They Who Knock at Our Gates - A Complete Gospel of Immigration

Mary Antin

• Publisher: Read & Co. Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781528781541
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Emigrazione e immigrazione

Three main questions may be asked with reference to immigration: First: Have we any right to regulate immigration?Second: What is the nature of our present immigration?Third: Is immigration good for us?Mary Antin's 'They Who Knock at Our Gates' provides a fascinating and valuable social history of immigration. A topic that has always been under political and economic scrutiny and even more so today. This text was originally published in 1914 and its message and ideas are still relevant today.Mary Antin (1881 – 1949) was an American author and immigration rights activist. She is best known for her 1912 autobiography The Promised Land, an account of her emigration and subsequent Americanisation.

II

JUDGES IN THE GATE

Judges and officers shalt thou make thee in all thy gates . . . and they shall judge the people with just judgment.

DEUT. XVI, 18.

THERE is nothing so potent in a public debate as the picturesque catchwords in which leaders of thought sum up their convictions. Logic makes fewer converts in a year than a taking phrase makes in a week. For catchwords are the popular substitute for logic, and the man in the street is reduced to silence by a good round phrase of the kind that sticks.

Two classes of citizens are especially prone to fall under the tyranny of phrases: those whose horizon, through no fault of their own, is limited by the rim of an empty dinner-pail; and those whose view of the universe is obstructed by the kitchen-middens of too many dinners. There is no clear thinking on an empty stomach, and equally muddled are the thoughts of the over-full. When I hear of a public measure that is largely supported by these two classes of citizens, I know at once that the measure appeals to human prejudices rather than to divine reason.

Thus I became suspicious of the restrictionist movement when I realized that it was in greatest favor among the thoughtless poor and the thoughtless rich. I am well aware that the high-priests of the cult include some of the most conscientious thinkers that ever helped to make history, and their earnestness is attested by a considerable body of doctrine, in support of which they quote statistics and special studies and scientific investigations. But I notice that the rank and file of restrictionists do not know as much as the titles of these documents. They have not followed the argument at all; they have only caught the catchwords of restrictionism. And these catchwords are the sort that appeal to the mean spots in human nature,—the distrust of the stranger, the jealousy of possession, the cowardice of the stomach. Nothing else is expressed by such phrases as “the scum of Europe,” “the exploitation of America’s wealth,” or “taking the bread from the mouth of the American workingman.”

Even the least venomous formula of restrictionism, “immigration isn’t what it used to be,” raises such a familiar echo of foolish human nature that I am bound to challenge its veracity. Does not every generation cry that the weather isn’t what it used to be, children are not what they used to be, society is not what it used to be? “The good old times” and “the old immigration” may be twin illusions of limited human vision.

If it is true that immigration is not what it used to be, the fact will appear from a detailed comparison of the “old” and the “new” immigration. But which of the immigrant stocks of the good old times shall be taken as a standard? Woman’s wisdom urges me to go right back to the original pattern, just as I would do if I went to the shops to match samples. And the original pattern was brought to this country in the year 1620. Surely comparison with the Mayflower stock is the most searching test of the quality of our immigration that any one could propose.

The predominant virtue of the Pilgrims was idealism. The things of the spirit were more to them than the things of the flesh. May we say the like of our present immigrants? Of very many of them, yes; a thousand times yes. Of the 8,213,000 foreigners landed between the years 1899 and 1909, 990,000 were of that race which for nineteen centuries has sacrificed its flesh in the service of the spirit. It takes a hundred times as much steadfastness and endurance for a Russian Jew of to-day to remain a Jew as it took for an English Protestant in the seventeenth century to defy the established Church.

Those who think that with the Spanish Inquisition Jewish martyrdom came to an end are asked to remember that the Kishinieff affair is only eight years behind us, and that Bielostock has been heard from since Kishinieff, and Mohileff since Bielostock. And more terrible than the recurrent pogrom, which hacks and burns and tortures a few hundreds now and then, is the continuous bloodless martyrdom of the six million Jews in Russia through the operation of the anti-Semitic laws of that country. Thirty minutes spent in looking over a summary of these laws recently compiled by an English historian(1) will convince any reader with a spark of imagination that every Russian Jewish immigrant to-day is a fugitive from religious persecution, even as were the English immigrants of 1620.

But while nobody questions the idealism of the Jew in religion, the world has been very slow to credit him with any degree of civic devotion. The world did not stop to think that a man has to have a country before he can prove himself a good citizen. But happily in recent times he has been put to the test of civic opportunity, notably in America; with the result that he was found to possess a fair share of the civic virtues, from the generosity displayed in the town meeting, when citizens vote away their substance to support a public cause, to the brute heroism of the battle-field, where mangled flesh gives proof of valiant spirit.(2) And what the Jews of West European stock proved in the American wars for freedom the Jews of Eastern Europe have proved more recently, by their forwardness in the Russian revolution of 1905.

No group of people of all the heterogeneous mass that constitutes the Russian nation were half so prominent as the Jews in that abortive attempt at freedom. Witness the police records of the revolutionary period, which show that sixty-five out of every hundred political offenders were Jews, in districts where the population was fifteen parts Jewish and eighty-five parts Gentile. When I visited my native town in the Pale, several years after the revolution, it was hard to find, among the young men and women I talked with, one in a dozen who had not shared in the dangers of 1905. If we really want to know how heartily the Jews played their part in the revolution, we need only ask the Russian Government why the anti-Semitic laws have been so vengefully enforced since a certain crimson year within the present decade. And the whole significance of these things, in the present study, lies in the fact that precisely that spirit which prompts to rebellion in despotic Russia rallies in free America to the support of existing institutions.

If it was a merit in 1620 to flee from religious persecution, and in 1776 to fight against political oppression, then many of the Russian refugees of to-day are a little ahead of the Mayflower troop, because they have in their own lifetime sustained the double ordeal of fight and flight, with all their attendant risks and shocks.

To obtain a nice balance between the relative merits of these two groups of rebels, we remind ourselves that, for sheer adventurousness, migration to America to-day is not to be mentioned on the same page with the magnificent exploit of 1620, and we reflect that the moral glory of the revolution of 1776 is infinitely greater than that of any subsequent revolt; because that, too, was a path-finding adventure, with no compass but faith, no chart but philosophical invention. On the other hand, it is plain that the Russian revolutionists moved against greater odds than the American colonists had to face. The Russians had to plot in secret, assemble in the dark, and strike with bare fists; all this under the very nose of the Czar, with the benighted condition of the Russian masses hanging like a cloud over their enterprise. The colonists were able to lay the train of revolution in the most public manner, they had the local government in their hands, a considerable militia obedient to their own captains, and the advantage of distance from the enemy’s resources, with a populace advanced in civic experience promising support to the leaders.

And what a test of heroism was that which the harsh nature of the Russian Government afforded! The American rebels risked their charters and their property; for some of them dungeons waited, and for the leaders dangled a rope, no doubt. But confiscation is not so bitter as Siberian exile, and a halter is less painful than the barbed whip of the Cossacks. The Minutemen at Concord Bridge defied a bully; the rioters in St. Petersburg challenged a tiger. And first of all to be thrust into the cage would be the rebels of Jewish faith, and nobody knew that better than the Jews themselves.

The superior zeal and high degree of self-sacrifice displayed by the Jewish revolutionists would naturally be explained by the fact that, of all the peoples held in chains by the Russian Government, the Jews are the ones who have suffered the cruelest oppression. But there is proof, proof that will go down with the stream of history, that the Jewish participants in the Russian revolution of 1905 were actuated by the highest patriotism, their peculiar grievances being forgotten in the grievances of the nation as a whole. The sinking of the Jewish question in the national question was an important article of the revolutionary propaganda among the Jews; so much so, that when a prominent Jewish leader attempted to demonstrate, on philosophical grounds, that that was a false position to take, he was hotly repudiated, although up to that time he had stood high in the councils of the leaders.(3)

If we find such a high degree of civic responsiveness in what we have been trained to think the most unlikely quarter, shall we not look hopefully in other corners of our world of immigrants? If the Jewish spirit of freedom leaps from the grave of Barkochla to the hovels of the Russian ghetto, half across the world and half across the civilized era, shall we not look for similar prodigies from the more recent graves of Kosciuszko and Garibaldi? If the hook-nosed tailor can turn hero on occasion, why not the grinning organ-grinder, and the surly miner, and the husky lumber-jack? We experienced a shock of surprise, a little while ago, when troops of our Greek immigrants deserted the bootblacking parlors and fruit-stands and tumbled aboard anything that happened to sail for the Mediterranean, in their eagerness—it’s hard to bring it out, in connection with a “Dago” bootblack!—in their eagerness to strike a blow for their country in her need.

But that’s the worst of calling names: it deceives those who do so. The little bootblacks would not have fooled us as they did if we had not recklessly summed up the Greek character in a contemptuous epithet. It is quite proper for street urchins to invent nicknames for everybody—that is what street urchins are for; but let us not hand down the judgment of the gutter where the judgment of the senate is called for. Between Leonidas at the pass and little Metro under the saloon window, fawning for our nickels, is indeed a dismal gap; and yet Metro, when occasion demanded, reached out his grimy hand and touched the tunic of the Spartan hero.

From these unexpected exploits of the craven Jew and the degenerate Greek, it would seem as if the different elements of the despised “new” immigration only await a spectacular opportunity to prove themselves equal to the “old” in civic valor. But if contemporary history fails to provide a war or revolution for each of our foreign nationalities, we are still not without the means of gauging the idealistic capacity of the aliens. Next after liberty, the Puritans loved education; and to-day, if you examine the registers of the schools and colleges they founded, you will find the names of recent immigrants thickly sprinkled from A to Z, and topping the honor ranks nine times out of ten. All readers of newspapers know the bare facts,—each commencement season, the prize-winners are announced in a string of unpronounceable foreign names; and every school-teacher in the immigrant section of the larger cities has a collection of picturesque anecdotes to contribute: of heroic sacrifices for the sake of a little reading and writing; of young girls stitching away their youth to keep a brother in college; of whole families cheerfully starving together to save one gifted child from the factory.

Go from the public school to the public library, from the library to the social settlement, and you will carry away the same story in a hundred different forms. The good people behind the desks in these public places are fond of repeating that they can hardly keep up with the intellectual demands of their immigrant neighbors. In the experience of the librarians it is the veriest commonplace that the classics have the greatest circulation in the immigrant quarters of the city; and the most touching proof of reverence for learning often comes from the illiterate among the aliens. On the East Side of New York, “Teacher” is a being adored. Said a bedraggled Jewish mother to her little boy who had affronted his teacher, “Don’t you know that teachers is holy?” Perhaps these are the things the teachers have in mind when they speak with a tremor of the immense reward of work in the public schools.

That way of speaking is the fashion among workers of all sorts in the educational institutions where foreigners attend in numbers. Get a group of settlement people swapping anecdotes about their immigrant neighbors, and there is apt to develop an epidemic of moist eyes. Out of the fullne...