in the continental United States was 92,000,000. Of these, only 50,000,000 were native whites of native parentage; while 13,000,000 were foreign-born and 19,000,000 others were of foreign-born or mixed parentage. The negroes and Indians were 10,000,000. This meant that out of the white pop., three-eighths were substantially foreign, and nearly one-half went back to a foreign ancestor not more than two generations behind them. Nearly one-half of this half came from S. or E. Europe. The urban pop. (in places having more than 2,500 inhabitants) was 43,000,000, or 46% of the whole. Here were elements of greatness and also of dissension and bitterness. Race riots, except where the negro was concerned, were very infrequent, because the non-English-speaking groups tended to establish “islands” of population in the great cities and manufacturing towns and live by themselves. Their children, however, went to public schools, learned English, and began to consider themselves Americans.
Americans were of various kinds. Everybody in the United States except the American Indian is an immigrant from some other country or a descendant of an immigrant. The main race groups were, first, the descendants of the colonists, who were mainly Anglo-Saxons with some Germans and Scotch-Irish and small elements of other races. The descendants of that ante-Revolutionary population naturally thought of themselves as the preëminently American-born Americans. Next in the account were descendants of the foreigners who began to come over in great numbers about 1820. Lastly came the large number of recent immigrants and their children. In 1910 there were in the United States, 2,266,535 unnaturalized aliens, many of whom expected to return to their native country; or if they remained, to cleave to their own kind, use their native language and keep up their own schools, language press, and home connexions.
The country was not yet aroused to the dangers arising from this mixture of unassimilated races. The theory was that in the 20th century, as in the 18th and 19th, all comers would find the United States the great “melting pot.” The process was one in which the public schools were supposed to play, and did play, an important part. Few voices were raised against admitting not only western Europeans, whose languages and customs were much like those of the United States, but men and women from E. and S.E. Europe and from W. Asia Russians, Poles, Jews, Bulgarians, Greeks, Turks, Serbians and many other races. The only bar to immigration based on race in 1908 was the prohibition of Chinese immigration and the practical exclusion of Japanese labourers by a “gentlemen's agreement” with the Japanese Government (1907), which undertook to refuse passports to Japanese labourers intending to come to the United States. There was as yet no organization, public or private, to aid the in-comer in acquiring the language and knowledge of the Government of his adopted country. There was no intelligence qualification, no provision that a man who sought naturalization should be able to read, write, or understand the language of the nation he wished to join. Some of the states permitted an alien to vote if he had filed a declaration of intention to become a citizen, without even troubling themselves to see that he carried out that intention. The undigested load was becoming heavy.
The immigrants were not the only burden on the State. Millions of American-born, many of them descended from the old colonial stock, were poor and ignorant and criminal. The southern mountaineers, the frontier farmers, the loggers and the miners, included a host of men and families who lived a rough life. Parts of the rich United States were infested by tramps and vagabonds. In the wealthiest cities there was grinding poverty and degradation in the slums. The situation was saved by general prosperity and the American spirit of cheerfulness, and of confident waiting for things to come right. Furthermore, out of the most unpromising conditions arose some of the strongest figures in American history. Presidents Jackson, Lincoln, Johnson and Grant were all children of the rude frontier. Two other race problems complicated the social and political life of the country. The American Indians were a small group of only about 250,000, most of them living in tribes on Government reservations. The problem was to make them individuals; but in 1908 they were still a race group. The negroes, about 10,000,000 in number, were unorganized as a race, and were scattered over a large area, mostly in the South. Descendants of forced immigrants, they had no culture and no traditions but those of the United States. The results of their former servitude still clung about them; they were shut out from their constitutional suffrage in some of the southern states. Legally equals of the whites, they were subject to humiliating discriminations, and both in N. and S. were held in an inferior social position from which there was no escape.
Defects in Government.—The units of American society were held together by a complicated, but strong, democratic Government, well fitted to rule a diverse population. The political forms were familiar to every schoolboy—a group of (in 1908) 46 states, each with its own government, rigidly cast by the traditional principle of “checks and balances” into three departments; legislative, executive, and judicial. A national Government, also balanced, had under the Federal Constitution large powers in national affairs. A widely distributed franchise was almost equivalent to universal suffrage for adult males. There was a belief that the courts were the highest authority, not only as to questions of personal rights and duties, but as to the validity of the laws and acts of the other two departments. In addition a third type of government in the city, town and county, set up by the states, was considered to be an essential part of the system. This combination of governments governed reasonably well. It was expensive, it was not highly skilled, but it performed its tasks to the general satisfaction of most of the people. It was supported by the conviction of a large part of the population that it was the “best Government on earth.”
The boast of the United States was its equal opportunity; the pride of the United States was its popular government, in which the will of the people was the only ultimate force. As a nation, Americans believed that they had, more than any other country in the world, the blessings of personal liberty, of free public education, of sharing in their government, of impartial judges. Everybody was supposed to have a fair chance in life. Few Americans could bring themselves to realize that equal opportunity was denied to those who chanced to be outside the advantages of education and of contact with their fellows; that the personal liberty of workers in mills, mines, or cotton-fields was much restricted; that some 10,000,000 negroes were subject to legal and social discrimination; that the public schools failed to reach at least one-fourth of the children who needed enlightenment and instruction; that the actual government of the country was in many communities carried on by a self-selected group of men who dictated nominations, controlled legislation and decided policies; that in matters of property or even personal rights, court proceedings were long, expensive and uncertain.
In the organization and conditions of business could be traced another startling contradiction between the word and the fact. Nominally all kinds of business not prohibited by law were open to all comers in free and honourable competition. In reality, by 1908 a great number of both employers and employees were engaged in a combat outside the laws, constant and conscienceless. Although the country grew wealthy fast, and commercial transactions increased, the small dealer or manufacturer or miner found himself shut in by a thick growth of corporations which had the great advantage of limited liability and the privilege of operating through the country under the legal fiction that a corporation was a “citizen” in the constitutional sense of the word. It was hard for individuals and firms to compete with corporations, and hard for small corporations to compete with large ones in the same line of business. For many years the steady accumulation of capital tended to flow into these expanding units, a process veiled by the use of parallel and “holding” corporations. The railways were among the most conspicuous of the large corporations, because everybody used them and because they, too, tended to combine into larger and more powerful units. The whole system was under suspicion, because railways and some other large corporations made it their business to get control of majorities in city and state Legislatures, and of party
