The Old World in the New. Edward Alsworth Ross
and two-thirds as often as among native American cases. In the charity hospitals of New York, the proportion of German patients treated for alcoholism is only half as large as that of the English and the native Americans, and only a third as great as that of the Irish. The charity workers in our cities report that "intemperance of the bread-winner" is less often found to be the cause of destitution among the German applicants than among those of any other North-European nationality. Among alien prisoners only one German of twenty-two was committed for intoxication as against one out of three Irish, one out of four French Canadians, one out of five Scotch, and one out of eight Scandinavians. On the other hand, the victims of drink are far more numerous among them than among the Italians, Magyars, Jews, and Syrians. These peoples, vine-growers and wine-bibbers from time immemorial, have had the chance to get drunk many thousand years longer than the Celts and Teutons; hence they have been more completely purged of their alcoholics. While a light beverage like beer produces fewer sots and wrecks than the "water of life" so grateful to the Northern palate, it produces a vast unreported stupefying and deterioration; so there is good reason why the German drinking customs are being sloughed off in the Fatherland at the very moment they are being warmly defended in America.
AMOUNT OF CRIME NORMAL AMONG GERMANS
The striking thing about the abnormality of the Germans is its normality in amount. Among the foreign-born, the Germans have just about their due share of insanity, neither less nor more. Likewise, the marked feature of German crime in this country is simply its featurelessness. Among the twelve thousand-odd aliens in our prisons, the German prisoners run a little above the average in their bent for gainful offenses and a little below the average in their crimes of violence. In their leaning to other offenses they come close to the mean. Among the twenty nationalities that figure in the police arrests of Chicago, the German stands, with respect to almost every form of misconduct, near the middle of the list. The French and the Hebrews stand out in bad eminence as offenders against chastity, the Italians lead in murder and blackmail, the Americans in burglary, the Greeks in kidnapping, the Lithuanians in assault, the Irish in disorderly conduct. But the German lacks distinction in evil, never coming near either the top or the bottom of the scale in predilection for any form of crime. On the whole, his criminal bent is very close to that of the native American.
WIDE VARIETY OF OCCUPATION
The Germans brought us much more in the way of industrial skill and professional training than the Irish; besides, they were much more successful in planting themselves upon the soil. They tended far more to farming and manufacturing, far less to domestic and personal service and transportation. The second generation shows no marked drift away from the farm. In 1900, three-fifths of all brewers in the country were Germans, a third of the bakers and cabinet-makers, a fifth of the saloon-keepers and butchers, a sixth of the hatters, tailors, and coopers, and a seventh of the musicians and teachers of music. Yet only one male bread-winner out of nineteen was a German.
The sons of Germans are a sixteenth of our male labor force; but they furnish a quarter of the trunk-and-satchel makers, a fifth of the bottlers, stovemakers, and engravers, and a sixth of the upholsterers, bookbinders, paper-box makers, butchers, brewers, and brass-workers. In our cities the German baker, tailor, butcher, cabinet-maker, or engraver is quite as characteristic and familiar a figure as the Irish drayman, fireman, brakeman, section boss, street-car conductor, plumber, or policeman.
The immigrant German women begin rather higher in the scale of occupation than the Irish, but their daughters do not rise in life with such amazing buoyancy as do the daughters of the Irish. Between the first-generation and the second-generation Germans the proportion of servants and waitresses falls from a third of all female bread-winners to a quarter. For the Irish the drop is from fifty-four per cent. to sixteen per cent. The second-generation Germans do not show such an advance on their parents as do the second-generation Irish, who bob up like corks released at the bottom of a stream.
TEUTONIC TRAITS
Physically the German is strong, but often too stocky for grace. A blend with the taller and thinner American is likely to give good results in figure. Being slow in response, he makes a poor showing in competitive sports. His forte is gymnastics rather than athletics, and he is to be found in the indoor, sedentary trades rather than in the active, outdoor callings. Not often will you come upon him riveting trusses far up on the skyscraper or the railway bridge. His pleasures he takes sitting rather than moving, so that he haunts summer-garden and picnic-ground rather than base-ball diamond and bowling-alley. For all his traditional domesticity, he is a sociable soul, and will lug off his entire family to a public resort, when an American would prefer a pipe by the fireside. He is fond of the table, and loves to enjoy talk, music, or drama while eating and drinking. In comparison with the native Americans, or the Celts from the British Isles, the Germans in America have the name of being materialistic. If this be true, it is doubtless due to the small representation among them of that noble leavening type that has made the spiritual greatness of Germany. Any one who has lived in the old country knows that there is a kind of German that one rarely sees among our fellow-citizens. Of such were the "Forty-eighters"; but as their influence fades, the idealism they fanned dies down, and visitors from the Fatherland complain that America has stamped its dollar-mark all over the souls of their kinsmen here. Professor Hugo Münsterberg, an impartial observer, judges that "the average German-American stands below the level of the average German at home."
But if he chases the dollar, let us grant that he does it in his own way. Honest and stable, he puts little faith in short-cuts to riches, such as "scream" advertising, commercial humbug, "faked" news, thimblerig finance, or political graft. He does not count on skipping many rungs in the ladder of success. German business enterprises grow slowly, but if you probe them, you find a solid texture. The German is hard-headed, and is not easily borne off his feet by the contagion of example. To speculative fever and to made panic he is rather immune. Because he is less mobile than the American and does not shift from one thing to another, he is more apt to gain skill and turn out good work. Then, too, he is not so keen to get on that he does not find the artist's enjoyment and pride in the practice of his craft. In a word, the Germans act in American society as a neutral substance moderating the action of an overlively ferment. For the universal eagerness to be "wide awake" and "up to date" has deposed habit, tradition, and external authority as lords of life among us.
The German is lasting in his sympathies and his antipathies and leisurely in his mental processes. It takes him long to make up his mind and longer to get an idea out of his head. In his thinking he tries to grasp more things at a time than does the Celt. Not for him the simple logic that proceeds from one or two outstanding factors in a situation and ignores all the rest. He wants to be comprehensive and final where the Latin aims to be merely clear and precise. It is this very complexity of thought that makes the German often silent, his speech heavy or confused. But just this relish for details and this passion for thoroughness make him a born investigator. This is why, on the practical side, the German-American has most distinguished himself in work that calls for long and close observation, such as gardening, viticulture, breeding, forestry, brewing, and the chemical industries.
Thirty years ago there was an outcry that the Germans were introducing into this country the virus of anarchism and socialism. It is now clear that German socialism, instead of being a shattering type of thought, is in fact highly constructive. However bold and iconoclastic he may be in his thinking, the German, with his respect for authority, his slow reaction to wrong, and his love of order and system, is a conservative by nature. The children of revolutionary immigrants are milder than their fathers were; and the German-Americans are now very far from leading the van of radicalism.
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