Murder me some three people, old and young,Ye never heard the names of—and be paidSo much. And the whole four accede at once.Demur? Do cattle bidden march or halt?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .All is done purely for the pay—which earned,And not forthcoming at the instant, makesReligion heresy, and the lord o' the landFit subject for a murder in his turn.The patron with cut throat and rifled purse,Deposited i' the roadside ditch, his due,Naught hinders each good fellow trudging homeThe heavier by a piece or two in poke,And so with new zest to the common life,Mattock and spade, plow-tail and wagon-shaftTill some such other piece of luck betide.
Murder me some three people, old and young,Ye never heard the names of—and be paidSo much. And the whole four accede at once.Demur? Do cattle bidden march or halt?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
All is done purely for the pay—which earned,And not forthcoming at the instant, makesReligion heresy, and the lord o' the landFit subject for a murder in his turn.The patron with cut throat and rifled purse,Deposited i' the roadside ditch, his due,Naught hinders each good fellow trudging homeThe heavier by a piece or two in poke,And so with new zest to the common life,Mattock and spade, plow-tail and wagon-shaftTill some such other piece of luck betide.
It was frequently stated to the members of the Immigration Commission in southern Italy that crime had greatly diminished in many communities because most of the criminals had gone to America. One Italian official at Messina stated that several years ago southern Italy was a hot-bed of crime, but that now very few criminals were left. When asked as to their whereabouts, he replied, "Why, they are all in the United States." From the Camorra, that vast spider-web of thieves and prostitutes by whom life and politics in Naples are controlled, have come thousands who find the hard-working Italian immigrants a richer field of exploitation than any field open at home. Still more harassing is the Mafia, by means of which Sicilians contrive to ignore police and courts and to secure justice in their own way. A legacy of Spanish domination and Spanish arrogance is the sense ofomertà, or manliness, which holds it dastardly to betray to justice even one's deadliest foe. To avenge one's wrongs oneself, and never to appeal to law, is a part of Sicilian honor.
In an Italian quarter are men who never work, yet who have plenty of money. "No," they say, "we do not work. Work does not agree with us. We have friends who work and give us money. Why not?" It is these parasites who commit most of the crime. Their honest fellow-countrymen shrink from them, yet, if one of them is arrested, some make it a point of honor to swear him off, while all scrupulously forget anything against him. Thanks to this perverse idea of "honor," an Italian murder may be committed in the street in broad daylight, with dozens looking on, yet a few minutes later every spectator will deny to the police that he has seen anything. This highbinder contempt for law is reinforced by sheer terrorism. It is said that often in our courts the sudden wilting of a promising Italian witness has been brought about by the secret giving of the "death-sign," a quick passing of the hand across the throat as if cutting.
The American, with his ready resort to the vigilance committee, is amazed that a whole community should let itself thus be bullied by a few miscreants known to all. Nothing of the sort has ever been tolerated by North European immigrants. The secret lies in the inaptness of the South Italians for good team work. Individualistic to the marrow, they lack the gift of pulling together, and have never achieved an efficient cooperating unit larger than the family.
General Theodore E. Bingham, former Police Commissioner of New York, estimated that thereare in that city not less than 3000 desperadoes from southern Italy, "among them as many ferocious and desperate men as ever gathered in a modern city in time of peace—medieval criminals who must be dealt with under modern law." In 1908 he stated: "Crimes of blackmailing, blowing up of shops and houses, and kidnapping of their countrymen have become prevalent among Italian residents of the city to an extent that cannot be much longer tolerated." It is obvious that if our legal system is called upon to cope with a great volume of such crime for a long time, it will slough off certain Anglo-Saxon features and adopt the methods which alone avail in Italy, namely, state police, registry system, "special surveillance" and "admonition."
lunchPhotograph by HineGroup of Italian Immigrants Lunching in Old Railroad Waiting-Room, Ellis Island
Photograph by HineGroup of Italian Immigrants Lunching in Old Railroad Waiting-Room, Ellis Island
Photograph by Hine
Group of Italian Immigrants Lunching in Old Railroad Waiting-Room, Ellis Island
Not being transients, the North Italians do not resist Americanizing influences. The Genoese, for example, come not to earn wages, but to engage in business. They shun the Italian "quarter," mix with Americans, and Anglicize their names. Mariani becomes Merriam; Abata turns to Abbey; Garberino softens to Gilbert; while Campana suffers a "sea change" into Bell. In the produce-markets they deal with Americans, and as high-class saloon-keepers they are forging past Michael and Gustaf.
But the South Italians remain nearly as aloof as did the Cantonese who built the Central Pacific Railway. Navvies who leave for Napleswhen the ground freezes, and return in April, who huddle in a "camp" or a box-car, or herd on some "Dago Flat," are not reallyinAmerica. In a memorial to the acting mayor of New York, the Italian-American Civic League speaks of the "great civically inert mass" of their countrymen in New York, and declares, "By far the largest part of the Italians of this city have lived a life of their own, almost entirely apart from the American environment." "In one street," writes Signor Pecorini, "will be found peasants from one Italian village; in the next street the place of origin is different, and distinct are manners, customs, and sympathies. Entire villages have been transplanted from Italy to one New York street, and with the others have come the doctor, the grocer, the priest, and the annual celebration of the local patron saint."
Among the foreign-born, the Italians rank lowest in adhesion to trade-unions, lowest in ability to speak English, lowest in proportion naturalized after ten years' residence, lowest in proportion of children in school, and highest in proportion of children at work. Taking into account the innumerable "birds of passage" without family or future in this country, it would be safe to say that half, perhaps two-thirds, of our Italian immigrants areunderAmerica, notofit. Far from being borne along with our onward life, they drift round and round in a "Little Italy" eddy, or lie motionless in some industrial pocket or crevice at the bottom of the national current.
Steerage passengers from a Naples boat show a distressing frequency of low foreheads, open mouths, weak chins, poor features, skew faces, small or knobby crania, and backless heads. Such people lack the power to take rational care of themselves; hence their death-rate in New York is twice the general death-rate and thrice that of the Germans. No other immigrants from Europe, unless it be the Portuguese or the half-African Bravas of the Azores, show so low an earning power as the South Italians. In our cities the head of the household earns on an average $390 a year, as against $449 for the North Italian, $552 for the Bohemian, and $630 for the German. In silk-mill and wollen-mill, in iron-ore mining and the clothing trade, no other nationality has so many low-pay workers; nor does this industrial inferiority fade out in the least with the lapse of time.
Their want of mechanical aptitude is often noticed. For example, in a New England mill manned solely by South Italians only one out of fifteen of the extra hands taken on during the "rush" season shows sufficient aptitude to be worth keeping. The operatives require closer supervision than Americans, and each is given only one thing to do, so as to put the least possible strain on his attention.
If it be demurred that the ignorant, superstitious Neapolitan or Sicilian, heir to centuries ofBourbon misgovernment, cannot be expected to prove us his race mettle, there are his children, born in America. What showing do they make? Teachers agree that the children of the South Italians rank below the children of the North Italians. They hate study, make slow progress, and quit school at the first opportunity. While they take to drawing and music, they are poor in spelling and language and very weak in abstract mathematics. In the words of one superintendent, "they lack the conveniences for thinking." More than any other children, they fall behind their grade. They are below even the Portuguese and the Poles, while at the other extremity stand the children of the Scandinavians and the Hebrews. The explanation of the difference is not irregularity of attendance, for among pupils attending three fourths of the time, or more, the percentage of South Italians retarded is fifty-six as against thirty-seven and a half per cent. for the Russian-Hebrew children and twenty-nine per cent. for the German. Nor is it due to the father's lack of American experience, for of the children of South Italians who have been in this country ten or more years sixty per cent. are backward, as against about half that proportion among the Hebrews and the Germans. After allowing for every disturbing factor, it appears that these children, with the dusk of Saracenic or Berber ancestors showing in their cheeks, are twice as apt to drop behind other pupils of theirage as are the children of the non-English-speaking immigrants from northern Europe.
boardPhotograph by HineBoard of Special Inquiry, Ellis Island
Photograph by HineBoard of Special Inquiry, Ellis Island
Photograph by Hine
Board of Special Inquiry, Ellis Island
utterPhotograph by Hine Courtesy of The SurveyUtter WearinessBohemian Woman on East Side, New York, after the Day's Work
Photograph by Hine Courtesy of The SurveyUtter WearinessBohemian Woman on East Side, New York, after the Day's Work
Photograph by Hine Courtesy of The Survey
Utter WearinessBohemian Woman on East Side, New York, after the Day's Work
The South Italian is volatile, unstable, soon hot, soon cool. Says one observer, "The Italian vote here is a joke. Every candidate claims it because they were 'for' him when he saw them. But the man who talks last to them gets their vote." A charity worker declares that they change their minds "three steps after they have left you." It is not surprising that such people are unreliable. Credit men pronounce them "very slippery," and say that the Italian merchants themselves do not extend credit to them. It is generally agreed that the South Italians lie more easily than North Europeans, and utter untruth without that self-consciousness which makes us awkward liars. "Most of my countrymen," says an educated Italian in the consular service of his country, "disregard their promises unless it is to their advantage to keep them." The man who "sweareth to his own hurt and changeth not" is likely to be a German with his ideal ofTreue, an Englishman with his ideal oftruth, or an American with his ideal ofsquareness.
The Italians are sociable. Who can forget the joyous, shameless gregariousness of Naples? As farmers they cluster, and seem to covet the intimacies of the tenement-house. The streets of an Italian quarter are lively with chatter and stirand folks sitting out in front and calling to one another. In their family life they are much less reserved than many other nationalities. With instinctive courtesy they make the visitor welcome, and their quick and demonstrative response to kindly advances makes them many friends. Visiting nurses comment on the warm expressions of gratitude they receive from the children of Italians whom they have helped.
Before the boards of inquiry at Ellis Island their emotional instability stands out in the sharpest contrast to the self-control of the Hebrew and the stolidity of the Slav. They gesticulate much, and usually tears stand in their eyes. When two witnesses are being examined, both talk at once, and their hands will be moving all the time. Their glances flit quickly from one questioner to another, and their eyes are the restless, uncomprehending eyes of the desert Bedouin between walls. Yet for all this eager attention, they are slow to catch the meaning of a simple question, and often it must be repeated.
Mindful of these darting eyes and hands, one does not wonder that the Sicilian will stab his best friend in a sudden quarrel over a game of cards. The Slavs are ferocious in their cups, but none is so ready with his knife when sober as the South Italian. In railroad work other nationalities shun camps with many Italians. Contractors are afraid of them because the whole force will impulsively quit work, perhaps flare into riot, if they imagine one of their number has suffered a wrong.
The principal of a school with four hundred Sicilian pupils observes that on the playground they are at once more passionate and more vindictive than other children. Elsewhere, once discipline has been established, "the school will run itself"; but in this school the teacher "has to sit on the lid all the time." Their restlessness keeps the truant officer busy, and their darting, flickering attention denies them concentration and the steady, telling stroke. For all their apparent brightness, when at fourteen they quit school, they are rarely beyond the third or fourth grade.
As grinding rusty iron reveals the bright metal, so American competition brings to light the race stuff in poverty-crushed immigrants. But not all this stuff is of value in a democracy like ours. Only a people endowed with a steady attention, a slow-fuse temper, and a persistent will can organize itself for success in the international rivalries to come. So far as the American people consents to incorporate with itself great numbers of wavering, excitable, impulsive persons who cannot organize themselves, it must in the end resign itself to lower efficiency, to less democracy, or to both.
italyImmigration from Italy, 1866-1910
Immigration from Italy, 1866-1910
Immigration from Italy, 1866-1910
In the dim east of Europe, far from the vertical beams of civilization, lies the melancholy Slavic world, with its 150,000,000 of human beings multiplying twice as fast and dying twice as fast as the peoples of the West. Since the curtain of history rose, the Slavs have been anvil rather than hammer. Subjugated by the Gauls in the first century B. C., by the Germans early in the Christian era, and by the Avars in the sixth century, they have played no master rôle in history and their very name is a conqueror's insult. In the temper of this race there appears to be something soft and yielding. For all their courage, these peaceful agriculturists have shown much less of the fighting, retaliating instinct than the Britons and the Norsemen.
At a time when western Europe was sending forth armies to rescue the Holy Sepulcher much of Slavland lay still in heathen darkness. Human sacrifices and the practice ofsutteedid not disappear until the adoption of Christianity. Helmold, a priest of Lübeck, who in 1158 was sent to Christianize the Slavs, speaks of them as a "depraved and perverse nation," and their country isto him "a land of horror and a vast solitude." In 1108 the Archbishop of Magdeburg writes in a pastoral letter, "These cruel people, the Slavs, have risen against us."... "They have cut off the heads of Christians and offered them as sacrifices."
Photograph by HineSlav Sisters
Photograph by HineSlav Sisters
Photograph by Hine
Slav Sisters
slavPhotograph by HineSlovak Girl
Photograph by HineSlovak Girl
Photograph by Hine
Slovak Girl
Unlike the maritime peoples of the West, the Slavs had no easement from the colonizing of the New World. When the era of machine industry dawned, they were not able, as were the English, the French, and the Germans, to get into the sunshine by catering to the world's demand for cheap manufactured goods. Moreover, they have had to bear the brunt of Oriental onslaught. The South Slavs—of Servia, Bulgaria, Herzegovina, and Macedonia—fell under those Comanches of Asia, the Turks, so that only within the last thirty-five years have the spires and turrets of their submerged civilization reappeared above the receding Ottoman flood.
While the Bohemians and the Moravians, thanks to a great intellectual awakening, have come nearly abreast of the Germans, the bulk of the Slavs remain on a much lower plane of culture. In ignorance and illiteracy, in the prevalence of superstition and priestcraft, in the harshness of church and state, in the subservience of the common people to the upper classes, in the low position of woman, in the subjection of the child to the parent, in coarseness of manner and speech, and in low standards of cleanliness and comfort, a large part of the Slavic world remains at thelevel of our English forefathers in the days of Henry the Eighth.
According to mother-tongue, there were in this country in 1910, 941,000 Poles, 228,000 Bohemians and Moravians, 165,000 Slovaks from the southern slopes of the Carpathians, 123,000 Slovenes from the head of the Adriatic, 78,000 Croatians and Dalmatians, 56,000 Russians, 40,000 Bulgarians, Servians, and Montenegrins, 30,000 Slavonians, 25,000 Ruthenians, to say nothing of 140,000 Lithuanians and Letts, who insist that they are a race apart. All told, there are 2,000,000 Slavs among us, and, if we heed the estimates of the leaders of the Slav groups, we should reckon at least 3,000,000. No doubt, between five and six per cent. of the whites in this country are of Slavic blood.
Of the Slav arrivals since 1899 nearly three-fourths are males. Among the immigrants from the Balkans, the men are from ten to twenty times as numerous as the women. Thirty-two per cent. have been illiterates, the proportion ranging from 1.7 per cent. among the Bohemians to 53.4 per cent. among the Ruthenians. Excepting the Bohemians, few of them have had any industrial experience or bring any valuable skill. It is as if great numbers of the English of the sixteenth century had suddenly appeared among us.
When, about fifteen years ago, the great Slav invasion began, the American frontier was remote,shrunken, and forbidding. The newcomers were not in quest of cheap land, with independence, so much as of paying jobs from which they might hoard "big money" and return well off to their homes. They gravitated, therefore, to the mining, metal-working, and packing centers, where there is a demand for unlimited quantities of raw labor, provided always it be cheap. So these sturdy peasant lads came to be Nibelungs, "sons of the gloom," haunting our coal-pits, blast-furnaces, coke-ovens, smelters, foundries, steel-mills, and metal refineries, doing rough, coarse work under skilled men who, as one foreman put it to me, "don't want them tothink, but toobey orders."
What irony that these peasants, straight from ox-goad and furrow, should come to constitute, so far as we can judge from official figures, three-fifths of the force in sugar refining, two-fifths of the force in meat-packing, three-eighths of the labor in tanneries and in oil refineries, one-third of the coal-miners and of the iron- and steel-workers, one-fourth of the workers in carpet-mills, and one-fifth of the hands in the clothing trade! On the other hand, they are but one-seventh of the labor force in the glass-factories and in the cotton-mills, one-ninth of the employees in copper-mining and smelting (who are largely Finns), one-twelfth of our railway labor, and only a handful in the silk and woolen industries.
For these manful Slavs, no work is too toilsome and dangerous. Their fatalistic acceptance ofrisk has much to do with the excessive blood-cost of certain of our industries. They are not "old clo'" men, junk-dealers, hucksters, peddlers, and snappers-up of unconsidered trifles, as are some of the people among us. They have no nose for the small, parasitic trades, but with a splendid work courage they tackle the heavy, necessary tasks. Large of body, hard-muscled, and inexpert in making his head save his heels, the Slav inevitably becomes the unskilled laborer in the basic industries.
Unlike the Teutons and Scandinavians of the eighties, whose chief location was the country beyond Chicago, the later Slavs have been drawn to Pennsylvania, in the hard-coal fields and the Pittsburgh district, and thence they have spread to the rising mining and metal-working centers throughout the country. So many are single men that they form an extraordinarily mobile labor force, willing to go anywhere for an extra two cents an hour. Although they do not build homes, and hence are dependent upon such housing as they can find, they do not stagnate in slums, save as the conditions of their employment impose congestion.
Bohemians and Poles come here to stay, so it is they who furnish the farmers. The Bohemian current began as far back as the fifties, and in 1900 a quarter of all the Bohemian-Americans were on the land. The Poles came later, and with less money, so that only one-tenth were then in agriculture. The immigrants of the seventiessought wild, cheap land, and therefore the Slav settlements are thickest in the Northwest and the Southwest. One-third of all the Polish farmers are in Wisconsin, while in Texas Bohemian cotton-growers are so numerous that in some localities even the negroes speak Bohemian! Of late raw Poles, working up through farm labor and tenancy, are coming to own "abandoned farms" in the Connecticut Valley. Crowded with several other families in an old Yankee farm-house, the Pole is raising, with the aid of his numerous progeny, incredible crops of onions and tobacco. "In old Hadley," reports Professor Emily Balch of Wellesley College, "all up and down the beautiful elm-shaded street the old colonial mansions are occupied by Poles." In one year these Poles, who were but one-fifth of the population, accounted for two-thirds of the births.
Coming from an Elizabethan world, the Slav is as frankly vinous as Falstaff with his "cup o' sack." He is a Bacchus worshiper unashamed, and our squeamishness about liquor strikes him as either hypocrisy or prudery. He thinks, too, that without stimulant he cannot stand up to the grueling work of mill and mine. A steel-worker, when besought to give up drink, replied, "No beer, no whisky, me no work." Hence an incredible amount of his wages goes to line the till of the saloon-keeper. In a steel town of 30,000 population, $60,000 are left with the saloon-keepers theSaturday and Sunday after pay-day. The Saturday brewery-wagon makes the rounds, and on a pleasant Sunday one sees in the yard of each boarding-house a knot of broad-shouldered, big-faced men about a keg of liquid comfort.
It is at celebrations that the worst excesses show themselves. What with caring for their large families and their boarders, the women usually lose their attractiveness early, and therewith their power to exercise a refining influence upon their men-folk. A wedding or a christening-feast lasts an entire day, and toward the end men beastly drunk bellow and fight in the presence of the terrified women and children. During festivals, too, old feuds, rekindled by drink, flare up in brutal and bloody rows. At such times one realizes that the poet Kollár's famous phrase "the dove-blood of the Slav" does not apply to the exhilarated.
Still, their heavy drinking is spasmodic, and they are said to lose less time from work on account of intoxication than certain other nationalities. Says a Jersey City doctor practising among the Ruthenians, "They drink, but few die drunkards or hurt their health with alcohol. If a man does get drunk he is likely to be violent. If he strikes his wife she defends herself if she can, but she does not complain, for she knows he has 'a right to hit her' and that makes a great difference." In Slavic neighborhoods, American influence first shows itself in the rise of a communitysentiment against alcoholic excess and in a growing refinement in festal customs.
For crime the Slav betrays no such bent as the South Italian. Aside from petty thieving—noted in some cases—the complaints of people near a Slav settlement center upon the affrays that follow in the wake of convivial drinking. The Bohemians have about the same criminal tendencies as the Germans. The other Slavs reveal the propensities of a rude, undeveloped people of undisciplined primitive passions. Animosity rather than cupidity is the motive of crime. When the Slav seeks illicit gain he takes the direct path of violence rather than the devious path of chicane; he commits robbery or burglary rather than theft or fraud or extortion. From crimes against chastity, and the loathsome knaveries that center in the social evil, he is singularly free. Morally, the stock is better than one would judge from the police records and from its reputation. No doubt if the descendants of these immigrants have the proper training and surrounding they will prove as orderly as the old American stock.
Among the South Slavs "every married man," says Vrčević, as quoted by Professor W. I. Thomas, "strikes his wife black and blue at least once a month, or spreads a box on the ear over her whole face, or else people are likely to say that heis afraid of his wife." Their popular proverbs corroborate this, as for example: "He who does not beat his wife is no man." "Strike a wife and a snake on the head." "One devil is afraid of the cross, the other (the wife) of a stick." "The dog may howl, but the wife must hold her tongue." In one wedding-song the bride begs her husband: "Strike your wife only with good cause and when she has greatly vexed you." In another folk-song the young wife sings: "What sort of husband are you to me? You do not pull my hair, nor do you strike me!"
Although beating the wife with a wet rope is going out of practice, the Galician peasant, says Von Hupka, "still regards her as a thing belonging to him, which was made in the first place for his service." No wonder the Slav mother averages eight children! No wonder there is an appalling infant mortality, while a childbed death is too often the fate of the forspent mother. Little cares the stolid peasant. What is the woman there for? Nor is this view strange in the New World. In Hungary the Slovak women "bear a child a year—'always either bearing or nursing,' is the saying." But the annual child arrives likewise in the Slovak families of New York. The Slav wife in this country bears from two to two and a half times as fast as the wife of American parentage. Her daughter born under the Stars and Stripes is seven-eighths as prolific as her barefoot immigrant mother. The average Slavic charity case involves five persons, the German or Scandinaviancase four persons, the American case three and one-half persons. A drunken Pole said with pride to the agent of a charitable society that was supporting his family: "Just think what I've done for the State! I've given it ten children!"
womanCourtesy of The SurveySlav Woman and Italian Husband
Courtesy of The SurveySlav Woman and Italian Husband
Courtesy of The Survey
Slav Woman and Italian Husband
girlsPhotograph by HineSlovak Girls
Photograph by HineSlovak Girls
Photograph by Hine
Slovak Girls
The Middle Ages are beginning to show among us. In twenty-one rural counties of Minnesota the Polish women have borne, on an average, seven children in the course of fourteen and a half years of married life. The full tale, no doubt, will come to nine or ten. Thanks to our child-pitying, child-saving civilization, the Polish mother will keep her brood nearly as well as her American neighbor with four or five. "The Irish for children," runs the proverb; and yet one Irish-American wife out of thirteen is childless, and one English-American wife out of twelve. But on the Minnesota farms only one Polish-American wife out of fifty-eight is barren!
In a county where the Poles, although but a third of the population, register 58 per cent. of the births, an old farmer said to me: "The Yankees here are too lazy to have kids. The Poles have from ten to fifteen in a family, and in a hundred years the people here will all be Poles." A hundred years? Even fourteen years ago Father Kruszka reckoned that there were in this country 700 such Polish communities, averaging a hundred families each. So there are hundreds of centers from which the Middle Ages spread. Farm by farm, township by township, the displacement ofthe American goes on—a quiet conquest, without spear or trumpet, a conquest made by child-bearing women. The fathers forage, but it is the mothers who have to face anguish, exhaustion, and even death in the campaign to possess the land. Spending their women brutally, the Slavs advance; pitying their women, the Americans retreat.
How can woman-worth go on rising as this country fills with people who have the brood-mare idea of woman? Yet leaders in the cause of womanhood are doing their best to hold the door open for the very tribes who most despise and misuse their sex! On the other hand, the new immigration may well find favor in the eyes of those who look upon the bearing of ten children as woman's best lot, and are complacent at seeing the stocks with low standards outbreed and crowd into oblivion the stocks with high standards.
Eastern Europe is full of half-drowned nationalities, which only of late are regaining self-consciousness. Bohemians, Slovaks, Poles, Lithuanians, Servians, and Bulgarians—each have had an "awakening," in which language revival and the study of national literature and history have played a great part. The immigrants who come with this quickened sense of nationality make it a point of honor not to drift selfishly with the American current and so lose touch with their struggling brethren in the old home. After refusingto be Germanized, Russified, or Magyarized in the old country, the patriotic Bohemian or Pole is bound to resist absorption here. It was the Irish-Americans who got the leverage for freeing Ireland. Now the Bohemians here are hoping to win home rule for Bohemia; while the Polish-Americans expect to find on this side of the water the fulcrum for the lever that shall free Poland. What, then, more natural than to cling to their own speech and traditions in home and church and parish school?
The vernacular press, of course, harps ever on the chord of "the national speech," so that the second generation may not drift away to the reading of American newspapers. The church, too, which carries matters with a high hand among the Poles, holds the immigrants away from Americanization. The good priests fear lest some of their flock should turn away from religion, while the greedy priests dread lest the flock should become restless under priestly dictation.
Our million Poles outnumber all the rest of the Slavs in America, and the Poles are very clannish. When they settle in groups there is little association between them and their neighbors. "In the communities visited," reports the Industrial Commission, "farmers of German, Scandinavian, Irish, Bohemian, Belgian, Swiss, and American origin were found living in juxtaposition to Poles. In virtually every instance the Pole was considered one degree lower than his neighbors." "Neither the Poles as a body nor the others desireto fuse socially, and the Bohemians felt well above their Slavic brethren." The farmers look down on the Poles as uncleanly, intemperate, quarrelsome, ignorant, priest-ridden, and hard on women and children. When a few Poles have come into a neighborhood, the other farmers become restless, sell out, and move away. Soon a parish is organized, church and parish school arise, the public school decays, and Slavdom has a new outpost.
The core of the large settlement is likely to be a rancid bit of the Old World. Clerical domination to a degree not tolerated among other Roman Catholics, a stately church overlooking mean farm-houses, numerous church holidays, a tiny public school, built wholly out of State grant, with a sister in the garb of her order as schoolmistress, a big parish school, using only Polish and teaching chiefly the catechism, a high illiteracy and a dense ignorance among lads born on American soil, crimes of violence rather than crimes of cunning, horror of water applied inside or outside, aversion to fresh air, barefoot women at work in the fields, with wretched housekeeping as the natural result, saloons patronized by both sexes, the priest frequently urging his flock to "have as many children as God will give them," much loth motherhood, early death from excessive child-bearing, large families brought up by the third, fourth, or fifth wife, harsh discipline of children, political apathy, a controlled vote, and an open contempt for Americans and their principles.
Little better off are the Slavs clustered by themselves in some "mining-patch" in the coal-fields or in the industrial quarter of a metal town. The general population does not associate with them, and they have their own church, school, customs, and festivals. The men pick up a little English, the women none at all. It is really the children that are the battle-ground of old and new. Let them mingle freely with Young America, and no pressure from their parents can make them remain different from their playmates. They dread the nickname of "Hun," "Hunkie," or "Bohunk" as if it were poison, and nothing will induce them to use their home tongue or take part in the organized life of their nationality.
In the big rural settlement, however, the children can be kept from outsiders, and the parents, who want them to settle on the farm, usually have their way. A few of the more restless dive off the island into circumambient America. For a little time the second generation appears progressive; it dresses flashily and shows itself "sporty." But after it marries it loses spirit, settles down, and obeys priest and parent. Whether the system can hold the third generation remains to be seen.
Obviously, the bird-of-passage Slovak or Croat who has left a wife at home, and who roughs it with his compatriots in a "stag" boarding-house in a dreary "black country," is a poor subject for assimilation. His life is bounded by the "boarding boss," the saloon-keeper, the private banker,and the priest—all of them of his own folk. Aside from the foreman's cursing, American life reaches him only through the eye, and then only the worst side of it. But for the good pay, he would hate his life here; and he goes back home with little idea of America save that it is a land of big chances to make money.
Without calling in question the worth of the Slavic race, one may note that the immigrant Slavs have small reputation for capacity. Many observers, after allowing for their illiteracy and lack of opportunity, still insist that they have little to contribute to our people. "These people haven't any natural ability to transmit," said a large employer of Slavs. "You may grind and polish dull minds all you want to in the public schools, but you never will get a keen edge on them because the steel is poor." "They aren't up to the American grade," insisted the manager of a steel-works. "We have a 'suggestion box,' and we reward valuable suggestions from our men, but precious few ever come from immigrant labor." The labor agent of a great implement-works rates the immigrant 75 in ability as compared with the American. A Bohemian leader puts his people above the Americans in music and the fine arts, but concedes the superiority of the Americans in constructive imagination, organizing ability, and tenacity of purpose. "TheCzechs," he says, "are strong in resistance but are not aggressive."
A steel-town superintendent of schools finds the bulk of the children of the Slavs "rather sluggish intellectually." They do well in the lower grades, where memory counts most; but in the higher grades, where association is called for, they fall behind. Of 23,000 pupils of non-English-speaking fathers, 43.4 per cent. were found to be behind their grade; the percentage of retardation for the children of Bohemian fathers was only 35.6 per cent.; but for Poles, the retardation was 58.1 per cent., and for Slovaks 54.5 per cent. While this showing is poor, there are good school men who stoutly maintain that it is still too soon to judge what the Slav-American can do.
An outflow of political exiles comes to an end when there is a turn of the political wheel; but a stream squeezed out by population pressure may flow on forever. So long as the birth-rate remains high, the mother-country is not depleted by the hemorrhage. "What has been the effect of emigration to America upon conditions in Bohemia?" I asked of an intelligent Czech. "Bohemia," he replied, with emphasis, "is just as crowded to-day; the struggle is just as hard as if never a Bohemian had left for America." "Will Polish emigration remain large?" I asked a leader of the Polish-Americans. "Yes," he replied,"it will continue for a long time. The Poles multiply at an extreme rate, and there is no room for them to expand in Poland."
Still, these minor currents may be lost in the flood that is likely to roll in upon us, once the great central Slavic mass of 80,000,000 "true Russians" is tapped. "This," observes the Immigration Commission, "affords a practically unlimited source of immigration, and one which may reasonably be expected to contribute largely to the movement from Europe to the United States in the future." "The economic conditions which in large part impel the emigration of these races (Russian Hebrews, Poles, Lithuanians and Finns) prevail also among true Russians, and already they are beginning to seek relief through emigration."
So the tide from Slavland may swell, and the superfecund Slavs may push to the wall the Anglo-Americans, the Irish-Americans, the Welsh-Americans, the German-Americans, and the rest, until the invasion of our labor market by hordes of still cheaper West Asiatics shall cause the Slav, too, to lose interest in America, even as the Briton, the Hibernian, the Teuton, and the Scandinavian have lost interest in America.
russianPhotograph by HineRussian Jews, Ellis Island
Photograph by HineRussian Jews, Ellis Island
Photograph by Hine
Russian Jews, Ellis Island
hindooCourtesy of The SurveyHindoo Immigrants
Courtesy of The SurveyHindoo Immigrants
Courtesy of The Survey
Hindoo Immigrants
In his defense of Flaccus, a Roman governor who had "squeezed" his Jewish subjects, Cicero lowers his voice when he comes to speak of the Jews, for, as he explains to the judges, there are persons who might excite against him this numerous, clannish and powerful element. With much greater reason might an American lower his voice to-day in discussing two million Hebrew immigrants united by a strong race consciousness and already ably represented at every level of wealth, power, and influence in the United States.
At the time of the Revolution there were perhaps 700 Jewish families in the colonies. In 1826 the number of Jews in the United States was estimated at 6000; in 1840, at 15,000; in 1848, at 50,000. The immigration from Germany brought great numbers, and at the outbreak of the Civil War there were probably 150,000 Jews in this country. In 1888, after the first wave from Russia, they were estimated at 400,000. Since the beginning of 1899, one and one-third millions of Hebrews have settled in this country.
Easily one-fifth of the Hebrews in the world are with us, and the freshet shows no signs of subsidence. America is coming to be hailed as the"promised land," and Zionist dreams are yielding to the conviction that it will be much easier for the keen-witted Russian Jews to prosper here as a free component in a nation of a hundred millions than to grub a living out of the baked hillsides of Palestine. With Mr. Zangwill they exult that: "America has ample room for all the six millions of the Pale; any one of her fifty states could absorb them. And next to being in a country of their own, there could be no better fate for them than to be together in a land of civil and religious liberty, of whose Constitution Christianity forms no part and where their collective votes would practically guarantee them against future persecution."
Hence the endeavor of the Jews to control the immigration policy of the United States. Although theirs is but a seventh of our net immigration, they led the fight on the Immigration Commission's bill. The power of the million Jews in the metropolis lined up the Congressional delegation from New York in solid opposition to the literacy test. The systematic campaign in newspapers and magazines to break down all arguments for restriction and to calm nativist fears is waged by and for one race. Hebrew money is behind the National Liberal Immigration League and its numerous publications. From the paper before the commercial body or the scientific association to the heavy treatise produced with the aid of the Baron de Hirsch Fund, the literature that proves the blessings of immigration to allclasses in America emanates from subtle Hebrew brains. In order to admit their brethren from the Pale the brightest of the Semites are keeping our doors open to the dullest of the Aryans!
Migrating as families the Hebrews from eastern Europe are pretty evenly divided between the sexes. Their illiteracy is 26 per cent., about the average. Artisans and professional men are rather numerous among them. They come from cities and settle in cities—half of them in New York. Centuries of enforced Ghetto life seem to have bred in them a herding instinct. No other physiques can so well withstand the toxins of urban congestion. Save the Italians, more Jews will crowd upon a given space than any other nationality. As they prosper they do not proportionately enlarge their quarters. Of Boston tenement-house Jews Dr. Bushee testifies: "Their inborn love of money-making leads them to crowd into the smallest quarters. Families having very respectable bank accounts have been known to occupy cellar rooms where damp and cold streaked the walls." "There are actually streets in the West End where, while Jews are moving in, negro housewives are gathering up their skirts and seeking a more spotless environment."
The first stream of Russo-Hebrew immigrants started flowing in 1882 in consequence of the reactionary policy of Alexander III. It contained many students and members of scholarly families, who stimulated intellectual activity among their fellows here and were leaders in radical thought.These idealists established newspapers in the Jewish-German Jargon and thus made Yiddish (Jüdisch) a literary language. The second stream reached us after 1890 and brought immigrants who were not steeped in modern ideas but held to Talmudic traditions and the learning of the rabbis. The more recent flow taps lower social strata and is prompted by economic motives. These later arrivals lack both the idealism of the first stream and the religious culture of the second.
Besides the Russian Jews we are receiving large numbers from Galicia, Hungary, and Roumania. The last are said to be of a high type, whereas the Galician Jews are the lowest. It is these whom Joseph Pennell, the illustrator, found to be "people who, despite their poverty, never work with their hands; whose town ... is but a hideous nightmare of dirt, disease and poverty" and its misery and ugliness "the outcome of their own habits and way of life and not, as is usually supposed, forced upon them by Christian persecutors."
The Hebrew immigrants rarely lay hand to basic production. In tilling the soil, in food growing, in extracting minerals, in building, construction and transportation they have little part. Sometimes they direct these operations, often they finance them, but even in direst poverty they contrive to avoid hard muscular labor. Under pressurethe Jew takes to the pack as the Italian to the pick.
In the '80's numerous rural colonies of Hebrews were planted, but, despite much help from outside, all except the colonies near Vineland, New Jersey, utterly failed. In New York and New England there are more than a thousand Hebrew farmers, but most of them speculate in real estate, keep summer boarders, or depend on some side enterprise—peddling, cattle trading or junk buying—for a material part of their income. The Hebrew farmers, said to number in all 6000, maintain a federation and are provided with a farmers' journal. New colonies are launched at brief intervals, and Jewish city boys are being trained for country life. Still, not over one Hebrew family in a hundred is on the land and the rural trend is but a trickle compared with the huge inflow.
Perhaps two-fifths of the Hebrew immigrants gain their living from garment-making. Naturally the greater part of the clothing and dry goods trade, the country over, is in their hands. They make eighty-five per cent. of the cigars and most of the domestic cigarettes. They purchase all but an insignificant part of the leaf tobacco from the farmers and sell it to the manufacturers. They are prominent in the retailing of spirits, and the Jewish distiller is almost as typical as the German brewer.
None can beat the Jew at a bargain, for through all the intricacies of commerce he can scent hisprofit. The peddler, junk dealer, or pawn broker is on the first rung of the ladder. The more capable rise in a few years to be theatrical managers, bankers or heads of department stores. Moreover great numbers are clerks and salesmen and thousands are municipal and building contractors. Many of the second generation enter the civil service and the professions. Already in several of the largest municipalities and in the Federal bureaus a large proportion of the positions are held by keen-witted Jews. Twenty years ago under the spoils system the Irish held most of the city jobs in New York. Now under the test system the Jews are driving them out. Among the school teachers of the city Jewesses outnumber the women of any other nationality. Owing to their aversion to "blind-alley" occupations Jewish girls shun housework and crowd into the factories, while those who can get training become stenographers, bookkeepers, accountants and private secretaries. One-thirteenth of the students in our seventy-seven leading universities and colleges are of Hebrew parentage. The young Jews take eagerly to medicine and it is said that from seven hundred to nine hundred of the physicians in New York are of their race. More noticeable is the influx into dentistry and especially into pharmacy. Their trend into the legal profession has been pronounced, and of late there is a movement of Jewish students into engineering, agriculture and forestry.
The Jewish immigrants cherish a pure, close-knit family life and the position of the woman in the home is one of dignity. More than any other immigrants they are ready to assume the support of distant needy relatives. They care for their own poor, and the spirit of coöperation among them is very noticeable. Their temper is sensitive and humane; very rarely is a Jew charged with any form of brutality. There is among them a fineélitewhich responds to the appeal of the ideal and is found in every kind of ameliorative work.
Nevertheless, fair-minded observers agree that certain bad qualities crop out all too often among these eastern Europeans. A school principal remarks that his Jewish pupils are more importunate to get a mark changed than his other pupils. A settlement warden who during the summer entertains hundreds of nursing slum mothers at a country "home" says: "The Jewish mothers are always asking forsomething extraover the regular kit we provide each guest for her stay." "The last thing the son of Jacob wants," observes an eminent sociologist, "is a square deal." A veteran New York social worker cannot forgive the Ghetto its littering and defiling of the parks. "Look at Tompkins Square," he exclaimed hotly, "and compare it with what it was twenty-five years ago amid a German population!" As for the caretakers of the parks theircomment on this matter is unprintable. Genial settlement residents, who never tire of praising Italian or Greek, testify that no other immigrants are so noisy, pushing and disdainful of the rights of others as the Hebrews. That the worst exploiters of these immigrants are sweaters, landlords, employers and "white slavers" of their own race no one gainsays.
The authorities complain that the East European Hebrews feel no reverence for law as such and are willing to break any ordinance they find in their way. The fact that pleasure-loving Jewish business men spare Jewesses but pursue Gentile girls excites bitter comment. The insurance companies scan a Jewish fire risk more closely than any other. Credit men say the Jewish merchant is often "slippery" and will "fail" in order to get rid of his debts. For lying the immigrant has a very bad reputation. In the North End of Boston "the readiness of the Jews to commit perjury has passed into a proverb." Conscientious immigration officials become very sore over the incessant fire of false accusations to which they are subjected by the Jewish press and societies. United States senators complain that during the close of the struggle over the immigration bill they were overwhelmed with a torrent of crooked statistics and misrepresentations by the Hebrews fighting the literacy test.
Graver yet is the charge that these East European immigrants lower standards wherever they enter. In the boot and shoe trade some Hebrewjobbers who, after sending in an order to the manufacturer, find the market taking an unexpected downward turn, will reject a consignment on some pretext in order to evade a loss. Says Dr. Bushee: "The shame of a variety of underhanded methods in trade not easily punishable by law must be laid at the door of a certain type of Jew." It is charged that for personal gain the Jewish dealer wilfully disregards the customs of the trade and thereby throws trade ethics into confusion. Physicians and lawyers complain that their Jewish colleagues tend to break down the ethics of their professions. It is certain that Jews have commercialized the social evil, commercialized the theatre, and done much to commercialize the newspaper.