Races and Immigrants in America

New York: The Macmillan Company. Very Good. 1908 (c.1907). 2nd printing. Hardcover. (no dust jacket) [good sound copy, modest wear to extremities, gilt lettering on front cover and spine still bright and easily readable]. (B&W photographs, plates, charts) A racially-focused examination of the "immigration problem," in which the author wastes no time getting to his thesis: in the first paragraph of the first chapter, entitled "Race and Democracy," he quotes Jefferson's "all men are created equal," but quickly cautions the reader that when the nation's founders signed on to that Constitutional sentiment "they were not publishing a scientific treatise on human nature nor describing the physical, intellectual, or moral qualities of different races and different individuals, but they were bent upon a practical object in politics." What they failed to acknowledge, however, in his opinion, was that this whole democracy thing breaks down when certain individuals, or classes, or races, "through any mental or moral defect," aren't up to the task of full participation, and therefore should be excluded from the benefits thereof. And with that, he's off to the races (pun intended), devoting roughly the first half of the book to a history of various waves of immigration. After a chapter on "Colonial Race Elements," he devotes another full chapter to "The Negro" and another to "Nineteenth Century Additions" (Italians, Jews, Russians, etc.). The second half of the book then proceeds to paint a not-very-pretty picture of how these various groups -- all of which are held to be morally and intellectually lacking -- have had a deleterious effect on America's industry, labor, city life, crime, poverty, and politics. It's a tribute to the persistence of these pernicious, race-based ideas that Macmillan was still putting out new printings of this book until at least the late 1920s. ***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." .