Races and Immigrants in America

by John R. Commons

Since the year 1900 the Immigration Bureau has not inquired as to the religious faith of the immigrants. In that year, when the number admitted was 361,000, one-fifth were Protestants, mainly from Great Britain, the Scandinavian countries, Germany, and Finland. One-tenth were Jews, 4 per cent were Greek Catholics, and 52 per cent were Roman Catholics. With the shifting of the sources toward the east and south of Europe the proportion of Catholic and Jewish faith has increased. During this transition the Protestant churches of America have begun to awaken to a serious problem confronting them. The three New England states which have given their religion and political character to Northern and Western states are themselves now predominantly Catholic. In all of the Northern manufacturing and industrial states and in their great cities the marvellous organization and discipline of the Roman Catholic Church has carefully provided every precinct, ward, or district with chapels, cathedrals, and priests even in advance of the inflow of population, while the scattered forces of Protestantism overlap in some places and overlook other places. Two consequences have followed. The Protestant churches in much the larger part of their activities have drawn themselves apart in an intellectual and social round of polite entertainment for the families of the mercantile, clerical, professional, and employing classes, while the Catholic churches minister to the laboring and wage-earning classes. In a minor and relatively insignificant part of their activities the Protestant churches have supported missionaries, colporters, and chapels among the immigrants, the wage-earners, and their children. Their home missionary societies, which in the earlier days followed up their own believers on the frontier and enabled them to establish churches in their new homes, have in the past decade or two become foreign missionary societies working at home. Nothing is more significant or important in the history of American Protestantism than the zeal and patriotism with which a few missionaries in this unaccustomed field have begun to lead the way. By means of addresses, periodicals, books, study classes, they are gradually awakening the churches to the needs of the foreigner at home.[140] Among certain nationalities, especially the Italians and Slavs, they find an open field, for thousands of those nationalities, though nominally Catholic, are indifferent to the church that they associate with oppression at home. Among these nationalities already several converts have become missionaries in turn to their own people, and with the barrier of language and suspicion thus bridged over, the influence of the Protestant religion is increasing. Perhaps more than anything else is needed a federation of the Protestant denominations similar to that recently arranged in Porto Rico. That island has been laid out in districts through mutual agreement of the home missionary societies, and each district is assigned exclusively to a single denomination.

While the Protestant churches have been withdrawing from the districts invaded by the foreigners, the field has been entered by the “social settlement.” This remarkable movement, eliminating religious propaganda, is essentially religious in its zeal for social betterment. Its principal service has been to raise up Americans who know and understand the life and needs of the immigrants and can interpret them to others. In the “institutional church” is also to be found a similar adaptation of the more strictly religious organization to the social and educational needs of the immigrants and their children.

More than any other class in the community, it is the employers who determine the progress of the foreigner and his children towards Americanization. They control his waking hours, his conditions of living, and his chances of advancement. In recent years a few employers have begun to realize their responsibilities, and a great corporation like the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company establishes its “sociological” department with its schools, kindergartens, hospitals, recreation centres, and model housing, on an equal footing with its engineering and sales departments. Other employers are interesting themselves in various degrees and ways in “welfare work,” or “industrial betterment,” and those who profit most by this awakening interest are the foreign-born and their families. This interest has not yet shown itself in a willingness to shorten the hours of labor, and this phase of welfare work must probably be brought about by other agencies.

The influence of schools, churches, settlements, and farming communities applies more to the children of immigrants than their parents. The immigrants themselves are too old for Americanization, especially when they speak a non-English language. To them the labor-union is at present the strongest Americanizing force. The effort of organized labor to organize the unskilled and the immigrant is the largest and most significant fact of the labor movement. Apart from the labor question itself, it means the enlistment of a powerful self-interest in the Americanization of the foreign-born. For it is not too much to say that the only effective Americanizing force for the Southeastern European is the labor-union. The church to which he gives allegiance is the Roman Catholic, and, however much the Catholic Church may do for the ignorant peasant in his European home, such instruction as the priest gives is likely to tend toward an acceptance of their subservient position on the part of the workingmen. It is a frequently observed fact that when immigrants join a labor-union they almost insolently warn the priest to keep his advice to himself.

Universal suffrage admits the immigrant to American politics within one to five years after landing. But the suffrage is not looked upon to-day as the sufficient Americanizing force that a preceding generation imagined. The suffrage appeals very differently to the immigrant voter and to the voter who has come up through the American schools and American life. The American has learned not only that this is a free government, but that its freedom is based on constitutional principles of an abstract nature. Freedom of the press, trial by jury, separation of powers, independence of the judiciary, equality of opportunity, and several other governmental and legal principles have percolated through his subconscious self, and when he contemplates public questions these abstract principles have more or less influence as a guide to his ballot. But the immigrant has none of these. He comes here solely to earn a better living. The suffrage is nothing to him but a means of livelihood. Not that he readily sells his vote for money—rather does he simply “vote for his job.” He votes as instructed by his employer or his political “boss,” because it will help his employer’s business or because his boss will get him a job, or will, in some way, favor him and others of his nationality. There is a noticeable difference between the immigrant and the children of the immigrant in this regard. The young men, when they begin to vote, can be appealed to on the ground of public spirit; their fathers can be reached only on the ground of private interest.

Now it cannot be expected that the labor-union or any other influence will greatly change the immigrant in this respect. But the union does this much: it requires every member to be a citizen, or to have declared his intention of taking out naturalization papers. The reasons for doing this are not political; they are sentimental and patriotic. The union usually takes pride in showing that its members are Americans, and have foregone allegiance to other countries. In a union like the musicians’ the reasons for requiring citizenship are also protective, since they serve to exclude transient musical immigrants from American audiences. Again, the union frees its members from the dictation of employers, bosses, and priests. Politicians, of course, strive to control the vote of organized labor, but so disappointing has been the experience of the unions that they have quite generally come to distrust the leader who combines labor and politics. The immigrant who votes as a unionist has taken the first step, in casting his ballot, towards considering the interests of others, and this is also the first step towards giving public spirit and abstract principles a place alongside private interest and his own job.

But there is another way, even more impressive, in which the union asserts the preëminence of principles over immediate self-interest. When the foreigner from Southern Europe is inducted into the union, then for the first time does he get the idea that his job belongs to him by virtue of a right to work, and not as the personal favor or whim of a boss. These people are utterly obsequious before their foremen or bosses, and it is notorious that nearly always they pay for the privilege of getting and keeping a job. This bribery of bosses, as well as the padrone system, proceed from the deep-seated conviction that despotism is the natural social relation, and that therefore they must make terms with the influential superior who is so fortunate as to have favor with the powers that be.

The anthracite coal operators represented such men, prior to joining the union, as disciplined and docile workmen, but in doing so they disregarded the fact that outside the field where they were obsequious they were most violent, treacherous, and factional. Before the organization of the union in the coal fields these foreigners were given over to the most bitter and often murderous feuds among the ten or fifteen nationalities and the two or three factions within each nationality. The Polish worshippers of a given saint would organize a night attack on the Polish worshippers of another saint; the Italians from one province would have a knife for the Italians of another province, and so on. When the union was organized the antagonisms of race, religion, and faction were eliminated. The immigrants came down to an economic basis and turned their forces against their bosses. “We fellows killed this country,” said a Polish striker to Father Curran, “and now we are going to make it.” The sense of a common cause, and, more than all else, the sense of individual rights as men, have come to these people through the organization of their labor unions, and it could come in no other way, for the union appeals to their necessities, while other forces appeal to their prejudices. They are even yet far from ideal Americans, but those who have hitherto imported them and profited by their immigration should be the last to cry out against the chief influence that has started them on the way to true Americanism.[141]

Agricultural Distribution of Immigrants.—The congestion and colonizing of immigrants in the cities and their consequent poverty and the deterioration of the second generation have brought forth various proposals for inducing them to settle upon the farms. The commissioners of immigration[142] at various times have advocated an industrial museum at Ellis Island, wherein the resources and opportunities of the several states could be displayed before the eyes of the incoming thousands. They and others have gone further and advocated the creation of a bureau of immigrant distribution to help the immigrants out of the crowded cities into the country districts. Still others have urged the establishment of steamship lines to Southern ports and the Gulf of Mexico, so that immigrants may be carried directly to the regions that “need them.” Very little can be expected from projects of this kind,[143] for the present contingent of immigrants from Southeastern Europe is too poor in worldly goods and too ignorant of American business to warrant an experiment in the isolation and self-dependence of farming. The farmers of the South and West welcome the settler who has means of purchase, but they distrust the newly arrived immigrant. Scandinavians and Germans in large numbers find their way to their countrymen on the farms, but the newer nationalities would require the fostering care of government or of wealthy private societies. The Jews have, indeed, taken up the matter, and the Jewish Agricultural and Industrial Aid Society of New York, by means of subventions from the Baron de Hirsch fund, has distributed many families throughout the country, partly in agriculture, but more generally in trade. The Society for the Protection of Italian Immigrants is doing similar work. Great railway systems and land companies in the South and West have their agricultural and industrial agents on the lookout for eligible settlers. All of the Southern states have established bureaus of immigration, and they are advertising the North and Europe for desirable immigrants. But these agencies seek mainly those immigrants who have resided in the country for a time, and have learned the language and American practices, and, in the case of the railroad and land companies, those who have accumulated some property.

The immigration bureaus of the Southern states and railways, the most urgent applicants at the present time for immigrants, are strongly opposed to the plan of federal distribution. They want farmers who will do their own work. From the standpoint of the immigrant himself this position is correct. To find a place as an agriculturist he must find a place as a farmer and not a harvest hand.[144] Speaking for the Southern bureaus, Professor Fleming says,[145] “The South decidedly objects to being made the government dumping-ground for undesirable immigrants. It does not want the lower class foreigners who have swarmed into the Northern cities. It wants the same sort of people who settled so much of the West.” The state board of South Carolina officially invites immigration of “white citizens of the United States, citizens of Ireland, Scotland, Switzerland, and France, and all other foreigners of Saxon origin.”