Chapter XV: Part 15

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.

The “old immigration” was from the North of Europe. It was of Germanic stock. It was predominantly Protestant. But the most important fact of all and the fact most usually ignored is an economic fact. The early immigrant found a broad continent awaiting him, peopled only by Indians. He became a free man. He took up a homestead. He ceased to belong to any one else. He built for himself. He paid no rent, he took no orders, he kept what he produced, and was inspired by hope and ambition to develop his powers. It was economic, not political, freedom that distinguishes the “old immigration” from the “new.”

The “new immigration” is from Southern and Central Europe. It is Latin and Slavic. It is largely Catholic. It, too, is poor. It, too, is driven out by oppression, mostly economic and for the most part landed. Almost every wave of immigration has been in some way related to changes for the worse in the landed systems of Europe. Wherever the poverty has been the most distressing, there the impulse to move has been the strongest. It has been the poverty of Europe that has determined our immigration from the 17th century until now.

The ethnic difference is secondary. So is the religious. The fundamental fact that distinguishes the “old immigration” from the “new” is economic. The “new immigration” works for the “old.” It found the free land all taken up. The public domain had passed into the hand of the Pacific railroads, into great manorial estates. Land thieves had repeated the acts of the British Parliament of the 18th century. The Westward movement of peoples that had been going on from the beginning of time came to an end when the pioneer of the 80’s and 90’s found only the bad lands left for settlement. That ended an era. It closed the land to settlement and sent the immigrant to the city. The peasant of Europe has become the miner and the mill worker. He left one kind of serfdom to take up another. It is this that distinguishes the “old immigrant” from the “new.” It is this that distinguishes the old America from the America of to-day. And the problem of immigration, like the problem of America, is the re-establishment of economic democracy. The protective tariff bred exotic industry. The employer wanted cheap labour. The mine owners and mill owners combined with the steamship companies to stimulate immigration. They sent agents abroad. They brought in gangs from Southern and Central Europe. They herded them in mining camps, in mill towns, in the tenements. The closing of the public domain and the rise of monopoly industry marks the turning point in immigration. It marks the beginning of the immigration “problem.” It is partly ethnic, but largely economic.

The “new immigration” from Southern and Central Europe began to increase in volume about 1890. It came from Southern rather than Northern Italy, from Poland, Hungary, Bohemia, Russia, the Balkans, and the Levant. There was a sprinkling of Spanish and Portuguese immigrants. In 1914 South and Central European immigration amounted to 683,000, while the North European immigration was but 220,000. Of the former 296,000 came from Italy, 123,000 from Poland, 45,000 from Russia, and 45,000 from Hungary. These figures do not include Jewish immigrants, who numbered 138,000. Of the North European immigrants 105,000 came from the British Isles, 80,000 came from Germany, and 36,000 from the Scandinavian countries.

Of the 14,000,000 persons of foreign birth now in the country, a very large percentage is of South and Central European stock.

We are accustomed to think of the old immigration and the new immigration in terms of races and religions. And much of the present-day hostility to immigration comes from the inexplicable prejudice which has recently sprung up against persons of differing races and religions. It is assumed that the new immigration is poor and ignorant because it is ethnically unfitted for anything different and that it prefers the tenement and the mining camp to American standards of living and culture. But the newly arrived immigrant goes to the mines and the crowded city not from choice but from necessity. He lives in colonies with his fellows largely because the employing class prefers that he be segregated and has no interest in his physical comfort or welfare. The alien has been a commodity, not a human being; he has been far cheaper than a machine because he provided his own capital cost and makes provision for his own depreciation and decay. He has been bought in the slums of Europe for his passage money and he can be left to starve when bad times or industrial power throws him on his own resources. The important difference between the “old immigration” and the “new immigration” is not ethnic. It is not religious. It is economic. The “old immigration” has become the owning and employing class, while the “new immigration” is the servile and dependent class. This is the real, the important difference between the “old immigration” and the “new.” The former owns the resources of America. The economic division coincides roughly with the race division.

When economic privilege becomes ascendant fear is born. It is born of a subconscious realization on the part of the privileged classes that their privileges rest on an unjust if not an unstable foundation. Fear is the parent of hate, and back of other explanations of the present demand for exclusion of the alien is fear. It is fear that gave birth to the persecution and ruthless official and semi-official activity first against all aliens under the White Slave Act and similar laws, next against the Germans, and later against the “reds.” An economic psychology born of injustice explains our present attitude toward the alien just as a different economic psychology explained our attitude during the first two and a half centuries of our life when it was the consuming desire of statesmen, real-estate speculators, and exploiters to people the continent and develop our industries and resources as rapidly as possible.

The “immigration problem,” so called, has always been and always will be an economic problem. There are many people who feel that there is an inherent superiority in the Anglo-Saxon race; that it has a better mind, greater virtue, and a better reason for existence and expansion than any other race. They insist there are eugenic reasons for excluding immigration from South and Central Europe; they would preserve America for people of Anglo-Saxon stock. As an immigration official I presided over Ellis Island for five years. During this time probably a million immigrants arrived at the port of New York. They were for the most part poor. They had that in common with the early immigrant. They had other qualities in common. They were ambitious and filled with hope. They were for the most part kindly and moved by the same human and domestic virtues as other peoples. And it is to me an open question whether the “new immigration,” if given a virgin continent, and the hope and stimulus which springs from such opportunity, would not develop the same qualities of mind and of character that we assume to be the more or less exclusive characteristics of the Anglo-Saxon race. There is also reason for believing that the warmer temperament, the emotional qualities, and the love of the arts that characterize the South and Central European would produce a race blend, under proper economic conditions, that would result in a better race than one of pure Northern extraction. For it is to be remembered that it was not political liberty, religious liberty, or personal liberty that changed the early immigrant of Northern Europe into the American of to-day. His qualities were born of economic conditions, of a free continent, of land to be had for the asking, of equal opportunity with his fellows to make his life what he would have it to be. The old immigrant recognized no master but himself. He was the equal of his neighbours in every respect. He knew no inferiority complex born of a servile relationship. It was this rather than our constitutions and laws that made the American of the first three centuries what he was. It was this alchemy that changed the serf of Northern Europe into the self-reliant freeman of America.

The immigration problem was born when this early economic opportunity came to an end. When the free land was all gone, the immigrant had to work for somebody else. He went to the mines and the city tenement not from the choice but from necessity. He took the first job that offered. When established he sent for his brother, his neighbour, or his friend. He, too, went to the mining camp or the slum. Colonies appeared. The alien became segregated. He lived by himself. And he developed the qualities that would be developed by any race under similar conditions. He, too, feared. He was known as a Dago, Wop, Hunkie. To him government meant a policeman, a health officer, and an immigration inspector--all agencies to be feared. He slowly learned to unionize. He came to understand group action. He found in his craft organization the only protection against the employers, and in the political boss the only protection against agencies that interfered with his personal and domestic life. The immigrant soon learned that our immigration laws were shaped by economic motives. He learned that he was in danger of being deported if he did not work. The menace which hangs over the immigrant during his early years is the phrase “likely to become a public charge.” And this alleged reason for deportation covers a multitude of other excuses which can be used as it is used--as a drag-net accusation. So the immigrant feels and justly feels that what we want of him is to work, to work for some one else, and to accept what is offered and be content. For within the last few years the doctrine has become accepted by him and by the nation as well that the alien must not complain, he must not be an agitator, he must not protest against the established industrial order or the place which he occupies within it. This has heightened his fear complex. It has tended to establish his inferiority relationship.

Our legislative attitude toward the alien has mirrored the economic conditions of the country. Up to about the middle of the last century we had no restrictive laws of any kind. America was free to all comers. We wanted population. Western States pleaded for settlers. They drew them from the East as they drew them from Europe. We were hospitable to the oppressed. We opened our arms to revolutionary leaders. We had no fears. Experience had shown that the poorest of Europe, even the classified criminals of Europe, would quickly Americanize themselves under the stimulus of new opportunity in a virgin land where all men were potentially equal. For generations there was fear that the American continent could never be fully peopled.

But the free lands were all gone about 1890. The Western drift of peoples, which had been in movement since the earliest times, came to an end. Population closed in on the Pacific. Cities grew with unprecedented rapidity. Factories needed men. Employers looked to Europe. They sent agents abroad who employed them in gangs. Often they were used to displace American-born workers. They were used to break up labour organizations. The aliens were mixed to prevent them organizing. Wages were temporarily at least forced down. For some years our immigration policy was shaped by the big industrials who combined with the steamship companies to induce immigration.

Organized labour began to protest. It, too, was moved by economic motives. It secured the passage of the contract labour law, which prevents the landing of any worker for whom employment has been provided in advance by an employer. Organized labour began to demand restrictive legislation to protect its standard of living. But the country was not ready for restrictive legislation. Congress instead adopted a selective policy. We excluded paupers, the insane and diseased, criminals, immoral persons, and those who were likely to become a public charge. Later we extended the selective idea to persons who did not believe in organized government, to anarchists, and to persons of revolutionary beliefs. We now exclude and deport for opinions as well as for physical and mental conditions. The percentage of rejections under these selective laws was not great. Of the 1,200,000 aliens who came to the country in 1914 only one and one-third per cent. were denied admission by the immigration authorities.

The war stimulated the anti-alien feeling. It provided an opportunity for crusades. The press aided the hue and cry. In 1915 there was a nation-wide round-up of immoral cases. Thousands of prostitutes, of procurers, and of persons guilty of some personal irregularity were arrested all over the country. Many of them were deported. The demand for restrictive legislation was supported by many different groups. It had the backing of organized labour, of the Southern States, of many protestant organization and churches. It was strongly supported in the West.

The “literacy test,” which went into effect in 1917, requiring of the alien an ability to read some language selected by him, was the first restrictive measure enacted. Its purpose was to check the South and Central European inflow. For in these countries illiteracy is very high. It rises as high as sixty and seventy per cent. in the Central European states. With the test of literacy applied it was felt that the old immigration from Northern Europe would reassert itself. Our industrial needs would be supplied from Great Britain, from Germany and from the Scandinavian countries. The same motive underlies the recently enacted law which arbitrarily fixes the number who may come in any one year from any one country to three per cent. of the aliens already here from that country. This will still further shift the immigration to the Northern countries, and if continued as the permanent policy of the Government will insure a predominant Anglo-Saxon-Germanic-Scandinavian stock as the racial stock of America.

Despite all of the Congressional concern over the alien and the recent nation-wide movement for his Americanization, there has never been any official concern for the alien, for his protection from exploitation and abuse, or any attempt to work out a policy of real Americanization. Not that the task is impossible. Not that it is even experimental. Australia, Brazil, and Canada have more or less well-developed agencies for aiding the alien on landing, for protecting him until he is able to protect himself, and for adjusting him as speedily as possible to new conditions of life. In all of these countries the aim of the government is to give the immigrant a stake in the land, to bring about his permanent residence in the country, and, if possible, to induce him to become a farmer rather than an industrial worker. This has not been done by agencies of distribution alone, but by conscious selection in the country from which the immigrant comes, by grants of land to those who are ready to take up land holdings, and by the extension of credit from state agencies to enable the settlers to stock and equip their farms. The policy of Brazil has been so successful that many colonies of Northern Italians have been induced to settle there who have become prosperous and contented farmers. In other words, these countries have consciously aimed to work out a continuing policy similar to that which prevailed in this country up to about 1890 when the immigrant drifted naturally to the land as a means of securing the freedom from the exploiting class that had driven him from Europe.

It is not to be inferred that our policy of hands off the alien after his landing has worked only evil. Viewed in the perspective of two centuries, it has worked amazingly well. The rapidity with which practically all immigrants rise in the world in spite of the obstacles of poverty, illiteracy, and unfamiliarity with our language is little short of a miracle. This is true of the older generation as it is of the younger. It is most true in the cities, least true in the mining camps and smaller industrial centres about the steel mills and slaughter houses where the tyranny of the employing class is most pronounced. For the newcomer speedily acquires the wants of those with whom he associates. He becomes dissatisfied with his shack. He demands more and better food and clothes. He almost always wants his children to have a schooling and to rise in the scale, which to him means getting out of the hod-carrying, day-labour, or even artisan class. And the next generation does rise. It rises only less rapidly than did the early immigrant. It increases its wants and demands. It finds the trades union a weapon with which it can combat the employer who seeks to bring about a confusion of tongues, a confusion of religion, and a confusion of races as a means of maintaining the open shop. As an evidence of this, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America is almost exclusively Jewish, Italian, and Latin in its membership. It is the most intelligent, the most social-minded, and the most highly developed labour organization in the country. The coal miners are largely men of foreign birth. They, too, have adopted an advanced social programme. The alien has found the trades union the most efficient if not the only agency through which he can Americanize himself. And in Americanizing himself he is merely doing what the aliens of earlier centuries who preceded him have done--he is seeking for economic freedom from a master class.

America is a marvellous demonstration of the economic foundations of all life. It is a demonstration of what happens to men when economic opportunities call forth their resourcefulness and latent ability on one hand and when the State, on the other, keeps its hands off them in their personal relationships. For the alien quickly adopts a higher standard of culture as he rises in the industrial scale, while his morals, whatever they may have been, quickly take on the colour of his new environment, whatever that may be. And if all of the elements which should enter into a consideration of the subject were included, I am of the opinion it would be found that the morals, the prevalence of vice and crime among the alien population is substantially that of the economic class in which he is found rather than the race from which he springs. In other words, the alleged prevalence of crime among the alien population is traceable to poverty and bad conditions of living rather than to ethnic causes, and in so far as it exists it tends disappear as the conditions which breed it pass away.

Despite the fact that our hands-off policy of the past has worked amazingly well, the time has come when it must be changed. Not because of any change in the character of the alien, but because of the change which has taken place in our own internal life. Economic conditions make it impossible for the alien, as it does for the native born, to become a farmer. Exploiting agencies are making it difficult and often impossible for the farmer to make a living. Land speculation has shot up the price of farm land to prohibitive figures. The railroads and middle men and banking agencies are putting the American farmer into a semi-servile status. He is unable to market his crop after it is produced or he markets it at a figure that ultimately reduces him to bankruptcy. The immigration problem remains an economic problem. It has become an American problem. The policy we should adopt for Americanizing the alien is a policy we should adopt for our own people as well, for when economic opportunity came to an end for our own people, it created not only an immigration problem, but a domestic problem. The solution of one is the solution of the other.

The alien will Americanize himself if he is given the opportunity to do so. The bird of passage will cease to migrate when he possesses a stake in the land of his adoption. The best cure for Bolshevism is not deportation but a home, a farm, a governmental policy of land settlement. A constructive immigration policy and Americanization policy is one that will:

1. Direct the alien as well as the native born to opportunities of employment and especially to agencies that will enable them to become home owners and farm owners;

2. Provide government grants, as is done in Australia, Denmark, and some of the South American countries, to which the would-be farmer or home owner can go for financial assistance. In Denmark and Australia any man who shows aptitude and desire for farming and who is able to satisfy a local commission of his abilities, can secure a small farm in a farm colony, fully equipped for planting. The grant includes a house and barn, some cattle and machinery, and sufficient capital to carry the settler over the first season. The applicant must provide a certain portion of the initial outlay himself. He is aided by experts from the colony, he is advised as to what to plant and how to care for his cattle. His produce is marketed co-operatively, while much of the machinery is owned either by the community or by co-operative agencies identified with the community. The land is purchased in large tracts by the State in advance of settlement to prevent speculation, while settlers are required to develop their holdings. They may not purchase for speculative purposes. The State of Denmark has planted thousands of home-owning farmers in this way and has all but ended farm tenancy in a generation’s time. The farm tenant and farm labourer have become owners. A similar policy has been developed in Australia, where millions of dollars have been advanced by the State to settlers. In both of these countries the land settlement colonies have been a great success. There have been few failures and no losses to the State.

3. The savings of the alien should be used for the benefit of the alien. Hundreds of millions of dollars leave this country annually in the form of remittances. Much of it goes abroad because of fear of American banks. Many millions more are in hiding for the same reason. The deposits in the Postal Savings banks are largely the deposits of the immigrant. They are turned over to the National banks and find their way into commercial activities. If these funds were mobilized in co-operative banks, as is done all over Europe, or if the Government would dedicate them to a revolving fund for aiding persons to build homes, to buy farms, and to aid the alien with credit, which he now has no means of securing; he would be lured from the city to the land, he would become a home and farm owner rather than an industrial worker, and would rapidly develop those qualities of mind and character that are associated in our minds with the early Anglo-Saxon settler but which are rather the qualities which spring up of themselves when the economic conditions encourage them.

4. Our deportation laws are a disgrace to any country. They are an adaptation of the fugitive slave laws. The offending alien is subject to lynch law sanctioned by the State. He is arrested on complaint by an inspector. He is then tried by the man who arrests him. His friends and relatives are excluded from the trial. The judge who made the arrest is often the interpreter and the clerk who transcribes the testimony. He also is his jailer. He can and does hold the alien incommunicado. Often the alien scarcely knows why he has been arrested. Often he does not understand the testimony. The local findings have to be approved at Washington by the Department of Labour. But the approval is by a clerk who, like the inspector, often wants to make a record. The opportunity for collusion with police, with crusaders, with employers, with Chambers of Commerce, and with organization bent on “ridding the country of disturbers” is manifest. Often men are arrested, tried, convicted, and possibly placed on ships for their home countries before their families are aware of what has happened to them.

The alien is denied every protection of our constitution. The Bill of Rights does not apply to him. He has no presentment before a Grand Jury, there is no jury trial, he rarely has counsel, and he is often held incommunicado by the official who has taken him into custody and who wants to justify his arrest. The only recourse the alien has is the writ of habeas corpus. But this is of practically no avail. For the courts have held that if there is a scintilla of evidence on which the inspector could act the court will not review the finding. And a scintilla is any evidence at all. When to this is added the fact that the charge “likely to become a public charge” has come to cover almost any condition that might arise, and as this charge is usually added to the others as a recourse on which the inspector may fall back, the chance of relief in the court is practically nil. Under the laws as they now exist the alien is a man without a country. He has no protection from the constitution and little protection under the laws. The alien knows this. He feels that he is defenceless. American liberty to him means the liberty of a policeman, a health or school official, an immigration inspector, and agents of the department of justice to invade his home, to seize his papers, to arrest without warrant, to hold incommunicado, and to deport on a charge that is often as foreign to the facts as anything could be.

It is this more than anything else that has embittered the alien towards America during the last few years. It is this that makes him feel that he is not wanted here. It is this that is sending hundreds of thousands back to Europe, many of them among the best of the aliens and many of them worthy in every way of our confidence and welcome.

A proper immigration policy should be a national policy. Not something for the alien alone but for our own people. For the immigration problem is merely another form of the domestic problem. When we are ready to settle the one we will settle the other. A cross section of one branch of our political State is a cross section of another. The alien of to-day is not very different from the alien of yesterday. He has the same instincts and desires as did those who came in the _Mayflower_. Only those who came in the _Mayflower_ made their own laws and their own fortunes. Those who come to-day have their laws made for them by the class that employs them and they make their own fortunes only as those aliens who came first permit them to do so.

FREDERIC C. HOWE

RACIAL MINORITIES

“... not to laugh at the actions of men, nor yet to deplore or
detest them, but simply to understand them.”--_Spinoza._

In America, the race-problem is not only without answer; thus far it is even without formulation. In the face of ordinary economic, political, and religious difficulties, people habitually formulate creeds which give a kind of rhyme and reason to their actions; but where inter-racial relations are concerned, the leaders go pussy-footing all around the fundamental question, while the emotions of the masses translate themselves into action, and action back again into emotion, with less consideration of means and ends than one expects of the maddest bomb-thrower. Everybody has some notion of the millennial aims of the Communist Party, the National Association of Manufacturers, the W.C.T.U., the Holy Rollers; but what are the Southerners getting at, when they educate the Negro, and refuse him the ballot; what ultimate result does the North expect from the granting of the franchise and the denial of social equality? Do both the North and the South hope to maintain a permanent racial division of the country’s population? If so, are the Indians, the Jews and the Asiatics to be classed with the Negroes, as unassimilable minorities? How is the conduct of the American majority suited to this aim, if it is an aim? How can permanent division be maintained, except by permanent prejudice? What do the racial liberators, ameliorators, uplifters, and general optimists think about it; or do they think about it at all?

From the moment of initial contact between the mass of the American population and the country’s most important racial minorities--the Indian, the Jew, the Oriental, and the Negro--the self-congratulatory feelings of the majority have always found a partial or complete counterpart everywhere except among the slaves and the children of the slaves. The long delay in the inception of All-Africanism in America, and the groping uncertainty which still characterizes its manifestations, are due in large part to the cultural youthfulness of the American Negro. Biologically, the black race was matured in Africa; culturally it had made considerable advances there, before the days of the slave-trade. The process of enslavement could not strip away the physical characteristics of the race, but in all that has to do with cultural life and social inheritance, the Negro was re-born naked in the new world.

When one compares the condition of the Negro with that of the other three racial minorities at the moment of contact with the miscellaneous white population, the Indian seems closer to the Jew and the Oriental than to the slave. In a general way, the condition of the Indian tribes resembled that of the Negroes in Africa, but the Indians were left in possession of most of the elements of savage culture and were never entirely deprived of the means of maintaining themselves in this stage of development. Needless to say, the Jews and the Orientals were in still better case than the Indians, for their imported cultural equipment was far more elaborate and substantial, and their economic position much better.

The four racial minorities thus varied widely in the degree of their self-sufficiency, and likewise, inversely, in the degree of their need for absorption into the current of American life. Quite obviously the Negro was least independent and most in need of assimilation. However, the necessity of the alien group has not been the only factor of importance in this matter of assimilation. Each of the minorities has been from the beginning subjected to the prejudice of the majority, and that group which first lost all life of its own through contact with the whites has been singled out for the maximum amount of persecution.

The standard explanation or excuse for race-prejudice is the theory of the inequality of racial stocks. However, for all their eagerness to bolster up a foregone conclusion, the race-patriots have not been able to prove by any sort of evidence, historical, biological, or psychological, that racial differences are not simply indications of unlikeness, rather than of inherent superiority or inferiority. The anthropologists are pretty well agreed that physical differences divide mankind into three major groups, European (including the Jews), Mongoloid (including the American Indians), and Negroid; but science has set no definite limit to the respective potentialities of these groups. In other words, it has remained for race-prejudice to assume an unproved inferiority, and to devise all possible measures for making the life of the objectionable races exactly what it would be, in the absence of interference, if the assumed inferiority were real.

To accept the term “race-prejudice” as accurately descriptive of the feelings to which it is usually applied, is to assume that these feelings originate in race-differences, if not in the inequality of races. This, however, is still to be proved. Race-differences are a factor of the situation wherever two races are in contact, but it is a matter of common knowledge that the members of two or more racial groups sometimes intermingle on terms of greatest friendliness. To attribute “race-prejudice” to race-difference, and to leave race-friendliness entirely unexplained, is to blind oneself deliberately to the existence of variable causes which alone can account for the variable results that appear in the presence of racial constants. Racial inequality of intelligence, if it actually exists, is simply one of a number of ever-present race-differences, and in all these differences taken together one can find no adequate explanation of the variable phenomenon commonly called “race-prejudice,” but so designated here only for the sake of convenience.

Any serious attempt to get at the non-racial causes of “race-prejudice” in America would necessarily involve the comparison, point by point, of economic, social, political, and intellectual conditions in various localities in the United States with corresponding local conditions in other countries where the races here in conflict are more nearly at peace. In the present state of knowledge, the racial theory of race-prejudice is demonstrably inadequate, while the non-racial theory is an hypothesis which can neither be proved nor disproved. Such being the case, the haphazard speculations which follow are not offered as a proof of this hypothesis, or as an explanation of the existence of race-prejudice in America, but simply as a stimulus to inquiry.

Beginning with these speculations, it may be said that the goods and opportunities of the material life, unlike those of the intellectual life, are frequently incapable of division without loss to the original possessor. On this account, competition is likely to be particularly keen and vindictive where material interests are given the foremost place. It is also perhaps safe to say that the long preoccupation of the American majority with the development of its material inheritance has brought to the majority a heavy heritage of materialism. One may hazard the statement that the prejudice of America’s native white majority against the Negroes, the Indians, the Jews and the Asiatics, is now and has always been in some sense attributable and proportional to the majority’s fear of some action on the part of the minority which might injure the material interests of the majority, while the only race-differences which have had any real importance are those superficial ones which serve to make the members of the minorities recognizable at sight. At any rate, an examination of some of the facts that come most easily to hand shows an interesting coincidence between the prejudice of the majority and the power of the minority.

Before the Civil War, the structure of Southern society was bottomed on slavery, and the fear of any humanization of the Negro which would make him appear worthy of emancipation was strong enough to arouse any degree of prejudice, and any amount of repression. The prejudice of the Southern white populace as a whole reached its maximum intensity when emancipation threatened to place the blacks in permanent political and economic control of certain portions of the South. Even to-day, fear of the political power of the Negroes, and perhaps also the over-emphasized fear of black “outrages,” still acts upon the white population as a unifying force; but in spite of this fact, class-interests have become plainly visible. When Black Republicanism had once been driven to cover, the masters set about rebuilding their privileges upon the foundation of Negro labour which is still their chief support. Only a few Negroes have been able to compete directly for a share in these privileges, and accordingly most of the fears of the well-to-do people of the South are anticipatory rather than immediate.

With the “poor whites,” the case is altogether different. Here there is no question of keeping the Negro in his place, for ever since the Emancipation the place of the Negro has been very much that of the poor white himself, at least in so far as economic status is concerned. In the view of the white labourer, the Negro rises too high the moment he becomes a competitor for a job, and every Negro is potentially just that. Accordingly, the prejudice of the poorer whites is bitter and indiscriminate, and is certainly not tending to decrease with the cityward drift of the Negro population.

With the appearance of Negro workers in large numbers in Northern industrial centres, race-prejudice has begun to manifest itself strongly among the white workers. The Northern masters have, however, shown little tendency to reproduce the sentiments of their Southern peers, for in the North there is no fear of political dominance by the blacks, and a supply of cheap labour is as much appreciated as it is south of the Line.

In spite of the fact that the proportion of Negroes in the total population of the United States has declined steadily from 15.7 per cent. in 1850 to 9.9 per cent. in 1920, the attitude of both Northerners and Southerners is somewhat coloured by the fear that the blacks will eventually overrun the country. If prejudice had no other basis than this, there would perhaps be no great difficulty in effecting its cure. As a matter of course, immigration accounts in part for the increasing predominance of the white population; but this hardly disposes of the fact that throughout the South, during the years 1890–1910, the percentage of native whites of native parentage advanced in both urban and rural communities. Discussion of comparative birth-rates also gives rise to numerous alarums and excursions, but the figures scarcely justify the fears expressed. Statistics show that, in spite of the best efforts of the people who attempt to hold the black man down, and then fear him all the more because he breeds too generously, the improvement in the material condition of the Negro is operating inevitably to check the process of multiplication.

If the case of the Negro is complicated in the extreme, that of the Indian is comparatively simple. Here race-prejudice has always followed the frontier. As long as the Indian interfered with the exploitation of the country, the pioneers feared him, and disliked him cordially. Their feelings worked themselves out in all manner of personal cruelty, as well as in a process of wholesale expropriation, but as soon as the tribes had been cooped up on reservations, the white man’s dislike for the Indian began to cool off perceptibly. From the beginning, the Indian interfered with expansion, not as an economic competitor, but as a military enemy; when the dread of him as a fighter disappeared, there was no new fear to take its place. During the years 1910 to 1920 the Indian population actually decreased 8.6 per cent.

If the Indian has neither shared the privileges nor paid the price of a generous participation in American life, the Jew has certainly done both. In every important field of activity, the members of this minority have proved themselves quite able to compete with the native majority, and accordingly the prejudice against them is not confined to any one social class, but is concentrated rather in those regions where the presence of Jews in considerable numbers predicates their competitive contact with individuals of all classes. Although as a member of one branch of the European racial family, the Jew is by no means so definitely distinguished by physical characteristics as are the members of the other minorities here under discussion, it is nevertheless true that when the Jew has been identified by his appearance, or has chosen to identify himself, the anti-Semite takes on most of the airs of superiority which characterize the manifestations of prejudice towards the other minorities. Nevertheless, the ordinary run of anti-Semitic talk contains frequent admissions of jealousy and fear, and it is safe to say that one must look chiefly to such emotions, as intensified by the rapid increase of the Jewish population from 1,500,000 in 1906 to 3,300,000 in 1918, rather than to the heritage of European prejudice, for an explanation of the growth of anti-Semitism in America. The inclusion of anti-Semitism with the other types of race-prejudice here under discussion follows naturally enough from the fact that the Jew is thought of as primarily a Jew, whatever the country of his origin may have been, while the Slav, for instance, is popularly regarded as a Russian, a Pole, a Serb--a _national_ rather than a _racial_ alien.

Like the Jew, the Oriental has come into the United States as a “foreigner,” as well as a member of an alien race. The absence of this special disqualification has not particularly benefitted the Negro and the Indian, but its presence in the case of the Japanese has been of considerable service to the agitators. The prevalent dislike and fear of the new Japan as a world-power has naturally coloured the attitude of the American majority toward the Japanese settlers in this country; but this in itself hardly explains why the Californians, who were burning Chinamen out of house and home in the ’seventies, are now centring their prejudice upon the Japanese agriculturist. The fact is that since the passage of the Exclusion Laws the Chinese population of the United States has fallen off more than 40 per cent., and the importance of Chinese competition has decreased accordingly, while on the other hand the number of Japanese increased 53.9 per cent. between 1910 and 1920, and the new competitors are showing themselves more than a match for the white farmers. With a frankness that neither Negrophobia nor anti-Semitism has made us familiar with, many of the Californians have rested their case against the Japanese on an economic foundation, and have confessed that they are unable to compete with the Japanese on even terms. As a matter of course, there is the usual flow of talk about the inferiority of the alien race, but the fear of competition, here so frankly admitted, would be enough in itself to account for this new outbreak of “race-prejudice.”

When one considers thus the course that prejudice has taken in the case of the Negro, the Indian, the Jew, and the Oriental, it begins to appear that this sentiment may wax and wane and change about astonishingly in the presence of racial factors that remain always the same. Such being the case, one is led to wonder what the attitude of the native majority would be, if the minorities were recognizable simply as groups, but _not_ as _racial_ groups. In other words, what would be the result if the racial factor were reduced simply to recognizability? The question has a more than speculative interest.

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If the causes of race-prejudice lie quite beyond the reach of any simple explanation, the manifestation of this prejudice on the part of the American majority are perhaps capable of an analysis which will render the whole situation somewhat more comprehensible. By and large, and with all due allowance for exceptions, it may be said that, in its more familiar manifestations, race-prejudice takes a direction exactly opposite to that taken by prejudice against the ordinary immigrant of European stock; in the former case, a conscious effort is made to magnify the differences between the majority and the minority, while in the latter, a vast amount of energy is expended in the obliteration of these differences. Thus race-prejudice aspires to preserve and even to increase that degree of unlikeness which is its excuse for being, while alien-prejudice works itself out of a job, by “Americanizing” the immigrant and making him over into an unrecognizable member of the majority. On one hand, enforced diversity remains as a source of friction, while on the other, enforced uniformity is demanded as the price of peace.

Although no purpose can be served by cataloguing here all the means employed in the South to keep the black man in his place, a few examples may be cited, in order to show the scope of these measures of repression. In the economic field, there is a pronounced tendency to restrict Negro workers to the humblest occupations, and in the agricultural areas the system of peonage or debt-slavery is widely employed for the purpose of attaching Negro families to the soil. Residence-districts are regularly segregated, Jim Crow regulations are everywhere in force, and inter-racial marriages are prohibited by law in all the States of the South. The administration of justice is in the hands of white judges and white juries, and the Negro’s chances in such company are notoriously small. In nearly one-fourth of the counties of the South, the population is half, or more than half black, but the denial of the ballot excludes the Negroes from local, State, and national political activities. In religious organizations, segregation is the invariable rule. Theatres and even public libraries are regularly closed to the Negro, and in every State in the South segregation in schools is prescribed by law. Some idea of the significance of the latter provision may be drawn from O. G. Ferguson’s study of white and Negro schools in Virginia. In this comparatively progressive State, the general rating of the white schools is 40.8, as against 22.3 for the coloured schools, the latter figure being seven points lower than the lowest general rating for any State in the Union.

Such are some of the legal, extra-legal, and illegal manifestations of that prejudice which finds its supreme expression in the activities of the lynching-mob and the Ku Klux Klan. There is still a considerable annual output of lynchings in this country (in 1920 the victims numbered sixty-five, of whom fifty were Negroes done to death in the South), but the casualty-list for the South and for the country as a whole has decreased steadily and markedly since 1889, and the proportion of Negro victims who were accused of rape or attacks on women has also decreased, from 31.8 per cent. in 1889–1893 to 19.8 per cent. in 1914–1918.

On the other hand, the Ku Klux Klan has now re-commenced its ghost-walking activities under the command of an “Imperial Wizard” who claims that he has already enlisted 100,000 followers in the fight to maintain the “God-ordained” pre-eminence of the Anglo-Saxon race in America. Other statements from the lips of the Wizard seem to indicate that his organization is not only anti-African, but anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, and anti-Bolshevik as well. Indeed, the bearers of the fiery cross seem bent upon organizing an all-American hate society, and the expansion of the Klan in the North is already under way.

However, the Klansmen might have succeeded in carrying the war into the enemy’s country even without adding new prejudices to their platform. There has always been some feeling against the Negro in the North, and the war-time migration of the blacks to Northern industrial centres certainly has not resulted in any diminution of existing prejudice. The National Urban League estimates that the recent exodus from Dixie has produced a net increase of a quarter of a million in the coloured population of twelve cities above the Line. This movement has brought black and white workers into competition in many industries where Negroes have hitherto been entirely unknown, and frequently the relations between the two groups have been anything but friendly. Since about half the “internationals” affiliated with the American Federation of Labour still refuse to accept Negro members, the unions themselves are in no small part to blame for the use that employers have made of Negro workers as strike-breakers.

In twelve Northern and Western States there are laws on the statute-books prohibiting marriage between whites and blacks. Jim Crow regulations are not in force north of Maryland, but in most of the cities there has been a continuous effort to maintain residential segregation, and the practice of discrimination in hotels and restaurants is the rule rather than the exception. Lynchings are infrequent, but the great riots of Washington and Chicago were not exactly indicative of good feeling between the races. One situation which revealed a remarkable similarity of temper between the North and the South was that which arose in the army during the war. It is notorious that Northerners in uniform fell in easily with the Southern spirit, and gave all possible assistance in an energetic Jim-Crowing of the Negroes of Michigan and the Negroes of Mississippi, from the first day of their service right through to the last.

The treatment of the Negro in literature and on the stage also reveals an unconscious but all the more important unanimity of opinion. It is true the North has produced no Thomas Dixons, but it is also true that the gentle and unassuming Uncle Tom of Northern song and story is none other than the Uncle Remus whom the South loves so much. In Boston, as in Baton Rouge, the Negro who is best liked is the loyal, humble, and not too able mammie or uncle of the good old days before the war. If an exception be made in the case of Eugene O’Neill’s “Emperor Jones,” it may be said that American literature has not yet cast a strong, upstanding black man for any other rôle than that of beast and villain.

And yet all these forms of discrimination and repression are not fully expressive of the attitude of the white population. The people of the South are fully sensible of the necessity of keeping the Negro in his place; still they do not keep him from attending school. Educational facilities, of a sort, are provided, however reluctantly, and in half the States of the South school attendance is even made compulsory by laws (which may or may not be enforced). The schooling is not of a kind that will fit the Negroes for the permanent and contented occupancy of a servile position. Generally speaking, the coloured children do not receive a vocational education that will keep them in their place, but an old-style three-R training that prepares for nothing but unrest. If unrest leads to urbanization, the half-hearted education of the Negro perhaps serves the interests of the new industrialists; but these industrial employers are so few in number that their influence cannot outweigh that of the planters who lose their peons, and the poor whites who find the Negro with one grain of knowledge a somewhat more dangerous competitor than the Negro with none. Hence there is every reason to believe that if the white South had rationalized this situation, the Negro would be as ruthlessly excluded from the school as he now is from the ballot-box. In fact, the education of the Negro seems quite inconsistent with race-prejudice as it is generally preached and practised in the South.

In the North there is no discrimination in the schools, and black children and white are put through the same mill. In the industrial field, prejudice cannot effectually close to the Negroes all those openings which are created by general economic conditions, and in politics the Northern Negro also finds some outlet for his energies.