What proportion of this host found their way to the farms is not known.[31] In the earlier years, the majority of the English and Scotch sought the land. In western New York, in Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and contiguous States there were many Scotch and English neighborhoods established before the Civil War. Since 1870, however, the incoming British have provided large numbers of skilled mechanics and miners, and the Welsh, also, have been drawn largely to the coal mines.

The French Revolution drove many notables to exile in the United States, and several attempts were made at colonization. The names Gallipolis and Gallia County, Ohio, bear witness to their French origin. Gallipolis was settled in 1790 by adventurers from Havre, Bordeaux, Nantes, La Rochelle, and other French cities. The colony was promoted in France by Joel Barlow, an Ananias even among land sharks, representing the Scioto Land Company, or Companie du Scioto, one of the numerous speculative concerns that early sought to capitalize credulity and European ignorance of the West. The Company had, in fact, no title to the lands, and the wretched colonists found themselves stranded in a wilderness for whose conquest they were unsuited. Of the colonists McMaster says: "Some could build coaches, some could make perukes, some could carve, others could gild with such exquisite carving that their work had been thought not unworthy of the King."[32] Congress came to the relief of these unfortunate people in 1795 and granted them twenty-four thousand acres in Ohio. The town they founded never fully realized their early dreams, but, after a bitter struggle, it survived the log cabin days and was later honored by a visit from Louis Philippe and from Lafayette. Very few descendants of the French colonists share in its present-day prosperity.

The majority of the French who came to America after 1820 were factory workers and professional people who remained in the cities. There are great numbers of French Canadians in the factory towns of New England. There are, too, French colonies in America whose inhabitants cannot be rated as foreigners, for their ancestors were veritable pioneers. Throughout the Mississippi Valley, such French settlements as Kaskaskia, Prairie du Rocher, Cahokia, and others have left much more than a geographical designation and have preserved an old world aroma of quaintness and contentment.

Swiss immigrants, to the number of about 250,000 and over 175,000 Dutch have found homes in America. The majority of the Swiss came from the German cantons of Switzerland. They have large settlements in Ohio, Wisconsin, and California, where they are very successful in dairying and stock raising. The Hollanders have taken root chiefly in western Michigan, between the Kalamazoo and Grand rivers, on the deep black bottom lands suitable for celery and market gardening. The town of Holland there, with its college and churches, is the center of Dutch influence in the United States. Six of the eleven Dutch periodicals printed in America are issued from Michigan, and the majority of newcomers (over 80,000 have arrived since 1900) have made their way to that State. These sturdy and industrious people from Holland and Switzerland readily adapt themselves to American life.

No people have answered the call of the land in recent years as eagerly as have the Scandinavians. These modern vikings have within one generation peopled a large part of the great American Northwest. In 1850 there were only eighteen thousand Scandinavians in the United States. The tide rose rapidly in the sixties and reached its height in the eighties, until over two million Scandinavian immigrants have made America their home. They and their descendants form a very substantial part of the rural population. There are nearly half as many Norwegians in America as in Norway, which has emptied a larger proportion of its population into the American lap than any other country save Ireland. About one-fourth of the world's Swedes and over one-tenth of the world's Danes dwell in America.

The term Scandinavian is here used in the loose sense to embrace the peoples of the two peninsulas where dwell the Danes, the Norwegians, and the Swedes. These three branches of the same family have much in common, though for many years they objected to being thus rudely shaken together into one ethnic measure. The Swede is the aristocrat, the Norwegian the democrat, the Dane the conservative. The Swede, polite, vivacious, fond of music and literature, is "the Frenchman of the North," the Norwegian is a serious viking in modern dress: the Dane remains a landsman, devoted to his fields, and he is more amenable than his northern kinsmen to the cultural influence of the South.

The Norwegian, true to viking traditions, led the modern exodus. In 1825 the sloop Restoration, the Mayflower of the Norse, landed a band of fifty-three Norwegian Quakers on Manhattan. These peasants settled at first in western New York. But within a few years most of them removed to Fox River, Illinois, whither were drawn most of the Norwegians who migrated before 1850. After the Civil War, the stream rapidly rose, until nearly seven hundred thousand persons of Norwegian birth have settled in America.

The Swedish migration started in 1841, when Gustavus Unonius, a former student of the University of Upsala, founded the colony of Pine Lake, near Milwaukee. His followers have been described as a strange assortment of "noblemen, ex-army officers, merchants, and adventurers," whose experiences and talents were not of the sort that make pioneering successful. Frederika Bremer, the noted Swedish traveler, has left a description of the little cluster of log huts and the handful of people who "had taken with them the Swedish inclination for hospitality and a merry life, without sufficiently considering how long it could last." Their experiences form a romantic prelude to the great Swedish migration, which reached its height in the eighties. Today the Swedes form the largest element in the Scandinavian influx, for well over one million have migrated to the United States.

Nearly three hundred thousand persons of Danish blood have come into the country since the Civil War. A large number migrated from Schleswig-Holstein, after the forcible annexation of that province by Prussia in 1866, preferring the freedom of America to the tyranny of Berlin.

Whatever distinctions in language and customs may have characterized these Northern peoples, they had one ambition in common—the desire to own tillable land. So they made of the Northwest a new Scandinavia, larger and far more prosperous than that which Gustavus Adolphus had planned in colonial days for his colony in Delaware. One can travel today three hundred miles at a stretch across the prairies of the Dakotas or the fields of Minnesota without leaving land that is owned by Scandinavians. They abound also in Wisconsin, Northern Illinois, Eastern Nebraska, and Kansas, and Northern Michigan. Latterly the lands of Oregon and Washington are luring them by the thousands, while throughout the remaining West there are scattered many prosperous farms cultivated by representatives of this hardy race. Latterly this stream of Scandinavians has thinned to about one-half its former size. In 1910, 48,000 came; in 1911, 42,000; in 1912, 27,000; in 1913, 33,000. The later immigrant is absorbed by the cities, or sails upon the Great Lakes or in the coastwise trade, or works in lumber camps or mines. Wherever you find a Scandinavian, however, he is working close to nature, even though he is responding to the call of the new industry.

It is the consensus of opinion among competent observers that these northern peoples have been the most useful of the recent great additions to the American race. They were particularly fitted by nature for the conquest of the great area which they have brought under subjugation, not merely because of their indomitable industry, perseverance, honesty, and aptitude for agriculture, but because they share with the Englishman and the Scotchman the instinct for self-government. Above all, the Scandinavian has never looked upon himself as an exile. From the first he has considered himself an American. In Minnesota and Dakota, the Norse pioneer often preceded local government. "Whenever a township became populous enough to have a name as well as a number on the surveyor's map, that question was likely to be determined by the people on the ground, and such names as Christiana, Swede Plain, Numedal, Throndhjem, and Vasa leave no doubt that Scandinavians officiated at the christening." These people proceeded with the organizing of the local government and, "except for the peculiar names, no one would suspect that the town-makers were born elsewhere than in Massachusetts or New York."[33] This, too, in spite of the fact that they continued the use of their mother tongue, for not infrequently election notices and even civic ordinances and orders were issued in Norwegian or Swedish. In 1893 there were 146 Scandinavian newspapers, and their number has since greatly increased.

In politics the Norseman learned his lesson quickly. Governors, senators, and representatives in Congress give evidence to a racial clannishness that has more than once proven stronger than party allegiance. Yet with all their influence in the Northwest, they have not insisted on unreasonable race recognition, as have the Germans in Wisconsin and other localities. Minnesota and Dakota have established classes in "the Scandinavian language" in their state universities, evidently leaving it to be decided as an academic question which is the Scandinavian language. Without brilliance, producing few leaders, the Norseman represents the rugged commonplace of American life, avoiding the catastrophes of a soaring ambition on the one hand and the pitfalls of a jaded temperamentalism on the other. Bent on self-improvement, he scrupulously patronizes farmers' institutes, high schools, and extension courses, and listens with intelligent patience to lectures that would put an American audience to sleep. This son of the North has greatly buttressed every worthy American institution with the stern traditional virtues of the tiller of the soil. Strength he gives, if not grace, and that at a time when all social institutions are being shaken to their foundations.

Among the early homesteaders in the upper Mississippi Valley there were a substantial number of Bohemians. In Nebraska they comprise nine per cent of the foreign born population, in Oklahoma seven per cent, and in Texas over six per cent. They began migrating in the turbulent forties. They were nearly all of the peasant class, neat, industrious and intelligent, and they usually settled in colonies where they retained their native tongue and customs. They were opposed to slavery and many enlisted in the Union cause.

Among the Polish immigrants who came to America before 1870, many settled on farms in Illinois, Wisconsin, Texas, and other States. They proved much more clannish than the Bohemians and more reluctant to conform to American customs.

Many farms in the Northwest are occupied by Finns, of whom there were in 1910 over two hundred thousand in the United States. They are a Tatar race, with a copious sprinkling of Swedish blood. Illiteracy is rare among them. They are eager patrons of night schools and libraries and have a flourishing college near Duluth. They are eager for citizenship and are independent in politics. The glittering generalities of Marxian socialism seem peculiarly alluring to them; and not a few have joined the I.W.W. Drink has been their curse, but a strong temperance movement has recently made rapid headway among them. They are natural woodmen and wield the axe with the skill of our own frontiersmen. Their peculiar houses, made of neatly squared logs, are features of every Finnish settlement. All of the North European races and a few from Southern and Eastern Europe have contributed to the American rural population; yet the Census of 1910 disclosed the fact that of the 6,361,502 white farm operators in the United States, 75 per cent were native American and only 10.5 per cent were foreign born.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 29: Oberholtzer, History of the United States since the Civil War, vol I, p. 275.]

[Footnote 30: Oberholtzer, supra cit., p. 278.]

[Footnote 31: The census of 1910 discloses the fact that of the 6,361,502 farms in the United States 75 per cent were operated by native white Americans and only 10.5 per cent by foreign born whites. The foreign born were distributed as follows: Austria, 33,336; Hungary, 3827; England, 39,728; Ireland, 33,480; Scotland, 10,220; Wales, 4110; France, 5832; Germany, 221,800; Holland, 13,790; Italy, 10,614; Russia, 25,788; Poland, 7228; Denmark, 28,375; Norway, 59,742; Sweden, 67,453; Switzerland, 14333; Canada, 61,878.]

[Footnote 32: History of the People of the United States, vol. VII, p. 203.]

[Footnote 33: K.C. Babcock, The Scandinavian Element in the United States, p. 143.]



CHAPTER VIII

THE CITY BUILDERS

"What will happen to immigration when the public domain has vanished?" was a question frequently asked by thoughtful American citizens. The question has been answered: the immigrant has become a job seeker in the city instead of a home seeker in the open country. The last three decades have witnessed "the portentous growth of the cities"—and they are cities of a new type, cities of gigantic factories, towering skyscrapers, electric trolleys, telephones, automobiles, and motor trucks, and of fetid tenements swarming with immigrants. The immigrants, too, are of a new type. When Henry James revisited Boston after a long absence, he was shocked at the "gross little foreigners" who infested its streets, and he said it seemed as if the fine old city had been wiped with "a sponge saturated with the foreign mixture and passed over almost everything I remembered and might have still recovered."[34]

Until 1882 the bulk of immigration, as we have seen, came from the north of Europe, and these immigrants were kinsmen to the American and for the most part sought the country. The new immigration, however, which chiefly sought the cities, hailed from southern and eastern Europe. It has shown itself alien in language, custom, in ethnic affinities and political concepts, in personal standards and assimilative ambitions. These immigrants arrived usually in masculine hordes, leaving women and children behind, clinging to their own kind with an apprehensive mistrust of all things American, and filled with the desire to extract from this fabulous mine as much gold as possible and then to return to their native villages. Yet a very large number of those who have gone home to Europe have returned to America with bride or family. As a result the larger cities of the United States are congeries of foreign quarters, whose alarming fecundity fills the streets with progeny and whose polyglot chatter on pay night turns even many a demure New England town into a veritable babel.

There are in the United States today roughly eight or ten millions of these new immigrants. A line drawn southward from Minneapolis to St. Louis and thence eastward to Washington would embrace over four-fifths of them, for most of the great American cities lie in this northeastern corner of the land. Whence come these millions? From the vast and mysterious lands of the Slavs, from Italy, from Greece, and from the Levant.

The term Slav covers a welter of nationalities whose common ethnic heritage has long been concealed under religious, geographical, and political diversities and feuds. They may be divided into North Slavs, including Bohemians, Poles, Ruthenians, Slovaks, and "Russians," and South Slavs, including Bulgarians, Serbians and Montenegrins, Croatians, Slovenians, and Dalmatians. As one writer on these races says, "It is often impossible in America to distinguish these national groups.... Yet the differences are there.... In American communities they have their different churches societies, newspapers, and a separate social life.... The Pole wastes no love on the Russian, nor the Ruthenian on the Pole, and a person who acts in ignorance of these facts, a missionary for instance, or a political boss, or a trade union organizer, may find himself in the position of a host who should innocently invite a Fenian from Cork County to hobnob with an Ulster Orangeman on the ground that both were Irish."[35]

The Bohemians (including the Moravians) are the most venturesome and the most enlightened of the great Slav family. Many of them came to America in the seventeenth century as religious pilgrims; more came as political refugees after 1848; and since 1870, they have come in larger numbers, seeking better economic conditions. All told, they numbered over 220,000, from which it may be estimated that there are probably today half a million persons of Bohemian parentage in the United States. Chicago alone shelters over 100,000 of these people, and Cleveland 45,000. These immigrants as a rule own the neat, box-like houses in which they live, where flower-pots and tiny gardens bespeak a love of growing things, and lace curtains, carpets, and center tables testify to the influence of an American environment. The Bohemians are much given to clubs, lodges, and societies, which usually have rooms over Bohemian saloons. The second generation is prone to free thinking and has a weakness for radical socialism.

The Bohemians are assiduous readers, and illiteracy is almost unknown among them. They support many periodicals and several thriving publishing houses. They cling to their language with a religious fervor. Their literature and the history which it preserves is their pride. Yet this love of their own traditions is no barrier, apparently, to forming strong attachments to American institutions. The Bohemians are active in politics, and in the cities where they congregate they see that they have their share of the public offices. There are more highly skilled workmen among them than are to be found in any other Slavic group; and the second generation of Bohemians in America has produced many brilliant professional men and successful business men. As one writer puts it: "The miracle which America works upon the Bohemians is more remarkable than any other of our national achievements. The downcast look so characteristic of them in Prague is nearly gone, the surliness and unfriendliness disappear, and the young Bohemian of the second or third generation is as frank and open as his neighbor with his Anglo-Saxon heritage."[36]

The bitter, political and racial suppression that made the Bohemian surly and defiant seem, on the other hand, to have left the Polish peasant stolid, patient, and very illiterate. Polish settlements were made in Texas and Wisconsin in the fifties and before 1880 a large number of Poles were scattered through New York, Pennsylvania, and Illinois. Since then great numbers have come over in the new migrations until today, it is estimated, at least three million persons of Polish parentage live in the United States.[37] The men in the earlier migrations frequently settled on the land; the recent comers hasten to the mines and the metal working centers, where their strong though untrained hands are in constant demand.

The majority of the Poles have come to America to stay. They remain, however, very clannish and according to the Federal Industrial Commission, without the "desire to fuse socially." The recent Polish immigrant is very circumscribed in his mental horizon, clings tenaciously to his language, which he hears exclusively in his home and his church, his lodge, and his saloon, and is unresponsive to his American environment. Not until the second and third generation is reached does the spirit of American democracy make headway against his lethal stolidity. Now that Poland has been made free as a result of the Great War, it may be that the Pole's inherited indifference will give way to national aspirations and that, in the resurrection of his historic hope of freedom, he will find an animating stimulant.

The Pole, however, is more independent and progressive than the Slovak, his brother from the northeastern corner of Hungary. For many generations this segment of the Slav race has been pitifully crushed. Turks, Magyars, and Huns have taken delight in oppressing him. An early, sporadic migration of Slovaks to America received a sudden impulse in 1882. About 200,000 have come since then, and perhaps twice that number of persons of Slovak blood now dwell in the mining and industrial centers of the United States. Many of them, however, return to their native villages. They keep aloof from things American and only too often prefer to live in squalor and ignorance. Their social life is centered in the church, the saloon, and the lodge. It is asserted that their numerous organizations have a membership of over 100,000, and that there were almost as many Slovak newspapers in America as in Hungary.[38]

Little Russia, the seat of turmoil, is the home of the Ruthenians, or Ukranians. They are also found in southeastern Galicia, northern Hungary, and in the province of Bukowina. They have migrated from all these provinces and about 350,000, it is estimated, now reside in the United States. They, too, are birds of passage, working in the mines and steel mills for the coveted wages that shall free them from debt at home and insure their independence. Such respite as they take from their labors is spent in the saloon, in the club rooms over the saloon, or in church, where they hear no English speech and learn nothing of American ways.

It is impossible to estimate the total number of Russian Slavs in the United States, as the census figures until recently included as "Russian" all nationalities that came from Russia. They form the smallest of the Slavic groups that have migrated to America. From 1898 to 1909 only 66,282 arrived, about half of whom settled in Pennsylvania and New York. It is surprising to note, however, that every State in the Union except Utah and every island possession except the Philippines has received a few of these immigrants. The Director of Emigration at St. Petersburg in 1907 characterized these people as "hardy and industrious," and "though illiterate they are intelligent and unbigoted."[39]

So much in brief for the North Slavs. Of the South Slavs, the Bulgarians possess racial characteristics which point to an intermixture in the remote past with some Asiatic strain, perhaps a Magyar blend. Very few Bulgarian immigrants, who come largely from Macedonia, arrived before the revolution of 1904, when many villages in Monastir were destroyed. For some years they made Granite City, near St. Louis, the center of their activities but, like the Serbians, they are now well scattered throughout the country. In Seattle, Butte, Chicago, and Indianapolis they form considerable colonies. Many of them return yearly to their native hills, and it is too early to determine how fully they desire to adapt themselves to American ways.

Montenegro, Serbia, and Bulgaria, countries that have been thrust forcibly into the world's vision by the Great War, have sent several hundred thousand of their hardy peasantry to the United States. The Montenegrins and Serbians, who comprise three-fourths of this migration, are virtually one in speech and descent. They are to be found in New England towns and in nearly every State from New York to Alaska, where they work in the mills and mines and in construction gangs. The response which these people make to educational opportunities shows their high cultural possibilities.

The Croatians and Dalmatians, who constitute the larger part of the southern Slav immigration, are a sturdy, vigorous people, and splendid specimens of physical manhood. The Dalmatians are a seafaring folk from the Adriatic coast, whose sailors may be found in every port of the world. The Dalmatians have possessed themselves of the oyster fisheries near New Orleans and are to be found in Mississippi making staves and in California making wine. In many cities they manage restaurants. The exceptional shrewdness of the Dalmatians is in bold contrast to their illiteracy. They get on amazingly in spite of their lack of education. Once they have determined to remain in this country, they take to American ways more readily than do the other southern Slavs.

Croatia, too, has its men of the sea, but in America most of the immigrants of this race are to be found in the mines and coke furnaces of Pennsylvania and West Virginia. In New York City there are some 15,000 Croatian mechanics and longshoremen. The silver and copper mines of Montana also employ a large number of these people. It is estimated that fully one-half of the Croatians return to their native hills and that they contribute yearly many millions to the home-folks.

From the little province of Carniola come the Slovenians, usually known as "Griners" (from the German Krainer, the people of the Krain), a fragment of the Slavic race that has become much more assimilated with the Germans who govern them than any other of their kind. Their national costume has all but vanished and with it the virile traditions of their forefathers. They began coming to America in the sixties, and in the seventies they founded an important colony at Joliet, Illinois. Since 1892 their numbers have increased rapidly, until today about 100,000 live in the United States. Over one-half of these immigrants are to be found in the steel and mining towns of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois, where the large majority of them are unskilled workmen. Among the second generation, however, are to be found a number of successful merchants.

All these numerous peoples have inherited in common the impassive, patient temperament and the unhappy political fate of the Slav. Their countries are mere eddies left by the mighty currents of European conquest and reconquest, backward lands untouched by machine industry and avoided by capital, whose only living links with the moving world are the birds of passage, the immigrants who flit between the mines and cities of America and these isolated European villages. Held together by national costume, song, dance, festival, traditions, and language, these people live in the pale glory of a heroic past. Most of those who come to America are peasants who have been crushed by land feudalism, kept in ignorance by political intolerance, and bound in superstition by a reactionary ecclesiasticism. The brutality with which they treat their women, their disregard for sanitary measures, and their love for strong drink are evidences of the survival of medievalism in the midst of modern life, as are their notions of class prerogative and their concept of the State. Buffeted by the world, their language suppressed, their nationalism reviled, poor, ignorant, unskilled, these children of the open country come to the ugliest spots of America, the slums of the cities, and the choking atmosphere of the mines. Here, crowded in their colonies, jealously shepherded by their church, neglected by the community, they remain for an entire generation immune to American influences. According to estimates given by Emily G. Balch,[40] between four and six million persons of Slavic descent are now dwelling among us, and their fecundity is amazing. Equally amazing is the indifference of the Government and of Americans generally to the menace involved in the increasing numbers of these inveterate aliens to institutions that are fundamentally American.

The Lithuanians and Magyars are often classed with the Slavs. They hotly resent this inclusion, however, for they are distinct racial strains of ancient lineage. An adverse fate has left the Lithuanian little of his old civilization except his language. Political and economic suppression has made sad havoc of what was once a proud and prosperous people. Most of them are now crowded into the Baltic province that bears their name, and they are reduced to the mental and economic level of the Russian moujik. In 1868 a famine drove the first of these immigrants to America, where they were soon absorbed by the anthracite mines of Pennsylvania. They were joined in the seventies by numbers of army deserters. The hard times of the nineties caused a rush of young men to the western El Dorado. Since then the influx has steadily continued until now over 200,000 are in America. They persistently avoid agriculture and seek the coal mine and the factory. The one craft in which they excel is tailoring, and they proudly boast of being the best dressed among all the Eastern-European immigrants. The one mercantile ambition which they have nourished is to keep a saloon. Drinking is their national vice; and they measure the social success of every wedding, christening, picnic, and jollification by its salvage of empty beer kegs.

Over 338,000 Magyars immigrated to the United States during the decade ending 1910. These brilliant and masterful folk are a Mongoloid blend that swept from the steppes of Asia across eastern Europe a thousand years ago. As the wave receded, the Magyars remained dominant in beautiful and fertile Hungary, where their aggressive nationalism still brings them into constant rivalry on the one hand with the Germans of Austria and on the other with the Slavs of Hungary. The immigrants to America are largely recruited from the peasantry. They almost invariably seek the cities, where the Magyar neighborhoods can be easily distinguished by their scrupulously neat housekeeping, the flower beds, the little patches of well-swept grass, the clean children, and the robust and tidy women. Among them is less illiteracy than in any other group from eastern and southern Europe, excepting the Finns, who are their ethnic brothers. As a rule they own their own homes. They learn the English language quickly but unfortunately acquire with it many American vices. Drinking and carousing are responsible for their many crimes of personal violence. They are otherwise a sociable, happy people, and the cafes kept by Hungarians are islands of social jollity in the desert of urban strife.

In bold contrast to these ardent devotees of nationalism, the Jew, the man of no country and of all countries, is an American immigrant still to be considered. By force of circumstance he became a city dweller; he came from the European city; he remained in the American city; and all attempts to colonize Jews on the land have failed. The doors of this country have always been open to him. At the time of the Revolution several thousand Jews dwelt in American towns. By 1850 the number had increased to 50,000 and by the time of the Civil War to 150,000. The persecutions of Czar Alexander III in the eighties swelled the number to over 400,000, and the political reactions of the nineties added over one million. Today at least one fifth of the ten million Jews in the world live in American cities.

The first to seek a new Zion in this land were the Spanish-Portuguese Jews, who came as early as 1655. They remain a select aristocracy among their race, clinging to certain ritualistic characteristics and retaining much of the pride which their long contact with the Spaniard has engendered. They are found almost exclusively in the eastern cities, as successful bankers, merchants, and professional men. There next came on the wave of the great German immigration the German Jews. They are to be found in every city, large and small, engaged in mercantile pursuits, especially in the drygoods and the clothing business. Nearly all of the prominent Jews in America have come from this stock—the great bankers, financiers, lawyers, merchants, rabbis, scholars, and public men. It was, indeed, from their broad-minded scholars that there originated the widespread liberal Judaism which has become a potent ethical force in our great cities.

The Austrian and Hungarian Jews followed. The Jews had always received liberal treatment in Hungary, and their mingling with the social Magyars had produced the type of the coffeehouse Jew, who loved to reproduce in American cities the conviviality of Vienna and Budapest but who did not take as readily to American ways as the German Jew. Most of the Jews from Hungary remained in New York, although Chicago and St. Louis received a few of them. In commercial life they are traders, pawnbrokers, and peddlers, and control the artificial-flower and passementerie trade.

By far the largest group are the latest comers, the Russian Jews. "Ultra orthodox," says Edward A. Steiner, "yet ultra radical; chained to the past, and yet utterly severed from it; with religion permeating every act of life, or going to the other extreme and having 'none of it'; traders by instinct, and yet among the hardest manual laborers of our great cities. A complex mass in which great things are yearning to express themselves, a brooding mass which does not know itself and does not lightly disclose itself to the outside."[41] Nearly a million of these people are crowded into the New York ghettos. Large numbers of them engage in the garment industries and the manufacture of tobacco. They graduate also into junk-dealers, pawnbrokers, and peddlers, and are soon on their way "up town." Among them socialism thrives, and the second generation displays an unseemly haste to break with the faith of its fathers.

The Jews are the intellectuals of the new immigration. They invest their political ideas with vague generalizations of human amelioration. They cannot forget that Karl Marx was a Jew: and one wonders how many Trotzkys and Lenines are being bred in the stagnant air of their reeking ghettos. It remains to be seen whether they will be willing to devote their undoubted mental capacities to other than revolutionary vagaries or to gainful pursuits, for they have a tendency to commercialize everything they touch. They have shown no reluctance to enter politics; they learn English with amazing rapidity, throng the public schools and colleges, and push with characteristic zeal and persistence into every open door of this liberal land.

From Italy there have come to America well over three million immigrants. For two decades before 1870 they filtered in at the average rate of about one thousand a year; then the current increased to several thousand a year; and after 1880 it rose to a flood.[42] Over two-thirds of these Italians live in the larger cities; one-fourth of them are crowded into New York tenements.[43] Following in order, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, New Orleans, Cleveland, St. Louis, Baltimore, Detroit, Portland, and Omaha have their Italian quarters, all characterized by overcrowded boarding houses and tenements, vast hordes of children, here and there an Italian bakery and grocery, on every corner a saloon, and usually a private bank with a steamship agency and the office of the local padrone. Scores of the lesser cities also have their Italian contingent, usually in the poorest and most neglected part of the town, where gaudily painted door jambs and window frames and wonderfully prosperous gardens proclaim the immigrant from sunny Italy. Not infrequently an old warehouse, store, or church is transformed into an ungainly and evil-odored barracks, housing scores of men who do their own washing and cooking. Those who do not dwell in the cities are at work in construction camps—for the Italian has succeeded the Irishman as the knight of the pick and shovel. The great bulk of these swarthy, singing, hopeful young fellows are peasants, unskilled of hand but willing of heart. Nearly every other one is unable to read or write. They have not come for political or religious reasons but purely as seekers for wages, driven from the peasant villages by overpopulation and the hazards of a precarious agriculture.

They have come in two distinct streams: one from northern Italy, embracing about one-fifth of the whole; the other from southern Italy. The two streams are quite distinct in quality. Northern Italy is the home of the old masters in art and literature and of a new industrialism that is bringing renewed prosperity to Milan and Turin. Here the virile native stock has been strengthened with the blood of its northern neighbors. They are a capable, creative, conservative, reliable race. On the other hand, the hot temper of the South has been fed by an infusion of Greek and Saracen blood. In Sicily this strain shows at its worst. There the vendetta flourishes; and the Camorra and its sinister analogue, the Black Hand, but too realistically remind us that thousands of these swarthy criminals have found refuge in the dark alleys of our cities. Even in America the Sicilian carries a dirk, and the "death sign" in a court room has silenced many a witness. The north Italians readily identify themselves with American life. Among them are found bakers, barbers, and marble cutters, as well as wholesale fruit and olive oil merchants, artists, and musicians. But the south Italian is a restless, roving creature, who dislikes the confinement and restraint of the mill and factory. He is found out of doors, making roads and excavations, railways, skyscrapers, and houses. If he has a liking for trade he trundles a pushcart filled with fruit or chocolates; or he may turn a jolly hurdy-gurdy or grind scissors. In spite of his native sociability, the south Italian is very slow to take to American ways. As a rule, he comes here intending to go back when he has made enough money. He has the air of a sojourner. He is picturesque, volatile, and incapable of effective team work.

About 300,000 Greeks have come to America between 1908 and 1917, nearly all of them young men, escaping from a country where they had meat three times a year to a land where they may have it three times a day. "The whole Greek world," says Henry P. Fairchild, writing in 1911, "may be said to be in a fever of emigration.... The strong young men with one accord are severing home ties, leaving behind wives and sweethearts, and thronging to the shores of America in search of opportunity and fortune." Every year they send back handsome sums to the expectant family. Business is an instinct with the Greek, and he has almost monopolized the ice cream, confectionery, and retail fruit business, the small florist shops and bootblack stands in scores of towns, and in every large city he is running successful restaurants. As a factory operative he is found in the cotton mills of New England, but he prefers merchandizing to any other calling.

Years ago when New Bedford was still a whaling port a group of Portuguese sailors from the Azores settled there. This formed the nucleus of the Portuguese immigration which, in the last decade, included over 80,000 persons. Two-thirds of these live in New England factory towns, the remaining third, strange to say, have found their way to the other side of the continent, where they work in the gardens and fruit orchards of California. New Bedford is still the center of their activity. They are a hard-working people whose standard of living, according to official investigations "is much lower than that of any other race," of whom scarcely one in twenty become citizens, and who evince no interest in learning or in manual skill.

Finally, American cities are extending the radius of their magnetism and are drawing ambitious tradesmen and workers from the Levant. Over 100,000 have come from Arabia, Syria, Armenia, and Turkey. The Armenians and Syrians, forming the bulk of this influx, came as refugees from the brutalities of the Mohammedan regime. The Levantine is first and always a bargainer. His little bazaars and oriental rug shops are bits of Cairo and Constantinople, where you are privileged to haggle over every purchase in true oriental style. Even the peddlers of lace and drawn-work find it hard to accustom themselves to the occidental idea of a market price. With all their cunning as traders, they respect learning, prize manual skill, possess a fine artistic sense, and are law-abiding. The Armenians especially are eager to become American citizens. Since the settlement of the Northwestern lands, many thousands of Scandinavians and Finns have flocked to the cities, where they are usually employed as skilled craftsmen.[44]

Thus the United States, in a quarter of a century, has assumed a cosmopolitanism in which the early German and Irish immigrants appear as veteran Americans. This is not a stationary cosmopolitanism, like that of Constantinople, the only great city in Europe that compares with New York, Chicago, or Boston in ethnic complexity. It is a shifting mass. No two generations occupy the same quarters. Even the old rich move "up town" leaving their fine houses, derelicts of a former splendor, to be divided into tenements where six or eight Italian or Polish families find ample room for themselves and a crowd of boarders.

Thousands of these migratory beings throng the steerage of transatlantic ships every winter to return to their European homes. The steamship companies, whose enterprise is largely responsible for this flow of populations, reap their harvest; and many a decaying village buried in the southern hills of Europe, or swept by the winds of the great Slav plains, owes its regeneration ultimately to American dollars.

They pay the price of their success, these flitting beings, links between distant lands and our own. The great maw of mine and factory devours thousands. Their lyric tribal songs are soon drowned by the raucous voices of the city; their ancient folk-dances, meant for a village green, not for a reeking dance-hall, lose here their native grace; and the quaint and picturesque costumes of the European peasant give place to American store clothes, the ugly badge of equality.

The outward bound throng holds its head high, talks back at the steward, and swaggers. It has become "American." The restless fever of the great democracy is in its veins. Most of those who return home will find their way back with others of their kind to the teeming hives and the coveted fleshpots they are leaving. And again they will tax the ingenuity of labor unions, political and social organizations, schools, libraries, and churches, in the endeavor to transform medieval peasants into democratic peers.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 34: This lament of Henry James's is cited by E.A. Ross in The Old World in the New, p. 101.]

[Footnote 35: Emily Greene Balch, Our Slavic Fellow Citizens, p. 8-9.]

[Footnote 36: Edward A. Steiner, On the Trail of the Immigrant, p. 228.]

[Footnote 37: This is an estimate made by the Reverend W.X. Kruszka of Ripon, Wisconsin, as reported by E.G. Balch in Our Slavic Fellow Citizens, p. 262. Of this large number, Chicago claims 350,000; New York City, 250,000; Buffalo, 80,000; Milwaukee, 75,000; Detroit, 75,000; while at least a dozen other cities have substantial Polish settlements. These numbers include the suburbs of each city.]

[Footnote 38: This is accounted for by the fact that the Hungarian Government rigorously censored Slovak publications.]

[Footnote 39: Since the Russo-Japanese War, Siberia has absorbed great numbers of Russian immigrants. This accounts for the small number that have come to America.]

[Footnote 40: Our Slavic Fellow Citizens, p. 280.]

[Footnote 41: On the Trail of the Immigrant, p. 27.]

[Footnote 42: The census figures show that approximately half the Italian immigrants return to their native land. American officers in the Great War were surprised to find so many Italian soldiers who spoke English. In 1910 there remained in the United States only 1,343,000 Italians who were born in Italy, and the total number of persons of Italian stock in the United States was 2,098,000.]

[Footnote 43: According to the Census of 1910 there were 544,000 Italians in New York City]

[Footnote 44: The Census of 1910 gives the following distribution of the American white population by percentages:

+ + -+ - Native born Native of Foreign or Foreign Location stock mixed parentage born + + -+ - Rural districts 64.1 13.3 7.5 Cities 2,500- 10,000 57.5 20.6 13.9 " 10,000- 25,000 50.4 24.6 17.4 " 25,000-100,000 45.9 26.5 20.2 " 100,000-500,000 38.9 31.3 22.1 " 200,000 and over 25.6 37.2 33.6 + + -+ -

The native white element predominates in the country but is only a fraction of the population in the larger cities.]



CHAPTER IX

THE ORIENTAL

America, midway between Europe and Asia, was destined to be the meeting-ground of Occident and Orient. It was in the exciting days of '49 that gold became the lodestone to draw to California men from the oriental lands across the Pacific. The Chinese for the moment overcame their religious aversion to leaving their native haunts and, lured by the promise of fabulous wages, made their way to the "gold hills." Of the three hundred thousand who came to America during the three decades of free entry, the large majority were peasants from the rural districts in the vicinity of Canton. They were thrifty, independent, sturdy, honest young men who sought the great adventure unaccompanied by wife or family. Chinese tradition forbade the respectable woman to leave her home, even with her husband; and China was so isolated from the world, so encrusted in her own traditions that out of her uncounted millions even the paltry thousands of peasants and workmen who filtered through the port of Canton into the great world were bound by ancient precedent as firmly as if they had remained at home. They invariably planned to return to the Celestial Empire and it was their supreme wish that, if they died abroad, their bodies be buried in the land of their ancestors.

The Chinaman thus came to America as a workman adventurer, not as a prospective citizen. He preserved his queue, his pajamas, his chopsticks, and his joss in the crude and often brutal surroundings of the mining camp. He maintained that gentle, yielding, unassertive character which succumbs quietly to pressure at one point, only to reappear silently and unobtrusively in another place. In the wild rough and tumble of the camp, where the outlaw and the bully found congenial refuge, the celestial did not belie his name. He was indeed of another world, and his capacity for patience, his native dignity without suspicion of hauteur, baffled the loud self-assertion of the Irish and the Anglo-Saxon.

During the first years of the gold rush, the Chinaman was welcome in California because he was necessary. He could do so many things that the miner disdained or found no time to do. He could cook and wash, and he could serve. He was a rare gardener and a patient day laborer. He could learn a new trade quickly. In the city he became a useful domestic servant at a time when there were very few women. In all his tasks he was neat and had a genius for noiselessly minding his own business.

As the number of miners increased, race prejudice asserted itself. "California for Americans" came to be a slogan that reflected their feelings against Mexicans, Spanish-Americans, and Chinese in the mines. Race riots, often instigated by men who had themselves but recently immigrated to America, were not infrequent. In these disorders the Chinese were no match for the aggressors and in consequence were forced out of many good mining claims.

The labor of the cheap and faithful Chinese appealed to the business instincts of the railroad contractors who were constructing the Pacific railways and they imported large numbers. In 1866 a line of steamships was established to run regularly between Hong Kong and San Francisco. In 1869 the first transcontinental railway was completed and American laborers from the East began to flock to California, where they immediately found themselves in competition with the Mongolian standard of living. Race rivalry soon flared up and the anti-Chinese sentiment increased as the railroads neared completion and threw more and more of the oriental laborers into the general labor market. Chinese were hustled out of towns. Here and there violence was done. For example, in the Los Angeles riots of October 24, 1871, fifteen Chinamen were hanged and six were shot by the mob.

This prejudice, based primarily upon the Chinaman's willingness to work long hours for little pay and to live in quarters and upon fare which an Anglo-Saxon would find impossible, was greatly increased by his strange garb, language, and customs. The Chinaman remained in every essential a foreigner. In his various societies he maintained to some degree the patriarchal government of his native village. He shunned American courts, avoided the Christian religion, rarely learned much of the English language, and displayed no desire to become naturalized. Instead of sympathy in the country of his sojourn he met discrimination, jealousy, and suspicion. For many years his testimony was not permitted in the courts. His contact with only the rough frontier life failed to reveal to him the gentle amenities of the white man's faith, and everywhere the upper hand seemed turned against him. So he kept to himself, and this isolation fed the rumors that were constantly poisoning public opinion. Chinatown in the public mind became a synonym for a nightmare of filth, gambling, opium-smoking, and prostitution.

Alarm was spreading among Americans concerning the organizations of the Chinese in the United States. Of these, the Six Companies were the most famous. Mary Roberts Coolidge, after long and careful research, characterized these societies as "the substitute for village and patriarchal association, and although purely voluntary and benevolent in their purpose, they became, because of American ignorance and prejudice, the supposed instruments of tyranny over their countrymen."[45] They each had a club house, where members were registered and where lodgings and other accommodations were provided. The largest in 1877 had a membership of seventy-five thousand; the smallest, forty-three thousand. The Chinese also maintained trade guilds similar in purpose to the American trade union. Private or secret societies also flourished among them, some for good purposes, others for illicit purposes. Of the latter the Highbinders or Hatchet Men became the most notorious, for they facilitated the importation of Chinese prostitutes. Many of these secret societies thrived on blackmail, and the popular antagonism to the Six Companies was due to the outrages committed by these criminal associations.

When the American labor unions accumulated partisan power, the Chinese became a political issue. This was the greatest evil that could befall them, for now racial persecution received official sanction and passed out of the hands of mere ruffians into the custody of powerful political agitators. Under the lurid leadership of Dennis Kearney, the Workingman's party was organized for the purpose of influencing legislation and "ridding the country of Chinese cheap labor." Their goal was "Four dollars a day and roast beef"; and their battle cry, "The Chinese must go." Under the excitement of sand-lot meetings, the Chinese were driven under cover. In the riots of July, 1877, in San Francisco, twenty-five Chinese laundries were burned. "For months afterward," says Mary Roberts Coolidge, "no Chinaman was safe from personal outrage even on the main thoroughfares, and the perpetrators of the abuses were almost never interfered with so long as they did not molest white men's property."[46]

This anti-Chinese epidemic soon spread to other Western States. Legislatures and city councils vied with each other in passing laws and ordinances to satisfy the demands of the labor vote. All manner of ingenious devices were incorporated into tax laws in an endeavor to drive the Chinese out of certain occupations and to exclude them from the State. License and occupation taxes multiplied. The Chinaman was denied the privilege of citizenship, was excluded from the public schools, and was not allowed to give testimony in proceedings relating to white persons. Manifold ordinances were passed intended to harass and humiliate him: for instance, a San Francisco ordinance required the hair of all prisoners to be cut within three inches of the scalp. Most extreme and unreasonable discriminations against hand laundries were framed. The new California constitution of 1879 endowed the legislature and the cities with large powers in regulating the conditions under which Chinese would be tolerated. In 1880 a state law declared that all corporations operating under a state charter should be prohibited from employing Chinese under penalty of forfeiting their charter. Chinese were also excluded from employment in all public works. Nearly all these laws and ordinances, however, were ultimately declared to be unconstitutional on account of their discriminatory character or because they were illegal regulations of commerce.

The States having failed to exclude the Chinese, the only hope left was in the action of the Federal Government. The earliest treaties and trade conventions with China (1844 and 1858) had been silent upon the rights and privileges of Chinese residing or trading in the United States. In 1868, Anson Burlingame, who had served for six years as American Minister to China, but who had now entered the employ of the Chinese Imperial Government, arrived at the head of a Chinese mission sent for the purpose of negotiating a new treaty which should insure reciprocal rights to the Chinese. The journey from San Francisco to Washington was a sort of triumphal progress and everywhere the Chinese mission was received with acclaim. The treaty drawn by Secretary Seward was ratified on July 28, 1868, and was hailed even on the Pacific coast as the beginning of more fortunate relations between the two countries. The treaty acknowledged the "inherent and inalienable right of man to change his home and allegiance, and also the mutual advantage of the free migration and emigration of their citizens and subjects respectively, from the one country to the other, for purposes of curiosity, of trade or as permanent residents." It stated positively that "citizens of the United States visiting or residing in China shall enjoy the same privileges, immunities, and exemptions in respect to travel and residence as may be enjoyed by the citizens of the most favored nation. And, reciprocally, Chinese subjects visiting or residing in the United States shall enjoy the same privileges, immunities, and exemptions in respect to travel or residence." The right to naturalization was by express statement not conferred by the treaty upon the subjects of either nation dwelling in the territory of the other. But it was not in any way prohibited.

The applause which greeted this international agreement had hardly subsided before the anti-Chinese agitators discovered that the treaty was in their way and they thereupon demanded its modification or abrogation. They now raised the cry that the Chinese were a threat to the morals and health of the country, that the majority of Chinese immigrants were either coolies under contract, criminals, diseased persons, or prostitutes. As a result, in 1879 a representative from Nevada, one of the States particularly interested, introduced in Congress a bill limiting to fifteen the Chinese passengers that any ship might bring to the United States on a single voyage, and requiring the captains of such vessels to register at the port of entry a list of their Chinese passengers. The Senate added an amendment requesting the President to notify the Chinese Government that the section of the Burlingame treaty insuring reciprocal interchange of citizens was abrogated. After a very brief debate the measure that so flagrantly defied an international treaty passed both houses. It was promptly vetoed, however, by President Hayes on the ground that it violated a treaty which a friendly nation had carefully observed. If the Pacific cities had cause of complaint, the President preferred to remedy the situation by the "proper course of diplomatic negotiations."[47]

The President accordingly appointed a commission, under the chairmanship of James B. Angell, president of the University of Michigan, to negotiate a new treaty. The commission proceeded to China and completed its task in November, 1880. The new treaty provided that, "whenever, in the opinion of the Government of the United States, the coming of Chinese laborers to the United States, or their residence therein, affects or threatens to affect the interests of that country, or to endanger the good order of the said country or of any locality within the territory thereof, the Government of China agrees that the Government of the United States may regulate, limit, or suspend such coming or residence, but may not absolutely prohibit it." Other Chinese subjects who had come to the United States, "as travelers, merchants, or for curiosity," and laborers already in the United States, were to "be allowed to go and come of their own free will," with all of the "rights, privileges, immunities, and exemptions which are accorded to the citizens of the most favored nation." The United States furthermore undertook to protect the Chinese in the United States against "ill treatment" and to "devise means for their protection."

Two years after the ratification of this treaty, a bill was introduced to prohibit the immigration of Chinese labor for twenty years. Both the great political parties had included the subject in their platforms in 1880. The Democrats had espoused exclusion and were committed to "No more Chinese immigration"; the Republicans had preferred restriction by "just, humane, and reasonable laws." The bill passed, but President Arthur vetoed it on the ground that prohibiting immigration for so long a period transcended the provisions of the treaty. A bill which was then passed shortening the period of the restriction to ten years received the President's signature, and on August 5, 1882, America shut the door in the face of Chinese labor.

The law, however, was very loosely drawn and administrative confusion arose at once. Chinese laborers leaving the United States were required to obtain a certificate from the collector of customs at the port of departure entitling them to reentry. Other Chinese—merchants, travelers, or visitors—who desired to come to the United States were required to have a certificate from their Government declaring that they were entitled to enter under the provisions of the treaty. As time went on, identification became a joke, trading in certificates a regular pursuit, and smuggling Chinese across the Canadian border a profitable business. Moreover, in the light of the law, who was a "merchant" and who a "visitor"? In 1884 Congress attempted to remedy these defects of phraseology and administration by carefully framed definitions and stringent measures.[48] The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of exclusion as incident to American sovereignty.

Meanwhile in the West the popular feeling against the Chinese refused to subside. At Rock Springs, Wyoming, twenty-eight Chinese were killed and fifteen were injured by a mob which also destroyed Chinese property amounting to $148,000. At Tacoma and Seattle, also, violence descended upon the Mongolian. In San Francisco a special grand jury which investigated the operation of the exclusion laws and a committee of the Board of Supervisors which investigated the condition of Chinatown both made reports that were violently anti-Chinese. A state anti-Chinese convention soon thereafter declared that the situation "had become well-nigh intolerable." So widespread and venomous was the agitation against Chinese that President Cleveland was impelled to send to Congress two special messages on the question, detailing the facts and requesting Congress to pay the Chinese claims for indemnity which Wyoming refused to honor. The remonstrances of the Chinese Government led to the drafting of a new treaty in 1888. But while China was deliberating over this treaty, Congress summarily shut off any hope for immediate agreement by passing the Scott Act prohibiting the return of any Chinese laborer after the passage of the act, stopping the issue of any more certificates of identification, and declaring void all certificates previously issued. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that this brutal political measure was passed with an eye to the Pacific electoral vote in the pending election. In the next presidential year the climax of harshness was reached in the Geary law, which required, within an unreasonably short time, the registration of all Chinese in the United States. The Chinese, under legal advice, refused to register until the Federal Supreme Court had declared the law constitutional. Subsequently the time for registration was extended.

The anti-Chinese fanaticism had now reached its highest point. While the Government maintained its policy of exclusion, it modified the drastic details of the law. In 1894 a new treaty provided for the exclusion of laborers for ten years, excepting registered laborers who had either parent, wife, or child in the United States, or who possessed property or debts to the amount of one thousand dollars. It required all resident Chinese laborers to register, and the Chinese Government was similarly entitled to require the registration of all American laborers resident in China. The treaty made optional the clause requiring merchants, travelers, and other classes privileged to come to the United States, to secure a certificate from their Government vised by the American representative at the port of departure.

In 1898 General Otis extended the exclusion acts to the Philippines by military order, owing to the fact that the country was in a state of war, and Congress extended them to the Hawaiian Islands. In 1904 China refused to continue the treaty of 1894, and Congress substantially reenacted the existing laws "in so far as not inconsistent with treaty obligations." Thus the legal status quo has been maintained, and the Chinese population in America is gradually decreasing. No new laborers are permitted to come and those now here go home as old age overtakes them. But the public has come to recognize that diplomatic circumlocution cannot conceal the crude and harsh treatment which the Chinaman has received; that the earlier laws were based upon reports that greatly exaggerated the evils and were silent upon the virtues of the Oriental; and that a policy which had its conception in frontier fears and in race prejudice was sustained by politicians and perpetuated by demagogues.

Rather suddenly the whole drama of discrimination was re-opened by the arrival of a considerable number of Japanese laborers in America. In 1900, there were some twenty-four thousand in the United States and a decade later this number had increased threefold. About one-half of them lived in California, and the rest were to be found throughout the West, especially in Washington, Colorado, and Oregon. They were nearly all unmarried young men of the peasant class. Unlike the Chinese, they manifested a readiness to conform to American customs and an eagerness to learn the language and to adopt American dress. The racial gulf, however, is not bridged by a similarity in externals. The Japanese possess all the deep and subtle contrasts of mentality and ideality which differentiate the Orient from the Occident. A few are not averse to adopting Christianity; many more are free-thinkers; but the bulk remain loyal to Buddhism. They have reproduced here the compact trade guilds of Japan. The persistent aggressiveness of the Japanese, their cunning, their aptitude in taking advantage of critical circumstances in making bargains, have by contrast partially restored to popular favor the patient, reliable Chinaman.

At first the Japanese were welcomed as unskilled laborers. They found employment on the railroads, in lumber mills and salmon canneries, in mines and on farms, and in domestic service. But they soon showed a keen propensity for owning or leasing land. The Immigration Commission found that in 1909 they owned over sixteen thousand acres in California and leased over one hundred and thirty-seven thousand. Nearly all of this land they had acquired in the preceding five years. In Colorado they controlled over twenty thousand acres, and in Idaho and Washington over seven thousand acres each. This acreage represents small holdings devoted to intensive agriculture, especially to the raising of sugar beets, vegetables, and small fruits.

The hostility which began to manifest itself against the Japanese especially in California brought that State into sharp contact with the Federal Government. In 1906 the San Francisco authorities excluded the Japanese from the public schools. This act was immediately and vigorously protested by the Japanese Government. After due investigation, the matter was finally adjusted at a conference held in Washington between President Roosevelt and a delegation from California. This incident served to re-awaken the ghost of Mongolian domination on the Pacific coast, for it occurred during the notorious regime of Mayor Schmitz. Labor politics were rampant. Isolated instances of violence against Japanese occurred, and hoodlums, without fear of police interference, attacked a number of Japanese restaurants. Political candidates were pledged to an anti-Japanese policy.

In 1907 the two governments reached an agreement whereby the details of issuing passports to Japanese laborers who desired to return to the United States was virtually left in the hands of the Japanese Government, which was opposed to the emigration of its laboring population. As a consequence of this agreement, passports are granted only to laborers who had previously been residents of the United States or to parents, wives, and children of Japanese laborers resident in America. Under authority of the immigration law of 1907, the President issued an order (March 14, 1907) denying admission to "Japanese and Korean laborers, skilled or unskilled, who have received passports to go to Mexico, Canada, Hawaii and come therefrom" to the United States.

Anti-Japanese feeling was crystallized into the alien land bill of California in 1913. So serious was the international situation that President Wilson sent Mr. Bryan, then Secretary of State, across the continent to confer with the California legislature and to determine upon some action that would at the same time meet the needs of the State and "leave untouched the international obligations of the United States." The law subsequently passed was thought by the Californians to appease both of these demands.[49] But the Japanese Government made no less than five vigorous formal protests and filled a lengthy brief which characterized the law as unfair and intentionally discriminating and in violation of the treaty of Commerce and Navigation entered into in 1911. While anti-Japanese demonstrations were taking place in Washington, there was a corresponding outbreak of anti-American feeling in the streets of Tokyo. On February 2, 1914, during the debate on a new immigration bill, an amendment was proposed in the House of Representatives, at the instigation of members from the Pacific coast, excluding all Asiatics, except such as had their entry right established by treaty. But this drastic proposal was defeated by a decisive vote.

The oriental question in America is further complicated by the fact that since 1905 some five thousand East Indians have come to the United States. Of these the majority are Hindoos, the remainder being chiefly Afghans. How these people who have lived under British rule will adapt themselves to American life and institutions remains to be seen.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 45: Chinese Immigration, p. 402.]

[Footnote 46: Chinese Immigration, p. 265.]

[Footnote 47: So intense was the feeling in the West that at this time a letter purporting to have been written by James A. Garfield, the Republican candidate, favoring unrestricted immigration, was published on the eve of the Presidential election (1880). Though the letter was shown to be a forgery, yet it was not without influence. In California Garfield received only one of the six electoral votes; and in Nevada he received none. In Denver, where only four hundred Chinese lived, race riots occurred which cost one Chinaman his life and destroyed Chinese property to the amount of $50,000.]

[Footnote 48: Wong Wing vs. U.S., 163 U.S. 235.]

[Footnote 49: The Alien Land Act of May 19, 1913, confers upon all aliens eligible to citizenship the same rights as citizens in the owning and leasing of real property; but in the case of other aliens (i.e. Asiatics) it limits leases of land for agricultural purposes to terms not exceeding three years and permits ownership "to the extent and for the purposes prescribed by any treaty."]



CHAPTER X

RACIAL INFILTRATION

With the free land gone and the cities crowded to overflowing, the door of immigration, though guarded, nevertheless remains open and the pressure of the old-world peoples continues. Where can they go? They are filling in the vacant spots of the older States, the abandoned farms, stagnant half-empty villages, undrained swamps, uninviting rocky hillsides. This infiltration of foreigners possessing themselves of rejected and abandoned land, which has only recently begun, shows that the peasant's instinct for the soil will reassert itself when the means are available and the way opens. It is surprising, indeed, how many are the ways that are opening for this movement. Transportation companies are responsible for a number of colonies planted bodily in cut-over timber regions of the South. The journals and the real estate agents of the different races are always alert to spy out opportunities. Dealing in second-hand farms has become a considerable industry. The advertising columns of Chicago papers announce hundreds of farms for sale in northern Michigan and Wisconsin. In all the older States there are for sale thousands of acres of tillable land which have been left by the restless shiftings of the American population. In New England the abandoned farm has long been an institution. Throughout the East there are depleted and dying villages, their solidly built cottages hidden in the matting of trees and shrubs which neglect has woven about them. One can see paralysis creeping over them as the vines creep over their deserted thresholds and they surrender one by one the little industries that gave them life. These are the opportunities of the immigrant peasant. Wherever the new migration swarms, there the receding tide leaves a few energetic individuals who have made for themselves a permanent home. In the wake of construction gangs and along the lines of railways and canals one discovers these immigrant families taking root in the soil. In the smaller cities, an immigrant day laborer will often invest his savings in a tumble-down house and an acre of land, and almost at once he becomes the nucleus for a gathering of his kind. The market gardens that surround the large cities offer work to the children of the factory operatives, and there they swarm over beet and onion fields like huge insects with an unerring instinct for weeds. Now and then a family finds a forgotten acre, builds a shack, and starts a small independent market garden. Within a few years a whole settlement of shacks grows up around it, and soon the trucking of the neighborhood is in foreign hands. Seasonal agricultural work often carries the immigrant into distant canning centers, hop fields, cranberry marshes, orchards, and vineyards. Every time a migration of this sort occurs, some settlers remain on land previously thought unfit for cultivation—perhaps a swamp which they drain or a sand-hill which they fertilize and nurture into surprising fertility by constant toil. This racial seepage is confined almost wholly to the Italian and the Slav.

There is a vast acreage of unoccupied good land in the South, which the negro, usually satisfied with a bare living, has neither the enterprise nor the thrift to cultivate. The prejudice of the former slave owner against the foreign immigration for many years retarded the development of this land. About 1880, however, groups of Italians, attracted by the sunny climate and the opportunities for making a livelihood, began to seep into Louisiana. By 1900 they numbered over seventeen thousand. When direct sailings between the Mediterranean and the Gulf of Mexico were established, their numbers increased rapidly and New Orleans became one of the leading Italian centers in the United States. From the city they soon spread into the adjoining region. Today they grow cotton, sugar-cane, and rice in nearly all the Southern States. In the deep black loam of the Yazoo Delta they prosper as cotton growers. They have transformed the neglected slopes of the Ozarks into apple and peach orchards. New Orleans, Dallas, Galveston, Houston, San Antonio, and other Southern cities are supplied with vegetables from the Italian truck farms. At Independence, Louisiana, a colony raises strawberries. In the black belt of Arkansas they established Sunnyside in 1895, a colony which has survived many vicissitudes and has been the parent of other similar enterprises. In Texas there are a number of such colonies, of which the largest, at Bryan, numbers nearly two thousand persons. In California the Italian owns farms, orchards, vineyards, market gardens, and even ranches. Here he finds the cloudless sky and mild air of his native land. The sunny slopes invite vine culture.

In the North and the East the alert Italian has found many opportunities to buy land. In the environs of nearly every city northward from Norfolk, Virginia, are to be found his truck patches. At Vineland and Hammonton, New Jersey, large colonies have flourished for many years. In New York and Pennsylvania, many a hill farm that was too rocky for its Yankee owner, and many a back-breaking clay moraine in Ohio and Indiana has been purchased for a small cash payment and, under the stimulus of the family's coaxing, now yields paying crops, while the father himself also earns a daily wage in the neighboring town. Where one such Italian family is to be found, there are sure to be found at least two or three others in the neighborhood, for the Italians hate isolation more than hunger. Often they are clustered in colonies, as at Genoa and Cumberland in Wisconsin, where most of them are railroad workmen paying for the land out of their wages.

The Slavs, too, wedge into the most surprising spaces. Their colonies and settlements are to be found in considerable numbers in every part of the Union except the far South. They are on the cut-over timber lands of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, usually engaged in dairying or raising vegetables for canning. On the great prairies in Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, and the Dakotas, the Bohemians and the Poles have learned to raise wheat and corn, and in Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas, they have shown themselves skillful in cotton raising. Wherever fruit is grown on the Pacific slope, there are Bohemians, Slavonians, and Dalmatians. In New England, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, and Maryland, the Poles have become pioneers in the neglected corners of the land. For instance in Orange County, New York, a thriving settlement from old Poland now flourishes where a quarter of a century ago there was only a mosquito breeding swamp. The drained area produces the most surprising crops of onions, lettuce, and celery. Many of these immigrants own their little farms. Others work on shares in anticipation of ownership, and still others labor merely for the season, transients who spend the winter either in American factories or flit back to their native land.

In Pennsylvania it is the mining towns which furnished recruits for this landward movement. In some of the counties an exchange of population has been taking place for a decade or more. The land dwelling Americans are moving into the towns and cities. The farms are offered for sale. Enterprising Slavic real estate dealers are not slow in persuading their fellow countrymen to invest their savings in land.

The Slavonic infiltration has been most marked in New England, especially in the Connecticut Valley. From manufacturing centers like Chicopee, Worcester, Ware, Westfield, and Fitchburg, areas of Polish settlements radiate in every direction, alien spokes from American hubs. Here are little farming villages ready made in attractive settings whose vacant houses invite the alien peasant. A Polish family moves into a sedate colonial house; often a second family shares the place, sometimes a third or a fourth, each with a brood of children and often a boarder or two. The American families left in the neighborhood are scandalized by this promiscuity, by the bare feet and bare heads, by the unspeakable fare, the superstition and credulity, and illiteracy and disregard for sanitary measures, and by the ant-like industry from starlight to starlight. Old Hadley has become a prototype of what may become general if this racial infiltration is not soon checked. In 1906 the Poles numbered one-fifth of the population in that town, owned one-twentieth of the land, and produced two-thirds of the babies. Dignified old streets that formerly echoed with the tread of patriots now resound to the din of Polish weddings and christenings, and the town that sheltered William Goffe, one of the judges before whom Charles I was tried, now houses Polish transients at twenty-five cents a bed weekly.

The transient usually returns to Europe, but the landowner remains. His kind is increasing yearly. It is even probable that in a generation he will be the chief landowner of the Connecticut Valley. It will take more than an association of old families, determined on keeping the ancient homes in their own hands, to check this transformation.

The process of racial replacement is most rapid in the smaller manufacturing towns. In the New England mills the Yankee gave way to the Irish, the Irish gave way to the French Canadian, and the French Canadian has been largely superseded by the Slav and the Italian. Every one of the older industrial towns has been encrusted in layer upon layer of foreign accretions, until it is difficult to discover the American core. Everywhere are the physiognomy, the chatter, and the aroma of the modern steerage. Lawrence, Massachusetts, is typical of this change. In 1848 it had 5923 inhabitants, of whom 63.3 per cent were Americans, 36 per cent were Irish, and about forty white persons belonged to other nationalities. In 1910 the same city had 85,000 inhabitants, of whom only about 14 per cent were Americans, and the rest foreigners, two-thirds of the old and one-third of the new immigration.

A like transformation has taken place in the manufacturing towns of New York, New Jersey, and Delaware and in the iron and steel towns of Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and the Middle West. For forty years after the establishment of the first iron furnace in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, in 1842, the mills were manned exclusively by Americans, English, Welsh, Irish, and Germans. In 1880 Slavic names began to appear on the pay rolls. Soon thereafter Italians and Syrians were brought into the town, and today sixty per cent of the population is of foreign birth, largely from southeastern Europe. The native Americans and Welsh live in two wards, and clustered around them are settlements of Italians, Slovaks, and Croatians.

The new manufacturing towns which are dependent upon some single industry are almost wholly composed of recent immigrants. Gary, Indiana, built by the United States Steel Corporation, and Whiting, Indiana, established by the Standard Oil Company for its refining industry, are examples of new American towns of exotic populations. At a glass factory built in 1890 in the village of Charleroi, Pennsylvania, over ten thousand Belgians, French, Slavs, and Italians now labor. An example of lightning-like displacement of population is afforded by the steel and iron center at Granite City and Madison, Illinois. The two towns are practically one industrial community, although they have separate municipal organizations. A steel mill was erected in 1892 upon the open prairies, and in it American, Welsh, Irish, English, German, and Polish workmen were employed. In 1900 Slovaks were brought in, and two years later there came large numbers of Magyars, followed by Croatians. In 1905 Bulgarians began to arrive, and within two years over eight thousand had assembled. Armenians, Servians, Greeks, Magyars, every ethnic faction found in the racial welter of southeastern Europe, is represented among the twenty thousand inhabitants that dwell in this new industrial town. In "Hungary Hollow" these race fragments isolate themselves, effectively insulated against the currents of American influence.

The mining communities reveal this relative displacement of races in its most disheartening form. As early as 1820 coal was taken from the anthracite veins of northeastern Pennsylvania, but until 1880 the industry was dominated by Americans and north Europeans. In 1870 out of 108,000 foreign born in this region, 105,000 or over ninety-seven per cent came from England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and Germany. In 1880 a change began and continued until in 1910 less than one-third of the 267,000 foreign born were of northern European extraction. In 1870 there were only 306 Slavs and Italians in the entire region; in 1890 there were 43,000; in 1909 there were 89,000; and in 1910 the number increased to 178,000.