Cities and towns; Social psychology; Sociology; Sociology, Urban
Finally (4) he must have affection, intimate association with someone
or something, even though it be merely a cat or a dog, for which he
feels affection and knows that affection is returned. All special
human wishes reduce finally to these four categories, and no human
creature is likely to be wholesome and happy unless, in some form or
manner, all four of these wishes are more or less adequately
realized.[62]
While I was on the Pacific Coast a few months ago, studying what we have
called “race relations,” I was impressed by the marked differences, as
between immigrant groups, with respect to their ability to accommodate
themselves to the American environment and, within the limitations
imposed upon them by our customs and our laws, to provide for all the
interests of life.
Immigrant communities are likely to include within the circle of their
interests and their organizations all the interests of life. Every
immigrant community will have a religious organization—a synagogue, a
temple, or a church—with its related, often dependent, mutual aid and
welfare organizations. It will have also its own business enterprises,
its clubs, lodges, coffee houses, restaurants and gathering places, and
a press. Every immigrant community is likely to have its press in
America even if it did not have one in the home country. The immigrant
colony is frequently nothing more than a transplanted village, for
America actually has been colonized not by races or by nationalities,
but by villages.
As to the competence of these immigrant communities to provide an
environment in which immigrants can live, Raymond Pearl’s paper, “The
Racial Origin of Almshouse Paupers in the United States,” published in
_Science_ (October 31, 1924), throws some light.
One paragraph in that paper states the situation as between the nation
and the foreign-born. It says:
While on January 1, 1923, there were in almshouses 59.8 native-born
white persons per 100,000 of the same class in the population, the
corresponding figure for the foreign-born was 173.6. This is by some
regarded as a fact of dread significance. Perhaps it is. To me it
seems possibly only an interesting expression of the difficulties
which the human organism finds in adapting itself to a new
environment.
If these figures may be regarded, as Dr. Pearl suggests that they
should, as an index of the difficulties which the human organism finds
in adapting itself to a new environment, the more detailed study of the
various racial groups exhibits some surprising results.
They show, in the first place, wide divergencies in the capacity of
different immigrant groups to adapt themselves to American life; they
show, in the second place, that the races and nationalities that have
lived here longest are the least able to meet the demands of the new
environment. Dr. Pearl states it in this way:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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