CHAPTER XVI
NEW AMERICANS AND OUR POLICIES
Illuminating anecdotes might be told of the storm and stress that often lie beneath the surface of the immigrant’s experience from the time he purchases his ticket in the old country until the gates at Ellis Island close behind him and the process of assimilation begins. That he has so often been left rudderless in strange seas forms a chapter in the history of this “land of opportunity” that cannot be omitted.
The confusion of the stranger, unable to speak the language and encountering unfamiliar laws and institutions, often has tragic results. Once in searching for a patient in a large tenement near the Bowery I knocked at each door in turn. An Italian woman hesitatingly opened one, no wider than to give me a glimpse of a slight creature obviously stricken with fear. Her face brought instantly to my mind the famous picture of the sorrowing mother. “Dolorosa!” I said. The tone and the word sufficed, and she opened the door wide enough to let me enter. In a corner of the room lay two children with marks of starvation upon them.
Laying my hat and bag upon the table, to indicate that I would return, I flew to the nearest grocery for food, taking time, while my purchases were being made ready, to telephone to a distinguished Italian upon whose interest and sympathy I could rely to meet me at the tenement, that we might learn the cause of this obvious distress.
My friend arrived before I had finished feeding the children, and to him the little mother poured forth her tale. She, with three children, had arrived some days before, to meet the husband who had preceded her and had prepared the home for them. One bambina was ill when they reached port, and it was taken from her, why she could not explain. She was allowed to land with the other two and join her husband, and the following day, in answer to their frantic inquiries, they learned that the child had been taken to a hospital and had died there. Then her husband was arrested, and she, unacquainted with a single human being in the city, found herself alone with two starving children, too frightened to open the door or to venture upon the street. She thought her husband was imprisoned somewhere nearby.
My friend and I went together to the Ludlow Street jail, and here a curious thing occurred. We merely inquired for the prisoner; we asked no questions. His cell door was opened and he was released. Later I learned that he had been arrested because of failure to make a satisfactory payment on a watch he was buying on the installment plan. There must have been gross irregularity in the transaction, judging by the willingness to release him and the fact that his creditor failed to appear against him. It was hinted, at the time, that there was collusion between the installment plan dealers and the prison officials.
A pleasanter story is that of the B⸺ family. One evening two neighborhood women, shawls over their heads, called to ask if I would contribute to a fund they were raising to furnish quarters for a family just arrived from Ellis Island. When I expressed wonder that they should have been permitted to land in a penniless condition the women shrugged their shoulders in characteristic fashion and said, “Well, they’re here, and we must do something.”
Not wishing to refuse, or to participate blindly, I asked for the whereabouts of the man of the family. I found him in a basement, a very dignified, gray-haired cobbler, between 40 and 45 years of age. When I asked how it happened that the first step of his family in America should be to claim help in this way he explained the complications in which they had been involved. He had preceded his family to make a home for them, and after some years had sent money for steamer tickets for them. When they arrived at the frontier, owing to some technicality, they were sent back. He had sent more money to defray the additional expenses; then himself had been compelled to undergo an operation for appendicitis, which took all he had hoarded to furnish the home. He was just out of the hospital when wife and children arrived.
Appreciating the importance of having the family begin life in their new environment with dignity and self-respect, an offer was made to loan him money if he would recall the women who were begging for him. Together we figured out the minimum sum needed, and within an hour the twenty-five dollars was in his hands and he had recalled the women with joy. He took the loan without exaggerated protest or gratitude, merely saying: “As there is a God in heaven you will not regret this.”
He was a skillful cobbler and the wife a good housekeeper, and in six months they brought back the twenty-five dollars. It was pleasanter not to think of the pinching in the household that made this prompt repayment possible. Some time later he brought me forty dollars which the family had saved, saying he knew it would give me pleasure to start the savings-bank account which they would need for the education of the children. The subsequent history of this family, like many another known to us in Henry Street, shows the real contribution brought into American life by immigrants of this character.
In discussions throughout the country of the problems of immigration it is significant that few, if any, of the men and women who have had extended opportunity for social contact with the foreigner favor a further restriction of immigration.
The government’s policy regarding the immigrant has been negative, concerned with exclusion and deportation, with the head tax and the enforcement of treaties and international agreements. By our laws we are protected from the pauper, the sick, and the vicious; but only within recent years has a hearing been given to those who have asked that our government assume an affirmative policy of protection, distribution, and assimilation.
The need of constructive social measures has long been indicated. The planting of roots in the new soil can best be accomplished through an intercourse with the immigrant in which the dignity of the individual and of the family is recognized. Heroic measures may be necessary to establish a satisfactory system of distribution, and these measures must be based on a philosophic understanding of democracy. Among them should be provision for giving instruction to the prospective immigrant in regard to those laws, customs, or prohibitions with which he is liable to come in contact, and also in regard to the industrial opportunities open to him. Then, with competent medical examination at the port of departure and humane consideration there and here, the tragedies now so frequent at the port of arrival might be diminished, or even eliminated altogether.
In turn, the private banker, the employment agent, the ticket broker, the lawyer, and the notary public have battened upon the helplessness of the immigrant. Our experience has convinced us that in the interest of the state itself the future citizens should be made to feel that protection and fair treatment are accorded by the state. The greater number of immigrants who come to us are adults for whose upbringing this country has been at no expense. It would seem only just to give them special protection during their first years in the country, to encourage confidence in our institutions, and to promote assimilation. From an academic point of view, it might be said that all institutions for the citizen are available to the immigrant, but the statement carries with it an implication of equal ability on the part of the latter to utilize these institutions, and this is not borne out by the experience of those familiar with actual conditions.
Such thoughts as these lay back of an invitation to Governor Hughes to dine and spend an evening at the settlement and there meet the colleagues who could speak with authority on these matters.
The Governor left us armed with maps and documentary evidence. A few months later the legislature authorized the creation of a commission to “make full inquiry, examination, and investigation into the condition, welfare, and industrial opportunities of aliens in the State of New York.” Among its nine members were two women, Frances Kellor and myself. Upon the recommendation of that commission the New York Bureau of Industries and Immigration of the Department of Labor was created.[21] Miss Kellor, the first woman to be head of a state bureau, became its chief.
Pending the enactment of legislation, she and I, with a photographer and a sympathetic companion interested in questions of labor, motored over the state examining the construction camps of the barge canal (a state contract), the camps connected with the city’s great new aqueduct, and some of the canning establishments.
In the latter we found ample illustration of indifference on the part of private employers. In the camps surrounding the canneries were large numbers of idle children who should have been in school. The local authorities were, perhaps not unnaturally, indisposed to enforce the compulsory education law upon these children whose stay in the community was to be a transient one. In the public work the New York City contracts, with few exceptions, showed carefully thought-out and standardized conditions for the men; but examination of the state contracts showed that while elaborate provision had been made for the expert handling of every other detail connected with the work, even to the stabling of the mules, nowhere was any mention made of the men.
In a shack that held three tiers of bunks, occupied alternately by the day and night shifts, with a cook-stove in a little clearing in the middle, we found a homesick man, who chanced not to be on the works, reading a book. When we engaged in conversation with him he pointed contemptuously to the bunks and their dirty coverings, and said, “This America! I show you Rome,” and produced from under his bed a photograph of the Coliseum.
The commission exposed many forms of exploitation of the immigrant, and subsequent reports have corroborated its findings. Some safeguards have now been established, and the reports of the Bureau of Industries and Immigration in the first years of its existence bore interesting testimony to its practical and social value. The significance of the indifference of the state to its employees, as it appeared to the investigators, was given publicity at the time, and roused comment and discussion. I quote from it as follows:
“The state, as employer, alone determines the terms upon which its new canal shall be built. It defines in great detail its standard of materials and workmanship, but takes no thought for the workmen who must operate in great transient groups. It does not leave to chance the realization of its material standard, but sends inspectors to make tests and provides a staff of engineers. It does leave to chance (in the ignorance and cupidity of padroni) the quality and price of foods and care of the men. It takes great care to prevent the freezing of cement, but permits any kind of houses to be used for its laborers. It is wholly indifferent as to how they are ventilated, lighted, or heated, how many men sleep in them, or whether the sleeping quarters are also used for cooking and eating and the bunks as cupboards. Neither does it care whether the men can keep themselves or their clothes clean.
“The simplest standards which military history shows are essential in handling such artificial bodies of people are grossly violated. Sanitary conveniences are sometimes entirely omitted; the men drink any kind of water they can obtain, and filthy grounds are of no evident concern. The state does not inquire whether there are hospitals or physicians, medicine, emergency aids, or anything of the kind. Notice is taken of gambling, drunkenness, and immorality only when they impair the efficiency of the men.... Men left alone in these miserable, uninspected shacks, where vermin and dirt prevail ... must inevitably deteriorate. The testimony of contractors themselves is that many of the laborers become nomads, drifting from camp to camp, drinking, quarreling, and averse to steady work.
“We commend this responsibility in all its phases to the various state departments charged with education, health, letting of contracts, payment of bills, supervision of highways and waterways, and protection of laborers. We ask the state as employer to consider its gain from the men at the most productive periods of their lives; we ask the state to measure the influence of this life upon its future citizens during their first years in the country when they are most receptive to impressions of America.”[22]
Quite recently the Public Health Council of the New York State Department of Health has adopted a sanitary code for all labor camps.
It is impossible to compute the sums that have been lost by immigrants through fake banks, fake express companies, and irresponsible steamship agencies. In New York State these were practically legislated out of existence through the efforts of the Commission of Immigration of 1909 just referred to, yet in the winter of 1914-15 approximately $12,000,000 was lost on the lower East Side by the failure of private banks, sweeping away the savings and capital of between 60,000 and 70,000 depositors. Happily, the postal savings bank has come, and is already much used by immigrants, incidentally keeping a large amount of money in this country. In important centers the stations might be socialized to the still greater advantage of the depositors and the service by having someone assigned to interpret, to write addresses and give information. These favors have been the bait held out to the timid stranger by the private agencies.
Perhaps an even greater loss has come to us through the land-sale deceptions. Farms cultivated in New York State are actually decreasing, while the population increases. The census of 1900-1910 shows 4.9 per cent. decrease of farms and 25.4 per cent. increase of population. Great numbers of the immigrants are peasants, and land-hungry, and if there was a policy throughout the states of registration of land for prospective settlers, and if severe penalties attached to land frauds, I have little doubt that valuable workers might be directed to the enormous areas that need cultivation. “I am an agriculturist,” said a man who found his way to the settlement to tell his troubles, “and I pull out nails in a box factory in New York.” His entire family have followed him to the land that he is now cultivating.
One winter a number of peasants from the Baltic provinces found themselves stranded in New York. It was a period of unemployment, and they could find no work. Unaccustomed to cities, they eagerly seized upon an opportunity to leave New York. At the settlement, where they were assembled, a state official told them of wood-cutters needed—in Herkimer County, as I remember it. An advertisement called for forty men, and the responsibility of the advertiser was vouched for by the local banker.
“Who can cut trees?” I asked. A shout went up from these countrymen—“Who cannot cut trees?” Forty to go? Everyone was ready. So we financed them in their quest for work, and bade good-by to a radiant, grateful group. Alas! only four men were needed. The contractor preferred to have a larger number come, that he might make selection. And this is not an exceptional instance. Ask the itinerant workers, the tramps even, how much faith can be placed in the advertisements of “Hands Wanted” in the East and in the West at the gathering of the crops.
The possibility of deflecting people to the land has been demonstrated by Jewish societies in New York, and with proper support other organizations interested in this phase of the immigrant’s welfare might repeat their success. Such programmes of distribution, however, cannot be carried out without effective co-operation from the people in the rural regions, and assimilative processes will not be wholly successful until the native-born American is freed from some of his prejudices and provincialism.
An unsocial attitude in the country naturally drives the stranger to an intensive colony life which accentuates the disadvantages of the barriers he and we build up.
An experience in Westchester County illustrates this very well. We were seeking lodgings for two intelligent and attractive young Italians who were working on a dam at one of our settlement country places. Incidentally, the work they were doing was quite beyond the powers of any native workers in the vicinity of whom we could hear. We asked an old native couple, squatters on some adjacent land, to rent an unoccupied floor of their house to the two young men. The man, despite their extremely indigent condition (the wife went to the almshouse a short time after), absolutely refused, fearing the loss of social prestige if they “lived in the house with dagoes.”
Perhaps, having little else, they were justified in clinging to their social exclusiveness, but their action in this case illustrates the almost universal attitude toward the immigrant, particularly the more recent ones, and perhaps only those who have felt the isolation and loneliness of the newcomer can comprehend its cruelty.
An educated Chinese merchant who once called at the settlement apologized for the eagerness with which he accepted an offer to show him over the house, explaining that although he had been thirty years in this country ours was the first American home he had been invited to enter.
We need also to analyze the philosophy of much of the discrimination against aliens in the matter of employment, and it is not pleasant to remember that until recently a state employing an enormous number of foreign workers forbade the bringing of suit by the non-resident family of the alien, although he might have lost his life in an accident through no fault of his own.
Scorn of the immigrant is not peculiar to our generation. A search of old newspaper files will show that the arrival of great numbers of immigrants of any one nationality has always been considered a problem. In turn each nationality as it became established in the new country has considered the next-comers a danger. The early history of Pennsylvania records the hostility to the Germans—“fear dominated the minds of the Colonists”—despite the fact that the German invaders were land-owning and good farmers.
An Irish boy observed to one of our residents that on Easter Day he intended to kill his little Jewish classmate. Having had long experience of the vigorous language and kind heart of the young Celt, she paid little attention to the threat, but was more startled when the soft-eyed Francesco chimed in that he was also going to destroy him “because he killed my Gawd.” “But,” said the teacher, “Christ was a Jew.” “Yes, I know,” answered the young defender of the faith, “He was then, but He’s an American now.”
Despite its absurdity, was not the boy’s conception an exaggerated illustration of that surface patriotism which is almost universally stimulated and out of which soul-deadening prejudices may grow—may take root even in the public schools?
Great is our loss when a shallow Americanism is accepted by the newly arrived immigrant, more particularly by the children, and their national traditions and heroes are ruthlessly pushed aside. The young people have usually to be urged by someone outside their own group to recognize the importance and value of customs, and even of ethical teaching, when given in a foreign language, or by old-world people with whom the new American does not wish to be associated in the minds of his acquaintances. This does not apply only to the recent immigrant, to whom his children often hear contemptuous terms applied. I remember attending a public hearing before the Department of Education of New York City at which Germans vigorously urged the study of their native tongue in the public schools, because of the impossibility of persuading their children to learn or use the language by any other means than that of having it made a part of the great American public school system.
It is difficult to find evidence of any serious effort on our part to comprehend the mental reaction upon the immigrant of the American institutions he encounters. Indeed, gathering up the story of the immigrant, I sometimes wonder if he, like the fairies, does not hold up a magic mirror wherein our social ethics are reflected, rather than his own visage.
What we are to the immigrant in our civic, social, and ethical relations is quite as important as what he is to us. We risk destruction of the spirit—that element of life that makes it human—when we disregard our neighbor’s personality.
Recent discussion of immigration bills focuses attention on two points deemed of fundamental importance by the settlement groups.
Three Presidents have vetoed bills for the restriction of immigration by means of a literacy test or by conditions that would virtually deny the right of asylum for political refugees. Once, in addressing a committee of the House on such proposed legislation, I protested against a departure from our tradition and reminded the members of the committee of the splendid Americans who would have been lost to this country had the door been so closed upon them. A young physician of Polish parentage followed, and his cultured diction and attractive appearance lent emphasis to his story. “My father,” he said, “came an illiterate to this country because the priest of his parish happened not to be interested in education, not because my father was indifferent. He has struggled all his life to give his children what he himself could never have, and has worshiped the country that gave us opportunity.”
In his veto of the bill President Wilson admirably formulated his reasons for opposing restriction of this character, and as these are exactly the arguments upon which social workers have based their objections, I cannot do better than quote him here:
“In two particulars of vital consequence this bill embodies a radical departure from the traditional and long-established policy of this country, a policy in which our people have conceived the very character of their government to be expressed, the very mission and spirit of the nation in respect of its relations to the peoples of the world outside their borders. It seeks to all but close entirely the gates of asylum, which have always been open to those who could find nowhere else the right and opportunity of constitutional agitation for what they conceived to be the natural and inalienable rights of men, and it excludes those to whom the opportunities of elementary education have been denied without regard to their character, their purposes, or their natural capacity.”
The immigrant brings in a steady stream of new life and new blood to the nation. The unskilled have made possible the construction of great engineering works, have helped to build bridges and roadways above and under ground. The number of skilled artisans and craftsmen among immigrants and the contribution they make to the cultural side of our national life are too rarely emphasized. Alas for our educational system! we must still look abroad for the expert cabinet-maker or stone-carver, the weaver of tapestry, or the artistic worker in metals, precious or base.
In another place I have spoken of the rise of certain needle trades from those of sweaters and sweaters’ victims to a standardized industry, with an output estimated at hundreds of millions yearly. The industry of cloak- and suit-making has been to a large extent developed by the immigrants themselves. When the stranger looks upon the loft buildings in other parts of the city, gigantic beehives with the swarms of workers going in and out, he seldom comprehends that great wealth has been created for the community by these humble workers.
The man who now stands at the gates of Ellis Island turns his socially trained mind toward the development of methods for the protection and assimilation of the immigrant after the gates have closed upon him. But the best conceived plans of this Commissioner of Immigration and others who have long studied the question will be fruitless unless, throughout the country, an intelligent and respectful attitude toward the stranger is sedulously cultivated.
In the early glow of our enthusiasm, when we were first brought in contact with the immigrant, we dreamed of making his coming of age—his admission to citizenship—something of a rite. Many who come here to escape persecution or the hardships suffered under a militaristic government idealize America. They bring an enthusiasm for our institutions that would make it natural to regard admission to the rights and responsibilities of citizenship with seriousness. Years ago we urged the use of school buildings, that registration and the casting of the ballot might be dignified by formal surroundings. This has been done in several cities, although not yet in New York.
The foreign press, particularly the Yiddish, has a distinct Americanizing influence. Many adults never learn the new language and, indeed, acquire here the habit of newspaper-reading. The history of the United States, biographies of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and other distinguished Americans appear in the pages of these papers, and one Italian daily published serially the Constitution of the United States. Effective, too, as an educational and assimilating measure have been the lectures in foreign languages conducted for many years by the Educational Alliance on East Broadway and by the various settlements, and included, for some years past, in the evening courses of the Department of Education.
In our neighborhood the physical changes of the last twenty years have been great. Since that first disturbing walk with the little girl to the rear tenement on Ludlow Street asphalt has replaced unclean, rough pavements; beautiful school buildings (some the finest in the world) have been erected; streets have been altered, and rows of houses demolished to make room for new bridges and small parks. Subway tubes take the working population to scattered parts of the greater city; piers have been built for recreation purposes, and a chain of small free libraries of beautiful design. A Tenement House Department has been created, charged with supervision and enforcement of the laws regulating the housing of 80 per cent. of the city’s population, and so far assaults upon this protective legislation have been repulsed, despite the tireless lobby of the owners year after year.
AT ELLIS ISLAND
There is a stream of inflowing life
As our neighbors have prospered many have moved to quarters where they find better houses, less congestion, more bathtubs; but an enormous working population still finds occupation in the lower part of the city. Carfare is an expense, and time spent in overcrowded cars, which scarcely afford standing-room, adds to the exhaustion of the long day, and these considerations keep many near the workshop. Despite the exodus, we still remain an overcrowded region of overcrowded homes. Through the tenements there is a stream of inflowing as well as outflowing life. The newcomer finds a lodging-place most readily in this vicinity, and the East Side is the shore of the harbor.
The settlements have been before the public long enough to have lost the glamour of moral adventure that was associated with their early days. Many who were identified with them then have steadfastly remained, although realizing, as one of them has said, that high purpose has often been mocked by petty achievement.
A characteristic service of the settlement to the public grows out of its opportunities for creating and informing public opinion. Its flexibility as an instrument makes it pliant to the essential demands made upon it; uncommitted to a fixed programme, it can move with the times.
Out of the enthusiasms and out of the sympathies of those who come to it, though they be sometimes crude and formless, a force is created that makes for progress. For these, as well as for the helpless and ignorant who seek aid and counsel, the settlement performs a function.
The visitors who come from all parts of the world and exchange views and experiences prove how absurd are frontiers between honest-thinking men and women of different nationalities or different classes. Human interest and passion for human progress break down barriers centuries old. They form a tie that binds closer than any conventional relationship.
