Imported Americans; the story of the experiences of a disguised American and his wife studying the immigration question

New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company. Very Good+. 1904. First Edition. Hardcover. (pictorial cloth with photographic label; no dust jacket) [nice-looking book, light wear to corners only; charming gift inscription on front endpaper, advocating sympathy towards foreigners, to a father "from his loving son," dated Xmas 1904]. (32 B&W photographic plates) The author explains how he and the Mrs. contrived to go "undercover" in the Lower East Side "Italian quarter" of New York City, believing that "the true light, the revelation of the natural remedies and the only real understanding of the immigrant lay in seeing from the underside." Why focus on the Italians? Simple: "Since Italy sends not only three times more immigrants than any other country, but a larger proportion of the sort that are objected to in America, it was plain that our work lay among the Italians." To this end, they became temporary tenement dwellers, on Houston Street on the Lower East Side, for a few months in early 1903, concentrating on soaking up the culture and learning the language. But they were determined to do the full-on Immigrant Experience, and so when midsummer arrived they booked passage (steerage, of course) on a ship bound for Naples, believing that to "get the fullest grasp on the process of [the immigrants'] transmutation we must become immigrants ourselves and re-enter our own country as strangers and aliens, [returning] in the steerage and pass[ing] through Ellis Island, bringing with us some typical immigrant family whose exact circumstances we had fully learned in their native community." (There is some indication as to how his poor wife was coping with all this in the author's dedication: "to my brave little wife, who endured with heroism conditions that, while not unbearable for me, were superlative hardships for a woman of delicacy and refinement.") A little more than half the book is devoted to their fact-finding mission in Italy before they get around to the voyage home and their Ellis Island re-entry. I have to say, it's a bit odd that the publishers chose to make the front-cover illustration that of a Jewish man; the author did encounter ethnicities and nationalities other than Italians, but their overall presence in the book is much smaller. ***This book is among the nearly 150 items offered in ReadInk's new Catalog Number 4, "Booking Passage: Books on the Immigrant Experience." You can access this catalog and its contents in any one of three ways: (1) email us to request a PDF to be emailed to you; (2) view or download the catalog from the link on our website's main page; (3) browse the books individually (including a few that didn't make the cut for the catalog) on our website under these two subject headings: "Immigration: Fiction" and "Immigration: Non-Fiction." .