Vanishing Immigrants

Sad times have overtaken the foreign language Press in the U. S. The Immigration Quota Act of 1924 laid it low by cutting the influx of foreigners from 700,000 in that year to 35,000 last year. Depression has put a number of gasping sheets out of misery. Last fortnight saw the passing of two more: the 75-year-old New Jersey Freie Zeitung, and the famed old Milwaukee Vorwaerts, founded 40 years ago by the late Socialist Victor Louis Berger.

The Freie Zeitung was the oldest foreign language daily in New Jersey. In 1930 it was bought by youthful John Barry Ryan Jr., grandson of the late Financier Thomas Fortune Ryan. He wanted its Associated Press franchise for a new English language daily which he named the Newark Free Press. After six months he abandoned both. The Free Press vanished immediately but the Freie Zeitung limped along in receivership, fell successively under control of Opera Tenor Walther Kirchhoff and the German-American Typographical Union. Last week the Zeitung hopefully called its suspension "temporary."

Founder Berger started Milwaukee's

Vorwaerts as a daily, soon made it a weekly. He edited it until 1904, supervised it for seven more years along with his Social Democratic Herald. He wrote in English for the Herald, translated to German for Vorwaerts. When Publisher Berger took his seat in Congress in 1911 he persuaded Heinrich Bartel, then editor of the Chicago Arbeiter Zeitung, to go to Milwaukee and take charge of Vorwaerts. Editor Bartel served until the end. Small, grey, he mourned last week the lack of sentimentality in post-War Germans. Moped he:

"Those readers whose subscriptions are two years or longer delinquent need look no farther for reasons for the paper's death. . . . Newer generations from Germany don't take the loss of a German language paper to heart. All recent comers read English and slowly drift away from the German."

An important corollary of that fact: advertisers long ago ceased to regard foreign language papers as the key to foreign colonies in U. S. cities.

Other casualties of the past year: the New York Volkszeitung; the daily edition of 104-year-old Courier des Etats Unis, published in Manhattan; Buffalo, N. Y.'s Polish Rekord-Unista.

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