Our Foreigners by Samuel P. Orth

S >> Samuel P. Orth >> Our Foreigners

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13

The bitter, political and racial suppression that made the Bohemian
surly and defiant seem, on the other hand, to have left the Polish
peasant stolid, patient, and very illiterate. Polish settlements were
made in Texas and Wisconsin in the fifties and before 1880 a large
number of Poles were scattered through New York, Pennsylvania, and
Illinois. Since then great numbers have come over in the new
migrations until today, it is estimated, at least three million
persons of Polish parentage live in the United States.[37] The men in
the earlier migrations frequently settled on the land; the recent
comers hasten to the mines and the metal working centers, where their
strong though untrained hands are in constant demand.

The majority of the Poles have come to America to stay. They remain,
however, very clannish and according to the Federal Industrial
Commission, without the "desire to fuse socially." The recent Polish
immigrant is very circumscribed in his mental horizon, clings
tenaciously to his language, which he hears exclusively in his home
and his church, his lodge, and his saloon, and is unresponsive to his
American environment. Not until the second and third generation is
reached does the spirit of American democracy make headway against his
lethal stolidity. Now that Poland has been made free as a result of
the Great War, it may be that the Pole's inherited indifference will
give way to national aspirations and that, in the resurrection of his
historic hope of freedom, he will find an animating stimulant.

The Pole, however, is more independent and progressive than the
Slovak, his brother from the northeastern corner of Hungary. For many
generations this segment of the Slav race has been pitifully crushed.
Turks, Magyars, and Huns have taken delight in oppressing him. An
early, sporadic migration of Slovaks to America received a sudden
impulse in 1882. About 200,000 have come since then, and perhaps twice
that number of persons of Slovak blood now dwell in the mining and
industrial centers of the United States. Many of them, however, return
to their native villages. They keep aloof from things American and
only too often prefer to live in squalor and ignorance. Their social
life is centered in the church, the saloon, and the lodge. It is
asserted that their numerous organizations have a membership of over
100,000, and that there were almost as many Slovak newspapers in
America as in Hungary.[38]

Little Russia, the seat of turmoil, is the home of the Ruthenians, or
Ukranians. They are also found in southeastern Galicia, northern
Hungary, and in the province of Bukowina. They have migrated from all
these provinces and about 350,000, it is estimated, now reside in the
United States. They, too, are birds of passage, working in the mines
and steel mills for the coveted wages that shall free them from debt
at home and insure their independence. Such respite as they take from
their labors is spent in the saloon, in the club rooms over the
saloon, or in church, where they hear no English speech and learn
nothing of American ways.

It is impossible to estimate the total number of Russian Slavs in the
United States, as the census figures until recently included as
"Russian" all nationalities that came from Russia. They form the
smallest of the Slavic groups that have migrated to America. From 1898
to 1909 only 66,282 arrived, about half of whom settled in
Pennsylvania and New York. It is surprising to note, however, that
every State in the Union except Utah and every island possession
except the Philippines has received a few of these immigrants. The
Director of Emigration at St. Petersburg in 1907 characterized these
people as "hardy and industrious," and "though illiterate they are
intelligent and unbigoted."[39]

So much in brief for the North Slavs. Of the South Slavs, the
Bulgarians possess racial characteristics which point to an
intermixture in the remote past with some Asiatic strain, perhaps a
Magyar blend. Very few Bulgarian immigrants, who come largely from
Macedonia, arrived before the revolution of 1904, when many villages
in Monastir were destroyed. For some years they made Granite City,
near St. Louis, the center of their activities but, like the Serbians,
they are now well scattered throughout the country. In Seattle, Butte,
Chicago, and Indianapolis they form considerable colonies. Many of
them return yearly to their native hills, and it is too early to
determine how fully they desire to adapt themselves to American ways.

Montenegro, Serbia, and Bulgaria, countries that have been thrust
forcibly into the world's vision by the Great War, have sent several
hundred thousand of their hardy peasantry to the United States. The
Montenegrins and Serbians, who comprise three-fourths of this
migration, are virtually one in speech and descent. They are to be
found in New England towns and in nearly every State from New York to
Alaska, where they work in the mills and mines and in construction
gangs. The response which these people make to educational
opportunities shows their high cultural possibilities.

The Croatians and Dalmatians, who constitute the larger part of the
southern Slav immigration, are a sturdy, vigorous people, and splendid
specimens of physical manhood. The Dalmatians are a seafaring folk
from the Adriatic coast, whose sailors may be found in every port of
the world. The Dalmatians have possessed themselves of the oyster
fisheries near New Orleans and are to be found in Mississippi making
staves and in California making wine. In many cities they manage
restaurants. The exceptional shrewdness of the Dalmatians is in bold
contrast to their illiteracy. They get on amazingly in spite of their
lack of education. Once they have determined to remain in this
country, they take to American ways more readily than do the other
southern Slavs.

Croatia, too, has its men of the sea, but in America most of the
immigrants of this race are to be found in the mines and coke furnaces
of Pennsylvania and West Virginia. In New York City there are some
15,000 Croatian mechanics and longshoremen. The silver and copper
mines of Montana also employ a large number of these people. It is
estimated that fully one-half of the Croatians return to their native
hills and that they contribute yearly many millions to the home-folks.

From the little province of Carniola come the Slovenians, usually
known as "Griners" (from the German _Krainer_, the people of the
Krain), a fragment of the Slavic race that has become much more
assimilated with the Germans who govern them than any other of their
kind. Their national costume has all but vanished and with it the
virile traditions of their forefathers. They began coming to America
in the sixties, and in the seventies they founded an important colony
at Joliet, Illinois. Since 1892 their numbers have increased rapidly,
until today about 100,000 live in the United States. Over one-half of
these immigrants are to be found in the steel and mining towns of
Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois, where the large majority of them are
unskilled workmen. Among the second generation, however, are to be
found a number of successful merchants.

All these numerous peoples have inherited in common the impassive,
patient temperament and the unhappy political fate of the Slav. Their
countries are mere eddies left by the mighty currents of European
conquest and reconquest, backward lands untouched by machine industry
and avoided by capital, whose only living links with the moving world
are the birds of passage, the immigrants who flit between the mines
and cities of America and these isolated European villages. Held
together by national costume, song, dance, festival, traditions, and
language, these people live in the pale glory of a heroic past. Most
of those who come to America are peasants who have been crushed by
land feudalism, kept in ignorance by political intolerance, and bound
in superstition by a reactionary ecclesiasticism. The brutality with
which they treat their women, their disregard for sanitary measures,
and their love for strong drink are evidences of the survival of
medievalism in the midst of modern life, as are their notions of
class prerogative and their concept of the State. Buffeted by the
world, their language suppressed, their nationalism reviled, poor,
ignorant, unskilled, these children of the open country come to the
ugliest spots of America, the slums of the cities, and the choking
atmosphere of the mines. Here, crowded in their colonies, jealously
shepherded by their church, neglected by the community, they remain
for an entire generation immune to American influences. According to
estimates given by Emily G. Balch,[40] between four and six million
persons of Slavic descent are now dwelling among us, and their
fecundity is amazing. Equally amazing is the indifference of the
Government and of Americans generally to the menace involved in the
increasing numbers of these inveterate aliens to institutions that are
fundamentally American.

The Lithuanians and Magyars are often classed with the Slavs. They
hotly resent this inclusion, however, for they are distinct racial
strains of ancient lineage. An adverse fate has left the Lithuanian
little of his old civilization except his language. Political and
economic suppression has made sad havoc of what was once a proud and
prosperous people. Most of them are now crowded into the Baltic
province that bears their name, and they are reduced to the mental and
economic level of the Russian moujik. In 1868 a famine drove the first
of these immigrants to America, where they were soon absorbed by the
anthracite mines of Pennsylvania. They were joined in the seventies by
numbers of army deserters. The hard times of the nineties caused a
rush of young men to the western El Dorado. Since then the influx has
steadily continued until now over 200,000 are in America. They
persistently avoid agriculture and seek the coal mine and the factory.
The one craft in which they excel is tailoring, and they proudly boast
of being the best dressed among all the Eastern-European immigrants.
The one mercantile ambition which they have nourished is to keep a
saloon. Drinking is their national vice; and they measure the social
success of every wedding, christening, picnic, and jollification by
its salvage of empty beer kegs.

Over 338,000 Magyars immigrated to the United States during the decade
ending 1910. These brilliant and masterful folk are a Mongoloid blend
that swept from the steppes of Asia across eastern Europe a thousand
years ago. As the wave receded, the Magyars remained dominant in
beautiful and fertile Hungary, where their aggressive nationalism
still brings them into constant rivalry on the one hand with the
Germans of Austria and on the other with the Slavs of Hungary. The
immigrants to America are largely recruited from the peasantry. They
almost invariably seek the cities, where the Magyar neighborhoods can
be easily distinguished by their scrupulously neat housekeeping, the
flower beds, the little patches of well-swept grass, the clean
children, and the robust and tidy women. Among them is less illiteracy
than in any other group from eastern and southern Europe, excepting
the Finns, who are their ethnic brothers. As a rule they own their own
homes. They learn the English language quickly but unfortunately
acquire with it many American vices. Drinking and carousing are
responsible for their many crimes of personal violence. They are
otherwise a sociable, happy people, and the cafes kept by Hungarians
are islands of social jollity in the desert of urban strife.

In bold contrast to these ardent devotees of nationalism, the Jew, the
man of no country and of all countries, is an American immigrant still
to be considered. By force of circumstance he became a city dweller;
he came from the European city; he remained in the American city; and
all attempts to colonize Jews on the land have failed. The doors of
this country have always been open to him. At the time of the
Revolution several thousand Jews dwelt in American towns. By 1850 the
number had increased to 50,000 and by the time of the Civil War to
150,000. The persecutions of Czar Alexander III in the eighties
swelled the number to over 400,000, and the political reactions of the
nineties added over one million. Today at least one fifth of the ten
million Jews in the world live in American cities.

The first to seek a new Zion in this land were the Spanish-Portuguese
Jews, who came as early as 1655. They remain a select aristocracy
among their race, clinging to certain ritualistic characteristics and
retaining much of the pride which their long contact with the Spaniard
has engendered. They are found almost exclusively in the eastern
cities, as successful bankers, merchants, and professional men. There
next came on the wave of the great German immigration the German Jews.
They are to be found in every city, large and small, engaged in
mercantile pursuits, especially in the drygoods and the clothing
business. Nearly all of the prominent Jews in America have come from
this stock--the great bankers, financiers, lawyers, merchants, rabbis,
scholars, and public men. It was, indeed, from their broad-minded
scholars that there originated the widespread liberal Judaism which
has become a potent ethical force in our great cities.

The Austrian and Hungarian Jews followed. The Jews had always received
liberal treatment in Hungary, and their mingling with the social
Magyars had produced the type of the coffeehouse Jew, who loved to
reproduce in American cities the conviviality of Vienna and Budapest
but who did not take as readily to American ways as the German Jew.
Most of the Jews from Hungary remained in New York, although Chicago
and St. Louis received a few of them. In commercial life they are
traders, pawnbrokers, and peddlers, and control the artificial-flower
and passementerie trade.

By far the largest group are the latest comers, the Russian Jews.
"Ultra orthodox," says Edward A. Steiner, "yet ultra radical; chained
to the past, and yet utterly severed from it; with religion permeating
every act of life, or going to the other extreme and having 'none of
it'; traders by instinct, and yet among the hardest manual laborers
of our great cities. A complex mass in which great things are yearning
to express themselves, a brooding mass which does not know itself and
does not lightly disclose itself to the outside."[41] Nearly a million
of these people are crowded into the New York ghettos. Large numbers
of them engage in the garment industries and the manufacture of
tobacco. They graduate also into junk-dealers, pawnbrokers, and
peddlers, and are soon on their way "up town." Among them socialism
thrives, and the second generation displays an unseemly haste to break
with the faith of its fathers.

The Jews are the intellectuals of the new immigration. They invest
their political ideas with vague generalizations of human
amelioration. They cannot forget that Karl Marx was a Jew: and one
wonders how many Trotzkys and Lenines are being bred in the stagnant
air of their reeking ghettos. It remains to be seen whether they will
be willing to devote their undoubted mental capacities to other than
revolutionary vagaries or to gainful pursuits, for they have a
tendency to commercialize everything they touch. They have shown no
reluctance to enter politics; they learn English with amazing
rapidity, throng the public schools and colleges, and push with
characteristic zeal and persistence into every open door of this
liberal land.

From Italy there have come to America well over three million
immigrants. For two decades before 1870 they filtered in at the
average rate of about one thousand a year; then the current increased
to several thousand a year; and after 1880 it rose to a flood.[42]
Over two-thirds of these Italians live in the larger cities;
one-fourth of them are crowded into New York tenements.[43] Following
in order, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, New Orleans, Cleveland, St.
Louis, Baltimore, Detroit, Portland, and Omaha have their Italian
quarters, all characterized by overcrowded boarding houses and
tenements, vast hordes of children, here and there an Italian bakery
and grocery, on every corner a saloon, and usually a private bank with
a steamship agency and the office of the local _padrone_. Scores of
the lesser cities also have their Italian contingent, usually in the
poorest and most neglected part of the town, where gaudily painted
door jambs and window frames and wonderfully prosperous gardens
proclaim the immigrant from sunny Italy. Not infrequently an old
warehouse, store, or church is transformed into an ungainly and
evil-odored barracks, housing scores of men who do their own washing
and cooking. Those who do not dwell in the cities are at work in
construction camps--for the Italian has succeeded the Irishman as the
knight of the pick and shovel. The great bulk of these swarthy,
singing, hopeful young fellows are peasants, unskilled of hand but
willing of heart. Nearly every other one is unable to read or write.
They have not come for political or religious reasons but purely as
seekers for wages, driven from the peasant villages by overpopulation
and the hazards of a precarious agriculture.

They have come in two distinct streams: one from northern Italy,
embracing about one-fifth of the whole; the other from southern Italy.
The two streams are quite distinct in quality. Northern Italy is the
home of the old masters in art and literature and of a new
industrialism that is bringing renewed prosperity to Milan and Turin.
Here the virile native stock has been strengthened with the blood of
its northern neighbors. They are a capable, creative, conservative,
reliable race. On the other hand, the hot temper of the South has been
fed by an infusion of Greek and Saracen blood. In Sicily this strain
shows at its worst. There the vendetta flourishes; and the Camorra and
its sinister analogue, the Black Hand, but too realistically remind us
that thousands of these swarthy criminals have found refuge in the
dark alleys of our cities. Even in America the Sicilian carries a
dirk, and the "death sign" in a court room has silenced many a
witness. The north Italians readily identify themselves with American
life. Among them are found bakers, barbers, and marble cutters, as
well as wholesale fruit and olive oil merchants, artists, and
musicians. But the south Italian is a restless, roving creature, who
dislikes the confinement and restraint of the mill and factory. He is
found out of doors, making roads and excavations, railways,
skyscrapers, and houses. If he has a liking for trade he trundles a
pushcart filled with fruit or chocolates; or he may turn a jolly
hurdy-gurdy or grind scissors. In spite of his native sociability,
the south Italian is very slow to take to American ways. As a rule, he
comes here intending to go back when he has made enough money. He has
the air of a sojourner. He is picturesque, volatile, and incapable of
effective team work.

About 300,000 Greeks have come to America between 1908 and 1917,
nearly all of them young men, escaping from a country where they had
meat three times a year to a land where they may have it three times a
day. "The whole Greek world," says Henry P. Fairchild, writing in
1911, "may be said to be in a fever of emigration.... The strong young
men with one accord are severing home ties, leaving behind wives and
sweethearts, and thronging to the shores of America in search of
opportunity and fortune." Every year they send back handsome sums to
the expectant family. Business is an instinct with the Greek, and he
has almost monopolized the ice cream, confectionery, and retail fruit
business, the small florist shops and bootblack stands in scores of
towns, and in every large city he is running successful restaurants.
As a factory operative he is found in the cotton mills of New England,
but he prefers merchandizing to any other calling.

Years ago when New Bedford was still a whaling port a group of
Portuguese sailors from the Azores settled there. This formed the
nucleus of the Portuguese immigration which, in the last decade,
included over 80,000 persons. Two-thirds of these live in New England
factory towns, the remaining third, strange to say, have found their
way to the other side of the continent, where they work in the gardens
and fruit orchards of California. New Bedford is still the center of
their activity. They are a hard-working people whose standard of
living, according to official investigations "is much lower than that
of any other race," of whom scarcely one in twenty become citizens,
and who evince no interest in learning or in manual skill.

Finally, American cities are extending the radius of their magnetism
and are drawing ambitious tradesmen and workers from the Levant. Over
100,000 have come from Arabia, Syria, Armenia, and Turkey. The
Armenians and Syrians, forming the bulk of this influx, came as
refugees from the brutalities of the Mohammedan regime. The Levantine
is first and always a bargainer. His little bazaars and oriental rug
shops are bits of Cairo and Constantinople, where you are privileged
to haggle over every purchase in true oriental style. Even the
peddlers of lace and drawn-work find it hard to accustom themselves to
the occidental idea of a market price. With all their cunning as
traders, they respect learning, prize manual skill, possess a fine
artistic sense, and are law-abiding. The Armenians especially are
eager to become American citizens. Since the settlement of the
Northwestern lands, many thousands of Scandinavians and Finns have
flocked to the cities, where they are usually employed as skilled
craftsmen.[44]

Thus the United States, in a quarter of a century, has assumed a
cosmopolitanism in which the early German and Irish immigrants appear
as veteran Americans. This is not a stationary cosmopolitanism, like
that of Constantinople, the only great city in Europe that compares
with New York, Chicago, or Boston in ethnic complexity. It is a
shifting mass. No two generations occupy the same quarters. Even the
old rich move "up town" leaving their fine houses, derelicts of a
former splendor, to be divided into tenements where six or eight
Italian or Polish families find ample room for themselves and a crowd
of boarders.

Thousands of these migratory beings throng the steerage of
transatlantic ships every winter to return to their European homes.
The steamship companies, whose enterprise is largely responsible for
this flow of populations, reap their harvest; and many a decaying
village buried in the southern hills of Europe, or swept by the winds
of the great Slav plains, owes its regeneration ultimately to American
dollars.

They pay the price of their success, these flitting beings, links
between distant lands and our own. The great maw of mine and factory
devours thousands. Their lyric tribal songs are soon drowned by the
raucous voices of the city; their ancient folk-dances, meant for a
village green, not for a reeking dance-hall, lose here their native
grace; and the quaint and picturesque costumes of the European
peasant give place to American store clothes, the ugly badge of
equality.

The outward bound throng holds its head high, talks back at the
steward, and swaggers. It has become "American." The restless fever of
the great democracy is in its veins. Most of those who return home
will find their way back with others of their kind to the teeming
hives and the coveted fleshpots they are leaving. And again they will
tax the ingenuity of labor unions, political and social organizations,
schools, libraries, and churches, in the endeavor to transform
medieval peasants into democratic peers.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 34: This lament of Henry James's is cited by E.A. Ross in
_The Old World in the New_, p. 101.]

[Footnote 35: Emily Greene Balch, _Our Slavic Fellow Citizens_, p.
8-9.]

[Footnote 36: Edward A. Steiner, _On the Trail of the Immigrant_, p.
228.]

[Footnote 37: This is an estimate made by the Reverend W.X. Kruszka of
Ripon, Wisconsin, as reported by E.G. Balch in _Our Slavic Fellow
Citizens_, p. 262. Of this large number, Chicago claims 350,000; New
York City, 250,000; Buffalo, 80,000; Milwaukee, 75,000; Detroit,
75,000; while at least a dozen other cities have substantial Polish
settlements. These numbers include the suburbs of each city.]

[Footnote 38: This is accounted for by the fact that the Hungarian
Government rigorously censored Slovak publications.]

[Footnote 39: Since the Russo-Japanese War, Siberia has absorbed great
numbers of Russian immigrants. This accounts for the small number that
have come to America.]

[Footnote 40: _Our Slavic Fellow Citizens_, p. 280.]

[Footnote 41: _On the Trail of the Immigrant_, p. 27.]

[Footnote 42: The census figures show that approximately half the
Italian immigrants return to their native land. American officers in
the Great War were surprised to find so many Italian soldiers who
spoke English. In 1910 there remained in the United States only
1,343,000 Italians who were born in Italy, and the total number of
persons of Italian stock in the United States was 2,098,000.]

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13