ALMOST AT THE END OF THE JOURNEY
THE MIGRANT FAMILY
Even when all the family has reached this country the problems of migration have not always ended. Many families do not establish a permanent home in the first place in which they settle, but move from place to place, and in each place there is a new set of conditions to which to adjust themselves. Of the ninety families visited in Chicago for this study, information on this point was obtained from only forty-two. Nineteen of these came directly to Chicago, but twenty-three had lived in other places. Five of them had been in the Pennsylvania mining district around Pittsburgh, two had been in North Dakota on a farm, two had been in a New Jersey manufacturing town, and the others had been at widely different places in other cities—New York, Philadelphia, Galveston, Texas, Boston—in small towns in the Middle West, and on plantations in Louisiana.
Some had moved several times. A Polish family, for example, had lived first in Boston, then in New York City, then somewhere in Canada, before they finally settled in Chicago. Another Ukrainian family, from Galicia, lived first in one mining town in Pennsylvania, then in another in the same state, and later moved to Chicago. The mother, who is a very intelligent woman, described her first impression of America when she, with her four children, arrived in the little mining town. She said that immigrants were living there, everything was dirty and ugly, and she was shocked by the number of drunken men and women she saw on the streets, "having not been accustomed to see them in the old country." She wished to return immediately and did not even want to unpack her belongings. For a whole year she lived amid these squalid surroundings, until her husband got work in another town where conditions seemed a little better.
Sometimes these changes mean family separations, as the man again goes ahead, as he did in coming to this country. The experience of a Polish family is typical. When the family first came to this country they went to Iron Mountain, Michigan, where the father worked in the ore mines until he lost his health. Then a sister of his wife, who was living in South Chicago, invited him to visit her family, and offered to get work for him in the steel mills. He came, living with his sister-in-law, and after a few months obtained work in the mills. Then the mother and children followed him.
FROM FARMING TO INDUSTRY
Another fact to which attention should be called is the adjustment in family life required by contact with the modern industrial system. Some of the immigrant groups come from countries more developed in an industrial way than others, but none of the newer groups come from any country in which the factory system has become so prevalent as in the United States. In the old country the family still exercised productive functions as a unit. It had access to tillable land, and was an essential part of an industrial system that is still organically related to the stage of development of the country. It had, therefore, within itself, the sources of self-support and self-determination. The civilization of which it was a part may be a declining civilization; but the conditions of life were those to which the wife and mother were accustomed. She took them for granted, felt at home among them, and was not conscious of being overwhelmed by them.
In the modern American industrial community, however, the family as a whole is generally divorced from land. It is not a unit in relation to the industrial organization, but in its productive function is usually broken up by it. For the family must live, and yet its income is dependent, not upon its size nor the volume of its needs, but upon the wage-earning capacity of the man under the prevailing system of bargaining. That the resulting income has often been wholly inadequate, even according to the modest standards set by dietetic experts and by social investigators, is testified to by an enormous body of data gathered during the decade preceding the Great War.[7]