THE MATERIALS OF THE NEW RACE
Each of us has an ideal of what the American of the future should be.
We have been told times without number that out of the mixture of
stocks, the intermingling of ideas and aspirations, there is to come a
race greater than any which has contributed to the population of the
United States. What is the basis for this hope that is so generally
indulged in? If the hope is founded upon realities, how may it be
realized? To understand the difficulties and the obstacles to be
overcome before the dream of a greater race in America can be
attained, is to understand something of the task before the women who
shall give birth to that race.
What material is there for a greater American race? What elements make
up our present millions? Where do they live? How do they live? In what
direction does our national civilization bend their ideals? What is
the effect of the "melting pot" upon the foreigner, once he begins to
"melt"? Are we now producing a freer, juster, more intelligent, more
idealistic, creative people out of the varied ingredients here?
Before we can answer these questions, we must consider briefly the
races which have contributed to American population.
Among our more than 100,000,000 population are Negroes, Indians,
Chinese and other colored people to the number of 11,000,000. There
are also 14,500,000 persons of foreign birth. Besides these there are
14,000,000 children of foreign-born parents and 6,500,000 persons
whose fathers or mothers were born on foreign soil, making a total of
46,000,000 people of foreign stock. Fifty per cent of our population
is of the native white strain.
Of the foreign stock in the United States, the last general census,
compiled in 1910, shows that 25.7 per cent was German, 14 per cent was
Irish, 8.5 per cent was Russian or Finnish, 7.2 was English, 6.5 per
cent Italian and 6.2 per cent Austrian. The Abstract of the same
census points out several significant facts. The Western European
strains in this country are represented by a majority of native-born
children of foreign-born or mixed parentage. This is because the
immigration from those sources has been checked. On the other hand,
immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, including Russia and
Finland, increased 175.4 per cent from 1900 to 1910. During that
period, the slums of Europe dumped their submerged inhabitants into
America at a rate almost double that of the preceding decade, and the
flow was still increasing at the time the census was taken. So it is
more than likely that when the next census is taken it will be found
that following 1910 there was an even greater flow from Spain, Italy,
Hungary, Austria, Russia, Finland, and other countries where the iron
hand of economic and political tyrannies had crushed great populations
into ignorance and want. These peoples have not been in the United
States long enough to produce great families. The census of 1920 will
in all probability tell a story of a greater and more serious problem
than did the last.
Over one-fourth of all the immigrants over fourteen years of age,
admitted during the two decades preceding 1910, were illiterate. Of
the 8,398,000 who arrived in the 1900-1910 period, 2,238,000 could not
read or write. There were 1,600,000 illiterate foreigners in the
United States when the 1910 census was taken. Do these elements give
promise of a better race? Are we doing anything genuinely constructive
to overcome this situation?
Two-thirds of the white foreign stock in the United States live in
cities. Four-fifths of the populations of Chicago and New York are of
this stock. More than two-thirds of the populations of Boston,
Cleveland, Detroit, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Newark, Jersey
City, Providence, Worcester, Scranton, Paterson, Fall River, Lowell,
Cambridge, Bridgeport, St. Paul, Minneapolis and San Francisco are of
other than native white ancestry. Of the fifty principal cities of the
United States there are only fourteen in which fifty per cent of the
population is of unmixed native white parentage.
Only one state in the Union--North Carolina--has less than one per
cent of the white foreign stock. New York, New Jersey, Delaware,
Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Michigan, Illinois,
Wisconsin, Minnesota, the Dakotas, Montana and Utah have more than
fifty per cent foreign stock. Eleven states, including those on the
Pacific Coast, have from 35 to 50 per cent. Maine, Ohio and Kansas
have from 25 to 35 per cent. Maryland, Indiana, Missouri and Texas
have from 15 to 25 per cent. These proportions are increasing rather
than decreasing, owing to the extraordinarily high birth rate of the
foreign strains.
A special analysis of 1915 vital statistics for certain states, in the
World Almanac for 1918, shows that foreign-born mothers gave birth to
nearly 62 per cent of the children born in Connecticut, nearly 58 per
cent in Massachusetts, nearly 33 per cent in Michigan, nearly 58 per
cent in Rhode Island, more than 43 per cent in New Hampshire, more
than 54 per cent in New York and more than 38 per cent in
Pennsylvania.
All these figures, be it remembered, fail to include foreign stock of
the second generation after landing. If the statistics for children
who have native parents but foreign-born grandparents, or who have one
foreign-born parent, were given, they would doubtless leave but a
small percentage of births from stocks native to the soil for several
generations.
Immigrants or their children constitute the majority of workers
employed in many of our industries. "Seven out of ten of those who
work in our iron and steel industries are drawn from this class," says
the National Geographic Magazine (February, 1917), "seven out of ten
of our bituminous coal miners belong to it. Three out of four who work
in packing towns were born abroad or are children of those who were
born abroad; four out of five of those who make our silk goods, seven
out of eight of those employed in woolen mills, nine out of ten of
those who refine our petroleum, and nineteen out of twenty of those
who manufacture our sugar are immigrants or the children of
immigrants." And it might have shown a similarly high percentage of
those in the ready-made clothing industries, railway and public works
construction of the less skilled sort, and a number of others.
That these foreigners who have come in hordes have brought with them
their ignorance of hygiene and modern ways of living and that they are
handicapped by religious superstitions is only too true. But they also
bring in their hearts a desire for freedom from all the tyrannies that
afflict the earth. They would not be here if they did not bear within
them the hardihood of pioneers, a courage of no mean order. They have
the simple faith that in America they will find equality, liberty and
an opportunity for a decent livelihood. And they have something else.
The cell plasms of these peoples are freighted with the potentialities
of the best in Old World civilization. They come from lands rich in
the traditions of courage, of art, music, letters, science and
philosophy. Americans no longer consider themselves cultured unless
they have journeyed to these lands to find access to the treasures
created by men and women of this same blood. The immigrant brings the
possibilities of all these things to our shores, but where is the
opportunity to reproduce in the New World the cultures of the old?
What opportunities have we given to these peoples to enrich our
civilization? We have greeted them as "a lot of ignorant foreigners,"
we have shouted at, bustled and kicked them.
Our industries have taken advantage of their ignorance of the
country's ways to take their toil in mills and mines and factories at
starvation wages. We have herded them into slums to become diseased,
to become social burdens or to die. We have huddled them together like
rabbits to multiply their numbers and their misery. Instead of saying
that we Americanize them, we should confess that we animalize them.
The only freedom we seem to have given them is the freedom to make
heavier and more secure their chains. What hope is there for racial
progress in this human material, treated more carelessly and brutally
than the cheapest factory product?
Nor are all our social handicaps bound up in the immigrant.
There were in the United States, when the Federal Industrial Relations
Committee finished its work in 1915, several million migratory
workers, most of them white, many of them married but separated from
their families, who were compelled, like themselves, to struggle with
dire want.
There were in 1910 more than 2,353,000 tenant farmers, two-thirds of
whom lived and worked under the terrible conditions which the
Industrial Relations Commission's report showed to prevail in the
South and Southwest. These tenant farmers, as the report showed, were
always in want, and were compelled by the very terms of the prevailing
tenant contracts to produce children who must go to the fields and do
the work of adults. The census proved that this tenancy was on the
increase, the number of tenants in all but the New England and Middle
Atlantic States having increased approximately 30 per cent from 1900
to 1910.
Moreover, there were in the United States in 1910, 5,516,163
illiterates. Of these 1,378,884 were of pure native white stock. In
some states in the South as much as 29 per cent of the population is
illiterate, many of these, of course, being Negroes.
There is still another factor to be considered--a factor which because
of its great scope is more ominous than any yet mentioned. This is the
underpaid mass of workers in the United States--workers whose
low wages are forcing them deeper into want each day. Let Senator
Borah, not a radical nor even a reformer, but a leader of the
Republican party, tell the story. "Fifty-seven per cent of the
families in the United States have incomes of $800 or less," said
he in a speech before the Senate, August 24, 1917, "Seventy per cent
of the families of our country have incomes of $1,000 or less. Tell me
how a man so situated can have shelter for his family; how he can provide
food and clothing. He is an industrial peon. His home is scant and pinched
beyond the power of language to tell. He sees his wife and children on the
ragged edge of hunger from week to week and month to month. If sickness
comes, he faces suicide or crime. He cannot educate his children;
he cannot fit them for citizenship; he cannot even fit them as soldiers
to die for their country.
"It is the tragedy of our whole national life--how these people live
in such times as these. We have not yet gathered the fruits of such an
industrial condition in this country. We have been saved thus far by
reason of the newness of our national life, our vast public lands now
almost exhausted, our great natural resources now fast being seized
and held, but the hour of reckoning will come."
Senator Borah was thinking, doubtless, of open revolution, of
bloodshed and the destruction of property. In a far more terrible
sense, the reckoning which he has referred to is already upon us. The
ills we suffer as the result of the conditions now prevailing in the
United States are appalling in their sum.
It is these conditions that produce the 3,000,000 child laborers of
the United States; child slaves who undergo hardships that blight them
physically and mentally, leaving them fit only to produce human beings
whose deficiencies and misfortunes will exceed their own.
From these same elements, living under these same conditions come the
feebleminded and other defectives. Just how many feebleminded there
are in the United States, no one knows, because no attempt has ever
been made to give public care to all of them, and families are more
inclined to conceal than to reveal the mental defects of their
members. Estimates vary from 350,000 at the present time to nearly
400,000 as early as 1890, Henry H. Goddard, Ph. D., of the Vineland,
N. J., Training School, being authority for the latter statement. Only
34,137 of these unfortunates were under institutional care in the
United States in 1916, the rest being free to propagate their kind--piling
up public burdens for future generations. The feebleminded are
notoriously prolific in reproduction. The close relationship between
poverty and ignorance and the production of feebleminded is shown by
Anne Moore, Ph.D., in a report to the Public Education Association of
New York in 1911. She found that an overwhelming proportion of the
classified feebleminded children in New York schools came from large
families living in overcrowded slum conditions, and that only a small
percentage were born of native parents.
Sixty thousand prostitutes go and come anew each year in the United
States. This army of unfortunates, as social workers and scientists
testify, come from families living under like conditions of want.
In the New York City schools alone in December, 1916, 61 per cent of
the children were suffering from undernourishment and 21 per cent in
immediate danger of it. These facts, also the result of the conditions
outlined, were discovered by the city Bureau of Child Hygiene.
Another item in the sordid list is that of venereal disease. In his
pamphlet entitled "_The Venereal Diseases_," issued in 1918, Dr.
Hermann M. Biggs head of the New York State Department of Health
quoted authorities who gave estimates of the amount of syphilis and
gonorrhea in the United States. One says that 60 per cent of the men
contract one disease or the other at some time. Another said that 40
per cent of the population of New York City had syphilis, one of the
most terrible of all maladies. Poverty, delayed marriage,
prostitution--a brief and terrible chain accounts for this scourge.
Finally, there is tuberculosis, bred by bad housing conditions and
contributed to in frightful measure by poor food and unhealthy
surroundings during the hours of employment. Dr. Frederick L. Hoffman,
director of the National Association for the Study and Prevention of
Tuberculosis and foremost statistical authority upon tuberculosis in
the United States, says: "We know of 2,000,000 tubercular persons in
the United States."
Does this picture horrify the reader? This is not the whole truth. A
few scattered statistics lack the power to reflect the broken lives of
overworked fathers, the ceaseless, increasing pain of overburdened
mothers and the agony of childhood fighting its way against the
handicaps of ill health, insufficient food, inadequate training and
stifling toil.
Can we expect to remedy this situation by dismissing the problem of
the submerged native elements with legislative palliatives or treating
it with careless scorn? Do we better it by driving out of the
immigrant's heart the dream of liberty that brought him to our shores?
Do we solve the problem by giving him, instead of an opportunity to
develop his own culture, low wages, a home in the slums and those
pseudo-patriotic preachments which constitute our machine-made
"Americanization"?
Every detail of this sordid situation means a problem that must be
solved before we can even clear the way for a greater race in America.
Nor is there any hope of solving any of these problems if we continue
to attack them in the usual way.
Men have sentimentalized about them and legislated upon them. They
have denounced them and they have applied reforms. But it has all been
ridiculously, cruelly futile.
This is the condition of things for which those stand who demand more
and more children. Each child born under such conditions but makes
them worse--each child in its own person suffers the consequence of
the intensified evils.
If we are to develop in America a new race with a racial soul, we must
keep the birth rate within the scope of our ability to understand as
well as to educate. We must not encourage reproduction beyond our
capacity to assimilate our numbers so as to make the coming generation
into such physically fit, mentally capable, socially alert individuals
as are the ideal of a democracy.
The intelligence of a people is of slow evolutional development--it
lags far behind the reproductive ability. It is far too slow to cope
with conditions created by an increasing population, unless that
increase is carefully regulated.
We must, therefore, not permit an increase in population that we are
not prepared to care for to the best advantage--that we are not
prepared to do justice to, educationally and economically. We must
popularize birth control thinking. We must not leave it haphazardly to
be the privilege of the already privileged. We must put this means of
freedom and growth into the hands of the masses.
We must set motherhood free. We must give the foreign and submerged
mother knowledge that will enable her to prevent bringing to birth
children she does not want. We know that in each of these submerged
and semisubmerged elements of the population there are rich factors of
racial culture. Motherhood is the channel through which these cultures
flow. Motherhood, when free to choose the father, free to choose the
time and the number of children who shall result from the union,
automatically works in wondrous ways. It refuses to bring forth
weaklings; refuses to bring forth slaves; refuses to bear children who
must live under the conditions described. It withholds the unfit,
brings forth the fit; brings few children into homes where there is
not sufficient to provide for them. Instinctively it avoids all those
things which multiply racial handicaps. Under such circumstances we
can hope that the "melting pot" will refine. We shall see that it will
save the precious metals of racial culture, fused into an amalgam of
physical perfection, mental strength and spiritual progress. Such an
American race, containing the best of all racial elements, could give
to the world a vision and a leadership beyond our present imagination.