Fathers was that they came not to despoil, but to build; that they
resolutely turned their backs on conditions of life that galled them,
and set out to make their own conditions in a strange and untried world,
at great hazard to life and limb and fortune; that they asked no favors
of God, but paid in advance for His miracles, by hewing and digging and
ploughing and fighting against odds; that they respected humankind,
believed in themselves, and pushed the business of the moment as if the
universe hung on the result.
The average immigrant of to-day, like the immigrant of 1620, comes to
build--to build a civilized home under a civilized government, which
diminishes the amount of barbarity in the world. He, too, like that
earlier newcomer, has rebelled against the conditions of his life,
and adventured halfway across the world in search of more acceptable
conditions, facing exile and uncertainty and the terrors of the untried.
He also pays as he goes along, and in very much the same coin as
did the Pilgrims; awaiting God's miracle of human happiness in the
grisly darkness of the mine, in the fierce glare of the prairie ranch,
in the shrivelling heat of coke-ovens, beside roaring cotton-gins,
beside blinding silk-looms, in stifling tailor-shops, in nerve-racking
engine-rooms,--in all those places where the assurance and pride of
the State come to rest upon the courage and patience of the individual
citizen.
There is enough of peril left in the adventure of emigration to mark him
who undertakes it as a man of some daring and resource. Has civilization
smoothed the sea, or have not steamships been known to founder as well
as sailing vessels? Does not the modern immigrant also venture among
strangers, who know not his ways nor speak his tongue nor worship his
God? If his landing is not threatened by savages in ambush, he has
to run the gauntlet of exacting laws that serve not his immediate
interests. The early New England farmer used to carry his rifle with him
in the fields, to be ready for prowling Indians, and the gutter-merchant
of New York to-day is obliged to carry about the whole armory of his
wits, to avert the tomahawk of competition. No less cruel than Indian
chiefs to their white captives is the greedy industrial boss to the
laborers whom poverty puts at his mercy; and how could you better match
the wolves and foxes that prowled about the forest clearings of our
ancestors than by the pack of sharpers and misinformers who infest the
immigrant quarters of our cities?
Measured by the exertions necessary to overcome them, the difficulties
that beset the modern immigrant are no less formidable than those
which the Pilgrims had to face. There has never been a time when it
was more difficult to get something for nothing than it is to-day, but
the unromantic setting of modern enterprises leads us to underestimate
the moral qualities that make success possible to-day. Undoubtedly the
pioneer with an axe over his shoulder is a more picturesque figure
than the clerk with a pencil behind his ear, but we who have stood up
against the shocks of modern life should know better than to confuse the
picturesque with the heroic. Do we not know that it takes a _man_ to
beat circumstances, to-day as in the days of the pioneers? And manliness
is always the same mixture of courage, self-reliance, perseverance, and
faith.
Inventions have multiplied since the days of the Pilgrims, but which
of our mechanical devices takes the place of the old-fashioned quality
of determination where obstacles are to be overcome? The New England
wilderness retreated not before the axe, but before the diligence
of the men who wielded the axe; and diligence it is which to-day
transmutes the city's refuse into a loaf for the ragpicker's children.
Resourcefulness--the ability to adjust the means to the end--enters
equally in the subtle enterprises of the business man and in the
hardy exploits of the settler; and it takes as much patience to wait
for returns on a petty investment of capital as it does to watch the
sprouting of an acre of corn.
Hardiness and muscle and physical courage were the seventeenth-century
manifestations of the same moral qualities which to-day are expressed
as intensity and nerve and commercial daring. Our country being in part
cultivated, in part savage, we need citizens with the endowment of the
twentieth century, and citizens with the pioneer endowment. The "new"
immigration, however interpreted, consists in the main of these two
types. Whether we get these elements in the proportion best suited to
our needs is another question, to be answered in its place. At this
point it is only necessary to admit that the immigrant possesses an
abundance of the homely virtues of the useful citizen in times of peace.
We arrived at this conclusion by a theoretical analysis of the qualities
that carry a man through life to-day; and that was fair reasoning,
since the great majority of aliens are known to make good, if not in
the first generation, then in the second or the third. Any sociologist,
any settlement worker, any census clerk will tell you that the history
of the average immigrant family of the "new" period is represented by
an ascending curve. The descending curves are furnished by degenerate
families of what was once prime American stock. I want no better
proof of these facts than I find in the respective vocabularies of
the missionary in the slums of New York and the missionary in the New
England hills. At the settlement on Eldridge Street they talk about
hastening the process of Americanization of the immigrant; the country
minister in the Berkshires talks about the rehabilitation of the Yankee
farmer. That is, the one assists at an upward process, the other seeks
to reverse a downward process.
Right here, in these opposite tendencies of the poor of the foreign
quarters and the poor of the Yankee fastnesses, I read the most
convincing proof that what we get in the steerage is not the refuse, but
the sinew and bone of all the nations. If rural New England to-day shows
signs of degeneracy, it is because much of her sinew and bone departed
from her long ago. Some of the best blood of New England answered to the
call of "Westward ho!" when the empty lands beyond the Alleghanies gaped
for population, while on the spent farms of the Puritan settlements too
many sons awaited the division of the father's property. Of those who
were left behind, many, of course, were detained by habit and sentiment,
love of the old home being stronger in them than the lure of adventure.
Of the aristocracy of New England that portion stayed at home which
was fortified by wealth, and so did not feel the economic pressure of
increased population; of the proletariat remained, on the whole, the
less robust, the less venturesome, the men and women of conservative
imagination.
It was bound to be so, because, wherever the population is set in
motion by internal pressure, the emigrant train is composed of the
stoutest, the most resourceful of those who are not held back by the
roots of wealth or sentiment. Voluntary emigration always calls for
the highest combination of the physical and moral virtues. The law of
analogy, therefore, might suffice to teach us that with every shipload
of immigrants we get a fresh infusion of pioneer blood. But theory is
a tight-rope on which every monkey of a logician can balance himself.
We practical Americans of the twentieth century like to feel the broad
platform of tested facts beneath our feet.
[Illustration: ROUGH WORK AND LOW WAGES FOR THE IMMIGRANT]
The fact about the modern immigrant is that he is everywhere continuing
the work begun by our pioneer ancestors. So much we may learn from a
bare recital of the occupations of aliens. They supply most of the
animal strength and primitive patience that are at the bottom of our
civilization. In California they gather the harvest, in Arizona they dig
irrigation ditches, in Oregon they fell forests, in West Virginia they
tunnel coal, in Massachusetts they plant the tedious crops suitable to
an exhausted soil. In the cities they build subways and skyscrapers and
railroad terminals that are the wonder of the world. Wherever rough work
and low wages go together, we have a job for the immigrant.
The prouder we grow, the more we lean on the immigrant. The Wall Street
magnate would be about as effective as a puppet were it not for the army
of foreigners who execute his schemes. The magic of stocks and bonds
lies in railroad ties and in quarried stone and in axle grease applied
at the right time. A Harriman might sit till doomsday gibbering at the
telephone and the stock exchange would take no notice of him if a band
of nameless "Dagos" a thousand miles away failed to repair a telegraph
pole. New York City is building an aqueduct that will surpass the works
of the Romans, and the average New Yorker will know nothing about it
until he reads in the newspapers the mayor's speech at the inauguration
of the new water supply.
Our brains, our wealth, our ambitions flow in channels dug by the hands
of immigrants. Alien hands erect our offices, rivet our bridges, and
pile up the proud masonry of our monuments. Ignoring in this connection
the fact that the engineer as well as the laborer is often of alien
race, we owe to mere muscle a measure of recognition proportionate to
our need of muscle in our boasted material progress. An imaginative
schoolboy left to himself must presently catch the resemblance between
the pick-and-shovel men toiling at our aqueducts and the heroes of
the axe and rifle extolled in his textbooks as the "sturdy pioneers."
Considered without prejudice, the chief difference between these two
types is the difference between jean overalls and fringed buckskins.
Contemporaneousness takes the romance out of everything; otherwise we
might be rubbing elbows with heroes. Whatever merit there was in hewing
and digging and hauling in the days of the first settlers still inheres
in the same operations to-day. Yes, and a little extra; for a stick
of dynamite is more dangerous to handle than a crowbar, and the steam
engine makes more widows in a year than ever the Indian did with bloody
tomahawk and stealthy arrow.
There is no contention here that every fellow who successfully passes
the entrance ordeals at Ellis Island is necessarily a hero. That there
are weaklings in the train of the sturdy throng of foreigners nobody
knows better than I. I have witnessed the pitiful struggles of the
unfit, and have seen the failures drop all around me. But no bold army
ever marched to the field of action without a fringe of camp-followers
on its flanks. The moral vortex created by the enterprises of the
resolute sucks in a certain number of the weak-hearted; and this is
especially true in mass movements, where the enthusiasm of the crowd
ekes out the courage of the individual. If it is not too impious
to suggest it, may there not have been among the passengers of the
Mayflower two or three or half a dozen who came over because their
cousins did, not because they had any zest for the adventure?
When we remember that the Pilgrim Fathers came with their families, we
may be very sure that that was the case, because the different members
of a family are seldom of the same moral fibre. No doubt the austere
ambitions of the voyagers of the Mayflower made them stern recruiting
masters, but our knowledge of men in the mass forbids the assumption
that they were all heroes of the first rank who stepped ashore on
Plymouth Rock.
I have little sympathy with declaimers about the Pilgrim Fathers,
who look upon them all as men of grand conceptions and superhuman
foresight. An entire ship's company of Columbuses is what the world
never saw.
It takes a wizard critic like Lowell to chip away the crust of historic
sentiment and show us our forefathers in the flesh. Lowell would agree
with me that the Pilgrims were a picked troop in the sense that there
was an immense preponderance of virtue among them. And that is exactly
what we must say of our modern immigrants, if we judge them by the sum
total of their effect on our country.
Not a little of the glory of the Pilgrim Fathers rests on their own
testimony. Our opinion of them is greatly enhanced by the expression we
find, in the public and private documents they have left us, of their
ideals, their aims, their expectations in the New World. Let us judge
our immigrants also out of their own mouths, as future generations will
be sure to judge them. And in seeking this testimony let us remember
that humanity in general does not produce one oracle in a decade. Very
few men know their own hearts, or can give an account of the impulses
that drive them in a particular direction. We put our ears to the lips
of the eloquent when we want to know what the world is thinking. And
what do we get when we sift down the sayings of the spokesmen among
the foreign folk? An anthem in praise of American ideals, a passionate
glorification of the principles of democracy.
Let it be understood that the men and women of exceptional intellect,
who have surveyed the situation from philosophical heights, are not
trumpeting forth their own high dreams alone. If they have won the ear
of the American nation and shamed the indifferent and silenced the
cynical, it is because they voiced the feeling of the inarticulate mob
that welters in the foreign quarters of our cities. I am never so clear
as to the basis of my faith in America as when I have been talking with
the ungroomed mothers of the East Side. A widow down on Division Street
was complaining bitterly of the hardships of her lot, alone in an alien
world with four children to bring up. In the midst of her complaints
the children came in from school. "Well," said the hard-pressed widow,
"bread isn't easy to get in America, but the children can go to school,
and that's more than bread. Rich man, poor man, it's all the same: the
children can go to school."
The poor widow had never heard of a document called the Declaration of
Independence, but evidently she had discovered in American practice
something corresponding to one of the great American principles,--the
principle of equality of opportunity,--and she valued it more than the
necessaries of animal life. Even so was it valued by the Fathers of the
Republic, when they deliberately incurred the dangers of a war with
mighty England in defense of that and similar principles.
[Illustration: THE UNGROOMED MOTHER OF THE EAST SIDE]
The widow's sentiment was finely echoed by another Russian immigrant,
a man who drives an ice-wagon for a living. His case is the more
impressive from the fact that he left a position of comparative opulence
in the old country, under the protection of a wealthy uncle who employed
him as steward of his estates. He had had servants to wait on him and
money enough to buy some of the privileges of citizenship which the
Russian Government doles out to the favored few. "But what good was
it to me?" he asked. "My property was not my own if the police wanted
to take it away. I could spend thousands to push my boy through the
Gymnasium, and he might get a little education as a favor, and still
nothing out of it, if he isn't allowed to be anything. Here I work like
a slave, and my wife she works like a slave, too,--in the old country
she had servants in the house,--but what do I care, as long as I know
what I earn I got it for my own? I got to furnish my house one chair at
a time, in America, but nobody can take it away from me, the little that
I got. And it costs me nothing to educate my family. Maybe they can,
maybe they can't go to college, but all can go through grammar school,
and high school, too, the smart ones. And all go together! Rich and
poor, all are equal, and I don't get it as a favor."
Better a hard bed in the shelter of justice than a stuffed couch under
the black canopy of despotism. Better a crust of the bread of the
intellect freely given him as his right than the whole loaf grudgingly
handed him as a favor. What nobler insistence on the rights of manhood
do we find in the writings of the Puritans?
Volumes might be filled with the broken sayings of the humblest among
the immigrants which, translated into the sounding terms of the
universal, would give us the precious documents of American history over
again. Never was the bread of freedom more keenly relished than it is
to-day, by the very people of whom it is said that they covet only the
golden platter on which it is served up. We may not say that immigration
to our country has ceased to be a quest of the ideal as long as the
immigrants lay so much stress on the spiritual accompaniment of economic
elevation in America. Nobly built upon the dreams of the Fathers, the
house of our Republic is nobly tenanted by those who cherish similar
dreams.
But dreams cannot be brought before a court of inquiry. A diligent
immigration commission with an appropriation to spend has little time to
listen to Joseph. A digest of its report is expected to yield statistics
rather than rhapsodies. The taxpayers want their money's worth of hard
facts.
But when the facts are raked together and boiled down to a summary that
the business man may scan on his way to the office, behold! we are
no wiser than before. For a host of interpreters jump into the seats
vacated by the extinct commission and harangue us in learned terms on
the merits and demerits of the immigrant, _as they conceive them_, after
studying the voluminous report. That is, the question is still what it
was before: a matter of personal opinion! The man with the vote realizes
that _he_ has to make up _his_ mind what instructions to send to his
representative in Congress on the subject of immigration. And where
shall he, a plain, practical man, unaccustomed to interpret dreams or
analyze statistics, find an index of the alien's worth that he can read
through the spectacles of common sense?
There is a phrase in the American vocabulary of approval that sums up
our national ideal of manhood. That phrase is "a self-made man." To
such we pay the tribute of our highest admiration, justly regarding our
self-made men as the noblest product of our democratic institutions.
Now let any one compile a biographical dictionary of our self-made men,
from the romantic age of our history down to the prosaic year 1914, and
see how the smell of the steerage pervades the volume! _There_ is a sign
that the practical man finds it easy to interpret. Like fruits grow
from like seeds. Those who can produce under American conditions the
indigenous type of manhood must be working with the same elements as the
native American who starts out a yokel and ends up a senator.
Focused under the microscope of theoretical analysis, or viewed through
the spectacles of common sense, the average immigrant of to-day still
shows the markings of virtue that have distinguished the best Americans
from the time of the landing at Plymouth to the opening of the Panama
Canal. But popular judgment is seldom based on a study of the norm,
especially in this age of the newspaper. The newspaper is devoted to the
portrayal of the abnormal--the shining example and the horrible example;
and most men think they have done justice when they have balanced the
one against the other, leaving out of account entirely the great mass
that lies between the two extremes. And even of the two extremes, it is
the horrible example that is more frequently brought to the attention
of the public. Half a dozen Italians draw knives in a brawl on a given
evening, and the morning newspapers are full of the story. On the
same evening hundreds of Italians were studying civics in the night
schools, inquiring for classics at the public library, rehearsing for a
historical pageant at the settlement--and not a word about them in the
newspapers. One Jewish gangster makes more "copy" than a hundred Jewish
boys and girls who win honors in college. So also it is the business of
the police to record the fact that a Greek was arrested for peddling
without a license, while it is nobody's business to report that a dozen
other Greeks chipped in their spare change to pay his fine. The reader
of newspapers is convinced that the foreigners as a whole are a violent,
vicious, lawless crowd, and the fewer we have of them the better.
Could the annual reports of libraries and settlements be circulated as
widely as the newspapers, the American public would not be guilty of
such errors of judgment. But who reads annual reports? The very name
of them is forbidding! It becomes necessary, therefore, to explain
the newspaper types that jump to the fore in every discussion of the
immigrant.
First of all we must get a good grip on our sense of proportion. To
speak of the immigrants as undesirable because a few of them throw bombs
or live by gambling is about as fair as it would be for the world to
call us Americans a nation of dissolute millionaires and industrial
pirates because a Harry Thaw drank himself into an insane asylum and a
Rockefeller swept a host of competitors to ruin.
But the bomb-thrower and the gambler are extremely undesirable. Look at
the Black Hand outrages, look at the Rosenthal case!
Aye, I have looked, and I see plainly that these horrible examples are
due to the same causes as any shining example that could be named. Each
is the product of the qualities the immigrant brought with him and the
opportunities he found here to exercise them. The law-abiding, ambitious
immigrant who came here a beggar and worked himself into the ranks
of the princes found his opportunity in our laws and customs, which
enable the common man to make the most of himself. The blackmailer's
opportunity was provided by the operation of corrupt politics, which
removes police commissioners and impeaches governors for trying to
enforce the law. The Rosenthal case brought forth Lieutenant Becker,
and an investigation of the spread of the Black Hand terror discovers
political bosses behind the scenes.(5) We have laws providing for the
deportation of alien criminals. Why are they not always enforced? When
we have found the broom that will sweep the political vermin from our
legislatures, we shan't need to look around for a shovel to keep back
the scum of Europe. The two will go together.
(5) See _The Outlook_, August 16, 1913; article by Frank Marshall
White.
In the whole catalogue of sins with which the modern immigrant is
charged, it is not easy to find one in which we Americans are not
partners,--we who can make and unmake our world by means of the ballot.
The immigrant is blamed for the unsanitary conditions of the slums, when
sanitary experts cry shame on our methods of municipal house-cleaning.
You might dump the whole of the East Side into the German capital and
there would be no slums there, because the municipal authorities of
Berlin know how to enforce building regulations, how to plant trees, and
how to clean the streets. The very existence of the slum is laid at the
door of the immigrant, but the truth is that the slums were here before
the immigrants. Most of the foreigners hate the slums, and all but the
few who have no backbone get out of them as fast as they rise in the
economic scale. To "move uptown" is the dearest ambition of the average
immigrant family.
If the slums were due to the influx of foreigners, why should London
have slums, and more hideous slums than New York? No, the slum is not
a by-product of the steerage. It is a sore on the social body in many
civilized countries, due to internal disorders of the economic system. A
generous dose of social reformation would do more to effect a cure than
repeated doses of restriction of immigration.
A whole group of phenomena due to social and economic causes have
been falsely traced, in this country, to the quantity and quality of
immigration. Among these are the labor troubles, such as non-employment,
strikes, riots, etc. England has no such immigration as the United
States, and yet Englishmen suffer from non-employment, from riots and
bitter strikes. Whom does the English workingman blame for his misery?
Let the American workingman quarrel with the same enemy. If wage-cutting
is a sin more justly laid at the door of the immigrant, a minimum wage
law might put a stop to that.