Home Missions in ActionAllen, Edith H. (Edith Hedden)
History
Home Missions in Action
Allen, Edith H. (Edith Hedden)
Home missions
They therefore are unfavorable to assimilative influences and tend
to establish in modified forms the standards and customs of the
communities from which they have come. "The town of Windber, in
Western Pennsylvania, has a population of 8000 persons and is the
center of twelve mining camps. It was founded by the opening of
bituminous coal mines, for which purpose 1600 experienced Englishmen
and 400 native Americans were brought into the locality. At the
present, eighteen races of recent immigration are numbered among its
mine workers. The Southern and Eastern Europeans among them have their
churches, banks, steamship agencies and business establishments in the
town to which they go to transact their affairs and to seek amusement."
"Another illustration is the recently established iron and steel
manufacturing community at Granite City and Madison, Illinois, which
has the distinction of being the largest Bulgarian colony in the United
States. These two cities join each other and for practical purposes are
one. Fifteen years ago its site was an unbroken stretch of corn fields.
The original wage-earners were English, Irish, Germans, Welsh and Poles;
then followed Slovaks, Magyars, a few Croatians. Mixed groups came next,
Roumanians, Greeks and Servians, and later Bulgarians, until that group
alone numbered 8000; later still, the foreigners were augmented by the
arrival of 4000 new immigrants--Armenians, Servians, Lithuanians, Slovaks,
Magyars and Poles. Under normal industrial conditions the population
of the community is estimated at 20,000 Here the various racial groups
live entirely apart from any American influence."
The New York Tribune states: "It is a somewhat startling
announcement that more than one-third of the adult male inhabitants
of New York City are unnaturalized aliens. There are, according to
the census, 1,433,749 males in the city, of twenty-one years or more,
and of these more than 500,000 have not become naturalized. In the
whole state there are 718,940 foreign-born white men of voting age
who have not become citizens. It needs no argument to prove that
this is not a desirable state of affairs, and that if perpetuated
it would be mischievous, if not disastrous."
From the figures collected in an investigation of four months in
New York City Night Court, it appears that 7.7 per cent of the
women arrested and convicted for keeping disorderly houses and
solicitation were foreign-born.
In New York City all the conditions created by immigration are
enormously accentuated, for within itself and its suburbs it has a
foreign population exceeding the whole population of Chicago.
"It is at once the largest Catholic city of history and the
largest Jewish city of history."
Statistics furnished by the industrial department of the Y.M.C.A.,
based upon the census of 1910, give the proportion of two out of every
three of the inhabitants of the following cities as foreign-born or of
foreign-born parentage.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account