Official proceedings of the annual meeting: 1923

306

THE HOME

Pushing still further back to the subtle and abstract changes involved in adjustment, we come upon three fundamental problems in the realm of individual and social
immigrant psychology. First, the problem of living in a social group guided by wholly
unknown social rules and values. Often this situation is complicated by loss of social
standing. We forget that this immigrant was a land-owner, even if only in a small way
in his own native land, and had a position in the community which is lost once he begins
to work for wages. Americans must clearly grasp the psychological significance of this
changed status.
Second, there is the problem of changed relations between man and man. This
is most clearly illustrated by the difference in relation between a man and his employer
in an American industrial plan and in an old-world, semi-feudal agrarian system.
There is the problem of changed relations between man and woman, because of the
entirely different legal status of the latter on this side of the water. And finally the
problem of changed relations between parents and children, due partly to the difference
in legal status of the latter, and partly to the fact that the child goes much further in
adjustment to American conditions than the parents.
Third, the psychological problem involved in a personality breakdown due to the
loss of the familial and the class system. In his old setting the peasant individual felt
that he had behind him his immediate family, that larger group of relatives, his community, his nation, and back of all that he was "compassed about with so great crowd
of witnesses," as St. Paul puts it, in the very dead whose traditions he was carrying on I
The foreign community in our great cities has often been berated and argued against
largely because we regarded it as an impregnable stronghold in our midst. If Americans knew the truth, this solidarity is more an aspect than a reality. To the present
individual it represents the greatest variety and gives him very little sense of security
and solid backing. He stands alone, without support, and every individual of his
acquaintance, instead of standing behind him, is moving away from him in the direction
of more complete American adjustment. His cousin, who came five years ago is a little
distance on the journey; his child, who goes to the public school, is leagues ahead of
him I
Lastly, there is the psychological factor involved in the moral breakdown of the
second generation. We are not in this paper considering that group in particular and
speak of it at this point only as a corollary to the psychological problem of the immigrant himself.
In the light of all this, is it not pertinent to question whether one human generation
is not too short a period of time for a complete transfer of interests, attitudes, and mental
contents; whether our Americanization haste, in such matters as language and citizenship, is not psychologically unsound; whether the foreign colony which we have often
damned is not an instinctive psychological protection akin to the protective coloring
in lower animal life; whether, as someone has said, we ought not to be more willing to
"leave a little to evolution" and only encourage that degree of change which is "consciously desired" by an individual or "socially necessary" in order to bridge the chasm
between immigrant parent and American-born child which, as social workers, we are
coming to recognize as fertile in social tragedy.
My contention is that about 50 per cent of his difficulties may be laid at the door
of this immigrant himself, and the other 50 per cent at the door of the unimaginative
or indifferent Americans (and this includes us as social case workers) with whom he