The radius of this native American influence bears no relation to numbers. It encompasses the school, the home, the neighborhood, the personal life of the resident. We fill our night schools by adjusting them to the industrial organization and securing its coöperation. We fill our civilian training camps by the coöperation of employers in granting absences and paying wages. We obtain a common standard of living by enforcement of laws that set the standard. Civic and philanthropic agencies may be the pioneers, the educators, the balance restorers; they can care for the waste and discover causes. But America has too long regarded them as the unifiers of its many peoples, as the makers of citizens. We now know that this task comes squarely back to the political and industrial leader and to no other; to the native born and to no other.
America is the proud possessor of some significant and far-reaching illusions which make a poor foundation for the structures it is seeking to build. Chief among these is the assertion that the immigrant lowers the American standard of living. In the final analysis it is America that lowers the immigrant’s own standard of living. A double standard of living is imposed upon the immigrant by the responsible native American.
Of the many hundreds of immigrant communities which I have studied, I recall none in which American ideals were being aggressively menaced by immigrants who were determined to have none of them. Isolation, betrayal of our own minimum social and civic standards, these I have seen over and over again. But always the immigrant population has been the weaker force in any given community. There are in the country to-day hundreds of towns, say of 1500 population, in which the foreign born number one half. But in civic strength, social influence, and political power, the immigrant 50 per cent measures less than 10 per cent. In the census they appear as towns of 1500. In reality the native-born residents of these towns consider them as towns of about 500—with an unfortunate though necessarily large annex of immigrant workmen and their families who live “on the other side of the railroad” or in some other segregated spot—to which fire and water systems, garbage collections and calling do not penetrate. Now there can be no doubt that that large “annex” is a menace to the future of America. But it is a menace produced by American neglect, not by immigrant aggression and malevolence.
We shall never solve the immigration problem so long as we begin with the immigrant’s shortcomings, nor shall we attain Americanism so long as we define it as nativism. We need not fear that we are not as much in control as we ever were. We set the standards. The question is whether we have cause to be satisfied with the way in which we do it. The ideals and standards of America are set by the American born to-day just as they were in our early history. In all communities which I have studied the American-born residents or employers are the determining factors. The citizen may send you through many devious channels, to see this boss and that boss, to win friends for your cause from this foreign-born leader or that immigrant saloon-keeper, but eventually you deal with a native American, not with an alien.
Mr. Ross, in the “Old World in the New,” points to a typical Western town of 26,000 inhabitants, 10,000 of them immigrants, and gives a picture of the vice, intemperance, bad housing, and wretched standards of living resulting in this town from the immigrant population. We in America believe in majority rule. There was a safe margin of 6000 Americans in that town, free to establish and insist upon any standard they chose. Why were the Americans beaten in the struggle? Because here as in many places they ignored or definitely isolated the immigrants, permitting them to work all day with Americans at the mills or factories where they were needed, and then encouraging or compelling them to spend all the rest of their time in their own corner of the town, and to encroach no more than necessary upon the respectable streets and schools and churches and recreations of the American section.
Persecuted America! Miss Repplier, lamenting the immigrant invasion of Philadelphia, in the Atlantic Monthly not long ago, presents a truly colonial point of view concerning the suffering wrought by the twentieth-century world of America in this colonial stronghold. In the mind of Miss Repplier and many thousands of Americans the long-suffering American, heir of all the ages, legatee of all the best traditions of liberty and opportunity sealed in 1776, is now driven like sheep before the advancing immigrant hordes:
“Dirt is a valuable asset in the immigrant’s hands. With its help he drives away decent neighbors, and brings property down to his level and his purse. The ill-fated Philadelphian is literally pushed out of his home—the only place, sighs Mrs. Pennell, where he wants to live—by conditions that he is unable to avert, and unwilling, as well as unfitted, to endure.”
Old Philadelphians that would never have run from an Indian, that would have conquered the forests and spanned the rivers, run from the Italian and the Pole. Alas! We too have deteriorated. We see nothing dramatic, we feel no challenge, in the fight to raise the standards of our less fortunate neighborhoods. We cannot find any inspiration in that ideal of justice which insists on law enforcement equally among all residents of a neighborhood. Is there nothing to be said on behalf of the neighborly, friendly visiting which would soon make dirt as unfashionable in the immigrant’s as in the Philadelphian’s home? The reason that the tenement fire escapes are cluttered in Rivington Street and free on Fifth Avenue is not, as we fondly suppose, that immigrants prefer fire escapes draped with bedding and pillows and children. The answer is that they move to Fifth Avenue as soon as their income permits and as fast as they learn how well it is possible to live in America.
Let us take a town in the making and see if the standards do not come back to some native American. Take, for instance, the towns that have grown up during the war-order prosperity, which is typical of our town building in the past in America. American capital, directed by native-American enterprise and brains, selects a site and builds a model factory, secures the necessary transportation facilities and puts in its power and machines. Anything else? Yes, the skilled labor market is scarce of men, so a few good houses are put up for skilled workmen, upon whom the operation of the plant depends.
As for the mass of foreign-born unskilled workmen, relying upon a well-stocked market, no provision is made for housing, sanitation, or other care of them. This is left to the individual workman and to the speculator. When a cluster of huts, tents, or bunk houses spring up, is it because the immigrant prefers the huts or tents, or is it because the only power to create standards—the native-American power—has ignored its obligation?