American cities have been slow to consider industrial questions as germane to government, and the Federal authorities have persistently treated the millions of immigrants who arrive every year upon a political theory and method adopted a century ago, because both of them ignore the fact that the organization of industry has completed a revolution during that period.
The gigantic task of standardizing the successive nations of immigrants throughout the country has fallen upon workmen because they alone cannot ignore the actual industrial situation. To thousands of workmen the immigration problem is a question of holding a job against a constantly lowering standard of living, and to withstand this stream of "raw labor" means to them the maintenance of industrial efficiency and of life itself. Workingmen are engaged in a desperate struggle to maintain a standard of wages against the constant arrival of unskilled immigrants at the rate of three- quarters of a million a year, at the ( 94) very period when the elaboration of machinery permits the largest use of unskilled men.
It may be owing to the fact that the workingman is brought into direct contact with the situation as a desperate problem of a living wage against starvation; it may be that wisdom is at her old trick of residing in the hearts of the ******, or that this new idealism, which is that of a reasonable life and labor, must, from the very nature of things, proceed from those who labor; or possibly it may be because amelioration arises whence it is so sorely needed; but certainly it is true, that, while the rest of the country talks of assimilation as if it were a huge digestive apparatus, the man with whom the immigrant has come most sharply into competition, has been forced into fraternal relations with him.
Curiously enough, however, as soon as the immigrant situation is frankly regarded as an industrial one, as these men must regard it, the political aspects of the industrial situation is revealed in the fact that trade organizations which openly concern themselves with the immigration problem on its industrial side, quickly take on the paraphernalia and machinery which have hitherto associated themselves only with governmental life and control. The trades unions have worked out all over again local autonomy, with central ( 95) councils and national representative bodies and the use of the referendum vote; and they also exhibit many of the features of political corruption and manipulation.
The first real lesson in self-government to many immigrants has come through the organization of labor unions, and it could come in no other way, for the union alone has appealed to their necessities. One sees the first indication of an idealism arising out of these primal necessities, and at moments one dares to hope that it may be sturdy enough and sufficiently founded upon experience to make some impression upon the tremendous immigration situation.
The movements embodying a new idealism have traditionally sought refuge with those who are near to starvation. Although the spiritual struggle is associated with the solitary garret of the impassioned dreamer, it may be that the idealism fitted to our industrial democracy will be evolved in crowded sewer ditches and in noisy factories. It may be contended that this remarkable coming together of the workingman and the immigrant has been the result of an economic pressure, and is without merit or idealism, and that the trades union record on Chinese exclusion and negro discrimination has been damaging. Be that as it may, this assimilation between the ( 96) immigrant and the workingman has exhibited amazing strength, which may be illustrated from two careful studies made in two different parts of the country.
To quote first from a study made from the University of Wisconsin of the stock yards strike which took place in Chicago in 1904 [ 1 ] "Perhaps the fact of the greatest social significance is that this was not merely a strike of skilled labor for the unskilled, but was a strike of Americanized Irish, Germans, and Bohemians, in behalf of Slovaks, Poles, and Lithuanians....
This substitution of races in the stock yards has been a continuing process for twenty years. The older nationalities have already disappeared from the unskilled occupations, and the substitution of races has evidently run along the line of lower standard of living. The latest arrivals, the Lithuanians and Slovaks, are probably the most oppressed of the peasants of Europe." The visitors who attended the crowded meetings of the strikers during the summer of 1904 and heard the same address successively translated by interpreters into six or eight languages, who saw the respect shown to the most uncouth of the speakers by the skilled American men represent-( 97)-ing a distinctly superior standard of life and thought, could never doubt the power of the labor organizations for amalgamation, whatever opinion they might hold concerning their other values. This may be said in spite of the fact that great industrial disturbances have arisen from the under-cutting of wages by the lowering of racial standard. Certainly the most notable of these have taken place in those industries and at those places in which the importation of immigrants has been deliberately fostered as a wage-lowering weapon; and even in those disturbances and under the shock and strain of a long strike, disintegration did not come along the line of race cleavage.
