Races and Immigrants in America

by John R. Commons

This significant fact is further brought out, and with it the obverse of the census mistake above referred to, when we examine the census inferences respecting juvenile criminals. The census calculations show that there are 250 juvenile offenders for every million of the native-born population, and only 159 such offenders for every million of the foreign-born population; but if we remember that the proportion of foreign-born children is small, and then proceed to compare the number of boys who are offenders with the number of boys 10 to 19 years of age rather than with the number of persons of all ages, we shall have the following results, confining our attention to the North Atlantic states, where juvenile reformatories are more liberally provided than in other sections:—

Male Juvenile Offenders per Million of Male Population Ten To Nineteen Years of Age, North Atlantic States, 1890 (Omitting “Unknown”)[98]

Native white, native parents		1,744
Native white, foreign parents		3,923
Foreign white		3,316
Colored		17,915

This table throws a different light on the situation, for it shows that the tendency towards crime among juveniles, instead of being less for the foreign-born than for the native-born, is nearly twice as great as that of the children of American parentage, and that the tendency among native children of foreign parentage (3923 per million) is more than twice as great as that among children of American parents (1744 per million).

This amazing criminality of the children of immigrants is almost wholly a product of city life, and it follows directly upon the incapacity of immigrant parents to control their children under city conditions. The boys, especially, at an early age lose respect for their parents, who cannot talk the language of the community, and who are ignorant and helpless in the whirl of the struggle for existence, and are shut up during the daytime in shops and factories. On the streets and alleys, in their gangs and in the schools, the children evade parental discipline, and for them the home is practically non-existent. Says a well-informed student of race problems in New York,[99] “Example after example might be given of tenement-house families in which the parents—industrious peasant laborers—have found themselves disgraced by idle and vicious grown sons and daughters. Cases taken from the records of charitable societies almost at random show these facts again and again.” Even the Russian Jew, more devoted and self-sacrificing in the training of his children than any other race of immigrants, sees them soon earning more money than their parents and breaking away from the discipline of centuries.

Far different is it with those foreigners who settle in country districts where their children are under their constant oversight, and while the youngsters are learning the ways of America they are also held by their parents to industrious habits. Children of such immigrants become substantial citizens, while children of the same race brought up in the cities become a recruiting constituency for hoodlums, vagabonds, and criminals.

The reader must have observed in the preceding statistical estimates the startling preëminence of the negro in the ranks of criminals. His proportion of prisoners for adult males (13,219 per million) seems to be four times as great as that of the native stock, and more than twice as great as that of foreign parentage, while for boys his portion in the North Atlantic states (17,915 per million) is ten times as great as that of the corresponding native stock, and four times as great as that of foreign parentage.

The negro perhaps suffers by way of discrimination in the number of arrests and convictions compared with the whites, yet it is significant that in proportion to total numbers the negro prisoners in the Northern states are nearly twice as many as in the Southern states. Here, again, city life works its degenerating effects, for the Northern negroes are congregated mainly in towns and cities, while the Southern negroes remain in the country.

Did space permit, it would prove an interesting quest to follow the several races through the various classes of crime, noticing the relative seriousness of their offences, and paying attention to the female offenders. Only one class of offences can here be noted in detail; namely, that of public intoxication. Although classed as a crime, this offence borders on pauperism and the mental diseases, and its extreme prevalence indicates that the race in question is not overcoming the degenerating effects of competition and city life. Statistics from Massachusetts seem to show that drunkenness prevails to the greatest extent in the order of preëminence among the Irish, Welsh, English, and Scotch, and least among the Portuguese, Italians, Germans, Poles, and Jews. The Italians owe their prominence in the lists of prisoners to their crimes of violence, and very slightly to intoxication, though the latter is increasing among them. In the Southern states the ravages of drink among the negroes have been so severe and accompanied with such outbreaks of violence that the policy of prohibition of the liquor traffic has been carried farther than in any other section of the country. Probably three-fourths of the Southern negroes live in prohibition counties, and were it not for the paternal restrictions imposed by such laws, the downward course of the negro race would doubtless have outrun considerably the speed it has actually attained.

Besides the crimes which spring from racial tendencies, there is a peculiar class of crimes springing largely from race prejudice and hatred. These are lynchings and mob violence. The United States presents the paradox of a nation where respect for law and constitutional forms has won most signal triumphs, yet where concerted violations of law have been most widespread. By a queer inversion of thought, a crime committed jointly by many is not a crime, but a vindication of justice, just as a crime committed by authority of a nation is not a crime, but a virtue. Such crimes have not been continuous, but have arisen at times out of acute racial antagonisms. The Knownothing agitation of 1850 to 1855, which prevailed among religious and patriotic Americans, was directed against the newly arrived flood of immigrants from Europe and Asia, and was marked by a state of lawlessness and mob rule such as had never before existed, especially in the cities of Boston, New York, Pittsburg, Cincinnati, Louisville, and Baltimore.[100] These subsided or changed their object under the oncoming slavery crisis, and the Civil War itself was a grand resort to violence by the South on a question of race domination. Beginning again with the Kuklux and White-cap uprisings in the seventies, mob rule drove the negroes back to a condition of subordination, but the lawless spirit then engendered has continued to show itself in the annual lynching of fifty to one hundred and fifty negroes suspected or convicted of the more heinous crimes.[101] Nor has this crime of the mob been restricted to the South, but it has spread to the North, and has become almost the accepted code of procedure throughout the land wherever negroes are heinously accused. In the Northern instances this vengeance of the mob is sometimes wreaked on the entire race, for in the North the negro is more assertive, and defends his accused brother. But in the South the mob usually, though not always, stops with vengeance on the individual guilty, or supposedly guilty, since the race in general is already cowed.