Vol. 19

The Stranger Within Our Gates; What Can the Library Do for Him?*

Rev. F. C. H. Wendel, Ph. D.

I am especially happy to have the privilege of speaking on a subject that is very near to my heart. Being myself of German parentage, having lived much of my life among those who are either themselves immigrants or the children of immigrants, I think I can. speak with knowledge acquired at first hand, especially as I am conversant with the tongues of several of the European nations. My service with the New York P. E. City Mission society as a chaplain engaged in hospital and prison work has familiarized me with some of the darker sides of our

immigration problems. And lately my membership on the Western Massachusetts diocesan committee

on

the

needs of Oriental Christians and other foreigners, has made it my duty to study these same problems from still a different point of view.

I have thus, in the course of not a few years, been enabled to note how these problems present constantly, almost year by year, new aspects, growing ever more complicated and more serious. Those of us who either have

reached middle age or are approaching that period of life, can readily recall a time when the immigration question presented comparatively few problems. The early streams of immigration, having their sources in Great Britain and Ireland, in Germany, and in the Scandinavian countries-mainly, if not en

*An address delivered at the midwinter meeting. Feb. 1, 1911, of the Western Massachusetts library club.

No. 3

tirely-these new elements of the population were readily assimilated. And this was so because they were closely related by ties of race, of language, and of religion, to the earliest settlers of this continent, who came, to a great extent-leaving one side the early French and Spanish settlers-from these same countries. And today the children and grandchildren of these immigrants are hardly distinguishable, in features, in speech, in religious convictions, or in social position, from the descendants of the original settlers.

But, practically within our own genchange over the character of the imeration, there has come a very decided migration. Men of new races, speakpossessing religious convictions and ing tongues strange to our people, expressing them in forms of worship foreign to our ideals, have come to this country, are still coming, and will continue to come in perhaps yet greater numbers. These peoples we understand as little as they understand us; and out of this fact arise most of the problems that puzzle both sides. mutual comprehension would solve more than one of these vexed problems. Let us glance at a few statistics. ians and about 900,000 Poles have been From 1900-1910, about 2,000,000 Italadded to our population. Within the same period, have come some 225,000 Greeks, 53.000 Syrians, hordes of Slovaks, and ever-increasing streams. from Russia, and the Balkan states. About 13,000 Turks have come to us in these same eleven years. Thus we have had added to our population two new peoples, the Italians and Poles, dif

ferent in language and in customs, though linked by a common faith to one class of our own population. In the Greeks, Russians, Slovaks and Balkans, we have an entirely new element, of strange tongues, of peculiar customs, of religious convictions entirely new to our people. The Greek The Greek church (the Holy Eastern Orthodox church) has now a full establishment here, with about 1,000,000 members, a Russian archbishop, a Greek archbishop, and a Syrian Orthodox bishop; and hardly one in a hundred of our people knows anything about these new neighbors of ours. Nor are the Mohammedan Turks less strange to our civilization, nor are we less ignorant of their language, customs and religious convictions. We are, perhaps, better acquainted with the Jewish element that has been coming to us lately, mainly from Russia, Poland, and the Balkan states. About 1,000,000 have come to us from this source in the past eleven years. Yet they present many differences from the Jews of a generation ago. This statistical survey of the question is merely intended as an approximate statement of the facts, and lays, of course, no claim to exactness. Western Massachusetts has had its fair share of this foreign influx. The population of the five western counties of this commonwealth was, by the state census of 1905, the latest at our command, a little more than 25 per cent foreign, and the nonEnglish-speaking element was about 15 per cent. The percentage varied from 18 per cent in Franklin county to 30 per cent in Worcester county.

As a whole, the attitude of our people has been anything but friendly or hospitable toward these new hordes. Not wholly comprehending the newcomers, the American people as a whole have felt, rather than understood, the differences of race, of language, and of religion that rise between us and our new populations as apparently insurmountable barriers. Racial antipathies are always more apt to be

matters of the emotions than of the intellect. To this day, the old feeling of almost every race is that the foreigner is an enemy. We have advanced but little beyond the conception of the ancient Romans, who had but one word for "foreigner" and enemy-hostis. For it is this same racial antipathy that makes the staid New England matron distrust all "foreigners," and that is reflected in such nicknames as, "Paddies," "Micks," "Hans," "Guineas" and "Dago." Yet this antiquated standpoint seems hardly justifiable in our land and age. We are proud to publish to all the world that our country is the divinely appointed refuge of the oppressed of all lands, yet when they do take us at our word, we look at them askance.

Would we justify our position, would we make good our boast, that this land should be the refuge of the Jew, fleeing from religious persecution in Russia or Roumania; to the Finn, sadly turning his back on country and home, because the Russian government is proscribing his Lutheran religion and coercing him to conform to the Orthodox Greek faith; to the Christian Syrian, fleeing from Mohammedan persecution; to the Greek and the Italian, seeking here what they cannot have at home-a chance to make a living; to the Mohammedan Turk and the heathen Chinaman, seeking commercial advantages; the first thing needful to us is a sympathetic understanding of these peoples. Three channels for such an understanding are, I believe, open to our people: Church work, public schools, and the public libraries.

While it would be fascinating to dwell, especially on the church work, I want simply to indicate the other two channels, and pass at once to the public library. It is a truism, of course, to librarians, that the true public library is a sort of literary exchange, a center and source of literary culture. But just here comes in the point of contact between you librarians and the

foreigner. Your library can be made the middle ground on which all of the races that make up our population be they old or be they new to our history-may meet on a basis of equal ity; and you, the librarian, might well act as a sympathetic mediator between, or rather among, discordant elements. Whether you stand at the head of a great institution like the City library of Springfield, or of a small town or village library, you should make yourself more or less (preferably more) acquainted with our foreign elements, with their home land, with their history, with their literature, with their religious faith, with their ideals-racial and personal. Such information can be found in elementary shape in encyclopædias, in books such as are included in "The stories of the nations" series, in general histories, in a host of books on travel, etc., as will readily occur to you all. Let me add that some knowledge of a foreign tongue would be of inestimable value to you. Brush up the French or the German learned at high school or college. Italian can readily be learned by one who knows French. Of course, this requires time; but if you love your vocation, you will not grudge the time. Let some one of you who has to deal with, say, French Canadians and Italians try this plan and experience the delightful results. The only trouble will be that your library, or your home-provided the foreigner has no priest or pastor to whom to go-will become a sort of bureau of universal information and helpfulness; and you will not know how to get rid of your importunate charges. Other tongues, such as Modern Greek, Polish, Russian, etc., are more difficult. But perhaps some bright young woman might be found. among these populations, who could take up library work and be an invaluable assistant. But at any rate you ought to know one foreign tongue. You can have no idea until you have made the experiment, what a bond of sympathy the possession of a common tongue may be. In my prison and hos

pital work in New York city, I was enabled to assist men and women and to help do away with more than one abuse, simply because I could speak to the German, the Frenchman, the Italian, and the Spaniard, each in his own tongue. My office in the Church of San Salvatore, in New York city, was a bureau of information, an employment bureau, and, in general, the resource of my Italian parishioners, whenever they or their friends had gotten into any trouble, or perplexities, owing to their ignorance of our language, our laws, or our customs. I remember one poor woman from Venezuela, who long lay on a bed of suffering. in Bellevue hospital, friendless and alone in a great city. The first day I came into the ward and addressed her in Spanish, she brightened up; and the nurse told me that every morning at the time I made my round through her ward that woman's eyes turned expectant toward the door. I could not do much for her; but the sound of her dear native tongue gave her new courage.

Not only does the knowledge of the foreign language give you a bond of sympathy with your new public, but it also opens up to you the gateway of the national literature, a knowledge of which is essential to the understanding of the habits of thought and of the ideals, as well as the manners and customs, of your foreigner. But whether you actually do acquire the new language or not, do not fail to learn all you can about your particular foreigners-French Canadians, Poles, Bohemians, Greeks, Italians, or whatever they be. Let them know that you comprehend them and their national life; and the bond of sympathy is knit, never to be loosed, so far as the foreigner is concerned.

And this leads me, naturally, to another point that is of great importance. Make your foreigner feel at home in your reading-room. This can best be done by taking for his benefit newspapers and magazines, in his native tongue-preferably from his own coun

try. I can recall with what avidity I devoured, in a Berlin reading-room, the first copy of the New York Herald that I had seen in some nine months. It was two weeks old; yet I read it all, from the first word on the first page to the last word on the last pagenews, personals and advertisementsjust because it was a home paper; yet I was in the land of my ancestors, of my own parents; and German was my mother tongue. You see I can appreciate what the home paper, or even the local paper, in the native language, must mean to the foreigner. Perhaps you are all doing something of this kind already. I noticed the local French papers in the reading-room of the Greenfield library. Let me suggest a few magazines and papers, quite at random: Revue des Deux Mondes and Lectures Pour Tous (Paris); Il Secolo XX. (Milan), and La Nuova Antologia (Rome); Por Esos Mundos and Blanco y Nero (Madrid); Die Gartenlaube and Tom Fels Zum Meer (Leipzig); Ai Athenai (Athens); Le Courier des Etats Unis (French); Die Staatszeitung (German); L' Araldo (Italian); and Atlantis (Greek); all of New York city. To these may be added local papers. No doubt there are intelligent and educated men of all the different races who can suggest the local periodicals in their own tongues. On the shelves of the library itself, the educated and cultured foreigners, of whom not a few come to America, should find the best of their own literature. It is not so much needful to have many books, as it is to make a good choice from both classical and recent literature in in their respective tongues. No doubt the editors of the leading foreign periodicals, or the clergy of the foreign churches, would be only too ready to help you. Whatever assistance I can render, I shall gladly place at your disposal at any time. How much good can be done in this way I saw, whenwith the full consent of the sheriff—I cleaned out the old library of the New York county jail, and put in a traveling library, in which were included books

written in German, French, and-if mistake not-Italian as well.

Having made your immigrant fee at home, you can next turn your at tention to assisting him to become more or less of an American. Deaff Giroux will have much to say on this subject, and I would not encroach on his topic; but permit me to suggest that the library can make itself the ally of our day and evening schools, by fur nishing the books recommended by the teachers, and aiding the interested stu dent in his struggles with the English language, and in his excursions into English and American literature and history. Be sure that your library has on its shelves the best dictionaries to be procured. Of inestimable value would be translations of popular and well-known foreign books into English, and vice versa, original and translation standing side by side and always to be read together. This should be you "Language student's shelf;" and the

ks should be strictly confined to this one use. Also be certain that you have several copies of American histories in each of the various foreign tongues, such as Botta's History of c war of independe...e in Italian, and Vlastes and Gkourtze's History of the United States in modern Greek.

Let me sum up briefly, in closing, the points I have tried to make: Would you librarians really help the "Stranger within our gates" to come into sympathetic touch with us, you should first become acquainted with him; you should give him a cordial welcome to your library, and make him feel at home there and in the community; you should do all in your power to assist him in his often blindly groping efforts to learn to know our language, our customs, and our ideals.

Your circumstances may be uncongenial, but they shall not long remain so if you but perceive an Ideal and strive to reach it. You cannot travel within and stand still without.

Use of the Library

W. F. Stevens, librarian, Homestead, Pa.

What is a working man?

The logical answer is, "A man that earns his living." There is, however, a common understanding that the laboring man is the man that does the laborious or dirty work. The working man has been discussed so much during the last 25 years that we have come to look upon him almost as a curiosity, and altogether as a problem. But the idea is not so much to define him as it is to interest him in self-culture. To be able to interest anyone in a matter for which they seem to have no particular liking requires an effort.

What is the very first requisite in creating interest?

It is a pedagogical fact that nothing is taught where no interest is taken. It is true that every sane man is interested in something. The point of interest can nly be discovered by personal contact. It often happens that a few well-directed questions will float a hobby or give y a clue to something that interests him. That point of interest may be developed by you making yourself "one of him." Tuis said of Senator Depew that it makes no difference to hin whom he is addressing, he makes himself "one of them," and his success in interesting his audiences is proverbial. If one has had a varied experience in life it makes this accomplishment quite easy. You and I get nothing out of the reading of a book with which we have no sympathy or common points of interest. It is equally true that we will get nothing out of a laboring man with whom we have no sympathy or common interest. The point of interest may not always be a high ideal, and that is where this kind of work proves objectionable to some librarians who contend the library has to do with only the intellectual.

Has the library a right to do more than administer books?

Yes. Many librarians claim that the ultimate aim of the library is to "get the right book used by the right person."

public institution that does not stand for all round development is not equal to its opportunity. The college library is supposed to cater to the class work, while the class work is really preparing the student for the use of the library. Pedagogs are coming more and more to the conclusion that when a scholar becomes a good reader he is half educated. The plans for one of the new branches of the Cleveland public library will be equipped for settlement work. The charter of the library may not permit this library to operate a settlement work, but it is planning to provide this department, and allowing another organization to operate it. The Cleveland library is, therefore, doing more than circulating books. Many libraries furnish rooms for clubs and reading circles. The museum, the art galley, the music hall, the night school, the athletic club and the public schools are all used in like manner as feeders for the library.

All this helps to demonstrate that the library has a right to conduct any reputable work that will aid in attaining its ultimate aim of getting the book used.

What are the most desirable adjuncts to library work?

There are three phases in the lives of people, which, if properly developed, will make them the most useful citizens: the mental, the moral and the physical. When Andrew Carnegie built and endowed the three institutional libraries at Braddock, Homestead and Duquesne, he seemed to have been inspired to provide for this triple or all round development. The library for the mental. A strong body with a weak mind only provides a ward for the state. The athletic club for the physical. A strong mind with a weak body is almost useless. The music hall stands for the ethical and moral. A strong mind with a strong body, but void of ethical culture and morals, constitutes a dangerous citizen. Most libraries provide literature that stands for this all round development, but few provide the means for carrying it out as completely as these three libraries in the Monongahela valley.