Transcriber's note:
Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).
Small capital text has been replaced with all capitals.
* * * * *
THE OLD WORLD
IN THE NEW
[Illustration: Towards the New World]
THE OLD WORLD
IN THE NEW
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF PAST AND PRESENT
IMMIGRATION TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE
BY
EDWARD ALSWORTH ROSS, PH.D., LL.D.
Professor of Sociology in the University of Wisconsin
Author of "Social Control," "Social Psychology,"
"The Changing Chinese," "Changing
America," Etc.
ILLUSTRATED WITH
MANY PHOTOGRAPHS
[Illustration: logo]
NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1914
Copyright, 1913, 1914, by
THE CENTURY CO.
_Published, October, 1914_
PREFACE
"Immigration," said to me a distinguished social worker and
idealist, "is a wind that blows democratic ideas throughout the
world. In a Siberian hut from which four sons had gone forth to
America to seek their fortune, I saw tacked up a portrait of Lincoln
cut from a New York newspaper. Even there they knew what Lincoln
stood for and loved him. The return flow of letters and people
from this country is sending an electric thrill through dwarfed,
despairing sections of humanity. The money and leaders that come
back to these down-trodden peoples inspire in them a great impulse
toward liberty and democracy and progress. Time-hallowed Old-World
oppressions and exploitations that might have lasted for generations
will perish in our time, thanks to the diffusion by immigrants of
American ideas of freedom and opportunity."
Rapt in these visions of benefit to belated humanity, my friend
refused to consider any possible harm of immigration to this
country. He did not doubt it so much as ignore it. How should the
well-being of a nation be balanced against a blessing to humanity?
"Think what American chances mean to these poor people!" urged a
large-hearted woman in settlement work. "Thousands make shipwreck,
other thousands are disappointed, but tens of thousands do realize
something of the better, larger life they had dreamed of. Who would
exclude any of them if he but knew what a land of promise America
is to the poor of other lands?" Her sympathy with the visible alien
at the gate was so keen that she had no feeling for the invisible
children of _our_ poor, who will find the chances gone, nor for
those at the gate of the To-be, who might have been born, but will
not be.
I am not of those who consider humanity and forget the nation, who
pity the living but not the unborn. To me, those who are to come
after us stretch forth beseeching hands as well as the masses on the
other side of the globe. Nor do I regard America as something to be
spent quickly and cheerfully for the benefit of pent-up millions in
the backward lands. What if we become crowded without their ceasing
to be so? I regard it as a nation whose future may be of unspeakable
value to the rest of mankind, provided that the easier conditions
of life here be made permanent by high standards of living,
institutions and ideals, which finally may be appropriated by all
men. We could have helped the Chinese a little by letting their
surplus millions swarm in upon us a generation ago; but we have
helped them infinitely more by protecting our standards and having
something worth their copying when the time came.
EDWARD ALSWORTH ROSS.
The University of Wisconsin,
Madison, Wisconsin,
September, 1914.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
PAGE
THE ORIGINAL MAKE-UP OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE 3
Traits of the Puritan stock--Elements in the peopling
of Virginia--The indentured servants and convicts--Purification
by free land--The Huguenots--The Germans--The Scotch-Irish--
Ruling motives in the peopling of the New World--Selective
agencies--The toll of the sea--The sifting by the wilderness--
The impress of the frontier--How an American Breed arose--Its
traits.
CHAPTER II
THE CELTIC IRISH 24
The great lull--The Hibernian tide--Why it has run low--Effects
on Ireland--Irish-Americans in the struggle for existence--Their
improvidence and unthrift--Why they lacked the economic virtues--
Drink their worst foe--Their small criminality--Loyalty to wife
and child--Their occupational preferences--Their rapid rise--Their
rank in intellectual contribution--Celtic traits--Place of the
Irish in American society.
CHAPTER III
THE GERMANS 46
Volume and causes of the German freshet--Why it has
ceased--Distribution of the Germans in America--_Deutschtum_
vs. assimilation--The "Forty-eighters"--Influence
of the Germans on our farming, on our drinking,
on our attitude toward recreation--Political tendencies
of German voters--The Germans as pathbreakers
for intellectual liberty--Their success in the struggle for
existence--Moderation in alcoholism and in crime--Preferred
occupations--Teutonic traits--Effect of the German
infusion on the temper of the American people.
CHAPTER IV
THE SCANDINAVIANS 7
The size of the Scandinavian wave--Distribution of this
element in the United States--Social characteristics--Crime
and alcoholism--Occupational choices--Readiness of assimilation--
Reaction to America--National contrasts among Scandinavians--
Intellectual rating--Race traits--Moral and political
significance of the Scandinavians.
CHAPTER V
THE ITALIANS 95
Causes of the Italian outflow--Distribution of Italians--Social
characteristics--Broad contrast between North Italians and South
Italians--Occupations--Agricultural settlements--Freedom from
alcoholism--Gaming--Addiction to violence--Camorra and Mafia in
America--Difficulties in dealing with Italian immigrants--Their
mental rating--Traits of character--The Italians as a social
element.
CHAPTER VI
THE SLAVS 120
Place of the Slavs in history--Lateness of their awakening--Size
of the Slav groups in America--Occupational tendencies of the
Slavic immigrants--Distribution--Alcoholism--Criminality--
Subjection of women--Extraordinary fecundity--Displacement of
other elements--Resistance to Americanization--Clannishness--
Social characteristics of Slav settlements--Industrial
segregation--Mental rating--Prospects of Slavic immigration.
CHAPTER VII
THE EAST EUROPEAN HEBREWS 143
One-fifth of the Hebrew race in America--"The Promised
Land"--Hebrew interest in free immigration--Waves
of Russo-Hebrew immigration--Occupational preferences--Morals--
Crime--Race traits--Intellectuality--Persistence of will--Growth
of Anti-Semitism in America--Causes--Prospects--Why America is
a powerful solvent of Judaism--Signs of Assimilation.
CHAPTER VIII
THE LESSER IMMIGRANT GROUPS 168
African, Saracen and Mongolian blood in our immigrants--The
Finns--Motives and characteristics--Political
aptitude--Patriotism--The Magyars--Social condition
and traits--The Portuguese--Origin and volume of the
Portuguese influx--Distribution--Industrial and social
characteristics--Resistance to assimilation--The Greeks--
Immigrationfrom Greece purely economic--Distribution
and occupational preferences--Serfdom of Greek
bootblacks--The Levantines--Racial and social characteristics.
CHAPTER IX
ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF IMMIGRATION 195
Stimulators of migration--The commercial interests behind
the movement--The new immigrant as an industrial
tool--How tariff protection coupled with the open
door augment the manufacturer's profits--Effect of the
new immigration upon the cost of living, upon agricultural
methods--Shall the penniless immigrant be helped
to get upon the land--The utilization of foreign labor
to break strikes--The foreign laborer as a hindrance to
unionism--Effect upon wages and conditions--Is the
foreigner indispensable--Immigrant women doing men's
work--Fate of the displaced American--Immigration and
crises--The inevitable rise of social pressure--Who bears
the brunt?
CHAPTER X
SOCIAL EFFECTS OF IMMIGRATION 228
Immigration and social atavism--Community reversions
to the Middle Ages--Immigrant illiteracy and ignorance--New
readers of the yellow press--The spread of white
peonage--Caste cleavage--Attitude of the foreign-born
toward the claims of women--Split-family immigration
and the social evil--How immigration makes acute the
housing problem--Why overgrown cities--Immigrants
who discount our charities--The wayward child of the
immigrant--Insanity among the foreign-born--Obstructions
to the operation of the public school--Signs of
social decline--Peasantism vs. social progress.
CHAPTER XI
IMMIGRANTS IN POLITICS 259
The Hibernian domination of Northern cities--Political
psychology of the Celts--Practical consequences--Immigration
as foe to party traditionalism--Citizenship of
the new immigrants compared with the old--Accumulation
of voteless men--How this lessens the political
strength of labor--Psychology of the ignorant naturalized
immigrants--How the cunning boss acquires "influence"--Feudal
relation between the boss and his humble
constituents--Naturalization frauds--The Tammany way--The
political machine--The liquor interest and the foreign-born
voter--The foreign press in politics--The cost
of losing political like-mindedness--Political mysticism
vs. common sense.
CHAPTER XII
AMERICAN BLOOD AND IMMIGRANT BLOOD 282
Submergence of the pioneering breed--Growing heterogeneity--
Primitive types among the foreign-born--How immigration will
affect good looks in this country--Effect of crossing on
personal beauty--Stature and physique of the newer immigrants--
Do they revitalize the American people--Race morals of the
South European stocks--Are the immigrants good samples of their
own people--Appraisal of the different ethnic strains in the
American people--Rating of present immigrant streams--How
immigration has affected the fecundity of Americans--Evading
a degrading competition by race suicide--The triumph of the
low-standard elements over the high-standard elements.
APPENDIX 307
INDEX 321
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
Towards the New World _Frontispiece_
Immigrant Women in Line for Inspection at Ellis Island 6
Slovaks, Ellis Island 15
Distribution of Irish and Natives of Irish Parentage--1910 38
Distribution of Germans and Natives of German Parentage--1910 55
Distribution of Scandinavians and Natives of Scandinavian
Parentage--1910 78
Typical Norwegian Boy 87
Typical Swedish Girl 87
Distribution of Italians and natives of Italian Parentage--1910 94
Italian Gypsy Mother and Child 100
Italian Woman of Greek or Albanian Ancestry 100
Group of Italian Immigrants Lunching in Old Railroad Waiting
Room, Ellis Island 109
Board of Special Inquiry, Ellis Island 115
Utter Weariness--Bohemian Woman on East Side, New York,
after the Day's Work 115
Slav Sisters 122
Slovak Girl 122
Slav Woman and Italian Husband 131
Slovak Girls 131
Russian Jews, Ellis Island 142
Hindoo Immigrants 142
Slovak Woman and Jewish Man, Ellis Island 151
Jewish Girl in Chicago Sweat-Shop 151
Jewish Runner Soliciting Immigrants for the Steamship Company 162
Magyar 171
Croatian 171
Roumanian 171
Croatians Celebrating Their Going Home to the "Old Country" 178
Roumanian Couple in Gala Attire, Youngstown, Ohio 178
Magyar Peasant Woman 186
Molokan from Russia 186
A Finnish Woman by Her Cabin of Hewn Logs in Northern
Wisconsin near Lake Superior 191
Some of Syracuse's Newer Citizens--A Greek and Two Turks 191
Sunday Group of Roumanian Steel Workers, Youngstown,
Ohio 199
Sunday Roumanians, Youngstown, Ohio 199
The Unemployed--Middle of the Morning, Chicago 206
"Shack" of a Polish Iron Miner, Hibbing, Minn. 211
Cabin of an Austrian Iron Miner, Virginia, Minn. 211
Immigrant Girls Coming to Work in the Early Morning at
the Union Stockyards 217
Polish Girls Washing Dishes Under the Sidewalk in a Chicago
Restaurant 217
Roumanian Shepherds in Native Costume, Ellis Island 224
Distribution of Foreign-born Whites in the United States--1910 241
Dependent Italian Family, Cleveland 248
Dependent Slovak Family, Cleveland 248
Italian Men's Civic Club, Rochester, N. Y. 257
A Civic Banquet to "New Citizens," July 4th 268
Y. M. C. A. Class of Slovenes in English Visiting a Session of
the City Council of Cleveland 277
Class of Foreign-born Women (Carinthians) at the Cleveland
Hardware Co., Cleveland, O., Meeting for Instruction
in English in the Factory, Twice a Week from 5 to 6.30 277
Distribution of Foreign Stock in the United States--1910 284
Distribution of Native White Stock in the United States--1910 301
THE OLD WORLD IN
THE NEW
THE OLD WORLD IN THE NEW
CHAPTER I
THE ORIGINAL MAKE-UP OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE
"God sifted a whole nation that He might send choice grain into the
wilderness." So thought the seventeenth century of the migration
to Massachusetts Bay in the evil years of Charles I; but what are
_we_ to think of it? There is to-day so little sympathy with that
remote, narrow New England theocracy that it is well to state again
in living terms what part the coming of the best of the English
Puritans bore in building up the American people.
As history makers, those who will suffer loss and exile rather than
give up an ideal that has somehow taken hold of them are well nigh
as unlike ordinary folk as if they had dropped from Mars. In every
generation those who are capable of heroic devotion to any ideal
whatsoever are only a remnant. Nine persons out of ten incline to
the line of least resistance or of greatest profit, and will no more
sacrifice themselves for an ideal than lead will turn to a magnet.
That the ideal should be final is of small consequence. It matters
little whether it is a religious tenet, a mode of worship, a
method of life, or a state of society. The essential thing is
that it stands apart from the appetites, passions, and petty aims
that govern most of us. Those who will face panther and tomahawk
for the sake of their ideal are not to be swayed by the sordid
motives and fitful passions that lord it over commonplace lives.
Holding themselves to be instruments for the fulfilment of some
larger purpose, men of this type make their mark upon the world.
The fathers dedicate themselves to establishing godliness in the
community. Their posterity fly to arms in behalf of the principle of
"No taxation without representation." _Their_ posterity, in turn,
war upon the liquor traffic, slavery, or imperialism. As surely as
one quarter of us are still of the blood of the twenty thousand
Puritans who sought the wilderness between 1618 and 1640, so surely
are there ideals not yet risen above the horizon that will inspire
Americans in the generations to come.
The Dutch settled New Amsterdam from practical motives, although
some of them were Walloons fleeing oppression in the Spanish
Netherlands. Gain prompted the peopling of Virginia, and that
colony received its share of human chaff. The Council of Virginia
early complained that "it hurteth to suffer Parents to disburden
themselves of lascivious sonnes, masters of bad servants and wives
of ill husbands, and so clogge the business with such an idle
crue, as did thrust themselves in the last voiage, that will rather
starve for hunger, than lay their hands to labor."
[Illustration: Photograph by Hine
Immigrant Women in Line for Inspection at Ellis Island]
In 1637 the collector of the port of London averred that "most of
those that go thither ordinarily have no habitation ... and are
better out than within the kingdom." After the execution of Charles
I, a number of Royalist families removed to Virginia rather than
brook the rule of Cromwell. This influx of the well-to-do registers
itself in an abrupt increase in the size of the land-grants and in
a sudden rise in the number of slaves. From this period one meets
with the names of Randolph, Madison, Monroe, Mason, Marshall,
Washington and many others that have become household words. On
the whole, however, the exodus of noble "Cavaliers" to Virginia
is a myth; for it is now generally admitted that the aristocracy
of eighteenth-century Virginia sprang chiefly from "members of
the country gentry, merchants and tradesmen and their sons and
relatives, and occasionally a minister, a physician, a lawyer, or a
captain in the merchant service," fleeing political troubles at home
or tempted by the fortunes to be made in tobacco.
Less promising was the broad substratum that sustained the
prosperity of the colony. For fifty years indentured servants
were coming in at a rate from a thousand to sixteen hundred a
year. No doubt many an enterprising wight of the English or Irish
laboring-class sold himself for a term into the tobacco-fields in
order to come within reach of beckoning Opportunity; but we know,
too, that the slums and alleys were raked for material to stock
the plantations. Hard-hearted men sold dependent kinsfolk to serve
in the colonies. Kidnappers smuggled over boys and girls gathered
from the streets of London and Bristol. About 1670, no fewer than
ten thousand persons were "spirited" from England in one year. The
Government was slow to strike at the infamous traffic, for, as was
urged in Parliament, "the plantations cannot be maintained without a
considerable number of white servants."
Dr. Johnson deemed the Americans "a race of convicts," who "ought
to be content with anything we allow them short of hanging." In the
first century of the colonies, gallows'-birds were often given the
option of servitude in the "plantations." Some prayed to be hanged
instead. In 1717 the British Government entered on the policy of
penal transportation, and thenceforth discharged certain classes of
felons upon the colonies until the Revolution made it necessary to
shunt the muddy stream to Botany Bay. New England happily escaped
these "seven-year passengers," because she would pay little for
them and because she had no tobacco to serve as a profitable return
cargo. It is estimated that between 1750 and 1770 twenty thousand
British convicts were exported to Maryland alone, so that even the
school-masters there were mostly of this stripe. The colonies
bitterly resented such cargoes, but their self-protective measures
were regularly disallowed by the selfish home government. American
scholars are coming to accept the British estimate that about 50,000
convicts were marketed on this side the water.
It is astonishing how quickly this "yellow streak" in the population
faded. No doubt the worst felons were promptly hanged, so that
those transported were such as excited the compassion of the court
in an age that recognized nearly three hundred capital offenses.
Then, too, the bulk were probably the unfortunate, or the victims
of bad surroundings, rather than born malefactors. Under the
regenerative stimulus of opportunity, many persons reformed and
became good citizens. A like purification of sewage by free land
was later witnessed in Australia. The incorrigible, when they did
not slip back to their old haunts, forsook the tide-water belt to
lead half-savage lives in the wilderness. Here they slew one another
or were strung up by "regulators," so that they bred their kind
less freely than the honest. Thus bad strains tended to run out,
and in the making of our people the criminals had no share at all
corresponding to their original numbers. Blended with the dregs from
the rest of the population, the convicts who were lazy and shiftless
rather than criminal became progenitors of the "poor whites,"
"crackers," and "sandhillers" that still cumber the poorer lands of
the southern Appalachians.
THE FRENCH HUGUENOTS
Probably no stock ever came here so gifted and prepotent as the
French Huguenots. Though only a few thousand all told, their
descendants furnished 589 of the fourteen thousand and more
Americans deemed worthy of a place in "Appletons' Cyclopedia of
American Biography." In 1790 only one-half of one per cent. of our
people bore a French name; yet this element contributed 4.2 per
cent. of the eminent names in our history, or eight times their due
quota. Like the Puritans and the Quakers, the Huguenots were of an
element that meets the test of fire and makes supreme sacrifices for
conscience' sake. They had the same affinity for ideals and the same
tenacity of character as the founders of New England, but in their
French blood they brought a sensibility, a fervor, and an artistic
endowment all their own.
It was likewise a sturdy stock, and in the early days of the
settlement it was no unusual thing for parties to walk from New
Rochelle to church in lower New York, a distance of twenty-three
miles. As a rule they walked this distance with bare feet, carrying
their shoes in their hands.
THE GERMANS
When seeking settlers for his new colony, William Penn gained much
publicity for it in Germany, where he had a wide acquaintance. The
German Pietists responded at once, and a stream of picked families
mingled with the English Quakers who founded the City of Brotherly
Love. The first Germans to come were well-to-do people. Nearly all
had enough money left on arrival to pay for the land they took up.
In 1710, however, there arose in parts of Germany a veritable furor
to reach the New World. The people of the ravaged Palatinate became
agitated over the lure of America, and ship after ship breasted the
Delaware, black with Palatines, Hanoverians, Saxons, Austrians,
and Swiss. The cost of passage from the upper Rhine was equal to
$500 to-day; but a vast number of penniless Germans got over the
barrier by contracting with the ship-owner to sell themselves into
servitude for a term of years. These were known as "redemptioners,"
and their service was commonly for from four to six years. Before
the Revolution not fewer than 60,000 Germans had debarked at
Philadelphia, to say nothing of the thousands that settled in the
South.
Although not without a sectarian background, this great immigration
bears clearly an economic impress. The virtues of the Germans were
the economic virtues; invariably they are characterized as "quiet,
industrious, and thrifty." Although Franklin wrote, "Those who come
to us are the most stupid of their own nation," he spoke of them
later, before a committee of the House of Commons, as "a people
who brought with them the greatest of all wealth--industry and
integrity, and characters that have been superpoised and developed
by years of persecution." It is likely that the intellectual
stagnation of the Pennsylvania Germans and the smallness of their
contribution to American leadership has been due to pietistic
contempt for education rather than to the natural qualities of the
stock.
THE SCOTCH-IRISH
The flailing of the clans after the futile rising of 1745 made
the Scots restless, and in the last twelve years of the colonial
era 20,000 Highlanders sought homes in America. But most of our
Scottish blood came by way of Ireland. Early in the eighteenth
century the discriminations of Parliament against the woolen
industry of Ireland, and against Presbyterianism, provoked the
largest immigration that occurred before the Revolution. The Ulster
Presbyterians were descended from Scotsmen and English who had been
induced between 1610 and 1618 to settle in the north of Ireland,
and who were, in Macaulay's judgment, "as a class, superior to the
average of the people left behind them." They cared for ideas, and
at the beginning of the outflow there was probably less illiteracy
in Ulster than anywhere else in the world. Entire congregations
came, each headed by its pastor. "The whole North is in a ferment,"
lamented an Irish archbishop in 1728. "It looks as if Ireland
were to send all her inhabitants hither," complained the governor
of Pennsylvania. About 200,000 came over, and on the eve of the
Revolution the stock was supposed to constitute a sixth of the
population of the colonies. They settled along the frontier, and
bore the brunt of the warfare with the savage. It was owing chiefly
to them that the Quakers and Germans of Pennsylvania were left
undisturbed to live up to their ideals of peace and non-resistance.
In eminence, the lead of the Scotch-Irish has been in government,
exploration, and war, although they have not been lacking in
contributors to education and invention. In art and music they have
had little to offer.
The outstanding trait of the Scotch-Irish was _will_. No other
element was so masterful and contentious. In a petition directed
against their immigration, the Quakers characterized them as a
"pernicious and pugnacious people" who "absolutely want to control
the province themselves." The stubbornness of their character is
probably responsible for the unexampled losses in the battles of our
Civil War. They fought the Indian, fought the British with great
unanimity in two wars, and were in the front rank in the conquest of
the West. More than any other stock has this tough, gritty breed, so
lacking in poetry and sensibility, molded our national character.
If to-day a losing college crew rows so hard that they have to be
lifted from their shell at the end of the boat-race, it is because
the never-say-die Scotch-Irish fighters and pioneers have been the
picturesque and glowing figures in the imagination of American
youth.
Looked at broadly, the first peopling of this country owes at least
as much to the love of liberty as to the economic motive. In the
seventeenth century the peoples of the Old World seemed to be at
odds with one another. Race trampled on race, and the tender new
shoots of religious yearning were bruised by an iron state and an
iron church. The rumor of a virgin land where the oppressed might
dwell in peace drew together a population varied, but rich in the
spirited and in idealists. What a contrast between the English
colonies and those of the orthodox powers! For the intellectual
stagnation of the French in Canada, thank Louis XIV, who would
not allow Huguenots to settle in New France. Spain barred out the
foreigner from her colonies, and even the Spaniard might not go
thither without a permit from the Crown. Heretics were so carefully
excluded that in nearly three centuries the Inquisition in Mexico
put to death "only 41 unreconciled heretics, a number surpassed
in some single days [in Spain] in Philip II's time." No wonder
Spanish-American history shows men swayed by greed, ambition, pride,
or fanaticism, but very rarely by a moral ideal.
Let no one suppose, however, that, as were the original settlers,
so must their descendants be. When you empty a barrel of fish fry
into a new stream there is a sudden sharpening of their struggle
for existence. So, when people submit themselves to totally strange
conditions of life, Death whets his scythe, and those who survive
are a new kind of "fittest."
[Illustration: Photograph by Hine
Slovaks, Ellis Island]
THE TOLL OF THE SEA
Were the Atlantic dried up to-day, one could trace the path between
Europe and America by cinders from our steamers; in the old days
it would have revealed itself by human bones. The conditions of
over-sea passage then brought about a shocking elimination of the
weaker. The ships were small and crowded, the cabins close, and the
voyage required from six to ten weeks. "Betwixt decks," writes a
colonist, "there can hardlie a man fetch his breath by reason there
ariseth such a funke in the night that it causeth putrifacation of
the blood and breedeth disease much like the plague."
In a circular, William Penn urged those who came to keep as much
upon deck as may be, "and to carry store of _Rue_ and _Wormwood_,
or often sprinkle _Vinegar_ about the Cabbin." The ship on which he
came over lost a third of its passengers by smallpox. In 1639 the
wife of the governor of Virginia writes that the ship on which she
had come out had been "so pestered with people and goods ... so full
of infection that after a while they saw little but throwing people
overboard." One vessel lost 130 out of 150 souls. One sixth of the
three thousand Germans sent over in 1710 perished in a voyage that
lasted from January to June. No better fared a shipload of Huguenot
refugees in 1686. A ship that left Rotterdam with 150 Palatines
landed fewer than fifty after a voyage of twenty-four weeks. In
1738 "malignant fever and flux" left only 105 out of 400 Palatines.
In 1775 a brig reached New York, having lost a hundred Highlanders
in passage. It was estimated that in the years 1750 and 1755 two
thousand corpses were thrown overboard from the ships plying out of
Rotterdam. In 1756, Mittelberger thus describes the horrors of the
passage:
During the voyage there is aboard these ships terrible misery,
stench, fumes, vomiting, many kinds of sickness, fever,
dysentery, scurvy, mouth-rot, and the like, all of which come
from old and sharply salted food and meat, also from very bad
and foul water, so that many die miserably.... Many hundred
people necessarily perish in such misery and must be cast into
the sea. The sighing and crying and lamenting on board the ship
continues night and day.
Thus many poor-conditioned or ill-endowed immigrants succumbed
en route. Those of greater resolution stood the better chance;
for there was a striking difference in fate between those who lay
despairing in the cabins and those who dragged themselves every day
to the life-giving air of the deck.
THE SIFTING BY THE WILDERNESS
Even after landing, the effects of the voyage pursued the
unfortunates. In 1604, De Monts lost half his colony at St. Croix
the first winter. More than half the Pilgrims were dead before the
_Mayflower_ left for home, four months after reaching Plymouth.
Of the Puritans who came to Massachusetts Bay in 1629, a fifth
were under ground within a year. Of the 1500 who came over in the
summer of 1630, 200 died before December. In 1754, a Philadelphia
sexton testified that up to November 14 he had buried that year 260
Palatines.
In the South lay in wait the Indian and the malaria-bearing
mosquito, and the latter slew more. The whites might patch a truce
with the redskin, but never with the mosquito. They died as die
raw Europeans to-day along the lower Niger or in the delta of the
Amazon. In June, 1610, only 150 persons were living on the banks of
the James River out of 900 who had been landed there within three
years. By 1616, 1650 persons altogether had been sent out; of these
300 had returned, and about 350 were living in Virginia. During
a twelvemonth in 1619-20, 1200 left England, but only 200 were
alive in April, 1620. Fifty years later, Governor Berkeley stated:
"There is not oft seasoned hands (as we term them) that die now,
whereas heretofore not one out of five escaped the first year." A
"seasoned" servant, having only one more year to serve, brought a
better price than a new-comer, with seven and a half years to serve.
Surely the survivors of such a shock had a tough fiber to pass on
to their descendants. It is such selection that explains in part
the extraordinary blooming of the colonies after the cruel initial
period was over.
THE IMPRESS OF THE FRONTIER
No doubt the iron hardihood of the South African Boers was built up
by the succumbing of physical and moral weaklings amid a wilderness
environment. In the same way our frontier made it hard for the
soft basswood type to survive. Of the 380 persons whom Robertson
collected in North Carolina in 1779 to found what is now Nashville,
only 134 were alive at the end of a year, although not one natural
death had occurred. Six months later only seventy were left alive.
If there had been any weaklings in the party, by this time surely
the tomahawk would have found them. No wonder, then, that when the
vote was cast on the question of staying or going back, no one voted
for going back. The less hardy, too, succumbed to the fever and
ague, which decimated the settlers of the wooded country until they
had cleared the forests and drained the marshes.
In the early days there streamed over the Wilderness Road that
led to the settlements in Kentucky two tides, an outgoing tide of
stout-hearted pioneers, seeking farms in the lovely blue-grass
land, and a return flow of timid or shiftless people, affrighted
by the horrors of Indian warfare or tired of the grim struggle for
subsistence amid the stumps. The select character of those who built
up these exposed settlements explains the wonderful forcefulness of
the people of Kentucky and Ohio, especially before they had given
so many of their blood to found the commonwealths farther west.
Thanks to the protecting frontier garrisons, the settlers of the
trans-Mississippi States were perhaps not so rigorously selected
as the trans-Alleghany pioneers; but, on the other hand, they were
themselves largely of pioneer stock.
No doubt the "run of the continent" has improved the fiber of
the American people. Of course the well established and the
intellectuals had no motive to seek the West; but in energy and
venturesomeness those who sought the frontier were superior to the
average of those in their class who stayed behind. It was the pike
rather than the carp that found their way out of the pool. Now, in
the main, those who pushed through the open door of opportunity
left more children than their fellows who did not. Often themselves
members of large families, they had fecundity, as it were, in the
blood. With land abundant and the outlook encouraging, they married
earlier. In the narrow life of the young West, love and family were
stronger interests than in the older society; hence all married.
Thanks to cheap living and to the need of helpers, the big family
was welcomed. Living by agriculture, the West knew little of cities,
manufactures, social rivalry, luxury, and a serving class, all foes
of rapid multiplication.
In 1802, Michaux found the families of the Ohio settlers "always
very numerous," and of Kentucky he wrote: "There are few houses
which contain less than four or five children." Traveling in the
Ohio Valley in 1807, Cumings observed: "Throughout this whole
country, whenever you see a cabin you see a swarm of children"; and
Woods wrote in 1819: "The first thing that strikes a traveler on the
Ohio is the immense number of children." But there is solider proof
of frontier prolificacy. The census of 1830 showed the proportion
of children under five years in the States west of the Alleghanies
to be a third to a half greater than in the seaboard region. The
proportion of children to women between fifteen and fifty was from
fifty to a hundred per cent. greater. In 1840, children were forty
per cent. more numerous among the Yankees of the Western Reserve
than among their kinsmen in Connecticut. The next half-century took
the edge off the fecundity of the people of the Ohio Valley; but
their sons and daughters who had pushed on into Kansas, Nebraska,
and Minnesota, showed families a fifth larger. In 1900, the people
of the agricultural frontier--Texas, Oklahoma, and the Dakotas--had
a proportion of children larger by twenty-eight per cent. than that
of the population between Pittsburgh and Omaha.
If the frontier drew from the seaboard population a certain element,
and let it multiply more freely than it would have multiplied at
home, the frontier must have made that element more plentiful in
the American people, taken as a whole; and this, indeed, appears
to be what actually occurred. No one ventures to assert that
the Americans are differentiated from the original immigrating
stocks by superiority in any form of talent or in any kind of
sensibility; but they impress all foreign observers with their high
endowment of energy, tenacity of purpose, and willingness to take
risks, and these are just the qualities that are fostered and made
more abundant by the wilderness. I do not maintain that life in
America has added any new trait to the descendants of transplanted
Europeans, nor has it filled them all with the pioneer virtues. What
I do mean is that, owing to the progressive peopling of the fertile
wilderness, certain valuable strains that once were represented
in, say, a sixth of the population, might come to be represented
in a quarter of it; and the timid, inert sort might shrivel from a
fifth of the population to a tenth. Such a shifting in the numerical
strength of types would account both for the large contingent of the
forceful in the normal American community, and for the prevalence
of the ruthless, high-pressure, get-there-at-any-cost spirit which
leaves in its wake achievement, prosperity, neurasthenia, Bright's
disease, heart failure, and shattered moral standards.