THE
UNITED
rican
A MAGAZINE OF GOOD CITIZENSHIP
Devoted to the Cause of
Americanization, Assimilation and Group Elimination; Pointing the way to a Constitutional
Americanism, to Equality in Citizenship, and a better understanding
between Native born and Foreign born.
Vol. 2 »“20
August, 1924
Number 11
THE DEFENDERS OF SLUMS AND TENEMENTS
A NEW FRONTIER WHERE IMMIGRANT LIFE IS WASTED
P LINTON W. GILBERT in the New York Evening
Post recently described the American city slum
as “the new frontier of American life.” His conten
tion that “it is in the slum that the struggle with the
elements, the battle merely to live is the hardest”
is undisputably true. If his conclusions are that the
struggle for life, common in the slums, tends to
quicken the finer emotions of life, virtues without
which commendable success in life cannot be attained,
then his conclusions are grossly misleading.
It is true that there are men and women who have
not alone come untainted out of the slums, but who
have given the slum and its evil atmosphere, contain
ing an abundance of soul and body deteriorating con
ditions, credit for the urge generated within by which
they achieved success in life, many of them having
became builders of better lives.
Nevertheless it is equally true that the slum with
its deteriorating influences is a condition of living
that virtually destroys the finer sensibilities with
which human life is endowed.
If the slum can be called a new frontier then it
certainly can not compare with the old frontier—the
virgin country with forest-clad hi'lls, broad planes and
mountain cascades towering above sheltered valleys
and dales where the early Americans—immigrants
and native born — struggled for a higher plane of liv
ing. Their thoughts and actions have become monu
ments and markers along the road of citizenship,
pointing the way to an acceptable standard of Ameri
can life.
The picture will never fit the slum, even at its best,
no matter how flexible the imagination may be. The
slum: the crowded tenement places, where live these
families, men, women arid children, married and un
married people, who toil hard for an existence, is not
the setting for that cheerfulness of life that is as
necessary to a human being as sunshine is to the
flower, if it is to attain the unfolding made possible by
the creative source.
The slum with its setting is void of the background
that is required for character building. Like a flower
that buds on the rim of a waste depository where a
ray of sunshine from the purer realms have touched
the vitals of its generative source, so may a rugged
character, even a romantic figure, rise and emerge
from the slums. But for all that the slum can be
little if anything else than what it has been, unless
the slum is so changed that it is no longer a slum,
save in the fantasy of an overzealous writer.
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The glowing fantasy picture of the slum, drawn by
Mr. Gilbert, furnishes the Foreign Language Informa
tion Service, the text for a bold sermon on the value oí
the new frontier, the slum, picturing it as a reservoir
of real values, where the manhood and womanhood
of America of tomorrow are in the making. The argu
ment in favor of the slum presented in the monthly
Bulletin issued by these foreign language preceptors
reads in part as follows:
No one should be surprised at this reference (The New
Frontier) to the modern city slum, crowded, overworked and
threatened by privation, as a place comparable with the old
outposts of civilization. The slum is not lovely with virgin
forests and green, prairies, but neither was the old frontier
lovely to those, who knew it when blizzards buried their huts
under ice and snow, when drought burned the prairie to a
crisp and savage men or beasts appeared to complete the
work of devastation. Nevertheless, with wife' and children
near and a free opportunity at hand to exercise the gifts with
in, your old settler saw beauty in the desert. And it is the
freedom they have found or.hope to find for themselves and
their offspring in the new wilderness of a crowded city that
makes mothers and fathers sigh contentedly as they view the
far array of littered tenements and hear a dozen languages
rise in confusion from the narrow streets.
During the last century native and foreign born Americans