CHAPTER IV

germanyImmigration from Germany, Netherlands, and Switzerland, 1826-1910

Immigration from Germany, Netherlands, and Switzerland, 1826-1910

Although Leif Ericson discovered America in the year 1000A.D., his countrymen made no serious use of his find until the latter part of the nineteenth century. It is only sixty-four years since the memorable visit of "the Swedish Nightingale," Jenny Lind, opened our eyes to the existence of the Northern peoples. In fact, the few thousands that about this time began to filter in were first known as "Jenny Lind men." Now there are among us a million and a quarter born in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, and, counting those of Scandinavian parentage and grandparentage, it is safe to say that a quarter of all this blood in the world is west of the Atlantic.

In 1874 the Icelanders celebrated the millennial anniversary of the settlement of Iceland, and only year before last certain of our fellow-citizens were commemorating the millennial anniversary of the cession of Normandy to Rollo the Dane. In all the thousand years since these colonizations, there has been no diffusion of Gothic blood to compare with the settlement in this country of nearly two million Scandinavian immigrants.Sweden has sent the most, but Norway has contributed a larger proportion of her people than any other country save Ireland. There are certainly half as many of Norse blood here as there are in the fatherland, and they own six times as much farming land. A Norwegian economist estimates that the property owned by his compatriots in this country corresponds in value to the entire national economy of Norway.

The crest of the Scandinavian wave passed thirty years ago. The current runs still, but it is a flow of job-seekers rather than of home-seekers. America is no longer so attractive to the land-hungry; besides, their home conditions have greatly improved. By their wonderful development of rural coöperation, the Danes have made themselves the most envied of European peasant farmers. By harnessing their waterfalls, the Norwegians have gained a basis for new industries. The Swedes have drawn the power of half a million horses from their streams, and their multiplying factories take on about ten thousand new hands every year.

The old Northwest, stretching from Detroit to Omaha, and thence north to the boundary, has been the Scandinavian's "land of Goshen." Here is the "New Sweden" that Gustavus Adolphus dreamed of when he planned a Swedish colony on the Delaware. In 1850, when there were only thirteen thousand of her race in that region,Frederika Bremer then in St. Paul had the vision of a Cumæan sibyl:

What a glorious new Scandinavia might not Minnesota become! Here would the Swede find again his clear, romantic lakes, the plains of Scania rich in corn, and the valleys of Norrland; here would the Norwegian find his rapid rivers, his lofty mountains, for I would include the Rocky Mountains and Oregon in the new kingdom; and both nations their hunting-fields and their fisheries. The Danes might here pasture their flocks and herds and lay out their farms on less misty coasts than those of Denmark.... The climate, the situation, the character of the scenery agree with our people better than that of any other of the American States.

It is a striking fulfilment of her prophecy that to-day a fifth of the Scandinavian blood in the world is in this very region. Fifty years ago Wisconsin led, with her great Norwegian contingent; then Minnesota passed her, and later Illinois, with Chicago as the lodestone. To-day two-fifths of the people of Minnesota are of Scandinavian strain. Northern Iowa has a strong infusion of the blood, while the Dakotas are deeply tinged. In 1870 four-fifths of all our Scandinavians were in this region. The proportion fell slowly to three-fourths in 1880, five-sevenths in 1890, two-thirds in 1900, and three-fifths in 1910. Of late many have dropped into the ranks of clanging industrialism between Pawtucket and Pittsburgh, while the current of home-seekers into the new Northwest has given Washingtonand Oregon as many Scandinavians as there are in the Dakotas.

Like the immigrants from Great Britain, the Scandinavians came with a male preponderance of about three-fifths. About a quarter of them were servants at home, a third were common laborers, and a sixth were skilled laborers. They have brought far less skill than the British, and distinctly less than the Germans and the Bohemians.

In point ofliteracythey lead the world. One finds an illiterate among every twenty German immigrants of more than fourteen years of age. Of immigrants from other nations, one may find an illiterate among every twenty-three Dutch, thirty-eight Irish, fifty-two Welsh, fifty-nine Bohemians, seventy-seven Finns, one hundred English, and one hundred and forty-three Scotch; but the proportion among those who come from Scandinavia isone in two hundred and fifty. What a contrast between these and the Lithuanians and South Italians, half of whom are unable to read any language!

It is perhaps the strain of melancholy lurking in Northern blood that gives our Scandinavians a tendency toward insanity slightly in excess of the foreign-born as a whole, and decidedly greater than that of Americans. In susceptibility to tuberculosis they make a worse showing than any others among our foreign-born save theIrish. They die of it oftener than do their children born in this country, but even these suffer twice the losses of their American neighbors. But the scourge is still worse in the old country; so very likely we have here not a race weakness, but a penalty for unhygienic conditions. In the bitter North, with the forests disappearing, people came to dread fresh air, and the trouble began as soon as the open hearth gave way to the tight stove.

In our Northwest many Scandinavians board up or nail down their windows for the winter, and in such homes one appreciates themotevoked by the query, "Why is the country air so pure?" The answer is, "Because the farmers keep all the bad air shut up in their houses." The second generation are taking to ventilation, and in their children very likely the Hyperboreans' horror of fresh air will have wholly disappeared, and with it their special susceptibility to the white plague.

The study of several thousand mixed marriages in Minneapolis has led Professor Albert Jenks of the University of Minnesota to this conclusion: "The Irish blood tends to increase fecundity, and the Scandinavian blood tends to decrease fecundity, of other peoples in amalgamation." Is this contrast due to the Scandinavians being so fore-looking, whereas the Irish give little heed to the future; to the fact that the Scandinavians are the purest Protestants, while the Irish are the purest Roman Catholics; or to the coming together in the Scandinavians ofprudence and Protestantism with a high status of women? At any rate, such caution in family is startling when one recalls that old Scandinavia was the mother hive of the swarms of barbarians that kept South Europeans in dread a thousand years, or notes what William Penn found among the Swedes on the Delaware two hundred and thirty years ago: "They have fine children and almost every house full; rare to find one of them without three or four boys and as many girls; some six, seven, or eight sons."

The primitive man commits crime from passion; the developed man commits more of his crimes from cupidity. Proverbially honest, the Scandinavian is less prone than the American to seek his living by crookedness. The gamut of exploit that reaches from theArtful DodgertoColonel Sellersis alien to him. Nor is he subject to the wild impulses that often crop out in the Italian or the Slav. Much of his crime springs from disorderly conduct, and drink must bear most of the blame, for on the Scandinavian nature liquor has a disastrous effect.

Pytheas of Marseilles, the explorer who about the time of Alexander the Great gave the world its first news of Norway, said that the people of Thule made from honey "a very pleasant drink." This beverage could hardly have touched the right spot, for when the product of the still reached the Thulites they fell upon it with thejoyous abandon of the inexperienced. A century ago Scandinavia was the home of hard drinkers. Even yet, in our cities, the "toughest" saloons are kept by old-time Norsemen, who left the fatherland before it began to dry out. One hears a proverb which runs, "What won't the German do for money and the Swede for whisky!" As charity seekers and hospital patients, our Scandinavians are not so alcoholic as the British, but more so than the Teutons. More and more, however, they come to us temperate, and strong believers in sumptuary legislation; for within a generation Scandinavia has become the Sahara whence issue the desiccating simooms—Gothenburg system,samlagsystem, etc.,—which have taken much "wet" territory off the map.

Rugged Norway freezes into the souls of her sons a sense of the preciousness of level, fertile land, and there are no great cities to infect the imagination of her country dwellers. What wonder, then, that in 1900 nearly four-fifths of our Norwegians were outside the cities, most of them sticking to the soil like limpets to a rock! In 1900 half of them were tillers, and sixty-three per cent. of their grown sons. For the rest, they are to be found in the forecastles of the great lakes, in the copper and iron mines of upper Michigan, in the coal-mines of Iowa, in Northern lumber-camps, where they wield another pattern of axthan did their forbears, who, eight centuries ago, were known as "ax-bearers" in the Eastern emperor's body-guard. They work in the building trades, on the railroads, in the flour-mills of the wheat centers, and in the furniture-mills, the plow-wagon-and-implement factories of the hardwood belt. From his vast new circle of opportunities, the Norwegian immigrant chooses those that enable him to continue his life at home. He insists on getting his living in connection with soil, water, and wood. In the East he shuns mill drudgery, but shines as a builder. A fourth part of the Norwegian wage-earners in New York are carpenters, while none are on the farms. In Iowa two-thirds are on the farms, and only seven per cent. are in the building trades.

Through the occupational choices of our Danes, one can catch a glimpse of the lush meadows of Jutland. Forty per cent. of them are on the farm, ten per cent. are laborers, and four per cent. are carpenters. In butter-making and dairying they are six times as numerous as in the general work of the country; in cabinet-making and before the mast they are three and one-half times as strong. As stock-raisers and drovers, the second generation are five and one-half times as strong as they are in other lines.

Coming from an industrial country, the Swedes bring skill, and show no marked bent for agriculture. Only thirty per cent. of them are at the plow-tail; of their sons, forty-three per cent. The rest will be carpenters, miners, and quarrymen,railroad employees, machinists, iron- and steel-workers, tailors, and teamsters. Although they form only an eightieth of the army of bread-winners, one out of twelve iron-workers, one out of fourteen cabinet-makers, one out of twenty-one boatmen and sailors, and one out of twenty-five tailors is a Swede. The Swedish aristocratic view of callings is perhaps responsible for the fact that the immigrants' sons are three times as successful in getting "white-handed" jobs as the immigrants, and are much keener for such work than the sons of our Norwegians.

A like difference is visible in the choices of the daughters. Between the first generation and the second the proportion in the "ladylike" jobs increases from 3 per cent. to 13.5 per cent. among the Swedes; from 4.2 per cent. to 9.8 per cent. among the Norwegians. While the proportion of servants and waitresses falls from 61.5 per cent. to 44.5 per cent. among the Swedes, it actually rises from 46 per cent. to 48 per cent. among the Norwegians. Among the former there is a more eager flight from kitchen to factory. On the other hand, the affinity of a democratic people for education reveals itself in the fact that in both generations the Norwegian women are decidedly more likely to be teachers than the Swedish women.

It may be true that "every Sunday Norwegian is preached in more churches in America than inNorway," still, no immigrants of foreign speech assimilate so quickly as the Scandinavians. They never pullulate in slums or stagnate in solid rural settlements. Of 10,200 families that have been studied in seven of our great cities, it was found that the 148 Swedish families had the most dwellings of five and six rooms, the largest incomes, the best housekeeping, the best command of English, and the highest proportion of voters among the men. The Scandinavians have not braced themselves against assimilation, as have the Germans, with theirDeutschtum. Not being beer-bibbers, and warned by their desperate home struggle, they will not stand with the Teutons for "personal liberty" on the question of drink. The anti-liquor sentiment is very strong among them, and in the Minnesota legislature nearly all the support for county option is Scandinavian. Politically, the Norwegians are more active than the Swedes, and they have been insurgent ever since they formed in the Northwest the backbone of so American a movement as Populism.

Among the Scandinavians the spirit of self-improvement is very strong. No other foreign-born people respond so eagerly to night-school opportunities. Farmers' institutes command better attendance and attention where they abound than in straight-American neighborhoods. On a holiday celebration the address attracts more Scandinavians, the ball-game or the fireworks, more natives. As patient listeners, theymatch our Puritan forefathers. No other people take more pride in giving their children a chance. In the words of a Minnesota schoolman, "They are the best people in the State to appreciate education and to want it improved." Unlike the Germans, they have left no mark on American culture. Our ideas and institutions have not been changed by their coming. What they have done is to quicken our interest in the literature of the North, and to win for it academic recognition. A department of Scandinavian is found not only in Harvard and Yale, but also in a dozen universities all the way from Chicago to Seattle. Even the high schools in Minneapolis and elsewhere find place for Scandinavian.

scandDistribution of Scandinavians and natives of Scandinavian Parentage—1910.

Distribution of Scandinavians and natives of Scandinavian Parentage—1910.

The commonplace Knud or Swen brings us a mind pinched by the petty parochialism of little countries on the world's byways. Coming from some valley-closet in a mountainous country, only three per cent. of which is fit for the plow, the Norse immigrant is here spiritually enlarged, like the native of a box-cañon let out into a plain, or the cove-dweller who comes to live by the open sea. In a log hut by a lonely fjord in Trondhjem, or on a dreary moor in Finmark, the story of a Norse peasant lad rising to be governor or senator in this country thrills as did, near a thousand years ago, the romantic tale of some Varangian back from service in the emperor's guard at Constantinople.

In the home-land, a distinguished Norwegian-American, Dr. Wergeland, finds:

Such an oppressive spiritual atmosphere of narrow-minded intolerance, of unloving readiness to raise teacup storms, of insolence, private and political, of clerical and æsthetic arrogance, that the Norseman, though scarcely knowing why, longs to get away from it all and to breathe a fresher, sweeter air. No wonder the people emigrate. There is a peculiar hardness and inflexibility in the Norseman's nature, and the mild virtues of forbearance grow but sparsely in his surroundings. This is perhaps the reason why the Norse immigrant brings to his new homestead for the first four or five years nothing but an open mouth and a silent tongue—speechless astonishment. And this is the reason that to come back to Norway, after spending some years abroad, is so often like coming from open fields into narrow alleys.

In this strain writes a North Dakota pioneer:

What of change the new-comer notices in us American Norsemen is good manners; the respect shown to women; the small class distinctions between rich and poor, high and low; and, finally, the quickness and practical insight into work and business.

Another pioneer, after revisiting Norway, writes:

I was often surprised to find that persons who had never seen me before took me at once for an American. It seems that even the expression of one's face is greatly changed here. During this visit I discovered that my mode of thinking and my spiritual life had changed so much during my thirteen years in America that Idid not feel quite at home with my childhood friends.... The Norwegian who has lived a while in America is more civilized than if he had not been here. He has seen more, experienced more, thought more, and all this has opened his eyes and broadened his view. He is more wide-awake, lives a richer life, and is in a closer correspondence with his surroundings. His sympathies are widened, and he takes more interest in what is going on in the world.

It will not do to shuffle all our Scandinavians into one deck. The Danes are courteous and pleasure-loving, though moody, and they run to moderation in virtues as in vices. The Swedes bear the impress of a society that has long known aristocracy, refinement, and industrialism. They are more polished in manner than the Norwegians, although the humble betray a servility which grates upon Americans. Many show a sociability and a love of pleasure worthy of "the French of the North." They bring, too, a love of letters, and I am told that most of the servant-girls write verse. The editor of a Swedish weekly receives very well written poems and contributions from his readers. Learning stands high with the Swedes, and since John Ericsson they have sent us many fine technical men. Only lately their great chemist Arrhenius hazarded the prediction that, owing to the tendency of American men of ability to go into business, our university chairs will some day be filled with scholars of German and Scandinavian blood.

The Swede is more melancholy than the Norseman, and his letters to friends in the old country are full of the expression of feeling. He has the temperament for pietism, which has always been marked among the Swedish-Americans because they have been dissenters rather than adherents of the state church. Formerly the Swedes came from the country, and were conservative; but of late they have been coming from the cities, and are of a radical and even socialistic spirit.

The Norwegian bears the stamp of a more primitive life. Squeezed into the few roods betwixt mountains and fjord, he has eked out the scanty yield of his farm by grazing the high glacier-fed meadows and gleaning the spoil of the sea. The need which ten centuries ago drove the Vikings to harry Europe, to-day forces their descendants into all the navies of the world. Granite and frost have made the Norse immigrant rough-mannered, reserved, and undemonstrative, cautious in speech, austere in church life, and little given to recreation. GermanGemüthlichkeitis not in him, nor has he the Irishman's sociability. Often he is as taciturn as an Indian, and the lonely farm-houses on the prairie, where not a needless word is uttered the livelong day, contribute many young people to the city maëlstrom.

The Norwegian immigrant has the high spirit of a people that has never known the steam-roller of feudalism, of peasants who held their farms by allodial tenure, and could order theking himself off their land. He has more pride of nationality than the Swede, gets into our politics sooner, and is more aggressive in improving his opportunities. He has the name of being truer to his friends and to his word. Firms declare that they lose less by his bad debts. "The Swede," remarks an educator, "will show the white feather and desert you in a pinch; but not the Norwegian." A mine "boss" thinks he can distinguish Scandinavians by type. "The smooth, white-haired fellows," he says, "have a yellow streak in them; but the dark, or sandy-haired fellows, with a rough skin and rugged features, are reliable." In the Northwest, the nickname "Norsky" is more apt to be used in a good-natured way than the term "Swede."

Since our editors and public men tender each nationality of immigrants—as soon as they have money and votes—nothing but lollipops of compliment, one is loth to proffer the pungent olive of truth. But it is a fact that many who have to do with the Americans of Scandinavian parentage question whether marked ability so often presents itself among them as among certain other strains. The weight of testimony indicates that resourcefulness and intellectual initiative are rarer among them than among those of German descent. Teachers find their children "rather slow," although few fall behind. Scandinavian students do well, but they are "plodders."They beat the Irish in close application, but less often are they called "brilliant."

Of 19,000 Americans recognized in "Who's Who in America," 332 were born in Germany, 151 in Ireland, 68 in France, 54 in Sweden, 42 in Russia, 41 in the Netherlands, 34 in Switzerland, 33 in Austria, 30 in Norway, 28 in Italy, and 14 in Denmark. The Scandinavians have reached prominence far less often than the French, Dutch, and Swiss Americans, and not so often even as the Germans. To the first thousand men of science in America, our Swedish fellow-citizens contribute at the rate of 5.2 per million as against 1.8 for the Irish, 7.1 for the Germans, 7.4 for those born in Russia, and 10.4 for those born in Austria-Hungary.

It is a fair question, then, whether our Scandinavians represent the flower of their people as well as the root and stalk. No doubt in venturesomeness they surpass those in like circumstances who stayed at home. No doubt they brought in full measure the forceful character of the race; but, thanks to our bland, syrupy way of appraising the naturalized foreign-born, the question of comparative brain power never comes up.

Now, oppression or persecution had very little to do with the outflow from Scandinavia. The immigrants came for a better living, for, in the main, they have been servants and common laborers, with a sprinkling of small farmers and a fair contingent of craftsmen. We have had very few representatives of the classes enjoying accessto higher education, business, the professions, and the public service. Having fair prospects at home, the more capable families very likely contributed fewer emigrants than the rest. A professor of Swedish parentage tells me that he has noticed that the successful Swedes he meets traveling in this country are wholly different in physiognomy from the immigrants. The faces here strike him as duller and less regular than the faces of people in Sweden. Other Swedish-Americans, however, contend that formerly caste barriers in the fatherland so blocked the rise of gifted commoners that the immigrant stream is as rich in natural ability as is the Swedish people at home. Rugged Norway has less to hold at home the more capable stocks; but still one meets with candid Norwegian-Americans who think our million of Norse blood represent the brawn rather than the brain of their folk.

Norse mythology is to Celtic mythology what a Yukon forest is to an Orinoco jungle. In the Sagas of Iceland the fancy never runs riot as it does in the legends of Connemara or Brittany. It is not surprising, then, that our Scandinavians are not distinguished for visual imagination. Professors notice that the lads of this breed are slow to grasp the principle of the machinery about the college of agriculture, and need a diagram to supplement oral description of a ventilating system. To them even a drawing is amaze of lines rather than a picture. A physical director working among Scandinavians labored in vain to get his trustees to imagine from the blue prints how the new gymnasium would look. Not until the scaffolding was down were his gymnasts satisfied that there would be "room to do the giant swing." His boy scouts had no faith in a selected camp-site till the brush was actually cleared from it. They lacked "the mind's eye."

"It is not enough," remarks a settlement head, "to show rich Nils or Lars 'how the other half lives'; you've got to clinch your appeal by showing him how the other halfoughtto live." Says a social worker, "I picture to the poor Slovak an eight-room, steam-heated house as a goal, and he will work for it; but the poor Swede can't imagine such a house as his own, so I have to talk to him of the four-room house he will one day possess."

It is said that, as merchant, the Scandinavian puts little visualizing into his advertisements, and is slow to catch the vision of a community prosperity through team-work. As business man, he is a "stand-patter," able to run a going concern, but without the American's power to anticipate developments and to plant a business where none exists. As farmer, he is not so far-sighted as the German. He will burn off the growth on his cut-over land till the humus has been consumed, or wear out his fields with some profitable but exhausting crop, like tobacco. As investor, he is the opposite of the imaginative,speculative American, for large, remote profits do not appeal to him. As labor leader, he lacks vision and idealism. On the stump he does not address the imagination as does the Hibernian spellbinder. As advocate, he makes a hard-headed plea without sentiment, and as after-dinner speaker he lacks in wit and fancy.

norwegianTypical Norwegian Boy

Typical Norwegian Boy

swedishTypical Swedish Girl

Typical Swedish Girl

So little sociable are the Scandinavians that it is said "ice-water runs in their veins." Even liquor will not start the current of fraternal feeling. They care little for the social side of their labor-unions, and neglect the regular meetings. They do not warm up to an employer who treats them "right." Without the happy art of mixing and fraternizing, these sons of the North do not shine as bar-tenders, salesmen, canvassers, commercial travelers, or life-insurance solicitors. As street-car conductors in Minneapolis they are said to be less helpful and polite than the American or the Irish conductors of St. Paul. Teachers of this blood do not easily attach their pupils to them; while the children, instead of being inspired by an audience, as are the Irish, become tongue-tied. Often one hears a teacher lament, "I can't get anythingoutof them."

There is sweetness in the Scandinavian nature, but you reach it deep down past flint. The late Governor Johnson of Minnesota drew people because he had imagination and tenderness—traits none too common among his people. They are undemonstrative in the family, and it is not surprising that their youth on the farms are restlessfrom heart-hunger. Besides, there is dearth of recreation. The Norwegian has his violin, but the Swedish folk-dances we hear so much about were not brought in by the immigrants. They lack the GermanMännerchor,Turnverein, andSchuetzenfest. It is unusual to find them organizing athletic sports. Their social gatherings center in the church, which of course acts as a damper on the spirits of the young. They love fun, to be sure, but have not the knack of making it. Shut up within themselves, hard to reach, slow to kindle, and dominated by an austere hell-fire theology, they are too often the prey of somber moods and victims of suicide and insanity.

An experienced social worker finds selfishness the besetting sin of the Scandinavians he deals with. If a settlement class get a room or a camp, they object to any others using it. In any undertaking they have in common with other nationalities they try to get the best for themselves. They withhold aid from the distressed of another nationality, while the Irish will respond generously to the same appeal. A labor leader notices that the Scandinavian working-men are "hard givers." A kindergartener who sent out Christmas gifts to twenty poor Scandinavian families received thanks from only one. A society gave relief to 260 such families during the winter, and the number who expressed gratitude could be counted on the fingers of one hand. One clergyman declared that his people are not generous in supporting their own charities.

On the other hand, an observer remarks: "For a sufferingperson, circulate your subscription paper among the Irish; for a goodcause, circulate it among the Scandinavians." In other words, the goodness of these people is from the head rather than from the heart. "If I can get him to see it as hisduty," testifies a charity worker, "the Scandinavian will go almost any length." Credit men rank them with the Germans as the surest pay. Insurance agents say no other people are so faithful in paying their premiums "on the nail." If there is a suspicious fire in a store, the owner's name never ends in "son." In Minnesota there are more coöperative stores, creameries, and elevators in the Scandinavian communities than in the American.

The Norwegians have been virile politically, and their politics has reflected moral ideas. They look upon public office as a trust, not a means of livelihood. In the days of Populism they were more open-minded than the Americans. In Wisconsin they have furnished a stanch support for the constructive policies which have drawn upon that State national attention. In the critical roll-calls in the Minnesota legislature all but one or two of the Scandinavian members are found on the "right side." The "interests" have the Germans,—brewing being an "interest,"—the Irish, and many Americans.

The truth is, their slow reaction gives these people the right psychology for self-government. In politics they are "good losers." They arenot to be stampeded by fiery rhetoric or mass hysteria. They have the self-control to right abuses by orderly constitutional methods. In the Chicago anarchist trials the defense was careful to keep Scandinavians out of the jury-box. Among the Scandinavian peoples riots, barricades, and street turbulence have played no part in the redress of political grievances. Ideas of right lie at the base of their social order, while habit and sentiment count for less than they do among South Europeans. So, while our Scandinavian strain may lack the qualities for political leadership, it provides an excellent, cool-blooded, self-controlled citizenship for the support of representative government.

denmarkImmigration from Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, 1841-1910

Immigration from Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, 1841-1910

italiansDistribution of Italians and natives of Italian Parentage—1910

Distribution of Italians and natives of Italian Parentage—1910

The immigration from Italy has shot up like Jonah's gourd. During the last decade a fourth of our immigrants have been Italians, and from being a twentieth part of our foreign-born, they have risen to be a tenth. This freshet is not born of religious or political oppression, for Italy enjoys a government on modern lines, created by the efforts of patriots like Mazzini, Cavour, and Garibaldi. The impulse that every year prompts from a quarter to a half of a million Italians to wander oversea is purely economic. Ignorance and the subjection of women cause blind multiplication, with the result that the Italians are wresting their food from narrower plots than any other European people. A population approximating that of all our Atlantic States is trying to live from a space little greater than the combined areas of New York and Georgia. Although Argentina seconds the United States in absorbing the overflow, still, Italy's population continually swells, her birth-rate is not sinking so rapidly as her death-rate, and one sees no reason why the Italian dusk should not in time quench what of the Celto-Teutonic flush lingers in the cheek of the native American.

Of our one and one-third million of Italians, the Northeast down to Washington holds about three-fourths, while south and southwest of the Capitol there are only three and a half per cent. The middle West has sixteen per cent., and the quota of the Far West is seven and a half per cent. For the most part, they are greatly concentrated in cities. Roughly speaking, five-sixths of the Italians in Delaware are in Wilmington; in Maryland, three-sevenths are in Baltimore; in Illinois, three-eights are in Chicago; in Nebraska, two-thirds are in Omaha; in Missouri, three-fifths are in St. Louis; in Oregon, one-half are in Portland; in Pennsylvania, one-half are in Philadelphia; in Louisiana, two-fifths are in New Orleans; in Michigan, a third are in Detroit; and in Ohio, a quarter are in Cleveland. In New York city are massed a third of a million of Italians, one-fourth of all in the country. Although a slow percolation into the rural districts is going on, this current distributes immigrants very differently from the older streams that debouched on the advancing frontier.

Migratory job-hunters rather than home-seekers, the Italians are loath to encumber themselves with their women. The women are only a little more than one-fifth of the whole, nor do they come here more freely as time goes on. A naturalconsequence of leaving families behind is a huge return currenttoItaly, amounting to a third of the arrivalsfromItaly.

More than half of our British immigrants are skilled. Of the Italian arrivals, one out of eight is skilled, one out of four is a farm-laborer, one out of three is a common laborer, and one in two hundred and fifty has a profession. In a word, two-thirds are of rural origin. The illiteracy of the Italian immigrants more than fourteen years of age is forty-seven per cent.; so that of the two million illiterates admitted to this country 1899-1909, nearly one-half hailed from Italy.

The fact that the emigrants from the north of Italy wander chiefly to South America, where industrially they dominate, while the emigrants from central and southern Italy come to this country, where they are dominated, makes it important to remember that in race advancement the North Italians differ from the rest of their fellow-countrymen. In the veins of the broadhead people of Piedmont, Lombardy, and Venetia runs much Northern blood—Celtic, Gothic, Lombard, and German. The other Italians are of the long-head, dark, Mediterranean race, with no small infusion of Greek, Saracen, and African blood in the Calabrians and Sicilians. Rarely is there so wide an ethnic gulf between the geographical extremes of a nation as there is between Milan and Palermo.

The Italians themselves have set forth these contrasts in the sharpest relief. In an elaborate treatise, Professor Niceforo shows that blue eyes and fair hair occur twice as often among the North Italians as among the people south of Rome; that their understatured are eight per cent. of the whole as against twenty per cent. for the South Italians; and that they show a greater frequency of high foreheads and a smaller frequency of low brows. They have a third of the illiteracy of the South, twice the school attendance, thrice the number of higher students; and while a clear third of the southern students fail in their examinations, less than a quarter of the northerners fail. Northern Italy is twice as well off in teachers and libraries, five times as productive in book publishing, has twice as many voters to the hundred inhabitants, and buys half as many lottery-tickets as the South. The astonishing dearth of literary and artistic production in the South ought to confound those optimists who, identifying "Italian" with "Venetian" and "Tuscan," anticipate that the Italian infusion will one day make the American stock bloom with poets and painters. The figures of Niceforo show that the provinces that contribute most to our immigrationhave been utterly sterile in creators of beauty.

In nothing are the two peoples so unlike as in their crimes. While northern Italy leads in fraud and chicane, southern Italy reveals a rank growth of the ferocious crimes that go with aprimitive stage of civilization. The contrast is between force and fraud, violence and cunning. The South produces five times as much homicide as the North, four times as much brigandage, three times as many assaults, and five times as many seizures or destructions of property. On the whole, it has from three to four times the violence of the North, while its obscene crimes, which constitute an index of sensuality, are thrice as numerous. As for Sicilians, they are scourged by seven times the homicide, four times the brigandage, and four times the obscene crime suffered by an equal number of North Italians.

gypsyPhotograph by HineItalian Gypsy Mother and Child

Photograph by HineItalian Gypsy Mother and Child

Photograph by Hine

Italian Gypsy Mother and Child

greekPhotograph by HineItalian Woman of Greek or Albanian Ancestry

Photograph by HineItalian Woman of Greek or Albanian Ancestry

Photograph by Hine

Italian Woman of Greek or Albanian Ancestry

Although less advanced, the Italians from the valley of the Po are racially akin to the Swiss and the South Germans. As immigrants, their superiority to other Italians is generally recognized. I have yet to meet an observer who does not rate the North Italian among us as more intelligent, reliable, and progressive than the South Italian. We know from statistics that he is less turbulent, less criminal, less transient; he earns more, rises higher, and acquires citizenship sooner. Yet only a fifth of our Italians are from the North. It is the backward and benighted provinces from Naples to Sicily that send us the flood of "gross little aliens" who gave Henry James, on revisiting Boston, the melancholy vision "of a huge applied sponge—a sponge saturated with the foreign mixture and passed over almost everything I remembered and might still have recovered."

Being new-comers, the Italians are doing the heavy, unskilled work which was once the prerogative of the Irish. The shovel is now as firmly associated in our minds with 'Tonio as formerly with Barney. The North Italians go much into mine and quarry and silk-mill, but the others stick close to railroad, street, and construction work. Of our railroads it has been said that "Italians build them, Irish run them, and Jews own them." Nearer to the truth, perhaps, is the New Yorkmot, "Houses nowadays are built by Italians, owned by Jews, and paid for by Irish tenants." Being small and vegetarian, the Italians are not preferred in earthwork for their physical strength, but because of their endurance of heat, cold, wet, and muck. As one contractor puts it, "they can stand the gaff."

Although the South Italians are numerous in the manufacture of boots and shoes, cigars, glass, woolen goods, and clothing, some employers refuse the males for "inside work" because they have the reputation of being turbulent. Their noteworthy absence from the rolling-mills is attributed to the fact that they lack the nervous stability needed for seizing a white-hot piece of iron with a pair of tongs. The phlegmatic Slav stands up to such work.

In the trades, the Italians crop up numerously as bakers, barbers, cobblers, confectioners, tailors, street musicians, scissors-grinders and marble-cutters.A great number become hucksters and peddlers of such characteristic wares as fruits and plaster casts. It is the Italian from the North, especially the Genoese, who brings native commercial capacity and becomes a wholesale or commission merchant in fruits and vegetables, while the Neapolitan is still fussing with his banana-stand. Thanks to their race genius, the Italian musicians and teachers of music among us bid fair to break the musical monopoly of the German-Americans.

In one province of southern Italy not a plow exists, and the women wield the hand implements beside the men. It is not strange that immigrants with such experience do well here in truck-farming and market-gardening. Those who engage in real agriculture settle chiefly in colonies, for the voluble, gregarious Italians cannot endure the chill loneliness of the American homestead. They follow their bent for intensive farming, and would hardly know how to handle more than fifteen or twenty acres. Few of them are up to ordinary extensive farming. As one observer says, "They haven't the head for it."

Although Italians are making a living on the cut-over pine-lands of northern Wisconsin, the rocky hills of New England, the sandy barrens of New Jersey, and the muck soil of western New York, their love of sunshine is not dead. The cane, cotton, and tobacco fields of the South attract them. More than half of the Italians in Louisiana are on the plantations. Half of thesixty thousand in California are in vineyard and orchard. The famed Italian-Swiss colony at Asti employs a thousand men to help it make wine under acielo serenolike that of Italy. Many a fisherman who has cast his net in the Gulf of Genoa now strains the waters of San Francisco Bay.

There are two-score rural colonies of Italians in the South, and the settlements at Bryan, Texas, and Sunnyside and Tontitown, Arkansas, are well known. Italians have been welcomed to the South by planters dissatisfied with negro labor or desirous of deriving a return from their raw land. As a cotton raiser, the Italian has excelled the negro at every point. When it was found, however, that thrifty Pietro insisted on buying land after his second crop as tenant, whereas the black tenant will go on forever letting his superintending white landlord draw an income from him, the enthusiasm of the planters cooled. Then, too, a fear has sprung up lest the Italians, being without the southern white man's strong race feeling, should mix with the negroes and create a hybrid. The South, therefore, is less eager for Italian immigrants than it was, and the legislatures of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia have recorded their sense of the undesirableness of this element.

The peoples from the Azores to Armenia are well-nigh immune to the seduction of alcohol; sothat if this be the test of desirableness, it will be easy to part the sheep from the goats. Certain American sentimentalists go into raptures over the "sobriety" of the new immigrants, and to such we may as well concede first as last that there would be no liquor problem here if abstemious Portuguese had landed at Jamestown instead of hard-drinking English; if temperate Rumanians had settled the colonies instead of thirsty Germans and Scotch-Irish; and if sober, coffee-drinking Turks had peopled the West instead of bibulous Hibernians and Scandinavians. The proportion of Italian charity cases due to drink is only a sixth of that for foreign-born cases, and a seventh of that for cases among native Americans. Alcoholics occur among the Italians in the charity hospitals from a tenth to a twentieth as often as among North Europeans. Still, American example and American strain are telling on the habits of the Italians, and in the Italian home the bottle of "rock and rye" is seen with increasing frequency by the side of the bottle of Chianti.

Bachelors in the pick-and-shovel brigade will have their diversions, so it is not surprising that the Italians, like the abstemious Chinese, are addicted to gambling. Games of chance flourish in their saloons, and many a knife-thrust has come out of a game of cards. At home the state lottery has whetted the taste for gambling. In the Neapolitan the intoxication of the lottery takes the place occupied by alcoholic intoxication in the Anglo-Saxon. When one learns that on an averagethe Neapolitan risks $3.15 a year in the lottery, six times as much as the average Italian, one does not wonder that the immigrant hankers to put his money on something.

For all the great majority of the Italian immigrants are peaceable and industrious, no other element matches them in propensity for personal violence. In homicide, rape, blackmail, and kidnapping they lead the foreign-born. Says the Immigration Commission: "The Italian criminals are largest in numbers and create most alarm by the violent character of their offenses in this country." Among moderns, gainful offenses occur from three to seven times as frequently as crimes of violence. The medievalism of the South Italians appears from the fact that they commit more deeds of personal violence than gainful offenses.

Browning, who knew the Italians, expresses this cheerful alacrity in murder when, in "The Ring and the Book," thePopetells of the four "bright-eyed, black-haired boys"Count Guidohired for his bloody work:

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