Americans by Choice

by John Palmer Gavit

In the earlier days, when industrialism was younger in this country and immigrants could pass more easily into agriculture and into access to actual land, there was a wider and quicker interest on the part of the immigrant in the land question as such. Probably that is why he responded more than he does now to such movements as the individualist single-tax agitation precipitated by Henry George. In recent years, when his opportunities for employment came to be more and more restricted to the cities and to great industrial plants and mines, the appeal of the Socialist agitation seemed more applicable to his situation. Furthermore, the single-tax movement represents, on the whole, an earlier stage in the development of radical theory.

The same might be said of Greenbackism, Populism, and the present-day Nonpartisan League movement. All three of these movements find the body of their rank and file among the small farmers, small producers, and the dissatisfied lower grades of the merchandising class, who feel, rightly or wrongly, that they are getting the worst of it in the development of law, taxation, finance, monopoly, or what not. The contented foreign born, or the contented anybody else, does not participate in or respond to radical agitation or movements for drastic reform. There are thousands of foreign-born members in the Nonpartisan League, but they are in it not as foreign born of any race, but as farmers who think they are not getting a square deal.

The farmers of the Northwest, who make up the bulk of the Nonpartisan League, are not at present amenable to Socialist doctrine. The foreign born among them are largely Scandinavian and old-stock Germans who have won their way to ownership of land and a measure of personal prosperity. They might stand for the expropriation of the powerful Eastern capitalist, but they are not willing to consider the confiscation of their own hard-earned farms. Peter Alexander Speek, in his monograph on “The Single Tax and the Labor Movement,”[174] puts it well:

It may be said that the Socialists understood the labor movement, its meaning and nature, better than did the Single-taxers. But what the Socialists failed in was this, that their philosophy, emphasizing as it did the social side of human life, was not acceptable to the majority of American wage-earners, who, though wage conscious and organized as a separate class, still were not yet class conscious—wage-earners among whom the individualistic spirit and a desire to become independent small producers prevailed.

Even so early there was visible a racial line of demarkation. The Irish never have taken kindly to Socialism. Preponderantly of the Roman Catholic faith, they were impervious to the implications of the Socialist doctrines as affecting religion and marriage, and nothing in their experience tended to modify their interest in the ownership of land. Mr. Speek says:

It is necessary to mention the fact that nationality of the members of the party (the United Labor party) also played its role in the conflict. The majority of the Irish element lined up with the Single Tax faction, the majority of the German element with the Socialist.

This division by nationalities was itself quite comprehensive. The Germans have always had a strong communal sentiment and social viewpoint upon human life, both being inherited from the centuries long gone by. Furthermore, many of them, before they came to America, were industrial wage earners in Germany—the homeland of Marxian Socialism.

The majority of the Irish immigrants had been formerly land tenants in Ireland. They had an individualistic viewpoint, and were devoted Catholics. Hence their lining up with Henry George, as a land reformer and agitator for the Irish cause in Ireland, and with McGlynn, as a Catholic priest.

A large proportion of the farmers of the Northwest are Scandinavians. They are of a naturally conservative type, they have been successful in establishing themselves as individual property owners, and the property owner does not as a rule afford good material for the Socialist seed-sowing. You may regard the propaganda of the Nonpartisan League, for example, as radical and in a general way “Socialistic,” but it does not satisfy the Socialist.