Lo, the Poor Immigrant!

IN ‘The Modest Immigrant,’ ¹ Miss Repplier has presented a story that the Americans of this country very much need to know, especially at this time, when the whole question of our nationalism is so alive. Unfortunately, however, at the very time when it is most necessary to grasp conditions clearly and act courageously and aggressively, the article is likely to lull us to sleep, to make us feel guiltless of the results of our domestic immigration policy and puffed up with pride at our magnanimous hospitality. We must know both sides of the shield of American citizenship if we are to use this citizenship intelligently for offense or defense in the struggle before us.

We who like to lay stress upon America’s tradition of hospitality need to be reminded that the hospitality of Lowell’s time has been changed into widespread exploitation throughout this land. Many of our immigrant communities are not primarily to blame for the admittedly wretched conditions in which they live.

Go through the ‘immigrant section’ of a typical industrial town. Miserable shacks, overcrowded with lodgers because there are not enough houses; inadequate water-supply, lack of repairs, unequal enforcement of village laws — all these things characterize the section. Where the company owns the property, there is no security in the home, for eviction as trespassers follows the slightest protest. And on some of our great estates conditions are little better. The men who keep Tuxedo Park so beautiful for the fortunate families who live there are crowded into sodden communities, unable to get their houses repaired, or indeed to secure a sufficient number of houses at a reasonable rent to enable them to live with fewer than ten in three rooms. I had occasion to visit one of the great estates in Central New York in the process of its evolution from a forest to a country estate. I found the hundreds of employees housed in tar shacks on the slope near the foot of the hill, compelled to take boarders because there were not enough shacks, and each paying two dollars a month rent. Some of the shacks had no windows; others had leaky roofs and damp, cold floors. There were no drainage facilities, and after a rain the little clearing in which the shacks had been constructed was a veritable mud-hole. Even in dry weather, there were stagnating puddles of water. Since no provision had been made for garbage collection and disposal, the women were compelled to throw animal and vegetable refuse in the bushes near by. The wooden privy vaults close by the shacks were seldom, if ever, cleaned, and the residents were compelled to use the fields. The watersupply was a spring into which the surface draining of the hill poured. There were no bathing or laundry facilities.

On interviewing a number of the men and women, I found that this had not been their standard of living abroad. One had been a butcher in a small town in Italy, where he had lived in a small wooden house and had had a goodsized truck-garden. Another had been a house-painter who had come here to better his condition and bring his family here, but was now anxiously awaiting the moment when he should have sufficient funds to take him back to the old home. Another had been a farmer on a small scale; he had come here to go into farming, but through lack of proper advice and direction had drifted into construction work. His family was with him, but they were all going back as soon as possible.

This was really a community study in the methods by which American employers create the ‘ immigrant standard of living’ in America, and incidentally the immigrant ‘bird of passage’ who contributes so much to American industrial instability. The determining factor in this place was one of the first families of America.

There are other phases of ‘hospitality’ which interest us greatly. There are Lawrence, Calumet, Trinidad, Roosevelt, Wheatland, Ludlow, where the sworn statements of witnesses lead us to doubt if we are living in free America. The report of the California Immigration Commission says of Wheatland: —

‘There had occurred on August 3, 1913, on the Durst hop ranch near Wheatland, Yuba County, a riot among the hop-pickers employed on the ranch, resulting in the killing of two police officials and two pickers. It was the claim of the pickers that one of the primary causes of the discontent in their ranks, leading to riot and bloodshed, was the insanitary condition of the camp in which they were segregated on the ranch.’ Before the trial of the men charged with inciting the riot and causing the murder, it was announced that ‘evidence concerning the sanitary and living conditions in the camp would be introduced,’and the commission availed itself of the opportunity to conduct ‘a careful investigation into the economic causes leading to the riot.’

They discovered that there were probably 2800 workers in camp at the time of the riot, of whom about half were women and children. Of the men, fully 1000 were foreign-born, — Syrians, Mexicans, Italians, Porto Ricans, Poles, Hindus, and Japanese. These people were expected to camp out in a desolate, treeless field. ‘There were a few tents to be rented at 75 cents a week, but the majority had to construct rude shelters of poles and gunny sacks, called “bull pens,” while many were compelled to sleep in the open on piles of vines or straw.’ The sanitary arrangements were unspeakably inadequate, foul, and unhealthy; drinking water was scarce, and some of the wells were infected from the surface water which drained back from stagnant pools that formed near the toilets and garbage piles. There were cases of dysentery, typhoid, and malaria in camp. ‘While the wage-scale and other factors contributed to the feeling of discontent, the real cause of the protest of the pickers seemed to come from the inadequate housing and the insanitary conditions under which the hop-pickers were compelled to live.’

Even more interesting is the Colorado situation. The investigation of the most recent Colorado struggle brought to light among other things this significant fact: that within ten years after their arrival every new force of immigrant workmen brought there reached the climax of their protest against the living conditions forced upon them. These successive revolts after years of helpless endurance have only one significance: left wholly to themselves, with little help in education or organization, these immigrant workmen not only attain in ten years a desire for the American standard of living, but are prepared to starve and die for it.

At one of the largest mines in New York State, owned and operated by the descendants of one of the oldest families in America, the writer found that the company practically owned the town except the saloons. It employed one of the justices and its counsel was county judge. A saloon-keeper and a padrone were the interpreters when one was needed. It was found in the case of both justices that bills and claims for fees had been presented to the supervisors and paid, which the docket did not substantiate; that they had failed to file records as required by law; that they had falsified accounts and settled cases in violation of law, there being no record kept; that they had neglected to transmit the fines to the clerk in their conduct of trials. How is an immigrant living and working in this town to learn to respect American hospitality or even to understand American justice?

There are graver evidences than these that the host, not the guest, is the violator of American hospitality. Some of the sons of the men who led the fight for the abolition of slavery in 1861 were fathering a peonage system among aliens in almost every state in the Union in 1909. The Federal Commission of Immigration verified the reports of the Department of Justice and found that foreign laborers were restrained in every state covered by its investigation, except Oklahoma and Connecticut, under conditions which, if substantiated by legal evidence, would constitute peonage as defined by the Supreme Court. According to the report of the Federal Immigration Commission, ‘The peonage cases in the South relating to immigrants have been found to cover almost every industry — farming, lumbering, logging, railroading, mining, factories, and construction work. The chief causes of the abuses have been the systems of making advances to laborers, the operation of contract-labor laws, and the misrepresentations made to laborers by unscrupulous agents.’

And the cases of peonage in the North and East, described in the same report, are quite as flagrant.

The peonage conditions are sporadic. But the other conditions herein described prevail in many communities throughout our large industrial states. They have become an accepted accompaniment of industrial development.

These are the conditions, this is the community type, which we permit and which we make. Let us face the matter squarely. The immigrant, upon coming to this country, is suddenly freed from the most minute surveillance of his daily affairs, and from persistent official repression, direction, and advice. He understands that this is the land of liberty. He is suddenly freed from every familiar form of ‘ control’; in the midst of strange customs, institutions, and laws, he is more helpless than he was at home. Does America make the slightest effort to teach him the difference between liberty and license? No. At the very port of entry he is robbed by the cabman, and by the hotel runner, the expressman, the banker who exchanges his money, the steamship agent, and the hotel-keeper. His first lesson in ‘property rights’ in America is often the loss of his own small possessions. He is held in bondage by the hotel-keeper, who takes up his ‘through railroad ticket’ and keeps it until he has secured a fair return in board bill. The ’padrone gets him a job, and for the privilege of housing and feeding him at a price and under conditions about which the immigrant has nothing to say, keeps him in a job. If he rebels, he is promptly blacklisted. The employment agent gets him into debt with a prospective employer, and peonage results. In times of scarcity of labor, contingents of immigrant workmen have been made drunk, shut up in box cars, and landed in labor camps from which there is no return until spring.

After a year or two, or less, of ‘ American ’ experience of this kind, suppose the immigrant chances some noonday to hear an agitator of the Industrial Workers of the World. This agitator is often the first person to listen sympathetically to the immigrant’s troubles. He represents America, he speaks of new liberty and new opportunity, and it is easy to convince the trusting ignorant alien that his way is the way out. No other way has been indicated. It is not that ‘ lawlessness and violence are the weapons he understands’; it is that they are the only weapons given to the immigrant. Moreover, the agitator addresses the immigrant in his own language. We forget the power of this appeal. In short, the I.W.W. has come to the immigrant, and the labor union has for years ignored him. There are aristocracies among labor unions as among Pilgrims. And the immigrant, ignorant of English and with no facilities for learning it, listens and follows the only ‘American’ message brought him in a language he can understand.

What we descendants of the first Americans have done is to substitute for that ancient tradition of hospitality a system of heartless exploitation and of neglect, urbane or resentful according to the occasion. A strong nation, with its intrenchments of position, power, and property, has found it possible thus to deal with the weaker peoples who are its guests and admittedly its prospective citizens. The determining factor in our hospitality has been the necessity for laborers — slaves if you will. For years a war has been waged by the workers, backed by the unions and restriction leagues, chiefly fed by race-prejudice on the one hand and by the employers on the other, over the question of admission. We have been so busy fortifying one or the other of the positions of these contestants that we have paid no heed to the guests themselves. Left in new and strange circumstances to work out both their own welfare and their own conduct, they have been unable to do so in a manner satisfactory to us. It is small wonder that they have forgotten or have ignored or have been impertinent to their hosts.

If immigrants are lawless, what is ‘the law’ in America and how are they to know it? The Romans had one law. We have not only a mass of Federal statutes, but innumerable statutes in forty-eight states and many thousands of ordinances, all providing penalties of fine or imprisonment for their violation, and branding the accused as a violator of law, if not a criminal. How make the immigrant see what many of our oldest Americans fail to grasp? Is it the law that an immigrant may dig trenches in one state but not in another; is it the law that an immigrant may shave his countryman in New York but not in Michigan; that he may own a dog in Delaware but not in Pennsylvania; that he may catch fish in Louisiana but not in Florida? Is it the law that he is entitled to hear and understand the accusation made against him by means of an interpreter in one court, and that in another the accusing officer or the complainant is the interpreter?

Only a few months ago a New Jersey justice of the peace fined an old Hungarian woman for having in her possession on Sunday seven apples taken from a neighboring orchard. Although the woman had taken the apples with permission, and although the person who had given the permission testified to it in court, the justice still maintained that carrying the apples on Sunday was against public policy — and persisted in the fine. It is only fair to add that local sentiment in this case does not seem inclined to tolerate the justice’s decision. However, a foreigner who could not speak English would, unaided, be helpless against such a decision.

Again, what is the immigrant to think when he commits larceny and the political leader gets him off if he promises to vote right at the next election? What is he to think when he is denied a license for a pushcart because he is an alien, but is advised to go on peddling and pay the fine each time he is caught, as his profits will cover the cost — with the proper influences? Wherever their own power and interests are at stake, it is the Americans who instruct him, not only to resent legal interference but to evade it.

It is true that our Puritan, Quaker, and Huguenot ancestors sacrificed temporal well-being for liberty of conscience and practiced the stern virtues of courage, fortitude, and a most splendid industry. But who shall say that courage and fortitude and industry are not still practiced when little immigrant children who go to school by day and have the free attention of doctors and dentists, sit in stuffy tenements at night making artificial flowers and picking nuts in order that they may have nourishment to carry them to these schools; or who work long hot days in canneries, taken out of these schools early in the spring and returning late in fall, so that they have but a limited portion of these blessings? Who shall say that these qualities are not practiced by the mother who has from three to ten children and ten boarders crowded into a shack, and must work eighteen hours a day for the three shifts of workmen required by our modern machinery? The machinery must be kept running and the human feeders also must therefore be always there. Who shall say that these virtues are not practiced by our seasonal workers, made idle many months of the year and subject to all the temptations, vices, and deterioration that go with periods of heavy overwork and of other periods of idleness? Who shall say that the laborer under the padrone, housed in shacks and stables, from whose pay are deducted charges for things he has never had, whose money given to agents for transmission abroad never reaches home, whose wages remain uncollectable, is lacking in these virtues, especially in fortitude?

And in how many schools in this country do the children have the care described by Miss Repplier? We reply, surely in New York City. But Barren Island, in New York City, has three hundred little children that have never had any form of this care. Barren Island is the scene of New York City’s garbage disposal; the workers are immigrants, and nobody cares. Yet the value which the immigrant sets upon education may be judged by the following quotation from the Federal Commissioner of Education, in a recent report: ‘That these people are interested in the elementary education of their children or at least obedient to the school-attendance laws,’ says Dr. Claxton, ‘is shown by the fact that the least illiterate element of our population is the native-born children of foreignborn parents.’

When will the prevalent belief that the average immigrant has nothing but what we give him to commend himself to American civilization, be abolished by more careful knowledge of the immigrants? ‘The immigrant frequently brings his contribution to enrich our civilization,’ says an associate superintendent of the New York City public schools. ‘The things of the higher kind — the spirituality, the reverence for authority, the love of art and music — are valuable to soften the materialism that has accompanied our great advance in prosperity, and they should not be crushed in our attempt to remake the immigrant.’

I am advancing no thesis that all immigrants have these qualities to contribute. I am saying that many of them have, and that the average American never dreams that they have. We shall never have a sound economic judgment on the whole big immigration question as a national policy until we have a sound and well-informed human judgment of the immigrant from the rank and file of the American people.

But the height of the failure of the older Americans is reached in their assumption that, as Miss Repplier puts it, ‘Dirt is a valuable asset in the immigrant’s hands. With its help he drives away decent neighbors, and brings property down to his level and his purse.’ Americans who would never have run from an Indian, who would have conquered the forests and spanned the rivers, run from the Italian and the Pole. Alas! we too have deteriorated. We see nothing dramatic, we feel no challenge, in the fight to raise the standards of our less fortunate neighborhoods. The reason that the tenement fire-escapes are cluttered in Rivington Street and free on Fifth Avenue is not, as we fondly suppose, that immigrants prefer fire-escapes draped with bedding and pillows and children. The answer is that they move to Fifth Avenue as soon as their income permits.

Mr. Ross, whom Miss Repplier considers an authority worth following, in The Old World in the New points to a typical Western town of 26,000 inhabitants, 10,000 of them immigrants, and gives a picture of the vice, intemperance, bad housing, and wretched standards of living resulting in this town from the immigrant population. We in America believe in majority rule. There was a safe margin of 6000 Americans in that town, free to establish and insist upon any standard they chose. Why were the Americans beaten in the struggle? Because here as in many other places they ignored or definitely isolated the immigrants, permitting them to work all day with Americans in the mills or factories where they were needed, and then encouraging or compelling them to spend all the rest of their time in their own corner of the town, in Little Italy or Hungary Hollow, and to encroach no more than necessary upon the respectable streets and schools and churches and recreations of the American section.

To many thousands of loyal Americans, the attitude of the GermanAmericans and especially of their children born here has been a source of wonder and of grief. But here, too, we find that we Americans have been derelict. Setting aside that part of the alienation of sympathy due to family ties and to the daily loss of friends and relatives in the war, how far has the rest of that alienation been influenced by America’s own policy? We have had no policy. Have we insisted upon English as our common language? We have allowed the development of community after community in which English is rarely spoken. The proceedings of one of our largest cities are still published year after year in German as well as in English, at the expense of the city. Have we encouraged naturalization and made our oath of allegiance mean something definitely American? Not at all. We have encouraged and fostered the hold of German organizations, publications, and institutions. The German press is allowed to say what it likes in America, but not in Germany. It is true that ‘we have no mutual understanding, no common denominator,’ but the first Americans whose opportunity and heritage it was to produce these have failed ignominiously. It was not expected that our newly arrived aliens should have the responsibility for this, — else what purpose have our Revolution and our Civil War served?

It is difficult in the face of the sins of omission by the American and the sins of commission by the immigrant to fix the responsibility for our failure to-day to have evolved one nation out of the many peoples in this country. We shall probably, in the absence of that information which makes sound judgments, be fair if we place the blame on both sides equally. But regardless of this, I am convinced that we shall never have a strong nation until the strong people cease exploiting the weak; until the people intrenched in position, power, and prosperity assume the burden and responsibility of the welding of that nation; until the Americans define what they want that nation to be, and then set in motion every resource and agency to achieve this result intelligently.