The Czechoslovak Review/Volume 1/New Books

 

NEW BOOKS.

Leadership of the New America, Racial and Religious By ARCHIBALD MCCLURE. Geo H. Doran Co. $1.25.

This book is a study of some sixteen racial groups of immigrants, giving an account in broad terms of their organization, leadership and the prevailing movements of the day. The author is a young minister who spent a year after graduating from the seminary in a study of the newer immigration in various sections of the United States. He gathered a tremendous amount of fresh material and shows unusual insight into the inner life of so many races differing from each other in language, degree of education, religion, mental and moral characteristics. Perhaps the chief reason for Mr. McClure’s success in describing the varied currents of life among the immigrants is his sympathetic treatment of them, lacking altogether the calm assumption of superiority exhibited by the average American toward the “Hunkies” and “Ginnies”. He does not hide the immigrant’s faults and vices, but gives him also credit for his good qualities; he emphasizes the undoubted fact that immigrants appreciate better than the native born the ideals and principles of America.

The chapter on Bohemians, the first race treated in this book, gives a very careful account of the location of Czech immigrants in the United States, their religious divisions, their fraternal and athletic organizations, the Bohemian press and the powerful movement organized since the outbreak of the war for the attainment of independence for Bohemia. The chapter dealing with the Slovaks is also written in a sympathetic spirit and with great accuracy as to facts and figures. Here and there one finds little errors of geography and history; Bukovina is not a Hungarian province, Slovakland does not border on Bohemia, for the whole width of Moravia separates them; Bohemia has been under the Hapsburgs since 1526 and not since 1630, although the real loss of its independence is dated 1620, when Czechs were defeated in the battle of White Mountain.

Mr. McClure’s book is to be commended to all Americans who want to know something of the special interests and the separate, racial sentiments of the thirteen million immigrants in the United States.