Races and Immigrants in America

By: Commons, John Rogers

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II COLONIAL RACE ELEMENTS Doubtless the most fascinating topic in the study of races is that of the great men whom each race has produced. The personal interest surrounding those who have gained eminence carries us back over each step of their careers to their childhood, their parents, and their ancestry.1 Pride of race adds its zest, and each race has its eulogists who claim every great man whose family tree reveals even a single ancestor, male or female, near or remote, of the eulogized race. Here is a conflict of jurisdiction, and the student who is without race prejudice begins to look for causes other than race origin to which should be ascribed the emergence of greatness. Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge 2 attempted, some years ago, to assign to the different races in America the 14,243 men eminent enough to find a place in Ap- pleton's Encyclopedia of American Biography. He prepared a statistical summary as follows: ? 1 See the interesting series of articles by H. N. Casson, Mun- sey's, 1906. 2 Lodge, p. 138. EMINENT AMERICANS English Scotch-Irish 1,439 German .......... 659 Huguenot 589 Scotch .......... 436 Dutch 336 Welsh 159 Irish 109 French 85 Scandinavian ......... 31 Spanish 7 Italian 7 Swiss 5 Greek 3 Russian I Polish 1 Total 14,243 When we inquire into the methods necessarily adopted in preparing a statistical table of this kind we discover serious limitations. Mr. Lodge was confined to the paternal line alone, but if, as some biologists assert, the female is the conservative element which holds to the type, and the male is the variable element which departs from the type, then the specific contribution of the race factor would be found in the maternal line. However, let this dubious point p...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 021797998X
• ISBN13: 9780217979986
• Release Date: May 2014
• Publisher: General Books LLC
• Length: 136 Pages
• Weight: 0.47 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"