But the notorious spoiling of the American child—some one says—is not that a proper cradle of liberty for the personality? A spoilt child may be a nuisance, but if he is on the way towards becoming a self-reliant, self-expressive adult, the “American way” of bringing up children may have its peculiar advantages. But a spoilt child is really a babyish child, and by that token he is on the way towards becoming a childish adult. Neither is his case disposed of simply by adjudging him a nuisance; the consequence of his spoiling carry much further than that. They are seen, for instance, in malnutrition of the children of the American rich—a fact which has but recently been discovered and which came as a great surprise to the experts. “In Chicago,” one of them tells us, “it was found that a group of foreign children near the stockyards were only 17 per cent. underweight, while in the all-American group near the University of Chicago they were 57 per cent. below normal.” The same condition of things was found in a select and expensive boarding school in the neighbourhood of Boston. A pathetic commentary—is it not?—on a country which leads the world in food-packing and food-profits, that it should contain so many parents who, with all the resources of the earth at their command, do not know how to feed their own children. Surely, the famous American spoiling has something to do with this. Whether it may not also be behind the vast amount of mental disturbance in the population may well be considered. The asylums are suddenly over-crowded. The National Committee for Mental Hygiene suggests for our consolation that this may be because the asylums are so much more humane than they used to be and the families of the sufferers are more willing than formerly to consign them to institutions.
It is the fashion to attribute all these mental tragedies to the strain of business life and industry, and more recently to war-shock. But if we are to accept the results of the latest psychological research, the family must receive the lion’s share of blame. The groundwork for fatal ruptures in the adult personality is laid in childhood and in the home which produced the victim. For many years the discussion of American nerves has hinged on the hectic haste of business and industrial life, on the noise and bustle and lack of repose in the national atmosphere. But we have neglected to accuse the family to its face of failing to protect the child against the cataclysms of the future while it had the chance.
The tremendous influence of the family on the individuals, old and young, composing it is not merely a pious belief. We are, alas, what our families make us. This is not a pleasant thought to many individuals who have learned through bitter experience to look on family relationships as a form of soul imprisonment. Yet it seems to be an incontestable fact that personality is first formed—or deformed—in the family constellation. The home really does the job for which the school, the press, the church, and the State later get the credit. It is a smoothly articulated course from the cradle onward, however, in which the subjugated parent produces a subjugated child, not so much by the rod of discipline—which figures very little in American family life—but by the more powerful and pervasive force of habit and attitude. Parents allow themselves to be a medium for transmitting the incessant pressure of standards which allow no room for impulse and initiative; they become the willing instrument of a public mania for standardization which tries to make every human soul into the image of a folded pattern. The babe is moulded in his cradle into the man who will drop a sentimental tear, wear a white carnation, and send a telegram on Mother’s Day—that travesty of a family festival which shames affection and puts spontaneous feeling to the blush.
As the family itself grows smaller, this pressure of mechanistic and conventional standards encroaches more closely upon the child. A sizeable group of brothers and sisters create for themselves a savage world which is their best protection against the civilization that awaits them. But with one or two children, or a widely scattered series, this natural protection is lost. The youngster is prematurely assimilated to the adult world of parents who are nowadays, owing to later marriage, not even quite so young as formerly they were. It is a peculiarity of parents, especially of mothers, that they never entertain a modest doubt as to whether they might be the best of all possible company for their children. And obviously the tired business man cannot properly substitute in the evenings for a roistering, shouting brother who never came into the world at all; nor can all the concentrated care of the most devoted mother take the place of the companionship and discipline which children get from other children. These considerations deserve more attention than they usually receive in connection with the falling birth-rate. The figures mean that the environment of the young child is being altered in a fundamental respect. Parents of small families need to take effective steps to counteract the loss. Practical things, like nursery schools, would be a help. But, chiefly, if parents will insist on being companions of their children, they need themselves to understand and practise the art of common joy and happiness.
Katharine Anthony
THE ALIEN
The immigrant alien has been discussed by the Anglo-Saxon as though he were an Anglo-Saxon “problem.” He has been discussed by labour as though he were a labour “problem”; by interpreters of American institutions as though man existed for institutions and for institutions which the class interpreting them found advantageous to its class. Occasionally the alien has been discussed from the point of view of the alien and but rarely from the point of view of democracy. The “problem” of the alien is largely a problem of setting our own house in order. It is the “problem” of Americanizing America. The outstanding fact of three centuries of immigration is that the immigrant alien ceases to be an alien when economic conditions are such as properly to assimilate him.
There is something rather humorous about the way America discusses “the alien.” For we are all aliens. And what is less to our liking we are almost all descended from the peasant classes of Europe. We are here because our forebears were poor. They did not rule over there. They were oppressed; they were often owned. And with but few exceptions they came because of their poverty. For the rich rarely emigrate. And in the 17th and 18th centuries there was probably a smaller percentage of immigrants who could pass the literacy test than there are to-day. Moreover, in the early days only suffering could drive the poor of Europe from their poverty. For the conditions of travel were hazardous. The death toll from disease was very high. It required more fortitude to cross the Atlantic and pass by the ring of settlers out onto the unbroken frontier than it does to pass Ellis Island and the exploiters round about it to-day.
The immigration question has arisen because America, too, has created a master class, a class which owns and employs and rules. And the alien in America is faced by a class opinion, born of the change which has come over America rather than any change in the alien himself. America has changed. The alien remains much the same. And the most significant phase of the immigration problem is the way we treat the alien and the hypocrisy of our discussion of the subject.
Sociologists have given us a classification of the immigrant alien. They speak of the “old immigration” and the “new immigration.” The former is the immigration of the 17th and 18th and the first three-quarters of the 19th centuries. It was English, Scotch, Irish, German, Scandinavian with a sprinkling of French, Swiss, and other nationalities. From the beginning, the preponderance was British. During the 18th century there was a heavy Scotch inflow and during the first half of the 19th a heavy Irish and German immigration. The Irish came because of the famine of 1848, the Scotch in large part because of the enclosure acts and the driving of the people from the land to make way for deer preserves and grazing lands for the British aristocracy. Most of the British immigration was the result of oppressive land laws of one kind or another. The population of Ireland was reduced from eight million to slightly over four million in three-quarters of a century. The British immigrant of the 17th century, like the recent Russian immigration, was driven from home by economic oppression. Only a handful came to escape religious oppression or to secure political liberty. The cause of immigration has remained the same from the beginning until now.