The Southern South

by Albert Bushnell Hart

Small as is the number of Northerners in the South, the number of aliens is not much larger. In the whole United States there were in 1900, 10,500,000 foreign-born, of whom only 727,000 were in the whole South; while the lower South from North Carolina to Texas contained 303,000, and the five states from South Carolina to Mississippi only 45,000. Of the 16,000,000 additional persons of foreign parentage in the Union the South had again 1,500,000. That is, with a third of the total population of the country, the South contains about one eleventh of the foreigners and children of foreigners. These general figures may be enforced by the statistics of particular cities. Baltimore and Boston have each a population rising 600,000; but in 1900 there were 69,000 foreigners in Baltimore against 197,000 in the Northern city. New Orleans and Milwaukee are not far apart in total numbers, but Milwaukee had 90,000 foreigners to 30,000 in New Orleans. Atlanta, with a population of near 100,000, had only about 3,000 foreign-born people; Saint Paul with a similar population had 47,000.

This condition and its causes go very far back. When immigration began on a large scale about 1820 the Northern states were nearer to the old world, had better and more direct communication, and populous cities were already established; hence the foreign current set that way. No doubt the immigrant disliked to go to a region where labor with the hands was thought to be menial, but his real objection to the South was not so much slavery as the lack of opportunity for progressive white people. After the Civil War cleared the way and the South began to develop its resources there was a demand for just such people as the foreign immigrants to work in sawmills and shops; and in addition they were eagerly coveted as a source of field labor to compete with and perhaps supplant the Negro. All the Northern states have encouraged and some have fostered immigration; and the South has recently reached out in the same direction, though with caution. As Senator Williams, of Mississippi, puts it: “Nor, last, would I neglect foreigners of the right types. Resort would have to be had to them very largely because of the fact that our own country could not furnish immigrants in sufficient numbers.”

During the last twenty years some systematic effort has been made to attract foreigners to the South; some of the Southern railroads, notably the Illinois Central, have attempted to stimulate immigration, in order to fill up the vacant lands and increase railroad business. Private agencies are at work in Northern cities, which try to direct immigrants southward. Immigration societies have been formed, and a great effort was made in 1907 to induce a current of immigration. A Southern State Immigration Commission was established under the chairmanship of the late Samuel Spencer, President of the Southern Railroad, and there are several similar local societies. Following an example originally set by some of the Northwestern states seventy years ago, several states appointed commissioners or bureaus of immigration, particularly North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana. The most active of all these bodies is the State Immigration Bureau of Louisiana, which has busily distributed Italians and Bulgarians through the State. The Federal Government has taken a hand in steering foreigners southward, through a bureau in New York which puts before newly arrived immigrants the opportunities of the South. By this bureau and by liberal and even strained construction of the statutes the Federal authorities have aided in the effort to bring the South to the attention of the incomer and to facilitate his distribution.

In 1906 South Carolina took a part in the process by agreeing practically to act as the agent of the planters and mill owners of the state, who raised a fund of twenty thousand dollars which, to avoid the Federal statute against the coming in of immigrants under contract to find them work, was turned over to the State authorities. They thereupon made a contract with the North German Lloyd Steamship Company to import several immigrants whose passage was paid out of the fund. In consequence, in November, 1906, appeared in the harbor of Charleston the steamer Wittekind, having on board 450 steerage passengers, an arrival which was declared to be the first successful undertaking to promote foreign immigration from Europe to the South Atlantic section of the United States in half a century. These immigrants—137 Belgians, 140 Austrians, and 160 Galicians—were fêted by the Charleston people and triumphantly distributed throughout the State. Part of them were not mill hands at all; others had been misinformed as to the scale of wages and conditions; one of them thought it monstrous that he should have been a week in South Carolina without ever seeing a bottle of beer. They wrote home such accounts of their unhappiness that the steamship company declined to forward any more immigrants, and Mr. Gadsden was sent by the State as a special commissioner to Europe to investigate. He reported in 1907 that the people were writing home to say that they did not like their work or housing. He diagnosed the trouble as follows: “Our efforts have been almost entirely expended in inducing immigrants to come to the South, and we have thought little or nothing of how the immigrant is to be treated after he has come in our midst; ... it seems to me that we have entirely overlooked our industrial conditions, namely, that the wage scale throughout the South is based on negro labor, which means cheap labor ... our attitude throughout the South to the white laborer will have to be materially altered before we can expect to have the immigrant satisfied to remain as a laborer with us.”

The only considerable groups of foreigners living together in the South are a small German colony in Charleston and a larger one in New Orleans, a body of Germans in central Texas (a settlement dating back to the Civil War), and a few thousand Italian laborers in the lower Mississippi valley who have been brought there chiefly through private agencies in New Orleans and New York. Some Slavs have been introduced into the lower South where they are collectively known as “Bohunks”; and a few efforts have been made to bring in the Chinese.

For the slenderness of the immigrant movement there are two principal reasons: the first is that the South does not like immigrants, and the second is that the immigrants do not like the South. One constantly encounters a sharp hostility to foreigners of every kind. The Georgia Farmers’ Union in 1907 unanimously voted against foreign immigration, because it would bring undesirable people who would compete with the Georgians for factory labor and would raise so much cotton that it would lower the price. A Texan lawyer in a Pullman car painted for the writer a gloomy picture of the unhappy condition of the North, which is obliged to accept “the scum of the earth” from foreign countries and is thereby overrun with Syrians, Russian Jews, and Sicilians, who are not capable of becoming American citizens and fill the slums of the cities; the South, in his judgment, was free from such difficulties. The Manufacturers’ Record of Baltimore is fearful of “masses of elements living largely unto themselves, speaking foreign tongues and kept alien to the country through having no contact with its people and its institutions save only through their own leaders. Such an immigration, it is easily understood from experience in other parts of the country, might become a dangerous fester upon the body politic.” A correspondent of the Richmond Times Despatch objects to immigrants because they will prevent the reëstablishment of the labor conditions which existed before the war, and will interfere with the plantation system; and he especially deprecates any effort “to try any of the races that have become inoculated with union notions, and who are so quick to overestimate their contributions to the success of the enterprises upon which they work and demand wages accordingly.”

Another argument is that of competition. As a Southern writer puts it: “The temptation of cheap alien labor from abroad is obvious as one of the ways in which a home population may be dispossessed. When it ceases to fill the rank and file with its own sons ... it ceases to be master or possessor of the country.” From another source the Negro is warned that: “When the European who has been used to hard work begins to make a bale and a half of cotton to where the negro makes but half a bale, ... then the farm labor will pass from the hands of the negro forever.”

On this question of immigration, as on many other matters, there is a divergence between the responsible and the irresponsible Whites, or rather between the large property owners and people who look to the development of the whole section, and the small farmers and white laborers. The criticism of the foreigner comes chiefly from the people who hardly know him; from the town loafer or the small plantation manager who “hates the Dago worse than a nigger.” Between such people and the few foreigners occasional “scraps” occur, and there have been instances of Italians or Bohunks who have been driven out by main force because their neighbors did not like them.

To be sure the foreigner in the North is not unacquainted with brickbats; but the real question is not whether the Southerner likes him, but whether he likes the South. He is under no such restraint as, for instance, in Buenos Ayres, where, if he is not satisfied, he must steam back six thousand miles to Europe; trains leave every part of the South every day bound for the North. Hence, as soon as the problem of getting the immigrant to the South is solved, the next point is how to keep him there. Of the immigrants brought over by the Wittekind in 1906, at the end of a year the larger part had left South Carolina. The authorities of the State were guiltless of holding out untrue inducements; but the immigrants did not expect to be charged their rail fares from Charleston to the place of labor; they found the wages less than they had supposed; sometimes less than they had received at home; they were obliged to deal with the company’s store, instead of being paid in cash. Especially they complained that farm hands were not so “intimately received by their employers” as their cousins were in the Northwest. When the Wittekind was ready to sail from Bremen two hundred people who expected to join her refused to go, because they had just heard of the race riot in Atlanta and thought the South could not be a pleasant place. Rumors of peonage, and a few actual cases, had also a deterring effect.

Nevertheless, there are a score or more of little agricultural communities in which a considerable part of the people are foreigners. Most of these people are Italians, that being an immigrating race accustomed to field labor in a warm climate, and traditionally inured to the peasant system. As these people bring little capital, most of them are assembled on some plantation which undertakes on the usual terms to advance them necessities until their crop can be made. It costs in central Louisiana about $60 per head to get Italians, and that is deducted out of their first year’s earnings. In some cases the Italians come out as railroad and levee hands and afterward bring over their families. At Alexandria, La., in the neighborhood of Shreveport, at Valdese, N. C., and elsewhere, are independent Italian villages.