SOCIAL EFFECTS OF IMMIGRATION
There is a certain anthracite town of 26,000 inhabitants in which
are writ large the moral and social consequences of injecting 10,000
sixteenth-century people into a twentieth-century community. By
their presence the foreigners necessarily lower the general plane
of intelligence, self-restraint, refinement, orderliness, and
efficiency. With them, of course, comes an increase of drink and of
the crimes from drink. The great excess of men among them leads to
sexual immorality and the diffusion of private diseases. A primitive
midwifery is practised, and the ignorance of the poor mothers fills
the cemetery with tiny graves. The women go about their homes
barefoot, and their rooms and clothing reek with the odors of
cooking and uncleanliness. The standards of modesty are Elizabethan.
The miners bathe in the kitchen before the females and children of
the household, and women soon to become mothers appear in public
unconcerned. The foreigners attend church regularly, but their noisy
amusements banish the quiet Sunday. The foreign men, three-eighths
of whom are illiterate, pride themselves on their physical strength
rather than on their skill, and are willing to take jobs requiring
nothing but brawn.
Barriers of speech, education, and religious faith split the
people into unsympathetic, even hostile camps. The worst element
in the community makes use of the ignorance and venality of the
foreign-born voters to exclude the better citizens from any share
in the control of local affairs. In this babel no newspaper becomes
strong enough to mold and lead public opinion. On account of the
smallness of the English-reading public,--the native born men number
slightly over two thousand and those of American parentage less
than a thousand--the single English daily has so few subscribers
that it cannot afford to offend any of them by exposing municipal
rottenness. The chance to prey on the ignorant foreigner tempts the
cupidity and corrupts the ethics of local business and professional
men. The Slavic thirst, multiplying saloons up to one for every
twenty-six families, is communicated to Americans, and results in
an increase of liquor crimes among all classes. In like manner
familiarity with the immodesties of the foreigners coarsens the
native-born.
With the basest Americans and the lowest foreigners united by
thirst and greed, while the decent Americans and the decent
foreigners understand one another too little for team-work, it is
not surprising that the municipal government is poor and that the
taxpayers are robbed. Only a few of the main streets are paved; the
rest are muddy and poorly guttered. Outside the central portion
of the city one meets with open sewage, garbage, dung-heaps, and
foul odors. Sidewalks are lacking or in bad repair. The police
force, composed of four Lithuanians, two Poles, one German, and one
Irishman, is so inefficient that "pistol-toting" after nightfall is
common among all classes. At times hold-ups have been so frequent
that it was not considered safe for a well-dressed person to show
himself in the foreign sections after dark. In the words of a
prominent local criminal lawyer:
We have a police force that can't speak English. Within the last
few years there have been six unavenged murders in this town.
Why, if there were anybody I wanted to get rid of, I'd entice
him here, shoot him down in the street, and then go around and
say good-by to the police.
Here in a nutshell are presented the social effects that naturally
follow the introduction into an advanced people of great numbers of
backward immigrants. One need not question the fundamental worth
of the immigrants or their possibilities in order to argue that
they must act as a drag on the social progress of the nation that
incorporates them.
ILLITERACY
Among us there are now two million foreign-born illiterates, while
the number of foreign-born men of voting age unable to read and
write has passed the million mark. The confessed illiteracy of the
multitudes coming from southern and eastern Europe is 35.8 per
cent., as against 2.7 per cent. for the dwindling streams from the
North and West. We know that the actual state is somewhat worse
than these figures indicate, because many unlettered aliens fearing
rejection falsely declare themselves able to read and write. If the
lands of ignorance continue to discharge unhindered their surplus
into our country, we must resign ourselves to having numbers of
fellow-citizens who, in the words of the Commissioner of Immigration
at New York, "do not know the days of the week, the months of the
year, their own ages, or the name of any country in Europe outside
their own." Or, as another official puts it:
In our daily official duties we come to know as belonging to
a normal human adult type the individual who cannot count to
twenty every time correctly; who can tell the sum of two and
two, but not of nine and six; name the days of the week, but not
the months of the year; who knows that he has arrived at New
York or Boston, as the case may be, but does not know the route
he followed from his home or how long it took to reach here; who
says he is destined to America, but has to rely on showing a
written address for further particulars; who swears he paid his
own passage, but is unable to tell what it cost, and at the same
time shows an order for railroad transportation to destination
prepaid in this country.
While sister countries are fast nearing the goal of complete adult
literacy, deteriorating immigration makes it very hard to lift the
plane of popular intelligence in the United States. The foreign-born
between twenty and thirty-four years of age, late-comers of course,
show five times the illiteracy of native whites of the same age. But
those above forty-five years of age, mostly earlier immigrants, have
scarcely twice the illiteracy of native whites above forty-five.
This shows how much wider is the gulf between the Americans of
to-day and the new immigrants than that between the Americans of a
generation ago and the old immigrants.
Thanks to extraordinary educational efforts, the illiteracy of
native white voters dropped a third during the last decade; that
is, from 4.9 per cent. to 3.5 per cent. But the illiteracy of the
foreign-born men rose to 12 per cent.; so that the proportion of
white men in this country unable to read and write any language
declined only 9 per cent. when, but for the influx of illiterates,
it would have fallen 30 per cent.
In the despatches of August 16, 1912, is an account of a gathering
of ten thousand afflicted people at a shrine at Carey, Ohio, reputed
to possess a miraculous healing virtue. Special trains brought
together multitudes of credulous, and at least one "miracle" was
reported. As this country fills up with the densely ignorant, there
will be more of this sort of thing. The characteristic features of
the Middle Ages may be expected to appear among us to the degree
that our population comes to be composed of persons at the medieval
level of culture.
YELLOW JOURNALISM
In accounting for yellow journalism, no one seems to have noticed
that the saffron newspapers are aimed at a sub-American mind groping
its way out of a fog. The scare-heads, red and green ink, pictures,
words of one syllable, gong effects, and appeal to the primitive
emotions, are apt to jar upon the home-bred farmer or mechanic.
"After all," he reflects, "I am not a child." Since its success in
the great cities, this style of newspaper has been tried everywhere;
but it appears there are soils in which the "yellows" will not
thrive. When a population is sixty per cent. American stock, the
editor who takes for granted some intelligence in his readers
outlasts the howling dervish. But when the native stock falls below
thirty per cent. and the foreign element exceeds it, yellowness
tends to become endemic. False simplicity, distortion, and crude
emotionalism are the resources of newspapers striving to reach and
interest undeveloped minds. But the arts that win the immigrant
deprave the taste of native readers and lower the intelligence of
the community.
PEONAGE
The friendless, exploitable alien by his presence tends to corrupt
our laws and practices respecting labor. In 1908 the House of
Representatives directed the Immigration Commission to report
on the treatment and conditions of work of immigrants in certain
Southern States "and other States." The last phrase was introduced
merely to avoid the appearance of sectionalism, for no congressman
dreamed that peonage existed anywhere save in the South. The
investigation disclosed, however, the startling fact that immigrant
peonage exists in every State but Oklahoma and Connecticut. In the
West the commission found "many cases of involuntary servitude,"
but no prosecutions. It was in the lumber-camps of Maine that
the commission found "the most complete system of peonage in the
country."
CASTE SPIRIT
The desire to cure certain ills has been slow to develop among
us because the victims are aliens who, we imagine, don't mind
it very much. On learning that the low pay of the Italian navy
forbids meat, we recall that all Italians prefer macaroni, anyhow.
With downtrodden immigrants we do not sympathize as we would with
downtrodden Americans. The foreign-born laborers are "wops" and
don't count; the others are "white men." After a great mine disaster
a Pittsburgh newspaper posted the bulletin: "Four hundred miners
killed. Fifteen Americans." Of late a great split has opened between
the American and Americanized working-men and the foreigners, with
their new sense of being exploited and despised. The break shows
itself sensationally in the bitter fight between the American
Federation of Labor and the Industrial Workers of the World. The
former denounces the red-flag methods of the latter, ignores I.
W. W. strikes, and allows its members to become strike-breakers.
When the latter precipitates a strike in some industry in which the
Federationists are numerous, we shall see an unprecedented warfare
between native and foreign groups of working-men. It is significant
of the coming cleavage that the mother of the I. W. W., the Western
Federation of Miners, at once the most American and the most radical
of the great labor-unions, has disowned the daughter organization
since its leaders sought to rally inflammable and irresponsible
immigrants with the fierce cry, "Sabotage. No Truce."
THE POSITION OF WOMEN
Perhaps the most sensitive index of moral advancement is the
position assigned to woman. Never is there a genuine advance
that does not leave her more planet and less satellite. Until
recently nowhere else in the world did women enjoy the freedom and
encouragement they received in America. It is folly, however, to
suppose that their lot will not be affected by the presence of six
millions from belated Europe and from Asia, where consideration for
the weaker sex is certainly not greater than that of the English
before the Puritan Reformation.
With most of our Slavic nationalities, it is said, the boy may
strike his sister with impunity, but the girl who strikes her
brother is likely to be chastised. Few of the later immigrants
think of giving the daughter as good a chance as the son. Among the
American students in our colleges there are three young men to one
young woman. For the native students of foreign fathers the ratio is
four to one, and for the foreign-born eight to one.
The Italians keep their daughters close, and marry them off very
early. In the 1909 strike of the New York shirt-waist makers, all
the nationalities responded to the union ideal save the Italian
girls. More than that, hundreds of them slipped into the strikers'
jobs. Mystified by the strange, stolid resistance of the brown-eyed
girls to all entreaties, the strike-leaders visited their homes.
There they found that the Italian woman, instead of being a free
moral agent, is absolutely subject to the will of her nearest male
relative, and the man would not take the wife, sister, or daughter
out of the shop unless he was well paid for it.
East European peasants are brutal in the assertion of marital
rights, so when the poor immigrant woman, noticing the lot of the
American wife, comes to the point of rebelling against the overlarge
family, she runs the risk of rough treatment. Some nationalities
are almost Oriental in the way they seclude their women. It is
significant that the Ruthenian, Polish, Portuguese, South Italian,
and Greek female employees who have lived here from five to ten
years are further behind their men-folk in speaking English than
the women from northern and western Europe.
That the woman's movement in America is to meet with hard sledding
cannot be doubted. The yielding conservatism of our East has been
buttressed of late by the incorporation of millions of immigrants
bred in the coarse peasant philosophy of sex. It may be long before
women win in the East the recognition they have won in the more
American parts of the country. Recently the school board of New
York, on motion of Commissioner Abraham Stern, refused even to
allow discussion of a woman teacher's petition for a year's leave
of absence without pay in order to have a baby. This moved "_The
Independent_," which has been a Mark Tapley on the immigration
question, to remark: "The wave of recent immigration has brought
with it the Oriental conception of woman's status. A man whose
religion requires him every morning to thank God that he was not
born a woman is likely to treat women so that they will wish they
had been born men. We must not shut our eyes to the fact that in the
future the Christian conception of womanhood is not to be maintained
in this country without a struggle."
THE SOCIAL EVIL
From a half to three-fifths of the immigration of the period 1868-88
was male, but the new immigration shows a male preponderance of
about three to one. Among those from Austria there are 155 males to
100 females. Among those from Hungary the proportion is 161 to 100;
from Italy, 191; from Asiatic Turkey, 210; from European Turkey,
769; from the Balkan States, 1107; from Greece, 1192. A quarter of
the Polish husbands in industry, a third of the married Slovak and
Italian men, nearly half of the Magyars and Russians, three-fifths
of the Croatians, three-fourths of the Greeks and Rumanians, and
nine-tenths of the Bulgarians, have left their wives in the old
country!
Two million more immigrant men than immigrant women! Can any
one ask what this leads to? In colonial times the consequences
of split-family immigration were so bad that Massachusetts and
Connecticut passed laws requiring spouses to return to their mates
in England unless they were "come over to make way for their
families." We are broader-minded, and will interfere with nothing
that does not wound prosperity. The testimony of foreign consuls
and leaders among the foreign-born leaves no doubt that in some
instances the woman cook of the immigrant boarding-house is common
to the inmates.
HOUSING
In the South Side of Pittsburgh there are streets lined with
the decent homes of German steel-workers. A glance down the
paved passage leading to the rear of the house reveals absolute
cleanliness, and four times out of five one glimpses a tree, a
flower garden, an arbor, or a mass of vines. In Wood's Run, a few
miles away, one finds the Slavic laborers of the Pressed Steel
Car Company huddled in dilapidated rented dwellings so noisome
and repulsive that one must visit the lower quarters of Canton to
meet their like. One cause of the difference is that the Slavs are
largely transients, who do nothing to house themselves because they
are saving in order to return to their native village.
The fact that a growing proportion of our immigrants, having left
families behind them, form no strong local attachments and have no
desire to build homes here is one reason why of late the housing
problem has become acute in American industrial centers.
OVERGROWTH OF CITIES
Not least among the multiplying symptoms of social ill health in
this country is the undue growth of cities. A million city-dwellers
create ten times the amount of "problem" presented by a million on
the farms. Now, as one traverses the gamut that leads from farms
to towns, from towns to cities, and from little cities to big, the
proportion of American stock steadily diminishes while the foreign
stock increases its representation until in the great cities it
constitutes nearly three-fourths of the population. In 1910 the
percentage distribution of our white population was as follows:--
NATIVE
WHITE FOREIGN FOREIGN-
STOCK STOCK BORN
Rural districts 64.1 20.8 7.5
Cities 2,500-10,000 57.5 34.5 13.9
Cities 10,000-25,000 50.4 42. 14.4
Cities 25,000-100,000 45.9 46.7 20.2
Cities 100,000-500,000 38.9 53.4 22.1
Cities 500,000 and over 25.6 70.8 33.6
It is not that the immigrants love streets and crowds. Two-thirds of
them are farm bred, but they are dropped down in cities, and they
find it easier to herd there with their fellows than to make their
way into the open country. Our cities would be fewer and smaller
had they fed on nothing but country-bred Americans. The later alien
influx has rushed us into the thick of urban problems, and these
are gravest where Americans are fewest. Congestion, misliving,
segregation, corruption, and confusion are seen in motley groups
like Pittsburgh, Jersey City, Paterson, and Fall River rather than
in native centers like Indianapolis, Columbus, Nashville, and Los
Angeles.
PAUPERISM
Ten years ago two-fifths of the paupers in our almshouses were
foreign-born, but most of them had come over in the old careless
days when we allowed European poorhouses to send us their inmates.
Now that our authorities turn back such as appear likely to become a
public charge, the obvious pauper is not entering this country.
We know that virtually every Greek in America is self-supporting.
The Syrians are said to be singularly independent. The Slavs and the
Magyars are sturdy in spirit, and the numerous indigent Hebrews are
for the most part cared for by their own race.
[Illustration: Distribution of Foreign-Born Whites in the United
States--1910]
Nevertheless, dispensers of charity agree that many South Italians
are landing with the most extravagant ideas of what is coming to
them. They apply at once for relief with the air, "Here we are. Now
what are you going to do for us?" They even _insist_ on relief as
a right. At home it had been noised about that in foolish America
baskets of food are actually sent in to the needy, and some are
coming over expressly to obtain such largess. Probably none are so
infected with spiritual hookworm as the immigrants from Naples. It
will be recalled that when Garibaldi and his thousand were fighting
to break the Bourbon tyranny in the South, the Neapolitans would
hurrah for them, but would not even care for the wounded.
Says the Forty-seventh Annual Report of the New York Juvenile Asylum:
It is remarkable that recently arrived immigrants who display
small adaptability in American standards are by no means slow in
learning about this and other institutions where they may safely
leave their children to be fed, clothed, and cared for at the
public expense. This is one of the inducements which led them to
leave their native land.
Charity experts are very pessimistic as to what we shall see when
those who come in their youth have passed their prime and met the
cumulative effects of overwork, city life, drink, and vice. Still
darker are their forebodings for a second generation, reared too
often by ignorant, avaricious rustics lodging in damp cellars,
sleeping with their windows shut, and living on the bad, cheap food
of cities. Of the Italians in Boston Dr. Bushee writes:
They show the beginnings of a degenerate class, such as has been
fully developed among the Irish.... If allowed to continue in
unwholesome conditions, we may be sure that the next generation
will bring forth a large crop of dependents, delinquents and
defectives to fill up our public institutions.
Says a charity superintendent working in a huge Polish quarter:
It is the second generation that will give us trouble. The
parents come with rugged peasant health, and many of them keep
their strength even in the slum. But their children often
start life weakened physically and mentally by the conditions
under which they were reared. They have been raised in close,
unsanitary quarters, in overlarge families, by parents who drunk
up or saved too much, spent too little on the children, or
worked them too soon. Their sole salvation is the open country,
and they can't be pushed into the country. All of us are aghast
at the weak fiber of the second generation. Every year I see the
morass of helpless poverty getting bigger. The evil harvest of
past mistakes is ripening, but it will take twenty years before
we see the worst of it. If immigration were cut off short
to-day, the burden from past neglect and exploitation would go
on increasing for years.
THE WAYWARD CHILD OF THE IMMIGRANT
In 1908 nine-tenths of the 2600 complaints of children going wrong
made to the Juvenile Protective Association of Chicago related to
the children of immigrants. It is said that four-fifths of the
youths brought before the Juvenile Court of Chicago come from the
homes of the foreign-born. In Pittsburgh the proportion is at least
two-thirds. However startling these signs of moral breakdown in
the families of the new immigrants, there is nothing mysterious
about it. The lower the state from which the alien comes, the more
of a grotesque he will appear in the shrewd eyes of his partly
Americanized children. "Obedience to parents seems to be dying out
among the Jews," says a Boston charity visitor. "The children feel
it isn't necessary to obey a mother who wears a shawl or a father
who wears a full beard." "Sometimes it is the young daughter who
rules the Jewish family," observes a Pittsburgh settlement head,
"because she alone knows what is 'American.' But see how this
results in a great number of Jewish girls going astray. Since the
mother continues to shave her head and wear a wig as she did in
Poland, the daughter assumes that mother is equally old-fogyish when
she insists that a nice girl doesn't paint her face or run with boys
in the evening."
Through their knowledge of our speech and ways, the children have
a great advantage in their efforts to slip the parental leash.
The bad boy tells his father that whipping "doesn't go" in this
country. Reversing the natural order, the child becomes the fount
of knowledge, and the parents hang on the lips of their precocious
offspring. If the policeman inquires about some escapade or the
truant officer gives warning, it is the scamp himself who must
interpret between parent and officer. The immigrant is braced by
certain Old-World loyalties, but his child may grow up loyal to
nothing whatever, a rank egoist and an incorrigible who will give us
vast trouble before we are done with him.
Still, the child is not always to blame. "Often the homes are so
crowded and dirty," says a probation officer, "that no boy can
go right. The Slavs save so greedily that their children become
disgusted with the wretched home conditions and sleep out." One
hears of foreign-born with several boarders sending their children
out to beg or to steal coal. In one city investigation showed
that only a third of the Italian children taken from school on
their fourteenth birthday were needed as bread-winners. Their
parents thought only of the sixty cents a week. In another only
one-fourteenth of the Italian school children are above the primary
grades, and one-eleventh of the Slavic, as against two-fifths of
the American school children in grammar grades or high school.
Miss Addams tells of a young man from the south of Italy who
was mourning the death of his little girl of twelve. In his grief
he said quite simply: "She was my oldest kid. In two years she
would have supported me, and now I shall have to work five or six
years longer until the next one can do it." He expected to retire
permanently at the age of thirty-four.
[Illustration: Dependent Italian Family, Cleveland. (Two Children
Absent)]
[Illustration: Dependent Slovak Family, Cleveland]
INSANITY AMONG THE FOREIGN-BORN
Not only do the foreign-born appear to be more subject to insanity
than the native-born, but when insane they are more likely to become
a public charge. Of the asylum population they appear to constitute
about a third. In New York during the year ending September 30,
1911, 4218 patients who were immigrants or of immigrant parents
were admitted to the insane hospitals of the State. This is
three-quarters of the melancholy intake for that year. Only one out
of nine of the first admissions from New York City was of native
stock. The New York State Hospital Commission declares that "the
frequency of insanity in our foreign population is 2.19 times
greater than in those of native birth." In New York City it "is 2.48
times that of the native-born."
Excessive insanity is probably a part of the price the foreign-born
pay for the opportunities of a strange and stimulating environment,
with greater strains than some of them are able to bear. America
calls forth powerful reactions in these people. Here they feel
themselves in the grasp of giant forces they can neither withstand
nor comprehend. The passions and the exertions, the hopes and the
fears, the exultations and the despairs, America excites in the
immigrant are likely to be intenser than anything he would have
experienced in his natal village.
In view of the fact that every year New York cares for 15,000
foreign-born insane at a cost of $3,500,000 and that the State's
sad harvest of demented immigrants during the single year 1911 will
cost about $8,000,000 before they die or are discharged, there is
some offset to be made to the profits drawn from the immigrants by
the transporting companies, landlords, real-estate men, employers,
contractors, brewers, and liquor-dealers of the State. Besides,
there is the cost of the paupers and the law-breakers of foreign
origin. All such burdens, however, since they fall upon the
public at large, do not detract from or qualify that private or
business-man's prosperity which it is the office of the true modern
statesman to promote.
IMMIGRATION AND THE SEPARATE SCHOOL
In a polyglot mining town of Minnesota is a superintendent who has
made the public school a bigger factor in Americanization than I
have found it anywhere else. The law gives him the children until
they are sixteen, and he holds them all. His school buildings
are civic and social centers. Through the winter, in his high
school auditorium, which seats 1200 persons, he gives a course of
entertainment which is self-supporting, although his "talent"
for a single evening will cost as much as $200. By means of the
400 foreigners in his night schools he has a grip on the voters
which his foes have learned to dread. Under his lead the community
has broken the mine-boss collar and won real self-government. The
people trust him and bring him their troubles. He has jurisdiction
over everything that can affect the children of the town, and his
conception is wide. Wielding both legal and moral authority, he is,
as it were, a corporation president and a medieval bishop rolled
into one.
This man sets no limit to the transforming power of the public
school. He insists that the right sort of schooling will not only
alter the expression, but will even change the shape of the skull
and the bony formation of the face. In his office is a beautiful
tabouret made by a "wild boy" within a year after he had been
brought in kicking and screaming. He scoffs at the fear of a lack of
patriotism in the foreign-born or their children. He knows just how
to create the sentiment. He has flag drills and special programs,
and in the Fourth of July parade and the Decoration day procession
the schools have always a fine float. He declares he can build human
beings to order, and will not worry about immigration so long as the
public school is given a chance at the second generation.
But is the public school to have this chance?
Multitudes of the new immigrants adhere to churches which do not
believe in the public schools. "Their pupils," observed a priest
to me, "are like wild children." Said a bishop: "No branches can be
safely taught divorced from religion. We believe that geography,
history, and even language ought to be presented from our point of
view." Hence with great rapidity the children of Roman Catholics are
being drawn apart into parochial schools. In Cleveland one-third of
the population is supposed to be Catholic, and the 27,500 pupils in
the parochial schools are nearly one-third of all school children.
In Chicago there are 112,000 in the parish schools to 300,000 in the
public schools. In New York the proportion is about one-sixth. In
twenty-eight leading American cities the attendance of the parish
schools increased sixty per cent. between 1897 and 1910, as against
an increase of from forty-five to fifty per cent. in the attendance
of the public schools. The total number of children in the parochial
schools is about 1,400,000. Separate education is a settled Catholic
policy, and the bishops say they expect to enroll finally the
children of all their people.
To bring this about, the public schools are denounced from the
pulpit as "Godless" and "immoral," their product as mannerless and
disobedient. "We think," says a Slovak leader, "that the parochial
school pupils are more pious, more respectful toward parents and
toward all persons in authority." The Polish, Lithuanian, or
Slovak priest, less often the German or Bohemian, says bluntly:
"If you send your children to the public school, they will go
to hell." Sometimes the priest threatens to exclude from the
confessional parents who send their children to the public school.
An archbishop recently decreed that parents who without permission
send their children to the public school after they have made their
first communion "commit a grievous sin and cannot receive the
sacraments of the church." Within the immigrant groups there is
active opposition, but it appears to be futile. In the soft-coal
mining communities of Pennsylvania 9 per cent. of the children of
native white parentage attend the parochial schools, whereas 24
per cent. of the Polish children and 48 per cent. of the Slovak
children are in these schools. In a certain district in Chicago
where the public-school teachers had felt they could hold their
own, the foreign mothers came at last to take away their children's
school-books, weeping because they were forced to transfer their
children to the parish school.
Now, the parish school tends to segregate the children of
the foreign-born. Parishes are formed for groups of the same
speech, so a parish school will embrace children of only one
nationality--German, Polish, Bohemian, Lithuanian, Croatian, Slovak,
Magyar, Portuguese, or French Canadian, as the case may be. Often
priest and teachers have been imported, and only the mother-tongue
is used. "English," says a school superintendent, "comes to be
taught as a purely ornamental language, like French in the public
high school." Hence American-born children are leaving school not
only unable to read and write English, but scarcely able to speak
it. The foreign-speech school, while it binds the young to their
parents, to their people, and to the old country, cuts them off
from America. Says a Chicago Lithuanian leader: "There are 3000
of our children in the parochial schools here. The teachers are
ignorant, illiterate spinsters from Lithuania who have studied here
two or three years. When at fourteen the pupils quit school, they
are no more advanced than the public-school pupils of ten. This is
why 50,000 Lithuanians here have only twenty children in the high
school."
When, now, to the removal of the second generation from the public
school there is added, as is often the case, the endeavor to keep
them away from the social center, the small park field-house, the
public playground, the social settlement, the secular American press
and welfare work in the factories, it is plain that those optimists
who imagine that assimilation of the immigrant is proceeding
unhindered are living in a fool's paradise.
SOCIAL DECLINE
"Our descendants," a social worker remarked to me, "will look back
on the nineteenth century as our Golden Age, just as we look back
on Greece." Thoughtful people whose work takes them into the slime
at the bottom of our foreignized cities and industrial centers
find decline actually upon us. A visiting nurse who has worked
for seven years in the stock-yards district of Chicago reports
that of late the drinking habit is taking hold of foreign women at
an alarming rate. In the saloons there the dignified _stein_ has
given way to the beer pail. In the Range towns of Minnesota there
are 356 saloons, of which eighty-one are run by native-born, the
rest chiefly by recent immigrants. Into a Pennsylvania coal town of
1,800 people, mostly foreign-born, are shipped each week a car-load
of beer and a barrel of whisky. Where the new foreign-born are
numerous, women and children frequent the saloons as freely as the
men. In the cities family desertion is growing at a great rate among
foreign-born husbands. Facts are justifying the forecast made ten
years ago by H. G. Wells: "If things go on as they are going, the
great mass of them will remain a very low lower class--will remain
largely illiterate, industrialized peasants."
The continuance of depressive immigration will lead to nothing
catastrophic. Riots and labor strife will oftener break out, but the
country will certainly not weaken nor collapse. Of patriotism, of
the military type there will be no lack. Scientific and technical
advance will go on the same. The spread of business organization and
efficiency will continue. The only thing that will happen will be a
mysterious slackening in social progress. The mass will give signs
of sluggishness, and the social procession will be strung out.
We are engaged in a generous rivalry with the West Europeans and
the Australians to see which can do the most to lift the plane of
life of the masses. Presently we shall be dismayed by the sense of
falling behind. We shall be amazed to find the Swiss or the Danes
or the New Zealanders making strides we cannot match. Stung with
mortification at losing our erstwhile lead in the advancement of the
common people, we shall cast about for someone to blame. Ultimate
causes, of course, will be overlooked; only proximate causes will
be noticed. There will be loud outcry that mothers, or teachers, or
clergymen, or editors, or social workers are not doing their duty.
Our public schools, solely responsible as they obviously are for
the intellectual and moral characteristics of the people, will be
roundly denounced; and it will be argued that church schools must
take their place. There will be trying of this and trying of that,
together with much ingenious legislation. As peasantism spreads
and inertia proves unconquerable, the opinion will grow that the
old American faith in the capacity and desire of the common people
for improvement was a delusion, and that only the superior classes
care for progress. Not until the twenty-first century will the
philosophic historian be able to declare with scientific certitude
that the cause of the mysterious decline that came upon the American
people early in the twentieth century was the deterioration of
popular intelligence by the admission of great numbers of backward
immigrants.
[Illustration: Italian Men's Civic Club. Rochester. N. Y.]