My friend and I went together to the Ludlow Street jail, and here a curious thing occurred. We merely inquired for the prisoner; we asked no questions. His cell door was opened and he was released. Later I learned that he had been arrested because of failure to make a satisfactory payment on a watch he was buying on the installment plan. There must have been gross irregularity in the transaction, judging by the willingness to release him and the fact that his creditor failed to appear against him. It was hinted, at the time, that there was collusion between the installment plan dealers and the prison officials.
A pleasanter story is that of the B⸺ family. One evening two neighborhood women, shawls over their heads, called to ask if I would contribute to a fund they were raising to furnish quarters for a family just arrived from Ellis Island. When I expressed wonder that they should have been permitted to land in a penniless condition the women shrugged their shoulders in characteristic fashion and said, “Well, they’re here, and we must do something.”
Not wishing to refuse, or to participate blindly, I asked for the whereabouts of the man of the family. I found him in a basement, a very dignified, gray-haired cobbler, between 40 and 45 years of age. When I asked how it happened that the first step of his family in America should be to claim help in this way he explained the complications in which they had been involved. He had preceded his family to make a home for them, and after some years had sent money for steamer tickets for them. When they arrived at the frontier, owing to some technicality, they were sent back. He had sent more money to defray the additional expenses; then himself had been compelled to undergo an operation for appendicitis, which took all he had hoarded to furnish the home. He was just out of the hospital when wife and children arrived.
Appreciating the importance of having the family begin life in their new environment with dignity and self-respect, an offer was made to loan him money if he would recall the women who were begging for him. Together we figured out the minimum sum needed, and within an hour the twenty-five dollars was in his hands and he had recalled the women with joy. He took the loan without exaggerated protest or gratitude, merely saying: “As there is a God in heaven you will not regret this.”
He was a skillful cobbler and the wife a good housekeeper, and in six months they brought back the twenty-five dollars. It was pleasanter not to think of the pinching in the household that made this prompt repayment possible. Some time later he brought me forty dollars which the family had saved, saying he knew it would give me pleasure to start the savings-bank account which they would need for the education of the children. The subsequent history of this family, like many another known to us in Henry Street, shows the real contribution brought into American life by immigrants of this character.
In discussions throughout the country of the problems of immigration it is significant that few, if any, of the men and women who have had extended opportunity for social contact with the foreigner favor a further restriction of immigration.
The government’s policy regarding the immigrant has been negative, concerned with exclusion and deportation, with the head tax and the enforcement of treaties and international agreements. By our laws we are protected from the pauper, the sick, and the vicious; but only within recent years has a hearing been given to those who have asked that our government assume an affirmative policy of protection, distribution, and assimilation.
