The Lutheran Pioneer St. Louis — 1931, Page 82

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82 THE LUTHERAN PIONEER

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The Immigrant in the City.

We have often heard it said that the frontiers
of our country are now to be found in our great
cities. Those who know the situation view with
a considerable degree of apprehension the down-
town wards of our larger cities, where there is to
be found the greatest danger for Church and State.
There are those among us who are convinced that
there will be a heavy penalty to pay in the near
future if the Church does not move with its forces
of light and helpfulness upon these densely peopled
districts of want, and woe, and wickedness, and
darkness. ‘To-day the down-town wards in many,
if not most, of our great cities hold the balance of
power. The people living in these districts are to
a great extent poor, people who cannot move away
because they lack the means to pay the rent in
better neighborhoods, and foreigners in great num-
bers, who become the easy prey of political gangsters
and ringsters. In saying this, we do not wish to
insinuate that these immigrants have been actuated
by low or reprehensible motives in coming to our
shores. On the contrary, we are sure that most of
them came here because hope and ambition were
alive in them and they had the conviction that they
could here find that economical betterment which
their homeland denied them. But it goes without
saying that most of them are utterly ignorant of
the nature of the free institutions of our country

' and know next to nothing of the proper use they
should make of them. Many of them live huddled
together, in the Atlantic port cities not far from
where they disembarked from the steerage of the
yessel that brought them from their native land,
and are as ignorant of the parks, fine boulevards,

' and beautiful residences and churches of the city
in which they live as though they lived hundreds

of miles away.

‘What has been said above is true of prac-

tically every one of our great cities, whether it

New York, Boston, or Philadelphia in the East,

Francisco in the West, or Chicago, Detroit,

St. Louis, or New Orleans in the more central por-

‘Hon of our country. For our present purposes it
serve us well to take Philadelphia as an example

native to our soil, and that its spirit is
, the census reveals the fact that only
nt. of Philadelphia’s population is fully

American. Of course, we know very well that many
a foreign-born person-is more American than some
of the sons of the Pilgrims or some of the daughters
of proud colonial dames. But yet it remains true

‘ that 62 per cent. of the people living in Phila-

delphia are either foreign or half-foreign. Another
amazing fact which the census reveals is that only
about one-third of Philadelphia’s population is con-
nected with any cliurch organization. Though the
Italians are in most instances nominally Catholic,
the Roman Church finds it yery difficult to hold
its Italian immigrant constituency loyal to the faith
of their fathers. The Jewish Rabbis are much dis-
turbed because of the Jewish immigrants’ apathy
in matters of religion, and the Protestant pastors
of the city bitterly complain of the difficulty they
have in holding their people. There seems to be
no doubt that there is a growing carelessness and
indifference toward the Church and the organiza-
tions of religion in general, if not a downright
disdain of religion. ’

In the older part of Philadelphia, along the
Delaware River, there is a district covering possibly
about six square miles, with a population of about
350,000. The district is densely settled, and no
larger polyglot population can be found anywhere
on the face of the earth. Every nation on the globe
seems to be represented. There are possibly 100,000
Jews, 75,000 Italians, 10,000 Negroes, and 50,000
native Americans. It is a veritable modern Babel
and becomes more congested every year. In one
ward the density has reached the almost incredible
figure of 130,000 to a square mile. This over-
crowding outrages every sense of decency and en-
dangers the health of the whole city. There are
said to be 4,000 families in Philadelphia which have
only one room each in which to live, cook, sleep,
and eat; in fact, whatever else has to be done in
a home must be done in this one room. There are
about 5,000 families that must get along as best
they can with two rooms each. Not a few of these
crowded families have boarders. In the old part of
Philadelphia there are thousands of small, dark,
dingy houses, built right up to the sidewalks or,
what is much worse, facing dreary, narrow alleys
or malodorous courts, into which the light of the
sun never penetrates. The 1920 census showed
that in this congested district there lived over 50,000
children of school age. About 10,000 children are
born in this section in the course of a year. We
understand that in this cramped and congested dis-
trict there are only eight small open squares that

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