In a preceding chapter I stated my conviction that in the district I covered as inspector of dog licenses there were representatives from every nationality on the globe. Now there are a considerable number of nationalities on the globe. Start to count and one will find the fingers of both hands used up hardly before the enumeration is well begun.

In spite of the self-evidence of this fact, persons proclaiming themselves as interested in “our immigration problem” are continually asking me:

“What do you think about our immigration problem? You’ve lived in the tenements and seen things first-hand. Which nationality do you think we should let in, and which shut out?” They speak so eagerly, are so confident of my ability to answer intelligently such simple questions.

Simple questions! Though I consider my district a fair slice of New York, I know that New York now contains only a small portion of the foreign riffraff that has been deluging the country for the past forty years. As I saw conditions in the slums of New York, the United States has no immigration problem.

Its immigration problem ceased to exist twenty years ago—it became an emergency. It is all very well to talk about the United States as an asylum for the oppressed peoples of the earth. That is a beautiful thought. But the asylum that admits every applicant, regardless of his or her mental or physical condition, soon becomes a pest-house.

Pest-house is what our country is rapidly becoming. Indeed I am not entirely sure that it does not already deserve that name. If it does not, at least it is so infested with the germs of virulent diseases that its doors should be closed until every suspected inmate is thoroughly fumigated. And that operation will consume several years.

The evening before leaving New York, while at dinner in the Woman’s City Club, I talked over the subject with a woman lawyer.

“You wouldn’t even let in the relatives of those immigrants already in this country?” she questioned disapprovingly.

“I would not,” I replied, and my tone was emphatic.

“Well, I don’t see just how you could do that,” she protested, and her disapproval had become near to indignation.

“Just three hows: I’m an American and believe in America first; I’m not a sentimentalist; I’m not an employer of cheap labor.”

“But it’s not sentimentality—allowing an immigrant to bring in his wife and children, or his mother and father,” she assured me.

“Isn’t it? How about a smallpox epidemic? I’ve been pretty near two or three. I never heard of an uninfested community begging that near relatives be allowed to pass through the quarantine for the sake of coming to them.”

“But that’s different—smallpox,” she contradicted, as resting her elbows on the table she brought the tips of her perfectly manicured finger-nails together that she might admire them at her leisure. “You’re an alarmist, my dear. I’ve been practising in New York for—for a good many years now. I’m sure if conditions were so bad I would have known about it before this.”

In my diary I recorded the history of one hundred and thirty-seven children—cases investigated for Bellevue social service department—every one of them the children of foreign parents—both parents. In only three cases the parents could not be classed as paupers.

Those three—one was a Finn, a printer; his wife died and he was ill with flu. So soon as he got on his feet he took his baby and offered to pay for what had been done for it. The second was an Italian bootblack, father of five children, whose wife died in Bellevue. He not only willingly assumed the responsibility of his children as soon as they were able to leave the hospital, but politely declined both financial assistance and advice from the social service department.

In the third case the father was a Spaniard and the mother an Italian. Their flat was practically stripped of every piece of salable furniture before they could be induced to allow themselves or any one of their children to be taken to Bellevue. On my first visit not one of them had a change of clothes. There was one bed, and two mattresses on the floor. Two ragged sheets, spotlessly clean, were all they had in the way of covers, though it was then the middle of a cold winter. There was a table, two chairs, a wood-stove, and about a half-dozen pieces of crockery—every one of these articles was broken. The pot and saucepan, though old, were whole.

The committee allowed me twenty-five dollars to spend for that family. Every penny of it went for household furnishings. Later, when I got my fingers on a few extra dollars, I called at the flat and offered to spend it for clothing. Courteously but firmly the mother told me that her husband had said they had taken enough; she must not accept any more help.

The parents of every one of those one hundred and thirty-seven children were defective, either mentally or physically, sometimes both. Even in the three non-pauper families, the bootblack was a cripple, the Finn tubercular, and the Italian wife of the Spaniard had had both breasts removed because of cancer.

I did not record the histories of those cases because they were in any way unusual. They are a fair sample of the cases given to any and every social worker on the staff of a hospital where the patients come from the slums of New York City. Of all the cases I investigated—nearly three hundred—as a social worker, there was not one child of American parentage—all of them the children of immigrants.

For thirty days during the summer of 1920 I kept a record of the nationality of the families on whom I called in the capacity of license inspector. Of the one thousand and six families talked with, eighteen had both parents American. In twenty-one, one parent was American.

Be it understood that when a family claimed to be Irish-American I rated them as Irish. There were a lot of such scum in my district. To my way of thinking the propaganda carried on by such individuals is much more dangerous to American institutions and ideals than that spouted by the few I met who claimed to be Bolsheviki.

Some of the most dangerous persons met during my four years in the underbrush, to American ideals and institutions, had entered the country after the declaration of peace. Four of them were prostitutes of that class known as street-walkers, for the time being or until, as they expressed it:

“I meek von reech haul.”

The fifth, having already made a rich haul, chanced to be visiting her pals when I called. All of these women were attractive to look at, all claimed to have come to this country to join relatives, and all were preaching the downfall of constitutional government. They were here to get money, and they didn’t care how they got it.

They all belonged to one of the oppressed peoples of the earth. They were all Poles, or claimed to be.

But I do not blame the immigrants, neither for coming nor for what they do after they get here. The present condition of the country is the fault of persons like myself—Americans born and bred, the descendants of the men and women who planted our colonies, fought and won the Revolution, and founded our government.

Proud in our own conceit, we have allowed the control of the country, handed over to our keeping by our fathers, to slip out of our hands. Like a pack of second-rate shop-keepers we have lost all initiative, and assuming an air of lofty indifference, pretend to be unconscious that the parvenu establishment across the street has taken all the trade that used to belong to us.

Why, there was a time when we got so exclusive, the whole pack of us, that we boasted:

“No gentleman will go into politics—such low associates.”

Then Theodore Roosevelt came. Being President of the United States became almost as aristocratic as tooling a coach or breeding dogs. And in a government of the people, by the people, for the people. To see the result of that un-American snobbishness one needs only to read a list of the men holding the highest political offices in our largest cities.

The descendants of the men and women who settled the country and founded the government are as scarce as hens’ teeth.

It is also the fault of us original Americans that immigrants have not become Americanized more rapidly. How could any one, you or I, become familiar with the ideals and aims of a Bedouin Arab if we had never come in speaking distance with a Bedouin Arab, could neither speak nor read his language, and only caught a glimpse of him careening by on his camel?

Take the residential districts of New York City, for instance. As soon as an immigrant moves in, what is known as “fashion” moves out. It is that habit of running hot-footed from the immigrant that was the beginning of New York slums. And not alone in New York, it’s all over the country.

In the small city in which I am now writing, the most beautiful, the best-drained, and healthiest section is being deserted. Wonderful homes with orange and grape-fruit trees in full bearing are being given up, their owners moving to a newly settled and less desirable quarter. All because of “the Latins”—Cubans, Spaniards, French, and Italians.

“But what is the matter with the Latins?” I asked a woman who had complained to me that her husband had refused to break up his home and move to Hyde Park.

“Oh, they’re disgusting,” she assured me, her face as expressive as her words. “The women do all their own housework, and they have so many children.”

Two great crimes—doing housework and having children.

Small wonder that the mother of George Washington lay for a hundred years in an unmarked grave before any one ever thought it worth while to write her life. She not only bore and brought up a houseful of sons and daughters, but she did housework—she ground and stuffed sausages for family consumption, and she wore an apron.

When told by a pompous courier that His Excellency the Commander-in-Chief of the American and French Armies was on his way to pay her a visit, she replied:

“Tell George I’ll be glad to see him. Sukie, go bring me a clean apron.”

Now we’ve gotten so snobbish, we the descendants of that sturdy old stock, that the sight of a woman next door wearing an apron makes us run away. Having run as far as possible, we turn around and find fault with that woman and her children for not imbibing American ideals.

It is our fault that in our country the immigration question has developed into an emergency—if from an asylum for the oppressed peoples of the earth the United States has become a pest-house.

After stating that I consider stopping immigration at least for a term of years an urgent necessity to the health of our country, it may seem useless to answer the second of the two questions propounded at the beginning of this chapter. But I would like to write briefly of a few of the nationalities with whom I came in close contact during my four years in the underbrush.

Jews and Italians are very attractive when met in their homes. Among my fellow workers I often heard Jews spoken of as “dirty Tykes.” Now I never succeeded in learning just what “Tyke” means. I never found any one who was sure about the spelling of the word. They would assure me that it meant a Jew, but why a Jew they could give no explanation.

So far as my observation went, the Jews of the tenements are not a dirty people, far from it. Some of the cleanest, best-kept homes that I entered were those of Jews—German Jews, Russian Jews, Polish Jews, and Jews the country of whose birth I never learned.

Never, in all my four years, did I receive a rude word, not even a rude glance, from a Jew. I never heard a Jewish man speak roughly to a woman or a child. I never had a Jew lie to me about having a dog, or claim a license when he had none.

In my work I met many Jews, some mere children, who seemed to me marvels of quick, straight thinking. At first this was a source of surprise—persons so humbly placed, having had so few advantages, could think and decide so wisely.

As a rule they met a crisis bravely, and I never knew one to flop over, a spineless, helpless, human jelly-fish. That is the supreme difference between the Jew and the other nationalities met in the tenements. For months that difference was the chiefest of my puzzles—why did the Jew always come up with his wits about him?

During the influenza epidemic I saw the remaining remnant of many families, on learning their condition, lose the power to think or plan for a future—fathers, with a lapful of young children, would become as helpless as the youngest of their brood, an older child left with one or more younger sisters or brothers. Even when they returned to work and were earning the money that supported their dependents, they needed and begged for the counsel and advice of the social worker.

It was never so with a Jew. Being a Jew means knowing how and attending to his own affairs. That is the way I came to look at it. And after months of observation and much thinking I found what I still believe to be the reason for that supreme difference.

The Jew has always thought for himself, acted for himself, depended on himself. So far as I could learn there is no book a Jew is forbidden to read, there is no thought he may not entertain. He has no one on whom to cast his burdens, he can gain absolution for his sins from no source. Whether he wins or loses is up to him, to his own character. He stands face to face with his God.

The Italians—my other favorite tenement-dwellers, for I became sincerely fond of many of them—are a laughter-loving, destructive race. Many of them are far from neat—coming from the slums of their own country and landing in the slums of New York, their standard of living is low.

Seen in their homes, among their family, they are charming. They meet their visitors on that visitor’s ground. However gruff was my reception, once I spoke, explained my visit, my reception was invariably cordial. However dirty and disordered her flat, however many children might be holding her skirts or squirming over the floor, the Italian woman would always insist on my coming in.

Even though she could not speak a word of American, she would throw open her door and try, bowing and waving, to induce me to enter. Often I did enter, waiting for some one, a neighbor or a child, to act as interpreter. To prevent time from hanging heavy on my hands she would show me her family album, birth, marriage, or death certificates, or some other such treasures.

Unfortunately, the Italians as met in the tenements have too many mental or physical defects. I cannot recall ever talking with an Italian woman who did not mention some relative in some philanthropic institution. Having always been poor, they struggle out of poverty as they can; but when they do not succeed they accept their condition gracefully.

To the Italian, poverty does not possess a sting. I believe it stings a Jew—being poor.

During the congestion in the tenements I got my best views of the national characteristics of the various peoples among whom I worked. Though a horribly uncomfortable period for the tenement-dweller, it was intensely interesting to me. It was as though after hearing a piece of music correctly played you again listened to it with both pedals down.