The number of those who received direct assistance was only a small fraction of the arrivals from Russia at that time. According to the opinion of the author of the article United States in the “Jewish Encyclopedia,” “The various committees and societies assisted about five per cent. of the total Jewish immigrants.” One of the most active and self-sacrificing of the workers for the refugees, Michael Heilprin, who was himself brought up under the influence of the Haskalah movement, was, like all Maskilim of the old school, a strong believer in the theory that the Jewish problem was to be solved by inducing or helping the Jews to become agriculturists. Many of the immigrants who belonged to the class described as Intellectuals or Intelligents, whose dreams of political liberty and assimilation in Russia were shattered by the pogroms, also entertained fantastic notions about the virtue of agriculture. They fell in with all colonization plans, for which they had more enthusiasm than natural aptitude, and this gave rise to a series of experiments in the colonizing of Russian immigrants, none of which were immediately successful, though it contributed to the inception of a small class of Jewish farmers which is slowly growing in the United States, and in which many see considerable promise for the future.
Herman Rosenthal.
Photo by Schill, Newark, N. J.
The first Jewish agricultural colony of that period was founded on Sicily Island, Catahoula Parish, Louisiana. The settlers, including thirty-five families from Kiev and twenty-five from Yelisavetgrad, had been partly organized in Russia. Its leading spirit was Herman Rosenthal (b. in Friedrichstadt, Courland, 1843; a. 1881), who is now chief of the Slavonic department of the New York Public Library. Before the colony was fairly started it was literally swept away by an overflow of the Mississippi in the spring of 1882, and the colonists scattered; a few of them, however, settling as independent farmers in Kansas and Missouri. In July, 1882, Rosenthal headed another group of twenty families which formed the colony Cremieux, in Davison county, in the present State of South Dakota. It led a precarious existence for about three years and was finally abandoned. Another attempt, which was made by the Alliance Israelite Universelle, with the formation of a colony surnamed “Betlehem Yehudah,” in the same region, was no more successful. Colonies founded in the same year in Colorado and Oregon met with no better fate. The colonies founded in North Dakota (one), in Kansas (five), in Michigan (one), and in Virginia (two) remain but memories. Those founded later in Connecticut were more successful, and some of them are still in existence and even growing. The most successful were those established in New Jersey, where four of the nine which were founded there since 1882 are still in existence and, considering the drawbacks of such enterprises, are in a flourishing condition. They are: Alliance, Salem county, founded by the Alliance Israelite in 1882; Carmel, Cumberland county, founded by the aid of Michael Heilprin in the same year; Rosenhayn, in the same county, which owes its origin to six families which were settled there by the Hebrew Emigrant Aid Society of New York in 1883; and Woodbine, Cape May county, which was founded by the trustees of the Baron de Hirsch Fund in 1891, and is the largest as well as the most thriving of all Jewish colonies in America. Woodbine now has over two thousand inhabitants, and is an incorporated borough with a government of its own, which was instituted in 1903, with Professor Hirsch Loeb Sabsovich (b. in Berdyansk, Russia, 1860; a. 1888), the former superintendent of The Baron de Hirsch Agricultural and Industrial School of that place, as the first Mayor. He was succeeded by M. L. Bayard, who is likewise a native of Russia.
While the assistance rendered to the needy immigrants, and the large sums expended in the formation of colonies and in supporting them, attracted the most attention, a larger number were effectively helped by being distributed over various parts of the country where they could engage in trade or find work for which they were much better fitted than for farming. The largest number received little, if any, assistance, except such as was rendered by their relatives or countrymen whom they found here. The least successful and those who became helpless or dependent from various causes were assisted by the old charitable institutions, which were enlarged or strengthened by the new demands made upon them, and by new ones which sprang up everywhere as the occasion required. But the bulk of the new comers succeeded remarkably well, and many of them were soon in a position to assist those who came after them, and to contribute to charities from which they received assistance but a short time before, or to found new charitable institutions which were conducted in a manner more suitable to the character of the immigrants.
The number of applicants to Jewish charitable institutions was increasing, and so was the number of people who crowded the districts in the larger cities where Jews live together. But in both cases there was going on a continual change, due to the steady inflow of new immigrants, on the one hand, and on the other to the steady rising in the social and economic scale, and the continued departure to other and better neighborhoods or to other cities. The same people did not apply for charity or dwell in tenement houses long. They soon made room for those who came after them, and what seemed to the superficial observer a solid, unmovable mass of poverty and helplessness which presented a very difficult problem, was in reality in a state of constant flux. This transient, fleeting mass slowly spread over the country, until we find communities of Jewish immigrants practically in every city in the Union, and hardly a place without some individuals of that class. Most of those Jewish immigrants living in smaller places, as well as almost all of them who live in more comfortable quarters in the large cities or their suburbs, passed through the tenement house districts or the so-called “Ghetti”; which proves that the distribution considered by some as a desirable process which must be artificially accelerated, is actually being accomplished by the free movement of individuals and is hardly noticed.
The number of those who remained, though temporarily, in the congested centers of population, especially in New York, was very large, and was constantly becoming larger, because more immigrants came in each year than the number of those who left those centers. This mass was hardly affected by the small withdrawals from it for the purpose of colonization. It was too large and was replenished too fast to be able to disperse as small traders over the country or to go in business even on a small scale in the cities, as did the smaller number of Jewish immigrants who came in the former periods. And so, after all deductions are made, including those who went to become farmers and those who went to become peddlers, of those whose intelligence and the learning which they brought with them enabled them, sometimes with a little aid, to pursue their studies; and those whose business acumen or the small capital which they brought, enabled them to engage in trade and to prosper in a short time—after all these deductions, there remained a very large class, steadily increasing by the excess of arrivals over departures, which could do the only thing which poor people can do in a country where capital is abundant and industries flourish—go to work. The Jewish immigrants soon began to fill the factories and the shops, especially those of the clothing trade, which was then to a certain extent already in Jewish hands. The trades to which they flocked began to extend fast; immigrant workers themselves soon ventured to open small shops, where they employed those who came after them. While wages were comparatively small and “sweating” was common, the earnings were so much above what the poor man can make in Russia, and the standard of living so much higher than the one to which the laborer is accustomed over there, that even those who worked under what an American would consider the worst circumstances, soon saved enough money to begin sending for their families, their relatives, and even their friends. The great mass was solving its own problem by hard work and by thrift; it built up and multiplied the industries in which it was occupied, and thus made it easy to absorb the newcomers year by year and to become a part of the great industrial army which is doing the work of the country.
Thus there arose a third and new class of Jewish immigrants, unlike the first or Sephardic small groups who came here usually with large means and took their position among the higher classes as soon as they arrived; also unlike the second and larger groups of German, Polish and Hungarian Jews who came in the second period, most of whom began as peddlers and artizans, but ultimately became merchants or professional men. Among the immigrants of the third period, which began in 1881, there were many men of means and skilled men who at once joined the better situated classes. There were also among them a large number who took up peddling or petty trade with various degrees of success. But the agriculturists and the industrial workers, or proletariat, are distinctive features of the new period. The colonist was mostly assisted and usually failed; then he joined the trading or the working classes in the cities. The industrial classes took care of themselves and fared much better. Even their new problems presented difficulties which were more apparent than real. The seeming persistence in errors which are characteristic of those who are here only a short time is easily explained when it is considered that in cities like Philadelphia or Chicago there are always thousands, and in New York there are always tens of thousands, of Jewish immigrants from Slavic countries who came to this country within the last year. So there is always at hand a mass which is not aware of what a similar mass—which to the outsider seems the same—did a year before; and what seem to be repetitions year after year of the same actions which lead to the same results or to the same lack of results, are actually experiments made but once by each successive wave of immigration and soon abandoned, only to be taken up later as a novel experience by those who come later.
As the worker succeeded the trader, so the political extremist comes to the fore in this period, as the radical in religious matters did in the former. Many of the “intellectuals” sympathized with the revolutionary movement in Russia, and were infected by the Socialistic virus which is the bane of that movement and has made its success well nigh impossible. While the German or Austrian revolutionary of the “forties” or “fifties” wanted nothing for his fatherland which the people of the United States did not already enjoy, the Russian theorist was dreaming of a social revolution and of fantastic victories for the peasantry and the proletariat which should put Russia far in advance of the civilization of the “rotten West.” There was plenty of opportunity under the freedom of speech and of the press prevailing in this country “to continue the struggle against capital” among the sweat-shop workers. For a while the Socialist agitator became the most active leader among the immigrant masses; the “maskilim,” or half-Germanized, Hebrew scholars were forced into the background, and the large Orthodox majority confined itself to the ever-increasing number of synagogues and kept quiet, as usual. But as the years went by and the immigrants of the beginning of the period became more Americanized and more conservative, it became clear that radicalism was a passing phase in the development of the Russian-Jewish immigrant, that the largest number outgrow it in several years at the utmost, and that the extreme movements depend almost entirely on the new arrivals who are attracted by its novelty, and on those who cater to them. Excepting what may be described as a pronounced tendency to Socialism in the Yiddish sensational press—differing in degree more than in kind from the general press of that type—the Socialist movement has not held its own proportionally among the Russian immigrants, and the fears of some of their friends that the neighborhoods where the noisy agitation was carried on would develop into politically Socialistic strongholds, were dispelled almost before the first decade of this period was over.