These peoples have not been in the United
States long enough to produce great families. The census of 1920 will
in all probability tell a story of a greater and more serious problem
than did the last.
Over one-fourth of all the immigrants over fourteen years of age,
admitted during the two decades preceding 1910, were illiterate. Of
the 8,398,000 who arrived in the 1900-1910 period, 2,238,000 could not
read or write. There were 1,600,000 illiterate foreigners in the
United States when the 1910 census was taken. Do these elements give
promise of a better race? Are we doing anything genuinely constructive
to overcome this situation?
Two-thirds of the white foreign stock in the United States live in
cities. Four-fifths of the populations of Chicago and New York are of
this stock. More than two-thirds of the populations of Boston,
Cleveland, Detroit, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Newark, Jersey
City, Providence, Worcester, Scranton, Paterson, Fall River, Lowell,
Cambridge, Bridgeport, St. Paul, Minneapolis and San Francisco are of
other than native white ancestry. Of the fifty principal cities of the
United States there are only fourteen in which fifty per cent of the
population is of unmixed native white parentage.
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