"1683-1920": The Fourteen Points and What Became of Them—Foreign Propaganda in the Public Schools—Rewriting the History of the United States—The Espionage Act and How It Worked—"Illegal and Indefensible Blockade" of the Central Powers—1,000,000 Victims of Starvation—Our Debt to France and to Germany—The War Vote in Congress—Truth About the Belgian Atrocities—Our Treaty with Germany and How Observed—The Alien Property Custodianship—Secret Will of Cecil Rhodes—Racial Strains in American Life—GermaSchrader, Frederick Franklin
History
"1683-1920": The Fourteen Points and What Became of Them—Foreign Propaganda in the Public Schools—Rewriting the History of the United States—The Espionage Act and How It Worked—"Illegal and Indefensible Blockade" of the Central Powers—1,000,000 Victims of Starvation—Our Debt to France and to Germany—The War Vote in Congress—Truth About the Belgian Atrocities—Our Treaty with Germany and How Observed—The Alien Property Custodianship—Secret Will of Cecil Rhodes—Racial Strains in American Life—Germa
Schrader, Frederick Franklin
Germans -- United States; World War, 1914-1918 -- Miscellanea
Wilhelm Kaufmann (“Die Deutschen im Am. Burgerkriege,”) makes
an ingenious calculation of the value of the immigration of the
nineteenth century to the U. S. in dollars and cents. Fifty years
ago, he says, a human being had a market price. An adult slave
about 1855 was valued at an average of $1,100. Estimating, for
the sake of argument, a white immigrant at the same price, the
19,500,000 immigrants for the stated period would represent a value
of $21,450,000,000; but as a white man performed three times as
much work as a slave, besides having a larger claim on life and a
much higher intelligence, a white immigrant represented four times
the value of a slave. What value, for instance, was an Ericson to
the Union army in the summer of 1862, or a Lieber, a Schurz, a
Mergenthaler or a Carnegie? But 22 percent of the total immigration
was made up of children under 15 years of age. According to the New
York Immigration authorities (1870) every German immigrant averaged a
possession of $150 cash on his arrival, representing a total value,
as regards German immigration alone, of $750,000,000. A famous
English economist says: “One of the imports of the U. S., that of
the adult and trained immigrants, would be in an economic analysis
underestimated at £100,000,000 ($500,000,000) a year.”--Thorold
Rogers, Lectures in 1888, “Economic Interpretations of History,” (p.
407). And the American, James Ford Rhodes (Vol. I, p. 355): “The
South ignored, or wished to ignore, the fact that able-bodied men
with intelligence enough to wish to better their conditions are the
most valuable products on earth, and that nothing can redound more to
the advantage of a new country than to get men without having been at
the cost of rearing them.”
Because the working conditions in Germany were exceptionally
favorable, immigration from the German Empire before the war had
reached by far the smallest stage of that of any of the leading
nations, save France, where the birthrate has been stationary
for many years. The figures for 1914 were only 35,734, while the
immigration from Greece was 35,832; Italian immigration in that year
reached a total of 283,738 and from Russia 255,660, while England
sent us 35,864, Scotland 10,682 and Wales 2,183. In 1915 only 7,799
Germans arrived, while England sent us 21,562. The money brought
by the Germans totaled $1,786,130, or $221.50 a head, while money
brought by the English totaled $3,467,458, a little over $160 a head.
German immigration was never a pauper immigration and of itself
refutes the assertion that German immigration was due to fear of
military service or political oppression.
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