The Old World in the New / The Significance of Past and Present Immigration to the American People

Some are quite cheerful about the confusion, cross-purposes, and delay that come with heterogeneity, because they think the variety of views introduced by immigration is a fine thing, "keeps us from getting into a rut." The plain truth is, that rarely does an immigrant bring in his intellectual baggage anything of use to us. The music of Mascagni and Debussy, the plays of Ibsen and Maeterlinck, the poetry of Rostand and Hauptmann, the fiction of Jókai and Sienkiewicz were not brought to us by way of Ellis Island. What we want is not ideas merely, but fruitful ideas, fructifying ideas. By debating the ideas of Nietzsche, Ostwald, Bergson, Metchnikoff, or Ellen Key, American thought is stimulated. But should we gain from the introduction of old Asiatic points of view, which would reopen such questions as witchcraft, child-marriage, and suttee? The clashings that arise from the presence among us of many voters with medieval minds are sheer waste of energy. While we Americans wrangle over the old issues of clericalism, separate schools, and "personal liberty," the little homogeneous peoples—Norwegians and Danes and New Zealanders—are forging ahead of us in rational politics and learning to look pityingly upon us as a chaos rather than a people.

POLITICAL MYSTICISM VS. COMMON SENSE

If you should ask an Englishman whether the tone of political life in his country would remain unaffected by the admission to the electorate of a couple of million Cypriotes, Vlachs, and Bessarabians after five years' residence, he would take you for a madman. Suggest to the German that the plane of political intelligence in reading and thinking Germany would not be lowered by the access to the ballot-box of multitudes of Serbs, Georgians, and Druses of Lebanon, and he will consign you to bedlam. Assure the son of Norway that the vote of the Persian or Yemenite, of sixty months' residence in Norway, will be as often wise and right as his own, and he will be insulted. It is only we Americans who assume that the voting of the Middle Atlantic States, with their million of naturalized citizens, or of the East North Central States, with their million, is as sane, discriminating, and forward-looking as it would be without them.

The Italian historian and sociologist Ferrero, after reviewing our immigration policy, concludes that the Americans, far from being "practical," are really the mystics of the modern world. He says: "To confer citizenship each year upon great numbers of men born and educated in foreign countries—men who come with ideas and sympathies totally out of spirit with the diverse conditions in the new country; to grant them political rights they do not want, and of which they have never thought; to compel them to declare allegiance to a political constitution which they often do not understand; to try to transform subjects of old European monarchies into free citizens of young American republics over night—is not all this to do violence to common sense?"

CHAPTER XII

AMERICAN BLOOD AND IMMIGRANT BLOOD

As I sought to show, near the end of my initial chapter, the conditions of settlement of this country caused those of uncommon energy and venturesomeness to outmultiply the rest of the population. Thus came into existence the pioneering breed; and this breed increased until it is safe to estimate that fully half of white Americans with native grandparents have one or more pioneers among their ancestors. Whatever valuable race traits distinguish the American people from the parent European stocks are due to the efflorescence of this breed. Without it there would have been little in the performance of our people to arrest the attention of the world. Now we confront the melancholy spectacle of this pioneer breed being swamped and submerged by an overwhelming tide of latecomers from the old-world hive. In Atlanta still seven out of eight white men had American parents; in Nashville and Richmond, four out of five; in Kansas City, two out of three; and in Los Angeles, one out of two; but in Detroit, Cleveland, and Paterson one man out of five had American parents; in Chicago and New York, one out of six; in Milwaukee, one out of seven; and in Fall River, one out of nine. Certainly never since the colonial era have the foreign-born and their children formed so large a proportion of the American people as at the present moment. I scanned 368 persons as they passed me in Union Square, New York, at a time when the garment-workers of the Fifth Avenue lofts were returning to their homes. Only thirty-eight of these passers-by had the type of face one would find at a county fair in the West or South.

In this sense it is fair to say that the blood now being injected into the veins of our people is "sub-common." To one accustomed to the aspect of the normal American population, the Caliban type shows up with a frequency that is startling. Observe immigrants not as they come travel-wan up the gang-plank, nor as they issue toil-begrimed from pit's mouth or mill gate, but in their gatherings, washed, combed, and in their Sunday best. You are struck by the fact that from ten to twenty per cent. are hirsute, low-browed, big-faced persons of obviously low mentality. Not that they suggest evil. They simply look out of place in black clothes and stiff collar, since clearly they belong in skins, in wattled huts at the close of the Great Ice Age. These oxlike men are descendants of those who always stayed behind. Those in whom the soul burns with the dull, smoky flame of the pine-knot stuck to the soil, and are now thick in the sluiceways of immigration. Those in whom it burns with a clear, luminous flame have been attracted to the cities of the home land and, having prospects, have no motive to submit themselves to the hardships of the steerage.

To the practised eye, the physiognomy of certain groups unmistakably proclaims inferiority of type. I have seen gatherings of the foreign-born in which narrow and sloping foreheads were the rule. The shortness and smallness of the crania were very noticeable. There was much facial asymmetry. Among the women, beauty, aside from the fleeting, epidermal bloom of girlhood, was quite lacking. In every face there was something wrong—lips thick, mouth coarse, upper lip too long, cheek-bones too high, chin poorly formed, the bridge of the nose hollowed, the base of the nose tilted, or else the whole face prognathous. There were so many sugar-loaf heads, moon-faces, slit mouths, lantern-jaws, and goose-bill noses that one might imagine a malicious jinn had amused himself by casting human beings in a set of skew-molds discarded by the Creator.

Our captains of industry give a crowbar to the immigrant with a number nine face on a number six head, make a dividend out of him, and imagine that is the end of the matter. They overlook that this man will beget children in his image—two or three times as many as the American—and that these children will in turn beget children. They chuckle at having opened an inexhaustible store of cheap tools and, lo! the American people is being altered for all time by these tools. Once before, captains of industry took a hand in making this people. Colonial planters imported Africans to hoe in the sun, to "develop" the tobacco, indigo, and rice plantations. Then, as now, business-minded men met with contempt the protests of a few idealists against their way of "building up the country."

Those promoters of prosperity are dust, but they bequeathed a situation which in four years wiped out more wealth than two hundred years of slavery had built up, and which presents to-day the one unsolvable problem in this country. Without likening immigrants to negroes, one may point out how the latter-day employer resembles the old-time planter in his blindness to the effects of his labor policy upon the blood of the nation.

IMMIGRATION AND GOOD LOOKS

It is reasonable to expect an early falling off in the frequency of good looks in the American people. It is unthinkable that so many persons with crooked faces, coarse mouths, bad noses, heavy jaws, and low foreheads can mingle their heredity with ours without making personal beauty yet more rare among us than it actually is. So much ugliness is at last bound to work to the surface. One ought to see the horror on the face of a fine-looking Italian or Hungarian consul when one asks him innocently, "Is the physiognomy of these immigrants typical of your people?" That the new immigrants are inferior in looks to the old immigrants may be seen by comparing, in a Labor Day parade, the faces of the cigar-makers and the garment-workers with those of the teamsters, piano-movers and steam-fitters.

Even aside from the pouring in of the ill-favored, the crossing of the heterogeneous is bound to lessen good looks among us. It is noteworthy that the beauty which has often excited the admiration of European visitors has shown itself most in communities of comparative purity of blood. New England, Virginia, and Kentucky have been renowned for their beautiful women, but not the commonwealths with a mixed population. It is in the less-heterogeneous parts of the Middle West, such as Indiana and Kansas, that one is struck by the number of comely women.

Twenty-four years ago the greatest living philosopher advised inquiring Japanese statesmen to interdict marriages of Japanese with foreigners, on the ground that the crossings of the too-unlike produce human beings with a "chaotic constitution." Herbert Spencer went on to say, "When the varieties mingled diverge beyond a certain slight degree, the result is inevitably a bad one." The greatest students of hybridism to-day confirm Spencer's surmise. The fusing of American with German and Scandinavian immigrants was only a reblending of kindred stocks, for Angles, Jutes, Danes, and Normans were wrought of yore into the fiber of the English breed. But the human varieties being collected in this country by the naked action of economic forces are too dissimilar to blend without producing a good many faces of a "chaotic constitution." Just as there is a wide difference in looks between Bretons and Normans, Dutch and Hanoverians, the Chinese of Hu-peh and the Chinese of Fukien, so broad contrasts in good looks may in time appear between the pure-blood parts of our country and those which have absorbed a motley assortment of immigrants.

STATURE AND PHYSIQUE

Although the Slavs stand up well, our South Europeans run to low stature. A gang of Italian navvies filing along the street present, by their dwarfishness, a curious contrast to other people. The Portuguese, the Greeks, and the Syrians are, from our point of view, undersized. The Hebrew immigrants are very poor in physique. The average of Hebrew women in New York is just over five feet, and the young women in the garment factories, although well developed, appear to be no taller than native girls of thirteen.

On the physical side the Hebrews are the polar opposite of our pioneer breed. Not only are they undersized and weak-muscled, but they shun bodily activity and are exceedingly sensitive to pain. Says a settlement worker: "You can't make boy scouts out of the Jews. There's not a troop of them in all New York." Another remarks: "They are absolute babies about pain. Their young fellows will scream with a hard lick." Students observe that husky young Hebrews on the foot-ball team lack grit, and will "take on" if they are bumped into hard. A young Ontario miner noticed that his Hebrew comrades groaned and wept over the hardships of the trail. "They kept swapping packs with me, imagining my pack must be lighter because I wasn't hollering."

Natural selection, frontier life, and the example of the red man produced in America a type of great physical self-control, gritty, uncomplaining, merciless to the body through fear of becoming "soft." To this roaming, hunting, exploring, adventurous breed what greater contrast is there than the denizens of the Ghetto? The second generation, to be sure, overtop their parents and are going in for athletics. Hebrews under Irish names abound in the prize-ring, and not long ago a sporting editor printed the item, "Jack Sullivan received a letter in Yiddish yesterday from his sister." Still, it will be long before they produce the stoical type who blithely fares forth into the wilderness, portaging his canoe, poling it against the current, wading in the torrents, living on bacon and beans, and sleeping on the ground, all for "fun" or "to keep hard."

VITALITY

"The Slavs," remarks a physician, "are immune to certain kinds of dirt. They can stand what would kill a white man." The women do not have puerperal fever, as our women would under their conditions. The men violate every sanitary law, yet survive. The Slavs come from a part of the world in which never more than a third of the children have grown up. In every generation, dirt, ignorance, superstition, and lack of medical attention have winnowed out all but the sturdiest. Among Americans, two-thirds of the children grow up, which means that we keep alive many of the tenderer, who would certainly have perished in the Slavic world. There is, however, no illusion more grotesque than to suppose that our people is to be rejuvenated by absorbing these millions of hardy peasantry, that, to quote a champion of free immigration, "The new-comers in America will bring fresh, vigorous blood to a rather sterile and inbred stock." The fact is that the immigrant stock quickly loses here its distinctive ruggedness. The physicians practising among rural Poles notice a great saving of infant life under American conditions. Says one: "I see immigrant women and their grown daughters having infants at the same time, and the children of the former will die of the things that the children of the latter get well of. The same holds when the second generation and the third bear at the same time. The latter save their children better than the former." The result is a marked softening of fiber between the immigrant women and the granddaughters. Among the latter are many of a finer, but frailer, mold, who would be ruined in health if they worked in the field the third day after confinement, as grandmother did. In the old country there were very few of this type who survived infancy in a peasant family.

There is, then, no lasting revitalization from this tide of life. If our people has become weak, no transfusion of peasants will set it on its feet again; for their blood too, soon thins. The trouble, if you call it that, is not with the American people, but with the wide diffusion among us of a civilized manner of life. Where the struggle for existence is mitigated not merely for the upper quarter of society, as formerly in the Old World, but for the upper three-quarters, as in this and other democratic countries, the effects of keeping alive the less hardy are bound to show. The remedy for the alleged degeneration of our stock is simple, but drastic. If we want only constitutions that can stand hardship and abuse, let us treat the young as they are treated in certain poverty-stricken parts of Russia. Since the mother is obliged to pass the day at work in distant fields, the nursling of a few months is left alone, crawling about on the dirt floor of the hut and comforting itself, when it cries from hunger, by sucking poultices of chewed bread tied to its hands and feet.

MORALITY

That the Mediterranean peoples are morally below the races of northern Europe is as certain as any social fact. Even when they were dirty, ferocious barbarians, these blonds were truth-tellers. Be it pride or awkwardness or lack of imagination or fair-play sense, something has held them back from the nimble lying of the southern races. Immigration officials find that the different peoples are as day and night in point of veracity, and report vast trouble in extracting the truth from certain brunet nationalities.

Some champions of immigration have become broad-minded enough to think small of the cardinal virtues. The Syrians, on Boston testimony, took "great pains to cheat the charitable societies" and are "extremely untrustworthy and unreliable." Their defender, however, after admitting their untruthfulness, explains that their lying is altruistic. If, at the fork of a road, you ask a Syrian your way, he will, in sheer transport of sympathy, study you to discover what answer will most please you. "The Anglo-Saxon variety of truthfulness," she adds, "is not a Syrian characteristic"; but, "if truthfulness includes loyalty, ready self-denial to promote a cause that seems right, the Syrian is to that extent truthful." Quoting a Syrian's admission that his fellow-merchants pay their debts for their credit's sake, but will cheat the customer, she comments, "This, however, does not seem to be exclusively a Syrian vice." To such miserable paltering does a sickly sentimentality lead.

In southern Europe, team-work along all lines is limited by selfishness and bad faith. Professor Fairchild notes "the inveterate factionalism and commercial dishonesty so characteristic of the [Greek] race," "the old dishonesty and inability to work together." "One of the maxims of Greek business life, translated into the American vernacular, is 'Put out the other fellow's eye.'" "These people seemed incapable of carying on a large coöperative business with harmony and success."

Nothing less than verminous is the readiness of the southern Europeans to prey upon their fellows. Never were British or Scandinavian immigrants so bled by fellow-countrymen as are South Italian, Greek and Semitic immigrants. Their spirit of mutual helpfulness saved them from padrone, "banker," and Black Hand. Among our South Italians this spirit shines out only when it is a question of shielding from American justice some cut-throat of their own race. The Greek is full of tricks to skin the greenhorn. A grocer will warn fellow-countrymen who have just established themselves in his town that he will have the police on them for violating municipal ordinances unless they buy groceries from him. The Greek mill-hand sells the greenhorn a job, and takes his chances on the foreman giving the man work. A Greek who knows a little English will get a Greek peddler arrested in order that he may get the interpreter's fee. The Greek boot-black who has freed himself from his serfdom, instead of showing up the system, starts a place of his own, and exploits his help as mercilessly as ever he was exploited.

The Northerners seem to surpass the southern Europeans in innate ethical endowment. Comparison of their behavior in marine disasters shows that discipline, sense of duty, presence of mind, and consideration for the weak are much more characteristic of northern Europeans. The southern Europeans, on the other hand, are apt, in their terror, to forget discipline, duty, women, children, everything but the saving of their own lives. In shipwreck it is the exceptional Northerner who forgets his duty, and the exceptional Southerner who is bound by it. The suicide of Italian officers on board the doomed Monte Tabor, the Notice, and the Ajace, is in striking contrast to the sense of responsibility of the Northerners in charge of the Cimbria, the Geiser, the Strathcona, and the City of Paris. Compare the mad struggle for the boats among the southern Europeans on La Bourgogne, the Ailsa, and the Utopia, with the self-possession of the Scandinavian emigrants on the Waesland and the Danmark, and the consideration for women and children shown on the sinking Mohegan, the Waesland, and the Titanic. Among all nationalities the Americans bear the palm for coolness, orderly saving of life, and consideration for the weak in shipwreck, but they will lose these traits in proportion as they absorb excitable mercurial blood from southern Europe.

NATURAL ABILITY

The performance of the foreign-born and their children after they have had access to American opportunities justifies the democrat's faith that latent capacity exists all through the humbler strata of society. On the other hand, it also confirms the aristocrat's insistence that social ranks correspond somewhat with the grades of natural ability existing within a people. The descendants of Europe's lowly are to be met in all the upper levels of American society, but not so frequently as the descendents of those who were high or rising in the land they left.

In respect to the value it contains, a stream of immigrants may be representative, super-representative, or sub-representative of the home people. When it is a fair sample, it is representative; when it is richer in wheat and poorer in chaff, it is super-representative; when the reverse is the case, it is sub-representative. What counts here, of course, is not the value the immigrants may have acquired by education or experience, but that fundamental worth which does not depend on opportunity, and which may be transmitted to one's descendants. Now, in the present state of our knowledge, it is perhaps risky to make a comparison in ability between the races which contributed the old immigration and those which are supplying the new immigration. Though backward, the latter may contain as good stuff. But it is fair to assume that a super-representative immigration from one stock is worth more to us than a sub-representative immigration from another stock, and that an influx which sub-represents a European people will thin the blood of the American people.

Many things have decided whether Europe should send America cream or skimmed milk. Religious or political oppression is apt to drive out the better elements. Racial oppression cannot be evaded by mere conformity; hence the emigration it sets up is apt to be representative. An unsubdued and perilous land attracts the more bold and enterprising. The seekers of homesteads include men of better stuff than the job-seekers attracted by high wages for unskilled labor. Only economic motives set in motion the sub-common people, but even in an economic emigration the early stage brings more people of initiative than the later. The deeper, straighter, and smoother the channels of migration, the lower the stratum they can tap.

It is not easy to value the early elements that were wrought into the American people. Often a stream of immigration that started with the best drained from the lower levels after it had worn itself a bed. It is therefore only in a broad way that I venture to classify the principal colonial migrations as follows:

Super-representative: English Pilgrims, Puritans, Quakers, Catholics, Scotch Covenanters, French Huguenots, German sectaries.

Representative: English of Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas, Scotch-Irish, Scotch Highlanders, Dutch, and Swedes.

Sub-representative: English of early Georgia, transported English, eighteenth-century Germans.

In our national period the Germans of 1848 stand out as a super-representative flow. The Irish stream has been representative, as was also the early German migration. The German inflow since 1870 has brought us very few of the élite of their people, and I have already given reasons for believing that the Scandinavian stream is not altogether representative. Our immigration from Great Britain has distinctly fallen off in grade since the chances in America came to be less attractive than those in the British Empire. However, no less an authority than Sir Richard Cartwright thinks that "between 1866 and 1896 one-third at least of the whole male population of Canada between the ages of twenty and forty found their way to the United States," and this "included an immense percentage of the most intelligent and adventurous." To-day we reciprocate by sending Western farmers with capital into the Canadian Northwest. Our loss has amounted to as many as 100,000 in a single year.

Oppression is now out of fashion over most of Europe, and our public lands are gone. Economic motives more and more bring us immigrants, and such motives will not uproot the educated, the propertied, the established, the well connected. The children of success are not migrating, which means that we get few scions from families of proved capacity. Europe retains most of her brains, but sends multitudes of the common and the sub-common. There is little sign of an intellectual element among the Magyars, Russians, South Slavs, Italians, Greeks, or Portuguese. This does not hold, however, for currents created by race discrimination or oppression. The Armenian, Syrian, Finnish, and Russo-Hebrew streams seem representative, and the first wave of Hebrews out of Russia in the eighties was superior. The Slovaks, German Poles, Lithuanians, Esthonians, and other restive subject groups probably send us a fair sample of their quality.

RACE SUICIDE

The fewer brains they have to contribute, the lower the place immigrants take among us, and the lower the place they take, the faster they multiply. In 1890, in our cities, a thousand foreign-born women could show 565 children under five years of age to 309 children shown by a thousand native women. By 1900 the contribution of the foreign women had risen to 612, and that of the American women had declined to 296. From such figures some argue that the "sterile" Americans need the immigrants in order to supply population. It would be nearer the truth to argue that the competition of low-standard immigrants is the root cause of the mysterious "sterility" of Americans. Certainly their record down to 1830 proved the Americans to be as fertile a race as ever lived, and the decline in their fertility coincides in time and in locality with the advent of the immigrant flood. In the words of General Francis A. Walker, "Not only did the decline in the native element, as a whole, take place in singular correspondence with the excess of foreign arrivals, but it occurred chiefly in just those regions"—"in those States and in the very counties," he says elsewhere—"to which those newcomers most frequently resorted."

"Our immigrants," says a superintendent of charities, "often come here with no standards whatever. In their homes you find no sheets on the bed, no slips on the pillows, no cloth on the table, and no towels save old rags. Even in the mud-floor cabins of the poorest negroes of the South you find sheets, pillow-slips, and towels, for by serving and associating with the whites the blacks have gained standards. But many of the foreigners have no means of getting our home standards after they are here. No one shows them. They can't see into American homes, and no Americans associate with them." The Americans or Americanized immigrants who are obliged to live on wages fixed by the competition of such people must cut somewhere. If they do not choose to "live in a pig-pen and bring up one's children like pigs," they will save their standards by keeping down the size of the family. Because he keeps them clean, neatly dressed, and in school, children are an economic burden to the American. Because he lets them run wild and puts them to work early, children are an asset to the low-standard foreigner.

As they feel the difficulty of keeping up their standards on a Slav wage, the older immigrant stocks are becoming sterile, even as the old Americans became sterile. In a generation complaint will be heard that the Slavs, too, are shirking big families, and that we must admit prolific Persians, Uzbegs, and Bokhariots, in order to offset the fatal sterility that attacks every race after it has become Americanized. Very truly says a distinguished economist, in praise of immigration: "The cost of rearing children in the United States is rapidly rising. In many, perhaps in most cases, it is simpler, speedier, and cheaper to import labor than to breed it." In like vein it is said that "a healthy immigrant lad of eighteen is a clear $1000 added to the national wealth of the United States."

Just so. "The Roman world was laughing when it died." Any couple or any people that does not feel it has anything to transmit to its children may well reason in such fashion. A couple may reflect, "It is simpler, speedier, and cheaper for us to adopt orphans than to produce children of our own." A nation may reason, "Why burden ourselves with the rearing of children? Let them perish unborn in the womb of time. The immigrants will keep up the population." A people that has no more respect for its ancestors and no more pride of race than this deserves the extinction that surely awaits it.

APPENDIX

TABLE I

ANNUAL IMMIGRATION 1820-1913

TABLE II

TOTAL NUMBER OF IMMIGRANTS, BY DECADES

TABLE III

INCREASE OF FOREIGN-BORN IN POPULATION BY DECADES

TABLE IV

FOREIGN-BORN IN UNITED STATES IN 1910