National Origins in Pennsylvania

...It was only when they began to gain political power in the cities and to enter into economic competition with earlier deposits of the population that slumbering native prejudices burst forth anew...

...Both are symptomatic of the fact that our time, pagan though it may seem at first sight, con-ceals certain inclinations toward Catholicism which might flower into fruit if they ended in Catholicism...

...The immediate occasion of Gordon's alarm was the arrival of IO9 Palatines, one of the numerous groups of Germans who followed Pastorius to Penn's land-- Philadelphia being a main port of entry...

...And it will not forget again...

...These new arrivals were rendered particularly obnoxious by the circumstance, noted by Logan, that there were "divers Papists among them...

...In this agitation, no demand was made for exclusion of immigrants, or even for restriction...

...From the earliest times there was a steady flow of Catholic Irish into the colonies, but during the nine- teenth century the movement swelled to a flood...

...Pro-viding as they did inexpensive manual labor for vast public projects then being undertaken, like the rail-roads and the canals, their entry was looked upon favorably, on the whole...

...Miss Robins, Papist herself, can hardly be accused of anti-Catholic feeling in the matter...

...The law was short-lived and had scant effect, but it is significant of the strength of the sentiment in those early days...

...In a letter to Peter Collinson he expresses the opinion that "measures of great temper are necessary with the Germans," and goes on to call them indiscreet, dull, credulous, ignorant and of inaccessible prejudices...

...If they were not tractable and law-abiding, these Scotch-Irish at least had the qualities of their defects...

...Scotch-Irish turbulence was not cured in a genera-tion...

...With this development, immigration, hitherto sectional, became national in its implications, and the country at large began to share the familiar apprehension of seaboard states like New York, Massachusetts and Pennsyl-vania...

...Incidentally, Fillmore succeeded in winning but a single state in the election--and that state Maryland l The record of the "Free State," if truth be told, is hardly better than Pennsylvania's on this issue...

...Reed's filibuster on this same national-origins matter in the closing hours of the last Congress...

...It imposed a head tax of forty shillings on all foreigners (non-English, that is) admitted to the colony...

...Vare...

...Thereafter Pennsylvania's voice, though still raised, was drowned in the general outcry...

...We are in the midst of a period of transition, but its unsatisfactory character-istics must not lead us to forget or minimize the ideal striven for...

...Curiously enough, this party first saw the light in Germantown, that suburb of Philadelphia founded and largely settled by the Palatine immi-grants whose entry a century earlier had been so widely opposed...

...Wine casks are too plentiful in South Philadelphia cellars for that...

...Appropriately enough, it was a senator from Penn- sylvania who effectually blocked a reconsideration of this vexing question of national origins in the current extraordinary session of Congress...

...It had not forgotten Mr...

...Dignified pillars of church and state today who trace their ancestry to this sturdy race might perhaps be amazed to hear of the reception that greeted their forbears, migrating in the early eighteenth century...

...A definite law concerning the practical execution of this constitutional enactment was to follow later...

...CHURCH AND STATE IN JAPAN By JOHANNES LAURES S INCE the termination of the persecution in the seventies of the nineteenth century, the Catholic Church has enjoyed liberty in the Land of the Rising Sun...

...Swarming into the province, they overran "in an auda- cious and disorderly manner" the private preserve of the Penn's, Conestoga Manor, squatting there in defiance of the Quaker government in Philadelphia...

...They aided vitally in the winning of independence...

...Certainly they seem to have been harmless enough...

...and succeeding generations of Penn254 THE COMMONWEAL July 3, ~9z9 sylvania Dutch have contributed no less than six gov- ernors to the commonwealth...

...Accordingly, this drastic and frankly discriminatory provision becomes part of the law on July I, committing us as a nation to racial selection--or rather rejection--within the white race as a method of choosing new population...

...To their reputation as gunmen they added the distinction of being our earliest moonshiners when, after the formation of our government, they refused to pay the excise duties imposed by Congress on dis- tillers and went as far as open rebellion in the famous Whiskey Insurrection...

...The foreigner was called the outstanding issue of the day, resolutions were passed, and appeals made to Congress to take some action...

...The coincidence of this development with the revival of Thomistic philosophy is of course no acci-dent...

...Logan claimed that five families of them made more trouble than fifty of any other nationality, that they were harsh in their treatment of the Indians, and that they had no regard for land titles...

...Thus it was but natural that they endeavored to accel- erate the enactment of a law that would give equal treatment to all religions...

...In short, unless the stream of their importation could be turned from this to other colonies, they will soon so outnumber us that all the advantages that we have will, in my opinion, be not able to preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious...

...Those coming to Pennsylvania, however, became and remained unpopular...

...The press has learned caution, and politically the "national blocs" have begun to loom formidably enough in the elector- ate to awe the average run of office-seeker...

...As late as i753 even so liberal a spirit as Benjamin Franklin permits himself to be disturbed about them...

...It is an open secret that the solid Democratic vote of the Vare wards in the presidential election was something more than enfranchised thirst...

...There is ample testimony to their industry, thrift, tractability...

...The eighties marked a turning-point in immigration...

...The Scotch-Irish emigrated to Pennsylvania in large numbers, Franklin estimating that they formed one-third of the population early in the eighteenth cen-tury...

...At about this time Congress seriously took up the task of regula- tion, hitherto in the hands of the individual states, the Supreme Court having decided in x 875 that immi- gration was a matter for federal action...

...But we hear it now and then...

...Even then the matter was settled only in a general way in that every Japanese citizen was given the right of becoming a member of a Christian denomination, "in so far as peace and order and his duties as a subject should not be threat- ened thereby...

...So for- midable, indeed, that when Senator Reed yields to his pet phobia in the Senate chamber it must greatly per- turb his as yet unseated colleague, Mr...

...A government proclamation in I873 abol- ished the old laws against Christianity and gave every citizen freedom of religious worship...

...The governor and the assembly, chronically at odds, found themselves for once in substantial agree-ment, and a law was passed in I729 which may be regarded as one of the ancestors of American immi- gration-restriction legislation based on race discrimi-nation...

...If then music has been able to bring us to such trends of thought it is because this music is, on the one hand, the most fervent of the arts excepting poetry and so feels the nearness to or remoteness from God that characterizes an epoch, and on the other hand re-mains, when genuine at all, necessarily a genuine child of its own particular age...

...Organized in 1834, it attracted a certain following for a while, electing several mayors in Philadelphia...

...Their spirit, energy and independence--their very belligerency--made them ideal recruits for revolution...

...The early Germans were only the first of a succes- sion of alien invasions that filled the nervous founding Fathers with concern for the safety and privileges of "His Majesty's subjects...

...The truth is, the heavy Italian population in this section was killing two birds with one ballot, paying its re-spects to Mr...

...A rereading of this chapter of his state's history might inspire a little charity in the breast of the Senator toward the shortcomings of subsequent immigrants...

...Know-nothingism ("the Order of the Star Spangled Banner"I) a recrudescence of the Nativist movement, July 3, i929 THE COMMONWEAL 255 was particularly strong in Pennsylvania, electing a mayor in Philadelphia and, according to Horace Greeley, capturing virtually the state's entire delega- tion to the Thirty-fifth Congress...

...At last a draft of the Religions Bill was laid before the House of Peers in i927 but met with great opposition...

...On a lower level, the old anti-alien ardor still smolders, readily fanned into flame by events like the last election, but it is becoming more and more rural and subterranean in its manifestations...

...In this connection, Adams draws an interesting parallel: For a very considerable part of the population, frontier conditions must have closely approximated those obtain- ing today among the first generation of immigrants such as the "Polacks" who take up abandoned farms in the East, or others whose standards of living we consider so "un-American...

...He ex-pressed his concern for the peace and security of the province, which "might be endangered by such num-bers of strangers daily pouring in, who, being igno- rant of our language and laws, make, as it were, a distinct people from His Majesty's subjects...

...The Scotch-Irish were the next terror to darken the horizon...

...July 3, I929 THE COMMONWEAL 233 generally valid forms, in particular to counterpoint and polyphony, the renewed attractiveness of which is indicated also in the contemporary Bach renaissance...

...Confessedly directed against "Irish Papists," the Native American agitation took violent form, marked by demonstrations in the city's streets and culminating in the firing of a nunnery, the homes of many Catholics, and two churches, one of which, Saint Augustine's, was demolished...

...The tide attained unprecedented proportions in these years, the normal flow from northern countries being augmented by the vanguard of the movement from southern and eastern Europe...

...There was the same fierce and sordid struggle to obtain a foothold, so as to secure the means of subsistence, the same squalor and dirt, the same annual addition to the number of children...

...In phrases strikingly like those employed by exclu- sionists today, Governor Patrick Gordon back in I727, was viewing with alarm the wholesale immigra- tion of Germans occurring at that time...

...The Anti-Semitic Society it- self, indeed, has a Philadelphian for president...

...It is true that our time needs a new polyphony, and this could not as yet have crystallized to the point where it constituted so nicely adjusted a system as that of old classical music...

...Whatever its immediate inspiration--a question that puzzles politi- cal observers--Senator David A. Reed's attitude is in line with a long-standing tradition in the common-wealth he represents...

...Reed as well as to prohibition...

...There was, however, no formal law that guar- anteed religious liberty until I889, when the new con- stitution was enacted...

...At that time Senator Reed's native city of Pittsburgh was as Irish as Londonderry...

...The Scotch-Irish continued to be a thorn in the side of the provincial authorities, going so far as to march on the city t,ooo strong in 1761 with an impudent demand that a few straggling Indian fugitives be turned over to them for massacre...

...The new arrivals no longer stopped along the crowded eastern seaboard, but penetrated into the interior, now becoming rapidly in- dustrialized, creating a social and economic problem wherever they settled in large numbers...

...The first attempt in this respect was made in I898 but proved a complete failure...

...Penn's colony, founded ex-pressly as "an asylum for the oppressed of all nations," by a curious irony, early became a hotbed of antlallen sentiment and long remained such, in spite of the heterogeneous composition of its popula- tion and in the face of the substantial debt it owes to the enterprise and industry, the brains and the brawn of successive waves of immigration...

...Then too, even those who take no heed of the basis supplied to all polyphonic music as such by views of the world, can hardly fail to dis- cern here something like an approach, even though it be as yet a quite remote and timid approach, to NATIONAL ORIGINS By FRANK the Thomistic and so also to the Catholic ideal of art...

...This govern-ment proclamation was followed by a similar one in I876...

...Furthermore, Philadelphia was chosen as friendly ground for the party's convention in 1855, at which Millard Fill-more was nominated for the Presidency...

...Of all immi- grant stocks, this turbulent breed appears to have made the worst impression on the decorous, property- minded colonial communities...

...This condition developed in the thirties...

...Yet apprehension on their account persisted, with nothing more formidable to sustain it than their num- bers and clannishness...

...No one questions any more the desirability of this substantial element in our population, and today the Wisters and the Ritten- houses mix freely and unabashed with the Logans and the Norrises, with no demoralizing effects...

...Shinto, Buddhism and Christianity were to enjoy equal rights, at least theoretically...

...Subsequent history made him out rather a poor prophet...

...there was still too much pick and shovel work to be done for anything so drastic as that...

...IN PENNSYLVANIA RAHILL p RESIDENT HOOVER has failed in his efforts to secure a further postponement of the appli-cation of the provision in the Immigration Act of I924 calling for the substitution of the census of I89 o for that of I9Io as a basis for computing "national origins...

...There were extenuating circumstances for the out-breaks of these frontiersmen, of course, precisely as there are for peoples similarly situated today--arriv- ing in a strange country and finding land and resources prefimpted by earlier settlers, and a life of drudgery and privation as their portion...

...The raiders were only prevented from finishing their bloody work by an unexpected show of fight on the part of the younger element of Quakers, who, under the energetic leadership of Franklin, forgot their pacific principles for the nonce and turned out in force to defend their city...

...These unfortu-nate natives were the remnant of a depleted band of Moravian converts, harmless and well-disposed, who had survived a murderous attack of these same Scotch- Irish on Conestoga Manor, and had fled to Philadel- phia for protection...

...At the same time a vigorous campaign was launched against it by the various religious organizations, above all by the Buddhists and Protestants...

...hers are sentimental regrets over a vanishing society, "seen through the witchery of intervening years...

...It has a familiar ring: Not being used to liberty, they know not how to make a modest use of it...

...Industrial depression, occurring at this time, widespread labor disturbances--frequently involving alien agitators and strikers--and the final exhaustion of the public domain further inflamed public opinion of the nation as a whole on the subject...

...As a result, it was never introduced into the lower House...

...James Truslow Adams says in his Provincial America: Everywhere there was strong prejudice against them...

...The Native American party, into which the movement was crystallized, took its stand on a plat- form that called for withholding naturalization privi- leges from foreigu-born and their debarment from public office...

...As early as t699 there was a statute on her books designed "to pre-vent too great a number of Irish Papists being im- ported into this province" and carrying a twenty-shilling head tax on all Irish servants brought in...

...The reason why the Religions Bill was so strongly opposed was the fact that it seemed to endanger the freedom of worship guaranteed by the constitution...

...Much the same emotion stirs William Bullitt in his single, savage Philadelphia novel--inclining in his case some- what to anti-Semitism...

...It received refined but bitter utterance through Elizabeth Robins, returned from a lengthy so- journ abroad to find her quiet Quaker city a polyglot metropolis...

...Meanwhile many gov- ernment regulations have been issued dealing almost exclusively with Buddhism and Shinto, so that these religious organizations were indeed in a less favorable condition than the various Christian denominations...

...In Franklin's own day, one of this "dull, credulous and ignorant" stock, Frederick A. Muhlen- berg, acquired a sufficient knowledge of our language and government to enable him to serve as Speaker of the first House of Representatives under the fed- eral constitution...