That these foreigners who have come in hordes have brought with them
their ignorance of hygiene and modern ways of living and that they are
handicapped by religious superstitions is only too true. But they also
bring in their hearts a desire for freedom from all the tyrannies that
afflict the earth. They would not be here if they did not bear within
them the hardihood of pioneers, a courage of no mean order. They have
the simple faith that in America they will find equality, liberty and
an opportunity for a decent livelihood. And they have something else.
The cell plasms of these peoples are freighted with the potentialities
of the best in Old World civilization. They come from lands rich in
the traditions of courage, of art, music, letters, science and
philosophy. Americans no longer consider themselves cultured unless
they have journeyed to these lands to find access to the treasures
created by men and women of this same blood. The immigrant brings the
possibilities of all these things to our shores, but where is the
opportunity to reproduce in the New World the cultures of the old?
What opportunities have we given to these peoples to enrich our
civilization? We have greeted them as "a lot of ignorant foreigners,"
we have shouted at, bustled and kicked them.
Our industries have taken advantage of their ignorance of the
country's ways to take their toil in mills and mines and factories at
starvation wages. We have herded them into slums to become diseased,
to become social burdens or to die. We have huddled them together like
rabbits to multiply their numbers and their misery. Instead of saying
that we Americanize them, we should confess that we animalize them.
The only freedom we seem to have given them is the freedom to make
heavier and more secure their chains. What hope is there for racial
progress in this human material, treated more carelessly and brutally
than the cheapest factory product?
Nor are all our social handicaps bound up in the immigrant.
There were in the United States, when the Federal Industrial Relations
Committee finished its work in 1915, several million migratory
workers, most of them white, many of them married but separated from
their families, who were compelled, like themselves, to struggle with
dire want.
There were in 1910 more than 2,353,000 tenant farmers, two-thirds of
whom lived and worked under the terrible conditions which the
Industrial Relations Commission's report showed to prevail in the
South and Southwest. These tenant farmers, as the report showed, were
always in want, and were compelled by the very terms of the prevailing
tenant contracts to produce children who must go to the fields and do
the work of adults. The census proved that this tenancy was on the
increase, the number of tenants in all but the New England and Middle
Atlantic States having increased approximately 30 per cent from 1900
to 1910.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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