Among the Polish immigrants who came to America before 1870, many settled on farms in Illinois, Wisconsin, Texas, and other States.  They proved much more clannish than the Bohemians and more reluctant to conform to American customs.

Many farms in the Northwest are occupied by Finns, of whom there were in 1910 over two hundred thousand in the United States.  They are a Tatar race, with a copious sprinkling of Swedish blood.  Illiteracy is rare among them.  They are eager patrons of night schools and libraries and have a flourishing college near Duluth.  They are eager for citizenship and are independent in politics.  The glittering generalities of Marxian socialism seem peculiarly alluring to them; and not a few have joined the I.W.W.  Drink has been their curse, but a strong temperance movement has recently made rapid headway among them.  They are natural woodmen and wield the axe with the skill of our own frontiersmen.  Their peculiar houses, made of neatly squared logs, are features of every Finnish settlement.  All of the North European races and a few from Southern and Eastern Europe have contributed to the American rural population; yet the Census of 1910 disclosed the fact that of the 6,361,502 white farm operators in the United States, 75 per cent were native American and only 10.5 per cent were foreign born.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 29:  Oberholtzer, History of the United States since the Civil War, vol I, p. 275.]

[Footnote 30:  Oberholtzer, supra cit., p. 278.]

[Footnote 31:  The census of 1910 discloses the fact that of the 6,361,502 farms in the United States 75 per cent were operated by native white Americans and only 10.5 per cent by foreign born whites.  The foreign born were distributed as follows:  Austria, 33,336; Hungary, 3827; England, 39,728; Ireland, 33,480; Scotland, 10,220; Wales, 4110; France, 5832; Germany, 221,800; Holland, 13,790; Italy, 10,614; Russia, 25,788; Poland, 7228; Denmark, 28,375; Norway, 59,742; Sweden, 67,453; Switzerland, 14333; Canada, 61,878.]

[Footnote 32:  History of the People of the United States, vol.  VII, p. 203.]

[Footnote 33:  K.C.  Babcock, The Scandinavian Element in the United States, p. 143.]

CHAPTER VIII

THE CITY BUILDERS

“What will happen to immigration when the public domain has vanished?” was a question frequently asked by thoughtful American citizens.  The question has been answered:  the immigrant has become a job seeker in the city instead of a home seeker in the open country.  The last three decades have witnessed “the portentous growth of the cities”—­and they are cities of a new type, cities of gigantic factories, towering skyscrapers, electric trolleys, telephones, automobiles, and motor trucks, and of fetid tenements swarming with immigrants.  The immigrants, too, are of a new type.  When Henry James revisited Boston after a long absence, he was shocked at the “gross little foreigners” who infested its streets, and he said it seemed as if the fine old city had been wiped with “a sponge saturated with the foreign mixture and passed over almost everything I remembered and might have still recovered."[34]