Oddly enough, fifty cents a week, or twenty-five dollars a year, is the amount that naturalization experts want to charge aliens for their schooling, but that Congress considers too high. It’s not enough for American tin-canners; but it’s too much for aliens. How does Congress get that way?
About the only things that aren’t furnished for the tin-canners are free telephones, a free morning paper and free butler and valet service.
During the 1920-1921 season there were great numbers of free tin-can camps throughout Florida; but Florida towns found, as the United States itself is beginning to find, that an open-handed and unsupervised welcome to any person who can scratch up enough money to take advantage of the welcome will bring nothing but annoyances, losses and misery in its train. The Tampa camp was a success because it was very carefully regulated and policed. Many of the other free camps, however, suddenly woke up to the truth of the old adage that people never appreciate the things that they get for nothing. This is, of course, the old problem of immigration reduced to a personal basis.
The United States talks for a century about the necessity of restricting immigration and forcing aliens to pay for the privilege of enjoying America’s benefits, but in that hundred years, she does next to nothing. Florida towns, confronted with a mild edition of the same problem, take action overnight.
What happened was this—and the same thing to a far greater degree and with far more evil and wide-spread results, is happening to the United States and will keep on happening until immigration is rigidly restricted:
Word began to go forth in the northern states that free camping-grounds were to be had in Florida towns and cities; that if one bought a second-hand flivver at the beginning of winter and beat his way to these camps, he could live more cheaply than he could live in the North, could afford to accept lower pay for his services than could the Florida natives, and could go back North in the spring with money in his pocket and sell his flivver for what he paid for it. These are almost exactly the same reasons that brought a million immigrants a year to America from Eastern and Southern Europe before the war.
Florida has made it plain that she wants no more of these seasonal laborers who can’t make a satisfactory living in their own communities. Most of them are so hard-boiled that a diamond-pointed drill is needed to penetrate their shells; and most of them have as much regard for neatness, cleanliness and the rights of others as a Berkshire hog has for a potato-peel. Tin-can towns have begun to charge various prices for the privilege of staying in them—prices ranging from twenty-five cents a night to seventy-five cents a night, or from four dollars to ten dollars a month. Even the free towns won’t admit residents who wish to go to work each day. They’ve got to be tourists, or devote themselves to taking the air. As a result the seasonal laborers who went to Florida for the 1921-1922 season were taking themselves homeward early in 1922 and hurling many a deep, guttural, rough-neck curse at the state of Florida as they went. America would get very rapid and satisfactory action on her immigration problem if her citizens could be brought in personal contact with its rottenness.
These automobile hoboes are about as welcome in Florida as a rattlesnake at a strawberry festival. The Florida newspapers, usually very slow indeed to find any flaws in anybody or anything that has secured a foothold in the state, emit poignant shrieks of rage at the very thought of them. Early in 1922 a North Carolina paper, with the smugness which characterizes the utterances of a resort newspaper when it thinks it is administering a painful black eye to another resort, stepped forward with a tale to the effect that 1922 was seeing a great exodus from Florida of broke, hungry and disheartened tourists. Instantly the Florida papers threw their palpitating typewriters into the breach. “The only Florida tourists beating it back to the North,” declared the Tampa Tribune scornfully, “are the cut-rate, fly-by-night cheap-skates who have been coming to the state and preying off the public for the past many years.... The state has enough of its own honest labor to take care of without opening its doors to the floater who is here to take the bread out of his brother’s mouth for less than the honest price. This winter Florida is taking care of its own out-of-work men and women. The riff-raff, the confidence men, the fakir, the wage cutter and the public mendicant all get the cold shoulder in Florida.”
The true sun-hunter and the tin-can tourist in good and accepted standing are received in most parts of the state with the same quiet welcome that would greet the arrival of a new citrus fruit. The big resorts like Palm Beach and Miami Beach don’t welcome the tin-canners; but those resorts don’t welcome any one who isn’t able to spend at least fifty dollars a day on the merest essentials. And there are a number of young men employed by the leading Palm Beach hostelries who have nothing but unutterable contempt for the person who doesn’t spend one hundred dollars a day while he is at Palm Beach.
So far as I know, tin-canners have never attempted to wield their can-openers at Palm Beach or Miami Beach; and it is highly probable that the regular Palm Beach set would give the tin-canners even more of a pain than the tin-canners would give the Palm Beach set. One can imagine the anguish on both sides if Mrs. J. Vanderplank Fritter of Park Avenue and a party of her prominent friends, should, after going in bathing in full evening dress, at one a. m., emerge in a still-potted state and run smack into a flivver loaded with that well-known tin-canner, Herman Blister, of Tackhammer, Michigan, and his wife, sister, daughter and maiden aunt. The Fritter party might feel that its entire evening had been spoiled; but the Blister family would probably feel that a sinister cloud had descended on their entire season.