1. The normal, direct attack of the political organizations, and voluntary efforts, organized and unorganized, of public-spirited citizens or others interested in “getting out the vote.” Generally speaking, the politicians have scarcely as yet discovered the voting power of the foreign-born woman citizen—especially such as do not speak the English language. The vote and political influence of the foreign-born woman have been negligible everywhere—except possibly in a few places where they have been rallied in a local-option election. One investigator reports two or three towns in Illinois where a “wet” result was attributed to the vote of foreign-born women. Other reports would indicate that the foreign-born woman, like her English-speaking sisters, have tended to favor the abolition of the saloon with its resulting (or, anyway, expected) reduction of home-coming drunkenness and deductions from the pay envelope.
In districts where politically active social settlements and similar organizations are influential, and in states which have had woman suffrage the longest, there is a considerable appearance of foreign-born women at the polls. But they are relatively few in numbers, and consist of younger women from the more radical parties, from those racial groups which display the keenest and most aggressive social intelligence, such as the Bohemians, and from such as in their own countries have had some experience with some measure of woman suffrage, such as the Swedes and Finns. There is quite as much tendency among foreign-born women as among native-born—perhaps considerably more—to follow the husband’s lead in politics and to duplicate his vote. In general, the political organizations have as yet made little effort to capitalize the “derivative vote.” The mass of it stays at home.
2. The campaign of the public schools, with or without the inspiration of the Naturalization Bureau, to induce the foreign-born woman to avail herself of formal educational work in the schools. As we have seen, she does not, to any appreciable extent, respond to this campaign. Social settlements, even attributing great influence to them—though as a matter of fact few of them exert any political influence whatever—are relatively few and far between; churches, as such, and other institutions of the same general kind, cannot be counted as substantially effective in this direction. The foreign-born woman goes to church in large numbers, but she does not get there any great impulse to interest herself in community affairs. She goes back to her babies and her washtub.
It is in her home, in the intervals between domestic duties and within arm’s length of the cradle and the kitchen table where she feeds her children, that she must be reached with this inspiration and instruction, if in any large measure she is to be reached at all. This brings us to
3. The Home Teacher. The movement in favor of the creation of a teaching force, employed by the public and organically a part of the public-school system, to go into the neighborhoods and into the homes and carry instruction in English, common-school branches, and the elements of civics, follows logically from the treatment of the foreign-born woman citizen as an individual, and from the fact that she must be dealt with in or close to her home. Classes grouped within a small section of a neighborhood, intensively instructed by teachers who realize the difficulties and limitations of their pupils, take on the aspect of social occasions, help to arouse a neighborhood spirit, encourage mutual acquaintance, and most effectively instruct those whom it is desired to reach. A movement of this kind, spreading over the country and backed by the public as such, follows the natural line of least resistance and tackles the problem where it really lives.
4. The direct and indirect influence of the children upon the mother. This is the best of all. And, while we are exciting ourselves about the ignorance and indifference of the foreign-born woman, and bemoaning her possible influence upon her children, it is well for us to remember that these children are in the American public schools, talking the English language, absorbing whatever there may be of “Americanism” in the social atmosphere about them, in daily sight of the Stars and Stripes, singing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” gaining enthusiasm for and pride in our country, and, what is most important, taking home daily to their foreign-born parents the direct and indirect influences of what they are learning, seeing, and feeling. The extent of this leavening process is impossible to estimate, but undoubtedly it is enormous.
A SPECIFIC EXAMPLE—IT WORKS
Perhaps the most striking and unmistakable exhibit of this process is to be found in the city of Grand Rapids, Michigan, where the work of the Americanization Society presents concrete and visible results. The work in process there since the fall of 1918 is susceptible of definite and even statistical study. It has produced effects upon elections which can be stated in figures, and results in homes upon concretely discoverable human beings about which there can be no question. It is socially physiological, so to speak; working in a normal way in consonance with known political methods and customs, along the rational lines of least resistance—making use of the natural, spontaneous life of the people in their ordinary social and political relationships and in their homes.
A battle with machine politics over a matter of local administration, especially as affecting the treatment of the poor, convinced those interested in the unselfish conduct of the city’s business that the way to win, and the only way, was to appeal to the people direct and get them to vote. There was no fear as to how they would vote, but the effort was not addressed to that aspect of the question. The slogans speak for themselves!