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AMERICAN AND
IMMIGRANT BLOOD

A STUDY OF THE SOCIAL EFFECTS OF IMMIGRATION

BY EDWARD ALSWORTH ROSS

Professor of Sociology, University of Wisconsin

IN these pages Professor Ross carries his study of our present immigration into the very throbbing heart of this nation. He shows how the sturdy blood of northern Europe once poured its red riches into American arteries to strengthen and to quicken, and he exhibits by contrast the vitiated and diseased and enfeebling mixtures making in recent years. The near, inevitable future is apparent. This paper constitutes one of the gravest and most important considerations ever laid before the American people. -THE EDITOR.

HERE is a certain anthracite town

THERE is cerbitants in which are

writ large the moral and social consequences of injecting 10,000 sixteenth-century people into a twentieth-century community. By their presence the foreigners necessarily lower the general plane of intelligence, self-restraint, refinement, orderliness, and efficiency. With them, of course, comes an increase of drink and of the crimes from drink. The great excess of men among them leads to sexual immorality and the diffusion of private diseases. A primitive midwifery is practised, and the ignorance of the poor mothers fills the cemetery with tiny graves. The women go about their homes barefoot, and their rooms and clothing reek with the odors of cooking and uncleanliness. The standards of modesty are Elizabethan. The miners bathe in the kitchen before the females and children of the household, and women soon to become mothers appear in public unconcerned. The foreigners attend church regularly, but their noisy amusements banish the quiet Sunday. The foreign men, three eighths of whom are illiterate, pride themselves on their physical strength rather than on their skill, and are willing to take jobs requiring nothing but brawn.

Barriers of speech, education, and religious faith split the people into unsympathetic, even hostile camps. The worst element in the community makes use of

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the ignorance and venality of the foreignborn voters to exclude the better citizens from any share in the control of local affairs. In this babel no newspaper becomes strong enough to mold and lead public opinion. On account of the smallness of the English-reading public, the single English daily has so few subscribers that it cannot afford to offend any of them by exposing municipal rottenness. The chance to prey on the ignorant foreigner tempts the cupidity and corrupts the ethics of local business and professional men. The Slavic thirst, multiplying saloons up to one for every twenty-six families, is communicated to Americans, and results in an increase of liquor crimes among all classes. In like manner familiarity with the immodesties of the foreigners coarsens the native-born.

With the basest Americans and the lowest foreigners united by thirst and greed, while the decent Americans and the decent foreigners understand one another too little for team-work, it is not surprising that the municipal government is poor and that the taxpayers are robbed. Only a few of the main streets are paved; the rest are muddy and poorly guttered. Outside the central portion of the city one meets with open sewage, garbage, dungheaps, and foul odors. Sidewalks are lacking or in bad repair. The police force, composed of four Lithuanians, two Poles, one German, and one Irishman, is so in

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efficient that "pistol-toting" after nightfall is common among all classes. At times hold-ups have been so frequent that it was not considered safe for a well-dressed person to show himself in the foreign sections after dark. In the words of a prominent local criminal lawyer:

We have a police force that can't speak English. Within the last few years there have been six unavenged murders in this town. Why, if there were anybody I wanted to get rid of, I 'd entice him here, shoot him down in the street, and then go around and say good-by to the police.

Here in a nutshell are presented the social effects that naturally follow the introduction into an advanced people of great numbers of backward immigrants. One need not question the fundamental worth of the immigrants or their possibilities in order to argue that they must act as a drag on the social progress of the nation that incorporates them.

ILLITERACY

AMONG us there are now two million foreign-born illiterates, while the number of foreign-born men of voting age unable to read and write has passed the million mark. The confessed illiteracy of the multitudes coming from southern and eastern Europe is 35.8 per cent., as against 2.7 per cent. for the dwindling streams from the North and West. We know that the actual state is somewhat worse than these figures indicate. As the lands of ignorance discharge their surplus into our country, we must expect to meet fellow-citizens who, in the words of the Commissioner of Immigration at New York, "do not know the days of the week, the months of the year, their own ages, or the name of any country in Europe outside their own." Or, as another official puts it:

In our daily official duties we come to know as belonging to a normal human adult type the individual who cannot count to twenty every time correctly; who can tell the sum of two and two, but not of nine and six; name the days of the week, but not the months of the year; who knows that he has arrived at New York or Boston, as the

case may be, but does not know the route he followed from his home or how long it took to reach here; who says he is destined to America, but has to rely on showing a written address for further particulars; who swears he paid his own passage, but is unable to tell what it cost, and at the same time shows an order for railroad transportation to destination prepaid in this coun

try.

While sister countries are fast nearing the goal of complete adult literacy, deteriorating immigration makes it very hard to lift the plane of popular intelligence in the United States. The foreignborn between twenty and thirty-four years of age, late-comers of course, show five times the illiteracy of native whites of the same age. But those above forty-five years of age, mostly earlier immigrants, have scarcely twice the illiteracy of native whites above forty-five. This shows how much wider is the gulf between the Americans of to-day and the new immigrants than that between the Americans of a generation ago and the old immigrants.

Thanks to extraordinary educational efforts, the illiteracy of native white voters dropped a third during the last decad; that is, from 4.9 per cent. to 3.5 per cent. But the illiteracy of the foreign-born men rose to 12 per cent.; so that the proportion of white men in this country unable to read and write any language declined only 9 per cent. when, but for the influx of illiterates, it would have fallen 30 per

cent.

In the despatches of August 16, 1912, is an account of a gathering of ten thousand afflicted people at a shrine at Carey, Ohio, reputed to possess a miraculous healing virtue. Special trains brought together multitudes of credulous, and at least one "miracle" was reported. As this country fills up with the densely ignorant, there will be more of this sort of thing. The characteristic features of the Middle Ages may be expected to appear among us to the degree that our population comes to be composed of persons at the medieval level of culture.

YELLOW JOURNALISM

IN accounting for yellow journalism, no one seems to have noticed that the saffron

newspapers are aimed at a sub-American mind groping its way out of a fog. The scare-heads, red and green ink, pictures, words of one syllable, gong effects, and appeal to the primitive emotions, are apt to jar upon the home-bred farmer or mechanic. "After all," he reflects, "I am not a child." Since its success in the great cities, this style of newspaper has been tried everywhere; but it appears there are soils in which the "yellows" will not thrive. When a population is sixty per cent. American stock, the editor who takes for granted some intelligence in his readers outlasts the howling dervish. But when the native stock falls below thirty per cent. and the foreign element exceeds it, yellowness tends to become endemic. False simplicity, distortion, and crude emotionalism are the resources of newspapers striving to reach and interest undeveloped minds. But the arts that win the immigrant deprave the taste of native readers and lower the intelligence of the community.

PEONAGE

THE friendless, exploitable alien by his presence tends to corrupt our laws and practices respecting labor. In 1908 the House of Representatives directed the Immigration Commission to report on the treatment and conditions of work of immigrants in certain Southern States "and other States." The last phrase was introduced merely to avoid the appearance of sectionalism, for no congressman dreamed that peonage existed anywhere save in the South. The investigation disclosed, however, the startling fact that immigrant peonage exists in every State but Oklahoma and Connecticut. In the West the commission found "many cases of involuntary servitude," but no prosecutions. It was in the lumber-camps of Maine that the commission found "the most complete system of peonage in the country."

CASTE SPIRIT

THE desire to cure certain ills has been slow to develop among us because the victims are aliens who, we imagine, don't mind it very much. On learning that the low pay of the Italian navvy forbids meat, we recall that all Italians prefer macaroni, anyhow. With downtrodden immi

Of

grants we do not sympathize as we would with downtrodden Americans. The foreign-born laborers are "wops" and don't count; the others are "white men." After a great mine disaster a Pittsburgh newspaper posted the bulletin: "Four hundred miners killed. Fifteen Americans." late a great split has opened between the American and Americanized working-men and the foreigners, with their new sense of being exploited and despised. The break shows itself sensationally in the bitter fight between the American Federation of Labor and the Industrial Workers of the World. The former denounces the redflag methods of the latter, ignores I. W. W. strikes, and allows its members to become strike-breakers. When the latter precipitates a strike in some industry in which the Federationists are numerous, we shall see an unprecedented warfare between native and foreign groups of working-men. It is significant of the coming cleavage that the mother of the I. W. W., the Western Federation of Miners, at once the most American and the most radical of the great labor-unions, has disowned the daughter organization since its leaders sought to rally inflammable and irresponsible immigrants with the fierce cry, "Sabotage. No Truce."

THE POSITION OF WOMEN

PERHAPS the most sensitive index of moral advancement is the position assigned to woman. Never is there a genuine advance that does not leave her more planet and less satellite. Until recently nowhere else in the world did women enjoy the freedom and encouragement they received in America. It is folly, however, to suppose that their lot will not be affected by the presence of six millions from belated Europe and from Asia, where consideration for the weaker sex is certainly not greater than that of the English before the Puritan Reformation.

With most of our Slavic nationalities, it is said, the boy may strike his sister with impunity, but the girl who strikes her brother is likely to be chastised. Few of the later immigrants think of giving the daughter as good a chance as the son. Among the American students in our colleges there are three young men to one young woman. For the native students

of foreign fathers the ratio is four to one, and for the foreign-born eight to one. The Italians keep their daughters close, and marry them off very early.

In the 1909 strike of the New York shirt-waist makers, all the nationalities responded to the union ideal save the Italian girls. More than that, hundreds of them slipped into the strikers' jobs. Mystified by the strange, stolid resistance of the brown-eyed girls to all entreaties, the strike-leaders visited their homes. There they found that the Italian woman, instead of being a free moral agent, is absolutely subject to the will of her nearest male relative, and the man would not take the wife, sister, or daughter out of the shop unless he was well paid for it.

Eastern European peasants are brutal in the assertion of marital rights, so when the poor immigrant woman, noticing the lot of the American wife, comes to the point of rebelling against the animal family, she runs the risk of rough treatment. Some nationalities are almost Oriental in the way they seclude their women. It is significant that the Ruthenian, Polish, Portuguese, southern Italian, and Greek female employees who have lived here from five to ten years are further behind their men-folk in speaking English than the women from northern and western Europe.

That the woman's movement in America is to meet with hard sledding cannot be doubted. The conservatism of our East has been buttressed by millions of immigrants bred in the coarse peasant philosophy of sex. It may be long before women win in the East the recognition they have won in the more American parts of the country. Recently the school board of New York, on motion of Commissioner Abraham Stern, refused even to allow discussion of a woman teacher's petition for a year's leave of absence without pay in order to have a baby. This moved "The Independent," which has been a Mark Tapley on the immigration question, to remark: "The wave of recent immigration has brought with it the Oriental conception of woman's status. . . . We must not shut our eyes to the fact that in the future the Christian conception of womanhood is not to be maintained in this country without a struggle."

VICE

FROM a half to three fifths of the immigration between 1868-88 was male, but the new immigration shows a male preponderance of about three to one. Among those from Austria there are 155 males to 100 females. Among those from Hungary the proportion is 161 to 100; from Italy, 191; from Asiatic Turkey, 210; from European Turkey, 769; from the Balkan States, 1107; from Greece, 1192. A quarter of the Polish husbands in industry, a third of the married Slovak and Italian men, nearly half of the Magyars and Russians, three fifths of the Croatians, three fourths of the Greeks and Rumanians, and nine tenths of the Bulgarians, have left their wives in the old country.

Two million more immigrant men than immigrant women! Can any one ask what this leads to? In colonial times the consequences of split-family immigration were so bad that Massachusetts and Connecticut passed laws requiring spouses to return to their mates in England unless they were "come over to make way for their families." We are broader-minded, and will interfere with nothing that does not wound prosperity. The testimony of foreign consuls and leaders among the foreign-born leaves no doubt that in some instances the woman cook of the immigrant boarding-house is common to the inmates.

HOUSING

IN the South Side of Pittsburgh there are streets lined with the decent homes of German steel-workers. A glance down the paved passage leading to the rear of the house reveals absolute cleanliness, and four times out of five one glimpses a tree, a flower garden, an arbor, or a mass of vines. In Wood's Run, a few miles away, one finds the Slavic laborers of the Pressed Steel Car Company huddled in dilapidated rented dwellings so noisome and repulsive that one must visit the lower quarters of Canton to meet their like. One cause of the difference is that the Slavs are largely transients, who do nothing to house themselves because they are saving in order to return to their native village.

The fact that a growing proportion of

It might here be added that the teacher our immigrants, having left families behas now been dismissed.

hind them, form no strong local attach

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