The Austrian and Hungarian Jews followed.  The Jews had always received liberal treatment in Hungary, and their mingling with the social Magyars had produced the type of the coffeehouse Jew, who loved to reproduce in American cities the conviviality of Vienna and Budapest but who did not take as readily to American ways as the German Jew.  Most of the Jews from Hungary remained in New York, although Chicago and St. Louis received a few of them.  In commercial life they are traders, pawnbrokers, and peddlers, and control the artificial-flower and passementerie trade.

By far the largest group are the latest comers, the Russian Jews.  “Ultra orthodox,” says Edward A. Steiner, “yet ultra radical; chained to the past, and yet utterly severed from it; with religion permeating every act of life, or going to the other extreme and having ’none of it’; traders by instinct, and yet among the hardest manual laborers of our great cities.  A complex mass in which great things are yearning to express themselves, a brooding mass which does not know itself and does not lightly disclose itself to the outside."[41] Nearly a million of these people are crowded into the New York ghettos.  Large numbers of them engage in the garment industries and the manufacture of tobacco.  They graduate also into junk-dealers, pawnbrokers, and peddlers, and are soon on their way “up town.”  Among them socialism thrives, and the second generation displays an unseemly haste to break with the faith of its fathers.

The Jews are the intellectuals of the new immigration.  They invest their political ideas with vague generalizations of human amelioration.  They cannot forget that Karl Marx was a Jew:  and one wonders how many Trotzkys and Lenines are being bred in the stagnant air of their reeking ghettos.  It remains to be seen whether they will be willing to devote their undoubted mental capacities to other than revolutionary vagaries or to gainful pursuits, for they have a tendency to commercialize everything they touch.  They have shown no reluctance to enter politics; they learn English with amazing rapidity, throng the public schools and colleges, and push with characteristic zeal and persistence into every open door of this liberal land.

From Italy there have come to America well over three million immigrants.  For two decades before 1870 they filtered in at the average rate of about one thousand a year; then the current increased to several thousand a year; and after 1880 it rose to a flood.[42] Over two-thirds of these Italians live in the larger cities; one-fourth of them are crowded into New York tenements.[43] Following in order, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, New Orleans, Cleveland, St. Louis, Baltimore, Detroit, Portland, and Omaha have their Italian quarters, all characterized by overcrowded boarding houses and tenements, vast hordes of children, here and there an Italian bakery and grocery, on every corner a saloon, and usually a private bank with a steamship agency