TO AMERICAN DEMOCRACY
 

CHAPTER VII.

LITERACY

THE "OLD" VERSUS THE "NEW" GENERATION
-"Thanks to the excellent public schools of the United
States and to the compulsory educational laws of many
of our states, the question of illiteracy is not one of the
greatest importance in the second generation."* With
the immigrant however the case is different. The rate
of synthetization of our racial stocks depends in the
first instance upon the degree of literacy prevalent. The
percentage of illiteracy varies greatly among immigrants
of different countries. The following tables showing the
different percentages of illiterates among Italians as
compared with other immigrant stocks were compiled
from the reports of the Commissioner General of Immi¬
gration and appeared in the Statistical Review of Im¬
migration.

ILLITERACY OF EUROPEAN IMMIGRANTS
1899—1910
 


 

Immigrants 14 yrs.
 

Immigrant illiterates
 


 

of age and over
 

14 yrs. of age
 

and over
 

People
 


 

Number
 

Percent
 

Jewish
 

806,786
 

209,507
 

26.0
 

Bohemian and Moravian     79,721
 

1,322
 

1.7
 

Croatian
 

320,977
 

115,785
 

36.1
 

English
 

347,348
 

3,648
 

1.0
 

Finnish
 

137,916
 

1,745
 

1.3
 

German
 

625,793
 

32,236
 

5.2
 

Greek
 

208,608
 

55,089
 

26.4
 

Irish
 

416,640
 

10,721
 

2.6
 

Italian, North
 

339,301
 

38,897
 

11.5
 

Italian, South
 

1,690,376
 

911,566
 

53.9
 

Lithuanian
 

161,441
 

79,001
 

48.9
 

Magyar
 

307,082
 

35,004
 

11.4
 

Polish
 

861,303
 

304,675
 

35.4
 

Ruthenian
 

140,705
 

76,165
 

53.4
 

Scandinavian
 

530,634
 

2,221
 

.4
 

Scotch
 

115,788
 

767
 

.7
 

Slovak
 

342,583
 

86,216
 

24.0
 

TOTAL                             8,398,624             2,238,801                   26.7

Illiteracy figures for the total immigration   to   the
United   States   show   that  the   Southern   Italian   leads,
* Jenks—"The Immigration Problem," p. 33.