They Who Knock at Our Gates: A Complete Gospel of Immigration

by Mary Antin

THE UNGROOMED MOTHER OF THE EAST SIDE

The widow’s sentiment was finely echoed by another Russian immigrant, a man who drives an ice-wagon for a living. His case is the more impressive from the fact that he left a position of comparative opulence in the old country, under the protection of a wealthy uncle who employed him as steward of his estates. He had had servants to wait on him and money enough to buy some of the privileges of citizenship which the Russian Government doles out to the favored few. “But what good was it to me?” he asked. “My property was not my own if the police wanted to take it away. I could spend thousands to push my boy through the Gymnasium, and he might get a little education as a favor, and still nothing out of it, if he isn’t allowed to be anything. Here I work like a slave, and my wife she works like a slave, too,—in the old country she had servants in the house,—but what do I care, as long as I know what I earn I got it for my own? I got to furnish my house one chair at a time, in America, but nobody can take it away from me, the little that I got. And it costs me nothing to educate my family. Maybe they can, maybe they can’t go to college, but all can go through grammar school, and high school, too, the smart ones. And all go together! Rich and poor, all are equal, and I don’t get it as a favor.”

Better a hard bed in the shelter of justice than a stuffed couch under the black canopy of despotism. Better a crust of the bread of the intellect freely given him as his right than the whole loaf grudgingly handed him as a favor. What nobler insistence on the rights of manhood do we find in the writings of the Puritans?

Volumes might be filled with the broken sayings of the humblest among the immigrants which, translated into the sounding terms of the universal, would give us the precious documents of American history over again. Never was the bread of freedom more keenly relished than it is to-day, by the very people of whom it is said that they covet only the golden platter on which it is served up. We may not say that immigration to our country has ceased to be a quest of the ideal as long as the immigrants lay so much stress on the spiritual accompaniment of economic elevation in America. Nobly built upon the dreams of the Fathers, the house of our Republic is nobly tenanted by those who cherish similar dreams.

But dreams cannot be brought before a court of inquiry. A diligent immigration commission with an appropriation to spend has little time to listen to Joseph. A digest of its report is expected to yield statistics rather than rhapsodies. The taxpayers want their money’s worth of hard facts.

But when the facts are raked together and boiled down to a summary that the business man may scan on his way to the office, behold! we are no wiser than before. For a host of interpreters jump into the seats vacated by the extinct commission and harangue us in learned terms on the merits and demerits of the immigrant, as they conceive them, after studying the voluminous report. That is, the question is still what it was before: a matter of personal opinion! The man with the vote realizes that he has to make up his mind what instructions to send to his representative in Congress on the subject of immigration. And where shall he, a plain, practical man, unaccustomed to interpret dreams or analyze statistics, find an index of the alien’s worth that he can read through the spectacles of common sense?

There is a phrase in the American vocabulary of approval that sums up our national ideal of manhood. That phrase is “a self-made man.” To such we pay the tribute of our highest admiration, justly regarding our self-made men as the noblest product of our democratic institutions. Now let any one compile a biographical dictionary of our self-made men, from the romantic age of our history down to the prosaic year 1914, and see how the smell of the steerage pervades the volume! There is a sign that the practical man finds it easy to interpret. Like fruits grow from like seeds. Those who can produce under American conditions the indigenous type of manhood must be working with the same elements as the native American who starts out a yokel and ends up a senator.

Focused under the microscope of theoretical analysis, or viewed through the spectacles of common sense, the average immigrant of to-day still shows the markings of virtue that have distinguished the best Americans from the time of the landing at Plymouth to the opening of the Panama Canal. But popular judgment is seldom based on a study of the norm, especially in this age of the newspaper. The newspaper is devoted to the portrayal of the abnormal—the shining example and the horrible example; and most men think they have done justice when they have balanced the one against the other, leaving out of account entirely the great mass that lies between the two extremes. And even of the two extremes, it is the horrible example that is more frequently brought to the attention of the public. Half a dozen Italians draw knives in a brawl on a given evening, and the morning newspapers are full of the story. On the same evening hundreds of Italians were studying civics in the night schools, inquiring for classics at the public library, rehearsing for a historical pageant at the settlement—and not a word about them in the newspapers. One Jewish gangster makes more “copy” than a hundred Jewish boys and girls who win honors in college. So also it is the business of the police to record the fact that a Greek was arrested for peddling without a license, while it is nobody’s business to report that a dozen other Greeks chipped in their spare change to pay his fine. The reader of newspapers is convinced that the foreigners as a whole are a violent, vicious, lawless crowd, and the fewer we have of them the better.

Could the annual reports of libraries and settlements be circulated as widely as the newspapers, the American public would not be guilty of such errors of judgment. But who reads annual reports? The very name of them is forbidding! It becomes necessary, therefore, to explain the newspaper types that jump to the fore in every discussion of the immigrant.