Races and Immigrants in America

by John R. Commons

Austria-Hungary.—Next to that from Italy the immigration from the Austro-Hungarian Empire in recent decades has reached the largest dimensions. While Italy sent 273,000 people in 1906, Austria-Hungary sent 265,000 in that year and 276,000 the year before. Like the immigration from Italy, this increase has occurred since 1880. Prior to that date the largest number reported from Austria-Hungary was 9000 in 1874.

While these figures compare with those of the Italians, yet, unlike the Italians, they refer to a congeries of races and languages distinct one from another. The significance of Austro-Hungarian immigration is revealed only when we analyze it by races. The race map of this empire shows at once the most complicated social mosaic of all modern nations. Here we see, not that mixture of races and assimilation of language which in our own country has evolved a vigorous, united people, but a juxtaposition of hostile races and a fixity of language held together only by the outside pressure of Russia, Germany, Italy, and Turkey. This conflict of races has made the politics of the empire nearly incomprehensible to foreigners, and has aggravated the economic inequalities which drive the unprivileged masses to emigrate.

Not only are there in Austria-Hungary five grand divisions of the human family,—the German, the Slav, the Magyar, the Latin, and the Jew,—but these are again subdivided. In the northern mountainous and hilly sections are 13,000,000 Slavic peoples, the Czechs, or Bohemians, with their closely related Moravians, and the Slavic Slovaks, Poles, and Ruthenians (known also as Russniaks); while in the southern hills and along the Adriatic are another 4,000,000 Slavs, the Croatians, Servians, Dalmatians, and Slovenians. Between these divisions on the fertile plains 8,000,000 Magyars and 10,000,000 Germans have thrust themselves as the dominant races. To the southwest are nearly a million Italians, and in the east 2,500,000 Latinized Slavs, the Roumanians. The Slavs are in general the conquered peoples, with a German and Magyar nobility owning their land, making their laws, and managing their administration. The northern Slavs are subject to Austria and Hungary, and the Ruthenians suffer a double subjection, for they were the serfs of their fellow-Slavs, the Poles, whom they continue to hate, and in whose longings for a reunited Poland they do not participate. The southern Slavs and Roumanians are subject to Hungary. The Roumanians are a widespread and disrupted nationality of Slavs, conquered by the Romans, from whom they imperfectly took their language, but now distributed partly in independent kingdoms and partly under the dominion of the Magyars. The Croatians from the southwest mountains are among the finest specimens of physical manhood coming to our shores. They are a vigorous people, hating Hungary which owns them and calling themselves “Austrians” to ward off the name “Hun,” by which Americans mistakenly designate them. The Magyars are the Asiactic conquerors who overran Europe ten centuries ago, and being repulsed by the Teutons to the west established themselves on the Slavs in the valley and plains of the Danube. Boasting a republican constitution a thousand years old they have not until the past year been compelled to share it with the people whom they subdued. Astute politicians and dashing military leaders, they are as careless in business as the Slavs, and the supremacy which they maintained in politics has slipped into the hands of the Jews in economics. In no other modern country has the Jew been so liberally treated, and in no other country have public and private finance come more completely under his control. Profiting by the Magyars’ suppression of the Slavs, the Jew has monopolized the business opportunities denied to the Slovak and the Croatian, and with this leverage has quietly elbowed out the Magyar himself. No longer is the Magyar the dominant race, and in the past year he has contributed to America more immigrants than any branch of his conquered Slavs. In the Austrian dominions of former Poland the Jew likewise has become the financier, and both the Ruthenian and the Pole, unable to rise under their burden of debt, contribute their more enterprising peasants to America.

By a perverse system of representative government, based on representation of classes both in Austria and in Hungary, the great landowners and wealthy merchants have heretofore elected three-fourths of the parliaments, but recently in both countries the emperor has granted universal manhood suffrage. The peasant Slavs will henceforth be on equal footing with the German, the Magyar, and the Jew, and whether out of the belated equality of races there will come equality of economic opportunity remains to be seen. For the past few years the emigration from the unfortunate dual empire has amazingly increased.

With all of this confusing medley of races, with this diversity of Greek and Roman Catholicism and Judaism, with this history of race oppression and hatred, it is not surprising that the immigrants should break out into factions and feuds wherever thrown together among us. It is the task of America to lift them to a patriotism which hitherto in their native land they could not know.

The earliest migration from Austria-Hungary was that of the Bohemians, the most highly educated and ardently patriotic of the Slavic people. After the revolution of 1848, when the Germans suppressed their patriotic uprising, students, professional men, and well-to-do peasants came to America and settled in New York, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Chicago, and in the rural districts of Texas, Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, and California. Again, after the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, skilled laborers were added to the stream, and they captured a large part of the cigar-making industry of New York and the clothing trade of Chicago. Latterly recruits from the peasants and unskilled laborers sought the sections where the pioneers had located, learned the same trades, or joined the armies of common labor. In Chicago the Bohemian section is almost a self-governing city, with its own language, industries, schools, churches, and newspapers. After a slight decline there is again an increasing flow of immigrants, the number in 1906 being 13,000. Those who come bring their families, and few return. In these earlier days the Polish and Hungarian Jews also began their migration, following the steps of their German precursors.

In the decade of the eighties the increase of immigration from Austria-Hungary was first that of the Poles, now numbering 44,000, then the Magyars, now 43,000, then the Slovaks, now 37,000. In the latter part of the nineties the Southern Slavs—Croatians and Slovenians—suddenly took up their burden, and 43,000 of them came in 1906. Following them came the Ruthenians from the North, numbering 16,000 in 1906. Last of all, the Latinized Slavs, the Roumanians, began their flight from the Magyar, to the number of less than 400 in the year 1900, but swelling to 11,000 in 1906. Only 300 additional came from their own proper kingdom—Roumania. During all this period there has been also a considerable migration of Germans, reaching 35,000 in 1906.

In the face of this swollen migration the Hungarian government has at last taken alarm. They see even their own people, the Magyars, escaping. Recently the government has attempted to restrict the unrest by prohibiting advertisements or public speeches advocating emigration, by prohibiting the sale of tickets or solicitation by any one not holding a government license for the purpose, by contracting with a steamship line from their own Adriatic part of Fiume in order to reduce migration across the German and Italian frontiers. This may account for the decline of ten thousand immigrants from Austria-Hungary in 1906.

Practically the entire migration of the Slavic elements at the present time is that of peasants. In Croatia the forests have been depleted, and thousands of immigrant wood-choppers have sought the forests of our South and the railway construction of the West. The natural resources of Croatia are by no means inadequate, but the discriminating taxes and railway freight rates imposed by Hungary have prevented the development of these resources. The needed railways are not obtainable for the development of the mines and minerals of Croatia, and the peasants, unable to find employment at home, are allured by the advertisements of American steamships and the agents of American contractors.

So it is with the Slovak peasants and mine workers of the northern mountains and foothills. With agricultural wages only eighteen cents a day, they find employment in the American mines, rolling-mills, stock-yards, and railroad construction at $1.50 a day.