That either of these alternatives is no small task, those of us realize who have had to meet the prevalent lack of comprehension of immigrant needs, reactions, and realities. Mr. Wells's recent remark will best describe it: "At the present level of education in the world," he said, "progress is like pushing one's way through a riot."

THE IMMIGRANT IN THE COMMUNITY

Bradley Buell, Secretary, Council on Immigrant Education, New York

The original title for this paper was "Organizing the Community for Immigrant Education." Miss Abbott, however, shortened it to "The Immigrant in the Community," with which I have no quarrel at all as long as she lets me talk about my original subject. For it is about our practical efforts to organize for immigrant education, and the organization and technical problems that seem to me to be involved, rather than primarily about the immigrant himself, that I wish to speak. Broadly speaking, our effective interest in the immigrant has largely divided itself along two general lines, the first having to do with his entrance into the country, the factors which enter into our policy of admission, and the administration of that policy as it finds itself expressed in law. The second active line of interest has been with the immigrant after he is admitted and as he lives his life in the American community, the adjustment which he makes to American conditions, the influence which he in turn has upon them.

For the past four years the eyes of social workers as well as of the interested public have been mainly focused upon the first set of problems. Legislation is always fascinating. The formation of our quota laws has been peculiarly so. Here, if anywhere, has been a battle ground upon which he who had opinions could prepare to shed them in the most vociferous and convincing manner possible, where prejudice and sentimentality had the most plausible grounds for self expression, where interested groups, economic, social, and racial, had the most deep-seated sort of motive for activity. Out of it has come our present law governing entrance and admission-neither better nor worse than most of the laws concerning social problems which find their way to our statute books. And it is little wonder that, for the period, the interest of all those concerned with immigration should have been so largely absorbed in this direction.

All the time, of course, we have had the 13,000,000 foreign-born residents of the United States. We have had, as one of the chief arguments of the prorestriction group, the difficulty of assimilating-whatever that meant-such large numbers of aliens. We had, for a time following the war, an Americanzation orgy. We have had, I think, even running through all this, something of an Americanization movement; and during all of these other things we have had, here and there, bits of truly serious and constructive work toward effecting a better long-time adjustment between the immigrant and his adopted country. Now that the quota policy is settled, at least for the time being, the focus of

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interest on the part of those who are professionally or semiprofessionally concerned with immigration is swinging back to what we once called Americanization and now call immigrant education, and which, whatever we may call it, goes back to the fundamental fact that the immigrant comes into a new country, that his adjustment to that country is a problem, at once to himself and to it, and that certain organized activities have within recent years been directed to the solution of that problem.

This, in general, is what I mean by organizing the community for immigrant education: taking whatever community resources and activities are at hand, and bringing them together in as effective as possible a fashion to facilitate and assist this process of adjustment. In so far as there is anything practical in what I have to say, it frankly comes from the experience of the Council on Immigrant Education in New York, which is a council of the agencies (some 250 in number) in the greater city who are working with the foreign-born, the Young Men's Christian Association, and Young Women's Christian Association, the Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant church groups, the settlements, libraries, some forty racial societies, a dozen workingmen's organizations, and a host of others. I recognize that for most of you this is an inadequate standpoint from which to speak. New York is unique, not only in its size, but in the character and number of its racial groups and the organization of its social agencies in so far as practical coordinating machinery is concerned. Other cities will and have devised other ways and means of organizing their communities. But the fundamental problems which any city with a large foreign-born population must meet are, I think, similar in kind, and it is an analysis of these problems, in terms of the possibility of our doing something about them, which I wish to make.

May I, first of all, however, make a few very general observations about the Americanization movement? I use that term for want of a better one. Any term is usually as good as the content which has been put into it, and it is usually just about as easy to change the content as it is to change the name. But the effort to "Americanize" the immigrant in terms of the patriotic society, on the one hand, and to facilitate his adjustment to America in terms of education and social work, on the other, has had, since the war at least, certain of the characteristics of a movement. Any practical effort to organize community resources to give the immigrant a more natural and normal place in the community inevitably goes back to such objectives, philosophy, or method as that movement has to give. To one who has been trying practically to effect such an organization this comes as an inescapable conclusion. There is at present the widest possible diversity of conception as to what the immigrant's place in the community should be, and the means by which he can be best assisted, if at all, to this place. There are 100 per cent Americans who would give him as little place as possible, and whose means to this end is the salute to the flag and the loyalty to the Constitution. There are the racial culturists who believe in the maximum preservation of his old-world habits, traditions, and customs.

There are the sentimentalists whose watchword is "Lo the Poor Immigrant," and there are the anthropologists who have been waging war against each other at a great rate. Out of all this may some day emerge basic ideas and attitudes which will stand the test of experience, and methods which will accomplish the results we are seeking, but it certainly has not yet. I think, however, that in the last two or three years a good deal of the froth has been blown off. The women's clubs, the chambers of commerce, and the loyalty leagues have gradually been intrigued in other directions. Fundamental differences in philosophy and method are commencing to emerge, and out of the clash behind their differences may come sound fundamental attitudes in regard to the communities' possibilities and opportunities toward its foreign-born population.

May I say one final word about this? The one field in which we have made most progress is that of instruction in English. The reasons are obvious. Even the most rabid of the racial culturists admits that knowledge of English is desirable. It is, in addition, something concrete and measurable. The public schools also exist everywhere, and the aftermath of the war, if it did nothing else, fixed upon them the responsibility for this task. Moreover, within the professional teaching group there has developed a leadership in immigrant education which is at least recognizable. There has been a steady specialization in methods for teaching adults English, and a very considerable literature published. Training courses have been organized very generally, and a sound personnel with specialized equipment for this particular kind of teaching has been developed. We would not paint too glowing a picture, yet it is the field in which the most practical achievements have been recorded.

The result has been that the educational group has pretty largely dominated the Americanization movement. And this has, I think, been unfortunate-unfortunate, at least, for social work. For it has tended to make practical community programs for Americanization mainly English-to-foreigners programsand for that broad field of adjustment and habit reformation it has left the avenue open for superficial propaganda about the vague concepts of loyalty, patriotism, love for America, and the like. In a sense this field of adjustment and habit reformation is that of the social worker, and the educators as specialists have little understood the problems or the method of the social worker. Both practically and theoretically, therefore, such Americanization movements as we have had have made little contribution to the practical problems of the social worker. The reverse is, I think, equally true.

In a city like New York, to talk about the immigrant is in a sense to talk about the city itself; 2,000,000 of its inhabitants were born abroad; another 2,000,000 are their children. What percentage there is of native American stock, if we take the census definition of that, namely, those whose ancestors were in this country about 1790, I do not know, probably between 5 per cent and 10 per cent, and most of them from the Middle West. Nearly half of the residents are of Jewish or Italian origin. This process of interaction, the whittling off of

the strictly orthodox of the old-world traditions in the foreign colonies, the absorption of some of their flavor by the city as a whole is, in its essence, the New York of today. The most typical New Yorker I know is a Russian Jewess who came to this country when she was very young, who went through the famous garment workers' strike of fifteen years ago, who was a leader in the suffrage movement, not only amongst the labor group, but with the club women as well, who has lived on the East Side, West Side, up and down town, whose daughter is a member of one of the leading artists' groups in the city, and a musical and theatrical critic. This woman knows New York as you and I can never know it. She loves it. She thinks the Middle West the seat of the conservative and home of the dull, the South, a hot and Bourbon place teeming with pickaninnies, and the Far West, the land of moving pictures. She is the best product of this inevitable process of adjustment and assimilation that I know. And when we talk of the melting-pot, if any one still does, I think that in New York, at least, we must frankly face the fact that she represents the strongest solution-the solutions which dominate out of all recognition that small percentage of those whose ancestors were here in 1790.

One of the first questions that we must raise, therefore, it seems to me, when we are talking about organizing the community for immigrant education, is whether or not we are considering as our basic problem this whole and fundamental process of adjustment, interaction, and assimilation which is going on. The definition of the Americanization Series of the Carnegie Foundation assumes that we do, although in so doing it is perfectly obvious that we are concerning ourselves with the entire life of the community. We have the immigrant in the schools, in the community, in the courts, in the press, on the land, in all of the institutions, situations, contacts, functions, which go to make up the community. Unquestionably it is his twenty-four-hour-a-day experience in these various phases of life which are breaking down the old habits and attitudes which he brought with him to this country, and giving him new ones. The same process is going on one step farther in the children.

To this process, taken as a whole, we have given almost no direction, nor am I at all convinced that we ever can. Certainly not as long as our knowledge of individual and group psychology is as inadequate as it is, and our understanding of organization in its present embryonic stage. For the fundamental fact about the assimilation of the immigrant is that it is life itself. It is no different in kind than the process of adaptation to our environment which is going on in every one of us, and in regard to the direction of that process, as a whole, social work and social science have made, so far, the most meager of contributions.

So that my first point in regard to the organization of the community for immigrant education is that we must proceed from the concrete to the general. It doesn't do much good to talk about the melting-pot as if it were something we could build a fire under, or Americanization as if it were something

one could teach. For fundamentally it is a process about which we understand little and can control less. What we can do, I think, is to recognize that while the process is identical in kind in all of us, yet for the majority of immigrants and for many of their children there are points in their experience where it is very different in degree. The practical problem of organizing the community seems to me to be just this: to find out where the strategic points are in the lives of the majority of immigrants, where the old-world customs are breaking down fastest, and the greatest difficulty in acquiring the customs of the New World is experienced; and after we have found out what these points are, of organizing around them the best service which we can.

Some of you are familiar with the study of the immigrant attitudes which the Council began a year ago under the auspices of Professor Julius Drachsler, and which has, unfortunately, been halted by his illness. Four questions were formulated: (1) What was your work experience in the Old Country? What here? Which do you like best? (2) What were your religious observances at home? What here? Contrast the two. (3) How did you spend your leisure time in the Old Country? How here? Which do you prefer? (4) What contact did you have with the court officials in Europe? Here? Contrast them. When the study is resumed, a fifth will be added-What was your home life abroad? Here? Which do you think is best? These questionnaires were printed in fifteen foreign languages, and a thousand of them distributed to students in English classes in the eastern states. Enough returns have been translated to show the value of this method in studying the problem, but my purpose in mentioning it here is to indicate the kind of scientific knowledge which we must have to tell us where these differences in degree are greatest, to point out where practical programs should be organized.

At present I think there are but four points, and I am tempted to say only four points, where we can be sure that the majority of the immigrants need special assistance that the native American does not; where, on the one hand, that difference in degree presents a stubborn barrier to the immigrant which does not exist for us, and which, on the other hand, is sufficiently concrete so that definite activities can be practically organized to help him over the barrier. These are:

First, the knowledge of the English language. I have already said what I think about this. Knowledge of our language is the means through which new habits and adjustment to America must, to a very large degree, come. If the immigrant cannot understand English, he cannot understand America nor make America understand him. The organization of adequate facilities for instructing the adult immigrant in English should, I think, come first and foremost on the program of any community organization.

Second, citizenship. About this there has been much more confusion. Immediately following the war there was a great hue and cry about making every immigrant a citizen, as if by that act he would become an American in whatever