in the cities, but not as a chief cause. Congestion is characteristic
of city life the world over, and the remedy will be found in improved
conditions of country life. Moreover, the immigrant has shown himself
responsive to direction away from the city when a systematic attempt
is made to help him find his place in the country. There is the
experience of the Industrial Removal Office of the Baron de Hirsch
Foundation as a hint of what the Government might accomplish if it took
a hand in the intelligent distribution of immigration. The records
of this organization, dealing with a group of immigrants supposed
to be especially addicted to city life, kill two immigrant myths at
one stroke. They prove that it is possible to direct the stream of
immigration in desired channels and that the Jew is not altogether
averse to contact with the soil; both facts contrary to popular notions.
A good deal of anti-immigration feeling has been based on the vile
conditions observed in labor camps, by another turn of that logic which
puts the blame on the victims. A labor camp at its worst is not an
argument against immigration, but an indictment of the brutality of the
contractor who cares only to force a maximum of work out of the workmen,
and cares nothing for their lives; an indictment also of the Government
that allows such shameful exploitation of the laborers to go on. That
a labor camp does not have to be a plague spot has been gloriously
demonstrated by Goethals at Panama. What Goethals did was to emphasize
the _man_ in workingman, with the result that Panama during the vast
operations of digging the Canal was a healthier, happier, more inspiring
place to live in than many of our proudest cities; the workmen came away
from the job better men and better citizens; and the work was better
done and with more dispatch and at less expense than any such work was
ever done by the old-fashioned method, where the workers are treated not
as men but as tools.
There may not be another Goethals in the country, but what a great
man devises little men may copy. The labor camp must never again be
mentioned as a reproach to the immigrant who suffers degradation in it,
or the world will think that we do not know the meaning of the medals
which we ourselves have hung on Goethals's breast.
Immigrants are accused of civic indifference if they do not become
naturalized, but when we look into the conditions affecting
naturalization we wonder at the numbers who do become citizens.
Facilities for civic education of the adult are very scant,
and dependent mostly on the fluctuating enthusiasm of private
philanthropies. The administration of the naturalization laws differs
from State to State and is accompanied by serious material hindrances;
while the community is so indifferent to the civic progress of its alien
members that it is possible for a foreigner to live in this country
for _sixteen years_, coming in contact with all classes of Americans,
without getting the bare information that he may become a citizen of
the United States if he wants to. Such a case, as reported by a charity
worker of New Britain, Connecticut, makes a sensitive American choke
with mortification. If we were ourselves as patriotic as we expect the
immigrant to be, we would employ Salvation Army methods to draw the
foreigner into the civic fold. Instead of that, we leave his citizenship
to chance--or to the most corrupt political agencies.
I would rather not review the blackest of all charges against the
immigrant, that he has a baleful effect on municipal politics: I am
so ashamed of the implications. But sensible citizens will talk and
talk about the immigrant selling his vote, and not know whom they are
accusing. Votes cannot be sold unless there is a market for them. Who
creates the market for votes? The ward politician, behind whom stands
the party boss, alert, and powerful; and behind him--the indifferent
electorate who allow him to flourish.
Among immigrants of the "new" order, the wholesale prostitution of
the ballot is confined to those groups which are largely subjected to
the industrial slavery of mining and manufacturing communities and
construction camps. These helpless creatures, in their very act of
sinning, bear twofold witness against us who accuse them. The foreman
who disposes of their solid vote acquires his power under an economic
system which delivers them up, body and soul, to the man who pays them
wages, and turns it to account under a political system which makes the
legislature subservient to the stock exchange. But let it be definitely
noted that to admit that groups of immigrants under economic control
fall an easy prey to political corruptionists is very far from proving
any inherent viciousness in the immigrants themselves.
Neither does the immigrant's civic reputation depend entirely on
negative evidence. New York City has the largest foreign population
in the United States, and precisely in that city the politicians
have learned that they cannot count on the foreign vote, because
it is not for sale. A student of New York politics speaks of the
"uncontrollable and unapproachable vote of the Ghetto." Repeated
analyses of the election returns of the Eighth District, which has
the largest foreign population of all, show that "politically it is
one of the most uncertain sections" in the city. Many generations of
campaign managers have discovered to their sorrow that the usual party
blandishments are wasted on the East Side masses. Hester Street follows
leaders and causes rather than party emblems. Nowhere is the art of
splitting a ticket better understood. The only time you can predict the
East Side vote is when there is a sharp alignment of the better citizens
against the boss-ridden. Then you will find the naturalized citizens in
the same camp with men like Jacob Riis and women like Lillian Wald. And
the experience of New York is duplicated in Chicago and in Philadelphia
and in every center of immigration. Ask the reformers.
How often we demand more civic virtue of the stranger than we ourselves
possess! A little more time spent in weeding our own garden will relieve
us of the necessity of counting the tin cans in the immigrant's back
yard.
As to tin cans, the immigrants are not the only ones who scatter
them broadcast. How can we talk about the foreigners defacing public
property, when our own bill-boards disfigure every open space that God
tries to make beautiful for us? It is true that the East Side crowds
litter the parks with papers and fruit-skins and peanut shells, but they
would not be able to do so if the park regulations were persistently
enforced. And in the mean time the East Side children, in their pageants
and dance festivals, make the most beautiful use of the parks that a
poet could desire.
There exists a society in the United States the object of which is to
protect the natural beauties and historical landmarks of our country.
Who are the marauders who have called such a society into being? Who is
it that threatens to demolish the Palisades and drain off Niagara? Who
are the vulgar folk who scrawl their initials on trees and monuments,
who chip off bits from historic tombstones, who profane the holy echoes
of the mountains by calling foolish phrases through a megaphone? The
officers of the Scenic and Historic Preservation Society are not
watching Ellis Island. On the contrary, it was the son of an immigrant
whose expert testimony, given before a legislative committee at Albany,
helped the Society to save the Falls of the Genesee from devastation by
a power company. This same immigrant's son, on another occasion, spent
two mortal hours tearing off visiting-cards from a poet's grave--cards
bearing the names of American vacationists.
Some of the things we say against the immigrants sound very strange from
American lips. We speak of the corruption of our children's manners
through contact with immigrant children in the public schools, when
all the world is scolding us for our children's rude deportment. Finer
manners are grown on a tiny farm in Italy than in the roaring subways of
New York; and contrast our lunch-counter manners with the table-manners
of the Polish ghetto, where bread must not be touched with unwashed
hands, where a pause for prayer begins and ends each meal, and on
festival occasions parents and children join in folk-songs between
courses!
If there is a corruption of manners, it may be that it works in the
opposite direction from what we suppose. At any rate, we ourselves admit
that the children of foreigners, before they are Americanized, have a
greater respect than our children for the Fifth Commandment.
We say that immigrants nowadays come only to exploit our country,
because some of them go back after a few years, taking their savings
with them. The real exploiters of our country's wealth are not the
foreign laborers, but the capitalists who pay them wages. The laborer
who returns home with his savings leaves us an equivalent in the
products of labor; a day's service rendered for every day's wages.
The capitalists take away our forests and water-courses and mineral
treasures and give us watered stock in return.
Of the class of aliens who do not come to make their homes here, but
only to earn a few hundred dollars to invest in a farm or a cottage
in their native village, a greater number than we imagine are brought
over by industrial agents in violation of the contract labor law. Put
an end to the stimulation of immigration, and we shall see very few of
the class who do not come to stay. And even as it is, not all of those
who return to Europe do so in order to spend their American fortune.
Some go back to recover from ruin encountered at the hands of American
land swindlers. Some go back to be buried beside their fathers, having
lost their health in unsanitary American factories. And some are helped
aboard on crutches, having lost a limb in a mine explosion that could
have been prevented. When we watch the procession of cripples hobbling
back to their native villages, it looks more as if America is exploiting
Europe.
O that the American people would learn where their enemies lurk! Not
the immigrant is ruining our country, but the venal politicians who try
to make the immigrant the scapegoat for all the sins of untrammeled
capitalism--these and their masters. Find me the agent who obstructs the
movement for the abolition of child labor, and I will show you who it
is that condemns able-bodied men to eat their hearts out in idleness;
who brutalizes our mothers and tortures tender babies; who fills the
morgues with the emaciated bodies of young girls, and the infirmaries
with little white cots; who fastens the shame of illiteracy on our
enlightened land, and causes American boys to grow up too ignorant to
mark a ballot; who sucks the blood of the nation, fattens on its brains,
and throws its heart to the wolves of the money market.
The stench of the slums is nothing to the stench of the child-labor
iniquity. If the foreigners are taking the bread out of the mouth of
the American workingman, it is by the maimed fingers of their fainting
little ones.
And if we want to know whether the immigrant parents are the promoters
or the victims of the child labor system, we turn to the cotton mills,
where forty thousand native American children between seven and sixteen
years of age toil between ten and twelve hours a day, while the fathers
rot in the degradation of idleness.
From all this does it follow that we should let down the bars and
dispense with the guard at Ellis Island? Only in so far as the policy
of restriction is based on the theory that the present immigration is
derived from the scum of humanity. But the immigrants may be desirable
and immigration undesirable. We sometimes have to deny ourselves to the
most congenial friends who knock at our door. At this point, however,
we are not trying to answer the question whether immigration is good
for us. We are concerned only with the reputation of the immigrant--and
incidentally with the reputation of those who have sought to degrade
him in our eyes. If statecraft bids us lock the gate, and our national
code of ethics ratifies the order, lock it we must, but we need not call
names through the keyhole.
Mount guard in the name of the Republic if the health of the Republic
requires it, but let no such order be issued until her statesmen and
philosophers and patriots have consulted together. Above all, let the
voice of prejudice be stilled, let not self-interest chew the cud
of envy in full sight of the nation, and let no syllable of willful
defamation mar the oracles of state. For those who are excluded when our
bars are down are exiles from Egypt, whose feet stumble in the desert
of political and social slavery, whose hearts hunger for the bread of
freedom. The ghost of the Mayflower pilots every immigrant ship, and
Ellis Island is another name for Plymouth Rock.
III
THE FIERY FURNACE
Nebuchadnezzar spake and said unto them, . . . Now if ye be ready that
at what time ye hear the sound of the cornet . . . ye fall down and
worship the image that I have made; well: but if ye worship not, ye
shall be cast the same hour into the midst of a burning fiery furnace;
and who is that God that shall deliver you out of my hands?
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego, answered and said to the king, O,
Nebuchadnezzar, we are not careful to answer thee in this matter. If it
be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning
fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thine hand, O king. But if
not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor
worship the golden image which thou hast set up.
Dan. iii, 14-18.
In the discussion of the third question,--whether immigration is good
for us,--more honest Americans have gone astray than in the other two
divisions. Let it be said at the outset that those who have erred have
been about equally distributed between the ayes and the nays. For the
answer to this question is neither aye nor nay, but something that
cannot be put into a single syllable. If we steer our way cautiously
between the opposing ranks, the light of the true answer will presently
shine on us.
The arguments they severally advance in defense of their respective
positions reveal an appalling number of citizens on each side of the
house who have entirely disregarded the principles involved. Those
who, like the labor-union lobbyists, point to the empty dinner-pails
of American workingmen as a reason for keeping out foreign labor, are
no more at fault than the lobbyists of the opposite side, who offer in
support of the open-door policy statistics showing the need of rough
laborers in various branches of our current material development. All of
them are wrong in that they would treat our foreign brothers as pawns
on the chessboard of our selfish needs. Show me a million American
workingmen out of work, and I fail to see a justification for the
exclusion of a million men from other lands who are also looking for a
job. Does the mother of an impoverished family strangle half her brood
in order that the other half may have enough to eat? No; she divides the
last crust equally among her starvelings, and the laws of nature do the
rest.
This analogy, of course, is a vessel without a bottom unless the gospel
of the brotherhood of man is accepted as a premise of our debate. The
only logic it will hold is the logic of a practical incarnation of
the theories we loudly applaud on occasions of patriotic excitement.
That ought to be acceptable both to the poor men who like to parade
the streets with the Stars and Stripes at the head of the column and
the _Marseillaise_ on their lips, and to the rich men who subscribe
generously to soldiers' and sailors' monument funds, and who ransack
ancient chronicles to establish their connection with the heroes of the
Revolution. Let the paraders and the ancestor-worshipers unite in a
practical recognition of the rights of their belated brothers who are
seeking to enter the kingdom of liberty and justice, and they will have
given a living shape to the sentiment they symbolically honor, each in
his own way.
I am not content if the labor leaders retire from the lobby when all the
mills are running full time and shop foremen are scouring the streets
for "hands." It is no proof of our sincerity that we are indifferent in
times of plenty as to who it is that picks up the crumbs after we have
fed. They only are true Americans who, remembering that this country was
wrested from the English in the name of the common rights of humanity,
resist the temptation to insure their own soup-kettles by patrolling the
national pastures and granaries against the hungry from other lands.
Share and share alike is the motto of brotherhood.
But who will venture to preach such devotion to principle to the starved
and naked and oppressed? Why, I, even I, who refuse to believe that the
American workingman is past answering the call of a difficult ideal,
no matter what privations are gnawing at his vitals. I have read in
the history books that when Lincoln issued his call for volunteers,
they came from mills and factories and little shops as promptly as from
counting-rooms and college halls. Fathers of large families that looked
to him for bread kissed their babies and marched off to the war, taking
an elder son or two with them. Were they all aristocrats whose names
are preserved on four thousand gravestones at Gettysburg? And who were
they who went barefoot in the snow and starved with Washington in Valley
Forge? The common people, most of them, the toilers for daily bread,
they who give all when they give aught, because they have not enough to
divide.
They only mark themselves as calumniators of the poor who protest that
times and men have changed since Washington's and Lincoln's day; who
think that the breed of heroes died out with the passing of the Yankee
farmer and the provincial townsman of the earlier periods. Shall not the
testimony of a daughter of the slums be heard when the poor are being
judged? I was reared in a tenement district of a New England metropolis,
where the poor of many nations contended with each other for a scant
living; and the only reason I am no longer of the slums is because a
hundred heroes and heroines among my neighbors fought for my release.
Not only the members of my family, but mere acquaintances put their
little all at my disposal. Merely that a dreamer among them might come
to the fulfillment of her dream, they fed and sheltered and nursed me
and cheered me on, again and again facing the wolves of want for my
sake, giving me the whole cloak if the half did not suffice to save the
spark of life in my puny body.
If my knowledge of the slums counts for anything, it counts for a
positive assurance that the personal devotion which is daily manifested
in the life of the tenements in repeated acts of self-denial, from the
sharing of a delicacy with a sick neighbor to the education of a gifted
child by the year-long sacrifices of the entire family, is a spark from
the smouldering embers of idealism that lie buried in the ashes of
sordid existence, and await but the fanning of a great purpose to leap
up into a flame of abstract devotion.
Times have changed, indeed, since the days of Washington. His was a time
of beginnings, ours is a time ripe for accomplishment. And yet the seed
the Fathers sowed we shall not reap, unless we consecrate ourselves to
our purpose as they did,--all of us, the whole people, no man presuming
to insult his neighbor by exempting him on account of apparent weakness.
The common people in Washington's time, and again in Lincoln's time,
stood up like men, because they were called as men, not as weaklings who
must be coddled and spared the shock of robust moral enterprise. Not a
full belly but a brimming soul made heroes out of ploughboys in '76.
The common man of to-day is capable of a like transformation if pricked
with the electric needle of a lofty appeal. Those who are teaching
the American workingman to demand the protection of his job against
legitimate alien competition are trampling out the embers of popular
idealism, instead of fanning it into a blaze that should transfigure the
life of the nation.
[Illustration: A FRESH INFUSION OF PIONEER BLOOD]
Idealism of the finest, heroism unsurpassed, are frequently displayed in
the familiar episodes of the class war that is going on before our eyes,
under unionistic leadership. But it is a narrowing of the vision that
makes a great mass of the people adopt as the unit of human salvation
the class instead of the nation. The struggle which has for its object
the putting of the rapacious rich in their place does not constitute a
full programme of national progress. If labor leaders think they are
leading in a holy war, they should be the last to encourage disrespect
of the principles of righteousness for which they are fighting. It
is inconsistent, to put it mildly, to lead a demonstration against
entrenched capital on one day, and the next day to head a delegation in
Congress in favor of entrenched labor. Is there anything brotherly about
a monopolization of the labor market? Substituting the selfishness of
the poor for the selfishness of the rich will bring us no nearer the day
of universal justice.
Though I should not hesitate to insist on a generous attitude toward
the foreigner even if it imposed on our own people all the hardships
which are alleged to be the result of immigration, I do not disdain to
point out the fact that, when all is said and done, there is enough of
America to go around for many a year to come. It is hard to know whether
to take the restrictionists seriously when they tell us that the country
is becoming overcrowded. The population of the United States is less
than three times that of England, and England is only a dot on our map.
In Texas alone there is room for the population of the whole world, with
a homestead of half an acre for every family of five, and a patch the
size of Maryland left over for a public park. A schoolboy's geography
will supply the figures for this pretty sum.
The over-supply of labor is another myth of the restrictionist
imagination that vanishes at one glance around the country, which
shows us crops spoiling for want of harvesters, and women running to
the legislature for permission to extend their legal working-day in
the fields; such is the scarcity of men. Said ex-Secretary Nagel,
commenting upon the immigration bill which was so strenuously pushed by
the restrictionists in the Sixty-third Congress, only to be vetoed by
President Taft:--
In my judgment no sufficiently earnest and intelligent effort has
been made to bring our wants and our supply together, and so far
the same forces that give the chief support to this provision of
the new bill [a literacy test, intended to check the influx of
cheap labor] have stubbornly resisted any effort looking to an
intelligent distribution of new immigration to meet the needs of our
vast country. [And] no such drastic measure [as the literacy test]
should be adopted until we have at least exhausted the possibilities
of a rational distribution of these new forces.
Distribution--geographical, seasonal, occupational; that should be our
next watch-word, if we are bent on applying our vast resources to our
needs. It cannot be too often pointed out that a nation of our political
confession is bound to try every other possible solution of her problems
before resorting to a measure that encroaches on the rights of humanity.
And so far are we from exhausting the possibilities of internal reform
that even the most obvious economic errors have not been corrected.
It is not good sense nor good morals to keep men at work twelve and
thirteen hours a day, seven days in the week, as they do, for example,
in the paper-mills. It is bad policy to use women in the mills; it is
heinous to use the children. Every one of those over-long jobs should
be cut in two; the women should be sent back to the nursery, and the
children put to school, and able-bodied men set in their places.
If such a programme, consistently carried out throughout the country,
still left considerable numbers unemployed, there is one more remedy
we might apply. We might chain to the benches in the city parks, where
involuntary idlers now pass the day, all the agents and runners who move
around Europe at the expense of steamship companies, labor contractors,
and mill-owners. We must _stop_ the importation of labor, not talk about
stopping it.