Immigration and Americanism

I was browsing through manybooks.net looking for free books I could load into the Kindle reader I am thinking about getting when I came across a description of As a Chinaman Saw Us, a book written in 1904. It offers a satirical view of America in the guise of a fictitious report from the 'Chinaman.' Here is what he supposedly said about Chicago:

About one-half only of the total population speak or understand English. There are 500,000 Germans, 125,000 Poles, 100,000 Swedes, 90,000 Bohemians, 50,000 Yiddish, 25,000 Dutch, 25,000 Italians, 15,000 French, 10,000 Irish, 10,000 Servians, 10,000 Lutherans, 7,000 Russians, and 5,000 Hungarians in Chicago. You will be surprised to learn that numbers do not count. The 500,000 Germans are not the dominating power, nor are the 100,000 Swedes. The 10,000 Irish are said absolutely to control the political situation. You will ask if I believe that this monster foreign element can be reduced to a homogeneous unit. I reply, yes. Fifty years from to-day they will all be Americans, and a majority will, doubtless, show you their family tree, tracing their ancestry back to the Mayflower.

Many of those Germans, btw, would be persecuted and condemned as enemy aliens who had not assimilated properly when we went to war with their presumed Fatherland in 1917. There were whole sections of Chicago where you heard nothing but German, with German newspapers and German language schools. Thank god we got rid of all that.

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