Races and Immigrants in America

Age Groups, Foreign and Native-born

Immigration and Wealth Production.—Over four-fifths of the immigrants are in the prime of life—the ages between fourteen and forty-five. In the year 1906 only 12 out of every 100 were under fourteen years of age, and only 4.5 out of every 100 over forty-five years of age. The census of 1900 offers some interesting comparisons between the native-born and the foreign-born in this matter of age distribution. It shows quite plainly that a large proportion of the native-born population is below the age of industrial production, fully 39 per cent, or two-fifths, being under fifteen years of age, while only 5 per cent of the foreign-born are of corresponding ages. On the other hand, the ages fifteen to forty-four include 46 per cent of the native and 58 per cent of the foreign-born. This is shown in the diagram based on five-year age periods. The native born are seen to group themselves in a symmetrical pyramid, with the children under five as the wide foundation, gradually tapering to the ages of eighty and eighty-four, but for the foreign-born they show a double pyramid, tapering in both directions from the ages of thirty-five to thirty-nine, which include the largest five-year group. Thus, immigration brings to us a population of working ages unhampered by unproductive mouths to be fed, and, if we consider alone that which produces the wealth of this country and not that which consumes it, the immigrants add more to the country than does the same number of native of equal ability. Their home countries have borne the expense of rearing them up to the industrial period of their lives, and then America, without that heavy expense, reaps whatever profits there are on the investment.

Proportion of Sexes. Native and Foreign-born Whites, 1900, and Immigrants 1906

In another respect does immigration add to our industrial population more than would be done by an equal increase in native population, namely, by the large excess of men over women. In 1906, over two-thirds of the immigrants were males and less than one-third were females. This is shown on the accompanying diagram, as well as the fact based on the census statistics that among the foreign-born the men predominate over the women in the ratio of 540 to 460, while among the native-born population the sexes are about equal, being in the proportion of 507 males to 493 females.

This small proportion of women and children shows, of course, that it is the workers, not the families, who seek America. Yet the proportions widely vary for different nationalities. Among the Jews 48 per cent are females and 28 per cent children. This persecuted race moves in a body, expecting to make America its home. At the other extreme the Greeks send only 4 per cent females and 3 per cent children, the Croatians 13 per cent females and 4 per cent children, the South Italians 21 per cent females and 11 per cent children. These are races whose immigration has only recently begun, and naturally enough the women and children, except in the case of the Jews, do not accompany the workmen. A race of longer migration, like the Germans, has 41 per cent females and 15 per cent children. The Irish have a peculiar position. Alone of all the races do the women equal the men, but only 5 per cent are children. Irish girls seeking domestic service explain this preponderance of women. Significant and interesting facts regarding other races may be seen by studying the table entitled “Industrial Relations of Immigrants.”

Sweden Greece Germany Russia China Scotland
Austria Australia Canada England Italy Roumania
American School Boys
(From World’s Work)

Such being the proportions of industrial energy furnished by immigration, what is the quality? Much the larger proportion of immigrants are classed as unskilled, including laborers and servants. Omitting those who have “no occupation,” including mainly women and children, who are 30.5 per cent of the total, only 21.7 per cent of the remainder who are working immigrants are skilled, and 73.4 per cent are unskilled. The proportions vary greatly among the different races. The largest element of skilled labor is among the Jews, a city people, two-thirds of whom are skilled workmen. Nearly the same proportion of the Scotch and Welsh and over one-half of the English and Bohemians are skilled mechanics. Nearly one-third of the Germans and Dutch are skilled, and one-fourth of the Scandinavians. At the other extreme, only 3 to 5 per cent of the Ruthenians, Croatians, Roumanians, and Slovaks are skilled, and 8 to 10 per cent of the Magyars, Lithuanians, and Poles. One-fifth of the North Italians and one-sixth of the South Italians are skilled. These and other proportions are shown in the statistical table.

The skilled labor which comes to America, especially from Northern and Western Europe, occupies a peculiar position in our industries. In the first place, the most capable workmen have permanent places at home, and it is, in general, only those who cannot command situations who seek their fortunes abroad. The exceptions to this rule are in the beginnings of an industry like that of tin plate, when a large proportion of the industry moved bodily to America, and the highly skilled tin workers of Wales brought a kind of industrial ability that had not hitherto existed in this country. As for the bulk of skilled immigrants, they do not represent the highest skill of the countries whence they come.

On the other hand, the European skilled workman is usually better trained than the American, and in many branches of industry, especially machinery and ship-building, the English and Scotch immigrants command those superior positions where an all-round training is required.

This peculiar situation is caused by the highly specialized character of American industry. In no country has division of labor and machinery been carried as far as here. By division of labor the skilled trades have been split up into simple operations, each of which in itself requires little or no skill, and the boy who starts in as a beginner is kept at one operation so that he does not learn a trade. The old-time journeyman tailor was a skilled mechanic who measured his customer, cut the cloth and trimmings, basted, sewed, and pressed the suit. Now we have factories which make only coats, others which make only vests, others trousers, and there are children’s knee-pants factories and even ladies’ tailor establishments where the former seamstress sees her precious skill dissipated among a score of unskilled workers. Thus the journeyman tailor is displaced by the factory, where the coat passes through the hands of thirty to fifty different men and women, each of whom can learn his peculiar operation in a month or two. The same is true in greater or less degree in all industries. Even in the building trades in the larger cities there are as many kinds of bricklayers as there are kinds of walls to be built, and as many kinds of carpenters as there are varieties of woodwork.

So it is with machinery. The American employer does not advertise for a “machinist”—he wants a “lathe hand” or a “drill-press hand,” and the majority of his “hands” are perhaps only automatic machine tenders. The employer cannot afford to transfer these hands from one job to another to enable them to “learn the trade.” He must keep them at one operation, for it is not so much skill that he wants as cheap labor and speed. Consequently, American industry is not producing all-round mechanics, and the employers look to Europe for their skilled artisans. In England the trade-unions have made it their special business to see that every apprentice learns every part of his trade, and they have prevented employers from splitting up the trades and specializing machinery and thereby transforming the mechanic into the “hand.” Were it not for immigration, American industries would ere now have been compelled to give more attention to apprenticeship and the training of competent mechanics. The need of apprenticeship and trade schools is being more seriously felt every year, for, notwithstanding the progress of division of labor and machinery, the all-round mechanic continues to play an important part in the shop and factory. American trade-unions are gaining strength, and one of their most insistent demands is the protection of apprenticeship. The bricklayers’ and carpenters’ unions of Chicago even secure from their employers instruction for apprentices in school. Not much headway in this line, however, has yet been made, and American industry has become abnormal, we might almost say suicidal, or at any rate, non-self-supporting. By extreme division of labor and marvellous application of machinery it makes possible the wholesale employment in factories of the farm laborers of Europe and their children, and then depends on Europe for the better-trained types of the skilled mechanic, who, on account of the farm laborer, have not been able to learn their trade in America.

Not only does immigration bring to America the strongest, healthiest, and most energetic and adventurous of the work-people of Europe and Asia, but those who come work much harder than they did at home. Migration tears a man away from the traditions, the routine, the social props on which he has learned to rely, and throws him among strangers upon his own resources. He must swim or drown. At the same time he earns higher wages and eats more nourishing food than he had ever thought within reach of one in his station. His ambition is fired, he is stirred by the new tonic of feeling himself actually rising in the world. He pictures to himself a home of his own, he economizes and saves money to send to his friends and family, or to return to his beloved land a person of importance. Watch a gang of Italians shovelling dirt under an Irish boss, or a sweat-shop of Jewish tailors under a small contractor, and you shall see such feverish production of wealth as an American-born citizen would scarcely endure. Partly fear, partly hope, make the fresh immigrant the hardest, if not the most intelligent, worker in our industries.

Industrial Capacities of Different Races.—But, however hard one may work, he can only exercise the gifts with which nature has endowed him. Whether these gifts are contributed by race or by civilization, we shall inquire when we come to the problems of amalgamation and assimilation. At present we are concerned with the varying industrial gifts and capacities of the various races as they actually exist at the time when immigration, annexation, or conquest takes place.

The mental and moral qualities suited to make productive workers depend upon the character of the industry. It is not conceivable that the immigrants of the present day from Southern Europe and from Asia could have succeeded as frontiersmen and pioneers in the settlement of the country. In all Europe, Asia, and Africa there was but one race in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that had the preliminary training necessary to plunge into the wilderness, and in the face of the Indian to establish homes and agriculture. This was the English and the Scotch-Irish. The Spaniards and the French were pioneers and adventurers, but they established only trading stations. Accustomed to a paternal government they had not, as a people, the self-reliance and capacity for sustained exertion required to push forward as individuals, and to cut themselves off from the support of a government across the ocean. They shrank from the herculean task of clearing the forests, planting crops among the stumps, and living miles away from their neighbors. True, the pioneers had among their number several of German, French, and Dutch descent, but these belonged to the second and third generations descended from the immigrants and thrown from the time of childhood among their English-Scotch neighbors. The French trappers and explorers are famous, and have left their names on our map. But it was the English race that established itself in America, not because it was first to come, not because of its armies and navies, but because of its agriculture. Every farm newly carved out of the wilderness became a permanent foothold, and soon again sent out a continuous colony of sons and daughters to occupy the fertile land. Based on this self-reliant, democratic, industrial conquest of the new world the military conquest naturally, inevitably followed.

But at the present day the character of industry has entirely changed. The last quarter of the nineteenth century saw the vacant lands finally occupied and the tribe of frontiersmen coming to an end. Population now began to recoil upon the East and the cities. This afforded to manufactures and to the mining industries the surplus labor-market so necessary for the continuance of large establishments which to-day need thousands of workmen and to-morrow hundreds. Moreover, among the American-born workmen, as well as the English and Scotch, are not found that docility, obedience to orders, and patient toil which employers desire where hundreds and thousands are brought like an army under the direction of foremen, superintendents, and managers. Employers now turn for their labor supply to those eastern and southern sections of Europe which have not hitherto contributed to immigration. The first to draw upon these sources in large numbers were the anthracite coal operators of Pennsylvania. In these fields the English, Scotch, Welsh, and Irish miners, during and following the period of the Civil War, had effected an organization for the control of wages, and the outrages of a secret society known as the Molly Maguires gave occasion for the importation of new races unaccustomed to unionism, and incapable, on account of language, of coöperation with English-speaking miners. Once introduced in the mining industry, these races rapidly found their way into the unskilled parts of manufactures, into the service of railroads and large contractors. On the construction of the Erie Canal in 1898, of 16,000 workmen, 15,000 were unnaturalized Italians.[74] The census of 1900 showed that while the foreign-born males were one-fourteenth of the laborers in agriculture, they were three-fourths of the tailors, more than one-half of the cabinet makers, nearly one-half of the miners and quarrymen, tannery workers, marble and stonecutters, more than two-fifths of the boot and shoe-makers and textile workers, one-third of the coopers, iron and steel workers, wood-workers and miscellaneous laborers, one-fourth of the carpenters, painters, and plasterers, and one-fifth of the sawmill workers.[75] The foreign-born females numbered nearly two-fifths of the female cotton-mill operatives and tailors, one-third of the woollen-mill operatives, one-fourth of the tobacco and silk-mill operatives.

On the Pacific slope the Chinese and Japanese immigrants have filled the place occupied by the southeast European in the East and the negro in the South. They were the workmen who built the Pacific railroads, and without them it is said that these railroads could not have been constructed until several years after their actual completion.

The immigration of the Chinese reached its highest figures prior to the exclusion laws of 1882, and since that time has been but an insignificant contribution. In their place have come the Japanese, a race whose native land, in proportion to its cultivable area, is more densely populated than any other country in the world. The Chinese and Japanese are perhaps the most industrious of all races, while the Chinese are the most docile. The Japanese excel in imitativeness, but are not as reliable as the Chinese. Neither race, so far as their immigrant representatives are concerned, possesses the originality and ingenuity which characterize the competent American and British mechanic. In the Hawaiian Islands, where they have enjoyed greater opportunities than elsewhere, they are found to be capable workmen of the skilled trades, provided they are under the direction of white mechanics.[76] But their largest field of work in Hawaii is in the unskilled cultivation of the great sugar plantations. Here they have been likened to “a sort of agricultural automaton,” and it becomes possible to place them in large numbers under skilled direction, and thus to secure the best results from their docility and industry.

In the United States itself the plantation form of agriculture, as distinguished from the domestic form, has always been based on a supply of labor from backward or un-Americanized races. This fact has a bearing on the alleged tendency of agriculture toward large farms. Ten years ago it seemed that the great “bonanza” farms were destined to displace the small farms, just as the trust displaces the small manufacturer. But it is now recognized that the reverse movement is in progress, and that the small farmer can compete successfully with the great farmer. It has not, however, been pointed out that the question is not merely an economic one and that it depends upon the industrial character of the races engaged in agriculture. The thrifty, hard-working and intelligent American or Teutonic farmer is able to economize and purchase his own small farm and compete successfully with the large undertaking. He is even beginning to do this in Hawaii since the compulsory labor of his large competitors was abolished.[77] But the backward, thriftless, and unintelligent races succeed best when employed in gangs on large estates. The cotton and sugar fields of the South with their negro workers have their counterpart in the plantations of Hawaii with their Chinese and Japanese, and in the newly developed sugar-beet fields of Nebraska, Colorado, and California, with their Russians, Bohemians, Japanese, and Mexicans. In the domestic or small form of agriculture the bulk of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe are not greatly desired as wage-earners, and they do not succeed as proprietors and tenants because they lack oversight and business ability. Where they are located in colonies under favorable auspices the Italians have achieved notable success, and in the course of Americanization they will doubtless rival older nationalities. But in the immigrant stage they are helpless, and it is the immigrants from Northwestern Europe, the Germans and Scandinavians, whose thrift, self-reliance, and intensive agriculture have made them from the start the model farmers of America.

The Jewish immigrant, particularly, is unfitted for the life of a pioneer. Remarkably individualistic in character, his field of enterprise is society, and not the land. Of the thirty thousand families sent out from New York by industrial and agricultural removal societies, nine-tenths are located in industry and trade, and the bulk of the remainder, who are placed on farms, succeed by keeping summer boarders. Depending on boarders, they neglect agriculture and buy their food-stuff. Their largest colony of hoped-for agriculturists, Woodbine, New Jersey, has become a clothing factory.[78] Yet the factory system, with its discipline and regular hours, is distasteful to the Jew’s individualism. He prefers the sweat-shop, with its going and coming. If possible, he rises through peddling and merchandising.

These are a few of the many illustrative facts which might be set forth to show that the changing character of immigration is made possible by the changing character of industry; and that races wholly incompetent as pioneers and independent proprietors are able to find a place when once manufactures, mines, and railroads have sprung into being, with their captains of industry to guide and supervise their semi-intelligent work.

CHAPTER VI

There are four variations in the treatment of labor as property in the United States, each of which has had its peculiar effect on the character of immigration, or has grown out of the relations between races. They are slavery, peonage, contract labor, and free labor. Under slavery the laborer and his children are compelled by law throughout their lifetime to work for an owner on terms dictated and enforced by him. Under peonage the laborer is compelled by law to pay off a debt by means of his labor, and under contract labor he is compelled by law to carry out a contract to work. To enforce peonage and contract labor the offence of “running away” is made punishable by imprisonment at forced labor, or by extension of the period of service. Under freedom the law refuses to enforce a contract to work, making this an exception to the sacredness of contracts, and refuses to enforce the payment of a debt by specific service. This leaves to the contractor or creditor the usually empty relief of suing for damages. The significance of these varying degrees of servile, semi-servile, and free labor will be seen in the following discussion of the social relations of the superior and inferior races.

In the entire circuit of the globe those races which have developed under a tropical sun are found to be indolent and fickle. From the standpoint of survival of the fittest, such vices are virtues, for severe and continuous exertion under tropical conditions bring prostration and predisposition to disease. Therefore, if such races are to adopt that industrious life which is a second nature to races of the temperate zones, it is only through some form of compulsion. The negro could not possibly have found a place in American industry had he come as a free man, and at the present time contract labor and peonage with the crime of “running away” are recognized in varying degrees by the laws of Southern states. These statutes have been held unconstitutional by the Supreme Court,[79] under an act of Congress passed in 1867, but the condition of peonage which they contemplate is considered by many planters as essential to the continuance of the cotton industry. One of them, in southwestern Georgia, a graduate of Columbia College, with five years of business training in the Northern states, is quoted in an interview as follows:[80]—

“We have two ways of handling our plantations. We rent small sections of forty acres each, and with these go a plough and the mule. In addition, I have about 450 hands who work on wages. These men are paid nine dollars a month, in addition to a fixed rate of food, which amounts to four pounds of meat a week, a certain percentage of vegetables, tobacco, sugar, flour, and some other commodities.

“These negroes live on the plantation, are given a roof over their heads, have garden patches, and several other more or less valuable privileges. They invariably come to me for small advances of money.

“These advances of money and rations and clothing, although there is not much of the latter, are frequently sufficient to put the negro in debt to us. The minute he finds he is in debt he naturally conceives it to be easier to go to work somewhere else and begin all over again, instead of paying his debts.

“Now, when a negro runs away and violates his contract, leaving us in the lurch, not only short of his labor, but short of the advances we have made to him in money and goods, what would happen if we depended simply and solely on our right to sue? In the first place, with 450 hands we would have 450 suits before the season is out, and if we won them all we would not be able to collect forty-five cents.

“The result is, that in Georgia and Alabama, and I believe in other states, the law recognizes the right of the planter to reclaim the laborer who has left in violation of his contract, whether he be actually in debt or not.

“Whether Judge Jones has declared this law constitutional or not, the planters in the black belt will have to maintain their right to claim their contract labor, or else they will have to go out of the business. Under any other system you would find it impossible to get in your cotton, because the negroes at the critical time would simply sit down and refuse to work. When they are well, we compel laborers to go to the field by force. This is the truth, and there is no use lying about it.”

This reasoning is entirely logical from the business standpoint. If production of wealth is the standard, contracts must be fulfilled and debts must be paid. Otherwise capital will not embark in business. But the reasoning does not stop with the negro. Once established, the practice spreads to other races. Instances are cited of white men held in peonage, negroes holding other negroes, and Italians forced to work in a phosphate mine.[81] It is an easy matter to get working men in debt. Many thousand rural justices keeping no records of convictions, hundreds of constables with fees depending on convictions, scores of petty crimes with penalties not usually enforced, contractors and planters eager for labor at the convict’s rating of 35 cents a day—neither the negro nor the poor white is safe. Immigrants avoid a country with such a record. Not only the dread of forced labor for themselves but the dread of competition with the low wages that the forced labor of others implies, keep the immigrants away from the South. The fame of peonage is spread among them before they leave their native land. The business that rests on coerced labor damages the whole community for its own temporary gain. The right to quit work is as sacred for the workman as the right to enforce contracts for the capitalist. It is just as necessary to get energetic labor as it is to get abundant capital to embark in business. By recognizing the right of workmen to violate contracts, the employer learns to content himself with contracts that will not hurt when violated. He learns to appeal to the workman’s motive to industry by methods that are not coercive. Admitting that the bulk of what is said about the negro’s fickleness is true, he nevertheless is indiscriminately maligned. The thousands that are unreliable furnish a cloak for suppressing the hundreds that are industrious. I have made comparisons of the pay-rolls of two gas works in Southern cities—the one employing negro stokers at 11 cents an hour, the other whites at 22 cents an hour, and both working 12 hours a day seven days a week. The negroes put in as many hours between pay-days as did the whites, and if they “laid off” after pay-day it is no more than any class of white workmen would do after two weeks of such exhausting work. The negro in Southern cities can scarcely hope to rise above 12 cents an hour, and white mechanics have a way of working with negro helpers at 10 cents an hour in order to lift their own wages to 20 cents an hour. White wage-earners and white employers in the South speak of the negroes’ efforts to get higher wages in the same words and tones as employers in the North speak of white wage-earners who have organized unions and demanded more pay. A foreman condemned his “niggers” for instability when they were leaving him at 10 cents an hour for a railroad job at 12½ cents an hour. Praising the Italians in comparison with the negro, he could not think of paying 17½ cents an hour for pick-and-shovel work, which Italians were said to be getting in another section of the state. The right to quit work is the right to get higher wages. If the higher wages are paid and proper treatment accorded, a process of natural selection ensues. The industrious and steady workmen of all races retain the jobs. The gas company referred to above, by a system of graded pay advancing with years of service, had sorted out a more steady and reliable force of negroes than they could have secured of whites at the rate of wages paid. The test is indeed a severe one where a race has always been looked upon as servile. With high wages regarded as “white man’s wages,” the process of individual selection does not work out, and the dominant race excuses its resort to whipping, beating, and peonage on the ground of the laziness which its methods of remuneration have not learned to counterbalance. Even the industrious Italians treated in this way would not be industrious—they would leave for other states.

The Malay races, to which the Filipinos belong, are, like the negroes, careless, thriftless, and disinclined to continuous exertion. In order to induce the Javanese to work, the Dutch government of Java sets aside a certain tract of government land for coffee planting, and compels each head of a household to set out and keep in order a certain number of coffee trees. On private estates in Java and in other Malay and Indian colonies, such as Burma, Ceylon, British India, where the government does not compel the native to take a contract to work, it nevertheless enforces contracts voluntarily made. In certain provinces of the Philippines “the tenants are usually in debt, and the old law which permits the creditor to imprison the debtor for non-payment of debt is still in force.... Landowners of a district frequently come together shortly before the crops are sold and agree among themselves how much interest to charge the tenants on their debts. This is for the purpose of charging the highest possible rate and at the same time retain tenants, who then could not leave, finding the same conditions prevailing throughout the district.”[82] In densely populated countries like Java and Southern India, where the native cannot set up for himself, he has no alternative except to work under these contracts, and this is also true in the more thickly populated districts of the Philippine Islands. But the case is different in sparsely settled countries like Burma, East Sumatra, and the greater part of the Philippines, where wages are so high that natives are not compelled by necessity to work continuously. “Speaking generally,” says Professor Jenks, “the unskilled Filipino laborer, while intelligent enough, is careless and thriftless. He in most cases wishes to take two or three days a week, on the average, to celebrate as feast days. In individual cases, where his wages have been increased, he has been known to lessen correspondingly the number of days per month which he would work. His income being sufficient to satisfy his modest needs, he could see no reason why he should toil longer than was necessary to earn his income.”[83]

Hence in these sparsely settled countries the Dutch and English governments have adopted, and Professor Jenks, in his report to the War Department, has recommended a limited use of the system of contract labor, not, however, for the native, but for imported Chinese. This system has existed in another of our newly acquired possessions, Hawaii, since 1852, where it applied to Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, and German immigrants, and whence it was abolished by the act of annexation in 1898.[84]

Filipino Governors
(From Census of the Philippine Islands)

Contract labor of this kind is quite different from the peonage and contract labor of the non-industrial races. It is similar to the indentured service of colonial times, in that the term of each contract is limited to a few years, and the contract is made by way of compensation for advanced expenses of immigration. The object is not, as in the case of slavery and peonage, to compel a shiftless race to work, but it is to develop the country by the introduction of an industrious race. The Chinese, after the expiration of their contracts, often become skilled laborers and merchants, and in the latter position their frugality and wiliness make them dangerous neighbors for the native Malay and Filipino races.[85] For this reason Professor Jenks recommends that employers be placed under bonds to return each contract Chinese coolie to China at the expiration of the period of contract, not to exceed three years, unless the government gives special permission for renewal of the contract. Governor Taft, in his report for the year 1902, while advocating a limited employment of Chinese contract coolies, said, “the truth is that, from a political standpoint, the unlimited introduction of the Chinese into these islands would be a great mistake. I believe the objection on the part of the Filipinos to such a course to be entirely logical and justified. The development of the islands by Chinamen would be at the expense of the Filipino people, and they may very well resent such a suggestion.”[86]

Governor Taft’s opinion is strongly supported by the special commissioner of the American Federation of Labor, who, after inquiries in the district surrounding Manila, reports as follows:—

“Their reluctance to work, continually harped upon by many employers, is simply the natural reluctance of a progressive people to work for low wages under bad treatment. When wages rise above the level of the barest and poorest necessaries of life, and where treatment is fair, there Filipinos are at work in any numbers required.”[87]

The situation here is similar to that of the negroes. In order to get two hundred steady workers at high wages it is necessary to try out a thousand or more. But the reports of the Philippine Commission show that with the process of selection which their engineers can pursue by means of the high wages on government work the results are satisfactory.[88]

“Of course,” continues Mr. Rosenberg in his report, “the Filipino worker cannot successfully compete—cheap as he can live—with the Chinese standard of living, hence the unceasing vilification of the Filipino workers by those employers and their following, who, seeing near by the unlimited supply of cheap Chinese labor, wish these islands to be thrown open to such labor, not only for the purpose of reducing the small wages of the Filipinos, but also to reduce that of the Chinese laborers now here. As one employer stated to me, ‘We want more Chinese, to keep them here for one or two years, then ship them back and get another lot, for the Chinese I have here now are becoming too independent and want more pay.’”

Free Labor.—The free laborer is not compelled by law to work. Then why should he work? Why does he work? The answer is found within himself. He wants something that he cannot get without working. Though this may seem a trifling question and a self-evident answer, the question and answer are the foundation of all questions of free institutions. For the non-working races and classes or the spasmodic and unreliable workers are the savages, paupers, criminals, idiots, lunatics, drunkards, and the great tribe of exploiters, “grafters,” despots, and “leisure classes,” who live on the work of others. Nearly every question of social pathology may be resolved to this, Why does he not work? And nearly every social ill would be cured if the non-workers could be brought voluntarily to work.

There are just two grand motives which induce the freeman to work—necessity and ambition. Necessity is the desire for quantity, quality, and variety of things to be used. The term is elastic. It is psychological, not material. It includes, of course, the wants of mere animal existence—food, clothing, shelter. But this is a small part. The cost of the mere quantity needed to support life is less than the added cost needed to secure the quality and variety that satisfy the taste and habits. A pig enjoys raw corn, but a man requires corn cake at five times the cost. Tastes and habits depend on one’s childhood, one’s training, one’s associations, and kind of work. The necessities of a Chinese coolie, Italian immigrant, or negro plantation hand are less, and cost less, than those of a skilled mechanic or a college graduate, because his associations have been different, and his present work is different. But necessity goes farther. It includes the wants of the family considered as a unit, and not merely the wants of the single man or woman, else the race would not continue to increase. Furthermore, social obligations impose added necessity. Compulsory education of children compels parents to support their children instead of living on their wages. Laws regulating sanitation and tenements compel the tenant to pay more rent. The necessities of a farm-hand on the estates of Italy are less than those of the same hand in the cities of America.

Ambition is the desire for an improved position for one’s self and family—for better quality and greater variety of material things. It demands a style of clothing and living suitable to the improved position aspired to. It demands an education for one’s children superior to the minimum set by compulsory schooling. It demands thrift and economy for the sake of independence or the ability to hold on until one’s demands are conceded. Ambition looks to the future—necessity is based on the past. The negro or the Malay works three days and loafs three because three days’ wages procure his necessities. The Chinaman, or Italian, or Jewish immigrant works six days and saves the wages of three because the future is vivid to his imagination. With similar necessities one is ambitious, the other is content.

The scope and possibility of evoking ambition depend upon the institution of private property. Property in human beings suppresses it, unless occasionally a slave is permitted to purchase his freedom. The wage system evokes ambition if the way is open for promotion or for escape by becoming an owner. Tenancy is on a still higher level, but most of all, for the masses of men, the ownership of his own small property is the keenest spur to ambition, for it rewards the worker with all of his product. This motive is the surest test of an individual’s or a race’s future. Compare the negro and the Italian cotton grower as tenants in the new vocation opening up to the latter. “It is always difficult,” says the observant planter, Mr. Stone,[89] “to get a negro to plant and properly cultivate the outer edges of his field—the extreme ends of his rows, his ditch banks, etc. The Italian is so jealous of the use of every foot for which he pays rent that he will cultivate with a hoe places too small to be worked with a plough, and derive a revenue from spots to which a negro would not give a moment’s thought. I have seen them cultivate right down to the water’s edge the banks of bayous that had never been touched by the plough. I have seen them walk through their fields and search out every skipped place in every row and carefully put in seed to secure a perfect stand. I have seen them make more cotton per acre than the negro on the adjoining cut, gather it from two to four weeks earlier, and then put in the extra time earning money by picking in the negro’s field.”

But ambition has its penalty. It is equivalent to an increase in the supply of labor. As an ambitious proprietor the increase goes into his permanent property, but the ambitious wage-earner accepts a lower rate of pay. His fellows see the reduction and go still lower. The see-saw continues until wages reach the level of necessities, and there is nothing left for ambition. The Jewish sweat-shop is the tragic penalty paid by that ambitious race. In the Illinois coal mines the wages were reduced one-third during twelve years of Italian and Slav immigration. The ambitious races are the industrial races. But their ambition and their industry bring the momentous problem of destructive competition. It might seem that this evil would correct itself—that an increase in the products of one industry would be offset by an increase in other industries; that therefore the increased supply in one would not be forced upon the market at lower prices, but would be exchanged on the same terms as before for the increased supply in others. This is indeed the case in prosperous times. All industries advance together, and the increasing supply of one is merely an increasing demand for others. But for some reason, industries do not always harmoniously advance together. And when the disproportion appears, the workers who are blindly but ambitiously pushing ahead endeavor to overcome, by increasing the quantity of output, what they lose by reducing the price. There is but one immediate and practical remedy—the organization of labor to regulate competition. The method of organization is to do in concert through self-sacrifice what the non-industrial races do individually for self-indulgence; namely, refuse to work. Where the one loafs the other strikes. While the necessities of the workers set the minimum below which wages cannot fall, and their physical endurance sets the maximum hours beyond which they cannot work, the labor-union, by means of the strike or the threat to strike, sets a higher minimum of wages and a lower maximum of hours, which leaves room for ambition. Eventually the higher wage and the shorter hours become habitual and become a higher level of necessities. Gifted individuals may, indeed, rise above the wage-earning class by their own efforts, but labor organization alone can raise the class as a whole.

The organization of workmen in labor unions has been more difficult in this than in other free countries, owing to the competition of races. Heretofore it has been the easiest possible matter for a manager, apprehensive of agitators in forming a union, to introduce a new race and a new language into his works. Indeed, almost the only device and symptom of originality displayed by American employers in disciplining their labor force has been that of playing one race against another. They have, as a rule, been weak in methods of conciliation and feelings of consideration for their employees, as well as in the means of safeguarding life and health, but they have been strong with the weapon “divide and conquer.” The number of races they have drawn upon is often amazing. The anthracite mine workers comprise nineteen languages and dialects. The employees of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company belong to thirty-two nationalities and speak twenty-seven languages. Such a medley of races offers indeed a disheartening prospect to the union organizer. And therefore when these races finally organize, the change in their moral character must be looked upon as the most significant of the social and industrial revolutions of our time. The United Mine Workers of America, with 300,000 members, is very largely composed of recent immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. So with the Longshoremen, the United Garment Workers, and the Butcher Workmen. These are or have been among the strongest and best disciplined of American labor-unions. The newest races of the past twenty years have been coming long enough to have members who speak the English language and act as interpreters and leaders, and this is essential where the speeches at a union meeting must be translated often into four or five languages before the subject can be voted upon. Furthermore, the recruiting area for new races has been nearly exhausted, and the races now coming find their fellow-countrymen already in the unions. In the anthracite coal field I saw a dozen Slovaks just arrived from Hungary, but persuaded by their unionized precursors not to take the places of strikers. In New York a shipload of Italians in time of strike has been taken directly into the union. Such a sight would have been unlikely a dozen years ago.

The competition of races is the competition of standards of living. The reason the Chinaman or the Italian can save three days’ wages is because wages have been previously fixed by the greater necessities of more advanced races. But competition has no respect for superior races. The race with lowest necessities displaces others. The cotton textile industry of New England was originally operated by the educated sons and daughters of American stock. The Irish displaced many of them, then the French Canadians completed the displacement; then, when the children of the French had begun to acquire a higher standard, contingents of Portuguese, Greeks, Syrians, Poles, and Italians entered to prevent a rise, and latterly the Scotch-Irish from the Appalachian Mountains came down to the valleys of the South, and with their low wages, long hours, and child labor, set another brake on the standard of living. Lastly, Italians are beginning to be imported to supplement the “poor whites.” Branches of the clothing industry in New York began with English and Scotch tailors, were then captured by Irish and Germans, then by Russian Jews, and lastly by Italians, while in Boston the Portuguese took a share, and in Chicago the Poles, Bohemians, and Scandinavians. Almost every great manufacturing and mining industry has experienced a similar substitution of races. As rapidly as a race rises in the scale of living, and through organization begins to demand higher wages and resist the pressure of long hours and overexertion, the employers substitute another race and the process is repeated. Each race comes from a country lower in the scale than that of the preceding, until finally the ends of the earth have been ransacked in the search for low standards of living combined with patient industriousness. Europe has been exhausted, Asia has been drawn upon, and there remain but three regions of the temperate zones from which a still lower standard can be expected. These are China, Japan, and India. The Chinese have been excluded by law, the Japanese and Koreans are coming in increasing numbers, and the Indian coolies remain to be experimented upon. That employers will make strenuous efforts to bring in these last remaining races in the progressive decline of standards, to repeal the Chinese prohibitive laws and to prevent additions to these laws, naturally follows from the progress toward higher standards and labor organization already made by the Italian and the Slav.

The trade-union is often represented as an imported and un-American institution. It is true that in some unions the main strength is in the English workmen. But the majority of unionists are immigrants and children of immigrants from countries that know little of unionism. Ireland and Italy have nothing to compare with the trade-union movement of England, but the Irish are the most effective organizers of the American unions, and the Italians are becoming the most ardent unionists. Most remarkable of all, the individualistic Jew from Russia, contrary to his race instinct, is joining the unions. The American unions, in fact, grow out of American conditions, and are an American product. Although wages are two or three times as high as in his European home, the immigrant is driven by competition and the pressure of employers into a physical exertion which compels him to raise his standard of living in order to have strength to keep at work. He finds also that the law forbids his children to work, and compels him to send them to school to maintain a higher standard and to support his children he must earn more wages. This he can do in no other way than by organizing a union. The movement is of course aided by English-speaking outsiders or “agitators,” especially by the Irish, but it finds a prompt response in the necessities of the recruits. Labor organization is essentially the outcome of American freedom, both as a corrective to the evils of free competition and as an exercise of the privilege of free association.

When once moved by the spirit of unionism, the immigrants from low-standard countries are the most dangerous and determined of unionists. They have no obligations, little property, and but meagre necessities that compel them to yield. The bituminous coal miners were on strike four months in 1897 and the anthracite mine workers five months in 1902. Unionism comes to them as a discovery and a revelation. Suddenly to find that men of other races whom they have hated are really brothers, and that their enmity has been encouraged for the profit of a common oppressor, is the most profound awakening of which they are capable. Their resentment toward employers who have kept them apart, their devotion to their new-found brothers, are terrible and pathetic. With their emotional temperament, unionism becomes not merely a fight for wages but a religious crusade. It is in the nature of retribution that, after bringing to this country all the industrial races of Europe and Asia in the effort to break down labor organizations, these races should so soon have wiped out race antagonism and, joining together in the most powerful of labor-unions, have wrenched from their employers the greatest advances in wages.

There is but one thing that stands in the way of complete unionization in many of the industries; namely, a flood of immigration too great for assimilation. With nearly a million immigrants a year the pressure upon unions seems almost resistless. A few of the unions which control the trade, like the mine workers and longshoremen, with high initiation fees and severe terms of admission, are able to protect themselves by virtue of strength already gained. But in the coast states and on miscellaneous labor this strategic advantage does not exist, and the standards are set by the newest immigrants.