OUR ALLIES FROM ABROAD
The European “hordes” continue to pour in upon us, and the agitation
over, and against, the “foreign devil” increases. We shall soon be
“welcoming to our shores” upwards of a million strangers a year, all
of them with no “capital”--except their muscles and the potentialities
of their minds and hearts. If Washington and Jefferson could have
looked forward to this time, they would have lifted jubilant prayers of
thankfulness that their hopes that this land would become “the refuge
of the poor and oppressed of all nations” were being superbly realized.
But many of our statesmen view the tidal-wave incursions with anything
but joy; and their woful cries find echo everywhere among those who do
not take the trouble to put facts into proper perspective. Russian and
Finn, Polack, Hun and Lithuanian, Sicilian and Greek and Syrian and
Bohemian, on they come, streaming from the noisome steerages of great
ocean liners, pouring through the gates of the immigration offices.
They are obviously poor, obviously the descendants of generations of
toilers. And with them are their wives and their children. Myriads of
anxious, troubled faces, in which hope and fear alternately triumph in
the struggle for expression. Indeed, a disquieting spectacle to those
who cannot or will not look beneath surfaces at universal human nature
with its powerful instincts for and resolves toward progress. But let
us watch this incoming flood with American eyes. Let us see what the
facts plead--the facts, as distinguished from prejudices.
What is our so-called foreign-population problem?
According to the latest census there were in the United States, of
our 76,300,000 population, no less than 26,200,000 persons of foreign
birth or parentage. Of these, ten and a half millions were born
abroad, while 11,000,000 more were born in this country of parents who
were foreign-born. Since 1880 and up to 1901 no less than 18,000,000
foreigners have come to us. That is to say, counting in arrivals and
births since the taking of our latest census, and making due mortality
allowance, we have to-day a population more than one-fourth of which
was born abroad or is of foreign parentage.
The anti-immigration crusade based upon these figures insists that
the foreigners come too fast for Americanism to digest and assimilate
them, that they will undermine and destroy free institutions. Also,
there is the cry that these recent comers are of peoples less desirable
than those that used to send their millions to us. The newcomers are
impossible in point of numbers, undesirable in point of quality.
As to numbers--Our first, and last previous, great flood of
immigration was between 1840 and 1861. In those twenty years about
13,000,000 immigrants came. Our population in 1840 was 17,000,000.
Thus, the immigration was about 80 per cent. Between 1880 and 1901,
the immigration was about 18,000,000. Our population in 1880 was
50,000,000. Thus, the immigration was not much above 35 per cent.
Clearly, the present “horde” is numerically not imposing or alarming
in comparison with the foreign invasion of half a century ago.
Our country is still sparsely inhabited; one-third of its area is
still absolutely undeveloped. If half a century ago, with the then
comparatively limited and crude means of transforming the foreigner
into the American, thirteen million foreigners did not “swamp”
seventeen million Americans, how can the present lesser immigration
seriously or permanently hinder the alert, democratically militant
America of to-day?
Then, there is the matter of distribution. Let us take New York City by
way of illustration. There the “congestion” of immigration is greater
than anywhere else; and the advocates of exclusion always point to
it as the crowning “awful example.” In the ’40s and ’50s that city
grew almost altogether by immigration from abroad. Between 1840 and
1861 New York City increased from 312,000 to 814,000--502,000. The
rate of growth, then, was just over 160 per cent. Between 1880 and
1901 the same territory increased in population from 1,200,000 to
2,050,000--850,000, and a large part of that increase was from the
smaller cities, the towns and the rural districts of the United States.
The ratio of increase was about 70 per cent., less than half what it
was during the preceding great immigration. Further, the charitable
and corrective forces, official and unofficial, at work in New York are
not much occupied with the immigrants who have come in the last twenty
years. The crime, the abject poverty, the destitution are among the
earlier immigrants and their descendants. The later immigration is not
from peoples given to excess in drink--and drunkenness is the chief
cause of the miseries of crime and pauperism.
Looking at the immigration problem thus numerically, we see that the
pessimists and the panic-stricken are afflicted with the narrowness
of geographic and historical vision which is responsible for so many
jeremiads. The shriek that the nation, and especially its cities, are
being “swamped” has no basis in mathematics.
“But the quality! The quality!” they cry. Well, what of the quality?
Turn to the files of the publications in the middle of the last
century; read what the “good Americans” then said and wrote and thought
of the vast in-marching armies of “foreign devils,” whose grandchildren
are a valuable part of our citizenship to-day. They were “the scum
of Ireland and Germany.” They were “incapable of receiving American
ideas.” They were “welcomed by the rich employers because their coming
meant cheap labor.” And loudest in lamentation and fiercest in demand
for bars and barriers were the people who had themselves just arrived!
But, that was a false alarm, say the anti-immigrationists; this is
the real thing. Again a lamentable lack of historical perspective,
a pitiful narrowness of human sympathy. The truth is that man, from
whatever clime or nation, is first of all man, the materials of
progress and civilization. If the present millions of newcomers are
ignorant, so much the less will they have to unlearn. If they have
been savagely oppressed, so much the more brightly will burn hatred of
inequality and injustice, love of equality and justice. If they are
poor--and poor they are--then, Heaven be praised! They will work hard;
and hard work and a passionate eagerness to get on in the world, and
the prospect of being able to rise by work instead of, as at home,
toiling that others might reap all, will make them hasten to become the
best possible Americans.
From poverty and experience of oppression comes the most militant
Democracy. Let us not be afraid of this our brother-man. Let us not
judge him by the superficial and unimportant differences between him
and us. Let us welcome him. He needs us, but not more than we need
him, and his familiarity with hard work, and his nature unspoiled by
over-prosperity. Above all, we need his children. They will be American
through and through. They will help us to outvote and to over-balance
and to counteract the supercilious breed of falsely educated who have
fallen away from the high and noble ideal of the equality and the
brotherhood of man. These newcomers are the descendants of the peoples
that built the splendid civilization of the past--the civilization
around the Mediterranean and in Eastern Europe. For centuries the
immense energy and imagination of those peoples have been forcibly
suppressed and repressed. But they are there, and in free America they
will burst forth again. Indeed, they are already bursting forth.
We hear so much about the glories of the Civil War that we are apt to
overlook its fearful cost. One item is important here:
In the Southern States, practically all the white males able to bear
arms went to the war. In the Northern States the two and three-quarter
millions who served were, on the average, under rather than over twenty
years of age.
That is to say, to the war the South gave all its manhood; the North
gave the fathers of its present native-born generation. So abounding is
our vitality as a people that we cannot clearly see the full results of
this fearful sacrifice. But let us remember that war kills only a few;
it returns to peaceful pursuits the vast majority poisoned and weakened
by all kinds of diseases.
What is the connection between these facts and immigration? Look at
the South, which sent all its manhood to camp and march and battle;
at the South, into which almost no immigration has gone to make good
the enormous losses. The trouble with the South to-day is not the
destruction or abolition of property, not the failure of natural
resources, but the depletion, the decay, the destruction of so large
a part of the splendid stock that made the South great in ante-bellum
days. Despite its abounding natural resources, despite the valiant
efforts it has made and is making, the South advances slowly and
with difficulty. And while the North had to make no such complete
sacrifice to war, still even there, in the few places to which foreign
immigration has not penetrated, the effects of the impairment of the
sources of the best manhood are plainly visible. Not infrequently you
find a Northern town with all the natural opportunities to progress,
yet with retrogression and decay eating it away. What’s the matter? The
war; the Civil War. The best young men, the most vigorous, the most
enterprising, the most ambitious, went to the war. Many of them came
back; but they had left at the war their best--their health, their
energy. And the present generation shows it, suffers for it.
It is indeed inspiring to see young men eager to die gloriously for
their country. We also need young men eager to _live_ gloriously for
their country. And war, the arch-enemy of progress, the great trickster
of man through his finest instincts, how many of those who would have
lived most gloriously for their country has it cost us!
Do we not owe to the “hordes” from Europe, to immigration, the good
fortune that our nation has pushed on apparently almost unaffected in
its manhood by the great calamity of ’61-’64? Is it unwarranted to
suggest that but for these inpourings of vigor and vitality, the losses
in that frightful catastrophe might have all but cost us our national
greatness, would certainly have set us back several generations?
As to the political effect of immigration: Among our cities the
two most conspicuous examples of misgovernment are New York and
Philadelphia. In each the dominant political machine is scandalously
corrupt. But it is far more audacious, far more cynically and openly
contemptuous of public opinion in Philadelphia than in New York.
Philadelphia is an “American” city; New York is a “foreign” city. In
Philadelphia the corruption seems almost hopeless; in New York the
element to which every movement for betterment looks--not in vain--is
the “foreign” element. The weakness of Tammany’s control over the
masses of “German-Americans” and “Italian-Americans” and “Jewish
Russian-Americans” is the chief reason why it does not feel easy and
secure in the enjoyment of plunder. Cities where the “foreign vote”
is preponderant may be corrupt; but so also are cities where the
native American rules undisputed. Manifestly, the causes of political
corruption are deeper than immigration, are not aggravated by it. And
since our most hopeful States politically are for the most part those
into which immigration from abroad has been pouring in a vast and
steady stream for fifteen years, is there not sufficient ground for the
confident assertion that the newcomer with his untainted passion for
Democracy and his new-born hope of rising in the world is one of our
tremendous political assets?
As to the industrial effect. The overwhelming mass are farmers or
unskilled laborers. But the wages of unskilled labor cannot be much
depressed. In all ages and in all countries the unskilled laborer has
got just about enough to keep him alive--never much more, often a
little less. In America, as a whole, the condition of unskilled labor
to-day is better than it ever has been. The fact that we have so much
rough work to do in developing our vast raw resources makes America the
best market for unskilled labor the world has ever seen; and it will
be many generations before that rough work is completed, so inadequate
is our supply of unskilled labor in proportion to the demand. In the
trades the competition of the immigrant has not lowered wages. There
again we have more work to do than there are workers. _The forces
that have operated unfavorably upon wages are notoriously not forces
of competition among wage-earners, but forces tending to abolish
competition among employers for the services of the skilled laborer._
And in combating these forces, is the immigrant a help or a hindrance?
Does his vote go for tyranny or for freedom?
The disposition of prosperity to look down on poverty, to drift out
of _brotherly_ sympathy with it, to misunderstand it, is as old as
property rights. The disposition of the so-called educated to look down
on the less educated, to mistake knowledge for intellect, absurdly
to exaggerate the practical and even the æsthetic value of “polite
learning,” to under-estimate the all-round importance of that real
education which is got only in the school of rude experience--this
supercilious disposition is as old as human vanity. It insinuates
itself into the sanest characters; it makes fools and incompetents
and snobs of many promising young men. And these two errors--the one,
through prosperity; the other, through false education--are responsible
for the failure of such a large section of our “elegantly articulate”
to appreciate that we are to-day getting from abroad the best in brain
and in vitality that we have ever got.
What differentiates the immigrant from those he left behind him? Why,
he had the enterprise, the courage to protest against the slavery in
which militarism and despotism were enwrapping all. He left; he made
the long and arduous journey into this remote and unknown land. He did
not give up when conditions became too hard, did not sink into serfdom;
he boldly made a hazard of new fortunes.
Away back in the centuries, Asia’s most vigorous fled from her into
Europe--and Asia sank into the slough of despotism and Europe became
great and strong, advancing in all the arts. Now-a-days--to-day no less
than when Salem and Jamestown and New Amsterdam and New Orleans were
founding--Europe is causing her best to fly to us. Her best, indeed!
We must be American enough, democratic enough, to disregard the snob
standards of our weak wanderers off after European caste and culture;
we must look at men in the true American fashion--must look at men as
_men_.
From the common people our Democracy--like all Democracy--sprang;
by the common people is it nourished; by the common people will it
prevail. And these newcomers are of the common people, the custodians
of the highest ideals that irradiate the human imagination. Unimportant
indeed is the traffic of individuals and ideas that goes first-class
between America and Europe, in the comparison with the traffic that
goes steerage.