nationalities have probably sent between 200,000 and 300,000 persons to
America. Dalmatians are oyster fishermen at New Orleans, make staves in
Mississippi, are wine dealers in San Francisco, and vine growers and
miners in other parts of California. The Slovenians are chiefly found in
the Pennsylvania mines and other mining regions. The Croatians are
mostly in the same regions and work, although in New York there are
about 15,000 of them engaged as longshoremen and mechanics, and a small
number are farmers out West. They are Roman Catholic, largely illiterate
and unskilled. The Catholics do little for them, and the Protestant
denominations have undertaken no specific work in their behalf.
[Sidenote: A Needy Group]
The Bosnians, Herzegovinians, Bulgarians, Servians, and Montenegrins are
just beginning to come in appreciable numbers. They represent much the
same home conditions as the nationalities mentioned more in detail.
Catholicism, Greek or Roman, has cast them pretty much in the same mold.
Ignorant, semi-civilized many of them, they have everything to get and
learn in their new home, and afford still larger opportunity for
Protestant Christianity in its mighty work of making and keeping America
the land of righteousness and progress.
[Sidenote: A Hopeful View]
An interesting series of articles appeared in 1906 in a magazine devoted
to social betterment,[68] the writer having spent a year in studying
conditions in the Slav districts of Austria-Hungary. Living among the
people, she has become profoundly interested in them, and takes a most
hopeful view of their possibilities in America. She says the life from
which the peasants mostly come to us is the old peasant life, but a
little way removed from feudalism and serfdom. Each little village is a
tiny world in itself, with its own traditions and ways, its own dress,
perhaps even its own dialect. The amazing gift of the Slav for color and
music permeates the whole home life with poetry. The Slav immigrants
have the virtues and faults of their primitive world. They come to
America to make money. The majority come with intent to earn money to
take back home, rather than with expectation to settle here permanently.
Unenterprising, unlettered, they are at the same time hardy, thrifty
and shrewd, honest and pious. They are undoubtedly highly endowed with
gifts of imagination and artistic expression for which in their American
conditions they find little or no outlet.
[Sidenote: Necessity of Christian Environment]
And here again is the point we are constantly having impressed upon us.
What the immigrant shall become, for good or ill, depends chiefly upon
what conditions are made for him, and whether he is given a chance to
express his best self in this country. Grinding monopoly, harsh
treatment, prejudice that drives into clannishness and race
hatred--these will make of the Slavs a peril. A genuinely Christian
environment and treatment will find them receptive and ready for
Americanization through evangelization.
_VIII. The Russian Jews_
[Sidenote: An Interesting Group]
In some respects the most interesting immigrants from the Slav countries
are the Jews from Russia and Roumania. The German Jew and the Russian
Jew must not be confounded; they are as distinct as any two races in the
entire immigrant group. The German Jew came to America to make more
money, and is making it. The Russian Jew, who comes from persecution, is
rigidly orthodox, and regards the commercial German class as apostate.
He forms a picturesque, vigorous, _sui generis_ member of the alien
procession.
[Sidenote: Coming Rapidly]
Since the year 1881 not less than 750,000 Jewish immigrants have arrived
at the port of New York alone. On Manhattan Island more than every
fourth person you meet is a Jew. The Jews admitted at Ellis Island
during the past five years outnumbered all the communicants in the
Protestant churches in Greater New York.
[Sidenote: Where they Come from]
Of the 106,000 Jews admitted in 1904, a large proportion of whom settled
in New York, 77,000 came from the Russian Empire, 20,000 from
Austria-Hungary, and 6,000 from Roumania. Jewish immigrants from eastern
Europe are all one people.
[Sidenote: Occupation]
They show a larger proportion with skilled, professional and commercial
training and experience than do any of the other newer immigrants except
the Finns. Nearly twenty per cent. of the Hebrew immigrants are tailors,
nearly five per cent. mechanics, merchants, or clerks, and almost one
per cent. follow the professions. Of the remainder a very considerable
proportion, though not a majority, are skilled workers such as bakers,
tobacco workers, carpenters, painters, and butchers. The garment trades,
to which they find themselves adapted, and for which New York is the
world center, engages perhaps 100,000 of them, men, women, and children,
many of them in the sweat-shops, which they created. For the first time
in their history, the Jews have built up a great industrial class, this
being an American development. According to a Jewish authority,[69] the
"unspeakable evils of the tenements and sweat-shops" of the ghetto are
undermining their physical and moral health.
[Sidenote: Location]
The newly arrived Russian Jew is kept in the ghetto of the larger
cities--New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston--not only by his
poverty and ignorance but by his orthodoxy. In this district the rules
of his religion can more certainly be followed. Here can be found the
lawful food, here the orthodox places of worship, here neighbors and
friends can be visited within "a sabbath day's journey." The young
people, however, rapidly shake off such trammels, and in the endeavor to
be like Americans urge their parents to move away from this "foreign"
district. When they succeed, the Americanizing process may be considered
well under way. Concerning the religious change that comes over the
young Jew after he reaches this country, a writer says:[70]
[Sidenote: Become Estranged from Judaism]
"Many a young man, who was firm in his religious convictions in his
native village, having heard of the religious laxity prevalent in
America, had fully made up his mind not to be misled by the temptation
and allurements of the free country, but he succumbed in his struggle
and renounced his Judaism when first submitting his chin to the barber's
razor, at the entreaties and persuasions of his Americanized friends
and relatives. Religion then appeared to him not only distinct from
life, but antagonistic to it, and since it was life, a free, full,
undisturbed life he sought in coming here, he felt compelled to divorce
himself from all the religious ties that had hitherto encompassed him.
Thus it is that the immigrant Jewish youth, even those faithful and
loyal to the institutions of old and who desired to conduct their lives
in accordance with the precepts of their religion, became estranged from
Judaism and suffered themselves to be swept along by the tide. Thus the
immigrant Jew in America has frequently become callous and indifferent,
and sometimes cynical and antagonistic to everything pertaining to
Judaism." While they are thus lost to Judaism they are not won to
Christianity, but they ought to be. The older people become reconciled
with difficulty to this irreligious attitude and "the old Jewess still
curses Columbus for his great transgression in discovering America,
where her children have lost their religion."
[Sidenote: Ambitious for Wealth and Education]
The Russian Jews usually come in great poverty, but do not stay poor
very long. In New York's East Side many tenements in Jewish quarters are
owned by persons who formerly lived in crowded corners of others like
them; and from this population comes many a Broadway merchant, and
professional men in plenty. It is certain that the adult Hebrew
immigrant has definite aspirations toward social, economic, and
educational advancement. The poorest among them will make all possible
sacrifices to keep his children in school; and one of the most striking
social phenomena in New York City is the way in which the Jews have
taken possession of the public schools, in the highest as well as lowest
grades. The city college is practically filled with Jewish pupils. In
the lower schools Jewish children are the delight of their teachers for
cleverness at their books, obedience, and general good conduct; and the
vacation schools, night schools, social settlements, libraries, bathing
places, parks, and playgrounds of the East Side are fairly besieged with
Jewish children. Jewish boys are especially ambitious to enter
professions or go into business. For example, the head of one of the
largest institutions of the East Side tells a story of a long interview
with a class of boys in which all spoke of the work they intended to do.
Law, medicine, journalism, and teaching came first. There were even some
who intended to become engineers. A smaller number were going into
business, and not one intended to learn any manual trade. Some were
going in for music, and occasionally one is found who intends to make
his living by art. But above all, the young Jew is ambitious and intends
to rise. This is true in all cities.
[Sidenote: Worthy Qualities]
The strong good qualities of the Jews are absence of the drink evil,
love of home, desire to preserve the purity of the family, and
remarkable eagerness for self-improvement. They easily adapt themselves
to the new environment and assimilate the customs and language of the
new country. This leads to the danger of readily falling in with the
vices found in the tenement districts--the children showing this in the
large numbers of them that appear in the Juvenile Court. The remedy is
removal, and this the Jewish parents seek as soon as they are able.
[Sidenote: Good Citizens, but Poor Americans]
With decent environment and a fair chance, the Russian Jew promises to
become a good citizen, intellectually keen, commercially shrewd,
professionally bound to shine. But that he will ever, except in rare
instances, imbibe the real American spirit or understand the American
ideals is a question. At the same time, the Jews are believers in the
principle of democracy, and in case of an issue arising on the
separation of Church and State, would be found standing with American
Protestantism for the religious liberties of the American people.
QUESTIONS FOR CHAPTER V
AIM: TO CONSIDER THE DESIRABILITY OF THE SLAVS AS IMMIGRANTS.
I. _The Slavic People as a Whole._
1. What nationalities are generally included under the term Slavs?
Are they numerous in population? Are they strictly of one race?
2. What grounds are there to justify popular prejudice against
them? Or to show it to be ill founded?
3. When did they begin to come in large numbers?
4. Where have they largely settled, and with what results?
II. _Racial Divisions of the Slavic Immigrants._
5. What can you tell about the Bohemians, as to their religious
history, political sufferings, and coming to America? What are
their conditions here? Their accessibility? Their location?
6. Tell about the Poles in the same way.
7. Tell about the Slovaks in the same way.
8. Tell about the Magyars in the same way.
9. Who and what are the Lithuanians?
10. Who and what are the Ruthenians?
III. _Slavic Elements of Strength and American Outlook._
11. Mention some encouraging features with reference to the
above-named and other Slavs.
12. * If you had been born a Slav in Europe, would you be likely to
prefer America to Europe? Protestantism to Roman Catholicism? The
country or the city?
IV. _Social, Moral, and Religious Aspects of the Jewish and Slavic
Population._
13. How many Jews are there in New York City?
14. What keeps the new arrivals in the larger cities?
15. Are they religious, quick to learn, temperate?
16. Mention some form of Christian work for Slavs or Jews about
which you know.
REFERENCES FOR ADVANCED STUDY.--CHAPTER V
I. _Further Study as to Race Origin and Inter-relationship of the
Slavs._
Warne: The Slav Invasion, III.
McLanahan: Our People of Foreign Speech, IV.
II. _National Conditions in Europe which the Slavs Seek to Escape._
Hall: Immigration, 60-65.
III. _Social and Moral Effects Produced by the Slav Invasion of the
Anthracite Regions._
Warne: The Slav Invasion, IV, VII.
IV. _Factors in Slavic History and Conditions Favoring and
Hindering the Access of the Gospel._
McLanahan: Our People of Foreign Speech, 34-58.
Charities and Commons, issues 1905-06.
V. _Conditions Among Russian Jews._
Statements of Jewish authors as to conditions
among Russian Jews in their native lands and in
America.
Bernheimer: The Russian Jew in the United
States, I (B), IV (A), VI (A).
_The city is the nerve center of our civilization. It is also the
storm center. The city has a peculiar attraction for the immigrant.
Here is heaped the social dynamite; here the dangerous elements are
multiplied and concentered._--Josiah Strong.
VI
THE FOREIGN PERIL OF THE CITY
The city is the most difficult and perplexing problem of modern
times.--_Francis Lieber._
We must save the city if we would save the nation. Municipal government
and city evangelization together constitute the distinctive problem of
the city, for this generation at least.--_Josiah Strong._
Talk of Dante's Hell, and all the horrors and cruelties of the torture
chamber of the lost! The man who walks with open eyes and bleeding heart
through the shambles of our civilization needs no such fantastic images
of the poet to teach him horror.--_General Booth._
With the influx of a large foreign population into the great cities,
there have come also foreign customs and institutions, laxity and
license--those phases of evil which are the most insidious foes of the
purity and strength of a people. The slums of our large cities are but
the stagnant pools of illiteracy, vice, pauperism, and crime, annually
fed by this floodtide of immigration.--_R. M. Atchison._
You can kill a man with a tenement as easily as with an ax.--_Jacob
Riis._
Our foreign colonies are to a large extent in the cities of our own
country. To live in one of these foreign communities is actually to live
on foreign soil. The thoughts, feelings, and traditions which belong to
the mental life of the colony are often entirely alien to an
American.--_Robert Hunter._
The vastness of the problem of the city slum, and the impossibility,
even with unlimited resources of men and money, of permanently raising
the standards of living of many of our immigrants as long as they are
crowded together, and as long as the stream of newer immigrants pours
into these same slums, has naturally forced itself upon the minds of
thinking persons.--_Robert D. Ward._
VI
THE FOREIGN PERIL OF THE CITY
_I. The Evils of Environment_
[Sidenote: Tendency Toward the Cities]
As is the city, so will the nation be. The tendencies all seem to be
toward steady concentration in great centers. The evils of congestion do
not deter the thronging multitudes. The attractions of the city are
irresistible, even to those who exist in the most wretched conditions.
The tenement districts baffle description, yet nothing is more difficult
than to get their miserable occupants to leave their fetid and squalid
surroundings for the country. To the immigrants the city is a magnet.
Here they find colonies of their own people, and prize companionship
more than comfort. "Folks is more company than stumps," said an old
woman in the slums to Dr. Schauffler. In the great cities the immigrants
are massed, and this constitutes a most perplexing problem. If tens of
thousands of foreigners could somehow be gotten out of New York, Boston,
Chicago, and other cities, and be distributed where they are needed and
could find work and homes, immigration would cause far less anxiety. But
when the immigrant prefers New York or Chicago, what authority shall
remove him to Louisiana or Oklahoma?
[Sidenote: Perils Due to Environment]
The foreigner is in the city; he will chiefly stay there; and the
question is what can be done to improve his city environment; for the
perils to which we refer are primarily due not to the foreigner himself
but to the evil and vice-breeding conditions in which he has to exist.
These imperil him and make him a peril in turn. The overcrowded
tenements and slums, the infection of long-entrenched corruption, the
absence of light, fresh air, and playgrounds for the children, the
unsanitary conditions and exorbitant rents, the political heelers
teaching civic corruption, the saloons with their attendant temptations
to vice and crime, the fraudulent naturalization--these work together
upon the immigrant, for his undoing and thus to the detriment of the
nation. When we permit such an environment to exist, and practically
force the immigrant into it because we do not want him for a next-door
neighbor, we can hardly condemn him for forming foreign colonies which
maintain foreign customs and are impervious to American influences. It
has too long been the common practice to lay everything to the
foreigner. Would it not be fairer and more Christian to distribute the
blame, and assume that part of it which belongs to us. In the study of
the facts contained in this chapter, put yourself persistently in the
place of the immigrant, suddenly introduced into the conditions here
pictured, and ask yourself what you would probably be and become in like
circumstances.
[Sidenote: A Call for Reform]
How the other half lives is not the only mystery. How little the
so-called upper-ten know how the lower-ninety live. And how little you
and I, who are fortunate to count ourselves in the next upper-twenty,
perhaps, know how the under-seventy exist and think and do. If only the
more fortunate thirty per cent. knew of the exact conditions under which
a large proportion of men, women, and children carry on the pitiful
struggle for mere existence, there would be an irresistible demand for
betterment. Every Christian ought to know the wrongs of our
civilization, in order that he may help to right them. This glimpse
beneath the surface of the city should stir us out of comfortable
complacency and give birth in us to the impulse that leads to settlement
and city mission work, and to civic reform movements. The young men and
women of America must create a public sentiment that will demolish the
slums, and erect in their places model tenements; that will tear down
the rookeries, root out the saloons and dens of vice, and provide the
children with playgrounds and breathing space. And this work will be
directly in the line of Americanizing and evangelizing the immigrants,
for they are chiefly the occupants and victims of the tenements and the
slums.
[Sidenote: Vanishing Americanism]
New York is a city in America but is hardly an American city.
Nor is any other of our great cities, except perhaps Philadelphia.
Boston is an Irish city, Chicago is a German-Scandinavian-Polish
city, Saint Louis is a German city, and New York is a
Hebrew-German-Irish-Italian-Bohemian-Hungarian city--a cosmopolitan race
conglomeration. Eighteen languages are spoken in a single block. In
Public School No. 29 no less than twenty-six nationalities are
represented. This indicates the complicated problem.
[Sidenote: A Jewish City]
New York is the chief Jewish capital. Of the 760,000 Jews on Manhattan,
about 450,000 are Russian, and they overcrowd the East Side ghetto. In
that quarter the signs are in Hebrew, the streets are markets, the shops
are European, the men, women, and children speak in Yiddish, and all
faces bear the foreign and Hebrew mark plainly upon them.
[Sidenote: An Italian City]
Go on a little further and you find that you are in Little Italy, quite
distinct from Jewry, but not less foreign. Here the names on the signs
are Italian, and the atmosphere is redolent with the fumes of Italy. The
hurdy-gurdy vies with the push-cart, the streets are full of children
and women, and you are as a stranger in a strange land. You would not be
in a more distinctively Italian section if you were by magic
transplanted to Naples or Genoa.
[Sidenote: A Foreign City]
[Sidenote: Other Foreign Cities]
Nor is it simply the East Side in lower New York that is so manifestly
foreign. Go where you will on Manhattan Island and you will see few
names on business signs that do not betray their foreign derivation. Two
out of every three persons you meet will be foreign. You will see the
Italian gangs cleaning the streets, the Irish will control the motor of
your trolley-car and collect your fares, the policeman will be Irish or
German, the waiters where you dine will be French or German, Italian or
English, the clerks in the vast majority of the shopping places will be
foreign, the people you meet will constantly remind you of the rarity of
the native American stock. You are ready to believe the statement that
there are in New York more persons of German descent than of native
descent, and more Germans than in any city of Germany except Berlin.
Here are nearly twice as many Irish as in Dublin, about as many Jews as
in Warsaw, and more Italians than in Naples or Venice. In government, in
sentiment, in practice, as in population (thirty-seven per cent.
foreign-born and eighty per cent. of foreign birth or parentage), the
metropolis is predominantly foreign, and in elections the foreign vote,
shrewdly manipulated for the most part, controls. Nor is this true of
New York alone. In thirty-three of our largest cities the foreign
population is larger than the native; in Milwaukee and Fall River the
foreign percentage rises as high as eighty-five per cent. In all these
cities the foreign colonies are as distinct and practically as isolated
socially as though they were in Russia or Poland, Italy or Hungary.
Foreign in language, customs, habits, and institutions, these colonies
are separated from each other, as well as from the American population,
by race, customs, and religion.
[Sidenote: Failure in City Government]
To believe that this makes no particular difference so far as the
development of our national life is concerned is to shut one's eyes to
obvious facts. As such an impartial and intelligent student of our
institutions as Mr. James Bryce has pointed out, the conspicuous failure
of democracy in America thus far is seen in the bad government of our
great cities. And it is in these centers that the mass of the immigrants
learn their first and often last lessons of American life.
[Sidenote: Where the Newcomers First Go]
The strong tendency of immigrants is to settle in or near the ports of
entry. Where in the great cities do these newcomers find a dwelling
place? What will their first lessons in American life be? If we deal
largely with New York, it is simply because here are the typical
conditions and here the larger proportion of arrivals. Once admitted at
Ellis Island, the alien is free to go where he will; or rather, where he
can, for his place of residence is restricted, after all. If he is an
Italian, he will naturally and almost of necessity go to one of the
Little Italies; if a Jew, to the ghetto of the East Side; if a Bohemian,
to Little Bohemia; and so on. In other words, he will go, naturally and
almost inevitably, to the colonies which tend to perpetuate race customs
and prejudices, and to prevent assimilation. Worse yet, these colonies
are in the tenement and slum districts, the last environment of all
conceivable in which this raw material of American citizenship should be
placed.
_II. Tenement-House Life_
[Sidenote: Vice-Breeding Conditions]