POLITICAL ASPECTS OF SOCIAL CLUBS
The spontaneous groups of foreign-speaking people of nearly every race, which have sprung up everywhere in response to the varied needs of the strangers within our gates—social, insurance, musical, athletic, etc.—necessarily and naturally take on political aspects. As President Wilson said once, “politics is human nature”; there is nothing sinister about this fact. It is wholesome that groups of folk, coming together spontaneously about a nucleus of common interest, should consider together and act together, in regard to such public matters as they think concern them. The only thing that is really dangerous in a republic is stolid indifference; it is on that that corruption and injustice feed.
In the matter of helping their fellow countrymen to secure naturalization, these organizations perform a service of value and importance both to the alien and to the country. Many of these racial societies devote much attention to old-country politics, and form nests of propaganda and even more concrete activity whose effects are felt not so much in this country as “back home.” And when, as in the case of Ireland, Poland, Italy, and so on, the issues of foreign politics are made the bone of contention in American political contests, these German-American, Italian-American, Polish-American societies may become exceedingly active in our own affairs, and project lines of division which may greatly complicate the politician’s task, and sometimes stand him upon his head.[13]
It is not too much to say that the power of Tammany Hall in politics, and that of every other important political organization in Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, or elsewhere—including those dominant in rural districts—grows out of intimate association with the people in their daily lives, and could grow out of nothing else. “Power and patronage,” says Professor Munro, “provide a cycle hard to break.” True; but “power and patronage” is only a phrase. Behind it lies the fact that the politician gains and holds his power because he deserves it; through his organization of the machinery, always “on the job,” through which human beings, with wives and children to feed, clothe and shelter, get the means to do it. The small, unskilled job in the employ of the city, or of business which can be helped or harmed by political or official action, is the coin-current through which the politician controls—so far as he does control—the rank and file of the foreign-born voters. This, and the small and larger personal human favors that he is in a position to render.
Here, with the first economic “toe-hold” that the immigrant gets in America, begins his introduction to our life and to our politics.