USA > Massachusetts > Barnstable County > History of Plymouth, Norfolk and Barnstable counties, Massachusetts, Vol. I > Part 33
USA > Massachusetts > Norfolk County > History of Plymouth, Norfolk and Barnstable counties, Massachusetts, Vol. I > Part 33
USA > Massachusetts > Plymouth County > History of Plymouth, Norfolk and Barnstable counties, Massachusetts, Vol. I > Part 33
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Carrying costs from Boston to the Pacific Coast, through the Panama Canal, are much lower than freight rates from Chicago to the Pacific Coast. New England has 2,000,000 horse power of potential hydro- electrical energy, and of this amount 1,400,000 has been developed. In New England there are about 20,000 manufacturing establishments. Aside from cotton, woolen and worsted, and shoe and leather industries, the remaining two-thirds of the total value of products is contributed by about 325 separate industries.
Having the industries, New England is especially open to attack from other states which have a hunger for more people and more manufac- tures. It is in a war of defense that she will point out her own ad- vantages for industries to come or stay.
The Brockton "Enterprise," February 22, 1927, contained the following editorial :
Written into the records as one of the worst blizzards in twenty years, and by some observers likened to the raging fury that in November, 1898, lashed New England, last Sunday's storm left twelve dead in its wake. This was the toll on land and sea, eight of them the crew of a coastguard patrol boat.
Distressing though the record is, compare it with what happens in California, glorious and golden, when elements go on a rampage? Or with Florida, with its sunshine, surf, dream cities and palatial hotels? Floods, earthquakes, tornado- these exact larger toll of life and pile up vastly greater damage.
Before twenty-four hours had elapsed the principal highways between cities and towns of the State were open. Most industries operated with a full complement of help on Monday. The holiday yesterday was marked by the usual activities, with little inconvenience caused by the snowdrifts. There was no blockade and there was comparatively little suffering.
While the rest of the country has jeered good-naturedly the versatile climate which so admirably satisfies the urge for constant change, and commiserated us because of the rigors of our winters, we have offered only a feeble defence. As a dispassionate fact, each subsequent storm proves New England is the best and safest place in which to live.
CHAPTER XXI CONTRIBUTIONS BY LATTER DAY PILGRIMS.
Early Days When The Church Was The State and Cruel Punishments and Bloodshed Spelled Narrowness Warmed By the Sunshine of More Liberal Democracy-Jews Helped Fight For Independence; Negroes In America Before the Pilgrims; Chinese and Twenty-five Other Na- tionalities Have Contributed to County Prosperity-Notable Congress of Foreign-Born Citizens at Brockton Fair Grounds-Education of Colored People By Plymouth County Teachers.
Halting for a moment at the period of the beginning of the Civil War, it is seen that there had been considerable immigration previous to that time and many of these immigrants fought in that great war for the preservation of the Union, as they have fought in. all wars, including the Revolutionary War. Proud as we are and have a right to be of our kin- ship with the first comers, it is well not to lose sight of the fact that the "Mayflower" was loaded with immigrants. Those who have arrived since, have had their reasons for leaving their native lands and have greeted the New World with high hopes and aspirations, many of which have been abundantly achieved. The United States would be a lone- some place, indeed, without the immigrants and descendants of immi- grants which make up the body politic. In these days, when there is so much thought given to diplomacy and the importance of trying to under- stand the people of all nations of the world, the American has a very definite task of trying to understand the people from all countries who have come here by recent vessels to become Americans. Without them the "Land of the free and the home of the brave" would be without most of its art, music, commercial life, financial prowess and the very founda- tion of the safety and stability of any nation, its agriculture. The influ- ence of the immigrant, speaking in terms of common parlance, has not been an unfavorable influence. In the process of becoming American- ized, he has contributed much which America would be poor without. There are millions of Americans by adoption and many other millions in the process of becoming Americans, and in this immediate vicinity there are representatives from all over the world. The United States is peculiarly linked to every other nation.
It is no part of the policy of this history to go outside of its well- defined boundaries and it does not have to do so, to mention the Car- negie libraries. There are several of them in Plymouth County and ad- jacent counties, and they were the gifts of an immigrant. It is merely necessary to offer that instance as a suggestion. Every reader can fill in
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for himself the details of the debt which Plymouth County owes to these latter-day Pilgrims.
Everyone can see the results of two or three generation of foreigners, how they adopt our institutions, ways of thinking, living and acting. Joseph V. Collins said in an article in the Forum of 1925: "America can take Jews from Russia and make the second generation as good at spending as at making money. She can take the son of a Slav peasant and make of him a Beau Brummel or an artist. America can transform a Dago (pardon the word) and a Dane and make of each a Wilberforce. She can adopt a German and Serb lad and develop each into a scientist and inventor fit to rank with the world's greatest. She can absorb awk- ward peasant boys from Europe and raise them up to be captains of industry. Surely these are not mistakes of America.
"Besides, methods and plans are in sight which will greatly promote the progress of Americanization."
According to Collins, it is our excessive partizanship which is poison- ing our life, as its counterpart, unbridled patriotism, is distorting life in Europe.
Be that as it may, Plymouth County, in which latter-day Pilgrims find themselves, is a fairly liberal place in which to assimilate and grow to the full stature of life as an American. The Plymouth Colony was al- ways more liberal than the Massachusetts Bay Colony which whipped Quakers through the streets, hanged witches in Boston, drove out Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson. But the two colonies were finally united and the same laws prevailed. The State, ostensibly the home of religious freedom, was in fact founded by colonies of devout believers who sought liberty of faith for themselves without extending the same privilege to others. The earliest government was a church government. The church was the state, in a figurative sense, before the Commonwealth, as such, existed. By slow degrees the colonies ridded themselves of this religious despotism. It took one hundred and fifty years to get to the point of drawing up a state constitution in which the right of the in- dividual to worship as he pleased was sedulously safeguarded. Even the early constitutional government was a Protestant government. The word occurs in Article 3 of the Old Constitution, where provision is made for support and maintenance of "public Protestant teachers of piety, religion and morality." This stipulation was later dropped for the Eleventh Amendment, which gave the right to all religious societies to elect their own leaders, and forbade the subordination of any one sect or denomination to another. The same amendment carried a repeal of the constitutional clause which empowered the Legislature to enforce at- tendance at church.
There is now in Plymouth County practically every denomination of religious believers to be found anywhere in the country, from Quakers
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to Latter Day Saints, inclusive. There is a welcome, and special oppor- tunities afforded to the immigrants, and religious prejudices are by no means as rampant as once they were, and no more in evidence than in the most liberal-minded communities in any part of the country.
These things had their day and have passed away. It is not to be wondered at that sectarian domination was part and parcel of New England in its first century. There may be those of our generation who criticize the Forefathers for the way in which they handled situations, their apparently rigid discipline enforced by merciless punishments, their narrow-mindedness and the like. But, rather than think of them as three hundred years behind the time, it is well to remember them as three « hundred years in advance of the times in which they lived. If they had not been what they were then, we might be now as they were then, in those qualities for which we are prone to criticize them; if indeed we would have been permitted at all, through their preservation, to inhabit the earth.
The Pilgrims were more tolerant than the Puritans and even the Puritans were far in advance of the Old World. James Russell Lowell, in "New England Two Centuries Ago," says: "Next to the fugitives whom Moses led out of Egypt, the little shipload of outcasts who landed at Plymouth two centuries and a half ago are destined to influ- ence the future of the world. The spiritual thirst of mankind has for ages been quenched at Hebrew fountains; but the embodiment in human institutions of truths uttered by the Son of Man eighteen centuries ago was to be mainly the work of Puritan thought and Puritan self- devotion."
"Safety First" A Necessity-The nineteen dwelling houses which the Pilgrims planned to build on their first street never became a necessity because half of the number of Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth died the first winter and entered "that house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens." On Cole's Hill, towering above Plymouth Rock, many of the brave voyagers had been laid to rest. Many times in the words of Ten- nyson had "the stately ships moved on to the haven under the hill." And many times were the survivors made to cry in their loneliness, additional words of Tennyson, "But Oh, for the touch of a vanished hand and the sound of a voice that is still."
It is neither a matter of fairness nor reasonable intelligence to try to judge the Pilgrims of the early seventeenth century by the standards of our own time. Rumors were brought to Plymouth of plans being made by the Indians to exterminate the white. This might easily have been done at any time that the Indians wished to stage a massacre. The Pil- grims could not afford to spend time in investigating the rumor. Their only safety lay in acting as though the rumor were true. They were sur-
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rounded by savages, whom they did not understand and by whom they were not understood. Aside from these red men, there were no human beings less than five hundred miles to the north, where there were a few French settlers. An equal distance to the south, was the little colony of Jamestown. So far as being of service was concerned, neither settle- ment of white people could have lifted a finger in protection. This was the situation when the "Mayflower" returned to England, but not one of the Pilgrims who had come over in the "Mayflower" accepted the invita- tion of Captain Jones to return with him.
Foreign-Born Americans-Undoubtedly many reasons have actuated the coming of Europeans to these shores and some of those who have arrived could easily be classified as undesirables without any departure from simple justice but, for the most part, the immigrants have brought with them ambitions which have blossomed in the sun of freedom into the best traits of character found in their native land. Let us not de- ceive ourselves into thinking that there was only one nationality of new- comers to the colonies in its early days or that people of other countries, sometimes spoken of contemptuously and unthinkingly as "foreigners," are of recent arrival. Many European countries made contributions to early America. It is true that the English sent the largest number and their abiding trait was home-loving and freedom-demanding. The Dutch and Swedes poured contributions of sturdiness and enterprise into the "melting pot." The Germans were plodding and thrifty in the seventeenth century as they are now in this country. Many Irish came to this country just before the Revolution and there were hardy and aggressive members of that race already on hand. The influence of the Pilgrims has entered into the Americanization of the immigrants from earliest times and is by no means a dead letter today.
At the present time one person in seven living in our country came here from a foreign land. Some conservative genealogist of Plymouth County may ask "What has that got to do with us? There are not many 'foreigners' in this county." There is in Plymouth one important indus- try conducted by the Plymouth Cordage Company, employing several hundred people. It is the largest rope manufacturing company in the world, and has enjoyed a wonderful degree of prosperity, founded on excellence of its product, denoting good management and good work- manship alike. For generations a large percentage of the employees have been foreign-born, many of them Germans, with a sprinkling of many others. In Brockton thirty years ago the foreign-born were con- fined almost wholly to the people from the British Isles, Swedes, Polanders, Lithuanians, Canadians, a few Greeks, Italians, Chinese and Portuguese from the Azores. Now there are about thirty nationalities there. The story of the original town of the county and the only city
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has been duplicated in all the towns, even the smallest, like Pem- broke, Halifax, Plympton and Carver. They are populated in respec- table numbers by latter-day Pilgrims who have come to this country to work out their destinies. Take them as a whole, they have contributed much to the county industrially and have given it very little trouble, as regards law and order.
So far as Jews are concerned, there was only one store in Brockton thirty years ago owned by a Jew and that was on the second floor of a Main Street building. Today the Jewish population in Brockton num- bers several thousands. There are several synagogues, numerous fra- ternal organizations, their charities are generously and well administered and they have proven their right to the respect and admiration of the rest of the population. There are more Jews in Brockton than in any other one town, of course, and presumably more in Brockton than all the other towns in the county put together.
The best known Jew in the county is Isaac S. Kibrick, who came to America as a political refugee from Russia, his native land. He had been a teacher of Latin in Russia but knew no English. His determina- tion to come to America was formed too late to enable him to speak the language when he arrived in New York, and began American industrial life by selling newspapers. He is now in the insurance business and in cne recent year wrote nearly $2,000,000 worth of life insurance. More- over, he has held office several years in the Brockton Chamber of Com- merce, as a public library trustee, director of the Brockton Hospital, and has been active in all civic enterprises.
The Jew has always been concerned in the upbuilding of America, loath as many people are to admit it, forgetful of the fact that it was a Jew who introduced Christopher Columbus to Ferdinand and Isabella and paved the way for the discovery of America. It was a Jew who suggested to Columbus the voyage of discovery and it was money con- fiscated from the Jews in Spain which financed Columbus' second voyage to America. The day after Columbus set sail for America 300,000 Jews left Spain, impelled by the edict that all Jews would be given three months to become Christians by joining the Catholic church and those who did not would be banished. They left while the going was good, before all their belongings had been confiscated. Italy, England and France did not want them and many of them went to Turkey. Later the Sultan of Turkey sent a letter to Ferdinand of Spain, thanking him for sending so many new people to help him build up his country.
There were forty-six Jews in our Revolutionary War and a propor- tionate number in the War of 1812 and the War of the Rebellion, while in the World War there was the largest representation of Jews, in pro- portion to the number in the country, of any race. At the beginning of the nineteenth century there were one million and a quarter Jews in
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America. In 1927 there are at least 14,000,000, not because they have multiplied so fast but because America treats the Jew with more Christian charity than any other nation on earth, the efforts of anti- semitic societies to the contrary notwithstanding.
Since this subject has been entered upon, it is a matter of justice to remember that it was not alone the public spirit of the descendants of the embattled farmers who fought at Lexington and Concord or even at Bunker Hill who erected the monument in memory of the Battle of Bunker Hill, or Breed's Hill, to be historically correct, but through the munificence of Judah Touro, a Jewish gentleman of New Orleans.
It is also a matter of common gratitude to keep in mind that Haym Salomon, one of the immigrants before the Revolutionary War, from his native Prussian-Poland, loaned the colonists $600,000 to help finance the struggle for independence. He died in Philadelphia in 1785 and at his death $400,000 had not been returned.
Among the latter-day Pilgrims who arrived within a few years have been hundreds who have taken advantage of the opportunities for education in the night schools and Americanization groups organized in Plymouth County. In 1927 there were in the night school at Brockton about nine hundred foreign-born eager to learn all they could which would enable them to take their rightful places with the people of the county. Of this number six hundred and seventy-two pursued academic studies. The average age was thirty years and none were under sixteen. Several were over sixty. The outstanding instance of progress in the citizenship classes was Rudolf Ungewitter, twenty-four years old, em- ployed by a landscape gardener in North Abington. He qualified for an evening high school diploma during the few weeks study. He was educated in his native land but needed instruction in the English lan- guage. Others were practically without education when they entered the school and their progress was remarkable.
Stephen Dalton, editorial and feature writer for the Brockton "Enter- prise," said of this school: "Strangely contrasting types are encountered in the citizenship classes, for which raw material is supplied by Ellis Island or kindred gateways. At a desk sits a man of middle age writing, 'I sit at a desk.' Memories go back to the Volga, to the knout and bay- onet and the red ruck of pogroms, to hideous nights when the Kol Nidre Nidre wailed the anguish of yesterday more poignantly than the sorrows spanning the centuries. Fifteen years have elapsed. Sometimes it takes more than fifteen years to heal wounds inflicted in fifteen minutes. But he's trying, and manfully."
Marinus Van Der Pol came to this country from Holland March 21, 1923, friendless and penniless, leaving behind in the land of dikes and tulips, Elizabeth, a buxom, smiling Dutch girl whom he would dearly have liked to bring across the water with him as his bride. Three years
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later he returned for Elizabeth and this time the cabin was booked for two. They make their home in Rockland and both attend a night school to become thoroughly Americanized. He is employed at the Bay State nurseries and has the cleverness in floriculture which seems to come naturally to the Dutch.
Notable Assembly of New Citizens-A few years ago the Brockton Fair Grounds contained thousands of newly made American citizens who had come to Plymouth County from many lands. The affair was largely arranged by the immigration secretary of the Brockton Young Men's Christian Association, with the cooperation of many organizations and citizens in the county. One of the speakers was James J. Davis, Secre- tary of Labor, himself an immigrant. In February, 1927, the "Saturday Evening Post" contained a story by James Stevens on "New New Eng- landers," in which he used the name of John Bianso for the hero of his story, and referred to this New Citizens' Day at the Brockton Fair Grounds as follows :
In Brockton, Massachusetts, the shoemakers and their families turn out in a tumultuous celebration of Citizenship Day. Thirty thousand men, women and children of twenty different nationalities heartily applaud the Americanization ora- tions. It is an inspiring sight, this demonstration of patriotism by the foreign-born and their sons and daughters. But the mark is totally missed if the demonstration is regarded as the expression of a group or a class. For the matter-of-fact truth turn to the individuals in the crowd. Here are men who earn from thirty-five to seventy dollars a week at piece work. They have known no labor battles with their employers since the war, though Brockton is the shoe city of New England.
They all wear royal raiment. Their wives wear satin and silk. Diamonds flash from scarfs and fingers. Every child is lusty and well fed. Here is a man who has worked in one factory for sixteen years. He owns a home valued at $6,800 and his family of five rides luxuriously in a big sedan. Here is another who drives a $2,000 car and whose home cost $3,000.
Let him visit the factories during the working hours and see the acres of parked cars, follow the stream of them when the day is done, and even a college sociologist will see that these two examples are average ones of the men who have had the capital of their labor invested for five years or more at Brockton. The real reason they celebrate is because they can afford it so well. Materialism is a fearful word to utter in the land of Emerson and Amos Bronson Alcott. But it is certainly New England industry which has been the greatest force in uplifting its immigrants and Americanizing them. It has made their labor an investment of capital which assures them of the material benefits the immigrants of other days dreamed about.
Through the materialism of industry the old class barriers have been destroyed and ranks based upon efficiency and skill have been established. Every worker now has a great deal more to lose than his chains. And far more inspiring to the Ameri- canization of John Bianso than the fine ideals expressed in speeches are his modern house, his automobile, his radio, his graphophone, his upholstered furniture, his evenings at the moving pictures, his tailored clothes, his summer week-ends in the White Mountains, his wife's vice-presidency in the Parent Teachers' Association, his membership in the Elks, his bank book, his share in the new community hotel, the privileges and usufructs of his rank as a veteran plumber. Is a man with such
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possessions anything like the pitiful wretch who has always been pictured as the typical member of the working class? Then so's your old banker. Here is a New Englander. Here is a man of respected rank in the all-embracing American cap- italist class.
Every one of these centres has its successful stories, of course; the accounts of ambitious and gifted young immigrants and immigrants' sons who climbed to the top ranks of American life.
This story by James Stevens gave a faithful picture of conditions which are experienced by the latter-day Pilgrims who came to Plymouth County and, by the mere investment of the labor of their hands and the use of their intelligence, sharpened by taking advantage of the oppor- tunities afforded by the evening schools, in the Young Men's Christian Association classes and extension courses, win the security, comfort and luxuries which are the rewards. The writer left out of his account a strike in the Brockton shoe factories which was initiated and continued by designing men in an attempt to tear down Brockton's prestige and prosperity, but who eventually faded away from the city and the at- mosphere of prosperity and industrial harmony in which they had no part.
Plymouth County has in recent years received important contributions to its population from the Azores, Madeira and the Cape Verde Islands, constituent parts of the Portuguese republic. These people are indus- trious and usually law abiding and thrifty. They have contributed much to agricultural supply in Plymouth and Barnstable counties, many of them being natural gardeners who make their farms smile with a harvest which have not been common to them under former ownership.
It seems late in the day to speak of the Swedish people as latter-day Pilgrims, as that country has been sending people to America since 1638, at least. The country of John Morton, Swedish-American signer of the Declaration of Independence ; of John Hanson who presided over the first congress of the colonies before George Washington was elected Pres- ident of the new country ; of Captain John Ericsson, Swedish engineer and inventor, who invented the "Monitor," the first turreted ironclad war vessel, which not only saved the Union Navy as the result of the famous and decisive battle with the "Merrimac" in Hampton Roads March 9, 1862, but transformed the navies of the world, has not left Plymouth County out in making its contributions of citizens who have been a credit to the country and location of their adoption.
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