It would be too much to say that the average immigrant from any country visions when he leaves his home the “America” outlined in the previous chapter, or even that he perceives it when, at some time after he arrives, he files his declaration of intention to seek citizenship. Doubtless in the ordinary case he comes merely to improve his personal, social, and economic condition; to put it bluntly, to get a better job. Nevertheless, we should do ourselves and our long-standing reputation in the world a great injustice if we did not recognize and take pride in the fact that the people of all races turn their faces hither not only with hope of opportunity to better their condition, but with a stirring of soul at the thought of what they believe awaits them in a land of wider liberty. That they do not always find us living up to our boast, so far as they are concerned, is the defect not of our tradition or, in the long run, of our intention, but of our practice.

At the outset the immigrant does not think about citizenship at all. The statistics gathered by this Study show conclusively that the average alien waits more than ten years before applying for citizenship. That even if he comes as early as sixteen he waits until he is twenty-eight before he files his final petition. And the vast majority of the men come between the ages of sixteen and thirty—just at the time of life when, it would seem, active participation in the political life of the country ought to be most appealing.

FACTORS IN IMMIGRATION

The alien does not come with any direct interest in citizenship. He comes to improve his status. And this motive has two aspects; the impulse is twofold—a push from behind and a pull from in front, sometimes one, usually both. The statistics displaying the fluctuations of what Prof. Frank J. Warne calls “The Tide of Immigration” are luminous in their reflection of this purely human fact. In order to see it stand forth, one must keep it vividly in mind that these tables of statistics are not mere exhibits of mathematical digits, but lists of human beings, inspired by motives precisely like our own. The 148,093 subjects of His Britannic Majesty—mostly Irish—who came to America in 1848 were, each of them, a specific individual human soul, impelled by the fact that the potato famine, or whatnot else at home, interfered with the adequacy of his meals; and attracted by the belief that he would find things better in America. The one lone Russian recorded in that year presumably represented precisely the same interplay of motives. The heavy German immigration in 1852, 1853, and 1854 was made up of men, women, and children who found conditions intolerable because of the repressions ensuing upon the revolutionary movement of ’48. And so on. On the other hand, the shrinkages in the figures in various later periods, in a general way, coincide with the times of industrial depression, unemployment, etc., in this country; things were not so attractive here as to offer substantial improvement upon the situation at home.

The six sources whence we have derived the bulk of our new population are Great Britain and Ireland; the three Scandinavian countries of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark; Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy, and Russia—in the seventy-eight years from 1840 down to and including 1918, when immigration virtually stopped owing to the conditions created by the World War. Immigration since then has been subject to influences so different from those prevailing before, and as yet so little understood, that intelligent comparisons would be perilous.[7]

Students of immigration have usually built their generalizations upon totals of inflow, frequently overlooking the striking disparity of time and numbers among the various racial groups. Yet there is much significance in this disparity. Professor Warne, for example, in the Annals of the American Academy of Political Science (1920), in an analysis generally of the upward and downward curves of immigration from all countries during the century since 1820, says:

Well enough for a generalization based on totals; but it is not to be overlooked that at that very point the then comparatively small immigration from Italy more than doubled between 1853 and 1854, jumping from 535 to 1,263, and remained above 1,000 with the exception of one year, until 1860. Again Professor Warne:

But it was precisely during the hottest and most critical years of the Civil War that German immigration increased. It had been relatively low between 1854 and 1865 (in which latter year it was 58,153), but jumped in 1866 to 120,218, and (with the exception of 1871, when it fell to 82,554) remained high until and including 1873, when it almost touched 150,000. It would seem that something must have been going on in Germany to drive these people out against the adverse economic conditions prevailing here.

But the Austrian, Italian, and Russian immigration, which had been relatively insignificant up to 1869 and 1870, was higher in 1870–75 than ever before, and with minor ups and downs increased more or less steadily up to the very high figures of the past two decades, which gave rise to the widely believed legend entitled, “The New Immigration.”

The question of means of livelihood, of a better job, is doubtless the chief factor, but it is not the only factor. Any job at all in a free country is better, for any man worth his salt, than a far better-paid job under conditions of oppression. The man who leaves his homeland to adventure even under adverse conditions, because he cannot tolerate political tyranny, used to be regarded per se as fit for American citizenship. He is still fit, even though he belong to the traditional “New Immigration”; even though of late we have tended rather to discourage the idea that personal liberty is valuable in and of itself. It is still true that along with our fame as a land where economic opportunity is to be found, the men and women of other lands are attracted by what they still believe to be our atmosphere of liberty.

POLITICS WELCOMES THE IRISH

The Irish immigration was earliest in the field, and first to profit by the hit-or-miss methods of naturalization which prevailed in the old shiftless days. They occupied socially at the outset very much the same position that the “New Immigration” has occupied during the past twenty years; but the American politician, to whose mill any kind of a biped who might vote was grist, welcomed it, and quickly taught the Irishman the methods of the game.

How solidly the Irish were installed before the Germans began to arrive in large numbers appears in Table I, showing the two streams of immigration between 1820 and 1840. Prior to 1840 there was no appreciable inflow from any other countries. It should be added that it was not until 1854, and then only for that one year, that the German immigration overtook the Irish. It did not again equal it until 1867.

TABLE I

Immigration From Ireland and Germany Each Year from 1820 to 1840

THEY ALWAYS HAVE BEEN DEMOCRATS

The traditional fidelity of the Irish to the Democratic party began forthwith. The elements in the population which were Whigs, and afterward became Republicans tended, on the whole, to be the more prosperous folk of the community; also they were largely of the Protestant faith. Very early in our political history, therefore, there came to be, to some extent, a division in which both social standing and religion played a part. Most of the Irish were poor, and nearly all of them were Roman Catholics. The Democratic party was rather the party of the poor and the foreign born, and when the great influx of Roman Catholic Irish injected also the religious issue, it was only natural that a kind of racial allegiance should attach the Irish to the Democratic party. The Know-Nothing and Native American agitations of the middle of the last century deepened the rift, and confirmed the Irish in their political faith.

Gustavus Myers says, in his History of Tammany Hall:[8]

It is true, but irrelevant, that in an earlier day Tammany had been as anti-foreign as anybody—originally it was decidedly aristocratic in tone. Myers recites how, on the night of April 24, 1817, two hundred Irishmen marched to the Wigwam “to impress upon the Committee the wisdom of nominating (for Congress) Thomas Addis Emmett, as well as other Irish Catholics on the Tammany ticket in the future.”

All this had long since become ancient history by 1840. Long before that time the Irish devotion to the Democratic party in general, and to Tammany Hall in particular, had become deeply rooted.

EARLY GERMANS BECAME REPUBLICANS

The Germans, who, as has been shown, formed the second great wave in the “tide of immigration,” began to come in formidable numbers about 1836, passing the 30,000 mark in 1845. While they were, on the whole, better educated and possibly more intelligent than the Irish, they were handicapped, as the Irish were not, by difference of language; so that for the practical purposes of the native American politician they were equally ignorant. And the mass of the immigrants of both races were peasants without experience in relation to political participation.

Very many of the Germans, however, had fled from the repressions at home preceding, accompanying, and following the revolutionary movements about 1848; they were to a great extent Protestants, and they were naturally opposed to slavery—though this is not to say that the Irish ever favored it. Generally speaking, Germans reacted favorably to the Republican party.

Both races took American politics as they found it. Let it not be supposed that corruption was the exclusive invention or hall mark of Tammany Hall! Even in England, at this time, politics was a dirty business. The Whigs did their best to beat Tammany at the game in which it had become expert. Myers says:[9]

This was the election which made William H. Seward Governor of the state of New York!

EFFECTS OF THE GOLD CRAZE

The whole situation was intensified during the years when corruption reached its greatest heights by the conditions ensuing upon the discovery of gold in California. The port of New York welcomed ships from the west coast bringing gold, and ships from across the Atlantic bringing immigrants. The “bulge” in the curve of immigration from Great Britain and Ireland, Germany, and Scandinavia in the period 1849–54 undoubtedly represents preponderantly the reaction abroad to the tales of gold to be found on the street corners of America.

And the immigrant stepped into an atmosphere of corruption in every field—including politics. The whole country was more or less money mad. The effect of the gold craze, as Myers (page 154) says, “was a still further lowering of the public tone; standards were generally lost sight of, and all means of ‘getting ahead’ came to be considered legitimate. Politics, trafficking in nominations and political influence, found it a most auspicious time.”

VAST NATURALIZATION FRAUDS

It is hard to realize now the public attitude of those old days on the subject of naturalization. There was a fabulous amount of virgin territory to be opened; new communities needed population, and especially muscle labor; lavish inducements, including the right to vote, were held out to anything in the form of a man who could be brought to help in the task. It was many years before citizenship came to be regarded as a precious thing, to be guarded with scrupulous vigilance. And as both of the great political parties were guilty of crimes against the ballot box, it was taken for granted that they were inevitable in politics.

The vexatious technicalities which now seem so unjust to many an applicant for citizenship are, after all, only reaction at the other extreme to the incredible laxity which characterized the process in the early years. The population of what was then New York City was only 515,547 in 1850; 813,669 in 1860; and 942,292 in 1870; but in the eight years, 1860–67, inclusive, more than 67,000 aliens were naturalized in that city alone. The naturalizations in New York City in each year from 1856 to 1867, inclusive, in only two courts—the Superior Court and the Court of Common Pleas—an average of more than 9,000 a year is shown in the following table:

TABLE II

Number of Aliens Naturalized Each Year from 1856 to 1867 in Two Courts in New York City{1}

note 1: John I. Davenport, The Wig and the Jimmy, p. 12.

These figures are taken from a curious pamphlet, published in 1869 by John I. Davenport, who was United States Commissioner and Chief Supervisor of Elections for the Southern District of New York, under the cryptic title, The Wig and the Jimmy, which tells in detail the story of the debauching of naturalization by these two courts. The year 1868, however, saw the scandal reach unprecedented heights. Says Mr. Davenport:[10]

The Court of Common Pleas, which save for a year or two previous had done the larger share of the work of naturalization, did but little in 1868, its total for the year being 3,145, of which 1,645 were in October. Justice requires the further statement that there was no evidence whatever of any fraud in this court, although all its judges were elected as Democrats, while proof was abundant that the duty entrusted to it of making citizens of the United States was discharged throughout with marked propriety and dignity.

In the Supreme and Superior Courts only were frauds proven. To what extent we will now consider. The following table was sworn to as being the daily number of applications for naturalization on file in the Supreme Court Clerk’s office for 1868:

TABLE III

Applicants for Naturalization in Supreme Court, New York City, in October, 1868

The significance of these great totals of applications for naturalization within a few days before election appears in Mr. Davenport’s summary of the behavior of the judges:[11]

The Judiciary Committee of the New York State Assembly, in a report upon the first notorious election frauds made to that House of the state legislature thirty years before, or on April 6, 1838, already had registered the fact that this was no post-war state of affairs, and depicted the situation of which the frauds of 1868 were only one year’s fruit:

It was partly the sense of the great public danger lying in such conditions, partly the growing anti-foreign feeling, and altogether an improving public morality, that beginning about 1870 and increasing as the years passed, brought about the cleansing of public elections and the reform embodied in the naturalization law of 1906 which has totally abolished the situation into which the immigrants of the mid-century and earlier stepped as into a swamp. Still survives in some quarters the notion that the alien is hurried from the ship to the ballot box, and that he pours therein some corrupting influence brought with him from abroad. The latter never was true; he has accepted and taken advantage of the situation which we ourselves created and suffered for generations to exist. The former was true during three-quarters of a century, but it is true no longer, and has not been true for nearly two decades.

FIRST CHOICE IN POLITICS

Bear it in mind that the chief motive of the newcomer is the same as that which usually leads men to go anywhere—the desire to “better himself.” It is notable that a very large number of immigrants arrive with the notion that the Republican party is the “party of prosperity,” of the “full dinner pail,” high wages, and the other advantages which have been the widely advertised slogans of that party. Without passing upon the question of the truth of these slogans, one may note that what actually happens is that the immigrant’s real search is for that connection, political or industrial, which involves employment and other advantages of a material kind. As soon as the conditions permit, he joins the penumbra of the political organization which has jobs to distribute, which controls public contracts and the wages that go with them. That means Tammany and the Democratic party in New York City; in Philadelphia it means the Republican organization, which in its day has followed and in some respects surpassed Tammany in all the ways of political corruption and machinism. In other cities it has been to this party or that, as the dominant color shifted, that the immigrant has swung.

As long as the naturalization process was the sport of corrupt politics, the political organizations gave early attention to the alien. With the institution of the present stringent law and practice, however, and also with the vast magnitude of the flood—swamping all the machinery which had been devised to absorb the immigrants—the politicians up to a recent time ceased to pay any attention to them. One of the results of this has been a considerable increase in the lapse of time between the arrival of the immigrant and his first steps in the direction of citizenship. One of the most enterprising of the younger leaders of Tammany Hall said to the present writer some months ago:

All of which is very natural and human, and a good illustration of the way in which the politician gets his hold upon the individual voter—newcomer or native.

The war created a new interest in the alien, brought new pressure upon him to become a citizen. Private concerns demanded at least “first papers” as a condition for employment; labor organizations intensified their insistence upon citizenship, or at least declaration of intention, as a prerequisite to membership; laws were passed in many states increasing the disabilities of aliens. And the political organizations generally have returned, but in a far better spirit, to the former search for voters among the foreign born; creating committees and bureaus to assist the alien in getting naturalization, and resuming the old “hand-picking” methods of getting the foreign born into active participation.

Little attention has been paid to the extent to which the politicians use private jobs as a part of their patronage. Not only the petty employments in saloons and even brothels have been at the disposal of the local leaders; but places for unskilled labor with street-railroad corporations and other public utilities needing the franchises and privileges in the public streets, have been utilized as the coin-current of local political traffic. Not infrequently a merchant finds that the stringency of the enforcement of ordinances regarding his buildings, blocking sidewalks with his merchandise, etc., is considerably mitigated after he has acted upon the suggestion of a district leader as to the employment of some person as truck hand or watchman. And the writer well remembers one occasion, many years ago in Chicago, when the street-railroad companies were keenly interested in an aldermanic election, wherein the polling places in certain doubtful wards were blocked by long lines of obviously foreign-born laborers, few if any of them voters, who did not attempt to vote, but monopolized the line for blocks, effectively slowing down the voting so as to prevent the real voters from getting to the polls at all!

THE POLITICIAN CLOSE TO HUMANITY

The secret of the whole business lies in the fact that political machines, and the political bosses of all sizes and grades who make up their staffs, are powerful and long-lived in just the measure to which they grow out of and identify their activities with the rank and file of the community—clear down to the bottom. The vote of a new-made citizen born in Galicia or Syria or Portugal is just as good for his purpose as that of a Son of the American Revolution—vastly more so if (as sometimes happens) the new voter will follow his “advice” and the old one will not! Furthermore, their vitality, especially in the poorer sections, is commensurate with the constancy of their activities; that is, their practical utility to the people all the time, for all purposes. As William Bennet Munro says:[12]

And he goes on to describe, aptly, why this work is “spread over the whole year,” and how it comes about that the boss, little or big, acquires so great an influence in his bailiwick. What he says applies most aptly to the so-called “poorer districts,” where the foreign-born voters live in the greatest numbers:

It seems usually to be forgotten that the evolution of the boss follows the law of natural selection, which in this case secures the survival of the man who is most resourceful in using to full advantage the conditions that he finds about him. To gain even a ward leadership and to hold this post requires industry, perseverance, and, no end of shrewd tactfulness. He must not be content with doing the work that comes to him; he must look for things to do. As his work consists mainly in doing favors for voters, he must inspire requests as well as grant them. Therefore he encourages voters to come to him for help when they are out of work, or in any other sort of trouble. When a voter is arrested, the ward or district leader will lend his services to secure bail or to provide counsel, or will arrange to have the offender’s fine paid for him. Then there are the day-to-day favors which the local boss stands ready to do for all who come to him, provided they are voters or can influence voters.