America's Own Refugees. Four Million Citizens on the March. by Henry Hill Collins,Review by: Arthur RaperSocial Forces, Vol. 20, No. 4 (May, 1942), pp. 522-523Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2570904 .

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522 SOCIAL FORCES

This study is an analysis of information derived by a house to house canvass of Jewish residents of New Orleans. The first part is primarily a statistical presentation of the demographic and economic characteristics. As of February 1938, the population of the Jewish community of New Orleans (there is no specific Jewish area in that city) was 6,742 persons, or 1.4 percent of the total population. This was much lower than the Jewish population (1930) in cities of similar size to New Orleans. The Jewish population was a mature group, 75 percent of which was over 21 years of age; there was a total of 1921 families, with an average size of 3.03. These facts point to a de- clining Jewish group.

The general education of the Jewish population showed one-third had public education; nearly one-half had high school training; and more than one-fourth had some or complete college education. The population is 80 percent native born.

Of the 2,590 gainfully employed persons, 1,049 (40 percent) were in the manager-executive group, while 627 (24 percent) were listed as salesmen or buyers. Only five persons were engaged in un- skilled labor, none in domestic service, and 93 unemployed.

The second part deals with the history and growth of the community-religious, social, and philanthropic development. The New Orleans Jewish community dates back to the eighteenth century, and was originally composed of the Spanish-Portuguese or Sephardic Jews. These Jews, as a group, have largely disappeared either through failure to reproduce, or by the assimilative process of intermarriage. (In 1938, there was one intermarriage in every seventeen Jewish families.) The arrival of the German and East European or Ashkenasic Jews introduced new blood into the community and saved it from dying out. They formed the nucleus of the Reform group which is dominant today. According to Feibelman, there is no distinct Jewish culture in New Orleans, but the Jewish community forms a part of what is called "New Orleans culture."

VERNON J. PARENTON Louisiana State University

Am1ERiCA'S OWN REFUGEES. FOUR MILLION CITIZENS

ON THE MARCH. By Henry Hill Collins, Jr. Prince- ton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1941. 323 pp. $2.00.

Historically speaking, all of us white Americans are migrants. So, too, are those of us with African

and Oriental backgrounds. Some of our families have been here longer than others, and many of us have kinsfolk the whole way across the map from Jamestown or Plymouth Rock to Seattle and Los Angeles.

"Americans all-migrants all," says Henry H. Collins in his first chapter in this disturbing book, America's Own Refu1gees. Four million citizens on the march, now not because they are being pulled toward unplowed lands and untaken jobs, but be- cause they are being pushed away from eroded hillsides and from communities in which there are more people looking for work than there are jobs.

Author Collins is well qualified to speak on the subject of America's refugees. He has worked with the Talon Committee in its investigation of migrants, and has quoted liberally from its reports. He feels now that the defense program, rather than solving the migrant problem in America, will most likely expand the nation's refugee population from four million to around six million.

The author discusses mass migrant movements with convincing details, writes as if he personally knew the people as they move here and there throughout this vast nation. He seems to know them by their first names, how many children they have and how old they are, where they sleep, what they eat, whether they are getting along well in school, what they are thinking about, and more important what they are not thinking about. Democracy in America has its greatest opportunity in this group which now knows little of the -protec- tion which civil liberties afford to the nonmigrant population of America.

Collins makes it clear that migrants are not limited to agricultural workers pushed off the land by dust storms, tractors, and AAA payments- which he says have consolidated the ownership of good land into larger holdings, further mechanized its cultivation, and so reduced the number of work- ers used. Even more numerous than the rural migrants, he finds, are the urban migrants. Here again in broad outline he makes one see workers with their families on their frequent movements in cheap automobiles, sometimes across the continent.

But these people on the move are the hope of America, they "retain the spunk to get up and git and not just to take disaster lying down." They are our present-day pioneers, and the nation has the challenge to develop real opportunities for them. Something has been done already by the Farm Security Administration in its camps for migrants, by the Council of Women for Home

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LIBRARY AND WORKSHOP 523

Missions in its centers, and by other agencies such as the Soil Conservation, which when it helps keep good dirt on the hillside provides a permanent home for a family. Right as are some of the be- ginnings which have already been made, the problem has hardly been scratched. Author Collins says in closing that "migrants, too, want to help build their own nation ... want their voices heard and their hands felt in the shaping of the future. Therefore, while the guns still roar abroad, let us start to rehabilitate our refugees at home, so that when tank and cannon finally cease to fire, some security may also be granted these millions....."

ARTEUR RAPER

Greensboro, Georgia

MEN WORKING. By John Faulkner. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1941. 300 pp. $2.50.

To the student of the folk and folkways, these pages carry more than an unflattering commentary on the too often misunderstood and misinterpreted work program as well as the sometimes ineffectual- ness of the WPA to develop a constructive pro- gram. For the Taylors, like the Joads, are symbolic of the folk, and there is real meaning in Maw's constantly reiterated "that was right narce of him," Paw's continual "aimin' to" but "some- how just didn't never git around to it," or Paw's "I just believe I'd druther wait till Mr. Will got back. I'd feel right bad ifen Mr. Will got back and got our cards and we had done took another job." Or again Hub's devotion to Buddy which failed to save Buddy yet made Hub a refugee from the law; Paw's insistence of the need for a preacher at Reno's burial, even though "Rinno was a monst'ous cur'osity"-"We done fergot the preacher.... Our folks is allus been buried with a preacher." These are but a few samplings taken at random from the many that enrich the text. Probably the finest piece of descriptive writing in the book, as well as the most vivid and under- standing portraiture of these folk occurs on pages 245-246 where Faulkner helps us to see this self- characterized "WP and A" group as "they filled the long hall outside the Social Worker's door...."

While to the sociologist and the social worker this book points up in a realistic way some of the weaknesses inherent in the WPA as now adminis- tered and already well known to the student, to the layman it may serve unhappily only to enhance his already preconceived, as well as misconceived,

idea of the shiftlessness of all WPA workers. It raises many questions but answers none. Perhaps there is no answer. Perhaps, as in all good teach- ing, there is the motivation to stimulate further investigation as well as further thinking on the part of both specialist and general public. And read critically, such books as this do not discourage, but enrich the cultural approach to the study of the folk society, basic to the study of all society.

KATHARINE JOCHER

University of North Carolina

OUR LANDED HERITAGE. THE PUBLIC DOMAIN

1776-1936. By Roy M. Robbins. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1941. 450 pp. $5.00.

Many students of American history, including all those particularly interested in the nation's land policies, must have shared the reviewer's delight when this volume appeared, bringing up to date the research so ably pioneered by Benjamin H. Hibbard twenty years ago. Indeed, one suspects that Professor Hibbard was the inspiration for it. If so, he may be proud of the work of his disciple, for Professor Robbins' book attains the same high standard of historical research as the earlier volume. Moreover, it is broader in scope. It is not only a history of the public lands of the United States; it integrates public land policies with the other forces that have shaped the course of national development. It is, in a word, a political and economic history of the United States with its evolving land policy as a central thread.

In a smooth-flowing narrative the author surveys the history of the public domain from its establish- ment with the cession to the federal government of the western lands claimed by seven of the original thirteen states, until it was finally closed to further settlement in 1935. At first, the owner- ship of common property was a unifying force in the life of the young nation, but soon the questions which arose over its disposal and settlement precip- itated bitter sectional and class coliflicts. They colored and affected other public issues-taxation, banking, Indian affairs, slavery, immigration, transportation.

The history of the public lands and of the ad- vancing frontier is indeed the history of the forma- tive period of our national life. Within this formative era the author recognizes four distinct periods, and therefore divides his narrative into four parts: (1) the period from 1780 to 1850 during

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