Races and Immigrants in America

by John R. Commons

On the other hand, the European skilled workman is usually better trained than the American, and in many branches of industry, especially machinery and ship-building, the English and Scotch immigrants command those superior positions where an all-round training is required.

This peculiar situation is caused by the highly specialized character of American industry. In no country has division of labor and machinery been carried as far as here. By division of labor the skilled trades have been split up into simple operations, each of which in itself requires little or no skill, and the boy who starts in as a beginner is kept at one operation so that he does not learn a trade. The old-time journeyman tailor was a skilled mechanic who measured his customer, cut the cloth and trimmings, basted, sewed, and pressed the suit. Now we have factories which make only coats, others which make only vests, others trousers, and there are children’s knee-pants factories and even ladies’ tailor establishments where the former seamstress sees her precious skill dissipated among a score of unskilled workers. Thus the journeyman tailor is displaced by the factory, where the coat passes through the hands of thirty to fifty different men and women, each of whom can learn his peculiar operation in a month or two. The same is true in greater or less degree in all industries. Even in the building trades in the larger cities there are as many kinds of bricklayers as there are kinds of walls to be built, and as many kinds of carpenters as there are varieties of woodwork.

So it is with machinery. The American employer does not advertise for a “machinist”—he wants a “lathe hand” or a “drill-press hand,” and the majority of his “hands” are perhaps only automatic machine tenders. The employer cannot afford to transfer these hands from one job to another to enable them to “learn the trade.” He must keep them at one operation, for it is not so much skill that he wants as cheap labor and speed. Consequently, American industry is not producing all-round mechanics, and the employers look to Europe for their skilled artisans. In England the trade-unions have made it their special business to see that every apprentice learns every part of his trade, and they have prevented employers from splitting up the trades and specializing machinery and thereby transforming the mechanic into the “hand.” Were it not for immigration, American industries would ere now have been compelled to give more attention to apprenticeship and the training of competent mechanics. The need of apprenticeship and trade schools is being more seriously felt every year, for, notwithstanding the progress of division of labor and machinery, the all-round mechanic continues to play an important part in the shop and factory. American trade-unions are gaining strength, and one of their most insistent demands is the protection of apprenticeship. The bricklayers’ and carpenters’ unions of Chicago even secure from their employers instruction for apprentices in school. Not much headway in this line, however, has yet been made, and American industry has become abnormal, we might almost say suicidal, or at any rate, non-self-supporting. By extreme division of labor and marvellous application of machinery it makes possible the wholesale employment in factories of the farm laborers of Europe and their children, and then depends on Europe for the better-trained types of the skilled mechanic, who, on account of the farm laborer, have not been able to learn their trade in America.

Not only does immigration bring to America the strongest, healthiest, and most energetic and adventurous of the work-people of Europe and Asia, but those who come work much harder than they did at home. Migration tears a man away from the traditions, the routine, the social props on which he has learned to rely, and throws him among strangers upon his own resources. He must swim or drown. At the same time he earns higher wages and eats more nourishing food than he had ever thought within reach of one in his station. His ambition is fired, he is stirred by the new tonic of feeling himself actually rising in the world. He pictures to himself a home of his own, he economizes and saves money to send to his friends and family, or to return to his beloved land a person of importance. Watch a gang of Italians shovelling dirt under an Irish boss, or a sweat-shop of Jewish tailors under a small contractor, and you shall see such feverish production of wealth as an American-born citizen would scarcely endure. Partly fear, partly hope, make the fresh immigrant the hardest, if not the most intelligent, worker in our industries.

Industrial Capacities of Different Races.—But, however hard one may work, he can only exercise the gifts with which nature has endowed him. Whether these gifts are contributed by race or by civilization, we shall inquire when we come to the problems of amalgamation and assimilation. At present we are concerned with the varying industrial gifts and capacities of the various races as they actually exist at the time when immigration, annexation, or conquest takes place.

The mental and moral qualities suited to make productive workers depend upon the character of the industry. It is not conceivable that the immigrants of the present day from Southern Europe and from Asia could have succeeded as frontiersmen and pioneers in the settlement of the country. In all Europe, Asia, and Africa there was but one race in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that had the preliminary training necessary to plunge into the wilderness, and in the face of the Indian to establish homes and agriculture. This was the English and the Scotch-Irish. The Spaniards and the French were pioneers and adventurers, but they established only trading stations. Accustomed to a paternal government they had not, as a people, the self-reliance and capacity for sustained exertion required to push forward as individuals, and to cut themselves off from the support of a government across the ocean. They shrank from the herculean task of clearing the forests, planting crops among the stumps, and living miles away from their neighbors. True, the pioneers had among their number several of German, French, and Dutch descent, but these belonged to the second and third generations descended from the immigrants and thrown from the time of childhood among their English-Scotch neighbors. The French trappers and explorers are famous, and have left their names on our map. But it was the English race that established itself in America, not because it was first to come, not because of its armies and navies, but because of its agriculture. Every farm newly carved out of the wilderness became a permanent foothold, and soon again sent out a continuous colony of sons and daughters to occupy the fertile land. Based on this self-reliant, democratic, industrial conquest of the new world the military conquest naturally, inevitably followed.

But at the present day the character of industry has entirely changed. The last quarter of the nineteenth century saw the vacant lands finally occupied and the tribe of frontiersmen coming to an end. Population now began to recoil upon the East and the cities. This afforded to manufactures and to the mining industries the surplus labor-market so necessary for the continuance of large establishments which to-day need thousands of workmen and to-morrow hundreds. Moreover, among the American-born workmen, as well as the English and Scotch, are not found that docility, obedience to orders, and patient toil which employers desire where hundreds and thousands are brought like an army under the direction of foremen, superintendents, and managers. Employers now turn for their labor supply to those eastern and southern sections of Europe which have not hitherto contributed to immigration. The first to draw upon these sources in large numbers were the anthracite coal operators of Pennsylvania. In these fields the English, Scotch, Welsh, and Irish miners, during and following the period of the Civil War, had effected an organization for the control of wages, and the outrages of a secret society known as the Molly Maguires gave occasion for the importation of new races unaccustomed to unionism, and incapable, on account of language, of coöperation with English-speaking miners. Once introduced in the mining industry, these races rapidly found their way into the unskilled parts of manufactures, into the service of railroads and large contractors. On the construction of the Erie Canal in 1898, of 16,000 workmen, 15,000 were unnaturalized Italians.[74] The census of 1900 showed that while the foreign-born males were one-fourteenth of the laborers in agriculture, they were three-fourths of the tailors, more than one-half of the cabinet makers, nearly one-half of the miners and quarrymen, tannery workers, marble and stonecutters, more than two-fifths of the boot and shoe-makers and textile workers, one-third of the coopers, iron and steel workers, wood-workers and miscellaneous laborers, one-fourth of the carpenters, painters, and plasterers, and one-fifth of the sawmill workers.[75] The foreign-born females numbered nearly two-fifths of the female cotton-mill operatives and tailors, one-third of the woollen-mill operatives, one-fourth of the tobacco and silk-mill operatives.

On the Pacific slope the Chinese and Japanese immigrants have filled the place occupied by the southeast European in the East and the negro in the South. They were the workmen who built the Pacific railroads, and without them it is said that these railroads could not have been constructed until several years after their actual completion.

The immigration of the Chinese reached its highest figures prior to the exclusion laws of 1882, and since that time has been but an insignificant contribution. In their place have come the Japanese, a race whose native land, in proportion to its cultivable area, is more densely populated than any other country in the world. The Chinese and Japanese are perhaps the most industrious of all races, while the Chinese are the most docile. The Japanese excel in imitativeness, but are not as reliable as the Chinese. Neither race, so far as their immigrant representatives are concerned, possesses the originality and ingenuity which characterize the competent American and British mechanic. In the Hawaiian Islands, where they have enjoyed greater opportunities than elsewhere, they are found to be capable workmen of the skilled trades, provided they are under the direction of white mechanics.[76] But their largest field of work in Hawaii is in the unskilled cultivation of the great sugar plantations. Here they have been likened to “a sort of agricultural automaton,” and it becomes possible to place them in large numbers under skilled direction, and thus to secure the best results from their docility and industry.

In the United States itself the plantation form of agriculture, as distinguished from the domestic form, has always been based on a supply of labor from backward or un-Americanized races. This fact has a bearing on the alleged tendency of agriculture toward large farms. Ten years ago it seemed that the great “bonanza” farms were destined to displace the small farms, just as the trust displaces the small manufacturer. But it is now recognized that the reverse movement is in progress, and that the small farmer can compete successfully with the great farmer. It has not, however, been pointed out that the question is not merely an economic one and that it depends upon the industrial character of the races engaged in agriculture. The thrifty, hard-working and intelligent American or Teutonic farmer is able to economize and purchase his own small farm and compete successfully with the large undertaking. He is even beginning to do this in Hawaii since the compulsory labor of his large competitors was abolished.[77] But the backward, thriftless, and unintelligent races succeed best when employed in gangs on large estates. The cotton and sugar fields of the South with their negro workers have their counterpart in the plantations of Hawaii with their Chinese and Japanese, and in the newly developed sugar-beet fields of Nebraska, Colorado, and California, with their Russians, Bohemians, Japanese, and Mexicans. In the domestic or small form of agriculture the bulk of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe are not greatly desired as wage-earners, and they do not succeed as proprietors and tenants because they lack oversight and business ability. Where they are located in colonies under favorable auspices the Italians have achieved notable success, and in the course of Americanization they will doubtless rival older nationalities. But in the immigrant stage they are helpless, and it is the immigrants from Northwestern Europe, the Germans and Scandinavians, whose thrift, self-reliance, and intensive agriculture have made them from the start the model farmers of America.