EDWARD ALFRED STEINER
None of our immigrant authors has written with more earnestness of America and things American than Edward A. Steiner, who was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1866. Unlike the average immigrant, before coming to the United States he had received considerable education in the public schools of his native city, in the gymnasium at Pilsen, Bohemia, and at the University of Heidelberg. After passing through most of the hardships incident to the life of an alien, he was graduated from the Oberlin Theological Seminary and was ordained a minister of the Congregational Church. Several years were then spent in pastoral work, and in 1903 he was elected to the Chair of Applied Christianity at Grinnell College, Iowa. He is widely known both as a lecturer and an author, and among his numerous books may be mentioned “On the Trail of the Immigrant,” 1906; “Against the Current,” 1910; “From Alien to Citizen,” 1914; “Introducing the American Spirit,” 1915; “Nationalizing America,” 1916; “Confession of a Hyphenated American,” 1916. This last voices the sensitiveness so commonly felt by Americans of foreign and particularly German birth in the face of much unreasonable suspicion and prejudice prior to and at the entrance of the United States into the European War. “Nationalizing America” is perhaps his most searching book; for in this almost every American institution is scrutinized, the State, the Church, the school, and the industrial life being examined in their relation to the immigrant.
Selections from two chapters of this book (“The Stomach Line” and “History and the Nation”) have been combined under one title, “Industrialism and the Immigrant.” “The Criminal Immigrant” is taken from chapter fourteen of the autobiographical volume, “From Alien to Citizen.”[7]