Straight America, a call to national service

by Frances Kellor

It is the same with contract work. The contractor, in figuring the cost of road building, includes not only materials, grades, etc., but the cost of decent housing for his American workmen. The immigrant workman he leaves to the padrone. The padrone is one of the most anti-American forces in this country, and he exists only by the grace of the native-born American employer. No immigrant body can impose him upon an employer who does not find him useful.

I am invariably met with the fact that native Americans refuse to rent to immigrants because of their alleged defacement of property. The one remedy seems to be eviction and refusal to rent. I have not yet found that a limitation on boarders in the rental clause has been tried or that any effort has been made to teach these tenants the meaning and methods of an American standard of living. I have not found that such conveniences as an adequate and accessible water supply, garbage collection, prompt repairs, and interest in the well-being of the tenants bear in the mind of the landlord much relation to care of person and property. The native American thinks of the immigrant tenant as an inferior human being, used to something quite different, and almost unconsciously brings the American standard down to his own idea of the immigrant’s capacities.

There are, of course, many people—not confined to immigrants—who are indifferent to or incapable of maintaining an American standard of living. Eliminating these, I believe that the native American can and must set the standard, pay decent enough wages to make it possible, and then admit no excuses whatever for non-performance. In my judgment it is a fallacy to suppose that increased wages and shorter hours alone will Americanize America, unless there goes with these things some education as to their use.

Paternalism? I have in mind a steel mill where the employer has increased wages 50 per cent, and established eight-hour shifts; where the most perfect conditions prevail in his plant, where his first-aid and safety-first work are excellent. He believes that to build company houses would be paternalism. Almost every one in the town works in his mill. He has added 5000 workmen to the village within a year. No private capital will take the risk of building houses for his war industry. His men sleep 5 to 15 in a room, often on the floor and in their clothing; they have no care and eat badly prepared food. They crowd family houses, destroying privacy and morality. That plant employed last year 34,000 men to keep an average of 15,000. This registers the immigrant’s protest,—the only one possible,—moving on. Yet one native-born American controls the health, decency, morality, and efficiency of some 8000 immigrant workmen whose only protest is to move on, and whose only future is high enough wages to return to his home country.

And the worst of it is that men get used to these conditions, believing them to be American, and with this belief go the dreams, the visions, and ambitions which are the essence of good citizenship. The prospective good citizen is sacrificed to the demand for cheap labor which is a native-American demand. For the few hundreds of men that are indifferent to or incapable of appreciating an American standard of living thousands are sacrificed daily at the hearth of the indifferent, complacent native American who thinks of them only as cogs in his machine and rarely as future citizens of America.

There is no more representative class of native Americans in the popular mind than those bearing old family names. The youth of America read and store up all the available information about them and aim to duplicate their achievements in dress, manner, entertainments, and work. And yet I can take you to any one of the great estates that they occupy, and if they employ immigrant labor, you will find it housed in miserable shacks, lacking the decencies and comforts of an American standard of living. You will find that the native Americans had these shacks put up and receive rent for them. You will find also that the immigrant has but one choice, to leave his job if he wants something better. Ask yourself, as an American with a family dependent upon you, whether you would have the courage to make this choice. I have in mind as I write a most exclusive club which is the wonder of the Hudson Valley for sheer beauty and order; and I see below the railroad track its thousand employees who toil all day to produce that beauty, housed in wretched frame buildings in bad repair and crowded with boarders because there are not enough houses. I find there the future citizens of America being brought up without regard to decency and morality, living 5 to 10 in a room, while the little native-born boy or girl in the clubhouses has a room and a bath to himself. Now this difference is not alone the difference of wealth. It goes deeper than that. The club owns the workmen’s houses; it gets an adequate return on its investment. The trouble is the native American does not regard the immigrant as anything but a workman—and so long as he ignores America’s interest in that man as a citizen, as a defender of America, as a voter, as a future taxpayer, he is anti-American. To these men, preaching patriotism and freedom in America must seem the height of insincerity when contemplated from overcrowded rooms under a leaky roof. Last Fourth of July the National Americanization Committee instituted “Americanization Day” when native-born citizens tendered receptions to foreign-born citizens. When foreign-born men wrote saying that although they had been here many years it was the first time they had shaken hands with an American, it demonstrated how wide is the gulf of our prejudice and its consequent neglect. The pay envelope has made a poor melting pot, and America is to-day paying the cost of an experiment that has failed. Whenever we have established lines that make our native Americans inaccessible to our foreign-born residents, there we have established the unknown quantity in fixing the responsibility for the immigrant standard of living, without which knowledge the truth can never be ascertained.

What I am urging is this: Before we assert so calmly that the immigrant lowers the American standard of living let us rest our case with the man higher up—if need be with the financier who supplies the capital and requires that all material conditions must be right, but who forgets that in the last analysis the success of any enterprise depends upon loyal, efficient workmen with a home stake in America.

Another native-American illusion is that the immigrant will not appreciate our efforts. Since when has America based its principles of action upon the flimsy desire for appreciation? Furthermore we expect the appreciation to be out of all proportion to what we do. We have indeed deteriorated when we have come to regard simple acts of justice, fair play, service, obligation, and duty as acts to be persisted in only when the immigrant is duly appreciative! Such a stimulus would have done little to develop the northwest and to conquer the resources of the country. The man who hesitates to build houses for his homeless or commuting workmen because it may be paternalism, closes the club-house he has provided because it is not appreciated, or bewails his empty playground as a species of rank ingratitude. A great weakness of the American character to-day is its desire for appreciation and credit, and it does not make for Americanism.

A third American illusion is that the native American always thinks of the immigrants as getting something from America—wages or liberty or opportunity or rights. We forget that the majority of them come to us as laborers, representing a net contribution of at least $1000, which is the cost of raising a native-born child to the productive age. In these days of prosperity, of new vision in business, of expansion marked by a remarkable greatness of spirit, it is no time to forget that the very industries which are at present by way of putting America in the front ranks of trade and commerce are dependent upon immigrant labor.

We know in a general way that the immigrant is the possessor of much brawn and muscle. But it is characteristic of us that we think of him always as a job hunter, not as a producer. His may be the opportunity; but we never reflect that ours may be the profit. The big mine owner, the subway contractor, the chief engineer of the railroads, the canal builder have a practical knowledge of just where, and how largely, the immigrant comes into new America’s scheme. But the average American has no grasp of the full significance of the immigrant’s immediate and present service to him and to the nation, in a purely present and industrial way.