THE IMMIGRANT
I
The Flood
My picture of America assumes now a certain definite form. I have
tried to convey the effect of a great and energetic English-speaking
population strewn across a continent so vast as to make it seem small
and thin; I have tried to show this population caught by the upward
sweep of that great increase in knowledge that is everywhere enlarging
the power and scope of human effort, exhilarated by it, and active and
hopeful beyond any population the world has ever seen, and I have tried
to show how the members of this population struggle and differentiate
among themselves in a universal commercial competition that must, in
the end, if it is not modified, divide them into two permanent classes
of rich and poor. I have ventured to hint at a certain emptiness in
the resulting wealthy, and to note some of the uglinesses and miseries
inseparable from this competition. I have tried to give my impressions
of the vague, yet widely diffused, will in the nation to resist this
differentiation, and of a dim, large movement of thought towards a
change of national method. I have glanced at the debasement of politics
that bars any immediate hope of such reconstruction. And now it is time
to introduce a new element of obstruction and difficulty into this
complicating problem--the immigrants.
Into the lower levels of the American community there pours perpetually
a vast torrent of strangers, speaking alien tongues, inspired by alien
traditions, for the most part illiterate peasants and working-people.
They come in at the bottom: that must be insisted upon. An enormous and
ever-increasing proportion of the laboring classes, of all the lower
class in America, is of recent European origin, is either of foreign
birth or foreign parentage. The older American population is being
floated up on the top of this influx, a sterile aristocracy above a
racially different and astonishingly fecund proletariat. (For it grows
rankly in this new soil. One section of immigrants, the Hungarians,
have here a birth-rate of forty-six in the thousand, the highest of any
civilized people in the world.)
Few people grasp the true dimensions of this invasion. Figures carry
so little. The influx has clambered from half a million to 700,000,
to 800,000; this year the swelling figures roll up as if they mean to
go far over the million mark. The flood swells to overtake the total
birth-rate; it has already over-topped the total of births of children
to native-American parents.
I have already told something of the effect of Ellis Island. I have
told how I watched the long procession of simple-looking, hopeful,
sunburned country folk from Russia, from the Carpathians, from southern
Italy and Turkey and Syria, filing through the wickets, bringing their
young wives for the mills of Paterson and Fall River, their children
for the Pennsylvania coal-breakers and the cotton-mills of the South.
Yet there are moments when I could have imagined there were no
immigrants at all. All the time, except for one distinctive evening, I
seem to have been talking to English-speaking men, now and then to the
Irishman, now and then, but less frequently, to an Americanized German.
In the clubs there are no immigrants. There are not even Jews, as there
are in London clubs. One goes about the wide streets of Boston, one
meets all sorts of Boston people, one visits the State-House; it's all
the authentic English-speaking America. Fifth Avenue, too, is America
without a touch of foreign-born; and Washington. You go a hundred yards
south of the pretty Boston Common and, behold! you are in a polyglot
slum! You go a block or so east of Fifth Avenue and you are in a
vaster, more Yiddish Whitechapel. You cross from New York to Staten
Island, attracted by its distant picturesque suggestion of scattered
homes among the trees, and you discover black-tressed, bold-eyed women
on those pleasant verandas, half-clad brats, and ambiguous washing,
where once the native American held his simple state. You ask the way
of a young man who has just emerged from a ramshackle factory, and you
are answered in some totally incomprehensible tongue. You come up again
after such a dive below, to dine with the original Americans again,
talk With them, go about with them and forget....
In Boston, one Sunday afternoon, this fact of immigration struck upon
Mr. Henry James:
"There went forward across the cop of the hill a continuous passage of
men and women, in couples and talkative companies, who struck me as
laboring wage-earners of the simpler sort arrayed in their Sunday best
and decently enjoying their leisure ... no sound of English in a single
instance escaped their lips; the greater number spoke a rude form of
Italian, the others some outland dialect unknown to me--though I waited
and waited to catch an echo of antique refrains."
That's one of a series of recurrent, uneasy observations of this great
replacement I find in Mr. James's book.
The immigrant does not clamor for attention. He is, indeed, almost
entirely inaudible, inarticulate, and underneath. He is in origin a
peasant, inarticulate, and underneath by habit and tradition. Mr. James
has, as it were, to put his ear to earth, to catch the murmuring of
strange tongues. The incomer is of diverse nationality and diverse
tongues, and that "breaks him up" politically and socially. He drops
into American clothes, and then he does not catch the careless eye.
He goes into special regions and works there. Where Americans talk or
think or have leisure to observe, he does not intrude. The bulk of the
Americans don't get as yet any real sense of his portentous multitude
at all. He does not read very much, and so he produces no effect upon
the book trade or magazines. You can go through such a periodical as
_Harper's Magazine_, for example, from cover to cover, and unless
there is some article or story bearing specifically upon the subject
you might doubt if there was an immigrant in the country. On the liner
coming over, at Ellis Island, and sometimes on the railroads one saw
him--him and his womankind,--in some picturesque east-European garb,
very respectful, very polite, adventurous, and a little scared. Then he
became less visible. He had got into cheap American clothes, resorted
to what naturalists call "protective mimicry," even perhaps acquired
a collar. Also his bearing had changed, become charged with a certain
aggression. He had got a pocket-handkerchief, and had learned to move
fast and work fast, and to chew and spit with the proper meditative
expression. One detected him by his diminishing accent, and by a few
persistent traits--rings in his ears, perhaps, or the like adornment.
In the next stage these also had gone; he had become ashamed of the
music of his native tongue, and talked even to his wife, on the
trolley-car and other public places, at least, in brief remarkable
American. Before that he had become ripe for a vote.
The next stage of Americanization, I suppose, is this dingy quick-eyed
citizen with his schooner of beer in my Chicago saloon--if it is not
that crumpled thing I saw lying so still in the sunlight under the
trestle bridge on my way to Washington....
II
In Defence of Immigration
Every American above forty, and most of those below that limit, seem
to be enthusiastic advocates of unrestricted immigration. I could not
make them understand the apprehension with which this huge dilution of
the American people with profoundly ignorant foreign peasants filled
me. I rode out on an automobile into the pretty New York country beyond
Yonkers with that finely typical American, Mr. Z.--he wanted to show
me the pleasantness of the land,--and he sang the song of American
confidence, I think, more clearly and loudly than any. He told me how
everybody had hope, how everybody had incentive, how magnificently it
was all going on. He told me--what is, I am afraid, a widely spread
delusion--that elementary education stands on a higher level of
efficiency in the States than in England. He had no doubt whatever of
the national powers of assimilation. "Let them all come," he said,
cheerfully.
"The Chinese?" said I.
"We can do with them all."...
He was exceptional in that extension. Most Americans stop at the
Ural Mountains, and refuse the "Asiatic." It was not a matter for
discussion with him, but a question of belief. He had ceased to reason
about immigration long ago. He was a man in the fine autumn of life,
abounding in honors, wrapped in furs, and we drove swiftly in his
automobile, through the spring sunshine. ("By Jove!" thought I, "you
talk like Pippa's rich uncle.") By some half-brother of a coincidence
we happened first upon this monument commemorating a memorable incident
of the War of Independence, and then upon that. He recalled details
of that great campaign as Washington was fought out of Manhattan
northward. I remember one stone among the shooting trees that indicated
where in the Hudson River near by a British sloop had fired the first
salute in honor of the American flag. That salute was vividly present
still to him; it echoed among the woods, it filled him with a sense
of personal triumph; it seemed half-way back to Agincourt to me. All
that bright morning the stars and stripes made an almost luminous
visible presence about us. Open-handed hospitality and confidence
in God so swayed me that it is indeed only now, as I put this book
together, I see this shining buoyancy, this bunting patriotism, in
its direct relation to the Italian babies in the cotton-mills, to the
sinister crowd that stands in the saloon smoking and drinking beer, an
accumulating reserve of unintelligent force behind the manoeuvres of
the professional politicians....
I tried my views upon Commissioner Watchorn as we leaned together over
the gallery railing and surveyed that bundle-carrying crowd creeping
step by step through the wire filter of the central hall of Ellis
Island--into America.
"You don't think they'll swamp you?" I said.
"Now look here," said the Commissioner, "I'm English born--Derbyshire.
I came into America when I was a lad. I had fifteen dollars. And here I
am! Well, do you expect me, now I'm here, to shut the door on any other
poor chaps who want a start--a start with hope in it, in the New World?"
A pleasant-mannered, a fair-haired young man, speaking excellent
English, had joined us as we went round, and nodded approval.
I asked him for his opinion, and gathered he was from Milwaukee, and
the son of a Scandinavian immigrant. He, too, was for "fair-play" and
an open door for every one. "Except," he added, "Asiatics." So also, I
remember, was a very New England lady I met at Hull House, who wasn't,
as a matter of fact, a New-Englander at all, but the daughter of a
German settler in the Middle West. They all seemed to think that I was
inspired by hostility to the immigrant in breathing any doubt about
the desirability of this immense process....
I tried in each case to point out that this idea of not being
churlishly exclusive did not exhaust the subject, that the present
immigration is a different thing entirely from the immigration of
half a century ago, that in the interest of the immigrant and his
offspring more than any one, is the protest to be made. Fifty years
ago more than half of the torrent was English speaking, and the rest
mostly from the Teutonic and Scandinavian northwest of Europe, an
influx of people closely akin to the native Americans in temperament
and social tradition. They were able to hold their own and mix
perfectly. Even then the quantity of illiterate Irish produced a marked
degradation of political life. The earlier immigration was an influx
of energetic people who wanted to come, and who had to put themselves
to considerable exertion to get here; it was higher in character and
in social quality than the present flood. The immigration of to-day is
largely the result of energetic canvassing by the steamship companies;
it is, in the main, an importation of laborers and not of economically
independent settlers, and it is increasingly alien to the native
tradition. The bulk of it is now Italian, Russian Jewish, Russian,
Hungarian, Croatian, Roumanian, and eastern European generally.
"The children learn English, and become more American and better
patriots than the Americans," Commissioner Watchorn--echoing everybody
in that--told me....
(In Boston one optimistic lady looked to the Calabrian and Sicilian
peasants to introduce an artistic element into the population--no
doubt because they come from the same peninsula that produced the
Florentines.)
III
Assimilation
Will the reader please remember that I've been just a few weeks in
the States altogether, and value my impressions at that! And will he,
nevertheless, read of doubts that won't diminish. I doubt very much
if America is going to assimilate all that she is taking in now; much
more do I doubt that she will assimilate the still greater inflow of
the coming years. I believe she is going to find infinite difficulties
in that task. By "assimilate" I mean make intelligently co-operative
citizens of these people. She will, I have no doubt whatever, impose
upon them a bare use of the English language, and give them votes and
certain patriotic persuasions, but I believe that if things go on as
they are going the great mass of them will remain a very low lower
class--will remain largely illiterate industrialized peasants. They
are decent-minded peasant people, orderly, industrious people, rather
dirty in their habits, and with a low standard of life. Wherever they
accumulate in numbers they present to my eye a social phase far below
the level of either England, France, north Italy, or Switzerland.
And, frankly, I do not find the American nation has either in its
schools--which are as backward in some States as they are forward in
others--in its press, in its religious bodies or its general tone, any
organized means or effectual influences for raising these huge masses
of humanity to the requirements of an ideal modern civilization. They
are, to my mind, "biting off more than they can chaw" in this matter.
I got some very interesting figures from Dr. Hart, of the Children's
Home and Aid Society, Chicago, in this matter. He was pleading for
the immigrant against my scepticisms. He pointed out to me that
the generally received opinion that the European immigrants are
exceptionally criminal is quite wrong.
The 1900 census report collapsed after a magnificent beginning, and its
figures are not available, but from the earlier records there can be
no doubt that the percentage of criminals among the "foreign-born" is
higher than that among the native-born. This, however, is entirely due
to the high criminal record of the French Canadians in the Northeast,
and the Mexicans in Arizona, who are not overseas immigrants at
all. The criminal statistics of the French Canadians in the States
should furnish useful matter for the educational controversy in Great
Britain. Allowing for their activities--which appear to be based on an
education of peculiar religious virtue--the figures bring the criminal
percentage among the foreigners far below that of the native-born.
But Dr. Hart's figures also showed very clearly something further: as
between the offspring of native and foreign parents the preponderance
of crime is enormously on the side of the latter.
That, at any rate, falls in with my own preconceptions and roving
observations. Bear in mind always that this is just one questioning
individual's impression. It seems to me that the immigrant arrives
an artless, rather uncivilized, pious, good-hearted peasant, with
a disposition towards submissive industry and rude effectual moral
habits. America, it is alleged, makes a man of him. It seems to me
that all too often she makes an infuriated toiler of him, tempts him
with dollars and speeds him up with competition, hardens him, coarsens
his manners, and, worst crime of all, lures and forces him to sell his
children into toil. The home of the immigrant in America looks to me
worse than the home he came from in Italy. It is just as dirty, it is
far less simple and beautiful, the food is no more wholesome, the moral
atmosphere far less wholesome; and, as a consequence, the child of the
immigrant is a worse man than his father.
I am fully aware of the generosity, the nobility of sentiment which
underlies the American objection to any hindrance to immigration. But
either that general sentiment should be carried out to a logical
completeness and a gigantic and costly machinery organized to educate
and civilize these people as they come in, or it should be chastened to
restrict the inflow to numbers assimilable under existing conditions.
At present, if we disregard sentiment, if we deny the alleged need
of gross flattery whenever one writes of America for Americans, and
state the bare facts of the case, they amount to this: that America,
in the urgent process of individualistic industrial development, in
its feverish haste to get through with its material possibilities,
is importing a large portion of the peasantry of central and eastern
Europe, and converting it into a practically illiterate industrial
proletariat. In doing this it is doing a something that, however
different in spirit, differs from the slave trade of its early
history only in the narrower gap between employer and laborer. In the
"colored" population America has already ten million descendants of
unassimilated and perhaps unassimilable labor immigrants. These people
are not only half civilized and ignorant, but they have infected
the white population about them with a kindred ignorance. For there
can be no doubt that if an Englishman or Scotchman of the year 1500
were to return to earth and seek his most retrograde and decivilized
descendants, he would find them at last among the white and colored
population south of Washington. And I have a foreboding that in this
mixed flood of workers that pours into America by the million to-day,
in this torrent of ignorance, against which that heroic being, the
schoolmarm, battles at present all unaided by men, there is to be found
the possibility of another dreadful separation of class and kind, a
separation perhaps not so profound but far more universal. One sees the
possibility of a rich industrial and mercantile aristocracy of western
European origin, dominating a darker-haired, darker-eyed, uneducated
proletariat from central and eastern Europe. The immigrants are being
given votes, I know, but that does not free them, it only enslaves the
country. The negroes were given votes.
That is the quality of the danger as I see it. But before this
indigestion of immigrants becomes an incurable sickness of the States
many things may happen. There is every sign, as I have said, that a
great awakening, a great disillusionment, is going on in the American
mind. The Americans have become suddenly self-critical, are hot with
an unwonted fever for reform and constructive effort. This swamping of
the country may yet be checked. They may make a strenuous effort to
emancipate children below fifteen from labor, and so destroy one of the
chief inducements of immigration. Once convince them that their belief
in the superiority of their public schools to those of England and
Germany is an illusion, or at least that their schools are inadequate
to the task before them, and it may be they will perform some swift
American miracle of educational organization and finance. For all
the very heavy special educational charges that are needed if the
immigrant is really to be assimilated, it seems a reasonable proposal
that immigration should pay. Suppose the new-comer were presently to
be taxed on arrival for his own training and that of any children he
had with him, that again would check the inrush very greatly. Or the
steamship company might be taxed, and left to settle the trouble with
the immigrant by raising his fare. And finally, it may be that if the
line is drawn, as it seems highly probable it will be, at "Asiatics,"
then there may even be a drying up of the torrent at its source. The
European countries are not unlimited reservoirs of offspring. As they
pass from their old conditions into more and more completely organized
modern industrial states, they develop a new internal equilibrium and
cease to secrete an excess of population. England no longer supplies
any great quantity of Americans; Scotland barely any; France is
exhausted; Ireland, Germany, Scandinavia have, it seems, disgorged
nearly all their surplus load, and now run dry....
These are all mitigations of the outlook, but still the dark shadow of
disastrous possibility remains. The immigrant comes in to weaken and
confuse the counsels of labor, to serve the purposes of corruption, to
complicate any economic and social development, above all to retard
enormously the development of that national consciousness and will on
which the hope of the future depends.
IV
The Educational Alliance
I told these doubts of mine to a pleasant young lady of New York, who
seems to find much health and a sustaining happiness in settlement work
on the East Side. She scorned my doubts. "Children make better citizens
than the old Americans," she said, like one who quotes a classic, and
took me with her forthwith to see the central school of the Educational
Alliance, that fine imposing building in East Broadway.
It's a thing I'm glad not to have missed. I recall a large cool room
with a sloping floor, tier rising above tier of seats and desks, and a
big class of bright-eyed Jewish children, boys and girls, each waving
two little American flags to the measure of the song they sang, singing
to the accompaniment of the piano on the platform beside us.
"God bless our native land," they sang--with a considerable variety of
accent and distinctness, but with a very real emotion.
Some of them had been in America a month, some much longer, but here
they were--under the auspices of the wealthy Hebrews of New York and
Mr. Blaustein's enthusiastic direction--being Americanized. They sang
of America--"sweet land of liberty"; they stood up and drilled with
the little bright pretty flags; swish they crossed and swish they
waved back, a waving froth of flags and flushed children's faces;
and they stood up and repeated the oath of allegiance, and at the end
filed tramping by me and out of the hall. The oath they take is finely
worded. It runs:
[Illustration: WHERE IMMIGRANT CHILDREN ARE AMERICANIZED]
"Flag our great Republic, inspirer in battle, guardian of our homes,
whose stars and stripes stand for bravery, purity, truth, and union, we
salute thee! We, the natives of distant lands, who find rest under thy
folds, do pledge our hearts, our lives, and our sacred honor to love
and protect thee, our country, and the liberty of the American people
forever."
I may have been fanciful, but as I stood aside and watched them going
proudly past, it seemed to me that eyes met mine, triumphant and
victorious eyes--for was I not one of these British from whom freedom
was won? But that was an ignoble suspicion. They had been but a few
weeks in America, and that light in their eyes was just a brotherly
challenge to one they supposed a fellow-citizen who stood unduly
thoughtful amid their rhythmic exaltation. They tramped out and past
with their flags and guidons.
"It is touching!" whispered my guide, and I saw she had caught a faint
reflection of that glow that lit the children.
I told her it was the most touching thing I had seen in America.
And so it remains.
Think of the immense promise in it! Think of the flower of belief and
effort that may spring from this warm sowing! We passed out of this
fluttering multiplication of the most beautiful flag in the world, into
streets abominable with offal and indescribable filth, and dark and
horrible under the thunderous girders of the Elevated railroad, to our
other quest for that morning, a typical New York tenement. For I wanted
to see one, with practically windowless bedrooms....
The Educational Alliance is of course not a public institution; it
was organized by Hebrews, and conducted for Hebrews, chiefly for the
benefit of the Hebrew immigrant. It is practically the only organized
attempt to Americanize the immigrant child. After the children have
mastered sufficient English and acquired the simpler elements of
patriotism--which is practically no more than an emotional attitude
towards the flag--they pass on into the ordinary public schools.
"Yes," I told my friend, "I know how these children feel. That, less
articulate perhaps, but no less sincere, is the thing--something
between pride and a passionate desire--that fills three-quarters of the
people at Ellis Island now. They come ready to love and worship, ready
to bow down and kiss the folds of your flag. They give themselves--they
want to give. Do you know I, too, have come near feeling that at times
for America."...
We were separated for a while by a long hole in the middle of the
street and a heap of builder's refuse. Before we came within talking
distance again I was in reaction against the gleam of satisfaction my
last confession had evoked.
"In the end," I said, "you Americans won't be able to resist it."
"Resist what?"
"You'll respect your country," I said.
"What do you mean?"
In those crowded noisy East Side streets one has to shout, and shout
compact things. "_This!_" I said to the barbaric disorder about us.
"Lynching! Child Labor! Graft!"
Then we were separated by a heap of decaying fish that some hawker had
dumped in the gutter.
My companion shouted something I did not catch.
"_We'll_ tackle it!" she repeated.
I looked at her, bright and courageous and youthful, a little
overconfident, I thought, but extremely reassuring, going valiantly
through a disorderly world of obstacles, and for the moment--I suppose
that waving bunting and the children's voices had got into my head a
little--I forgot all sorts of things....
I could have imagined her the spirit of America incarnate rather than a
philanthropic young lady of New York.