The prosperity that followed the war [World War 11 attracted hordes of newcomers who were welcomed by the native Americans to operate factories, build railroads and fill up the waste spaces-"developing the country" it was called.
These new immigrants were no longer
exclusively members of the Nordic race as were the earlier ones who came of
their own impulse to improve their social conditions. The transportation lines
advertised America as a land flowing with milk and honey and the European
governments took the opportunity to unload upon careless, wealthy and
hospitable America the sweepings of their jails and asylums. The result was
that the new immigration, while it still included many strong elements from the
north of Europe, contained a large and increasing number of the weak, the
broken and the mentally crippled of all races drawn from the lowest stratum of
the Mediterranean basin and the Balkans, together with hordes of the wretched,
submerged populations of the Polish Ghettos. Our jails, insane asylums and
almshouses are filled with this human flotsam and the whole tone of American life,
social, moral and political has been lowered and vulgarized by them.
With a pathetic and fatuous belief in
the efficacy of American institutions and environment to reverse or obliterate
immemorial hereditary tendencies, these newcomers were welcomed and given a
share in our land and prosperity. The American taxed himself to sanitate and
educate these poor helots and as soon as they could speak English, encouraged
them tqenter into the political life, first of municipalities and then of the
nation.
The native Americans are splendid raw
material, but have as yet only an imperfectly developed national consciousness.
They lack the instinct of self- preservation in a racial sense. Unless such an instinct
develops their race will perish, as do all organisms which disregard this
primary law of nature. Nature had granted to the Americans of a century ago the
greatest opportunity in recorded history to produce in the isolation of a
continent a powerful and racially homogeneous people and had provided for the
experiment a pure race of one of the most gifted and vigorous stocks on earth,
a stock free from the diseases, physical and moral, which have again and again
sapped the vigor of the older lands. Our grandfathers threw away this
opportunity in the blissful ignorance of national childhood and inexperience.
The result of unlimited immigration is
showing plainly in the rapid decline in the birth rate of native Americans
because the poorer classes of Colonial stock, where they still exist, will not
bring children into the world to compete in the labor market with the Slovak,
the Italian, the Syrian and the Jew. The native American is too proud to mix
socially with them and is gradually withdrawing from the scene, abandoning to
these aliens the land which he conquered and developed. The man of the old
stock is being crowded out of many country districts by these foreigners just
as he is to-day being literally driven off the streets of New York City by the
swarms of Polish Jews. These immigrants adopt the language of the native
American, they wear his clothes, they steal his name and they are beginning to
take his women, but they seldom adopt his religion or understand his ideals and
while he is being elbowed out of his own home the American looks calmly abroad
and urges on others the suicidal ethics which are exterminating his own race.
When the test of actual battle comes,
it will, of course, be the native American who will do the fighting and suffer
the losses. With him will stand the immigrants of Nordic blood, but there will
be numbers of these foreigners in the large cities who will prove to be
physically unfit for military duty.
As to what the future mixture will be
it is evident that in large sections of the country the native American will
entirely disappear. He will not inter- marry with inferior races and he cannot
compete in the sweat shop and in the street trench with the newcomers. Large
cities from the days of Rome, Alexandria, and Byzantium have always been
gathering points of diverse races, but New York is becoming a cloaca gentium
which will produce many amazing racial hybrids and some ethnic horrors that
will be beyond the powers of future anthropologists to unravel.
One thing is certain: in any such mixture, the surviving
traits will be determined by competition between the lowest and most primitive
elements and the specialized traits of Nordic man; his stature, his light colored
eyes, his fair skin and light colored hair, his straight nose and his splendid
fighting and moral qualities, will have little part in the resultant mixture.
The "survival of the
fittest" means the survival of the type best adapted to existing
conditions of environment, which to-day are the tenement and factory, as in
Colonial times they were the clearing of forests, fighting Indians, farming the
fields and sailing the Seven Seas. From the point of view of race it were
better described as the "survival of the unfit." . . .
Success in colonization depends on the selection of new lands and
climatic conditions in harmony with the immemorial requirements of the incoming
race. The adjustment of each race to its own peculiar habitat is based on
thousands of years of rigid selection which cannot be safely ignored. A certain
isolation and freedom from competition with other races, for some centuries at
least, is also important, so that the colonists may become habituated to their
new surroundings.
The Americans have not been on the
continent long enough to acquire this adjustment and consequently do not
present as effective a resistance to competition with immigrants as did, let us
say, the Italians when overrun by northern barbarians. As soon as a group of
men migrate to new surroundings, climatic, social or industrial, a new form of
selection arises and those not fitted to the new conditions die off at a
greater rate than in their original home. This form of differential selection
plays a large part in modern industrial centers and in large cities, where
unsanitary conditions bear more heavily on the children of Nordics than on
those of Alpines or Mediterraneans.