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Atlantic Monthly. 102: 745-59. December, 1908

Races in the United States. William Z. Ripley

The population of Europe may, in a rough way, be divided into an east and a west. The contrast between the two may be best illustrated, perhaps, in geological terms. Everywhere these populations have been laid down originally in more or less distinct strata. In the Balkan States and Austria-Hungary, this stratification is recent and still distinct; while in western Europe the several layers have become metamorphosed by the fusing heat of nationality and the pressure of civilization. But in both instances these populations are what the geologist would term sedimentary. In the United States, an entirely distinct formation occurs; which, in continuation of our geological figure, may best be characterized by the term eruptive. We have to do, not with the slow processes of growth by deposit or accretion, but with violent and volcanic dislocation. We are called upon to survey a lava-flow of population, suddenly cast forth from Europe and spread indiscriminately over a new continent.

Judged solely from the standpoint of numbers, the phenomenon of American immigration is stupendous. We have become so accustomed to it in the United States that we often lose sight of its numerical magnitude. About 25,000,000 people have come to the United States from all over Europe since 1820. This is about equal to the entire population of the United Kingdom only fifty years ago, at the time of our Civil War. It is, again, more than the population of all Italy in the time of Garibaldi. Otherwise stated, this army of people would populate, as it stands to-day, all that most densely settled section of the United States north of Maryland and east of the Great Lakes,—all New England, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, in fact.

This horde of immigrants, has mainly come since the Irish potato famine of the middle of the last century. The rapid increase year by year has taken the form, not of a steady growth, but of an intermittent flow. First came the people of the British Isles after the downfall of Napoleon, 2000 in 1815 and 35,000 in 1819. Thereafter the numbers remain about 75,000 yearly, until the Irish famine, when, in 1852, 368,000 immigrants from the British Isles landed on our shores. These were succeeded by the Germans, largely moved at first by the political events of 1848. By 1854 a million and a half Teutons, mainly from northern

Germany, had settled in America. So many were there that ambitious plans for the foundation of a German state in the new country were actually set on foot. The later German immigrants were recruited largely from the Rhine provinces, and have settled further to the northwest, in Wisconsin and Iowa; the earliest wave having come from northern Germany to Ohio, Indiana, and Missouri. The Swedes began to come after the Civil War. Their immigration culminated in 1882 with the influx of about 50,000 in that year. More recent still are the Italians, beginning with a modest 20,000 in 1876, rising to over 200,000 arrivals in 1888, and constituting an army of 300,000 in the single year of 1907 and accompanying the Italian has come the great horde of Slavs, Huns, and Jews.

Wave has followed wave, each higher than the last,—the ebb and flow being dependent upon economic conditions in large measure. It is the last great wave, ebbing since last fall, which has most alarmed us in America. This gathered force on the revival of prosperity about 1897, but it did not attain full measure until 1900. Since that year over six million people have landed on our shores,-one-quarter of the total immigration since the beginning. The newcomers of these eight years alone would repopulate all the five older New England states as they stand today; or, if properly disseminated over the newers parts of the country, they would serve to populate no less than nineteen states of the Union as they stand. The new-comers of the last eight years could, if suitably seated in the land, elect thirty-eight out of the present ninety-two Senators of the United States. Is it any wonder that thoughtful political students stand somewhat aghast? In the last of these eight years-1907-there were one and one quarter million arrivals. This number would entirely populate both New Hampshire and Maine, two of our oldest states, with an aggregate territory approximately equal to Ireland and Wales. The arrivals of this one year would found a state with more inhabitants than any one of twenty-one of our other existing commonwealths which could be named.

It is not alone the rapid increase in our immigration which merits attention. It is also the radical change in its character, in the source from whence it comes. Whereas, until about twenty years ago, our immigrants were drawn from the AngloSaxon or Teutonic populations of north-western Europe, they

have swarmed over here in rapidly growing proportions since that time from Mediterranean, Slavic, and Oriental sources. A quarter of a century ago, two-thirds of our immigration was truly Teutonic or Anglo-Saxon in origin. At the present time, less than one-sixth comes from this source. The British Isles,

Germany, Scandinavia, and Canada unitedly sent us 90 per cent of our immigrants in the decade to 1870; 82.8 per cent in 1870-80; 75.6 per cent in 1880-90; and only 41.8 per cent in 1890-1900. Since then, the proportion has been very much smaller still. Germany used to contribute one-third of our new-comers. In 1907 it sent barely one-seventh. On the other hand, Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Italy, which produced about 1 per cent of the total in 1860-70, jointly contributed 50.1 per cent in 18901900. Of the million and a quarter arrivals in 1907, almost 900,000 came from these three countries alone. I have been at some pains to reclassify the immigration for 1907, in conformity with the racial groupings of the "Races of Europe"; disregarding, that is to say, mere linguistic affiliations, and dividing on the basis of physical types. The total of about one and onequarter million arrivals was distributed as follows:

330,000 Mediterranean Race (one-quarter)

194,000 Alpine Race (one-sixth)

330,000 Slavic Race (one-quarter)

194,000 Teutonic Race (one-sixth)

146,000 Jewish (mainly Russian) (one-eighth)

In that year, 330,000 South Italians took the place of the 250,000 Germans who came in 1882, when the Teutonic immigration was at its flood. One and one-half million Italians have come since 1900; over one million Russians; and a million and a half natives of Austria-Hungary. We have even tapped the political sinks of Europe, and are now drawing large numbers of Greeks, Armenians, and Syrians. No people is too mean or lowly to seek an asylum on our shores.

The net result of this immigration has been to produce a congeries of human beings, unparalleled for ethnic diversity anywhere else on the face of the earth. The most complex populations of Europe, such as those of the British Isles, Northern France, or even the Balkan States, seem ethnically pure by contrast.

Our people have been diverse in origin from the start to a greater degree than is ordinarily supposed. Virginia and New

England, to be sure, were for a long time Anglo-Saxon undefiled; but in the other colonies there was much intermixture, such as the German in Pennsylvania, the Swedish along the Delaware, the Dutch in New York, and the Scotch Highlander and Huguenot in the Carolinas. Little centres of foreign inoculation in the early days are discoverable everywhere.

Concerning New York City, Father Jognes states that the Director-General told him of eighteen languages spoken there in 1644. For the entire thirteen colonies at the time of the Revolution, we have it on good authority that one-fifth of the population could not speak English; and that one-half at least was not Anglo-Saxon by descent. Upon such a stock, it is little wonder that the grafting of these twenty-five million immigrants promises to produce an extraordinary human product.

For over half a century more than one-seventh of our aggregate population has been of actually foreign birth. This proportion of actual foreigners of all sorts varies greatly, however, as between the different states. In Minnesota and New York, for example, at the present time, the foreign-born, as we denote them statistically, constitute about a fourth of the whole population; in Massachusetts, the proportion is about one-third; occasionally, as in North Dakota in 1899, it approaches one-half (42 per cent). It is in the cities, of course, that this proportion of actual foreigners rises highest. In New York City there are over two million people born in Europe, who have come there hoping to better their lots in life. Boston has an even higher proportion of actual foreigners, but the relatively larger numbers of those speaking English, such as the Irish, renders the phenomenon less striking. Nevertheless, within a few blocks, in a colony of 28,000 people, there are no less than twenty-five distinct nationalities. In this entire district, once the fashionable quarter of Boston, out of the 28,000 inhabitants, only 1500 in 1895 had parents born in the United States.

The full measure of our ethnic diversity is revealed only when one aggregates the actually foreign-born with their children born in America, totalizing, as we call it, the foreign-born and the native-born of foreign parentage. This group thus includes only the first generation of American descent. Oftentimes even the second generation may remain ethnically as undefiled as the first; but our positive statistical data carry us no further.

This group of foreign-born with its children con

stitutes to-day upwards of one-third of our total population; and, excluding the negroes, it equals almost one-half (46 per cent) of the whole white population. This is for the country as a whole. Considered by states or cities, the proportion is, of course, much higher. Baltimore, one of our purest American cities, had 40 per cent of foreigners with their children in 1900. In Boston, the proportion leaps to 70 per cent; in New York to 80 per cent; and it reaches a maximum in Milwaukee, with 86 per cent thus constituted. Imagine an English city of the size of Edinburgh with only about one person in eight English by descent through only a modest two generations. To this condition must be added the probability that not over one-half of that remnant of a rear-guard can trace its descent on American soil as far back as a third generation. Were we to eliminate these foreigners and their children from our city population, it has been estimated that Chicago, with today a population of over two millions, would dwindle to a city of not much over one hundred thousand inhabitants.

One may select industries practically given over to foreigners. Over 90 per cent of the tailors of New York City are Jews, mainly Russian and Polish. In Massachusetts, the centre of our staple cotton manufacture, out of 98,000 employees, one finds that only 3900, or about 4 per cent, are native-born Americans; and most of those are of Irish or Scotch-Irish descent two generations back. All of our day labor, once Irish, is now Italian; our fruit-venders, once Italian, are now becoming Greek; and our coal mines, once manned by people from the British Isles, are now worked by Hungarians, Poles, Slovaks, or Finns.

A special study of the linguistic conditions in Chicago well illustrates our racial heterogeneity. Among the people of that great city, the second in size in the United States,-fourteen languages are spoken by groups of not less than ten thousand persons each. Newspapers are regularly published in ten languages; and church services are conducted in twenty different tongues. Measured by the size of its foreign linguistic colonies, Chicago is the second Bohemian city in the world, the third Swedish, the fourth Polish, and the fifth German (New York being the fourth). There is one large factory in Chicago employing over four thousand people, representing twenty-four distinct nationalities. Rules of the establishment are regularly

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