The Reign of Gilt

by David Graham Phillips

We hear so much about the glories of the Civil War that we are apt to overlook its fearful cost. One item is important here:

In the Southern States, practically all the white males able to bear arms went to the war. In the Northern States the two and three-quarter millions who served were, on the average, under rather than over twenty years of age.

That is to say, to the war the South gave all its manhood; the North gave the fathers of its present native-born generation. So abounding is our vitality as a people that we cannot clearly see the full results of this fearful sacrifice. But let us remember that war kills only a few; it returns to peaceful pursuits the vast majority poisoned and weakened by all kinds of diseases.

What is the connection between these facts and immigration? Look at the South, which sent all its manhood to camp and march and battle; at the South, into which almost no immigration has gone to make good the enormous losses. The trouble with the South to-day is not the destruction or abolition of property, not the failure of natural resources, but the depletion, the decay, the destruction of so large a part of the splendid stock that made the South great in ante-bellum days. Despite its abounding natural resources, despite the valiant efforts it has made and is making, the South advances slowly and with difficulty. And while the North had to make no such complete sacrifice to war, still even there, in the few places to which foreign immigration has not penetrated, the effects of the impairment of the sources of the best manhood are plainly visible. Not infrequently you find a Northern town with all the natural opportunities to progress, yet with retrogression and decay eating it away. What’s the matter? The war; the Civil War. The best young men, the most vigorous, the most enterprising, the most ambitious, went to the war. Many of them came back; but they had left at the war their best—their health, their energy. And the present generation shows it, suffers for it.

It is indeed inspiring to see young men eager to die gloriously for their country. We also need young men eager to live gloriously for their country. And war, the arch-enemy of progress, the great trickster of man through his finest instincts, how many of those who would have lived most gloriously for their country has it cost us!

Do we not owe to the “hordes” from Europe, to immigration, the good fortune that our nation has pushed on apparently almost unaffected in its manhood by the great calamity of ’61-’64? Is it unwarranted to suggest that but for these inpourings of vigor and vitality, the losses in that frightful catastrophe might have all but cost us our national greatness, would certainly have set us back several generations?

As to the political effect of immigration: Among our cities the two most conspicuous examples of misgovernment are New York and Philadelphia. In each the dominant political machine is scandalously corrupt. But it is far more audacious, far more cynically and openly contemptuous of public opinion in Philadelphia than in New York. Philadelphia is an “American” city; New York is a “foreign” city. In Philadelphia the corruption seems almost hopeless; in New York the element to which every movement for betterment looks—not in vain—is the “foreign” element. The weakness of Tammany’s control over the masses of “German-Americans” and “Italian-Americans” and “Jewish Russian-Americans” is the chief reason why it does not feel easy and secure in the enjoyment of plunder. Cities where the “foreign vote” is preponderant may be corrupt; but so also are cities where the native American rules undisputed. Manifestly, the causes of political corruption are deeper than immigration, are not aggravated by it. And since our most hopeful States politically are for the most part those into which immigration from abroad has been pouring in a vast and steady stream for fifteen years, is there not sufficient ground for the confident assertion that the newcomer with his untainted passion for Democracy and his new-born hope of rising in the world is one of our tremendous political assets?

As to the industrial effect. The overwhelming mass are farmers or unskilled laborers. But the wages of unskilled labor cannot be much depressed. In all ages and in all countries the unskilled laborer has got just about enough to keep him alive—never much more, often a little less. In America, as a whole, the condition of unskilled labor to-day is better than it ever has been. The fact that we have so much rough work to do in developing our vast raw resources makes America the best market for unskilled labor the world has ever seen; and it will be many generations before that rough work is completed, so inadequate is our supply of unskilled labor in proportion to the demand. In the trades the competition of the immigrant has not lowered wages. There again we have more work to do than there are workers. The forces that have operated unfavorably upon wages are notoriously not forces of competition among wage-earners, but forces tending to abolish competition among employers for the services of the skilled laborer. And in combating these forces, is the immigrant a help or a hindrance? Does his vote go for tyranny or for freedom?

The disposition of prosperity to look down on poverty, to drift out of brotherly sympathy with it, to misunderstand it, is as old as property rights. The disposition of the so-called educated to look down on the less educated, to mistake knowledge for intellect, absurdly to exaggerate the practical and even the æsthetic value of “polite learning,” to under-estimate the all-round importance of that real education which is got only in the school of rude experience—this supercilious disposition is as old as human vanity. It insinuates itself into the sanest characters; it makes fools and incompetents and snobs of many promising young men. And these two errors—the one, through prosperity; the other, through false education—are responsible for the failure of such a large section of our “elegantly articulate” to appreciate that we are to-day getting from abroad the best in brain and in vitality that we have ever got.

What differentiates the immigrant from those he left behind him? Why, he had the enterprise, the courage to protest against the slavery in which militarism and despotism were enwrapping all. He left; he made the long and arduous journey into this remote and unknown land. He did not give up when conditions became too hard, did not sink into serfdom; he boldly made a hazard of new fortunes.