AMERICA 1900-1910 -- 'The Newcomers' (Part 3)

SEIFERT

Posted By: David (email)
Date: 3/7/2004 at 21:17:12

'AMERICA 1900-1910'

'The Newcomers'

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'Hard Lessons for Greenhorns'

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Bewildered at first by their strange new country, most immigrants huddled together in urban enclaves of their own. But once they had entered the Germantowns and Jewtowns and Little Italys, their fine new freedoms were whittled away by the sharp edge of poverty.

Each ethnic slum was a tiny world that clutched at its denizens, holding them to a few filthy streets, markets and sweatshops. Seldom did the overworked laborer or his child-burdened wife have the will to venture a couple of miles to the wonderland of theaters and department stores. Elderly residents on the upper floors of tenements hesitated to attempt the ramshackle stairs; some did not leave their dingy flats for years.

The degradation of the slumdwellers triggered angry volleys from reform-minded muckrakers. Journalist Jacob Riis, himself an immigrant from Denmark, presented grim photographs and stories of festering tenements and their disease-ridden inmates; he warned his readers that "in the battle of the slum we win or we perish. There is no middle ground." Novelist Frank Norris, reporting on the Pennsylvania coal fields, quoted a miner's opinion of the lot of local immigrants: "They don't live no better than dogs." Norris disagreed. Their existence, he said, was much worse: "They live in houses built of sheet-iron, and boards, about fifteen feet square and sunk about three feet in the ground. Of course there is but one room, and in this room the family -- anywhere from six to ten humans -- cooks, eats and sleeps."

Despite the long-range benefits of such exposes, the immigrants received little practical help and almost no immediate improvement in their condition. Happily, there were exceptional cases, and a few city governments took steps to make life easier for the poor. Tom L. Johnson, the benevolent mayor of Cleveland, Ohio, introduced cheap public transportation and built parks, playgrounds and public baths to help brighten the dreariness of slum life. But in most other places, immigrants were forced to rely upon themselves. Banding together to seek strength in numbers, they joined religious brotherhoods, community welfare associations, labor unions and local political clubs.

Politically, most of the newcomers were inexperienced and naive; they spent years learning how to use the American party system to make government responsive to their needs. In the interim, many became the clients - and the victims - of machine politicians, who, although they did offer some leadership and protection, nevertheless set records for venality and greed. Perhaps the greediest of all was tough William Flinn, a Pittsburgh boss who made several fortunes in high-level graft; when Flinn died in l924, he left an estate of more than $11 million. But even lesser ward bosses amassed millions in small "donation" from shopkeepers, criminals and companies angling for business with the city.

Thus any crafty boss had plenty of money to spend, and he spent it liberally down in the wards whence came his power. In New York City, with its immigrant-crowded slums, the casting of bread upon the waters brought manifold returns to the Tammany organization of boss Charles F. Murphy. One of Murphy's lieutenants, George W. Plunkitt, was an expert in philanthropy. "If a family is burned out," explained this rich and genial grafter, "I don't ask whether they are Republicans or Democrats. I just get quarters for them, buy clothes for them if their clothes were burned up, and fix them up till they get things runnin' again. Who can tell how many votes these fires bring me?"

Because Flinn and many other bosses were immigrants with big immigrant followings, bigoted natives held the newcomers responsible for political corruption. But the muckraking champions of the hapless immigrant put bossism and corruption in proper perspective. "The boss," said Riis, "is like measles, a distemper of a self-governing people's infancy." Lincoln Steffens, investigating municipal corruption for a series in McClure's magazine, discovered that New York and Chicago were well governed despite their immigrants, while Philadelphia, "the purest American community of all," was "the most hopeless." Steffens concluded: "The 'foreign element' excuse is one of the hypocritical lies that save us from the clear sight of ourselves."

The prejudice and scorn of natives drove many immigrants in upon themselves and hardened them. However, most of the younger immigrants, and almost all of the second generation, sought to win acceptance by Americanization. They were pathetically eager to abandon Old World ways and dress, to speak English without an accent, to acquire American friends and manners. A Polish immigrant, gainfully employed in a Polish section but frustrated by the "foreign" environment, wrote a touching appeal to the Massachusetts Commission on Immigration: "I want live with american people, but where? Not in the country, because I want go in the city, free evening schools and lern. I'm looking for help. If somebody could give me another job between american people, help me live with them and lern english - and could tell me the best way how I can lern - it would be very, very good for me."

Ironically, the ideal of assimilation was responsible for the immigrant's ultimate tragedy. Some parents encouraged their children's efforts to Americanize. Others resisted with the full strength of their Old World authority. But in either case, the results were usually the same. Even before the children grew up and left home, they drifted away from the family, and the gap between the generations steadily widened.

Complete Americanization was the goal of Mary Antin, a gifted girl from Russia whose family settled in a Boston slum. With the father's encouragement, the children went their own way; Mary devoted herself to study and writing. She scored a grade-school triumph when her poem in praise of George Washington was published in the Boston Herald, and her father proudly distributed among friends all the papers he could buy. In the arrogance of her youthful fame, and with a faith in America that defied yet demanded explication, Mary wrote passionately, "It would have been amazing if I had stuck in the mire of the slum. By every law of my nature, I was bound to soar above it, to attain the fairer places that wait for every emancipated immigrant."

Mary Antin and countless fellow immigrants did escape from the slums into the American mainstream. But they left behind many others - people once as optimistic as they - to hopeless proverty and frustration.

To Be Continued . . . 'The Kids'

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Copied by Nancee(McMurtey)Seifert
February 27, 2004