On the Trail of The Immigrant Part 1

On the Trail of The Immigrant.

by Edward A. Steiner.

I

BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION

_My Dear Lady of the First Cabin_:

On the fourth morning out from Hamburg, after your maid had disentangled you from your soft wrappings of steamer rugs, and leaning upon her arm, you paced the deck for the first time, the sun smiled softly upon the smooth sea, and its broken reflections came back hot upon your pale cheeks. Then your gentle eyes wandered from the illimitable sea back to the steamer which carried you. You saw the four funnels out of which came pouring clouds of smoke trailing behind the ship in picturesque tracery; you watched the encircling gulls which had been your fellow travellers ever since we left the white cliffs of Albion; and then your eyes rested upon those mighty Teutons who stood on the bridge, and whose blue eyes searched the sea for danger, or rested upon the compa.s.s for direction.

From below came the sweet notes of music, gentle and wooing, one of the many ways in which the steamship company tried to make life pleasant for you, to bring back your "Bon appet.i.t" to its tempting tables. Then suddenly, you stood transfixed, looking below you upon the deck from which came rather p.r.o.nounced odours and confused noises. The notes of a jerky harmonica harshly struck your ears attuned to symphonies; and the song which accompanied it was gutteral and unmusical.

The deck which you saw, was crowded by human beings; men, women and children lay there, many of them motionless, and the children, numerous as the sands of the sea,--unkempt and unwashed, were everywhere in evidence.

You felt great pity for the little ones, and you threw chocolate cakes among them, smiling as you saw them in their tangled struggle to get your sweet bounty.

You pitied them all; the frowsy headed, ill clothed women, the men who looked so hungry and so greedy, and above all you pitied, you said so,--do you remember?--you said you pitied your own country for having to receive such a conglomerate of human beings, so near to the level of the beasts. I well recall it; for that day they did look like animals.

It was the day after the storm and they had all been seasick; they had neither the spirit nor the appliances necessary for cleanliness. The toilet rooms were small and hard to reach, and sea water as you well know is not a good cleanser. They were wrapped in gray blankets which they had brought from their bunks, and you were right; they did look like animals, but not half so clean as the cattle which one sees so often on an outward journey; certainly not half so comfortable.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _From stereograph copyright--1905, by Underwood & Underwood, N. Y._

AS SEEN BY MY LADY OF THE FIRST CABIN.

The fellowship of the steerage makes good comrades, where no barriers exist and introductions are neither possible nor necessary.]

You were taken aback when I spoke to you. I took offense at your suspecting us to be beasts, for I was one of them; although all that separated you and me was a little iron bar, about fifteen or twenty rungs of an iron ladder, and perhaps as many dollars in the price of our tickets.

You were amazed at my temerity, and did not answer at once; then you begged my pardon, and I grudgingly forgave you. One likes to have a grudge against the first cabin when one is travelling steerage.

The next time you came to us, it was without your maid. You had quite recovered and so had we. The steerage deck was more crowded than ever, but we were happy, comparatively speaking; happy in spite of the fact that the bread was so doughy that we voluntarily fed the fishes with it, and the meat was suspiciously flavoured.

Again you threw your sweetmeats among us, and asked me to carry a basket of fruit to the women and children. I did so; I think to your satisfaction. When I returned the empty basket, you wished to know all about us, and I proceeded to tell you many things--who the Slavs are, and I brought you fine specimens of Poles, Bohemians, Servians and Slovaks,--men, women and children: and they began to look to you like men, women and children, and not like beasts. I introduced to you, German, Austrian and Hungarian Jews, and you began to understand the difference. Do you remember the group of Italians, to whom you said good-morning in their own tongue, and how they smiled back upon you all the joy of their native land? And you learned to know the difference between a Sicilian and a Neapolitan, between a Piedmontese and a Calabrian. You met Lithuanians, Greeks, Magyars and Finns; you came in touch with twenty nationalities in an hour, and your sympathetic smile grew sweeter, and your loving bounty increased day by day.

You wondered how I happened to know these people so well; and I told you jokingly, that it was my Social nose which over and over again, had led me steerage way across the sea, back to the villages from which the immigrants come and onward with them into the new life in America.

You suspected that it was not a Social nose but a Social heart; that I was led by my sympathies and not by my scientific sense, and I did not dispute you. You urged me to write what I knew and what I felt, and now you see, I have written. I have tried to tell it in this book as I told it to you on board of ship. I told you much about the Jews and the Slavs because they are less known and come in larger numbers. When I had finished telling you just who these strangers are, and something of their life at home and among us, in the strange land, you grew very sympathetic, without being less conscious how great is the problem which these strangers bring with them.

If I succeed in accomplishing this for my larger audience, the public, I shall be content.

You were loth to listen to figures; for you said that statistics were not to your liking and apt to be misleading; so I leave them from these pages and crowd them somewhere into the back of the book, where the curious may find them if they delight in them.

My telling deals only with life; all I attempt to do is to tell what I have lived among the immigrants, and not much of what I have counted.

Here and there I have dropped a story which you said might be worth re-telling; and I tell it as I told it to you--not to earn the smile which may follow, but simply that it may win a little more sympathy for the immigrant.

If here and there I stop to moralize, it is largely from force of habit; and not because I am eager to play either preacher or prophet. If I point out some great problems, I do it because I love America with a love pa.s.sing your own; because you are home-born and know not the lot of the stranger.

You may be incredulous if I tell you that I do not realize that I was not born and educated here; that I am not thrilled by the sight of my cradle home, nor moved by my country's flag.

I know no Fatherland but America; for after all, it matters less where one was born, than where one's ideals had their birth; and to me, America is not the land of mighty dollars, but the land of great ideals.

I am not yet convinced that the peril to these ideals lies in those who come to you, crude and unfinished; if I were, I would be the first one to call out: "Shut the gates," and not the last one to exile myself for your country's good.

I think that the peril lies more in the first cabin than in the steerage; more in the American colonies in Monte Carlo and Nice than in the Italian colonies in New York and Chicago. Not the least of the peril lies in the fact that there is too great a gulf between you and the steerage pa.s.senger, whose virtues you will discover as soon as you learn to know him.

I send out this book in the hope that it will mediate between the first cabin and the steerage; between the hilltop and lower town; between the fashionable West side and the Ghetto.

Do you remember my Lady of the First Cabin, what those Slovaks said to you as you walked down the gangplank in Hoboken? What they said to you, I now say to my book: "Z'Boghem," "The Lord be with thee."

II

THE BEGINNING OF THE TRAIL

Some twenty years ago, while travelling from Vienna on the Northern Railway, I was locked into my compartment with three Slavic women, who entered at a way station, and who for the first time in their lives had ventured from their native home by way of the railroad. In fear and awe they looked out the window upon the moving landscape, while with each recurring jolt they held tightly to the wooden benches.

One of them volunteered the information that they were journeying a great distance, nearly twenty-five miles from their native village. I ventured to say that I was going much further than twenty-five miles, upon which I was asked my destination. I replied: "America," expecting much astonishment at the announcement; but all they said was: "Merica?

where is that? is it really further than twenty-five miles?"

Until about the time mentioned, the people of Eastern and Southeastern Europe had remained stationary; just where they had been left by the slow and glacial like movement of the races and tribes to which they belonged. Scarcely any traces of their former migrations survive, except where some warlike tribe has exploited its history in song, describing its escape from the enemy, into some mountain fastness, which was of course deserted as soon as the fury of war had spent itself.

From the great movements which changed the destinies of other European nations, these people were separated by political and religious barriers; so that the discovery of America was as little felt as the discovery of the new religious and political world laid bare by the Reformation. Each tribe and even each smaller group developed according to its own native strength, or according to how closely it leaned towards Western Europe, which was pa.s.sing through great evolutionary and revolutionary changes.

On the whole, it may be said that in many ways they remained stationary, certainly immobile. Old customs survived and became laws; slight differentiations in dress occurred and became the unalterable costume of certain regions; idioms grew into dialects and where the native genius manifested itself in literature, the dialect became a language. These artificial boundaries became impa.s.sable, especially where differences in religion occurred. Each group was locked in, often hating its nearest neighbours and closest kinsmen, and also having an aversion to anything which came from without. Social and economic causes played no little part, both in the isolation of these tribes and groups and in the necessity for migration. When the latter was necessary, they moved together to where there was less tyranny and more virgin soil. They went out peacefully most of the time, but could be bitter, relentless and brave when they encountered opposition.

But they did not go out with the conqueror's courage nor with the adventurer's l.u.s.t for fame; they were no iconoclasts of a new civilization, nor the bearers of new tidings. They went where no one remained; where the Romans had thinned the ranks of the Germans, where Hun, Avar and Turk had left valleys soaked in blood and made ready for the Slav's crude plow; where Roman colonies were decaying and Roman cities were sinking into the dunes made by ocean's sands. They destroyed nothing nor did they build anything; they accepted little or nothing which they found on conquered soil, but lived the old life in the new home, whether it was under the shadow of the Turkish crescent, or where Roman conquerors had left empty cities and decaying palaces.

In travelling through that most interesting Austrian province, Dalmatia, on the sh.o.r.es of the Adriatic, opposite Italy, I came upon the palace of Diocletian, in which the Slav has built a town, using the palace walls for the foundations of his dwellings. In spite of the fact that both strength and beauty lie imbedded in these foundations, the houses are as crude and simple as those built in an American mining camp. Upon the ruins of the ancient city of Salona, I found peasants breaking the Corinthian pillars into gravel for donkey paths. These people although surrounded by conquering nations were not amalgamated, and were enslaved but not changed. Art lived and died in their midst but bequeathed them little or no culture.

This is true not only of many of the Slavs but also of many of the Jews who live among them and who have remained unimpressed and unchanged for centuries; except as tyrannical governments played shuffle-board with them, pushing them hither and thither as policy or caprice dictated.

The Italian peasant began his wanderings earlier than the other nations, at least to other portions of Europe, where he was regarded as indispensable in the building of railroads. These movements, however, were spasmodic, and he soon returned to his native village to remain there, locked in by prejudice and superst.i.tion, and unbaptized by the spirit of progress.

But all this is different now; and the change came through that word quite unknown in those regions twenty-five years ago--the word AMERICA?.

Having exhausted the labour supply of northern Europe which, as for instance in Germany, needed all its strength for the up-building of its own industries, American capitalists deemed it necessary to find new human forces to increase their wealth by developing the vast, untouched natural resources. Just how systematically the recruiting was carried on is hard to tell, but it is sure that it did not require much effort, and that the only thing necessary was to make a beginning.

In nearly all the countries from which new forces were to be drawn there was chronic, economic distress, which had lasted long, and which grew more painful as new and higher needs disclosed themselves to the lower cla.s.ses of society. Most of the land as a rule, was held by a privileged cla.s.s, and labour was illy paid. The average earning of a Slovak peasant during the harvest season was about twenty-five cents a day, which sank to half that sum the rest of the time, with work as scarce as wages were low.

If a load of wood was brought to town, it was besieged by a small army of labourers ready to do the necessary sawing; other work than wood sawing there practically was none, and consequently in the winter time much distress prevailed.

The labour of women was still more poorly paid. A muscular servant girl, who would wash, scrub, attend to the garden and cattle and help with the harvesting, received about ten dollars a year, with a huge cake and perhaps a pair of boots no less huge as a premium. These wages were paid only in the most prosperous portion of the Slavic world, being much lower in other regions, while in the mountains neither work nor wages were obtainable.