Their interest in education is of the feeblest. In the mill towns the percentage of Portuguese children at home is much larger than that of the English; although in this respect the showing of the Fall River Poles is much worse. No other mill people have so large a proportion of their children in the primary grades. The retardation of Portuguese school children is high. In California their children are taken out of school early and the few who go on are sent to "business college" rather than to high school.
No immigrants care so little for citizenship as the Portuguese. Of the men whose term of residence entitles them to claim citizenship only 3.2 per cent. have become naturalized. At New Bedford only one in twenty entitled to citizenship has sought it; whereas, of the other foreign born, over half have taken steps to gain citizenship. The Portuguese farmers of California, although prosperous, care nothing for public affairs and not half of them take a newspaper. They are interested only in making money, saving, and buying land.
Owing to their extreme clannishness assimilation is slow. In the city they live in a quarter by themselves; in the country they form a colony. They have their church life apart and their societies center about their church. Although the thriving farmers are improving their housing and standard of living, they are "inclined to be clannish, partly because Americans do not care for their society." The chief agents of assimilation are the children. Having mingled with other children in the public schools, the young people are taken into fraternal orders and share the social life of the community. Moreover, the parents unconsciously raise their standard of living through their efforts to gratify the wants inspired in their children by contact with schoolmates coming from better homes. If the second generation are soon to be segregated in parochial schools, as are the children of the Poles and the French Canadians, this happy assimilation of the Portuguese through their children will be checked.
THE GREEKS
Practically all our 150,000 Greeks have joined us in the course of a decade and a half. The immigrants are mostly young men and the proportion of females is negligible. Fugitives from oppression always bring their families; so that this stream almost without women is the clearest proof that the immigration from Hellas is purely economic. The Hellenic Government is democratic and popular, military service is slight and there is no religious or political oppression. What has happened is that the huge American orb has swum within the ken of a little people about as numerous as the population of New Jersey and the larger mass is exerting its solar attraction. The peasant living on greens boiled in olive oil, who eats meat three times a year and keeps without noticing it the 150 fasting days in the Greek calendar, has sniffed the flesh pots of America. Hence a wild-fire exodus which has devastated whole villages and threatens to deplete the labor force of the kingdom.
Says the emigrant when questioned as to his motive: "It is hard to make a living here. America is rich, I can make more money there. It is the money." "Money" is the keynote of Greek immigration. Flashy strangers have gone about talking with the peasant in his furrow and the shepherd on the hillside, exciting their imagination as to the wonders of America and smoothing out the difficulties in the way of migrating. In the earlier days of the movement one man made $50,000 a year from his network of agencies selling tickets and advancing passage money on a mortgage. The letter to the home folks, written by the Greek who has found footing in Lowell or Chicago and which is read by or to every one in the village, has been seized upon by money-lenders and they have lost no opportunity to encourage both the writing and the wide circulation of such epistles. The result is that, in the words of Professor Fairchild the closest student of this immigration, "The whole Greek world may be said to be in a fever of emigration. From the highlands and the lowlands of the Morea, from Attica, Thessaly and Euboea, from Macedonia, Asia Minor and the Islands, the strong young men with one accord are severing home ties, leaving behind wives and sweethearts and thronging to the shores of America in search of opportunity and fortune." "America is a household word in almost every Greek family." "Greek immigrants know to just what place in the United States they are going and have a very definite idea of what work they are going to do."
Although there are 10,000 Greek mill hands in Lowell, there is a strong tendency for the Greeks in America to take to certain lines of business, such as candy-kitchens and confectionery stores, ice-cream parlors, fruit carts, stands and stores, florist shops and boot-blacking establishments. This is due to the fact that this catering to the minor wants of the public admits of being started on the curb with little capital and no experience. Once his foot is on the first rung, the saving and commercial-minded Greek climbs. From curb to stand, from stand to store, from little store to big store, to the chain of stores, and to branch stores in other cities—such are the stages in his upward path. As the Greeks prosper, they do not venture out into untried lines, but scatter into the smaller cities and towns in order to follow there the few businesses in which they have become expert.
Magyar Peasant Woman