The most important single source of information on the present status of the coloured race in the United States is “The Negro Year Book,” edited by Monroe N. Work (Negro Year Book Pub. Co., Tuskegee Institute, Alabama); the edition for 1918–19 contains an extensive bibliography. Brawley’s “Short History of the American Negro” (Macmillan, rev. ed., 1919) presents in text-book form a general narrative, together with supplementary chapters on such topics as religion and education among the Negroes. The Government report on “Negro Population, 1790–1915” (Washington, Bureau of the Census, Government Printing Office, 1918), is invaluable. Important recent developments are treated in “Negro Migration in 1916–17” and “The Negro at Work During the World War and During Reconstruction” (Washington, Dep’t of Labour, 1919 and 1920 respectively). Some notion of the various manifestations of prejudice against the Negro may be gathered from the following sources: “Negro Education” (U. S. Bureau of Education Bulletin, 1916, nos. 38 and 39); “The White and the Colored Schools of Virginia as Measured by the Ayres Index,” by George Oscar Ferguson, Jr. (School and Society, vol. XII, no. 297, p. 170, 4 Sept., 1920); “Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889–1918,” and “Disfranchisement of Colored Americans in the Presidential Election of 1920” (New York, National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, 1919 and 1921 respectively). A few representative expressions from the Negroes themselves are: “Up from Slavery, an Autobiography,” by Booker T. Washington (Doubleday, 1901); “Darkwater,” by W. E. Burghardt Du Bois (Harcourt, 1920); The Messenger (a Negro Socialist-syndicalist magazine, 2305 Seventh Avenue, New York); and the “Universal Negro Catechism” (Universal Negro Improvement Association, 56 West 135th Street, New York).
A great body of valuable information on the Indians is collected in two publications of the Government, the second of which contains a very extensive bibliography; “Indian Population in the United States and Alaska, 1910” (Washington, Bureau of the Census, Government Printing Office, 1915), and the “Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico,” edited by Frederick Webb Hodge (Washington, Bureau of Ethnology, Government Printing Office, 1907–10, 2 vols.). An annual report containing current data on the status of the Indian is published by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs. Francis Ellington Leupp, who held this title from 1905 to 1909, was the author of a volume which presents in popular form the results of official experience (“The Indian and His Problem,” Scribner, 1910).
The “American Jewish Year Book” (Philadelphia, Jewish Publication Society of America) is an extremely useful volume, and particularly so because one must refer to it for statistical information which in the case of the other racial minorities is available in the reports of the national census. In the American Magazine for April, 1921, Harry Schneiderman, the editor of the “Year Book,” assembles a great many facts bearing upon the relation of the Jews to the economic, social, political, and intellectual life of the country (“The Jews of the United States,” p. 24). Of special interest to students of the Semitic problem is Berkson’s “Theories of Americanization; a Critical Study with Special Reference to the Jewish Group” (Teachers’ College, Columbia University, 1920).
The standard works on the Oriental question are Coolidge’s “Chinese Immigration” (Holt, 1909), and Millis’s “Japanese Problem in the United States” (Macmillan, 1915). The Japanese problem in California is treated statistically in a booklet prepared recently by the State Board of Control (“California and the Oriental,” Sacramento, State Printing Office, 1920), and in a symposium which appeared in The Pacific Review for December, 1920 (Seattle, University of Washington).
G. T. R.
ADVERTISING
Expect from me no recommendation of the “scientific” treatises on advertising or of the professional psychological analyses of the instincts. Books, books in tons, have been written about advertising, and as far as I am concerned, every single one of them is right. Read these, if you have the hardihood, and remain mute. Read them, I should say, and be eternally damned. Read them and retire rapidly to a small room comfortably padded and securely locked.
J. T. S.
BUSINESS
Within the limits of this space anything like an adequate reference to the source books of fact and thought is impossible. All that may be attempted is to suggest an arbitrary way through the whole of the subject—a thoroughfare from which the reader may take off where he will as his own interests develop. For the foundations of an economic understanding one needs only to read “Principles of Political Economy,” by Simon Newcomb, the American astronomer, who in a mood of intellectual irritation inclined his mind to this mundane matter and produced the finest book of its kind in the world. For the rough physiognomy of American economic phenomena there is “A Century of Population Growth,” Bureau of the Census, 1909, a splendid document prepared under the direction of S. N. D. North. Katharine Coman’s “Industrial History of the United States” is an important work in itself and contains, besides, an excellent and full bibliography. “Crises and Depressions” and “Corporations and the State,” by Theodore E. Burton; “Forty Years of American Finance,” by Alexander D. Noyes; “Railroad Transportation, Its History and Its Laws,” by A. T. Hadley; “Trusts, Pools and Corporations,” by Wm. Z. Ripley; and “The Book of Wheat,” by Peter Tracy Dondlinger, are books in which the separate phases indicated by title are essentially treated. For dissertation, interpretation, and universal thought every student will find himself deeply indebted to “Trade Morals, Their Origin, Growth and Province,” by Edward D. Page; “The Economic Interpretation of History,” by James E. Thorold Rogers; “History of the New World Called America,” by E. J. Payne; “Economic Studies,” by Walter Bagehot; “Essays in Finance,” by R. Giffen; “Recent Economic Changes,” by David A. Wells, and “The Challenge of Facts and Other Essays,” by William Graham Sumner.