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- Herausgeber: Musaicum Books
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
John R. Commons' 'Races & Immigrants in USA' is a groundbreaking work that delves into the complex issue of race and immigration in the United States. Written in a meticulous and scholarly style, Commons explores the historical context of immigration and its impact on the social and economic landscape of the country. Drawing on sociological and historical research, the book offers a comprehensive analysis of the experiences of different racial and ethnic groups in America. Commons' literary approach combines empirical data with engaging storytelling, making it an accessible and compelling read for both academics and general readers alike. John R. Commons, a pioneering economist and sociologist, was a leading figure in the Progressive Era known for his contributions to labor studies and social reform. His firsthand experience working with immigrant communities and advocating for fair labor practices deeply influenced his writing on race and immigration. 'Races & Immigrants in USA' reflects Commons' commitment to social justice and his dedication to studying the complexities of American society. I highly recommend 'Races & Immigrants in USA' to anyone interested in gaining a deeper understanding of the historical and social dynamics surrounding race and immigration in the United States. Commons' insightful analysis and profound insights make this book a must-read for anyone seeking to engage with these important issues. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
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Races & Immigrants in USA
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Table of Contents
Introduction
At the junction of nation-building and mass migration, this book probes how a democratic society reshapes and is reshaped by the people it admits. Races & Immigrants in USA by John R. Commons is a work of social analysis rooted in the early twentieth-century United States, when industrialization, urban growth, and transatlantic migration transformed public life. Written during the Progressive Era, it studies immigration as a force in economic organization and civic culture. Commons approaches the subject as a scholar of labor and institutions, producing a compact, programmatic text that situates newcomers within factories, neighborhoods, and political arenas across a rapidly changing nation.
The book’s premise is straightforward: to examine who comes, where they settle, how they work, and what their presence means for American institutions. The reading experience is that of a concise treatise blending historical narrative, demographic tables, and interpretive commentary, written in a measured, didactic voice. Commons builds arguments cumulatively, moving from descriptive portraits of immigrant streams to analyses of labor markets and public policy. His tone is reformist and pragmatic, attentive to practical consequences more than rhetorical flourish. Readers encounter an author intent on diagnosis and prescription, mapping the connections among migration, industry, governance, and the evolving idea of national cohesion.
Among its central themes is the relationship between immigration and work: how wages, skills, and bargaining power shift as new groups enter expanding industries. The analysis extends to household economies, neighborhood formation, and civic participation, tracing how communities adapt through schools, associations, and political coalitions. Commons relates the pressures of competition and cooperation, noting the ways institutions mediate conflict. He attends to regional differences across the United States and to the cyclical nature of demand for labor. Without sensationalism, the book frames immigration as a structural phenomenon embedded in markets and laws, rather than merely a sequence of individual journeys.
Methodologically, the study combines aggregates with case-like observations, moving between official statistics, contemporary reports, and reasoned generalization. Comparative passages place immigrant groups side by side to illuminate differences in timing, occupation, and settlement, while sections on institutional change explore how schools, charities, unions, and employers respond. The prose is compact and schematic, favoring classification and synthesis over anecdote. Rather than a travelogue or ethnography, this is a policy-minded survey that seeks patterns large enough to inform governance. Its arguments proceed stepwise, inviting readers to consider how public rules and private incentives funnel diverse newcomers into particular roles.
Because it was written in the early twentieth century, the book reflects categories and assumptions about race and culture that today are recognized as limited and biased. Commons analyzes differences among groups in ways that mirror the vocabularies of his time, and his proposals arise from a Progressive Era confidence in administrative remedies. Reading critically, one can separate the historical framing from the underlying questions about inclusion, fairness, and institutional capacity. The text offers a window into how policy thinkers once organized evidence and argument, even as it requires modern readers to navigate and interrogate its period-specific taxonomies.
That historical vantage is precisely why the book still matters. It clarifies how debates over immigration recur around wages, public order, education, and national identity, and how policy designs shape outcomes as much as intentions do. By tracing links among labor demand, regulation, and community life, Commons supplies a framework for thinking about trade-offs that remain with us. The specifics of populations and industries have changed, yet the dynamics of inclusion, backlash, and adaptation persist. Readers interested in today’s policy questions can mine this text for precedents, cautionary patterns, and reminders that institutions channel both conflict and cooperation.
Approached as a primary document of its era and a succinct model of institutional analysis, Races & Immigrants in USA rewards close, reflective reading. It does not offer a final word but a scaffold for inquiry, encouraging comparisons across periods and policies without collapsing differences. Students of history, economics, law, and public administration will find its clarity of structure instructive, while general readers gain perspective on how ideas about migration become rules that govern everyday life. Taken on its own terms and examined critically, the book serves as both a map of past reasoning and a prompt for contemporary debate.
Synopsis
John R. Commons’s Races and Immigrants in America (1907) surveys the making of the United States’ population through successive migrations and the economic institutions that received them. Writing as a labor economist in the Progressive Era, Commons organizes the topic around racial and national categories as they were then classified, examining how industry, law, and community life channel newcomers into work and citizenship. He blends historical narrative with statistical observation and case materials, asking how immigration alters wages, power in the workplace, urban growth, and political organization. The book positions immigration as both an engine of expansion and a source of industrial and civic strain.
Commons first reconstructs the country’s settlement and migration sequence, from colonial origins and early republic movements to nineteenth‑century surges. He distinguishes the earlier influx from Northern and Western Europe—especially Irish and German migrants, and later Scandinavians—associated with frontier agriculture and artisan trades, from the post‑1880 movement of Southern and Eastern Europeans into dense industrial cities. He notes how railroads, steamship companies, and recruiters reduced costs and intensified flows, while changing opportunities on the American frontier and in factories redirected settlement. This periodization frames his central inquiry: different sources of labor enter at different moments of national development, meeting distinct economic demands.
In analyzing labor markets, Commons emphasizes how immigrant supply interacts with wage levels, hours, and bargaining power. He describes occupational ladders and ethnic niches in mines, mills, construction, and domestic service, as well as middlemen systems such as labor agents that steer arrivals into seasonal or low‑wage jobs. He observes that employers may prefer groups they deem tractable or skilled for particular tasks, while unions struggle to align diverse workforces. Patterns of chain migration concentrate kin and villagers in the same trades and districts, shaping competition and solidarity. Industrial technology and business cycles, he argues, magnify these dynamics, alternately absorbing and displacing workers.
Beyond workplaces, the book follows immigrants into neighborhoods, churches and synagogues, mutual‑aid societies, and the public school. Commons treats these institutions as bridges between old‑world cultures and civic participation, observing how language learning, savings clubs, newspapers, and naturalization practices mediate adjustment. He contrasts the landowning path that earlier rural settlers could pursue with the urban tenement conditions later arrivals faced, and he considers the role of political machines and reform organizations in organizing votes and services. Trade unions and cooperative ventures appear as additional schools of citizenship, though their inclusiveness varies with industry and time, affecting whether solidarity outpaces ethnic segmentation.
Commons also examines the legal and racial boundaries that shape opportunity. He discusses the position of African Americans within Southern agriculture and migration, and the constraints created by segregation, as distinct from the trajectories of European immigrants. He considers Asian immigration in light of exclusion laws of the period, showing how statute and administration define who may enter, naturalize, or compete for jobs. Across cases, he differentiates cultural difference from formal barriers, arguing that restrictions backed by state and community power can entrench divisions in ways that economic integration alone may not quickly undo, with consequences for labor markets and politics.
Turning to policy, the book evaluates instruments intended to manage immigration and labor standards. Commons reviews contract‑labor prohibitions, passenger regulation, public health inspections, and proposals to restrict or select entrants, alongside efforts to strengthen factory laws, wages, and hours. He contends that unchecked recruitment can depress standards and weaken collective bargaining, and that the state has a role in setting floors that protect both native‑born and immigrant workers. Regulation of inflows, he argues, should be coordinated with domestic reforms that reduce the incentive to undercut. Education and civic programs, in his account, complement these measures by accelerating language acquisition and political incorporation.
As a synthesis, Races and Immigrants in America offers a formative Progressive‑Era framework for thinking about population change, industrial capitalism, and citizenship. Its typologies and policy reasoning document how early twentieth‑century reformers linked immigration to wage floors, urban governance, and national cohesion, while revealing assumptions about race and hierarchy that later scholarship would revise. The book endures as both analysis and artifact: it maps institutional channels through which newcomers entered work and public life, and it records the debates that preceded later restriction regimes. Readers encounter questions that remain unsettled—how to balance openness, fairness, and standards—presented with the empirical focus and policy ambition of its time.
Historical Context
John R. Commons published Races and Immigrants in America in 1907, at the height of the Progressive Era, when the United States was urbanizing and industrializing rapidly. The federal government had centralized immigration oversight under the Department of Commerce and Labor in 1903, with the Bureau of Immigration managing enforcement. Ellis Island, opened in 1892, processed most arrivals to New York Harbor, replacing Castle Garden. Universities, reform organizations, and state commissions were expanding social surveys to guide policy. Commons, an institutional economist associated with the University of Wisconsin and the "Wisconsin Idea," wrote within this research-driven milieu, linking immigration patterns to labor markets and public institutions.
Between 1880 and 1914, the United States received unprecedented numbers of immigrants, with fiscal year 1907 setting a record of roughly 1.28 million admissions. Increasingly, arrivals came from southern and eastern Europe—Italians, Poles, Slovaks, and Jews from the Russian Empire—alongside established communities of Irish and Germans. Many settled in industrial centers across the Northeast and Midwest, where overcrowding prompted municipal reforms such as New York’s Tenement House Act of 1901. Ellis Island’s medical and legal inspections sorted arrivals by health and admissibility standards. This demographic shift, visible in census data and city ward maps, underlies Commons’s attention to neighborhood lifeways, occupations, and assimilation.
Industrial conflict shaped public debate about immigration. The Homestead strike of 1892 and the Pullman strike of 1894 dramatized tensions over wages, skill, and managerial power. The 1902 anthracite coal strike, involving many recent European immigrants, drew federal mediation by President Theodore Roosevelt. Organized labor was divided: the American Federation of Labor, led by Samuel Gompers, often supported restriction, arguing that unchecked immigration depressed wages and enabled strikebreaking. New unions like the Industrial Workers of the World, founded in 1905, recruited immigrant laborers into mass organizations. Commons’s training in labor economics positioned him to analyze how segmented labor markets encouraged ethnic competition and cooperation.
Policy debates intensified as restrictionists organized. The Immigration Restriction League, founded in 1894, campaigned for a literacy test, approved by Congress in 1897 but vetoed by President Grover Cleveland; later versions would pass only in 1917. Congress broadened exclusions in 1903, barring anarchists, and in 1907 raised the head tax and established a joint congressional inquiry, the Dillingham Commission. Asian migration faced special barriers: the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, strengthened by the Geary Act of 1892 and made permanent in 1902, and the 1907-1908 Gentlemen’s Agreement limiting Japanese labor emigration. Commons wrote amid these legislative experiments and organized campaigns.
Naturalization policy also shifted. The Basic Naturalization Act of 1906 standardized court procedures, centralized record-keeping, created the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization, and introduced an English language requirement for citizenship. Progressive reformers promoted "Americanization" through night schools, settlement houses, and public libraries. Institutions such as Jane Addams’s Hull House (founded 1889) documented immigrant neighborhoods while offering social services, English classes, and civic clubs. Municipal tenement commissions, public health departments, and school systems gathered detailed statistics on housing, sanitation, and truancy. Commons’s reliance on official reports and field observations reflects this era’s confidence that systematic data could diagnose social problems and justify administrative remedies.
Racial hierarchy framed national policy and scholarship. The Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) endorsed "separate but equal," enabling Jim Crow segregation and disenfranchisement across the South. In immigration law, Chinese laborers were excluded while birthright citizenship was affirmed in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) for American-born children. Anti-Asian hostility flared on the West Coast, including the 1906 San Francisco school segregation dispute and anti-Asian riots in Bellingham, Washington, in 1907. In academia, eugenic ideas circulated through organizations like the American Breeders Association, which created a eugenics committee in 1906. Commons’s categories reflect prevailing, now-discredited racial typologies.
Transatlantic migration was driven by intertwined global forces. Steamship companies reduced costs and transit times, expanding steerage traffic through European ports such as Hamburg, Bremen, and Naples. Political violence and repression, including pogroms in the Russian Empire after 1903 and unrest surrounding the 1905 Revolution, spurred Jewish and other departures. Rural poverty and land fragmentation in southern Italy and parts of Austro-Hungary pushed laborers abroad, often in circular patterns of seasonal work and remittances. Employers and labor agents in the United States recruited workers for mines, mills, and railroads. Commons drew on these documented flows to explain settlement patterns and occupational niches.
Commons’s analysis fused Progressive reform with contemporary racial assumptions. He evaluated the "American standard of living" in relation to migrant labor, criticizing contract labor and padrone systems and urging regulation to restrain exploitative intermediaries. He favored measures such as a literacy test and civic education to promote assimilation, while advocating labor laws to reduce downward wage pressure. The book’s statistical orientation and policy proposals mirror the era’s confidence in administrative expertise and social surveys. At the same time, its hierarchical classifications and generalized judgments reflect the boundaries of early twentieth-century social science, revealing how reform impulses coexisted with exclusionary thinking in national debates.
Races & Immigrants in USA
REFERENCES CITED IN FOOTNOTES
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Atlanta University Publications[1]:—No. 1. “Mortality among Negroes in Cities” (1896).No. 2. “Social and Physical Condition of Negroes in Cities” (1897).No. 3. “Some Efforts of Negroes for Social Betterment” (1898).No. 6. “The Negro Common School” (1901).No. 7. “The Negro Artisan” (1902).No. 8. “The Negro Church” (1903).No. 9. “Notes on Negro Crime” (1904).No. 10. “A Select Bibliography of the Negro American” (1905).
Balch, Emily Greene, “Slav Emigration at its Source,” Charities, 1906. “Introductory,” Jan. 6; “Bohemians,” Feb. 3; “Slovaks,” March 3, April 7; “Galicia, Austrian Poles, Ruthenians,” May 5.
Bluntschli, J. K., The Theory of the State. New York, 1885.
Brandenburg, Broughton, Imported Americans (1904). Description of trip by author and wife through southern Italy and Sicily and return by steerage with immigrants.
Brinton, Daniel G., Religions of Primitive Peoples. New York, 1897.
Bureau of Labor, Seventh Special Report, The Slums of Baltimore, Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia (1894). Ninth Special Report, The Italians in Chicago (1897).
Burgess, John W., Reconstruction and the Constitution, 1866–1876. New York, 1903.
Bushee, Frederick A., “Ethnic Factors in the Population of Boston,” American Economic Association, 3d Series, Vol. IV, pp. 305–470 (1903).
Casson, Herbert N., Munsey’s Magazine, “The Jews in America,” 34:381; “The Sons of Old Scotland in America,” 34:599; “The Germans in America,” 34:694; “The Scandinavians in America,” 35:613; “The Welsh in America,” 35:749; “The Italians in America,” 35:122; “The Dutch in America,” 35:238; “The Spanish in America,” 35:294.
Coman, Katherine, “The History of Contract Labor in the Hawaiian Islands,” American Economic Association, 3d Series, Vol. IV, No. 3 (1903). “The Negro as Peasant Farmer,” American Statistical Association, June, 1904, pp. 39–54.
Commissioner of Education, Annual Reports, Washington.
Commissioner-General of Immigration, Annual Reports, Washington.
Commons, J. R., Proportional Representation. New York, 1907.
Cutler, James E., Lynch Law. An Investigation into the History of Lynching in the United States. New York, 1905.
De Forest and Veillier, The Tenement House Problem, 2 vols. New York, 1903.
Du Bois, W. E. B., The Philadelphia Negro. Philadelphia, 1899; The Soul of Black Folk. New York, 1903; “Negroes,” Twelfth Census, Supplementary Analysis, pp. 185–275; “The Negro Farmer,” pp. 511–579.
Eaton, Dorman B., The Civil Service in Great Britain. New York, 1880.
Emigration to the United States, Special Consular Reports, Vol. XXX. Department of Commerce and Labor, 1904.
Facts about Immigration. Reports of Conferences of the Immigration Department of the National Civic Federation, Sept. 14 and Dec. 12, 1906. New York, 1907.
Federation. Quarterly Journal of Federation of Churches and Christian Organizations, New York. Especially June, July, December, 1902, March, June, October, 1903. Also annual reports and sociological canvasses of the Federation.
Fiske, John, Old Virginia and her Neighbors, 2 vols. New York, 1897.
Fleming, Walter L., Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama. New York, 1897.
Franklin, F. J., The Legislative History of Naturalization in the United States. Chicago, 1906.
Grose, Howard B., Aliens or Americans? Forward Mission Study Courses. New York, 1906.
Hall, Prescott F., Immigration and its Effect upon the United States. New York, 1906.
Hampton Negro Conference, Annual, 1897–1901.
Hanna, Charles A., The Scotch-Irish, 2 vols. New York, 1902.
Hawaii, Reports on, United States Bureau of Labor, 1st Report, Sen. Doc. 169, 57th Congress, 1st Sess., 13:4231; 2d Report, Bulletin No. 47 (1903); 3d Report, Bulletin No. 66 (1906).
Hoffman, Frederick L., “Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro,” Publications of the American Economic Association, Vol. XI, Nos. 1, 2, 3 (1896).
Huebner, Grover G., “The Americanization of the Immigrant,” American Academy of Political and Social Science, May, 1906, p. 191.
Hull House Maps and Papers, A Presentation of Nationalities and Wages in a Congested District of Chicago, by residents of Hull House. New York, 1895.
Hunter, Robert, Poverty. New York, 1904. Chapter VI, “The Immigrant.”
Immigration Laws and Regulations and Chinese Exclusion Laws, Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization, Washington.
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Japanese and Korean Exclusion League, San Francisco. Leaflets.
Jenks, J. W., Certain Economic Questions in the English and Dutch Colonies in the Orient. War Department, Bureau of Insular Affairs, 1902, Doc. No. 168.
Jewish Agricultural and Industrial Aid Society, Annual Reports. New York.
Kellor, Frances A., Out of Work. New York, 1904.
Kelsey, Carl, The Negro Farmer. Chicago, 1903. Also Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, January, 1903.
King and Okey, Italy To-day. London, 1901.
Kuczynski, R., “The Fecundity of the Native and Foreign Born Population in Massachusetts,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, November, 1901, February, 1902. “Die Einwanderungspolitik und die Bevölkerungsfrage der Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika,” Volkswirthschaftliche Zeitfragen. Berlin, 1903.
Lazare, Bernard, Antisemitism, Its History and Causes. New York, 1903.
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Lodge, Henry Cabot, Historical and Political Essays. Boston, 1892.
Lord, Trenor, and Barrows, The Italian in America. New York, 1905. Especially Italians in American agriculture.
Mallock, W. H., Aristocracy and Evolution. New York, 1898.
Marshall, Alfred, Principles of Economics. New York, 1891.
Merriam, G. S., The Negro and the Nation. New York, 1906.
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CHAPTER I
RACE AND DEMOCRACY
“All men are created equal[2q].” So wrote Thomas Jefferson, and so agreed with him the delegates from the American colonies. But we must not press them too closely nor insist on the literal interpretation of their words. They were not publishing a scientific treatise on human nature nor describing the physical, intellectual, and moral qualities of different races and different individuals, but they were bent upon a practical object in politics. They desired to sustain before the world the cause of independence by such appeals as they thought would have effect; and certainly the appeal to the sense of equal rights before God and the law is the most powerful that can be addressed to the masses of any people. This is the very essence of American democracy, that one man should have just as large opportunity as any other to make the most of himself, to come forward and achieve high standing in any calling to which he is inclined. To do this the bars of privilege have one by one been thrown down, the suffrage has been extended to every man, and public office has been opened to any one who can persuade his fellow-voters or their representatives to select him.
But there is another side to the successful operations of democracy. It is not enough that equal opportunity to participate in making and enforcing the laws should be vouchsafed to all—it is equally important that all should be capable of such participation. The individuals, or the classes, or the races, who through any mental or moral defect are unable to assert themselves beside other individuals, classes, or races, and to enforce their right to an equal voice in determining the laws and conditions which govern all, are just as much deprived of the privilege as though they were excluded by the constitution. In the case of individuals, when they sink below the level of joint participation, we recognize them as belonging to a defective or criminal or pauper class, and we provide for them, not on the basis of their rights, but on the basis of charity or punishment. Such classes are exceptions in point of numbers, and we do not feel that their non-participation is a flaw in the operations of democratic government. But when a social class or an entire race is unable to command that share in conducting government to which the laws entitle it, we recognize at once that democracy as a practical institution has in so far broken down, and that, under the forms of democracy, there has developed a class oligarchy or a race oligarchy.
Two things, therefore, are necessary for a democratic government such as that which the American people have set before themselves: equal opportunities before the law, and equal ability of classes and races to use those opportunities. If the first is lacking, we have legal oligarchy; if the second is lacking, we have actual oligarchy disguised as democracy.
Now it must be observed that, compared with the first two centuries of our nation’s history, the present generation is somewhat shifting its ground regarding democracy. While it can never rightly be charged that our fathers overlooked the inequalities of races and individuals, yet more than the present generation did they regard with hopefulness the educational value of democracy. “True enough,” they said, “the black man is not equal to the white man, but once free him from his legal bonds, open up the schools, the professions, the businesses, and the offices to those of his number who are most aspiring, and you will find that, as a race, he will advance favorably in comparison with his white fellow-citizens.”
It is now nearly forty years since these opportunities and educational advantages were given to the negro, not only on equal terms, but actually on terms of preference over the whites, and the fearful collapse of the experiment is recognized even by its partisans as something that was inevitable in the nature of the race at that stage of its development. We shall have reason in the following pages to enter more fully into this discussion, because the race question in America has found its most intense expression in the relations between the white and the negro races, and has there shown itself to be the most fundamental of all American social and political problems. For it was this race question that precipitated the Civil War, with the ominous problems that have followed upon that catastrophe; and it is this same race problem that now diverts attention from the treatment of those pressing economic problems of taxation, corporations, trusts, and labor organizations which themselves originated in the Civil War. The race problem in the South is only one extreme of the same problem in the great cities of the North, where popular government, as our forefathers conceived it, has been displaced by one-man power, and where a profound distrust of democracy is taking hold upon the educated and property-holding classes who fashion public opinion.
