodation. "By accommodation old habits are
broken up, and new co-ordinations are made which are more complex."[239]
Baldwin suggested a division of accommodation into the three fields:
acclimatization, naturalization, and equilibrium. The term equilibrium
accurately describes the type of organization established by competition
between the different biological species and the environment, but not
the more permanent organizations of individuals and groups which we find
in human society. In human society equilibrium means organization. The
research upon acclimatization is considerable, although there is far
from unanimity of opinion in regard to its findings.
Closely related to acclimatization but in the field of social
naturalization are the accommodations that take place in colonization
and immigration. In colonization the adjustment is not only to climatic
conditions but to the means of livelihood and habits of life required by
the new situation. Historic colonial settlements have most infrequently
been made in inhospitable areas, and that involved accommodations to
primitive peoples of different and generally lower cultural level than
the settlers. Professor Keller's work on _Colonization_ surveys the
differences in types of colonial ventures and describes the adjustments
involved. It includes also a valuable bibliography of the literature of
the subject.
In immigration the accommodation to the economic situation and to the
folkways and mores of the native society are more important than in
colonization. The voluminous literature upon immigration deals but
slightly with the interesting accommodations of the newcomer to his new
environment. One of the important factors in the process, as emphasized
in the recent "Americanization Study" of the Carnegie Corporation, is
the immigrant community which serves as a mediating agency between the
familiar and the strange. The greater readiness of accommodation of
recent immigrants as compared with that of an earlier period has been
explained in terms of facilities of transportation, communication, and
even more in the mobility of employment in large-scale modern industry
with its minute subdivision of labor and its slight demand for skill and
training on the part of the employees.
The more subtle forms of accommodation to new social situations have not
been subjected to analysis, although there is a small but important
number of studies upon homesickness. In fiction, to be sure, the
difficulties of the tenderfoot in the frontier community, or the awkward
rural lad in an urban environment and the _nouveau riche_ in their
successful entrée among the social élite are often accuately and
sympathetically described. The recent immigrant autobiographies contain
materials which throw much new light on the situation of the immigrant
in process of accommodation to the American environment.
The whole process of social organization is involved in the processes by
which persons find their places in groups and groups are articulated
into the life of the larger and more inclusive societies. The literature
on the taming of animals, the education of juveniles and adults, and on
social control belongs in this field. The writings on diplomacy, on
statescraft, and upon adjudication of disputes are also to be considered
here. The problem of the person whether in the narrow field of social
work or the broader fields of human relations is fundamentally a problem
of the adjustment of the person to his social milieu, to his family, to
his primary social groups, to industry, and to cultural, civic, and
religious institutions. The problems of community organization are for
the most part problems of accommodation, of articulation of groups
within the community and of the adjustment of the local Community to the
life of the wider community of which it is a part.
Adjustments of personal and social relations in the past have been made
unreflectively and with a minimum of personal and social consciousness.
The extant literature reveals rather an insistent demand for these
accommodations than any systematic study of the processes by which the
accommodations take place. Simmel's observation upon subordination and
superordination is almost the only attempt that has been made to deal
with the subject from the point of view of sociology.
2. Subordination and Superordination
Materials upon subordination and superordination may be found in the
literature under widely different names. Thorndike, McDougall, and
others have reported upon the original tendencies in the individual to
domination and submission or to self-assertion and self-abasement.
Veblen approaches nearer to a sociological explanation in his analysis
of the self-conscious attitudes of invidious comparison and conspicuous
waste in the leisure class.
The application of our knowledge of rapport, esprit de corps, and morale
to an explanation of personal conduct and group behavior is one of the
most promising fields for future research. In the family, rapport and
consensus represent the most complete co-ordination of its members. The
life of the family should be studied intensively in order to define more
exactly the nature of the family consensus, the mechanism of family
rapport, and minor accommodations made to minimize conflict and to avert
tendencies to disintegration in the interest of this real unity.
Strachey's _Life of Queen Victoria_ sketches an interesting case of
subordination and superordination in which the queen is the subordinate,
and her adroit but cynical minister, Disraeli, is the master.
Future research will provide a more adequate sociology of subordination
and superordination. A survey of the present output of material upon the
nature and the effects of personal contacts reinforces the need for such
a fundamental study. The obsolete writings upon personal magnetism have
been replaced by the so-called "psychology of salesmanship," "scientific
methods of character reading," and "the psychology of leadership." The
wide sale of these books indicates the popular interest, quite as much
as the lack of any fundamental understanding of the technique of human
relations.
3. Accommodation Groups
The field of investigation available for the study of accommodation
groups and their relation to conflict groups may perhaps be best
illustrated by the table on page 722.
The existence of conflict groups like parties, sects, nationalities,
represents the area in any society of unstable equilibrium.
Accommodation groups, classes, castes, and denominations on the other
hand, represent in this same society the areas of stable equilibrium. A
boys' club carries on contests, under recognized rules, with similar
organizations. A denomination engages in fraternal rivalry with other
denominations for the advancement of common interests of the church
universal. A nation possesses status, rights, and responsibilities only
in a commonwealth of nations of which it is a member.
Conflict Groups Accommodation Groups
1. Gangs 1. Clubs
2. Labor organizations, employers' 2. Social classes, vocational
associations, middle-class unions, groups
tenant protective unions
3. Races 3. Castes
4. Sects 4. Denominations
5. Nationalities 5. Nations
The works upon accommodation groups are concerned almost exclusively
with the principles, methods, and technique of organization. There are,
indeed, one or two important descriptive works upon secret organizations
in primitive and modern times. The books and articles, however, on
organized boys' groups deal with the plan of organization of Boy Scouts,
Boys' Brotherhood Republic, George Junior Republics, Knights of King
Arthur, and many other clubs of these types. They are not studies of
natural groups.
The comparative study of social classes and vocational groups is an
unworked field. The differentiation of social types, especially in urban
life, and the complexity and subtlety of the social distinctions
separating social and vocational classes, opens a fruitful prospect for
investigation. Scattered through a wide literature, ranging from
official inquiries to works of fiction, there are, in occasional
paragraphs, pages, and chapters, observations of value.
In the field of castes the work of research is well under way. The caste
system of India has been the subject of careful examination and
analysis. Sighele points out that the prohibition of intermarriage
observed in its most rigid and absolute form is a fundamental
distinction of the caste. If this be regarded as the fundamental
criterion, the Negro race in the United States occupies the position of
a caste. The prostitute, in America, until recently constituted a
separate caste. With the systematic breaking up of the segregated vice
districts in our great cities prostitution, as a caste, seems to have
disappeared. The place of the prostitute seems to have been occupied by
the demimondaine who lives on the outskirts of society but who is not by
any means an outcast.
It is difficult to dissociate the materials upon nationalities from
those upon nations. The studies, however, of the internal organization
of the state, made to promote law and order, would come under the latter
head. Here, also, would be included studies of the extension of the
police power to promote the national welfare. In international relations
studies of international law, of international courts of arbitration, of
leagues or associations of nations manifest the increasing interest in
the accommodations that would avert or postpone conflicts of militant
nationalities.
In the United States there is considerable literature upon church
federation and the community church. This literature is one expression
of the transition of the Protestant churches from sectarian bodies,
engaged in warfare for the support of distinctive doctrines and dogmas,
to co-operating denominations organized into the Federal Council of the
Churches of Christ in America.
4. Social Organization
Until recently there has been more interest manifested in elaborating
theories of the stages in the evolution of society than in analyzing the
structure of different types of societies. Durkheim, however, in _De la
division du travail social_, indicated how the division of labor and the
social attitudes, or the mental accommodations to the life-situation,
shape social organization. Cooley, on the other hand, in his work
_Social Organization_ conceived the structure of society to be "the
larger mind," or an outgrowth of human nature and human ideals.
The increasing number of studies of individual primitive communities has
furnished data for the comparative study of different kinds of social
organization. Schurtz, Vierkandt, Rivers, Lowie, and others in the last
twenty years have made important comparative studies in this field. The
work of these scholars has led to the abandonment of the earlier notions
of uniform evolutionary stages of culture in which all peoples,
primitive, ancient, and modern alike, might be classified. New light has
been thrown upon the actual accommodations in the small family, in the
larger family group, the clan, gens or sib, in the secret society, and
in the tribe which determined the patterns of life of primitive peoples
under different geographical and historical conditions.
At the present time, the investigations of social organization of
current and popular interest have to do with the problems of social work
and of community life. "Community organization," "community action,"
"know your own community" are phrases which express the practical
motives behind the attempts at community study. Such investigations as
have been made, with a few shining exceptions, the Pittsburgh Survey and
the community studies of the Russell Sage Foundation, have been
superficial. All, perhaps, have been tentative and experimental. The
community has not been studied from a fundamental standpoint. Indeed,
there was not available, as a background of method and of orientation,
any adequate analysis of social organization.
A penetrating analysis of the social structure of a community must quite
naturally be based upon studies of human geography. Plant and animal
geography has been studied, but slight attention has been given to human
geography, that is, to the local distribution of persons who constitute
a community and the accommodations that are made because of the
consequent physical distances and social relationships.
Ethnological and historical studies of individual communities furnish
valuable comparative materials for a treatise upon human ecology which
would serve as a guidebook for studies in community organization. C. J.
Galpin's _The Social Anatomy of an Agricultural Community_ is an example
of the recognition of ecological factors as basic in the study of social
organization.
In the bibliography of this chapter is given a list of references to
certain of the experiments in community organization. Students should
study this literature in the light of the more fundamental studies of
types of social groups and studies of individual communities listed in
an earlier bibliography.[240] It is at once apparent that the rural
community has been more carefully studied than has the urban community.
Yet more experiments in community organization have been tried out in
the city than in the country. Reports upon social-center activities,
upon community councils, and other types of community organization have
tended to be enthusiastic rather than factual and critical. The most
notable experiment of community organization, the Social Unit Plan,
tried out in Cincinnati, was what the theatrical critics call a _succès
d'estime_, but after the experiment had been tried it was abandoned.
Control of conditions of community life is not likely to meet with
success unless based on an appreciation and understanding of human
nature on the one hand, and of the natural or ecological organization of
community life on the other.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
I. THE PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY OF ACCOMMODATION
A. _Accommodation Defined_
(1) Morgan, C. Lloyd, and Baldwin, J. Mark. Articles on "Accommodation
and Adaptation," _Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology_, I, 7-8,
14-15.
(2) Baldwin, J. Mark. _Mental Development in the Child and the Race._
Methods and processes. Chap, xvi, "Habit and Accommodation," pp. 476-88.
New York, 1895.
(3) Simmel, Georg. _Soziologie._ Untersuchungen über die Formen der
Vergesellschaftung. "Kompromiss und Versöhnung," pp. 330-36. Leipzig,
1908.
(4) Bristol, L. M. _Social Adaptation._ A study in the development of
the doctrine of adaptation as a theory of social progress. Cambridge,
Mass., 1915.
(5) Ross, E. A. _Principles of Sociology._ "Toleration," "Compromise,"
"Accommodation," pp. 225-34. New York, 1920.
(6) Ritchie, David G. _Natural Rights._ A criticism of some political
and ethical conceptions. Chap. viii, "Toleration," pp. 157-209. London,
1895.
(7) Morley, John. _On Compromise._ London, 1874.
(8) Tardieu, É. "Le cynisme: étude psychologique," _Revue
philosophique_, LVII (1904), 1-28.
(9) Jellinek, Georg. _Die Lehre von den Staatenverbindungen._ Berlin,
1882.
B. _Acclimatization and Colonization_
(1) Wallace, Alfred R. Article on "Acclimatization." _Encyclopaedia
Britannica_, I, 114-19.
(2) Brinton, D. G. _The Basis of Social Relations._ A study in ethnic
psychology. Part II, chap. iv, "The Influence of Geographic
Environment," pp. 180-99. New York, 1902.
(3) Ripley, W. Z. _The Races of Europe._ A sociological study. Chap.
xxi, "Acclimatization: the Geographical Future of the European Races,"
pp. 560-89. New York, 1899. [Bibliography.]
(4) Virchow, Rudolph. "Acclimatization," _Popular Science Monthly_,
XXVIII (1886), 507-17.
(5) Boas, Franz. "Changes in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants,"
_Report of Immigration Commission, 1907._ Washington, 1911.
(6) Keller, Albert G. _Colonization._ A study of the founding of new
societies. Boston, 1908. [Bibliography.]
(7) ----. "The Value of the Study of Colonies for Sociology," _American
Journal of Sociology_, XII (1906), 417-20.
(8) Roscher, W., and Jannasch, R. _Kolonien, Kolonialpolitik und
Auswanderung._ 3d ed. Leipzig, 1885.
(9) Leroy-Beaulieu, P. _De la colonisation chez les peuples modernes._
5th ed., 2 vols. Paris, 1902.
(10) Huntington, Ellsworth. _Civilization and Climate._ Chap. iii, "The
White Man in the Tropics," pp. 35-48. New Haven, 1915.
(11) Ward, Robert De C. _Climate._ Considered especially in relation to
man. Chap. viii, "The Life of Man in the Tropics," pp. 220-71. New York,
1908.
(12) Bryce, James. "British Experience in the Government of Colonies,"
_Century_, LVII (1898-99), 718-29.
C. _Superordination and Subordination_
(1) Simmel, Georg. "Superiority and Subordination as Subject Matter of
Sociology," translated from the German by Albion W. Small, _American
Journal of Sociology_, II (1896-97), 167-89, 392-415.
(2) Thorndike, E. L. _The Original Nature of Man._ "Mastering and
Submissive Behavior," pp. 92-97. New York, 1913.
(3) McDougall, William. _An Introduction to Social Psychology._ "The
Instincts of Self-Abasement (or Subjection) and of Self-Assertion (or
Self-Display) and the Emotions of Subjection and Elation," pp. 62-66.
12th ed. Boston, 1917.
(4) Münsterberg, Hugo. _Psychology, General and Applied._ Chap. xviii,
"Submission," pp. 254-64. New York, 1914.
(5) Galton, Francis. _Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development._
"Gregarious and Slavish Instincts," pp. 68-82. New York, 1883.
(6) Ellis, Havelock. _Studies in the Psychology of Sex._ Vol. III,
"Analysis of the Sexual Impulse." "Sexual Subjection," pp. 60-71; 85-87.
Philadelphia, 1914.
(7) Calhoun, Arthur W. _A Social History of the American Family._ From
colonial times to the present. Vol. II, "From Independence through the
Civil War." Chap. iv, "The Social Subordination of Woman," pp. 79-101. 3
vols. Cincinnati, 1918.
(8) Galton, Francis. "The First Steps toward the Domestication of
Animals," _Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London_, III,
122-38.
D. _Conversion_
(1) Starbuck, Edwin D. _The Psychology of Religion._ London, 1899.
(2) James, William. _The Varieties of Religious Experience._ Lectures ix
and x, "Conversion," pp. 189-258. London, 1902.
(3) Coe, George A. _The Psychology of Religion._ Chap. x, "Conversion,"
pp. 152-74. Chicago, 1916.
(4) Prince, Morton. "The Psychology of Sudden Religious Conversion,"
_Journal of Abnormal Psychology_, I (1906-7), 42-54.
(5) Tawney, G. A. "The Period of Conversion," _Psychological Review_, XI
(1904), 210-16.
(6) Partridge, G. E. _Studies in the Psychology of Intemperance._ Pp.
152-63. New York, 1912. [Mental cures of alcoholism.]
(7) Begbie, Harold. _Twice-born Men._ A clinic in regeneration. A
footnote in narrative to Professor William James's _The Varieties of
Religious Experience_. New York, 1909.
(8) Burr, Anna R. _Religious Confessions and Confessants._ With a
chapter on the history of introspection. Boston, 1914.
(9) Patterson, R. J. _Catch-My-Pal._ A story of Good Samaritanship. New
York, 1913.
(10) Weber, John L. "A Modern Miracle, the Remarkable Conversion of
Former Governor Patterson of Tennessee," _Congregationalist_, XCIX
(1914), 6, 8. [See also "The Conversion of Governor Patterson,"
_Literary Digest_, XLVIII (1914), 111-12.]
II. FORMS OF ACCOMMODATION
A. _Slavery_
(1) Letourneau, Ch. _L'évolution de l'esclavage dans les diverses races
humaines._ Paris, 1897.
(2) Nieboer, Dr. H. J. _Slavery as an Industrial System._ Ethnological
researches. The Hague, 1900. [Bibliography.]
(3) Wallon, H. _Historie de l'esclavage dans l'antiquité._ 2d ed., 3
vols. Paris, 1879.
(4) Sugenheim, S. _Geschichte der Aufhebung der Leibeigenschaft und
Hörigkeit in Europa bis um die Mitte des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts._ St.
Petersburg, 1861.
(5) Edwards, Bryan. _The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British
Colonies in the West Indies._ 3 vols. London, 1793-1801.
(6) Helps, Arthur. _Life of Las Casas, "the Apostle of the Indies."_ 5th
ed. London, 1890.
(7) Phillips, Ulrich B. _American Negro Slavery._ A survey of the
supply, employment, and control of Negro labor as determined by the
plantation régime. New York, 1918.
(8) ----. _Plantation and Frontier, 1649-1863._ Documentary history of
American industrial society. Vols. I-II. Cleveland, 1910-11.
(9) _A Professional Planter._ Practical rules for the management and
medical treatment of Negro slaves in the Sugar Colonies. London, 1803.
[Excerpt in Phillips, U. B., _Plantation and Frontier_, I, 129-30.]
(10) Russell, J. H. "Free Negro in Virginia, 1619-1865," _Johns Hopkins
University Studies in Historical and Political Science._ Baltimore,
1913.
(11) Olmsted, F. L. _A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States._ With
remarks on their economy. New York, 1856.
(12) Smedes, Susan D. _Memorials of a Southern Planter._ Baltimore,
1887.
(13) Sartorius von Walterhausen, August. _Die Arbeitsverfassung der
englischen Kolonien in Nordamerika._ Strassburg, 1894.
(14) Ballagh, James C. "A History of Slavery in Virginia," _Johns
Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science_.
Baltimore, 1902.
(15) McCormac, E. I. "White Servitude in Maryland, 1634-1820," _Johns
Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science_.
Baltimore, 1904.
(16) Kemble, Frances A. _Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation
in 1838-1839._ New York, 1863.
B. _Caste_
(1) Risley, Herbert H. _The People of India._ Calcutta and London, 1915.
(2) ----. _India._ Ethnographic Appendices, being the data upon which
the caste chapter of the report is based. Appendix IV. Typical Tribes
and Castes. Calcutta, 1903.
(3) Bouglé, M. C. "Remarques générales sur le régime des castes,"
_L'Année sociologique_, IV (1899-1900), 1-64.
(4) Crooke, W. "The Stability of Caste and Tribal Groups in India,"
_Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute_, XLIV (1914), 270-81.
(5) Bhattacharya, Jogendra Nath. _Hindu Castes and Sects._ An exposition
of the origin of the Hindu caste system and the bearing of the sects
toward each other and toward other religious systems. Calcutta, 1896.
(6) Somló, F. _Der Güterverkehr in der Urgesellschaft._ "Zum Ursprung
der Kastenbildung," pp. 157-59. Instituts Solvay: Travaux de l'Institut
de Sociologie. _Notes et mémoires_, Fascicule 8. Bruxelles, 1909.
(7) Ratzel, Friedrich. _Völkerkunde._ I, 81. 2d rev. ed. Leipzig and
Wien, 1894. [The origin of caste in the difference of occupation.]
(8) Iyer, L. K. Anantha Krishna. _The Cochin Tribes and Castes._ London,
1909.
(9) Bailey, Thomas P. _Race Orthodoxy in the South._ And other aspects
of the Negro question. New York, 1914.
C. _Classes_
(1) Bücher, Carl. _Industrial Evolution._ Translated from the 3d German
edition by S. Morley Wickett. Chap. ix, "Organization of Work and the
Formation of Social Classes," pp. 315-44. New York, 1907.
(2) Hobhouse, L. T. _Morals in Evolution._ A study in comparative
ethics. Part I, chap. vii, "Class Relations," pp. 270-317. New York,
1915.
(3) Schmoller, Gustav. _Grundriss der allgemeinen
Volkswirtschaftslehre._ Vol. I, Book II, chap. vi, "Die
gesellschaftliche Klassenbildung," pp. 391-411. 6. Aufl. Leipzig, 1901.
(4) Cooley, Charles H. _Social Organization._ Part IV, "Social Classes,"
pp. 209-309. New York, 1909.
(5) Bauer, Arthur. "Les classes sociales," _Revue internationale de
sociologie_, XI (1903), 119-35; 243-58; 301-16; 398-413; 474-98; 576-87.
[Includes discussions at successive meetings of the Société de
Sociologie de Paris by G. Tarde, Ch. Limousin, H. Monin, René Worms, E.
Delbet, L. Philippe, M. Coicou, H. Blondel, G. Pinet, P. Vavin, E. de
Roberty, G. Lafargue, M. le Gouix, M. Kovalewsky, I. Loutschisky, E.
Séménoff, Mme. de Mouromtzeff, R. de la Grasserie, E. Cheysson, D.
Draghicesco.]
(6) Bouglé, C. _Les idées égalitaires._ Étude sociologique. Paris, 1899.
(7) Thomas, William I. _Source Book for Social Origins._ "The Relation
of the Medicine Man to the Origin of the Professional Occupations," pp.
281-303. Chicago, 1909.
(8) Tarde, Gabriel. "L'hérédité des professions," _Revue internationale
de sociologie_, VIII (1900), 50-59. [Discussion of the subject was
continued under the title "L'hérédité et la continuité des professions,"
pp. 117-24, 196-207.]
(9) Knapp, Georg F. _Die Bauernbefreiung und der Ursprung der
Landarbeiter in den älteren Theilen Preussens._ Leipzig, 1887.
(10) Zimmern, Alfred E. _The Greek Commonwealth._ Politics and economics
in fifth-century Athens. Pp. 255-73, 323-47, 378-94. 2d rev. ed. Oxford,
1915.
(11) Mallock, W. H. _Aristocracy and Evolution._ A study of the rights,
the origin, and the social functions of the wealthier classes. New York,
1898.
(12) Veblen, Thorstein. _The Theory of the Leisure Class._ An economic
study in the evolution of institutions. New York, 1899.
(13) D'Aeth, F. G. "Present Tendencies of Class Differentiation,"
_Sociological Review_, III (1910), 267-76.
III. ACCOMMODATION AND ORGANIZATION
A. _Social Organization_
(1) Durkheim, É. _De la division du travail social._ 2d ed. Paris, 1902.
(2) Cooley, Charles H. _Social Organization._ A study of the larger
mind. Part V, "Institutions," pp. 313-92. New York, 1909.
(3) Salz, Arthur. "Zur Geschichte der Berufsidee," _Archiv für
Sozialwissenschaft_, XXXVII (1913), 380-423.
(4) Rivers, W. H. R. _Kinship and Social Organization._ Studies in
economic and political science. London, 1914.
(5) Schurtz, Heinrich. _Altersklassen und Männerbünde._ Eine Darstellung
der Grundformen der Gesellschaft. Berlin, 1902.
(6) Vierkandt, A. "Die politischen Verhältnisse der Naturvölker,"
_Zeitschrift für Sozialwissenschaft_, IV, 417-26, 497-510.
(7) Lowie, Robert H. _Primitive Society._ Chap. x, "Associations," chap.
xi, "Theory of Associations," pp. 257-337. New York, 1920.
(8) Zimmern, Alfred E. _The Greek Commonwealth._ Politics and economics
in fifth-century Athens. 2d rev. ed. Oxford, 1915.
(9) Thomas, William I. _Source Book for Social Origins._ Ethnological
materials, psychological standpoint, classified and annotated
bibliographies for the interpretation of savage society. Part VII,
"Social Organization, Morals, the State," pp. 753-869. Chicago, 1909.
[Bibliography.]
B. _Secret Societies_
(1) Simmel, Georg. "The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies,"
translated from the German by Albion W. Small, _American Journal of
Sociology_, XI (1905-6), 441-98.
(2) Heckethorn, C. W. _The Secret Societies of All Ages and Countries._
A comprehensive account of upwards of one hundred and sixty secret
organizations--religious, political, and social--from the most remote
ages down to the present time. New ed., rev. and enl., 2 vols. London,
1897.
(3) Webster, Hutton. _Primitive Secret Societies._ A study in early
politics and religion. New York, 1908.
(4) Schuster, G. _Die geheimen Gesellschaften, Verbindungen und Orden._
2 vols. Leipzig, 1906.
(5) Boas, Franz. "The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of
the Kwakiutl Indians," _U.S. National Museum, Annual Report, 1895_, pp.
311-738. Washington, 1897.
(6) Frobenius, L. "Die Masken und Geheimbünde Afrikas," _Abhandlungen
der Kaiserlichen Leopoldinisch-Carolinischen deutschen Akademie der
Naturforscher_, LXXIV, 1-278.
(7) Pfleiderer, Otto. _Primitive Christianity, Its Writings and
Teachings in Their Historical Connections._ Vol. III, chap, i, "The
Therapeutae and the Essenes," pp. 1-22. Translated from the German by W.
Montgomery. New York, 1910.
(8) Jennings, Hargrave. _The Rosicrucians, Their Rites and Mysteries._
3d rev. and enl. ed., 2 vols. London, 1887.
(9) Stillson, Henry L., and Klein, Henri F. Article on "The Masonic
Fraternity," _The Americana_, XVIII, 383-89. [Bibliography.]
(10) Johnston, R. M. _The Napoleonic Empire in Southern Italy and the
Rise of the Secret Societies._ Part II, "The Rise of the Secret
Societies," Vol. II, pp. 3-139, 153-55; especially chap. ii, "Origin and
Rites of the Carbonari," Vol. II, pp. 19-44. London, 1904.
[Bibliography.]
(11) Fleming, Walter L. _Documentary History of Reconstruction._ Vol.
II, chap. xii, "The Ku Klux Movement," pp. 327-77. Cleveland, 1907.
(12) Lester, J. C., and Wilson, D. L. _The Ku Klux Klan._ Its origin,
growth, and disbandment. With appendices containing the prescripts of
the Ku Klux Klan, specimen orders and warnings. With introduction and
notes by Walter L. Fleming. New York and Washington, 1905.
(13) La Hodde, Lucien de. _The Cradle of Rebellions._ A history of the
secret societies of France. Translated from the French by J. W. Phelps.
New York, 1864.
(14) Spadoni, D. _Sètte, cospirazioni e cospiratori nello Stato
Pontificio all'indomani della restaurazioni._ Torino, 1904.
(15) "Societies, Criminal," _The Americana_, XXV, 201-5.
(16) Clark, Thomas A. _The Fraternity and the College._ Being a series
of papers dealing with fraternity problems. Menasha, Wis., 1915.
C. _Social Types_
(1) Thomas, W. I., and Znaniecki, F. _The Polish Peasant in Europe and
America._ Monograph of an immigrant group. Vol. III, "Life Record of an
Immigrant." Boston, 1919. ["Introduction," pp. 5-88, analyzes and
interprets three social types: the philistine, the bohemian, and the
creative.]
(2) Paulhan, Fr. _Les caractères._ Livre II, "Les types déterminés par
les tendances sociales," pp. 143-89. Paris, 1902.
(3) Rousiers, Paul de. _L'élite dans la société moderne._ Son rôle, etc.
Paris, 1914.
(4) Bradford, Gamaliel, Jr. _Types of American Character._ New York,
1895.
(5) Kellogg, Walter G. _The Conscientious Objector._ Introduction by
Newton D. Baker. New York, 1919.
(6) Hapgood, Hutchins. _Types from City Streets._ New York, 1910.
(7) Bab, Julius. _Die Berliner Bohème._ Berlin, 1905.
(8) Cory, H. E. _The Intellectuals and the Wage Workers._ A study in
educational psychoanalysis. New York, 1919.
(9) Buchanan, J. R. _The Story of a Labor Agitator._ New York, 1903.
(10) Taussig, F. W. _Inventors and Money-Makers._ New York, 1915.
(11) Stoker, Bram. _Famous Impostors._ London, 1910.
D. _Community Organization_
(1) Galpin, Charles J. "Rural Relations of the Village and Small City,"
_University of Wisconsin Bulletin No. 411._
(2) ----. _Rural Life._ Chaps. vii-xi, pp. 153-314. New York, 1918.
(3) Hayes, A. W. _Rural Community Organization._ Chicago, 1921. [In
Press.]
(4) Morgan, E. L. "Mobilizing a Rural Community," _Massachusetts
Agricultural College, Extension Bulletin No. 23._ Amherst, 1918.
(5) "Rural Organization," _Proceedings of the Third National Country
Life Conference, Springfield, Massachusetts, 1920._ Chicago, 1921.
(6) Hart, Joseph K. _Community Organization._ New York, 1920.
(7) _National Social Unit Organization, Bulletins 1, 2, 2a, 3, 4, 5._
Cincinnati, 1917-19.
(8) Devine, Edward T. "Social Unit in Cincinnati," _Survey_, XLIII
(1919), 115-26.
(9) Hicks, Mary L., and Eastman, Rae S. "Block Workers as Developed
under the Social Unit Experiment in Cincinnati," _Survey_ XLIV (1920),
671-74.
(10) Ward, E. J. _The Social Center._ New York, 1913. [Bibliography.]
(11) Collier, John. "Community Councils--Democracy Every Day," _Survey_,
XL (1918), 604-6; 689-91; 709-11. [Describes community defense
organizations formed in rural and urban districts during the war.]
(12) Weller, Charles F. "Democratic Community Organization," An
after-the-war experiment in Chester, _Survey_, XLIV (1920), 77-79.
(13) Rainwater, Clarence E. _Community Organization._ Sociological
Monograph No. 15, University of Southern California. Los Angeles, 1920.
[Bibliography.]
TOPICS FOR WRITTEN THEMES
1. Biological Accommodation and Social Accommodation.
2. Acclimatization as Accommodation.
3. The Psychology of Accommodation.
4. Conversion as a Form of Accommodation: A Study of Mutations of
Attitudes in Religion, Politics, Morals, Personal Relation, etc.
5. The Psychology and Sociology of Homesickness and Nostalgia.
6. Conflict and Accommodation: War and Peace, Enmity and Conciliation,
Rivalry and Status.
7. Compromise as a Form of Accommodation.
8. The Subtler Forms of Accommodation: Flattery, "Front," Ceremony, etc.
9. The Organization of Attitudes in Accommodation: Prestige, Taboo,
Rapport, Prejudice, Fear, etc.
10. Slavery, Caste, and Class as Forms of Accommodation.
11. The Description and Analysis of Typical Examples of Accommodation:
the Political "Boss" and the Voter, Physician and Patient, the Coach and
the Members of the Team, the Town Magnate and His Fellow-Citizens, "The
Four Hundred" and "Hoi Polloi," etc.
12. Social Solidarity as the Organization of Competing Groups.
13. Division of Labor as a Form of Accommodation.
14. A Survey of Historical Types of the Family in Terms of the Changes
in Forms of Subordination and Superordination of Its Members.
15. Social Types as Accommodations: the Quack Doctor, the Reporter, the
Strike Breaker, the Schoolteacher, the Stockbroker, etc.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. How do you distinguish between biological adaptation and social
accommodation?
2. Is domestication biological adaptation or accommodation?
3. Give illustrations of acclimatization as a form of accommodation.
4. Discuss phenomena of colonization with reference to accommodation.
5. What is the relation of lonesomeness to accommodation?
6. Do you agree with Nieboer's definition of slavery? Is the slave a
person? If so, to what extent? How would you compare the serf with the
slave in respect to his status?
7. To what extent do slavery and caste as forms of accommodation rest
upon (a) physical force, (b) mental attitudes?
8. What is the psychology of subordination and superordination?
9. What do you understand to be the relation of suggestion and rapport
to subordination and superordination?
10. What is meant by a person "knowing his place"?
11. How do you explain the attitude of "the old servant" to society? Do
you agree with her in lamenting the change in attitude of persons
engaged in domestic service?
12. What types of the subtler forms of accommodation occur to you?
13. What arguments would you advance for the proposition that the
relation of superiority and inferiority is reciprocal?
14. "All leaders are also led, as in countless cases the master is the
slave of his slaves." Explain.
15. What illustrations, apart from the text, occur to you of reciprocal
relations in superiority and subordination?
16. What do you understand to be the characteristic differences of the
three types of superordination and subordination?
17. How would you classify the following groups according to these three
types: the patriarchal family, the modern family, England from 1660 to
1830, manufacturing enterprise, labor union, army, boys' gang, boys'
club, Christianity, humanitarian movement?
18. What do you think Simmel means by the term "accommodation"?
19. How is accommodation related to peace?
20. Does accommodation end struggle?
21. In what sense does commerce imply accommodation?
22. What type of interaction is involved in compromise? What
illustrations would you suggest to bring out your point?
23. Does compromise make for progress?
24. Is a compromise better or worse than either or both of the proposals
involved in it?
25. What, in your judgment, is the relation of personal competition to
the division of labor?
26. What examples of division of labor outside the economic field would
you suggest?
27. What do you understand to be the relation of personal competition
and group competition?
28. In what different ways does status (a) grow out of, and (b)
prevent, the processes of personal competition and group competition?
29. To what extent, at the present time, is success in life determined
by personal competition, and social selection by status?
30. In what ways does the division of labor make for social solidarity?
31. What is the difference between social solidarity based upon
like-mindedness and based upon diverse-mindedness?
FOOTNOTES:
[221] _Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology_, I, 15, 8.
[222] _Social Organization_, p. 4.
[223] A teacher in the public schools of Chicago came in possession of
the following letter written to a friend in Mississippi by a Negro boy
who had come to the city from the South two months previously. It
illustrates his rapid accommodation to the situation including the
hostile Irish group (the Wentworth Avenue "Mickeys").
Dear leon I write to you--to let you hear from me--Boy you
don't know the time we have with Sled. it Snow up here Regular.
We Play foot Ball. But Now we have So much Snow we don't Play
foot Ball any More. We Ride on Sled. Boy I have a Sled call The
king of The hill and She king to. tell Mrs. Sara that Coln
Roscoe Conklin Simon Spoke at St Mark the church we Belong to.
Gus I havnt got chance to Beat But to Boy. Sack we show Runs
them Mickeys. Boy them scoundle is bad on Wentworth Avenue.
Add 3123a Breton St Chi ill.
[224] From Daniel G. Brinton, _The Basis of Social Relations_, pp.
194-99. (Courtesy of G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York and London, 1902.)
[225] From Dr. H. J. Nieboer, _Slavery as an Industrial System_, pp.
1-7. (Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1910.)
[226] From Matthew G. Lewis, _Journal of a West India Proprietor_, pp.
60-337. (John Murray, 1834.)
[227] From "Modern Theories of Caste: Mr. Nesfield's Theory," Appendix
V, in Sir Herbert Risley, _The People of India_, pp. 407-8. (W. Thacker
& Co., 1915.)
[228] From Sir Herbert Risley, _The People of India_, pp. 130-39. (W.
Thacker & Co., 1915.)
[229] From Hugo Münsterberg, _Psychology, General and Applied_, pp.
259-64, (D. Appleton & Co., 1914.)
[230] Adapted from _Domestic Service_, by An Old Servant, pp. 10-110.
(Houghton Mifflin Co., 1917.)
[231] Adapted from a translation of Georg Simmel by Albion W. Small,
"Superiority and Subordination," in the _American Journal of Sociology_,
II (1896-97), 169-71.
[232] Adapted from a translation of Georg Simmel by Albion W. Small,
"Superiority and Subordination," in the _American Journal of Sociology_,
II (1896-97), 172-86.
[233] Adapted from a translation of Georg Simmel by Albion W. Small,
"The Sociology of Conflict," in the _American Journal of Sociology_, IX
(1903-4), 799-802.
[234] Adapted from a translation of Georg Simmel by Albion W. Small,
"The Sociology of Conflict," in the _American Journal of Sociology_, IX
(1903-4), 804-6.
[235] Adapted from Charles H. Cooley, "Personal Competition," in
_Economic Studies_, IV (1899), No. 2, 78-86.
[236] From Robert E. Park, "The City," in the _American Journal of
Sociology_, XX (1915), 584-86.
[237] Translated and adapted from Émile Durkheim, _La division du
travail social_, pp. 24-209. (Félix Alcan, 1902.)
[238] _Pure Sociology_, p. 16.
[239] _Mental Development in the Child and the Race_, p. 23.
[240] _Supra_, pp. 218-19.
CHAPTER XI
ASSIMILATION
I. INTRODUCTION
1. Popular Conceptions of Assimilation
The concept assimilation, so far as it has been defined in popular
usage, gets its meaning from its relation to the problem of immigration.
The more concrete and familiar terms are the abstract noun
Americanization and the verbs Americanize, Anglicize, Germanize, and the
like. All of these words are intended to describe the process by which
the culture of a community or a country is transmitted to an adopted
citizen. Negatively, assimilation is a process of denationalization, and
this is, in fact, the form it has taken in Europe.
The difference between Europe and America, in relation to the problem of
cultures, is that in Europe difficulties have arisen from the forcible
incorporation of minor cultural groups, i.e., nationalities, within the
limits of a larger political unit, i.e., an empire. In America the
problem has arisen from the voluntary migration to this country of
peoples who have abandoned the political allegiances of the old country
and are gradually acquiring the culture of the new. In both cases the
problem has its source in an effort to establish and maintain a
political order in a community that has no common culture. Fundamentally
the problem of maintaining a democratic form of government in a southern
village composed of whites and blacks, and the problem of maintaining an
international order based on anything but force are the same. The
ultimate basis of the existing moral and political order is still
kinship and culture. Where neither exist, a political order, not based
on caste or class, is at least problematic.
Assimilation, as popularly conceived in the United States, was expressed
symbolically some years ago in Zangwill's dramatic parable of _The
Melting Pot_. William Jennings Bryan has given oratorical expression to
the faith in the beneficent outcome of the process: "Great has been the
Greek, the Latin, the Slav, the Celt, the Teuton, and the Saxon; but
greater than any of these is the American, who combines the virtues of
them all."
Assimilation, as thus conceived, is a natural and unassisted process,
and practice, if not policy, has been in accord with this laissez faire
conception, which the outcome has apparently justified. In the United
States, at any rate, the tempo of assimilation has been more rapid than
elsewhere.
Closely akin to this "magic crucible" notion of assimilation is the
theory of "like-mindedness." This idea was partly a product of Professor
Giddings' theory of sociology, partly an outcome of the popular notion
that similarities and homogeneity are identical with unity. The ideal of
assimilation was conceived to be that of feeling, thinking, and acting
alike. Assimilation and socialization have both been described in these
terms by contemporary sociologists.
Another and a different notion of assimilation or Americanization is
based on the conviction that the immigrant has contributed in the past
and may be expected in the future to contribute something of his own in
temperament, culture, and philosophy of life to the future American
civilization. This conception had its origin among the immigrants
themselves, and has been formulated and interpreted by persons who are,
like residents in social settlements, in close contact with them. This
recognition of the diversity in the elements entering into the cultural
process is not, of course, inconsistent with the expectation of an
ultimate homogeneity of the product. It has called attention, at any
rate, to the fact that the process of assimilation is concerned with
differences quite as much as with likenesses.
2. The Sociology of Assimilation
Accommodation has been described as a process of adjustment, that is, an
organization of social relations and attitudes to prevent or to reduce
conflict, to control competition, and to maintain a basis of security in
the social order for persons and groups of divergent interests and types
to carry on together their varied life-activities. Accommodation in the
sense of the composition of conflict is invariably the goal of the
political process.
Assimilation is a process of interpenetration and fusion in which
persons and groups acquire the memories, sentiments, and attitudes of
other persons or groups, and, by sharing their experience and history,
are incorporated with them in a common cultural life. In so far as
assimilation denotes this sharing of tradition, this intimate
participation in common experiences, assimilation is central in the
historical and cultural processes.
This distinction between accommodation and assimilation, with reference
to their rôle in society, explains certain significant formal
differences between the two processes. An accommodation of a conflict,
or an accommodation to a new situation, may take place with rapidity.
The more intimate and subtle changes involved in assimilation are more
gradual. The changes that occur in accommodation are frequently not only
sudden but revolutionary, as in the mutation of attitudes in conversion.
The modifications of attitudes in the process of assimilation are not
only gradual, but moderate, even if they appear considerable in their
accumulation over a long period of time. If mutation is the symbol for
accommodation, growth is the metaphor for assimilation. In accommodation
the person or the group is generally, though not always, highly
conscious of the occasion, as in the peace treaty that ends the war, in
the arbitration of an industrial controversy, in the adjustment of the
person to the formal requirements of life in a new social world. In
assimilation the process is typically unconscious; the person is
incorporated into the common life of the group before he is aware and
with little conception of the course of events which brought this
incorporation about.
James has described the way in which the attitude of the person changes
toward certain subjects, woman's suffrage, for example, not as the
result of conscious reflection, but as the outcome of the unreflective
responses to a series of new experiences. The intimate associations of
the family and of the play group, participation in the ceremonies of
religious worship and in the celebrations of national holidays, all
these activities transmit to the immigrant and to the alien a store of
memories and sentiments common to the native-born, and these memories
are the basis of all that is peculiar and sacred in our cultural life.
As social contact initiates interaction, assimilation is its final
perfect product. The nature of the social contacts is decisive in the
process. Assimilation naturally takes place most rapidly where contacts
are primary, that is, where they are the most intimate and intense, as
in the area of touch relationship, in the family circle and in intimate
congenial groups. Secondary contacts facilitate accommodations, but do
not greatly promote assimilation. The contacts here are external and too
remote.
A common language is indispensable for the most intimate association of
the members of the group; its absence is an insurmountable barrier to
assimilation. The phenomenon "that every group has its own language,"
its peculiar "universe of discourse," and its cultural symbols is
evidence of the interrelation between communication and assimilation.
Through the mechanisms of imitation and suggestion, communication
effects a gradual and unconscious modification of the attitudes and
sentiments of the members of the group. The unity thus achieved is not
necessarily or even normally like-mindedness; it is rather a unity of
experience and of orientation, out of which may develop a community of
purpose and action.
3. Classification of the Materials
The selections in the materials on assimilation have been arranged under
three heads: (a) biological aspects of assimilation; (b) the
conflict and fusion of cultures; and (c) Americanization as a problem
in assimilation. The readings proceed from an analysis of the nature of
assimilation to a survey of its processes, as they have manifested
themselves historically, and finally to a consideration of the problems
of Americanization.
a) _Biological aspects of assimilation._--Assimilation is to be
distinguished from amalgamation, with which it is, however, closely
related. Amalgamation is a biological process, the fusion of races by
interbreeding and intermarriage. Assimilation, on the other hand, is
limited to the fusion of cultures. Miscegenation, or the mingling of
races, is a universal phenomenon among the historical races. There are
no races, in other words, that do not interbreed. Acculturation, or the
transmission of cultural elements from one social group to another,
however, has invariably taken place on a larger scale and over a wider
area than miscegenation.
Amalgamation, while it is limited to the crossing of racial traits
through intermarriage, naturally promotes assimilation or the
cross-fertilization of social heritages. The offspring of a "mixed"
marriage not only biologically inherits physical and temperamental
traits from both parents, but also acquires in the nurture of family
life the attitudes, sentiments, and memories of both father and mother.
Thus amalgamation of races insures the conditions of primary social
contacts most favorable for assimilation.
b) _The conflict and fusion of cultures._--The survey of the process
of what the ethnologists call _acculturation_, as it is exhibited
historically in the conflicts and fusions of cultures, indicates the
wide range of the phenomena in this field.
(1) Social contact, even when slight or indirect, is sufficient for the
transmission from one cultural group to another of the material elements
of civilization. Stimulants and firearms spread rapidly upon the
objective demonstration of their effects. The potato, a native of
America, has preceded the white explorer in its penetration into many
areas of Africa.
(2) The changes in languages in the course of the contacts, conflicts,
and fusions of races and nationalities afford data for a more adequate
description of the process of assimilation. Under what conditions does a
ruling group impose its speech upon the masses, or finally capitulate to
the vulgar tongue of the common people? In modern times the
printing-press, the book, and the newspaper have tended to fix
languages. The press has made feasible language revivals in connection
with national movements on a scale impossible in earlier periods.
The emphasis placed upon language as a medium of cultural transmission
rests upon a sound principle. For the idioms, particularly of a spoken
language, probably reflect more accurately the historical experiences of
a people than history itself. The basis of unity among most historical
peoples is linguistic rather than racial. The Latin peoples are a
convenient example of this fact. The experiment now in progress in the
Philippine Islands is significant in this connection. To what extent
will the national and cultural development of those islands be
determined by native temperament, by Spanish speech and tradition, or by
the English language and the American school system?
(3) Rivers in his study of Melanesian and Hawaiian cultures was
impressed by the persistence of fundamental elements of the social
structure. The basic patterns of family and social life remained
practically unmodified despite profound transformations in technique,
in language, and in religion. Evidently many material devices and formal
expressions of an alien society can be adopted without significant
changes in the native culture.
The question, however, may be raised whether or not the complete
adoption of occidental science and organization of industry would not
produce far-reaching changes in social organization. The trend of
economic, social, and cultural changes in Japan will throw light on this
question. Even if revolutionary social changes actually occur, the point
may well be made that they will be the outcome of the new economic
system, and therefore not effects of acculturation.
(4) The rapidity and completeness of assimilation depends directly upon
the intimacy of social contact. By a curious paradox, slavery, and
particularly household slavery, has probably been, aside from
intermarriage, the most efficient device for promoting assimilation.
Adoption and initiation among primitive peoples provided a ceremonial
method for inducting aliens and strangers into the group, the
significance of which can only be understood after a more adequate study
of ceremonial in general.
c) _Americanization as a problem of assimilation._--Any consideration
of policies, programs, and methods of Americanization gain perspective
when related to the sociology of assimilation. The "Study of Methods of
Americanization," of the Carnegie Corporation, defines Americanization
as "the participation of the immigrant in the life of the community in
which he lives." From this standpoint participation is both the medium
and the goal of assimilation. Participation of the immigrant in American
life in any area of life prepares him for participation in every other.
What the immigrant and the alien need most is an opportunity for
participation. Of first importance, of course, is the language. In
addition he needs to know how to use our institutions for his own
benefit and protection. But participation, to be real, must be
spontaneous and intelligent, and that means, in the long run, that the
immigrant's life in America must be related to the life he already
knows. Not by the suppression of old memories, but by their
incorporation in his new life is assimilation achieved. The failure of
conscious, coercive policies of denationalization in Europe and the
great success of the early, passive phase of Americanization in this
country afford in this connection an impressive contrast. It follows
that assimilation cannot be promoted directly, but only indirectly, that
is, by supplying the conditions that make for participation.
There is no process but life itself that can effectually wipe out the
immigrant's memory of his past. The inclusion of the immigrant in our
common life may perhaps be best reached, therefore, in co-operation that
looks not so much to the past as to the future. The second generation of
the immigrant may share fully in our memories, but practically all that
we can ask of the foreign-born is participation in our ideals, our
wishes, and our common enterprises.
II. MATERIALS
A. BIOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF ASSIMILATION
1. Assimilation and Amalgamation[241]
Writers on historical and social science are just beginning to turn
their attention to the large subject of social assimilation. That the
subject has until recently received little attention is readily seen by
a mere glance at the works of our leading sociologists and historians.
The word itself rarely appears; and when the theme is touched upon, no
clearly defined, stable idea seems to exist, even in the mind of the
author. Thus Giddings at one time identifies assimilation with
"reciprocal accommodation." In another place he defines it as "the
process of growing alike," and once again he tells us it is the method
by which foreigners in the United States society become Americans. Nor
are M. Novicow's ideas on the subject perfectly lucid, for he considers
assimilation sometimes as a _process_, at other times as an _art_, and
again as a _result_. He makes the term "denationalization" coextensive
with our "assimilation," and says that the ensemble of measures which a
government takes for inducing a population to abandon one type of
culture for another is denationalization. Denationalization by the
authority of the state carries with it a certain amount of coercion; it
is always accompanied by a measure of violence. In the next sentence,
however, we are told that the word "denationalization" may also be used
for the non-coercive _process_ by which one nationality is assimilated
with another. M. Novicow further speaks of the _art_ of assimilation,
and he tells us that the _result_ of the intellectual struggle between
races living under the same government, whether free or forced, is in
every case assimilation. Burgess also takes a narrow view of the
subject, restricting the operation of assimilating forces to the present
and considering assimilation a result of modern political union. He
says: "In modern times the political union of different races under the
leadership of the dominant race results in assimilation."
From one point of view assimilation is a process with its active and
passive elements; from another it is a result. In this discussion,
however, assimilation is considered as a process due to prolonged
contact. It may, perhaps, be defined as that process of adjustment or
accommodation which occurs between the members of two different races,
if their contact is prolonged and if the necessary psychic conditions
are present. The result is group homogeneity to a greater or less
degree. Figuratively speaking, it is the process by which the
aggregation of peoples is changed from a mere mechanical mixture into a
chemical compound.
The process of assimilation is of a psychological rather than of a
biological nature, and refers to the growing alike in character,
thoughts, and institutions, rather than to the blood-mingling brought
about by intermarriage. The intellectual results of the process of
assimilation are far more lasting than the physiological. Thus in France
today, though nineteen-twentieths of the blood is that of the aboriginal
races, the language is directly derived from that imposed by the Romans
in their conquest of Gaul. Intermarriage, the inevitable result to a
greater or less extent of race contact, plays its part in the process of
assimilation, but mere mixture of races will not cause assimilation.
Moreover, assimilation is possible, partially at least, without
intermarriage. Instances of this are furnished by the partial
assimilation of the Negro and the Indian of the United States. Thinkers
are beginning to doubt the great importance once attributed to
intermarriage as a factor in civilization. Says Mayo-Smith, "It is not
in unity of blood but in unity of institutions and social habits and
ideals that we are to seek that which we call nationality," and
nationality is the result of assimilation.
2. The Instinctive Basis of Assimilation[242]
It is a striking fact that among animals there are some whose conduct
can be generalized very readily in the categories of self-preservation,
nutrition, and sex, while there are others whose conduct cannot be thus
summarized. The behavior of the tiger and the cat is simple and easily
comprehensible, whereas that of the dog with his conscience, his humor,
his terror of loneliness, his capacity for devotion to a brutal master,
or that of the bee with her selfless devotion to the hive, furnishes
phenomena which no sophistry can assimilate without the aid of a fourth
instinct. But little examination will show that the animals whose
conduct it is difficult to generalize under the three primitive
instinctive categories are gregarious. If, then, it can be shown that
gregariousness is of a biological significance approaching in importance
that of the other instincts we may expect to find in it the source of
these anomalies of conduct, and of the complexity of human behavior.
Gregariousness seems frequently to be regarded as a somewhat superficial
character, scarcely deserving, as it were, the name of an instinct,
advantageous, it is true, but not of fundamental importance or likely to
be deeply ingrained in the inheritance of the species. This attitude may
be due to the fact that among mammals, at any rate, the appearance of
gregariousness has not been accompanied by any very gross physical
changes which are obviously associated with it.
To whatever it may be due, this method of regarding the social habit is,
in the opinion of the present writer, not justified by the facts, and
prevents the attainment of conclusions of considerable fruitfulness.
A study of bees and ants shows at once how fundamental the importance of
gregariousness may become. The individual in such communities is
completely incapable, often physically, of existing apart from the
community, and this fact at once gives rise to the suspicion that, even
in communities less closely knit than those of the ant and the bee, the
individual may in fact be more dependent on communal life than appears
at first sight.
Another very striking piece of general evidence of the significance of
gregariousness as no mere late acquirement is the remarkable coincidence
of its occurrence with that of exceptional grades of intelligence or
the possibility of very complex reactions to environment. It can
scarcely be regarded as an unmeaning accident that the dog, the horse,
the ape, the elephant, and man are all social animals. The instances of
the bee and the ant are perhaps the most amazing. Here the advantages of
gregariousness seem actually to outweigh the most prodigious differences
of structure, and we find a condition which is often thought of as a
mere habit, capable of enabling the insect nervous system to compete in
the complexity of its power of adaptation with that of the higher
vertebrates.
From the biological standpoint the probability of gregariousness being a
primitive and fundamental quality in man seems to be considerable. It
would appear to have the effect of enlarging the advantages of
variation. Varieties not immediately favorable, varieties departing
widely from the standard, varieties even unfavorable to the individual,
may be supposed to be given by it a chance of survival. Now the course
of the development of man seems to present many features incompatible
with its having proceeded among isolated individuals exposed to the
unmodified action of natural selection. Changes so serious as the
assumption of the upright posture, the reduction in the jaw and its
musculature, the reduction in the acuity of smell and hearing, demand,
if the species is to survive, either a delicacy of adjustment with the
compensatingly developing intelligence so minute as to be almost
inconceivable, or the existence of some kind of protective enclosure,
however imperfect, in which the varying individuals may be sheltered
from the direct influence of natural selection. The existence of such a
mechanism would compensate losses of physical strength in the individual
by the greatly increased strength of the larger unit, of the unit, that
is to say, upon which natural selection still acts unmodified.
The cardinal quality of the herd is homogeneity. It is clear that the
great advantage of the social habit is to enable large numbers to act as
one, whereby in the case of the hunting gregarious animal strength in
pursuit and attack is at once increased beyond that of the creatures
preyed upon, and in protective socialism the sensitiveness of the new
unit to alarms is greatly in excess of that of the individual member of
the flock.
To secure these advantages of homogeneity, it is evident that the
members of the herd must possess sensitiveness to the behavior of their
fellows. The individual isolated will be of no meaning; the individual
as part of the herd will be capable of transmitting the most potent
impulses. Each member of the flock tending to follow his neighbor, and
in turn to be followed, each is in some sense capable of leadership; but
no lead will be followed that departs widely from normal behavior. A
lead will only be followed from its resemblance to the normal. If the
leader go so far ahead as definitely to cease to be in the herd, he will
necessarily be ignored.
The original in conduct, that is to say, resistiveness to the voice of
the herd, will be suppressed by natural selection; the wolf which does
not follow the impulses of the herd will be starved; the sheep which
does not respond to the flock will be eaten.
Again, not only will the individual be responsive to impulses coming
from the herd but he will treat the herd as his normal environment. The
impulse to be in and always to remain with the herd will have the
strongest instinctive weight. Anything which tends to separate him from
his fellows, as soon as it becomes perceptible as such, will be strongly
resisted.
So far we have regarded the gregarious animal objectively. Let us now
try to estimate the mental aspects of these impulses. Suppose a species
in possession of precisely the instinctive endowments which we have been
considering to be also self-conscious, and let us ask what will be the
forms under which these phenomena will present themselves in its mind.
In the first place, it is quite evident that impulses derived from herd
feeling will enter the mind with the value of instincts--they will
present themselves as "a priori syntheses of the most perfect sort
needing no proof but their own evidence." They will not, however, it is
important to remember, necessarily always give this quality to the same
specific acts, but will show this great distinguishing characteristic
that they may give to any opinion whatever the characters of instinctive
belief, making it into an "a priori synthesis"; so that we shall expect
to find acts which it would be absurd to look upon as the results of
specific instincts carried out with all the enthusiasm of instinct and
displaying all the marks of instinctive behavior.
In interpreting into mental terms the consequences of gregariousness we
may conveniently begin with the simplest. The conscious individual will
feel an unanalysable primary sense of comfort in the actual presence of
his fellows and a similar sense of discomfort in their absence. It will
be obvious truth to him that it is not good for man to be alone.
Loneliness will be a real terror insurmountable by reason.
Again, certain conditions will become secondarily associated with
presence with, or absence from, the herd. For example, take the
sensations of heat and cold. The latter is prevented in gregarious
animals by close crowding and experienced in the reverse condition;
hence it comes to be connected in the mind with separation and so
acquires altogether unreasonable associations of harmfulness. Similarly,
the sensation of warmth is associated with feelings of the secure and
salutary.
Slightly more complex manifestations of the same tendency to homogeneity
are seen in the desire for identification with the herd in matters of
opinion. Here we find the biological explanation of the ineradicable
impulse mankind has always displayed toward segregation into classes.
Each one of us in his opinions, and his conduct, in matters of dress,
amusement, religion, and politics, is compelled to obtain the support of
a class, of a herd within the herd. The most eccentric in opinion or
conduct is, we may be sure, supported by the agreement of a class, the
smallness of which accounts for his apparent eccentricity, and the
preciousness of which accounts for his fortitude in defying general
opinion. Again, anything which tends to emphasize difference from the
herd is unpleasant. In the individual mind there will be an analysable
dislike of the novel in action or thought. It will be "wrong," "wicked,"
"foolish," "undesirable," or, as we say, "bad form," according to
varying circumstances which we can already to some extent define.
Manifestations relatively more simple are shown in the dislike of being
conspicuous, in shyness, and in stage fright. It is, however,
sensitiveness to the behavior of the herd which has the most important
effects upon the structure of the mind of the gregarious animal. This
sensitiveness is, as Sidis has clearly seen, closely associated with the
suggestibility of the gregarious animal, and therefore with that of man.
The effect of it will clearly be to make acceptable those suggestions
which come from the herd, and those only. It is of especial importance
to note that this suggestibility is not general, and that it is only
herd suggestions which are rendered acceptable by the action of
instinct.
B. THE CONFLICT AND FUSION OF CULTURES
1. The Analysis of Blended Cultures[243]
In the analysis of any culture, a difficulty which soon meets the
investigator is that he has to determine what is due to mere contact and
what is due to intimate intermixture, such intermixture, for instance,
as is produced by the permanent blending of one people with another,
either through warlike invasion or peaceful settlement. The fundamental
weakness of most of the attempts hitherto made to analyze existing
cultures is that they have had their starting-point in the study of
material objects, and the reason for this is obvious. Owing to the fact
that material objects can be collected by anyone and subjected at
leisure to prolonged study by experts, our knowledge of the distribution
of material objects and of the technique of their manufacture has very
far outrun that of the less material elements. What I wish now to point
out is that in distinguishing between the effects of mere contact and
the intermixture of peoples, material objects are the least trustworthy
of all the constituents of culture. Thus in Melanesia we have the
clearest evidence that material objects and processes can spread by mere
contact, without any true admixture of peoples and without influence on
other features of the culture. While the distribution of material
objects is of the utmost importance in suggesting at the outset
community of culture, and while it is of equal importance in the final
process of determining points of contact and in filling in the details
of the mixture of cultures, it is the least satisfactory guide to the
actual blending of peoples which must form the solid foundation of the
ethnological analysis of culture. The case for the value of
magico-religious institutions is not much stronger. Here, again, in
Melanesia there is little doubt that whole cults can pass from one
people to another without any real intermixture of peoples. I do not
wish to imply that such religious institutions can pass from people to
people with the ease of material objects, but to point out that there is
evidence that they can and do so pass with very little, if any,
admixture of peoples or of the deeper and more fundamental elements of
the culture. Much more important is language; and if you will think over
the actual conditions when one people either visit or settle among
another, this greater importance will be obvious. Let us imagine a party
of Melanesians visiting a Polynesian island, staying there for a few
weeks, and then returning home (and here I am not taking a fictitious
occurrence, but one which really happens). We can readily understand
that the visitors may take with them their betel-mixture, and thereby
introduce the custom of betel-chewing into a new home; we can readily
understand that they may introduce an ornament to be worn in the nose
and another to be worn on the chest; that tales which they tell will be
remembered, and dances they perform will be imitated. A few Milanesian
words may pass into the language of the Polynesian island, especially as
names for the objects or processes which the strangers have introduced;
but it is incredible that the strangers should thus in a short visit
produce any extensive change in the vocabulary, and still more that they
should modify the structure of the language. Such changes can never be
the result of mere contact or transient settlement but must always
indicate a far more deeply seated and fundamental process of blending of
peoples and cultures.
Few will perhaps hesitate to accept this position; but I expect my next
proposition to meet with more skepticism, and yet I believe it to be
widely, though not universally, true. This proposition is that the
social structure, the framework of society, is still more fundamentally
important and still less easily changed except as the result of the
intimate blending of peoples, and for that reason furnishes by far the
firmest foundation on which to base the process of analysis of culture.
I cannot hope to establish the truth of this proposition in the course
of a brief address, and I propose to draw your attention to one line of
evidence only.
At the present moment we have before our eyes an object-lesson in the
spread of our own people over the earth's surface, and we are thus able
to study how external influence affects different elements of culture.
What we find is that mere contact is able to transmit much in the way of
material culture. A passing vessel, which does not even anchor, may be
able to transmit iron, while European weapons may be used by people who
have never even seen a white man. Again, missionaries introduce the
Christian religion among people who cannot speak a word of English or
any language but their own or only use such European words as have been
found necessary to express ideas or objects connected with the new
religion. There is evidence how readily language may be affected, and
here again the present day suggests a mechanism by which such a change
takes place. English is now becoming the language of the Pacific and of
other parts of the world through its use as a _lingua franca_, which
enables natives who speak different languages to converse not only with
Europeans but with one another, and I believe that this has often been
the mechanism in the past; that, for instance, the introduction of what
we now call the Melanesian structure of language was due to the fact
that the language of an immigrant people who settled in a region of
great linguistic diversity came to be used as a _lingua franca_, and
thus gradually became the basis of the languages of the whole people.
But now let us turn to social structure. We find in Oceania islands
where Europeans have been settled as missionaries or traders perhaps for
fifty or a hundred years; we find the people wearing European clothes
and European ornaments, using European utensils and even European
weapons when they fight; we find them holding the beliefs and practicing
the ritual of a European religion; we find them speaking a European
language, often even among themselves, and yet investigation shows that
much of their social structure remains thoroughly native and
uninfluenced, not only in its general form, but often even in its minute
details. The external influence has swept away the whole material
culture, so that objects of native origin are manufactured only to sell
to tourists; it has substituted a wholly new religion and destroyed
every material, if not every moral, vestige of the old; it has caused
great modification and degeneration of the old language; and yet it may
have left the social structure in the main untouched. And the reasons
for this are clear. Most of the essential social structure of a people
lies so below the surface, it is so literally the foundation of the
whole life of the people, that it is not seen; it is not obvious, but
can only be reached by patient and laborious exploration. I will give a
few specific instances. In several islands of the Pacific, some of which
have had European settlers on them for more than a century, a most
important position in the community is occupied by the father's sister.
If any native of these islands were asked who is the most important
person in the determination of his life-history, he would answer, "My
father's sister"; and yet the place of this relative in the social
structure has remained absolutely unrecorded, and, I believe, absolutely
unknown, to the European settlers in those islands. Again, Europeans
have settled in Fiji for more than a century, and yet it is only during
this summer that I have heard from Mr. A. M. Hocart, who is working
there at present, that there is the clearest evidence of what is known
as the dual organization of society as a working social institution at
the present time. How unobtrusive such a fundamental fact of social
structure may be comes home to me in this case very strongly, for it
wholly eluded my own observation during a visit three years ago.
Lastly, the most striking example of the permanence of social structure
which I have met is in the Hawaiian Islands. There the original native
culture is reduced to the merest wreckage. So far as material objects
are concerned, the people are like ourselves; the old religion has gone,
though there probably still persists some of the ancient magic. The
people themselves have so dwindled in number, and the political
conditions are so altered, that the social structure has also
necessarily been greatly modified, and yet I was able to ascertain that
one of its elements, an element which I believe to form the deepest
layer of the foundation, the very bedrock of social structure, the
system of relationship, is still in use unchanged. I was able to obtain
a full account of the system as actually used at the present time, and
found it to be exactly the same as that recorded forty years ago by
Morgan and Hyde, and I obtained evidence that the system is still deeply
interwoven with the intimate mental life of the people.
If, then, social structure has this fundamental and deeply seated
character, if it is the least easily changed, and only changed as the
result either of actual blending of peoples or of the most profound
political changes, the obvious inference is that it is with social
structure that we must begin the attempt to analyze culture and to
ascertain how far community of culture is due to the blending of
peoples, how far to transmission through mere contact or transient
settlement.
The considerations I have brought forward have, however, in my opinion
an importance still more fundamental. If social institutions have this
relatively great degree of permanence, if they are so deeply seated and
so closely interwoven with the deepest instincts and sentiments of a
people that they can only gradually suffer change, will not the study
of this change give us our surest criterion of what is early and what is
late in any given culture, and thereby furnish a guide for the analysis
of culture? Such criteria of early and late are necessary if we are to
arrange the cultural elements reached by our analysis in order of time,
and it is very doubtful whether mere geographical distribution itself
will ever furnish a sufficient basis for this purpose. I may remind you
here that before the importance of the complexity of Melanesian culture
had forced itself on my mind, I had already succeeded in tracing out a
course for the development of the structure of Melanesian society, and
after the complexity of the culture had been established, I did not find
it necessary to alter anything of essential importance in this scheme. I
suggest, therefore, that while the ethnological analysis of cultures
must furnish a necessary preliminary to any general evolutionary
speculations, there is one element of culture which has so relatively
high a degree of permanence that its course of development may furnish a
guide to the order in time of the different elements into which it is
possible to analyze a given complex.
If the development of social structure is thus to be taken as a guide to
assist the process of analysis, it is evident that there will be
involved a logical process of considerable complexity in which there
will be the danger of arguing in a circle. If, however, the analysis of
culture is to be the primary task of the anthropologist, it is evident
that the logical methods of the science will attain a complexity far
exceeding those hitherto in vogue. I believe that the only logical
process which will in general be found possible will be the formulation
of hypothetical working schemes into which the facts can be fitted, and
that the test of such schemes will be their capacity to fit in with
themselves, or, as we generally express it, "explain" new facts as they
come to our knowledge. This is the method of other sciences which deal
with conditions as complex as those of human society. In many other
sciences these new facts are discovered by experiment. In our science
they must be found by exploration, not only of the cultures still
existent in living form, but also of the buried cultures of past ages.
2. The Extension of Roman Culture in Gaul[244]
The Roman conquest of Gaul was partially a feat of arms; but it was much
more a triumph of Roman diplomacy and a genius for colonial government.
Roman power in Gaul was centered in the larger cities and in their
strongly fortified camps. There the laws and decrees of Rome were
promulgated and the tribute of the conquered tribes received. There,
too, the law courts were held and justice administered. Rome bent her
efforts to the Latinizing of her newly acquired possessions. Gradually
she forced the inhabitants of the larger cities to use the Latin tongue.
But this forcing was done in a diplomatic, though effective, manner.
Even in the days of Caesar, Latin was made the only medium for the
administration of the law, the promulgation of decrees, the exercise of
the functions of government, the administration of justice, and the
performing of the offices of religion. It was the only medium of
commerce and trade with the Romans, of literature and art, of the
theater and of social relations. Above all, it was the only road to
office under the Roman government and to political preferment. The Roman
officials in Gaul encouraged and rewarded the mastery of the Latin
tongue and the acquirement of Roman culture, customs, and manners.
Thanks to this well-defined policy of the Roman government, native Gauls
were found in important offices even in Caesar's time. The number of
these Gallo-Roman offices increased rapidly, and their influence was
steadily exercised in favor of the acquirement, by the natives, of the
Latin language. A greater inducement still was held out to the Gauls to
acquire the ways and culture of their conquerors. This was the prospect
of employment or political preference and honors in the imperial city of
Rome itself. Under this pressure so diplomatically applied, the study of
the Latin language, grammar, literature, and oratory became a passion
throughout the cities of Gaul, which were full of Roman merchants,
traders, teachers, philosophers, lawyers, artists, sculptors, and
seekers for political and other offices. Latin was the symbol of success
in every avenue of life. Native Gauls became noted merchant princes,
lawyers, soldiers, local potentates at home, and favorites of powerful
political personages in Rome and even in the colonies outside Gaul.
Natives of Gaul, too, reached the highest offices in the land, becoming
even members of the Senate; and later on a native Gaul became one of the
most noted of the Roman emperors. The political policy of Rome made the
imposition of the Latin language upon the cities of Gaul a comparatively
easy matter, requiring only time to assure its accomplishment.
Everywhere throughout the populous cities of Gaul there sprang up
schools that rivaled, in their efficacy and reputation, the most famous
institutions of Rome. Rich Romans sent their sons to these schools
because of their excellence and the added advantage that they could
acquire there a first-hand knowledge of the life and customs of the
natives, whom they might be called upon in the future to govern or to
have political or other relations with. Thus all urban Gaul traveled
Rome-ward--"all roads led to Rome."
The influence of Roman culture extended itself much more slowly over the
rural districts, the inhabitants of which, in addition to being much
more conservative and passionately attached to their native institutions
and language, lacked the incentive of ambition and of commercial and
trade necessity. A powerful Druidical priesthood held the rural Celts
together and set their faces against Roman culture and religion. But
even in the rural districts Latin made its way slowly and in a mangled
form, yet none the less surely. This was accomplished almost entirely
through the natural pressure from without exercised by the growing power
of the Latin tongue, which had greatly increased during the reign of the
Emperor Claudius (41-54 A.D.). Claudius, who was born in Lyon and
educated in Gaul, opened to the Gauls all the employments and dignities
of the empire. On the construction of the many extensive public works he
employed many inhabitants of Gaul in positions requiring faithfulness,
honesty, and skill. These, in their turn, frequently drew laborers from
the rural districts of Gaul. These latter, during their residence in
Rome or other Italian cities, or in the populous centers of Gaul,
acquired some knowledge of Latin. Thus, in time, through these and other
agencies, a sort of _lingua franca_ sprang up throughout the rural
districts of Gaul and served as a medium of communication between the
Celtic-speaking population and the inhabitants of the cities and towns.
This consisted of a frame of Latin words stripped of most of their
inflections and subjected to word-contractions and other modifications.
Into this frame were fitted many native words which had already become
the property of trade and commerce and the other activities of life in
the city, town, and country. Thus, as the influence of Latin became
stronger in the cities, it continued to exercise greater pressure on the
rural districts. This pressure soon began to react upon the centers of
Latin culture. The uneducated classes of Gaul everywhere, even in the
cities, spoke very imperfect Latin, the genius of which is so different
from that of the native tongues of Gaul. But while the cities afforded
some correction for this universal tendency among the masses to corrupt
the Latin language, the life of the rural districts, where the native
tongues were still universally spoken, made the disintegration of the
highly inflected Roman speech unavoidable. As the masses in the city and
country became more Latinized, at the expense of their native tongues,
the corrupted Latin spoken over immense districts of the country tended
to pass current as the speech of the populace and to crowd out classical
or school Latin. As this corrupted local Latin varied greatly in
different parts of the country, due to linguistic and other influences,
there resulted numerous Roman dialects throughout Gaul, many of which
are still in existence.
The introduction of Christianity gave additional impulse to the study of
Latin, which soon became the official language of the Christian church;
and it was taught everywhere by the priests to the middle and upper
classes, and they also encouraged the masses to learn it. It seemed as
if this was destined to maintain the prestige of Latin as the official
language of the country. But in reality it hastened its downfall by
making it more and more the language of the illiterate masses. Soon the
rural districts furnished priests who spoke their own Roman tongue; and
the struggle to rehabilitate the literary Latin among the masses was
abandoned. The numerous French dialects of Latin had already begun to
assume shape when the decline of the Roman Empire brought the Germanic
tribes down upon Gaul and introduced a new element into the Romanic
speech, which had already worked its will upon the tongue of the
Caesars. Under its influence the loose Latin construction disappeared;
articles and prepositions took the place of the inflectional
terminations brought to a high state of artificial perfection in Latin;
and the wholesale suppression of unaccented syllables had so contracted
the Latin words that they were often scarcely recognizable. The
modification of vowel sounds increased the efficacy of the disguise
assumed by Latin words masquerading in the Romanic dialects throughout
Gaul; and the Celtic and other native words in current use to designate
the interests and occupations of the masses helped to differentiate the
popular speech from the classical Latin. Already Celtic, as a spoken
tongue, had almost entirely disappeared from the cities; and even in the
rural districts it had fallen into a certain amount of neglect, as the
_lingua franca_ of the first centuries of Roman occupation, reaching out
in every direction, became the ever-increasing popular speech.
3. The Competition of the Cultural Languages[245]
Some time ago a typewriter firm, in advertising a machine with Arabic
characters, made the statement that the Arabic alphabet is used by more
people than any other. A professor of Semitic languages was asked: "How
big a lie is that?" He answered: "It is true."
In a certain sense, it is true; the total population of all the
countries whose inhabitants use the Arabic alphabet (if they use any) is
slightly larger than that of those who use the Latin alphabet and its
slight variations, or the Chinese characters (which of course are not an
alphabet), or the Russian alphabet. If, however, the question is how
many people can actually use any alphabet or system of writing, the
Arabic stands lowest of the four.
The question of the relative importance of a language as a literary
medium is a question of how many people want to read it. There are two
classes of these: those to whom it is vernacular, and those who learn it
in addition to their own language. The latter class is of the greater
importance in proportion to its numbers; a man who has education enough
to acquire a foreign language is pretty sure to use it, while many of
the former class, who can read, really do read very little. Those who
count in this matter are those who can get information from a printed
page as easily as by listening to someone talking. A fair index of the
relative number of these in a country is the newspaper circulation
there.
A language must have a recognized literary standard and all the people
in its territory must learn to use it as such before its influence goes
far abroad. English, French, and German, and they alone, have reached
this point. French and German have no new country, and practically the
whole of their country is now literate; their relative share in the
world's reading can only increase as their population increases. Spanish
and Russian, on the other hand, have both new country and room for a
much higher percentage of literacy.
It is probable that all the countries in temperate zones will have
universal literacy by the end of the century. In this case, even if no
one read English outside its vernacular countries, it would still hold
its own as the leading literary language. German and French are bound to
fall off relatively as vernaculars, and this implies a falling off of
their importance as culture languages; but the importance of English in
this respect is bound to grow. The first place among foreign languages
has been given to it in the schools of many European and South American
countries; Mexico and Japan make it compulsory in all schools of upper
grades; and China is to follow Japan in this respect as soon as the work
can be organized.
The number of people who can actually read, or will learn if now too
young, for the various languages of the world appears to be as follows:
Number
in Millions Per Cent
English 136 27.2
German 82 16.4
Chinese[A] 70 14.0
French 28 9.6
Russian 30 6.0
Arabic 25 5.0
Italian 18 4.6
Spanish 12 2.6
Scandinavian 11 2.2
Dutch and Flemish 9 1.9
Minor European[B] 34 6.8
Minor Asiatic[B] 16 3.2
Minor African and Polynesian[B] 2+ 0.5
Total 473+ 100.0
Notes:
[A] Not a spoken language, but a system of writing.
[B] None representing as much as 1 per cent of total.
English, therefore, now leads all other languages in the number of its
readers. Three-fourths of the world's mail matter is addressed in
English. More than half of the world's newspapers are printed in
English, and, as they have a larger circulation than those in other
languages, probably three-fourths of the world's newspaper reading is
done in English.
The languages next in importance, French and German, cannot maintain
their relative positions because English has more than half of the new
land in the temperate zone and they have none. The languages which have
the rest of the new territory, Spanish and Russian, are not established
as culture languages, as English is. No other language, not even French
or German, has a vernacular so uniform and well established, and with so
few variations from the literary language. English is spoken in the
United States by more than fifty million people with so slight
variations that no foreigner would ever notice them. No other language
whatever can show more than a fraction of this number of persons who
speak so nearly alike.
It is then probable that, within the century, English will be the
vernacular of a quarter instead of a tenth of the people of the world,
and be read by a half instead of a quarter of the people who can read.
4. The Assimilation of Races[246]
The race problem has sometimes been described as a problem in
assimilation. It is not always clear, however, what assimilation means.
Historically the word has had two distinct significations. According to
earlier usage it meant "to compare" or "to make like." According to
later usage it signifies "to take up and incorporate."
There is a process that goes on in society by which individuals
spontaneously acquire one another's language, characteristic attitudes,
habits, and modes of behavior. There is also a process by which
individuals and groups of individuals are taken over and incorporated
into larger groups. Both processes have been concerned in the formation
of modern nationalities. The modern Italian, Frenchman, and German is a
composite of the broken fragments of several different racial groups.
Interbreeding has broken up the ancient stocks, and interaction and
imitation have created new national types which exhibit definite
uniformities in language, manners, and formal behavior.
It has sometimes been assumed that the creation of a national type is
the specific function of assimilation and that national solidarity is
based upon national homogeneity and "like-mindedness." The extent and
importance of the kind of homogeneity that individuals of the same
nationality exhibit have been greatly exaggerated. Neither interbreeding
nor interaction has created, in what the French term "nationals," a more
than superficial likeness or like-mindedness. Racial differences have,
to be sure, disappeared or been obscured, but individual differences
remain. Individual differences, again, have been intensified by
education, personal competition, and the division of labor, until
individual members of cosmopolitan groups probably represent greater
variations in disposition, temperament, and mental capacity than those
which distinguished the more homogeneous races and peoples of an earlier
civilization.
What then, precisely, is the nature of the homogeneity which
characterizes cosmopolitan groups?
The growth of modern states exhibits the progressive merging of smaller,
mutually exclusive, into larger and more inclusive, social groups. This
result has been achieved in various ways, but it has usually been
followed or accompanied by a more or less complete adoption by the
members of the smaller groups of the language, technique, and mores of
the larger and more inclusive ones. The immigrant readily takes over the
language, manners, the social ritual, and outward forms of his adopted
country. In America it has become proverbial that a Pole, Lithuanian, or
Norwegian cannot be distinguished, in the second generation, from an
American born of native parents.
There is no reason to assume that this assimilation of alien groups to
native standards has modified to any great extent fundamental racial
characteristics. It has, however, erased the external signs which
formerly distinguished the members of one race from those of another.
On the other hand, the breaking up of the isolation of smaller groups
has had the effect of emancipating the individual man, giving him room
and freedom for the expansion and development of his individual
aptitudes.
What one actually finds in cosmopolitan groups, then, is a superficial
uniformity, a homogeneity in manners and fashion, associated with
relatively profound differences in individual opinions, sentiments, and
beliefs. This is just the reverse of what one meets among primitive
peoples, where diversity in external forms, as between different groups,
is accompanied by a monotonous sameness in the mental attitudes of
individuals. There is a striking similarity in the sentiments and mental
attitudes of peasant peoples in all parts of the world, although the
external differences are often great. In the Black Forest, in Baden,
Germany, almost every valley shows a different style of costume, a
different type of architecture, although in each separate valley every
house is like every other and the costume, as well as the religion, is
for every member of each separate community absolutely after the same
pattern. On the other hand, a German, Russian, or Negro peasant of the
southern states, different as each is in some respects, are all very
much alike in certain habitual attitudes and sentiments.
What, then, is the rôle of homogeneity and like-mindedness, such as we
find them to be, in cosmopolitan states? So far as it makes each
individual look like every other--no matter how different under the
skin--homogeneity mobilizes the individual man. It removes the social
taboo, permits the individual to move into strange groups, and thus
facilitates new and adventurous contacts. In obliterating the external
signs, which in secondary groups seem to be the sole basis of caste and
class distinctions, it realizes, for the individual, the principle of
_laissez faire_, _laissez aller_. Its ultimate economic effect is to
substitute personal for racial competition, and to give free play to
forces that tend to relegate every individual, irrespective of race or
status, to the position he or she is best fitted to fill.
As a matter of fact, the ease and rapidity with which aliens, under
existing conditions in the United States, have been able to assimilate
themselves to the customs and manners of American life have enabled this
country to swallow and digest every sort of normal human difference,
except the purely external ones, like the color of the skin.
It is probably true, also, that like-mindedness of the kind that
expresses itself in national types contributes indirectly by
facilitating the intermingling of the different elements of the
population to the national solidarity. This is due to the fact that the
solidarity of modern states depends less on the homogeneity of
population than, as James Bryce has suggested, upon the thoroughgoing
mixture of heterogeneous elements. Like-mindedness, so far as that term
signifies a standard grade of intelligence, contributes little or
nothing to national solidarity. Likeness is, after all, a purely formal
concept which of itself cannot hold anything together.
In the last analysis social solidarity is based on sentiment and habit.
It is the sentiment of loyalty and the habit of what Sumner calls
"concurrent action" that gives substance and insures unity to the state
as to every other type of social group. This sentiment of loyalty has
its basis in a _modus vivendi_, a working relation and mutual
understanding of the members of the group. Social institutions are not
founded in similarities any more than they are founded in differences,
but in relations, and in the mutual interdependence of parts. When these
relations have the sanction of custom and are fixed in individual habit,
so that the activities of the group are running smoothly, personal
attitudes and sentiments, which are the only forms in which individual
minds collide and clash with one another, easily accommodate themselves
to the existing situation.
It may, perhaps, be said that loyalty itself is a form of
like-mindedness or that it is dependent in some way upon the
like-mindedness of the individuals whom it binds together. This,
however, cannot be true, for there is no greater loyalty than that which
binds the dog to his master, and this is a sentiment which that faithful
animal usually extends to other members of the household to which he
belongs. A dog without a master is a dangerous animal, but the dog that
has been domesticated is a member of society. He is not, of course, a
citizen, although he is not entirely without rights. But he has got into
some sort of practical working relations with the group to which he
belongs.
It is this practical working arrangement, into which individuals with
widely different mental capacities enter as co-ordinate parts, that
gives the corporate character to social groups and insures their
solidarity. It is the process of assimilation by which groups of
individuals, originally indifferent or perhaps hostile, achieve this
corporate character, rather than the process by which they acquire a
formal like-mindedness, with which this paper is mainly concerned.
The difficulty with the conception of assimilation which one ordinarily
meets in discussions of the race problem is that it is based on
observations confined to individualistic groups where the characteristic
relations are indirect and secondary. It takes no account of the kind of
assimilation that takes place in primary groups where relations are
direct and personal--in the tribe, for example, and in the family.
Thus Charles Francis Adams, referring to the race problem in an address
at Richmond, Virginia, in November, 1908, said:
The American system, as we know, was founded on the assumed
basis of a common humanity, that is, absence of absolutely
fundamental racial characteristics was accepted as an
established truth. Those of all races were welcomed to our
shores. They came, aliens; they and their descendants would
become citizens first, natives afterward. It was a process
first of assimilation and then of absorption. On this all
depended. There could be no permanent divisional lines. That
theory is now plainly broken down. We are confronted by the
obvious fact, as undeniable as it is hard, that the African
will only partially assimilate and that he cannot be absorbed.
He remains an alien element in the body politic. A foreign
substance, he can neither be assimilated nor thrown out.
More recently an editorial in the _Outlook_, discussing the Japanese
situation in California, made this statement:
The hundred millions of people now inhabiting the United States
must be a united people, not merely a collection of groups of
different peoples, different in racial cultures and ideals,
agreeing to live together in peace and amity. These hundred
millions must have common ideals, common aims, a common custom,
a common culture, a common language, and common
characteristics, if the nation is to endure.
All this is quite true and interesting, but it does not clearly
recognize the fact that the chief obstacle to the assimilation of the
Negro and the Oriental are not mental but physical traits. It is not
because the Negro and the Japanese are so differently constituted that
they do not assimilate. If they were given an opportunity, the Japanese
are quite as capable as the Italians, the Armenians, or the Slavs of
acquiring our culture and sharing our national ideals. The trouble is
not with the Japanese mind but with the Japanese skin. The Jap is not
the right color.
The fact that the Japanese bears in his features a distinctive racial
hallmark, that he wears, so to speak, a racial uniform, classifies him.
He cannot become a mere individual, indistinguishable in the
cosmopolitan mass of the population, as is true, for example, of the
Irish, and, to a lesser extent, of some of the other immigrant races.
The Japanese, like the Negro, is condemned to remain among us an
abstraction, a symbol--and a symbol not merely of his own race but of
the Orient and of that vague, ill-defined menace we sometimes refer to
as the "yellow peril." This not only determines to a very large extent
the attitude of the white world toward the yellow man but it determines
the attitude of the yellow man toward the white. It puts between the
races the invisible but very real gulf of self-consciousness.
There is another consideration. Peoples we know intimately we respect
and esteem. In our casual contact with aliens, however, it is the
offensive rather than the pleasing traits that impress us. These
impressions accumulate and reinforce natural prejudices. Where races are
distinguished by certain external marks, these furnish a permanent
physical substratum upon which and around which the irritations and
animosities, incidental to all human intercourse, tend to accumulate and
so gain strength and volume.
Assimilation, as the word is here used, brings with it a certain
borrowed significance which it carried over from physiology, where it is
employed to describe the process of nutrition. By a process of
nutrition, somewhat similar to the physiological one, we may conceive
alien peoples to be incorporated with, and made part of, the community
or state. Ordinarily assimilation goes on silently and unconsciously,
and only forces itself into popular conscience when there is some
interruption or disturbance of the process.
At the outset it may be said, then, that assimilation rarely becomes a
problem except in secondary groups. Admission to the primary group, that
is to say, the group in which relationships are direct and personal, as,
for example, in the family and in the tribe, makes assimilation
comparatively easy and almost inevitable.
The most striking illustration of this is the fact of domestic slavery.
Slavery has been, historically, the usual method by which peoples have
been incorporated into alien groups. When a member of an alien race is
adopted into the family as a servant or as a slave, and particularly
when that status is made hereditary, as it was in the case of the Negro
after his importation to America, assimilation followed rapidly and as a
matter of course.