The Immigrant Tide, Its Ebb and Flow

by Edward Alfred Steiner

Thus far I have touched upon two problems presented by the return of the immigrant tide: the economic and the ethnic.

Another problem presented by this influx of aliens is in that rather indefinable realm called culture.

The question is: Will these people be able to appreciate the cultural ideals of America, and make them their own?

It would be an insult to my readers to try to make clear to them that the people who come to us are not barbarians or semi-barbarians; although as a rule they are uncultured and not yet in harmony with many of our ideals. I would not even attempt to mention this, were it not for the fact that it is the commonly accepted idea, that we are dealing with the offscouring of Europe. Let me illustrate. Not very long ago, I heard a home missionary secretary of a certain denomination say before an audience of intelligent, Christian people, that “We are landing annually a million paupers and criminals”; and I venture to say that nearly every one who heard that statement believed it. Let us see who these people are who come to us.

Slavs, Latins and other Aryan groups, such as Lithuanians, Albanians, and Greeks; of whom the first two have fairly earned the right to be called the oldest inhabitants of the continent of Europe. Next in order are Finns and Magyars, from among the Ugru-Altaic races, Jews and some smaller Semitic groups. The bulk is made up of Slavs, Latins and Semitic peoples.

Need I question whether the Latin has in him the qualities which will enable him to appreciate our culture? The Italian who built Florence, whose sons built St. Peter’s, painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and carved out of Carrara marble the “Pieta” and the statue of Moses?

Need I mention Giotto, the builder, Raphael, the painter, a Dante, a Petrarch, a Savonarola—a hundred masters of the chisel and the brush, of rhythmic rhyme and stately prose, all reared in that Garden of Europe, Italy?

Will the Jew learn to appreciate that culture, the best of which was created by his sires? For the glory of our American culture lies in the quality of its manhood and womanhood and that at its best is patterned after men and women whose names would debar them from certain clubs and hotels to-day. Moses, Amos and Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and in all reverence I mention Jesus and Mary, John, Paul and Peter. Strange to say, it is sometimes necessary to call the attention of intelligent people to the fact that these men and women were not Methodists or Presbyterians or even Episcopalians; and that neither their sires nor their sons came over in the Mayflower.

Perhaps we need to realize that as Americans we have neither invented nor discovered education, liberty or religion. What we have accomplished is, that we have made gifts to the many, of some of those blessings which in the immigrants’ country are the possession only of the few; and that is no small achievement.

The problem, the real problem, is: how to feed these people on truly vital knowledge, how to make common to all, the beautiful, the harmonious, the ethical; how to bring to all, the knowledge of that religion which indeed makes free from tribal pride and racial hate and leads men into the freedom of the sons of God.