New viewpoints in American history

Front matter

IM^dO\^t

CORNELL

UNIVERSITY

Foreword

Most adult Americans of today gained their knowledge of American history before the present generation of historians had made perceptible progress in their epoch-making work of reconstructing the story of our past in the light of their new studies and investigations. Signs of a renaissance of American historical writing began to be evident as early as the decade of the eighties of the last century. The new interest in historical and social phenomena was shown, for instance, in the founding of the American Historical Association, the American Economic Association, the American Statistical Association and the jA^prican Academy of Political and Social Science during <tlml decade, followed shortly after by the formation of the American Political Science Association, the American Sociological Society and the American Society of International Law. American history, which had formerly been envis^^ed as a record of arid political and constitutional development, began to be enriched by the new conceptions and f resh.^oints of view afforded by the scientific study of economics, sociology and politics. Influences from abroad also played their part, particularly the notable work of John Richard Green, A Short History of the English People ( 1874) , with its revisions and enlargements. Quickened by these new impulses, historians began to view the past of America with broadened vision and to attain the power of seeing familiar facts in new relationships.

The change did not take place overnight. Historical students in the nineties made important contributions toward viii FOREWORD

the new history; but it was not until the opening years of the present century that the real transformation occurred. All historical study and writing since then have been strongly colored by the new interests, viewpoints and sympathies.

Unfortunately, the product of the new school of American historians has, in very large part, been buried in the files of historical society journals, in the learned publications of the universities and in monographs privately printed at the expense of the authors. The new history was being written by historians for historians rather than for laymen; and the public generally has remained oblivious of the great revolution in our knowledge of American history wrought by the research specialists. Even the school textbooks have not until a comparatively recent time been affected by the discoveries of the specialists; and too often the newer type of textbook has suffered at the hands of teachers who, though familiar with the new facts and emphases as set forth in the textbook, have no acquaintance with the general point of view which gives to these new facts their tremendous significance.

The object of the present work is to bring together and summarize, in non-technical language, some of the results of the researches of the present era of historical study and to show their importance to a proper understanding of American history. It seems unnecessary to say that the interest aroused by the World War in Americanization work makes it important that all citizens of the republic should learn what the historians have to say about the past of their country: Americanization must begin at home. History teachers in the public schools may also find in this volume a short cut to a rather extensive literature inaccessible to most of them. It is the further hope of the author that graduate students venturing forth into the field of American history for the first time may find this volume useful in suggesting

FOREWORD ix

the special interests of the present generation of historians apd some of the tendencies that seem likely to guide historical research for some years to come. It has not been my primary purpose to celebrate the names of the men and women who have cleared the new trails; but an effort has been made in the notes at the end of each chapter to render due acknowledgment.

, The title of this volume is, in a sense, a misnomer since the viewpoints presented are not new to workers in the history field nor are all the new viewpoints set forth. In explanation of the omissions, the author can only plead his feeling that the points of view omitted are not as essential as those that have been included or else that the viewpoint in question has not yet been sufficiently worked out or defined to merit inclusion at this time. In the latter category fall two approaches to American history which are certain to receive more careful attention in the future, that of religious and sectarian influences in American development, and the point of view represented by the psychoanalysts. Some of the groundwork upon which a religious interpretation of American history might be based has already been laid by special students of American church history; and the possibilities of the psychological approach are suggested, for example, by the series of articles on "The American Mind", written by Harvey O'Higgins and Edward H. Reede in McClure's, vol. 53 (1921), Nos. 3, 4, 6 and 7. It should be added that the significant point of view presented by Herbert Eugene Bolton and Thomas Maitland Marshall in their book, The Colonisation of North America 1492-1783 (New York, 1920), is not treated here for the reason that the plan of the present volume embraces only such influences and conditions as contributed vitally to the national development of the United States.

A work of this kind can hardly hope to be free of error.

X FOREWORD ,

although I believe that no errors have crept in that would invalidate the general conclusions reached. Nor can I hope that I have been completely successful in eliminating the personal equation. Every teacher of history evolves a philosophy of history which will find expression in spite of all efforts at repression; and this is particularly true when the subject matter dealt with is controversial in character. Because of the scheme of treatment a certain amount of repetition in dealing with special incidents and movements has been rendered necessary. In putting my material into printed form I owe much to the interest and encouragement of certain secondary school teachers who heard much of the material in lecture form in summer school classes in the Ohio State University and the University of Iowa in 1919 and 1920. A number of my friends have helpfully read portions of the completed manuscript. In particular I am indebted to Professor F. W. Coker and Dr. Carl Wittke of the Ohio State University. To my wife Elizabeth Bancroft I am obligated for assistance rendered at every stage of the preparation of the manuscript. Chapters I, VII and XI appeared originally in somewhat altered form in the American Journal of Sociology, the Political Science Quarterly and the Historical Outlook; and for permission to use them again I am indebted to the editors of those journals.

A. M. S.

Contents

FACE

Foreword vii

CHAPTER

Chapter I The Influence Of Immigration On American History

The New World was discovered by a man who was trying his utmost to find an older world than the one from which he had sailed. If Columbus had known that he had failed to reach the fabled Orient, he would have died a bitterly disillusioned man. Yet, in the judgment of history, the measure of his greatness is to be found in the fact that he committed this cardinal blunder, for thereby he and the later explorers opened up to the crowded populations of Europe a means of escape from poverty and oppression for many centuries to come. The ratio between man and land became changed for the whole civilized world, and there opened up before humanity unsuspected opportunities for development and progress. On account of political disturbances in Europe and the difficulties of ocean travel, the full possibilities of this epochal change were only gradually developed; and the effects were thus distributed through the last four centuries of world-history. But the event itself stands forth as one of the tremendous facts of history. So far as the human mind can foresee, nothing of a similar nature can ever happen again.

The great Volkerwanderungen, set in motion by the opening up of the Western Hemisphere, have been essentially unlike any earlier migrations in history, and in comparison with them most of the earlier movements of population were numerically insignificant. In a large sense, all American history has been the product of these migratory movements from the Old World. Since the red-skinned savage has never been a potent factor in American development, the whole history of the United States and, to a lesser degree, of the two Americas is, at bottom, the story of the successive waves of immigration and of the adaptation of the newcomers and their descendants to the new surroundings offered by the Western Hemisphere. Thus the two grand themes of American history are, properly, the influence of immigration upon American life and institutions, and the influence of the American environment, especially the frontier in the early days and the industrial integration of more recent times, upon the ever-changing composite population.

Columbus's first voyage of discovery was a strange foreshadowing of the later history of the American people, for, in a very real sense, his voyage may be considered an international enterprise. Acting under the authority of Spain, this Italian sailed with a crew consisting of Spaniards, one Irishman, an Englishman, and an Israelite. These nationalities were later to enter fully into the rich heritage which this voyage made possible to the world. In the next two centuries the nations of Europe, large and small, sought to stake out colonial claims in America, not with entire success from an imperialistic point of view, but with the result that cultural foundations were laid whose influence may still be traced in the legal systems, customs, and institutions of many parts of the United States today. A familiar illustration is afforded in the case of Louisiana, where the continental civil law, instead of the English common law, governs domestic relations and transfers of property as a reminder of the days when the French and the Spanish owned the land.

Contrary to a widespread belief, even the people of the thirteen English colonies were a mixture of ethnic breeds. Indeed, these colonies formed the most cosmopolitan area in the world at the time. This was due, in part, to the English conquest of colonies planted by rival European powers along the Atlantic Coast, but was the result more largely of abundant immigration from various parts of the world after the original settlements had been well established. A Colonial Dame or a Daughter of the American Revolution might conceivably have nothing but pure Hebrew blood or French or German blood in her veins. During the first century of English colonization, the seventeenth, the English race was the main contributor to the population, the Dutch and French Huguenot contributions being less important. These racial elements occupied the choice lands near the coast, and thus compelled the stream of immigration of the eighteenth century to pour into the interior, a significant development in view of the different character and great numbers of these later settlers.

While the religious motive has properly been stressed in the history of colonization, it should not be overlooked that the economic urge, operating independently or as a stiffening to religious conviction, sent countless thousands fleeing to American shores. We need not wink at the fact that the immigrants of colonial times were actuated by the same motives as the immigrants today, namely a determination to escape religious or political oppression and a desire to improve their living conditions. To make this generalization strictly applicable to immigration in our own day, one might wish to reverse the order of emphasis, although the Russian Jews and the Armenian refugees are conspicuous examples of the contrary.

The earliest English settlement, that at Jamestown, was sent out by an English trading corporation which was interested primarily in making profits for the stockholders of the company out of the industry of the settlers. In a like spirit, that canny Quaker William Penn lost no opportunity, after the first settlements were made in his dominion of Pennsylvania, to stimulate immigration artificially, for the resulting enhancement of real estate values meant an increased income for him. He advertised his lands widely throughout Europe, offering large tracts at nominal prices and portraying the political and religious advantages of residence under his rule. In anticipation of later practices, he maintained paid agents in the Rhine Valley, who were so successful that within a score of years German immigrants numbered almost one-half of the population.

Another source of "assisted immigration" was to be found in the practice of European nations to drain their almshouses and jails into their colonies; it has been estimated that as many as fifty thousand criminals were sent to the thirteen colonies by Great Britain. Due allowance must, of course, be made for a legal code which condemned offenders to death for stealing a joint of meat worth more than one shilling! Perhaps one-half of all the white immigrants during the larger part of the colonial period were unable to pay their expenses. They came "indentured" and were auctioned off for a period of service by the ship captains in payment for their transportation. Still another element of the population, perhaps one-fifth of the whole in the eighteenth century, consisted of Guinea negroes who became emigrants to the New World only through the exercise of superior force. A well-known historian is authority for the statement that probably one-third of the colonists in 1760 were born outside of America.

Men of older colonial stock viewed the more recent comers with a species of alarm that was to be repeated with each new generation of the American breed. Benjamin Franklin declared that the German immigrants pouring into Pennsylvania "are generally the most stupid of their own nation. . . . Not being used to liberty they know not how to make modest use of it." They appear at elections "in droves and carry all before them, except in one or two counties. Few of their children know English." At one time a bill was passed by the colonial legislature of Pennsylvania to restrict the immigration of the German Palatines, but it was vetoed by the governor. The familiar objections to immigration on grounds of non-assimilability, pauperism, and criminality originated during these early days, leaving for later and more congested times the development of arguments derived from the fear of economic competition.

The preponderance of English settlers in the first century of colonization served to fix governmental institutions and political ideals in an English mold and to make English speech the general language of the colonists. In the later colonial period most of New England retained its purely English character because of the Puritan policy of religious exclusiveness ; but into the other colonies alien racial elements came in great numbers and left their impress on native culture and, in a less measure, on American speech. It is instructive to remember that the great English Puritan migration did not exceed twenty thousand, whereas more than one hundred and fifty thousand Scotch-Irish Presbyterians settled in the colonies in the eighteenth century.^

* These were lowland Scots who had been transplanted to Ulster earljr in the seventeenth century. Suffering from religious and political disabilities and afflicted with hard times, these Ulstermen sought relief through migration to the colonies.

Unlike the Puritans, the Scotch-Irish were to be found in nearly five hundred settlements scattered through all the colonies on the eve of the Revolution; and being everywhere animated with a fierce passion for liberty, they served as an amalgam to bind together all other racial elements in the population. The Germans, who numbered over 200,000 in 1776, were to be found chiefly in western New York, and particularly in the western counties of Pennsylvania, where they gave rise to the breed which we call the Pennsylvania Dutch. A recent student of the subject estimates that, at the outbreak of the War for Independence, about one-tenth of the total population was German and perhaps one-sixth Scotch-Irish.

Since the best sites near the coast were pre-empted, the Scotch-Irish and the Germans for the most part pushed into the valleys of the interior where they occupied fertile farm lands and acted as a buffer against Indian forays on the older settlements. Combining with the native whites in the back country, they quickly developed a group consciousness due to the organized efforts of the English- American minorities of the seaboard to minimize the influence of the frontier population in the colonial legislature and courts ; and in the case of the abortive Regulator uprising in North Carolina, they invoked civil war to secure a redress of grievances. Eventually their struggle proved to be the decisive factor in establishing the two American principles of equality before the law and of representation upon the basis of numbers. When the disruption with Great Britain approached, the non-English strains of the back country lent great propulsive force to the movement for independence and republican government. They were probably the deciding factors in Pennsylvania and South Carolina, where the ties of loyalty binding the colonists were especially strong.

Other racial strains made a deep impress upon the history of the times. Someone has pointed out that eight of the men most prominent in the early history of New York represented eight non-English nationalities: Schuyler, of Dutch descent ; Herkimer, whose parents were pure-blooded Germans from the Rhine Palatinate; John Jay, of French stock; Livingston, Scotch; Clinton, Irish; Morris, Welsh; Baron Steuben, Prussian; and Hoffman, Swedish. Of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence, eighteen were of non-English stock and, of these, eight were born outside of the colonies. Joseph Galloway, the Pennsylvania loyalist, declared before a committee of the House of Commons in 1779 that in the patriot army "there were scarcely one-fourth natives of America — about one-half Irish, the other fourth were English and Scotch." This statement fails to do justice to the other foreign-born soldiers who fought in the War for Independence.

II

Throughout the period of national independence, immigration continued to exert a profound influence on the development of American institutions, political ideals, and industrial life. Within ten years of the adoption of the Constitution, immigration received unwelcome recognition as wielding a democratizing influence on American life. The Federalist party, dominated by aristocratic sympathies, was determined to deal a death blow to the heresy known variously as "mobocracy" or "democracy" ; and so it passed the Alien and Sedition Acts and the Naturalization Law in 1798 for the purpose of preventing aliens from cultivating this dangerous doctrine in the United States. The party did not survive this legislation ; but its hatred of the foreigner in America continued to burn unabated. The Hartford Convention of 1814, voicing the old Federalist spirit, ascribed the fallen state of the country partly to the fact that malcontents from Europe were permitted to hold office, and demanded that the Constitution be amended to disqualify immigrants, even though naturalized, from holding federal position. Yet, during this period, two of the foremost statesmen of the nation were foreigners by birth: Alexander Hamilton, Washington's great Secretary of the Treasury, a native of the West Indies ; and Albert Gallatin, Jefferson's great Secretary of the Treasury, a Swiss by birth. It is difficult to see how the young republic could have been guided safely through the financial perils of these first critical years of independence without the genius of these two men.

Beginning with the year 1820 the numbers of foreigners migrating into the United States each decade mounted rapidly, passing the half-million mark during the thirties and rising above the two and a half million mark in the decade of the fifties. The racial strains represented in this migration were essentially the same as during colonial times, the Teutonic and the Celtic. The high-water mark in the period before the Civil War was reached when the tide of immigration brought to American shores, in the late forties and early fifties, g^eat ntimbers of German liberals who had fled Germany because of the failure of the Revolution of 1848, and huge numbers of famine-stricken peasants from central and southern Ireland. More than half a million Germans sought America between 1830 and 1850, and nearly a million more came in the next decade. The larger portion of these went into the Middle West. They became pioneers in the newer parts of Ohio and in Cincinnati ; they took up the hardwood lands of the Wisconsin counties along Lake Michigan ; they went in large numbers to Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Missouri and the river towns of Iowa. This German influx contained an exceptionally large proportion of educated and forceful leaders, men and women who contributed powerfully to the spiritual and educational development of the communities in which they settled and whose liberal social customs were at interesting variance with the inherited Puritan austerity of the settlers of New England extraction. Virtually all the western states perceived the advantages of immigration as an agency for developing their resources; and emulating the example of William Penn they were not backward in appropriating money and establishing agents in Europe to furnish prospective emigrants with all possible information as to the soil, climate, and general conditions of the country. Colonies of European peasants began to be established in many parts of the West — at one time it appeared that Wisconsin might become exclusively a German state.

The Irish immigrants, on the other hand, sought the Eastern cities or else went forth into the construction camps. These were the years during which roads, canals, and public works were being constructed upon an extensive scale and the first railroads were being projected. The hard manual labor for these enterprises was performed mainly by the Irish. The congestion of the Irish in the eastern cities led to many evils, none more startling than the increases in pauperism, intemperance and illiteracy. In 1838 it was estimated that more than one-half of the paupers in the country were of foreign birth. A committee of the city of Boston reported in 1849 on the "wretched, dirty and unhealthy condition of a great number of the dwelling houses occupied by the Irish population," showing that each room from cellar to garret was likely to contain one or more families. Such conditions gave great impetus to the numerous movements for humanitarian reform which characterized the thirties and forties. Better housing conditions, a more humane legal code, prohibition, better schools, labor reform — all these demands received increased emphasis because of the social conditions under which the immigrants, and particularly the Irish, lived in the Eastern cities.

As a result of the heavy immigration of the forties and fifties, political corruption became an important factor in American politics for the first time. The newly arrived foreigner fell an easy prey to the unscrupulous native politician in the cities; and fraudulent naturalization papers, vote buying, and similar practices became so notorious that a probe committee of Congress declared in i860: "It is well known to the American people that stupendous frauds have been perpetrated in the election of 1856, in Pennsylvania, by means of forged and fictitious naturalization papers." President Buchanan wrote that "we never heard until within a recent period of the employment of money to carry elections." Much of the immigrant labor came in under contract to private corporations, and the decade of the fifties saw the first effective employment of arguments against immigration based upon the plea that the lower standard of living of the foreigners made it impossible for native laborers to compete with them.

The jealousy and ill feeling engendered by the above causes were increased by religious differences. The Irish were mostly Catholics; and it was not long before Catholic churches began to rise throughout southern New England and the Middle Atlantic States, and convents and parochial schools competed with the public schools, which were coming to be looked upon as the true basis of democracy. The outcome was the growth of a powerful movement against immigration, which is without parallel in American history. Calling themselves Native Americans, political parties were formed in New York and other eastern cities to prevent the election of foreign-born citizens to office ; and ten years later, in 1845, 3. national organization was effected with more

THE INFLUENCE OF IMMIGRATION n

than one hundred thousand members. In 1850 the movement assumed the guise of a secret organization under the name, known only to the initiate, of The Supreme Order of the Star-Spangled Banner. Outsiders lost no time in dubbing the members "Know Nothings," since the rank and file, when asked regarding the mysteries of the order, invariably replied: "We know nothing." Due perhaps to the disturbed state of politics in the fall of 1854 and the hesitancy of many citizens to take a definite stand on the slavery question as reopened by the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the party enjoyed phenomenal success, carrying six states and failing in seven others only by a narrow margin. But two years later, with a presidential ticket in the field, the party showed little strength, having succumbed to the growing popular absorption in the slavery controversy. Several attempts were made after the Civil War by secret societies and minor parties to revive nativist feeling but with a notable lack of success, although, as we shall see presently, non-partisan political agitation during the same period has resulted in the passage of certain restrictive measures by the federal government.

In the period prior to the Civil War the stream of immigration had been turned from the South by the Mason and Dixon line, for the free laborers of Europe could not profitably compete with the slave laborers of the South. Nearly all the immigrant guidebooks published before the Civil War warned Europeans against the presence of slavery and the strongly intrenched caste system in that section. This avoidance had serious results for the South, as some economists of that section foresaw, for it practically precluded that diversification of industry which a plentiful supply of cheap white labor would have rendered possible. Thus the economic system of the South came to rest more and more exclusively upon a single prop, and the control of southern policy fell into the ambitious hands of the cotton planters. Furthermore, the native southern stock, left to itself, interbred, and the mass of the whites were deprived of the liberalizing influences of contact with persons and ideas from other parts of the world. The first federal law restricting immigration was passed during this period when the act of 1807 forbade the future introduction of negro slaves; but this l^w came too late to avert the evil consequences flowing from the earlier unrestricted importation of blacks.

Meanwhile, the European peasants and workingmen, predisposed against slavery by temperament and economic interest, had massed themselves in the North and helped to stiffen the sentiment of that section against an institution that was an anachronism in Europe. It is but a slight indication of the attitude of the German Americans to note that, when additional federal territory was opened to possible slave settlement by the Kansas-Nebraska Act, eighty German newspapers out of eighty-eight were decidedly opposed to the measure. Who can estimate of what vital consequence it was to the future of a united country that, in the eventful decade prior to the outbreak of the Civil War, the foreign population of the United States increased eighty- four per cent? It was William H. Seward, campaigning in Missouri in i860 for the election of Lincoln, who congratulated the state upon its "onward striving, freedom loving German inhabitants" and declared that "Missouri must be Germanized in order to be free." In the actual fighting, foreign-born soldiers played a notable part, although many of them had fled Europe to escape compulsory military service. It is perhaps generally known that the militia companies formed among the Germans in Missouri, especially in St. Louis, were pivotal in saving that state for the Union in the early months of the war; but it is not so well known that both the Germans and the Irish furnished more troops to the federal armies in proportion to their numbers than did the native-born northerners.

ni

Immigration entered a new phase in the years following the Civil War. Prior to this time the immigrants had been of racial strains very closely related to the original settlers of the country. ' Indeed, from one point of view, the American people in the ante bellum period were merely a making-over, in a new environment, of the old English race out of the same elements which had entered into its composition from the beginning in England. But with the great industrial expansion in America after the war and the opening of many steamship lines between the Mediterranean ports and the United States, new streams of immigration began to set in from Southern and Eastern Europe; and this new invasion with its lower standards of living caused a reduction in the old Teutonic and Celtic immigration from Western Europe. The change began to be apparent about 1885, but it was not until 1896 that the three currents from Austria-Hungary, Italy, and Russia exceeded in volume the contributions of the United Kingdom, Germany, and Scandinavia.

On the Pacific Coast a new situation also arose, due to the first coming of thousands of Chinese laborers in the fifties and sixties. California became transformed into a battleground for a determination of the issue whether the immigrant from the Orient or from the Occident should perform the manual work of the Pacific Coast. In this connection it is suggestive that the notorious Dennis Kearney, arch-agitator of the Sand Lots against the Chinese immigrant, was himself a native of the County Cork. The victory ultimately fell to the European immigrant and his

American offspring in this conflict as well as in the later and more familiar one with the Japanese immigrant ; and by one means or another the yellow race has been excluded from further entrance into the United States. The considered judgment of Americans of European origin seems to be that no Asiatic strain shall enter into the composite American stock or make its first-hand contribution to American culture.