John R. Commons

“ Besides the crimes which spring from racial tendencies, there is a peculiar class of crimes springing largely from race prejudice and hatred. These are lynchings and mob violence. The United States presents the paradox of a nation where respect for law and constitutional forms has won most signal triumphs, yet where concerted violations of law have been most widespread. By a queer inversion of thought, a crime committed jointly by many is not a crime, but a vindication of justice, just as a crime committed by authority of a nation is not a crime, but a virtue. ”

“ What wonder that the wage-earner should use the same argument to keep out the pauper himself, and especially that he should begin by applying the argument to those races which showed themselves unable rapidly to assimilate, and thereby make a stand for high wages and high standards of living. Certain it is that had the white wage-earners possessed the suffrage and political influence during colonial times, the negro would not have been admitted in large numbers, and we should have been spared that race problem which of all is the largest and most nearly insoluble. ”

“ Property in human beings suppresses it, unless occasionally a slave is permitted to purchase his freedom. The wage system evokes ambition if the way is open for promotion or for escape by becoming an owner. Tenancy is on a still higher level, but most of all, for the masses of men, the ownership of his own small property is the keenest spur to ambition, for it rewards the worker with all of his product. This motive is the surest test of an individual’s or a race’s future. Compare the negro and the Italian cotton grower as tenants in the new vocation opening up to the latter. ”

“ Migration tears a man away from the traditions, the routine, the social props on which he has learned to rely, and throws him among strangers upon his own resources. He must swim or drown. [Pg 127] At the same time he earns higher wages and eats more nourishing food than he had ever thought within reach of one in his station. His ambition is fired, he is stirred by the new tonic of feeling himself actually rising in the world. He pictures to himself a home of his own, he economizes and saves money to send to his friends and family, or to return to his beloved land a person of importance. ”

“ And then, by the cataclysm of a war in which it took no part, this race, after many thousand years of savagery and two centuries of slavery, was suddenly let loose into the liberty of citizenship and the electoral suffrage. The world never before had seen such a triumph of dogmatism and partizanship. It was dogmatism, because a theory of abstract equality and inalienable rights of man took the place of education and the slow evolution of moral character. ”

“ 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 [Pg 3] 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. ”

“ Through the prism of this noble instrument of the human mind all other instruments focus their powers of assimilation upon the new generations as they come forth from the disunited immigrants. The public schools, the newspapers, the books, the political parties, the trade unions, the religious propagandists with their manifold agencies of universal education, the railroads with their inducements to our unparalleled mobility of population, are all dependent upon our common language for their high efficiency. ”

“ The high wages of the industries and occupations which radiate from American cities are to them the magnet which fortune-seeking is to the American-born. The cities, too, furnish that choice of employers and that easy reliance on charitable and friendly assistance which is so necessary to the indigent laborer looking for work. Thus it is that those races of immigrants the least self-reliant or forehanded, like the Irish and the Italians, seek the cities in greater proportions than those sturdy races like the Scandinavians, English, Scotch, and Germans. ”

“ Amalgamation is a process of centuries, but assimilation is a process of individual training. Amalgamation is a blending of races, assimilation a blending of civilizations. Amalgamation is beyond the organized efforts of government, but assimilation can be promoted by social institutions and laws. Amalgamation therefore cannot attract our practical interest, except as its presence or absence sets limits to our efforts toward assimilation.
Our principal interest in amalgamation is its effect on the negro race. ”

“ Thus, immigration brings to us a population of working ages unhampered by unproductive mouths to be fed, and, if we consider alone that which produces the wealth of this country and not that which consumes it, the immigrants add more to the country than does the same number of native of equal ability. Their home countries have borne the expense of rearing them up to the industrial period of their lives, and then America, without that heavy expense, reaps whatever profits there are on the investment. ”

“ We have, indeed, a most notable advantage compared with other countries where race divisions have undermined democracy. A single language became dominant from the time of the earliest permanent settlement, and all subsequent races and languages must adopt the established medium. This is essential, for it is not physical amalgamation that unites mankind; it is mental community. To be great a nation need not be of one blood, it must be of one mind. Racial inequality and inferiority are fundamental only to the extent that they prevent mental and moral assimilation. ”

“ The conditions necessary for democratic government are not merely the constitutions and laws which guarantee equality, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, for these after all are but paper documents. They are not merely freedom from foreign power, for the Australian colonies enjoy the most democratic of all governments, largely because they are owned by another country which has protected them from foreign and civil wars. Neither are wealth and prosperity necessary for democracy, for these may tend to luxury, inequality, and envy. ”

“ Their resentment toward employers who have kept them apart, their devotion to their new-found brothers, are terrible and pathetic. With their emotional temperament, unionism becomes not merely a fight for wages but a religious crusade. It is in the nature of retribution that, after bringing to this country all the industrial races of Europe and Asia in the effort to break down labor organizations, these races should so soon have wiped out race antagonism and, joining together in the most powerful of labor-unions, have wrenched from their employers the greatest advances in wages. ”

“ In a Southern city like Memphis it would exclude 1 per cent of the white and 38 per cent of the colored.
Tested by the standards of democracy, the ability to read and write the English language is a proper qualification. It is perhaps the maximum that can be required, for to test the ability to understand what is read and written is to open the door to partisanship and race discrimination. Yet it is intelligence that makes the suffrage an instrument of protection, and it is not a denial of rights to refuse such an instrument to one who injures himself with it. ”

“ Thus it is that this marvellous and paradoxical race, the parent of philosophers, artists, reformers, martyrs, and also of the shrewdest exploiters of the poor and ignorant, has, in two decades, come to America in far greater numbers than in the two centuries preceding.
It should not be inferred that the Jews are a race of pure descent. Coming as they do from all sections and nations of Europe, they are truly cosmopolitan, and have taken on the language, customs, and modes of thought of the people among whom they live. ”

“ Freedom of the press, trial by jury, separation of powers, independence of the judiciary, equality of opportunity, and several other governmental and legal principles have percolated through his subconscious self, and when he contemplates public questions these abstract principles have more or less influence as a guide to his ballot. But the immigrant has none of these. He comes here solely to earn a better living. The suffrage is nothing to him but a means of livelihood. ”

“ Apart from the negro we have very little knowledge of the amalgamation of races in America. We only know that for the most part they have blended into a united people with harmonious ideals, and the English, the German, the Scotch-Irish, the Dutch, and the Huguenot have become the American.
We speak of superior and inferior races, and this is well enough, but care should be taken to distinguish between inferiority and backwardness—between that superiority which is the original endowment of race and that which results from the education and training which we call civilization. ”

“ And while the clear-cut race distinctions have been blended through many centuries of amalgamation, yet it is most apparent that a gradation in the color of the skin follows the gradation in social position, from the light-colored, high-caste Brahman to the dark-colored, low-caste Sudra, or outcast pariah. Race divisions have been forgotten, but in their place religion has sanctified a division even more rigid than that of race, for it is sacrilege and defiance of the gods when a man of low caste ventures into the occupation and calling of the high caste. ”

“ Men are not equal, neither are races or classes equal. True equality comes through equal opportunity. If individuals go forward, their race or class is elevated. They become spokesmen, defenders, examples. No race or class can rise without its own leaders. If they get admitted on equal terms with other leaders, whether it be in the councils of the church, the law-making bodies of the city, state, and nation, or the wage conferences of employers, they then can command the hearing which their abilities justify. ”

“ With such a social class democracy is the only acceptable form of government. They demand and secure equal opportunities because they are able to rise to those opportunities. By their own inherent nature they look forward to and aspire to the highest positions.
But the peasants of Europe, especially of Southern and Eastern Europe, have been reduced to the qualities similar to those of an inferior race that favor despotism and oligarchy rather than democracy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ World power, however glorious and enticing, is not helpful to democracy, for it inclines to militarism and centralization, as did Rome in the hands of an emperor, or Venice in the hands of an oligarchy. The true foundations of democracy are in the character of the people themselves, that is, of the individuals who constitute the democracy. ”