THE LESSER IMMIGRANT GROUPS
The immigration question is a live wire and whoever handles it may look for tingling surprises. One is a bit startled on realizing that through the "Bravas" from the Cape Verde Islands we are getting a new dash of black from the Senegambian tar-brush. How few are aware that a third of Sicily, from which so many immigrants come, is chiefly Saracen in stock, so that the heredity of the Bedouin tribes of Mohamet's time is to be blent with the heredity of our pioneering breed! Who reflects that, with Chinese and Japanese, Finns and Magyars, Bulgars and Turks, about a half a million more or less Mongolian in blood have cast in their lot with us and will leave their race stamp upon the American people of the future?
THE FINNS
Our 130,000 immigrants from Finland should be counted to the Finno-Tartar branch of the Mongolian race, although since the dawn of history the western Finns have intermingled with the Swedes until their blondness and cast of countenance bespeak the North European. Nevertheless, here and there among the Finns one notices that inward and downward slant of the eyes which proclaims the Asiatic.
Ever since the heavy paw of the Russian bear descended on Finland, these people have been seeping into the United States. They come for liberty's sake, bring their families and expect to remain. Lovers of wood and water, they keep to the North and the Northwest and are willing to tackle the roughest land in order to become independent. As farmers they are thrifty but, if left to themselves, not particularly skillful or progressive. Among them survive Old-World ways, such as reaping by handfuls with a sickle and hauling hay from the field on a sleigh. With a sharp ax in his hand the Finn turns artist and will hew out a log house so beautiful as to put an American pioneer to the blush. One of the first things he builds is an air-tight bath-house in which he may steam himself by dashing water on hot stones.
Practically all these immigrants are literate and they are eager patrons of night schools. In acquiring English they are rather slow. Their native ability is good, but is not considered to be equal to that of the Swedes. They are quiet and law-abiding, but litigious. With his grim intensity of character the Finn cannot bear to compromise his wrongs, but insists on all he thinks is due him. It is needless to add that a man with so much iron in his blood is honest.
Like the drunken Magyar or Lithuanian the "loaded" Finn is a terrible fellow. Liquor seems to let loose in him fell and destructive impulses which had been held in the leash by moral ideas. The immigrants realize their danger and the total abstinence movement is very strong amongst them. A rival current is Socialism for, strange to say, thousands of Finns, since coming to this country, have utterly lost faith in the existing social order. The mining company praises the "temperance" Finns but makes haste to get rid of the Socialists, although they are earnest people of a peaceable temper.
Such movements reveal a thinking mood. Thanks to the long struggle with Russia, the Finnish mind is awake and open to ideas. Our Finns have a real thirst for education and, besides supporting the best of public schools, they maintain near Duluth a college of their own of 1,200 students. In all their discussions the women take an equal share with the men and, when the Northwest adopts equal suffrage, the wives of the Finns will be among the first to vote. The Finns are prompt to acquire citizenship and they do not abuse the ballot. They will not vote for a fellow countryman unless he is the fittest candidate for the office.
Their civic attitude is revealed by an incident that occurred at the outbreak of the Spanish-American war. A community of agricultural Finns near Carlton, Minnesota, who had settled there in the eighties, came together after the call for volunteers and considered what they ought to do. After deliberation they concluded that in token of their gratitude for their good fortune under the stars and stripes they ought to send one of their number to the war. So they picked out as their representative a stalwart, comely farm lad of twenty-three and he served through the Cuban campaign as Finnish champion of American institutions!
Magyar
Croatian
Roumanian
THE MAGYARS
In the school of Western civilization the Finns and the Magyars sit nearer the front than any other people of Mongol speech and blood. In progressiveness the quarter of a million Magyars in our midst are as American as any immigrants we receive. A thousand years ago the Magyars, invading from Asia, conquered the Slavs in Hungary and settled down as a dominant race. Although a minority in the land, they have remained masters and rulers. Hence the Magyar immigrant, however poverty-pinched, feels the constant prick of the spur of race pride. His sense of honor is high. He will not seek charity unless he really needs it. In a Magyar quarter squalor and degeneration are not to be seen. The grass and flowers about the cottages, the clean yard and the clean children proclaim the presence of a race that cannot bear to be looked down on.
While the Magyars have been political and military leaders in Hungary, the masses are familiar with the struggle for existence. They are exploited in many ways by the Jews, who in Hungary have been treated more liberally than anywhere else in Europe. It is not surprising, then, that few immigrants land here with so little money as the Magyars. Lacking the means to acquire land, they are little known in agriculture. They go straight into the industries and four-fifths of them are to be found in the workplaces of Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio and New Jersey. They constitute a floating labor supply shifting constantly back and forth between Fiume and New York. In recent years four Magyars have departed for every five that arrived.
Their illiteracy is 11.4 per cent., a better showing than is made by any immigrants from eastern or southern Europe, save their cousins the Finns. They bring more industrial skill than the average Slav and their earning power is greater than that of most of the Slavic nationalities. They are loth to remain renters and in their endeavor to acquire a home they will assume burdens heavier than they can carry. Their race pride plays into the hands of the hurry-up American bosses with the result that, more than other immigrants, the Magyars injure themselves by overwork.
In the Magyar stream the men are nearly three times as numerous as the women and two out of five of the men have left wives in the old country. This means boarding-house life, shocking congestion and a rich harvest for saloon and bawdy house. The Pittsburgh Magyar who earns $1.80 a day will spend ten cents of it for lodging, forty cents for food, and thirty cents for beer. The Magyars are a wine-drinking people and the immigrants come from the farms and know nothing of the corrosion of cities. Being high-spirited, however, they want to become American quickly, with the result that often they acquire our vices before they acquire our virtues. In the mill towns they learn to guzzle beer, carouse and leave their earnings with the caterers to appetite.
Their crime record is bad. No alien is more dreaded by the police than a vengeful or drink-maddened Magyar. The proportion of alien Magyar prisoners who have been committed for murder is 35.6 per cent., higher than of any other nationality save the Russians. Their hot-headed and quarrelsome disposition causes personal violence to bulk very large in their crime. In offenses against chastity their showing is bad, but their bent for gainful crime is slight.
Most Magyars come to America with the expectation of returning eventually to Hungary to live. For this reason few have acquired citizenship and scarcely any immigrants from southeastern Europe show less interest in the ballot. After a trip or two home and a vain effort to settle down to life in the old country, many return to America reconciled, to the prospect of ending their days here.
THE PORTUGUESE
Mongrelism and social decay have hurt the southwest of Europe even more than the Turk has hurt the southeast. This is why the 60,000 Portuguese in the United States are, in point of culture, behind even the Servians and the Macedonians. In the growing army of foreign born illiterates they constitute the van. Not even the Turks, Syrians or East Indians can vie with them. On arrival not a third are able to read and write. As we find them in the cotton mills 55 per cent. of them cannot speak English. Even after ten years or more in our midst two Portuguese out of five cannot manage the speech of the country.
There are two centers of Portuguese distribution—southeastern New England and central California. California has 23,000 Portuguese immigrants, Massachusetts 26,000, Rhode Island 6,000. In Boston are 1,225, in Cambridge 2,000, in Providence 2,200, in Lowell 2,200, in New Bedford 4,000, in Fall River 14,000. We understand why Portuguese should settle in California but what brings these olive-skinned people to chilly New England? The answer takes us into the realm of Chance. In the beginning of a stream of immigration there is often romance. Then, if ever, accident counts and the venturesome individual. Just as a fallen tree on the Continental Divide may turn certain snow waters from the Pacific to the Gulf, so a practice of New Bedford whalers a lifetime ago caused the crowded Azores to overflow into Massachusetts instead of Brazil. In the old days the whalers, after a summer cruise, touched at the Azores and took on each from 25 to 35 natives. When after two or three years of whaling they returned to New Bedford, some of these Azoreans remained and a settlement grew up. To-day their quarter of New Bedford, known as "Fayal," is very prosperous.
Courtesy of The Survey
Croatians Celebrating their Going Home to the "Old Country"
Roumanian Couple in Gala Attire, Youngstown, O.
All down Cape Cod these fishermen have well nigh replaced the sea-faring Yankees. Provincetown, the spot where the Pilgrims first landed and which was settled by the purest English, seems to-day a South European town. Handsome dark-skinned Azoreans man the fishing boats, Correa, Silva, Cabral, and Manta are the names on the shops and the Roman Catholics outnumber those of any other denomination.
When the bottom fell out of whaling the New Bedford Portuguese went into the cotton mills and their countrymen began coming in larger numbers. Besides the "White Portuguese" have come in multitudes of "Black Portuguese" from the Cape Verde islands. Three thousand of them work during the season in the cranberry bogs of Massachusetts and all other pickers flee before them. They are obviously negroid, lack foresight and are so stupid they cannot follow a straight line.
The real Portuguese immigrate in families and show very little money on landing. At home 70 per cent. of them were farmers or farm laborers. They know sea and soil but bring no industrial skill. If they cannot farm or fish they become day laborers, mill hands, dockers, teamsters, draymen, stationary engineers or firemen. Many of their women are in the needle trades.
In the mills the Portuguese do not shine. The men earn $8.00 a week, while the rest of the foreign born average $12.00. Their sons and daughters earn $9.50, whereas the second generation of other immigrants average $14.00. They put wife and daughters into the mill and stay out of labor unions. In eight cases out of nine they sleep three or more in a room. In Lowell, according to the government investigator, "The standard of living of the Portuguese, as judged by the number of persons per apartment, room and sleeping room, is much lower than that of any other race."
In Boston, "Among the Portuguese poverty is greater and more hopeless than it is among the Jews and Italians, although there are no Portuguese in the almshouses. Few of the Portuguese are really well to do while many are partially dependent because the labor of the women, who are often obliged to support the family, is too unremunerative to ensure their independence. Portuguese women who have shown their low moral sense by rearing a family of fatherless children exhibit their courage and industry by sewing early and late to gain a meager living for their little ones."
Although unskilled, ignorant and segregated, the Portuguese commit very little crime. Nevertheless, their moral standard is in some respects exceedingly low. Says Dr. Bushee: "The idea of family morality among them is almost primitive, resembling that of the negroes of the South. Not only are elopements made and repaid in kind without involving further complications, but also what anthropologists call 'sexual hospitality' is not unknown among the Portuguese." They "are not free from drunkenness and thieving, but these faults are more carefully concealed among them and fewer arrests result than would be the case with other nationalities. Many of the Portuguese men are idle and thriftless, and some of the women are suspected of having been public women in the Azore Islands from which they come."
In California the Portuguese live like the Italians, but while the Italians coöperate in leasing land, the Portuguese are so individualistic that they seldom rent or own land in partnership. This has handicapped them in agricultural competition with the Italians and the Japanese.
Their interest in education is of the feeblest. In the mill towns the percentage of Portuguese children at home is much larger than that of the English; although in this respect the showing of the Fall River Poles is much worse. No other mill people have so large a proportion of their children in the primary grades. The retardation of Portuguese school children is high. In California their children are taken out of school early and the few who go on are sent to "business college" rather than to high school.
No immigrants care so little for citizenship as the Portuguese. Of the men whose term of residence entitles them to claim citizenship only 3.2 per cent. have become naturalized. At New Bedford only one in twenty entitled to citizenship has sought it; whereas, of the other foreign born, over half have taken steps to gain citizenship. The Portuguese farmers of California, although prosperous, care nothing for public affairs and not half of them take a newspaper. They are interested only in making money, saving, and buying land.
Owing to their extreme clannishness assimilation is slow. In the city they live in a quarter by themselves; in the country they form a colony. They have their church life apart and their societies center about their church. Although the thriving farmers are improving their housing and standard of living, they are "inclined to be clannish, partly because Americans do not care for their society." The chief agents of assimilation are the children. Having mingled with other children in the public schools, the young people are taken into fraternal orders and share the social life of the community. Moreover, the parents unconsciously raise their standard of living through their efforts to gratify the wants inspired in their children by contact with schoolmates coming from better homes. If the second generation are soon to be segregated in parochial schools, as are the children of the Poles and the French Canadians, this happy assimilation of the Portuguese through their children will be checked.
THE GREEKS
Practically all our 150,000 Greeks have joined us in the course of a decade and a half. The immigrants are mostly young men and the proportion of females is negligible. Fugitives from oppression always bring their families; so that this stream almost without women is the clearest proof that the immigration from Hellas is purely economic. The Hellenic Government is democratic and popular, military service is slight and there is no religious or political oppression. What has happened is that the huge American orb has swum within the ken of a little people about as numerous as the population of New Jersey and the larger mass is exerting its solar attraction. The peasant living on greens boiled in olive oil, who eats meat three times a year and keeps without noticing it the 150 fasting days in the Greek calendar, has sniffed the flesh pots of America. Hence a wild-fire exodus which has devastated whole villages and threatens to deplete the labor force of the kingdom.
Says the emigrant when questioned as to his motive: "It is hard to make a living here. America is rich, I can make more money there. It is the money." "Money" is the keynote of Greek immigration. Flashy strangers have gone about talking with the peasant in his furrow and the shepherd on the hillside, exciting their imagination as to the wonders of America and smoothing out the difficulties in the way of migrating. In the earlier days of the movement one man made $50,000 a year from his network of agencies selling tickets and advancing passage money on a mortgage. The letter to the home folks, written by the Greek who has found footing in Lowell or Chicago and which is read by or to every one in the village, has been seized upon by money-lenders and they have lost no opportunity to encourage both the writing and the wide circulation of such epistles. The result is that, in the words of Professor Fairchild the closest student of this immigration, "The whole Greek world may be said to be in a fever of emigration. From the highlands and the lowlands of the Morea, from Attica, Thessaly and Euboea, from Macedonia, Asia Minor and the Islands, 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." "America is a household word in almost every Greek family." "Greek immigrants know to just what place in the United States they are going and have a very definite idea of what work they are going to do."
Although there are 10,000 Greek mill hands in Lowell, there is a strong tendency for the Greeks in America to take to certain lines of business, such as candy-kitchens and confectionery stores, ice-cream parlors, fruit carts, stands and stores, florist shops and boot-blacking establishments. This is due to the fact that this catering to the minor wants of the public admits of being started on the curb with little capital and no experience. Once his foot is on the first rung, the saving and commercial-minded Greek climbs. From curb to stand, from stand to store, from little store to big store, to the chain of stores, and to branch stores in other cities—such are the stages in his upward path. As the Greeks prosper, they do not venture out into untried lines, but scatter into the smaller cities and towns in order to follow there the few businesses in which they have become expert.
Magyar Peasant Woman
Note own embroidery on apron: "If I am pure and good, I expect to be honored"
Molokan from Russia
From a semi-wild tribe, members of which eat no meat
If the immigration from Hellas keeps up, in twenty years the Greeks will own the candy trade of the country, the soda fountains and perhaps the fruit business. Born epicures and cooks the Greeks are going into the catering of food. In Atlanta they have 35 restaurants, in St. Louis 26, in Pittsburgh 25, in Birmingham 12 hotels and 14 restaurants.
Although Greeks are very rarely farmers, we hear of them as fruit raisers in California, miners in Utah, laborers on the railroads and fishers on both our coasts. In the cotton mills the Greeks are on a level with the more backward nationalities. They show little mechanical ability and few have reached responsible posts. They are sober and amenable to discipline, but some employers find them too excitable and unsteady to be good workers.
The ugliest thistle patch we owe to Old-World seed is the serfdom of thousands of Greek boys in the shoe-shining parlors that have sprung up everywhere. In some parts of Greece the peasant sets his children early to work in order that their earnings may leave him free to loaf the livelong day in a coffee-house. Upon them, too, he saddles the burden of providing dowries for their sisters. Accordingly, in certain districts, the poor send away their boys to the cities of Greece and Turkey, where they are hired out to peddlers, grocers and restaurant keepers, who treat them badly and work them unconscionably long hours. From such parents the Greek in America has no difficulty in recruiting boys whom he exploits under conditions that savor of slavery.
In thousands of Greek shoe-shining shops are working bound boys who are miserably fed and lodged by their masters, paid $3.00 or $4.00 a week and required to turn over all tips. Often the tips alone cover the boy's wages and keep, so that his labor costs the master nothing. Seeing that from each boy the padrone makes from $100 to $200 a year, a chain of such establishments yields him a princely income. No wonder the negro bootblack and the Italian bootblack have been forced to the wall.
The bound boys are on duty 15 or 16 hours a day and work every day in the year. They get in their eating and sleeping as best they can. They know no recreation. Late at night, completely exhausted, they drop with their clothes on into a bed that must suffice for four or five. Boys who have been in a city several years may learn nothing of it save the shop, their living quarters and the streets between. Since the padrone's game is to keep his boys dumb and blind, they are not allowed to talk freely with Greek customers. The moment a customer talks with a boy, "trusties" crowd round to listen. No truth can be gotten from the boys, concerning their age, their work or their pay. To avoid the arm of the truant officer, no Greek bound boy confesses to less than seventeen years. They are ignorant of the rights and rewards of labor in this country and are told that, if they leave their work, they will be arrested. Even their letters home are read and censored.
The effects of this servitude on the boys are shocking. They miss all schooling and years may elapse before they get their eyes open. The study of English is the first step towards emancipation; but where work is constant they miss even this chance and young men will be found who have been shining shoes for years and feel no ambition for anything else. The physical ravages of such work and confinement are appalling. In their memorial to the Immigration Commission the Greek physicians of Chicago say:
"Young immigrants laboring in shoeshining places for a period of upwards of two years become afflicted with chronic gastritis and hepatitis. These diseases undermine their constitutions, so that if they continue longer at the same work they become afflicted with pulmonary tuberculosis. Being too ignorant to take precautionary measures, the disease is communicated to others by contagion."
They go on to ask the Government not to allow such bound boys to land.
Through this peep hole we glimpse one secret of the immigrant's sky-rocket commercial rise. Behold Stephanos, who landed ten years ago without a drachma and now draws a cool thousand a month from his business and is one of our solid men! "Wonderful!" exclaims the innocent American. "What stuff there must be in him! Shows, too, that the country is still full of good chances." The fact is the worthy Stephanos lolls on the backs of a hundred unseen bootblacks who are being ruined that he may prosper. When one considers how mercilessly the immigrant landlord, banker, saloon keeper, contractor or employment agent hoodwinks and fleeces his helpless fellow countrymen, certain of the "successes" one hears of do not seem so remarkable after all.
THE LEVANTINES
One hundred thousand immigrants from Asiatic Turkey introduce us to certain very marked differences between the European civilization and the Asiatic. In general, these Syrians, Armenians, Arabs and Turks eschew alcohol, shun violence and give little trouble to the police. They are thrifty, acquisitive and self supporting. Their women folk are hedged and virtuous. Their native intelligence is beyond question, they respect learning and they appreciate educational opportunities for their children.
On the other hand, they tend to crowd, their standards of cleanliness are low and they are greatly afflicted with trachoma, an excludable eye disease. Their narrow range of interests throws out in ugly relief their lust of gain, especially gain without sweat. The Oriental attitude toward females shows itself in a great difference between the sexes in illiteracy, and in the betrothal of young girls to mature men whom they scarcely know. These people love trade, particularly the individual bargain, which offers scope for what is amiably called "a contest of wits" but is really the ensnaring of the unsuspecting by the spider type. At a time when our retail commerce has happily come to the "one-price" system, the lustrous-eyed peddlers from the Levant bring in again the odious haggling trade with its deceit and trickery.
A Finnish Woman by her Cabin of Hewn Logs in Northern Wisconsin near Lake Superior
Courtesy of The Survey
Some of Syracuse's Newer Citizens—a Greek and Two Turks
That these immigrants lack physical and moral courage is conceded even by their friends. They do not settle their quarrels on the spot face to face but revenge themselves treacherously from behind when they get a safe chance. Their feeling that truth is a luxury not to be brought out on common occasions gives them an advantage in a commercial system which takes for granted a good deal of Anglo-Saxon straightforwardness. It needs but half an eye to see that the "business ability" attributed to the prospering dealer is often nothing but the practice of Oriental craft among the unsuspicious. As the Romans found these people at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, so we find them to-day, good looking, pliant, clever, sometimes brilliant, but shifty and wanting in character.
When two peoples find that their standards repel like oil and water, they do not care to associate. Naturally, then, the Oriental immigrants tend to huddle in colonies in which they may live in the old way, keep their pride and spare themselves the pains of adjustment to American ideals. Not only do such colonies check the assimilation of those who most need it, but they are apt to be nests of congestion, disease and depravity, as well as hot-beds for the propagation of false and impractical ideas of political and social freedom.