Eugen Peter Schwiedland: Review of Sartorius von Waltershausen’s Die Vereinigten Staaten als heutiges und künftiges Einwanderungsland (1921)

Schwiedland’s short review presents Waltershausen’s study as a warning to Germans considering emigration to the United States. Its opening endorses the book’s account as realistic, then organizes its assessment around an asserted American lack of both independent cultural capacity and sufficient labor. The central distinction is between a country’s demand for immigrants and the opportunities it offers them:

Wenn auch nun die Union für eine lange Zukunft viele Menschen braucht, so ist doch für Deutsche dort wenig zu holen.

English translation: Even though the Union will need many people for a long time to come, there is nevertheless little there for Germans to gain.

The review moves from migration patterns to agricultural and industrial conditions. Alternative destinations—Canada, Argentina, and Brazil—and temporary migration followed by return qualify the United States’ attraction. Exhaustive cultivation of farmland, exploitation of child labor, and dismissals during crises depict an economy that consumes resources and workers without sustaining them. Migrants’ return with savings consequently appears as a response to American conditions, not simply a failure to settle. Organized labor offers no straightforward corrective:

Die Gewerkvereine aber trachten, die Landung Fremder möglichst zu erschweren, um das Arbeitsmonopol ihrer Angehörigen nicht preiszugeben.

English translation: The trade unions, however, endeavour to make the landing of foreigners as difficult as possible, so as not to surrender the labour monopoly of their members.

Schwiedland thus presents labor scarcity and restrictions on immigration as compatible: incumbent workers defend their position against newcomers. The review adds fear of Bolshevism and hostility toward Chinese and Japanese immigrants, before passing into racialized and gendered claims about climate, bodily degeneration, luxury, and cultural vitality. These assertions are conveyed without critical distance. They extend the economic indictment into a judgment about society’s supposed inability to regenerate itself through immigration.

The argument then shifts from domestic conditions to international power. Large-scale industry is said to require imperial expansion, with the war partly satisfying and partly intensifying American ambitions. Against the United States, Britain, and Japan, continental Europe’s fragmentation becomes a strategic liability:

Ein in viele kleine Staaten zersplittertes festländisches Europa ist aber machtlos gegen die großstaatliche Handelspolitik und gegen die vordringenden Kapitalien und Kredite der Union.

English translation: A continental Europe splintered into many small states is, however, powerless against great-power commercial policy and against the advancing capital and credits of the Union.

The closing returns to prospective German emigrants. Farmers are urged to consider tolerable conditions at home, while industrial workers face hostility toward socialists, Taylorist labor discipline, and employers still prepared to break workers’ organizations by force. The decisive contrast concerns whether productive capacity is developed through social protection or extracted through coercive organization.

The review’s significance lies in this coupling of emigration advice with a postwar critique of American economic power. Schwiedland closely relays and endorses the book’s judgments: America’s need for labor is treated neither as a promise of worker welfare nor as evidence of cultural strength, and its industrial ascendancy becomes a reason for European concern rather than admiration.