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On the Trail of The Immigrant

<h2>XXI THE NEW AMERICAN AND OLD PROBLEMS</h2> “COMPETITION is the life of prejudice” is an old truth, in a somewhat new setting. Back of the prejudice against Jew, Italian and Slav, is this fact: they are monopolizing certain departments of labour and trades, and in nearly every activity they are beginning to be felt in competition. The Swede is regarded as treacherous by the man whose place he has taken in the machine shops East and West; the Slovak and Pole are called dirty and unreliable by the miners whom they have supplanted in Pennsylvania, and the Jew is accused of trickery by the American who has a clothing store on the next corner. Under whatever name the feeling against the foreigner hides itself, it usually is in substance the fear of competition; and every law restricting immigration has been with the idea of protecting American labour. Nevertheless the economic problem presented by the New American is ill-defined, largely formulated by conflicting business interests, and is still only a question of the labour market. As a rule it may be said that the immigrant is willing to work only for the standard rate of wage; and whether that rate has been lowered by the recent influx of immigrants remains an undecided question. There are as reliable figures to prove that it has increased, as that it has decreased. The reports and resolutions of Labour Unions are coloured by self-interest as much as are the reports of Manufacturers’ Associations. It is an undisputed fact that the New England loom workers have been largely displaced by the Irish and by French Canadians; and that Greeks, Armenians and Syrians are now displacing these in turn. The native New Englander however has not suffered by the process; for the foreman, the forewoman and the man who invents the loom and makes it, are these New Englanders, who do something more and better than merely keep the spindles full. It is true that the Irishman no longer has the supremacy on railroad sections, and that he has been supplanted; but not even by the wildest imagination can we say that this Irishman has suffered in the process; for is he not now policeman, fireman, alderman or some other kind of man where formerly he was only a hand on a section? A similar change has taken place in all channels of activity; whether this is for good or ill, I am not ready to say. While no doubt exists in any mind that there are foreigners who are willing to work for less than the standard wage, it is because they do not yet know what that standard is; or because the immediate need drives them to take work at any price. Those of us who are acquainted with the immigrant as a labourer are aware that very soon he knows enough to demand his full wage, and that, smarting under a real or fancied wrong he will “strike” as quickly as if he had had twenty-five years of training in a Labour Union. The history of the labour troubles of the last fifteen years proves conclusively that the foreigner will strike; and that he knows how to use the weapons of the strike, such as picketing and slugging and all that goes with that form of industrial warfare. It is at such a time that he is most denounced for his pernicious activity; while the very Labour Union with which he has made a common cause, will then repudiate him as a “scab” and a menace. The author who, in his book,[4] which is supposed to be an authentic source of information on immigration, quoted the following, surely must have done so against his better judgment: “The agent[5] stated also that the rising generation of Jews, Italians and Hungarians are likely to live for the most part in the same conditions as their parents, and to remain unskilled labourers.” This is so evidently untrue that it must be known to be false by any man, even although he has examined this subject very superficially. The standard of living rises very perceptibly in the first generation among all classes of immigrants; and in proof of that I have the testimony of merchants in nearly all industrial centres in the United States. The boy who landed in Pennsylvania in homespun will discard it within a week and demand of his father short trousers and shirt waists. He will get them too; and he will get the best the father can afford. The wife will soon grow weary of keeping twenty boarders in one room; and I have seen the dawn of liberty rise upon her face as with flushing cheek she told her husband: “Me boss of this shanty.” When he tried to strike her as he did in the Old World she would remind him of the fact that this is the land of liberty, and I have seen her lift the battle-axe in defiance. Axe in hand she said: “I won’t keep boarders,” and the husband has been long enough in this country to know that when a woman in America says: “I won’t,” she won’t; and the boarders go. With the going of the boarders comes the demand for a carpet; a cheap cotton carpet with huge design of many colours, the same kind that our forefathers put upon their floors when rag carpets went out of fashion; not very beautiful; but thoroughly and primitively American. Plush furniture is added and stands stiffly against the wall; not very useful, but somewhat like the article which stands in more pretentious parlours. The “installment plan” agent finds among these people willing victims to plush albums, sewing machines and crayon portraits. Scarcely any of the New Americans I know are miserly or have essentially a different standard of living from our own, except as that standard was forced upon them by economic conditions. All of them in common with our frail humanity will spend money in proportion to their income and often, too often, out of proportion. The Slovak and the Pole who are most complained about on this score of a low standard of living, are fond of fine clothes and good food. In their native village they go about resplendent in glorious apparel, usually twice the value of ours; though we affect a higher standard of living. There are Slovak girls in Pennsylvania now, who have spent a year’s wage on a dress in the old country; and I have known women living in wretched huts who paid ten dollars for the half yard of lace on their caps. Mother vanity has her devotees everywhere and she exacts her tribute on this side of the Atlantic as well as on the other. Those who know the immigrant and care for his well being, are not concerned by the fact that he does not spend money, but that he does not spend it wisely;—that the girls of the first and second generations follow the fashions too quickly, and buy the things which are useless; even as their mothers will fill the homes with things which are neither comfortable nor beautiful. The Jews who are such a great economic factor in our life may be accused of everything with more show of justice than of this one thing; namely, that, viewed from this standpoint, their standard of living is low. They are proverbially good dressers; and good eating is part of their traditions; it is closely allied to their religion. If it were not for the Jews in New York and in Chicago, the theatres would be half empty and the music halls not less so; one of the stock complaints against the Jews of our large cities is that they want the best seats in these places, that they want to go to the best hotels and live in the finest residence sections. To get along in the world, to get up and out, to be “as good as the best,” is a passion in Israel; a passion which has made the Jew more enemies than he himself knows. I cannot regard the immigrant as a problem from this narrow economic view: while upon the broader question, of the general effect he has upon the condition of labour in America, I am at present in no position to be dogmatic. I recognize that it is natural for those engaged in the same pursuit to fear the competition which will lower their wage and consequently narrow their whole life. I believe that it is the business of the government to protect them against unjust competition, but first we must have tangible facts; and those we do not yet possess. Let me quote again, almost verbatim, a labour leader from Ohio, who lifted up his voice in the Immigration Congress which convened in Madison Square Garden, New York, on December 6, 1905. He said: “We don’t want you fellers to let in any more of them yellow crawling worms from Europe; we have them in Ohio. They live on a piece of bread and one beer, and we can’t live like a decent American ought to live.” I happen to know Ohio and the city from which this gentleman comes. I do not know a single foreign colony there, in which men are satisfied by a piece of bread and one beer. Those I know fix no limit as to the beer; and the vats of the Cincinnati brewers would be dry, were it not for the proverbial thirst of the foreigners who live on the classic shores of the “Rhine,”—as a certain muddy stream is called which manages to flow into the Ohio by way of Cincinnati. The discernment(?) of this man and of his kind is not enough to raise a false alarm. Any of us would bow before facts, presented by an unprejudiced observer and would gladly help to cry “Halt” to the invasion of strangers who would lower the standard of living in America. It takes neither figures nor close investigation to discover that in spite of the constant inflow of foreigners, the standard of living is rising continually; that the luxuries of yesterday are the comforts and necessities of to-day; and that in a larger measure than ever, it is true that the masses, if they have not reached this plane, are constantly at work trying to reach it. To blame the immigrant for the slums and the sweat-shops rests also upon pure assumption. It is indisputably true that the “slum” was always more or less here and that it is found wherever poverty and vice have met each other. The immigrant moves into wretched houses and narrow streets and alleys because they are here. American citizens draw revenue from death traps and do it without a twinge of conscience; but even then these places are not slums. I venture to assert that in the real slums of American cities, the native Americans, using the word native in its true sense, outnumber these foreigners with whom we always associate the slums, with their grim twins—Poverty and Vice. Only degenerate people sink into slums; and these foreigners have helped to regenerate them. In Chicago the first Ghetto developed in a quarter which could truly be called slums; full of dives in which the foulest vice flourished. Nearly all the women in those dens, and there must have been hundreds of them, were native Americans, or came from what we call the better immigrant stock, Germans and Scandinavians. On one side of this Ghetto was the most congested railroad district in the United States; on the other side as foul a slum as ever disgraced any city; but the Jew did not sink into the mire. He lifted that district out of it, so that to-day it is practically empty of that kind of vice. There is no doubt that in the last few years, the army of unfortunate women and gamblers has received recruits from among recent immigrants, and there is also no doubt that the number will still increase; but the stock, the root, the peculiar kind of decayed house and people which we call slum, is a native product. Most of the Slavs who come here do not know anything about the business of prostitution or gambling; and until a few years ago this was true among the Jews also. I am willing to assert that the people who are making these peculiar crimes their business, are ninety per cent. native Americans. This does not necessarily cast any aspersion upon the American people; for I can truthfully say that as a whole their standard of morality is higher than that of any other people I know. Yet it is true that the class of immigrants who come, peasants and labourers, do not import the slum, the brothel and the gambling house. If I were sent out to-day to find the people best fitted to replenish our physical stock, to help in winning the wealth of forest and mine, I should not go to Paris, to Vienna, to Berlin and London; or even to Glasgow or Edinburgh. I should go to the very villages in the Carpathians and Alps, on the broad Danubian plains, from which our recent immigration comes. Whether we are in need of replenishing this stock, whether the wealth of forest and mines should be harvested as quickly as it is now, is another question of those many with which I cannot deal here. Taking conditions as I see them, granting that we need muscle and brawn, I can say very dogmatically that we are getting exactly what we need. The sweat-shop it is true flourishes because of this recent immigration; but gradually its domain is losing ground and the fighters at the front against both slums and sweat-shops are the New Americans, who are helping to solve some old problems and to heal some old diseases. The claim that every able bodied foreigner who comes here is worth so many dollars to this country has been ridiculed. Count Aponyi, of Hungary, who claims that his country loses money by the withdrawal of this able bodied army of men and women, puts the height of our gain at five thousand dollars for every man. However that may be, this is true: immigration has had a direct economic influence upon the countries from which the immigrants come, an influence which is both for good and bad. In certain regions wages have increased nearly fifty per cent. The relation between servant and master has changed, and a note of independence rings from the guttural throats of Slovaks and Poles; while “strike” and “meeting” are two English words which have entered permanently into their vocabularies. The removal of so many able bodied men has left whole villages with but women and children; and while the moral tone of such regions has not improved, one cannot as yet perceive any economic loss. This is due to the fact that money comes pouring in which offsets the loss sustained by the removal of so large a population. Nevertheless it is a fact that the governments of Europe most concerned still regard themselves as losers, and are taking steps to restrict the emigration of desirable classes. It has been claimed by a certain member of congress, that the withdrawal of this money from America is an economic loss and that the American people should stop it; because the money goes to support foreign governments. The argument is both narrow and false. First of all it is true, that the immigrant has earned this money in the most honest way, and that consequently he has a right to send it home if he pleases to do so. Secondly, this money no more goes for the support of foreign governments than does the money that the politician paid for the imported cloth of which the evening suit was made which he wore when he delivered that criticism. Thirdly, the money sent home each year by the men who have earned it, is only a small fraction of the large sums which are spent annually by Americans abroad; money which in a great number of cases has not been earned by those who spent it, or has not been earned so honestly as it has been by those “hewers of wood.” Fourth, the money which is spent by Americans in Paris, Dresden, Nice and Carlsbad, does not so immediately return to the United States as does the money which is spent in Kottowin or Breczowa or in Oswicczim. That flows into the trade channels whose golden stream runs directly back to the United States; for more money in those villages means more money for Southern cotton, Chicago lard, and Connecticut clocks and sewing machines. I doubt that even the minutest investigation will prove that the money sent annually to Italy or Hungary means a loss to the United States, or that as yet the immigrant is a serious economic menace. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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