growing generations to the newer concept of social harmony rather than feeding their imaginations exclusively on the beauties and the profits of social uniformity. Still less impatient would the native-born American of the old white stock be with the cultural heritage of the immigrant if he knew more clearly what happens in the mind of the new settler in the process of assimilation. After having unconsciously slipped into the new habit life he often begins to justify his acceptance of it. He begins to rationalize it. It is here that the danger in the process of assimilation lurks. With the shedding of superficial traits has gone imperceptibly a change in some deeper habits of thought and of action. The danger is not so much that he finds himself in a new frame of mind as that he tends to justify it at all costs.

That there is much in American life which, after having been imitated by the eager immigrant, is hardly justifiable or "rationalizable," cannot be denied. There is only one way to prevent him from rationalizing habits and values not worth while. It is so to reconstruct the life of the community into which the immigrant comes as a stranger that he will acquire only such habits as are worthy of rationalization. But this requires in most instances a radical remaking of the structure of community life. The immigrant in this sense becomes a perennial challenge to the ethically minded native, compelling him to ask himself soul-searching questions about the inner and the outer life of America.

What, then, must be the guiding thought in the quest for a newer ideal of Americanization? It must be the thought of a democracy broad enough to embrace full political equality, human enough to make room for industrial self-realization, dwelling in the midst of America to join, as perpetually creative forces, in the building of a synthetic civilization that shall bear the lasting imprints of the genius of many peoples.

B. IMMIGRANT HERITAGES

Professor Robert E. Park, University of Chicago

Some years ago an enterprising Chicago newspaper man wrote a series of articles describing the different foreign language communities in Chicago under the title of "Round the World in Forty Blocks." One of the strange, interesting, and significant features of American life is its foreign language communities. During a peaceful invasion covering a period of a hundred years, nearly every language group in the civilized world has established colonies in this country, little cultural centers which are trying to maintain in the midst of us traditions and a language of their own. When there are in an American city as many Jews as there are Danes in Denmark, and in the same city more Italians than there are Italians in Rome, we have indeed "something new in history."

It happens that for the past two or three years I have been "seeing" this America. I have been seeing it mainly through the contents of the foreign language press. The distribution of this press is significant, since it locates with considerable accuracy their principal settlements in the United States, and makes it possible to outline "cultural areas" in which the influences of certain immigrant groups have been more pronounced than elsewhere. Every foreign language group tends to make some one city its cultural capital, as New York is the Jewish, and Chicago the Polish capital, respectively. Here

are their largest populations and their most important cultural institutions. The character and contents of the papers published in these areas are an index likewise to the characteristic interests, ambitions, and social attitudes of the people who read them. In this way it is possible, not merely to define different immigrant areas, but to sketch, in a rough way, their moral, psychological, and political complexions. Outside New York and Chicago, where most of the larger immigrant colonies are located, the immigrant population, as marked by the location of their journals, falls into three or four large groups.

The Middle West group, represented by the Germans and Scandinavians, stretches a German arm down into the Southwest as far as central Texas, and a Scandinavian arm up into Minnesota and the Northwest. This group includes also the Bohemian farmers of Wisconsin and Iowa, and small groups of Hollanders, and such minor population groups as the Belgian-Flemish and the Welch. If it were possible to characterize this Middle Western group with a word, one might designate them, with reference to their attitude as immigrants, as settlers.

A second group might include the Spanish, who have crossed the border from Mexico in the south, and the French, who have come down from the Province of Quebec on the north. These peoples, with reference to their attitude toward American life, might be designated as colonists.

A third division of immigrant peoples that can be locally defined, is that represented mainly by the Italian and Slavic populations. These people have left their own country, but they have not quite settled in this. We may characterize them as the migrant, as distinguished from the immigrant peoples. They are the migrant industrials.

Finally, there are the minor nationalities, who live for the most part in the larger cities, and engage either in trade or in the lighter secondary industries. All these we may classify as exotics, because for various reasons they are, or seem to be, more completely isolated and removed from contact and participation in American life than any other immigrant peoples.

Some groups do not belong completely to any one of these classifications. The sea-roving Portuguese from the Cape Verde Islands have established small colonies and newspapers on both the eastern and the western coasts. The fact that they cling to the coast shows how tentative their occupation is, and from the point of view of participation in American life, they should be classed with the exotics. Yet, industrially, they belong with the migrant industrials. The Jewish immigrants, who might be classed with any one of the different categories, can actually be classed with none. The Jew, to be sure, has a predilection for trade and is by tradition a city-dweller. But the Jew, just because he has no native country, in the sense that the Norwegian is native to Norway, when he changes his nationality does so whole-heartedly. He brings his family and all his household and tribal gods

These outlines of the characteristic types States offer a first rough sketch of America as the point of view of the immigrants themselves life of any one of these foreign language settle interesting and informing. In order to little foreign communities we must know and the motives that sustained them afte

494

UNITING OF NATIVE AND FOREIGN-BORN

The fever of immigration, as has long been recognized, is highly contag When it strikes a peasant village, it infects the whole community and continues to until all who can have emigrated. In this country a new community is thus es lished which is virtually a colony of the village, and eventually of the province, in old country from which the immigrants originally came. ered with little settlements, each composed almost entirely of people from a sin village or province abroad. The United States is che

The difference in the situation of the immigrant people who settled mostly in th cities and those who settled in rural communities is that the colonies of the former hav been literally crushed together in congested areas; while the latter have been dispersed and isolated in small agricultural communities scattered over two-thirds of the United States. This accounts for a great many of the differences which students have noted between the earlier and later generations of immigrants. The earlier immigrants were what we have called settlers. They came to stay and for the most part they settled on the land. This was not true of the Irish. They settled in the cities. The later immigrants have followed the example of the Irish. Now the first effect of city life is to destroy the provincialism of the immigrant, and to intensify his sense of racial and national solidarity. This explains why the Jewish people, although they use three distinct foreign languages, German, Yiddish, and Ladino, have attained in the United States a degree of solidarity and community organization more efficient than they have attained anywhere else since the Dispersion. What is true of the Jews is likewise true, though in a less degree, of the other urban peoples. This effect of city life is visible in the urban press, where both news columns and editorials create and maintain an active interest in the politics, national and international, of the home country. The larger metropolitan papers, with their wide circulation, are bound to address themselves neither to Bavarians, nor to Westphalians, nor to Saxons, but to Germans; not to Genoese, Neapolitans, Abuzzesi, or Girgentesi, but simply to Italians. In this way, residence in our cities has broken down the local and provincial loyalties, with which the immigrants arrived, and substituted a less intense but more national loyalty in its place.

The tendency of rural life is naturally in the opposite direction. It emphasizes local differences, preserves the memories of the immigrants, and fosters a sentimental interest in the local home community. This is illustrated by the German provincial press, which is printed in a dialect no longer recognized by the European press, and which idealized German provincial life as it existed fifty years ago and still lives in the memories of the editors and readers of these papers.

It is an interesting fact that as first step in Americanization the immigrant ceases to be a provincial and becomes a nationalist. The Wurtemburgers and the Westphalians become Germans; the Siciantians and Neapolitans become Italians, and the Jews become Zionists. The ambition of the immigrant to gain recognition in the American community, "to represent" the national name "well in America," as Agaton Giller says, is one of the first characteristic manifestations of national consciousness and it is because he has been unable to get that recognition as an individual that he seeks it as a member of a nationality. One reason immigrants live in a colony is that they cannot get out, and one reason they establish nationalist societies which seek among other things to represent the old country well in this, is that in this way they can

contagious. nues to rage thus estabnce, in the

is checka single

a American life. If the immigrant chooses to remain a hyphenated is frequently because, only through an organization of his own language ne get status and recognition in the larger American world outside. As a i immigrant community he and the community are enabled to participate in life in ways which they could not as individuals, unacquainted with the and with the customs of the country as they are. Sometimes the motive of nalist leader is less patriotic, nationalistically, than commercial. A Report of ed States Immigration Commission on immigrant banks refers to the frequent aking coalition between immigrant bankers and immigrant newspapers. ere is no question that not only the nationalist societies, which avowedly aim eserve" the immigrant for the mother country, but all other immigrant institudo intentionally or unintentionally seek to retard the assimilation of the immi. But it is doubtful whether the nationalist societies which are organized for the ose of maintaining a patriotic interest in the language and in the home country ot on the whole promote Americanization rather than retard it. The nationalist spaper does not want its readers to become Americans, but by encouraging them to d it does make them more intelligent, and by printing news of what is going on in aerica, which it must do in order to circulate at all, it necessarily prepares its readers be American citizens.

No racial group has made a more desperate fight to maintain the interest of its mmigrants in the home country than the Poles. It is the observation of a very keen student, Florian Znaniecki, that Polish-American circles are wholly absorbed in Polish politics. So absorbed is the Polish community in itself and in Poland that they refer to the Polish-American community as Polonia America and regard it as "the fourth division of Poland." In spite of the interest of the Polish intelligentzia in Polish politics its efforts to impart its enthusiams to the masses are not always successful. We have only to read the accounts which the leaders give in their own press of the difficulties they are having to maintain in this country the language and traditions of the homeland, to realize how glacial and, in the long run, wholly irresistible, under conditions of American life, is the trend toward a common language, a common life, and a common tradition of all the peoples in this country. Many immigrants do not learn until they return to their native country how completely assimilated they have become.

If it is true that the immigrant, who arrives here a provincial, takes his first step in Americanization when he becomes concerned about the reputation of his home country in America, it is equally true that the immigrant who remains a provincial remains at the same time farthest removed from American life. The Italians apply the term caffone, simpleton, to a class of immigrants who refuses to burnth patriotic sentiment for his own nationality-perhaps does not know what nation 1-and is equally unconcerned in regard to the opinions of Americans in regard countrymen.

memories, the news, and the gossip of the home community. Every letter to any member of the community is news for the whole community. Nothing goes on in the home village that is not known soon or later in the American colony of that village. Everyone reckons upon eventually returning home, if for nothing more than a visit. If any member of the colony in America marries outside the community or announces finally that he does not intend to return he is regarded as lost. It is natural under the circumstances that, even in the heart of the largest city in America, immigrants living thus should gain a very inadequate and a very unfavorable opinion of America. This is true of the Italians, perhaps, because most of what they learn of this country outside of the gossip of the colony comes to them through the Italian newspapers. These newspapers are bound to print what their public can and will read. They do print, at any rate, the sort of news ignorant peasants, already prejudiced against this country, are likely to read most easily. There is a good deal of crime committed by Italians against Italians. This is naturally all attributed to the inefficiency of the American police and the corruption of American politics.

We do not realize that the Americanization of the immigrant begins long before he reaches America. Every peasant village in Europe has some returned immigrants. The letters from America are filled with stories of strange adventures of relatives and neighbors. Every peasant village has its own tradition about America, but it is not the America we know; it is immigrant America. A striking feature of the market places in Catania, Sicily, where on a market day the peasants from all the surrounding country gather to trade and chaffer, exchanging their little stocks of produce for the townsman's wares, are the professional story-tellers, each surrounded by a group of enthralled peasants. The favorite stories are of America, America and the "Black Hand." We think of the Black Hand as an importation from Sicily. The Sicilian, however, does not regard the fabulous stories about America as comparable with anything in his experience. The only America of which the Sicilian peasant has any knowledge is just that America which is even more strange and foreign to us than it is to him, namely, the Little Italies of our great cities.

It is reasonably clear, then, that the immigrant lives in America where he can, and there learns of America. He lives in a colony of his own people because, under ordinary circumstances, that is the only place he can live at all. He learns about America what the experience of those who preceded him have taught them. He makes the accommodations that others have made. For a long time the immigrant community is almost the only source of information about American life that is accessible to the newly arrived immigrant. For a long time, as far as he is concerned, the immigrant community is America. If this community is well organized, if it is directed by leaders of intelligence and understanding, if the average of intelligence and culture in the community is high, as is the case with the Jews and the Japanese, then the difficult, painful, and often heart-breaking process of accommodation to American life will proceed, relatively speaking, rapidly and easily. If the situation is, as frequently happens, just the opposite, then Americanization will lag, and the natural animosities or indifference to American institutions and life will obstruct where it does not altogether inhibit the process of assimilation. The fact is, however, that the immigrant community, which is itself an accommodation to American life, is almost the only institution outside of the public school that has actually helped the immigrant to find his place and make his way in America.