| Number in Millions | Per Cent | |
| English | 136 | 27.2 |
| German | 82 | 16.4 |
| Chinese[A] | 70 | 14.0 |
| French | 28 | 9.6 |
| Russian | 30 | 6.0 |
| Arabic | 25 | 5.0 |
| Italian | 18 | 4.6 |
| Spanish | 12 | 2.6 |
| Scandinavian | 11 | 2.2 |
| Dutch and Flemish | 9 | 1.9 |
| Minor European[B] | 34 | 6.8 |
| Minor Asiatic[B] | 16 | 3.2 |
| Minor African and Polynesian [B] | 2+ | 0.5 |
| Total | 473+ | 100.0 |
English, therefore, now leads all other languages in the number of its readers. Three-fourths of the world's mail matter is addressed in English. More than half of the world's newspapers are printed in English, and, as they have a larger circulation than those in other languages, probably three-fourths of the world's newspaper reading is done in English.
The languages next in importance, French and German, cannot maintain their relative positions because English has more than half of the new land in the temperate zone and they have none. The languages which have the rest of the new territory, Spanish and Russian, are not established as culture languages, as English is. No other language, not even French or German, has a vernacular so uniform and well established, and with so few variations from the literary language. English is spoken in the United States by more than fifty million people with so slight variations that no foreigner would ever notice them. No other language whatever can show more than a fraction of this number of persons who speak so nearly alike.
It is then probable that, within the century, English will be the vernacular of a quarter instead of a tenth of the people of the world, and be read by a half instead of a quarter of the people who can read.
The race problem has sometimes been described as a problem in assimilation. It is not always clear, however, what assimilation means. Historically the word has had two distinct significations. According to earlier usage it meant "to compare" or "to make like." According to later usage it signifies "to take up and incorporate."
There is a process that goes on in society by which individuals spontaneously acquire one another's language, characteristic attitudes, habits, and modes of behavior. There is also a process by which individuals and groups of individuals are taken over and incorporated into larger groups. Both processes have been concerned in the formation of modern nationalities. The modern Italian, Frenchman, and German is a composite of the broken fragments of several different racial groups. Interbreeding has broken up the ancient stocks, and interaction and imitation have created new national types which exhibit definite uniformities in language, manners, and formal behavior.
It has sometimes been assumed that the creation of a national type is the specific function of assimilation and that national solidarity is based upon national homogeneity and "like-mindedness." The extent and importance of the kind of homogeneity that individuals of the same nationality exhibit have been greatly exaggerated. Neither interbreeding nor interaction has created, in what the French term "nationals," a more than superficial likeness or like-mindedness. Racial differences have, to be sure, disappeared or been obscured, but individual differences remain. Individual differences, again, have been intensified by education, personal competition, and the division of labor, until individual members of cosmopolitan groups probably represent greater variations in disposition, temperament, and mental capacity than those which distinguished the more homogeneous races and peoples of an earlier civilization.
What then, precisely, is the nature of the homogeneity which characterizes cosmopolitan groups?
The growth of modern states exhibits the progressive merging of smaller, mutually exclusive, into larger and more inclusive, social groups. This result has been achieved in various ways, but it has usually been followed or accompanied by a more or less complete adoption by the members of the smaller groups of the language, technique, and mores of the larger and more inclusive ones. The immigrant readily takes over the language, manners, the social ritual, and outward forms of his adopted country. In America it has become proverbial that a Pole, Lithuanian, or Norwegian cannot be distinguished, in the second generation, from an American born of native parents.
There is no reason to assume that this assimilation of alien groups to native standards has modified to any great extent fundamental racial characteristics. It has, however, erased the external signs which formerly distinguished the members of one race from those of another.
On the other hand, the breaking up of the isolation of smaller groups has had the effect of emancipating the individual man, giving him room and freedom for the expansion and development of his individual aptitudes.
What one actually finds in cosmopolitan groups, then, is a superficial uniformity, a homogeneity in manners and fashion, associated with relatively profound differences in individual opinions, sentiments, and beliefs. This is just the reverse of what one meets among primitive peoples, where diversity in external forms, as between different groups, is accompanied by a monotonous sameness in the mental attitudes of individuals. There is a striking similarity in the sentiments and mental attitudes of peasant peoples in all parts of the world, although the external differences are often great. In the Black Forest, in Baden, Germany, almost every valley shows a different style of costume, a different type of architecture, although in each separate valley every house is like every other and the costume, as well as the religion, is for every member of each separate community absolutely after the same pattern. On the other hand, a German, Russian, or Negro peasant of the southern states, different as each is in some respects, are all very much alike in certain habitual attitudes and sentiments.
What, then, is the rôle of homogeneity and like-mindedness, such as we find them to be, in cosmopolitan states? So far as it makes each individual look like every other—no matter how different under the skin—homogeneity mobilizes the individual man. It removes the social taboo, permits the individual to move into strange groups, and thus facilitates new and adventurous contacts. In obliterating the external signs, which in secondary groups seem to be the sole basis of caste and class distinctions, it realizes, for the individual, the principle of laissez faire, laissez aller. Its ultimate economic effect is to substitute personal for racial competition, and to give free play to forces that tend to relegate every individual, irrespective of race or status, to the position he or she is best fitted to fill.
As a matter of fact, the ease and rapidity with which aliens, under existing conditions in the United States, have been able to assimilate themselves to the customs and manners of American life have enabled this country to swallow and digest every sort of normal human difference, except the purely external ones, like the color of the skin.
It is probably true, also, that like-mindedness of the kind that expresses itself in national types contributes indirectly by facilitating the intermingling of the different elements of the population to the national solidarity. This is due to the fact that the solidarity of modern states depends less on the homogeneity of population than, as James Bryce has suggested, upon the thoroughgoing mixture of heterogeneous elements. Like-mindedness, so far as that term signifies a standard grade of intelligence, contributes little or nothing to national solidarity. Likeness is, after all, a purely formal concept which of itself cannot hold anything together.
In the last analysis social solidarity is based on sentiment and habit. It is the sentiment of loyalty and the habit of what Sumner calls "concurrent action" that gives substance and insures unity to the state as to every other type of social group. This sentiment of loyalty has its basis in a modus vivendi, a working relation and mutual understanding of the members of the group. Social institutions are not founded in similarities any more than they are founded in differences, but in relations, and in the mutual interdependence of parts. When these relations have the sanction of custom and are fixed in individual habit, so that the activities of the group are running smoothly, personal attitudes and sentiments, which are the only forms in which individual minds collide and clash with one another, easily accommodate themselves to the existing situation.
It may, perhaps, be said that loyalty itself is a form of like-mindedness or that it is dependent in some way upon the like-mindedness of the individuals whom it binds together. This, however, cannot be true, for there is no greater loyalty than that which binds the dog to his master, and this is a sentiment which that faithful animal usually extends to other members of the household to which he belongs. A dog without a master is a dangerous animal, but the dog that has been domesticated is a member of society. He is not, of course, a citizen, although he is not entirely without rights. But he has got into some sort of practical working relations with the group to which he belongs.
It is this practical working arrangement, into which individuals with widely different mental capacities enter as co-ordinate parts, that gives the corporate character to social groups and insures their solidarity. It is the process of assimilation by which groups of individuals, originally indifferent or perhaps hostile, achieve this corporate character, rather than the process by which they acquire a formal like-mindedness, with which this paper is mainly concerned.
The difficulty with the conception of assimilation which one ordinarily meets in discussions of the race problem is that it is based on observations confined to individualistic groups where the characteristic relations are indirect and secondary. It takes no account of the kind of assimilation that takes place in primary groups where relations are direct and personal—in the tribe, for example, and in the family.
Thus Charles Francis Adams, referring to the race problem in an address at Richmond, Virginia, in November, 1908, said:
The American system, as we know, was founded on the assumed basis of a common humanity, that is, absence of absolutely fundamental racial characteristics was accepted as an established truth. Those of all races were welcomed to our shores. They came, aliens; they and their descendants would become citizens first, natives afterward. It was a process first of assimilation and then of absorption. On this all depended. There could be no permanent divisional lines. That theory is now plainly broken down. We are confronted by the obvious fact, as undeniable as it is hard, that the African will only partially assimilate and that he cannot be absorbed. He remains an alien element in the body politic. A foreign substance, he can neither be assimilated nor thrown out.
More recently an editorial in the Outlook, discussing the Japanese situation in California, made this statement:
The hundred millions of people now inhabiting the United States must be a united people, not merely a collection of groups of different peoples, different in racial cultures and ideals, agreeing to live together in peace and amity. These hundred millions must have common ideals, common aims, a common custom, a common culture, a common language, and common characteristics, if the nation is to endure.
All this is quite true and interesting, but it does not clearly recognize the fact that the chief obstacle to the assimilation of the Negro and the Oriental are not mental but physical traits. It is not because the Negro and the Japanese are so differently constituted that they do not assimilate. If they were given an opportunity, the Japanese are quite as capable as the Italians, the Armenians, or the Slavs of acquiring our culture and sharing our national ideals. The trouble is not with the Japanese mind but with the Japanese skin. The Jap is not the right color.
The fact that the Japanese bears in his features a distinctive racial hallmark, that he wears, so to speak, a racial uniform, classifies him. He cannot become a mere individual, indistinguishable in the cosmopolitan mass of the population, as is true, for example, of the Irish, and, to a lesser extent, of some of the other immigrant races. The Japanese, like the Negro, is condemned to remain among us an abstraction, a symbol—and a symbol not merely of his own race but of the Orient and of that vague, ill-defined menace we sometimes refer to as the "yellow peril." This not only determines to a very large extent the attitude of the white world toward the yellow man but it determines the attitude of the yellow man toward the white. It puts between the races the invisible but very real gulf of self-consciousness.
There is another consideration. Peoples we know intimately we respect and esteem. In our casual contact with aliens, however, it is the offensive rather than the pleasing traits that impress us. These impressions accumulate and reinforce natural prejudices. Where races are distinguished by certain external marks, these furnish a permanent physical substratum upon which and around which the irritations and animosities, incidental to all human intercourse, tend to accumulate and so gain strength and volume.
Assimilation, as the word is here used, brings with it a certain borrowed significance which it carried over from physiology, where it is employed to describe the process of nutrition. By a process of nutrition, somewhat similar to the physiological one, we may conceive alien peoples to be incorporated with, and made part of, the community or state. Ordinarily assimilation goes on silently and unconsciously, and only forces itself into popular conscience when there is some interruption or disturbance of the process.
At the outset it may be said, then, that assimilation rarely becomes a problem except in secondary groups. Admission to the primary group, that is to say, the group in which relationships are direct and personal, as, for example, in the family and in the tribe, makes assimilation comparatively easy and almost inevitable.
The most striking illustration of this is the fact of domestic slavery. Slavery has been, historically, the usual method by which peoples have been incorporated into alien groups. When a member of an alien race is adopted into the family as a servant or as a slave, and particularly when that status is made hereditary, as it was in the case of the Negro after his importation to America, assimilation followed rapidly and as a matter of course.
It is difficult to conceive two races farther removed from each other in temperament and tradition than the Anglo-Saxon and the Negro, and yet the Negro in the southern states, particularly where he was adopted into the household as a family servant, learned in a comparatively short time the manners and customs of his master's family. He very soon possessed himself of so much of the language, religion, and the technique of the civilization of his master as, in his station, he was fitted or permitted to acquire. Eventually, also, Negro slaves transferred their allegiance to the state of which they were only indirectly members, or at least to their masters' families, with whom they felt themselves in most things one in sentiment and interest.
The assimilation of the Negro field hand, where the contact of the slave with his master and his master's family was less intimate, was naturally less complete. On the large plantations, where an overseer stood between the master and the majority of his slaves, and especially on the sea island plantations off the coast of South Carolina, where the master and his family were likely to be merely winter visitors, this distance between master and slave was greatly increased. The consequence is that the Negroes in these regions are less touched today by the white man's influence and civilization than elsewhere in the southern states.
The Americanization Study has assumed that the fundamental condition of what we call "Americanization" is the participation of the immigrant in the life of the community in which he lives. The point here emphasized is that patriotism, loyalty, and common sense are neither created nor transmitted by purely intellectual processes. Men must live and work and fight together in order to create that community of interest and sentiment which will enable them to meet the crises of their common life with a common will.
It is evident, however, that the word "participation" as here employed has a wide application, and it becomes important for working purposes to give a more definite and concrete meaning to the term.
Obviously any organized social activity whatever and any participation in this activity implies "communication." In human, as distinguished from animal, society common life is based on a common speech. To share a common speech does not guarantee participation in the community life but it is an instrument of participation, and its acquisition by the members of an immigrant group is rightly considered a sign and a rough index of Americanization.
It is, however, one of the ordinary experiences of social intercourse that words and things do not have the same meanings with different people, in different parts of the country, in different periods of time, and, in general, in different contexts. The same "thing" has a different meaning for the naïve person and the sophisticated person, for the child and the philosopher; the new experience derives its significance from the character and organization of the previous experiences. To the peasant a comet, a plague, and an epileptic person may mean a divine portent, a visitation of God, a possession by the devil; to the scientific man they mean something quite different. The word "slavery" had very different connotations in the ancient world and today. It has a very different significance today in the southern states and in the northern states. "Socialism" has a very different significance to the immigrant from the Russian pale living on the "East Side" of New York City, to the citizen on Riverside Drive, and to the native American in the hills of Georgia.
Psychologists explain this difference in the connotation of the same word among people using the same language in terms of difference in the "apperception mass" in different individuals and different groups of individuals. In their phraseology the "apperception mass" represents the body of memories and meanings deposited in the consciousness of the individual from the totality of his experiences. It is the body of material with which every new datum of experience comes into contact, to which it is related, and in connection with which it gets its meaning.
When persons interpret data on different grounds, when the apperception mass is radically different, we say popularly that they live in different worlds. The logician expresses this by saying that they occupy different "universes of discourse"—that is, they cannot talk in the same terms. The ecclesiastic, the artist, the mystic, the scientist, the Philistine, the Bohemian, represent more or less different "universes of discourse." Even social workers occupy universes of discourse not mutually intelligible.
Similarly, different races and nationalities as wholes represent different apperception masses and consequently different universes of discourse and are not mutually intelligible. Even our remote forefathers are with difficulty intelligible to us, though always more intelligible than the Eastern immigrant because of the continuity of our tradition. Still it is almost as difficult for us to comprehend Elsie Dinsmore or the Westminster Catechism as the Koran or the Talmud.
It is apparent, therefore, that in the wide extension and vast complexity of modern life, in which peoples of different races and cultures are now coming into intimate contact, the divergences in the meanings and values which individuals and groups attach to objects and forms of behavior are deeper than anything expressed by differences in language.
Actually common participation in common activities implies a common "definition of the situation." In fact, every single act, and eventually all moral life, is dependent upon the definition of the situation. A definition of the situation precedes and limits any possible action, and a redefinition of the situation changes the character of the action. An abusive person, for example, provokes anger and possibly violence, but if we realize that the man is insane this redefinition of the situation results in totally different behavior.
Every social group develops systematic and unsystematic means of defining the situation for its members. Among these means are the "don'ts" of the mother, the gossip of the community, epithets ("liar," "traitor," "scab"), the sneer, the shrug, the newspaper, the theater, the school, libraries, the law, and the gospel. Education in the widest sense—intellectual, moral, aesthetic—is the process of defining the situation. It is the process by which the definitions of an older generation are transmitted to a younger. In the case of the immigrant it is the process by which the definitions of one cultural group are transmitted to another.
Differences in meanings and values, referred to above in terms of the "apperception mass," grow out of the fact that different individuals and different peoples have defined the situation in different ways. When we speak of the different "heritages" or "traditions" which our different immigrant groups bring, it means that, owing to different historical circumstances, they have defined the situation differently. Certain prominent personalities, schools of thought, bodies of doctrine, historical events, have contributed in defining the situation and determining the attitudes and values of our various immigrant groups in characteristic ways in their home countries. To the Sicilian, for example, marital infidelity means the stiletto; to the American, the divorce court. And even when the immigrant thinks that he understands us, he nevertheless does not do this completely. At the best he interprets our cultural traditions in terms of his own. Actually the situation is progressively redefined by the consequences of the actions, provoked by the previous definitions, and a prison experience is designed to provide a datum toward the redefinition of the situation.
It is evidently important that the people who compose a community and share in the common life should have a sufficient body of common memories to understand one another. This is particularly true in a democracy, where it is intended that the public institutions should be responsive to public opinion. There can be no public opinion except in so far as the persons who compose the public are able to live in the same world and speak and think in the same universe of discourse. For that reason it seems desirable that the immigrants should not only speak the language of the country but should know something of the history of the people among whom they have chosen to dwell. For the same reason it is important that native Americans should know the history and social life of the countries from which the immigrants come.
It is important also that every individual should share as fully as possible a fund of knowledge, experience, sentiments, and ideals common to the whole community and himself contribute to this fund. It is for this reason that we maintain and seek to maintain freedom of speech and free schools. The function of literature, including poetry, romance, and the newspaper, is to enable all to share victoriously and imaginatively in the inner life of each. The function of science is to gather up, classify, digest, and preserve, in a form in which they may become available to the community as a whole, the ideas, inventions, and technical experience of the individuals composing it. Thus not merely the possession of a common language but the wide extension of the opportunities for education become conditions of Americanization.
The immigration problem is unique in the sense that the immigrant brings divergent definitions of the situation, and this renders his participation in our activities difficult. At the same time this problem is of the same general type as the one exemplified by "syndicalism," "bolshevism," "socialism," etc., where the definition of the situation does not agree with the traditional one. The modern "social unrest," like the immigrant problem, is a sign of the lack of participation and this is true to the degree that certain elements feel that violence is the only available means of participating.
In general, a period of unrest represents the stage in which a new definition of the situation is being prepared. Emotion and unrest are connected with situations where there is loss of control. Control is secured on the basis of habits and habits are built up on the basis of the definition of the situation. Habit represents a situation where the definition is working. When control is lost it means that the habits are no longer adequate, that the situation has changed and demands a redefinition. This is the point at which we have unrest—a heightened emotional state, random movements, unregulated behavior—and this continues until the situation is redefined. The unrest is associated with conditions in which the individual or society feels unable to act. It represents energy, and the problem is to use it constructively.
The older societies tended to treat unrest by defining the situation in terms of the suppression or postponement of the wish; they tried to make the repudiation of the wish itself a wish. "Contentment," "conformity to the will of God," ultimate "salvation" in a better world, are representative of this. The founders of America defined the situation in terms of participation, but this has actually taken too exclusively the form of "political participation." The present tendency is to define the situation in terms of social participation, including demand for the improvement of social conditions to a degree which will enable all to participate.
But, while it is important that the people who are members of the same community should have a body of common memories and a common apperception mass, so that they may talk intelligibly to one another, it is neither possible nor necessary that everything should have the same meaning for everyone. A perfectly homogeneous consciousness would mean a tendency to define all situations rigidly and sacredly and once and forever. Something like this did happen in the Slavic village communities and among all savage people, and it was the ideal of the medieval church, but it implies a low level of efficiency and a slow rate of progress.
Mankind is distinguished, in fact, from the animal world by being composed of persons of divergent types, of varied tastes and interests, of different vocations and functions. Civilization is the product of an association of widely different individuals, and with the progress of civilization the divergence in individual human types has been and must continue to be constantly multiplied. Our progress in the arts and sciences and in the creation of values in general has been dependent on specialists whose distinctive worth was precisely their divergence from other individuals. It is even evident that we have been able to use productively individuals who in a savage or peasant society would have been classed as insane—who perhaps were indeed insane.
The ability to participate productively implies thus a diversity of attitudes and values in the participants, but a diversity not so great as to lower the morals of the community and to prevent effective co-operation. It is important to have ready definitions for all immediate situations, but progress is dependent on the constant redefinitions for all immediate situations, and the ideal condition for this is the presence of individuals with divergent definitions, who contribute, in part consciously and in part unconsciously, through their individualism and labors to a common task and a common end. It is only in this way that an intelligible world, in which each can participate according to his intelligence, comes into existence. For it is only through their consequences that words get their meanings or that situations become defined. It is through conflict and co-operation, or, to use a current phrase of economists, through "competitive co-operation," that a distinctively human type of society does anywhere exist. Privacy and publicity, "society" and solitude, public ends and private enterprises, are each and all distinctive factors in human society everywhere. They are particularly characteristic of historic American democracy.
In this whole connection it appears that the group consciousness and the individual himself are formed by communication and participation, and that the communication and participation are themselves dependent for their meaning on common interests.
But it would be an error to assume that participation always implies an intimate personal, face-to-face relation. Specialists participate notably and productively in our common life, but this is evidently not on the basis of personal association with their neighbors. Darwin was assisted by Lyell, Owen, and other contemporaries in working out a new definition of the situation, but these men were not his neighbors. When Mayer worked out his theory of the transmutation of energy, his neighbors in the village of Heilbronn were so far from participating that they twice confined him in insane asylums. A postage stamp may be a more efficient instrument of participation than a village meeting.
Defining the situation with reference to the participation of the immigrant is of course not solving the problem of immigration. This involves an analysis of the whole significance of the qualitative and quantitative character of a population, with reference to any given values—standards of living, individual level of efficiency, liberty and determinism, etc. We have, for instance, in America a certain level of culture, depending, let us say as a minimum, on the perpetuation of our public-school system. But, if by some conceivable lusus naturae the birth rate was multiplied a hundred fold, or by some conceivable cataclysm a hundred million African blacks were landed annually on our eastern coast and an equal number of Chinese coolies on our western coast, then we should have neither teachers enough nor buildings enough nor material resources enough to impart even the three R's to a fraction of the population, and the outlook of democracy, so far as it is dependent upon participation, would become very dismal. On the other hand, it is conceivable that certain immigrant populations in certain numbers, with their special temperaments, endowments, and social heritages, would contribute positively and increasingly to our stock of civilization. These are questions to be determined, but certainly if the immigrant is admitted on any basis whatever the condition of his Americanization is that he shall have the widest and freest opportunity to contribute in his own way to the common fund of knowledge, ideas, and ideals which makes up the culture of our common country. It is only in this way that the immigrant can "participate" in the fullest sense of the term.
The literature upon assimilation falls naturally under three main heads: (1) assimilation and amalgamation; (2) the conflict and fusion of cultures; and (3) immigration and Americanization.
Literature on assimilation is very largely a by-product of the controversy in regard to the relative superiority and inferiority of races. This controversy owes its existence, in the present century, to the publication in 1854 of Gobineau's The Inequality of Human Races. This treatise appeared at a time when the dominant peoples of Europe were engaged in extending their benevolent protection over all the "unprotected" lesser breeds, and this book offered a justification, on biological grounds, of the domination of the "inferior" by the "superior" races.
Gobineau's theory, and that of the schools which have perpetuated and elaborated his doctrines, defined culture as an essentially racial trait. Other races might accommodate themselves to, but could not originate nor maintain a superior culture. This is the aristocratic theory of the inequalities of races and, as might be expected, was received with enthusiasm by the chauvinists of the "strong" nations.
The opposing school is disposed to treat the existing civilizations as largely the result of historical accident. The superior peoples are those who have had access to the accumulated cultural materials of the peoples that preceded them. Modern Europe owes its civilization to the fact that it went to school to the ancients. The inferior peoples are those who did not have this advantage.
Ratzel was one of the first to venture the theory that the natural and the cultural peoples were fundamentally alike and that the existing differences, great as they are, were due to geographical and cultural isolation of the less advanced races. Boas' Mind of Primitive Man is the most systematic and critical statement of that view of the matter.
The discussion which these rival theories provoked has led students to closer studies of the effects of racial contacts and to a more penetrating analysis of the cultural process.
The contacts of races have invariably led to racial intermixture, and the mixed breed, as in the case of the mulatto, the result of the white-Negro cross, has tended to create a distinct cultural as well as a racial type. E. B. Reuter's volume on The Mulatto is the first serious attempt to study the mixed blood as a cultural type and define his rôle in the conflict of races and cultures.
Historical cases of the assimilation of one group by another are frequent. Kaindl's investigations of the German settlements in the Carpathian lands are particularly instructive. The story of the manner in which the early German settlers in Cracow, Galicia, were Polonized mainly under the influence of the Polish nobility, is all the more interesting when it is contrasted with the German colonists in the Siebenbürgen, which have remained strongholds of the German language and culture in the midst of a population of Roumanian peasants for nearly eight hundred years. Still more interesting are the recent attempts of the Prussians to Germanize the former province of Posen, now reunited to Poland. Prussia's policy of colonization of German peasants in Posen failed for several reasons, but it failed finally because the German peasant, finding himself isolated in the midst of a Polish community, either gave up the land the government had acquired for him and returned to his native German province, or identified himself with the Polish community and was thus lost to the cause of German nationalism. The whole interesting history of that episode is related in Bernard's Die Polenfrage, which is at the same time an account of the organization of an autonomous Polish community within the limits of a German state.
The competition and survival of languages affords interesting material for the study of cultural contacts and the conditions that determine assimilation. Investigations of the racial origins of European peoples have discovered a great number of curious cultural anomalies. There are peoples like the Spreewälder who inhabit a little cultural island of about 240 miles square in the Province of Brandenburg, Prussia. Surviving remnants of a Slavic people, they still preserve their language and their tribal costumes, and, although but thirty thousand in number and surrounded by Germans, maintain a lively literary movement all their own. On the other hand, the most vigorous and powerful of the Germanic nationalities, the Prussian, bears the name of a conquered Slavic people whose language, "Old Prussian," not spoken since the seventeenth century, is preserved only in a few printed books, including a catechism and German-Prussian vocabulary, which the German philologists have rescued from oblivion.
The contacts and transmission of cultures have been investigated in different regions of social life under different titles. The ethnologists have investigated the process among primitive peoples under the title acculturation. Among historical peoples, on the other hand, acculturation has been called assimilation. The aim of missions has been, on the whole, to bring the world under the domination of a single moral order; but in seeking to accomplish this task they have contributed greatly to the fusion and cross-fertilization of racial and national cultures.
The problem of origin is the first and often the most perplexing problem which the study of primitive cultures presents.[248] Was a given cultural trait, i.e., a weapon, a tool, or a myth, borrowed or invented? For example, there are several independent centers of origin and propagation of the bow and arrow. Writing approached or reached perfection in at least five different, widely separated regions. Other problems of acculturation which have been studied include the following: the degree and order of transmissibility of different cultural traits; the persistence or the immunity against change of different traits; the modification of cultural traits in the process of transmission; the character of social contacts between cultural groups; the distance that divides cultural levels; and the rôle of prestige in stimulating imitation and copying.
The development of a world-commerce, the era of European colonization and imperial expansion in America, Asia, and Africa and Australia, the forward drive of occidental science and the Western system of large-scale competitive industry have created racial contacts, cultural changes, conflicts, and fusions of unprecedented and unforeseen extent, intensity, and immediateness. The crash of a fallen social order in Russia reverberates throughout the world; reports of the capitalization of new enterprises indicate that India is copying the economic organization of Europe; the feminist movement has invaded Japan; representatives of close to fifty nations of the earth meet in conclave in the assembly of the League of Nations.
So complete has been in recent years the interpenetration of peoples and cultures that nations are now seeking to preserve their existence not alone from assault from without by force of arms, but they are equally concerned to protect themselves from the more insidious attacks of propaganda from within. Under these circumstances the ancient liberties of speech and press are being scrutinized and questioned. Particularly is this true when this freedom of speech and press is exercised by alien peoples, who criticize our institutions in a foreign tongue and claim the right to reform native institutions before they have become citizens and even before they are able to use the native language.
The presence of large groups of foreign-born in the United States was first conceived of as a problem of immigration. From the period of the large Irish immigration to this country in the decades following 1820 each new immigrant group called forth a popular literature of protest against the evils its presence threatened. After 1890 the increasing volume of immigration and the change in the source of the immigrants from northwestern Europe to southeastern Europe intensified the general concern. In 1907 the Congress of the United States created the Immigration Commission to make "full inquiry, examination, and investigation into the subject of immigration." The plan and scope of the work as outlined by the Commission "included a study of the sources of recent immigration in Europe, the general character of incoming immigrants, the methods employed here and abroad to prevent the immigration of persons classed as undesirable in the United States immigration law, and finally a thorough investigation into the general status of the more recent immigrants as residents of the United States, and the effect of such immigration upon the institutions, industries, and people of this country." In 1910 the Commission made a report of its investigations and findings together with its conclusions and recommendations which were published in forty-one volumes.
The European War focused the attention of the country upon the problem of Americanization. The public mind became conscious of the fact that "the stranger within our gates," whether naturalized or unnaturalized, tended to maintain his loyalty to the land of his origin, even when it seemed to conflict with loyalty to the country of his sojourn or his adoption. A large number of superficial investigations called "surveys" were made of immigrant colonies in the larger cities of the country. Americanization work of many varieties developed apace. A vast literature sprang up to meet the public demand for information and instruction on this topic. In view of this situation the Carnegie Corporation of New York City undertook in 1918 a "Study of the Methods of Americanization or Fusion of Native and Foreign Born." The point of view from which the study was made may be inferred from the following statement by its director, Allen T. Burns:
Americanization is the uniting of new with native born Americans in fuller common understanding and appreciation to secure by means of self-government the highest welfare of all. Such Americanization should produce no unchangeable political, domestic, and economic régime delivered once for all to the fathers, but a growing and broadening national life, inclusive of the best wherever found. With all our rich heritages, Americanism will develop through a mutual giving and taking of contributions from both newer and older Americans in the interest of the common weal. This study will follow such an understanding of Americanization.
The study, as originally planned, was divided into ten divisions, as follows: the schooling of the immigrant, the press and the theater, adjustment of homes and family life, legal protection and correction, health standards and care, naturalization and political life, industrial and economic amalgamation, treatment of immigrant heritages, neighborhood agencies, and rural developments. The findings of these different parts of the study are presented in separate volumes.
This is the most recent important survey-investigation of the immigrant, although there are many less imposing but significant studies in this field. Among these are the interesting analyses of the assimilation process in Julius Drachsler's Democracy and Assimilation and in A. M. Dushkin's study of Jewish Education in New York City.
The natural history of assimilation may be best studied in personal narratives and documents, such as letters and autobiographies, or in monographs upon urban and rural immigrant communities. In recent years a series of personal narrative and autobiographical sketches have revealed the intimate personal aspects of the assimilation process. The expectancy and disillusionment of the first experiences, the consequent nostalgia and homesickness, gradual accommodation to the new situation, the first participations in American life, the fixation of wishes in the opportunities of the American social environment, the ultimate identification of the person with the memories, sentiments, and future of his adopted country—all these steps in assimilation are portrayed in such interesting books as The Far Journey by Abraham Rihbany, The Promised Land by Mary Antin, Out of the Shadow by Rose Cohen, An American in the Making by M. E. Ravage, My Mother and I by E. C. Stern.
The most reflective use of personal documents for the study of the problems of the immigrant has been made by Thomas and Znaniecki in The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. In these studies letters and life-histories have been, for the first time, methodically employed to exhibit the processes of adjustment in the transition from a European peasant village to the immigrant colony of an American industrial community.
The work of Thomas and Znaniecki is in a real sense a study of the Polish community in Europe and America. Less ambitious studies have been made of individual immigrant communities. Several religious communities composed of isolated and unassimilated groups, such as the German Mennonites, have been intensively studied.
Materials valuable for the study of certain immigrant communities, assembled for quite other purposes, are contained in the almanacs, yearbooks, and local histories of the various immigrant communities. The most interesting of these are the Jewish Communal Register of New York and the studies made by the Norwegian Lutheran Church in America under the direction of O. M. Norlie.[249]
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(1) Ratzel, Friedrich. The History of Mankind. Vol. I, Book I, sec. 4, "Nature, Rise and Spread of Civilization," pp. 20-30. Vol. II, Book II, sec. 31, "Origin and Development of the Old American Civilization," pp. 160-70. Translated from the 2d German ed. by A. J. Butler. 3 vols. London, 1896-98.
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(4) Boas, Franz. The Mind of Primitive Man. Chap. vi, "The Universality of Cultural Traits," pp. 155-73. Chap. vii, "The Evolutionary Viewpoint," pp. 174-96. New York, 1911.
(5) Vierkandt, A. Die Stetigkeit im Kulturwandel. Eine sociologische Studie. Leipzig, 1908.
(6) McGee, W. J. "Piratical Acculturation," American Anthropologist, XI (1898), 243-51.
(7) Crooke, W. "Method of Investigation and Folklore Origins," Folklore, XXIV (1913), 14-40.
(8) Graebner, F. "Die melanesische Bogenkultur und ihre Verwandten," Anthropos, IV (1909), 726-80, 998-1032.
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(10) Goldenweiser, A. A. "The Principle of Limited Possibilities in the Development of Culture," Journal of American Folklore, XXVI (1913), 259-90.
(11) Dixon, R. B. "The Independence of the Culture of the American Indian," Science, N.S., XXXV (1912), 46-55.
(12) Johnson, W. Folk-Memory. Or the continuity of British archaeology. Oxford, 1908.
(13) Wundt, Wilhelm. Völkerpsychologie. Eine Untersuchung der Entwicklungsgesetze von Sprache, Mythus, und Sitte. Band I, "Die Sprache." 3 vols. Leipzig, 1900-1909.
(14) Tarde, Gabriel. The Laws of Imitation. Translated from the 2d French ed. by Elsie Clews Parsons. New York, 1903.
(1) Bauer, Otto. Die Nationalitätenfrage und die Sozialdemokratie. Wien, 1907. Chap. vi, sec. 30, "Der Sozialismus und das Nationalitätsprinzip," pp. 507-21. (In: Adler, M. and Hildering, R. Marx-Studien; Blätter zur Theorie und Politik des wissenschaftlichen Sozialismus. Band II. Wien, 1904.
(2) Kerner, R. J. Slavic Europe. A selected bibliography in the western European languages, comprising history, languages, and literature. "The Slavs and Germanization," Nos. 2612-13, pp. 193-95. Cambridge, Mass., 1918.
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(6) Reich, Emil. General History of Western Nations, from 5000 B.C. to 1900 A.D. "Europeanization of Humanity," pp. 33-65, 480-82. (Vols. I-II published.) London, 1908.
(7) Thomas, William I. "The Prussian-Polish Situation: an Experiment in Assimilation," American Journal of Sociology, XIX (1913-14), 624-39.
(8) Parkman, Francis. Conspiracy of Pontiac and the Indian Wars after the Conquest of Canada. 8th ed., 2 vols. Boston, 1877. [Discusses the cultural effects of the mingling of French and Indians in Canada.]
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(12) Kallen, H. M. Structure of Lasting Peace. An inquiry into the motives of war and peace. Boston, 1918.
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(16) Fishberg, Maurice. The Jews: a Study in Race and Environment. London and New York, 1911. [Chap. xxii deals with assimilation versus nationalism.]
(17) Bailey, W. F., and Bates, Jean V. "The Early German Settlers in Transylvania," Fortnightly Review, CVII (1917), 661-74.
(18) Auerbach, Bertrand. Les Races et les nationalités en Autriche-Hongrie. Paris, 1898.
(19) Cunningham, William. Alien Immigrants to England. London and New York, 1897.
(20) Kaindl, Raimund Friedrich. Geschichte der Deutschen in den Karpathenländern. Vol. I, "Geschichte der Deutschen in Galizien bis 1772." 3 vols. in 2. Gotha, 1907-11.
(1) Moore, Edward C. The Spread of Christianity in the Modern World. Chicago, 1919. [Bibliography.]
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(1) Faust, Albert B. The German Element in the United States. With special reference to its political, moral, social, and educational influence. New York, 1909.
(2) Green, Samuel S. The Scotch-Irish in America, 1895. A paper read as the report of the Council of the American Antiquarian Society, at the semi-annual meeting, April 24, 1895, with correspondence called out by the paper. Worcester, Mass., 1895.
(3) Hanna, Charles A. The Scotch-Irish. Or the Scot in North Britain, North Ireland, and North America. New York and London, 1902.
(4) Jewish Publication Society of America. The American Jewish Yearbook. Philadelphia, 1899.
(5) Jewish Communal Register, 1917-1918. 2d ed. Edited and published by the Kehillah (Jewish Community) of New York City. New York, 1919.
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(7) Horak, Jakub. Assimilation of Czechs in Chicago. [In press.]
(8) Millis, Harry A. The Japanese Problem in the United States. An investigation for the Commission on Relations with Japan appointed by the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America. New York, 1915.
(9) Fairchild, Henry P. Greek Immigration to the United States. New Haven, 1911.
(10) Burgess, Thomas. Greeks in America. An account of their coming, progress, customs, living, and aspirations; with a historical introduction and the stories of some famous American-Greeks. Boston, 1913.
(11) Coolidge, Mary R. Chinese Immigration. New York, 1909.
(12) Foerster, Robert F. The Italian Emigration of Our Times. Cambridge, Mass., 1919.
(13) Lord, Eliot, Trenor, John J. D., and Barrows, Samuel J. The Italian in America. New York, 1905.
(14) DuBois, W. E. Burghardt. The Philadelphia Negro, A Social Study. Together with a special report on domestic service by Isabel Eaton. "Publications of the University of Pennsylvania, Series in Political Economy and Public Law," No. 14. Philadelphia, 1899.
(15) Williams, Daniel J. The Welsh of Columbus, Ohio. A study in adaptation and assimilation. Oshkosh, Wis., 1913.
(1) Drachsler, Julius. Democracy and Assimilation. The blending of immigrant heritages in America. New York, 1920. [Bibliography.]
(2) Dushkin, Alexander M. Jewish Education in New York City. New York, 1918.
(3) Thompson, Frank V. Schooling of the Immigrant. New York, 1920.
(4) Daniels, John. America via the Neighborhood. New York, 1920.
(5) Park, Robert E., and Miller, Herbert A. Old World Traits Transplanted. New York, 1921.
(6) Speek, Peter A. A Stake in the Land. New York, 1921.
(7) Davis, Michael M. Immigrant Health and the Community. New York, 1921.
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(1) Bridges, Horace. On Becoming an American. Some meditations of a newly naturalized immigrant. Boston, 1919.
(2) Riis, Jacob A. The Making of an American. New York, 1901.
(3) Rihbany, Abraham Mitrie. A Far Journey. Boston, 1914.
(4) Hasanovitz, Elizabeth. One of Them. Chapters from a passionate autobiography. Boston, 1918.
(5) Cohen, Rose. Out of the Shadow. New York, 1918.
(6) Ravage, M. E. An American in the Making. The life-story of an immigrant. New York, 1917.
(7) Cahan, Abraham. The Rise of David Levinsky. A novel. New York, 1917.
(8) Antin, Mary. The Promised Land. New York, 1912.
(9) ——. They Who Knock at Our Gates. A complete gospel of immigration. New York, 1914.
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(12) Stern, Mrs. Elizabeth Gertrude (Levin). My Mother and I. New York, 1919.
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