On the Trail of The Immigrant Part 19

They are caught by the contagious enthusiasm of our patriotism, and will outdo us; for they love America as no native can love it. Neither do I fear that they will fail us in fighting our greater battles against injustice and against corruption in high places. What I fear is that they will fight, that they will become one with the tumultuous mob, which may at any time arise and blindly demand its long deferred dividends for its share of labour, toil and suffering. I fear that we are gathering inflammable material from the dissatisfied of all the nations, who here may endeavour to reek vengeance upon all governments; a ma.s.s easily inflamed by demagogues and made a scourge in the land, when the land needs scourging.

No nation has ever faced such a problem as we are facing; not only because of its gigantic proportions, nor because of its peculiar nature, but because of the fact that the nation's weal or woe is being decided right before our very eyes; because its shroud or its wedding garment is now being woven, and we who live to-day may stretch our hands against the threads of the loom and say which it shall be.

XXIII

BIRDS OF Pa.s.sAGE

Again the ship's band plays the songs of the Fatherland, while marching up the streets of Hoboken towards the dock, comes a long procession of men escorting one of the chief citizens of the town. He is the owner of the largest saloon and is about to visit his native land across the sea.

The decks of the steamer are crowded by pa.s.sengers and their friends, and through the discordant noise of rattling chains one hears the mingled notes of joy and sorrow, until finally at the stern command of the captain the long homeward journey has begun.

The steerage of the _Kaiser Wilhelm II_ is crowded to the limit; and Jews, Slavs, Italians and Germans are beginning to settle down in their congested quarters, in a somewhat closer fellowship than on the westward journey; for now they have a common experience and a few sentences of common language to bind them to one another.

The women all of them, have discarded the peasant's dress and are bedecked in the spoils of bargain counters; while the men invariably wear "store clothes," always carry huge watches and not rarely a revolver. Where you still see peasant's clothing you will find a heavy spirit within it; for the wearer is one of the unfortunates who was turned back from "the gate which leads into the city."

The steerage pa.s.sengers may be roughly divided into two cla.s.ses: those who go home because they have succeeded, and those who go home because they have failed. Those who have succeeded have not yet reached the point of achievement which lifts them from the steerage to the cabin, but still belong to that large cla.s.s which goes back to the Fatherland for a season and then returns, to try again the road to fortune. More than one-fourth of all our immigrants belong to this cla.s.s and have to be reckoned with when the sum total is counted. While I cannot give the exact figures I should say that nearly two hundred thousand men and women go back and forth each year.

This cla.s.s has lost much of the Old World spirit and is neither so docile nor so polite as it was when first it occupied these quarters.

The ship's crew has become more civil towards it, which is due to the fact that the homeward bound steerage pa.s.senger has grown to be something more of a man, has more self-a.s.sertion and more dollars; all of which has power to subdue the over-officious crew. The men have learned more or less English, which is freely interspersed by oaths, while the women can say: "Yes, no, and good-bye" call their "Dum, de house" and are fairly versed in the language of the grocery and dry goods store. They can say "how much" and even "you bet"; but beyond that, the English language has remained "terra incognita" to them.

The women are the birds of pa.s.sage who most go back; for they are loyal to their kinsmen, to their home and their traditions, not having been long enough in America to prize the great privileges of womanhood here.

The children are most loath to return; especially those who have gone to school here and who in their migrations to and fro, have learned the difference.

a.n.u.shka, a bright twelve year old girl goes from a Pennsylvania town, to the Frenczin district in Hungary. She is dressed "American fashion," has gone to the public school and speaks English fairly well.

"a.n.u.shka moya, tell me, do you like to go back to Hungary?" and the little girl tells me: "No, siree. America is the best country. There we have white bread and b.u.t.ter and candy, and I can chew gum to beat the band;" and tears fill her eyes at the memory of the American luxuries which she has tasted. If she stays in her mountain village she will degenerate into the common life about her, and marry a peasant lad with whom she will hover between enough and starvation, all the days of her life. Yet she will never forget America, the white bread and b.u.t.ter, the candy and the chewing-gum.

In a little village in Hungary I know a woman who in her youth had tasted all these things and the freedom of life in Chicago. Now, although she has been married fifteen years and has lived away from America longer than that, she speaks with glowing eyes of the time when she lived on South Halstad Street, ate thin bread with thick jam on it, and the land was flowing with sausages, lager beer and chewing-gum.

Most blessed are the girls who have been in service in American families. They have learned English well, and also the ways of the American household. They have tasted of the spirit of Democracy which permeates our serving cla.s.s, and when such an one returns to her native village she unsettles the relations of servant and mistress. Therefore, her coming is dreaded by the "Hausfrau" who has had one servant-girl through many years, paying her fifteen dollars a year and treating her like a beast. Shall I quote one of those mistresses? "What kind of country is that anyway, that America? These servant girls come back with gold teeth in their mouths, and with long dresses which sweep the streets, and with unbearable manners. They do not kiss our hands when they meet us, and when they speak of their mistress in America they speak of her as if they were her equals. When one of those girls comes home with her finery and her money, we are liable to lose every servant; and wages are going up fabulously."

I met one of these servant-girls "with gold teeth in her mouth" after she had lived three years in America, and I found that she had acquired something besides gold teeth. She had learned to speak both German and English, she had manners which were refined, she had been uplifted by an American mistress out of her peasant life to a plane which women reach nowhere but in America, and she was the equal if not the superior, of any of the young women in her village, who had had the privilege of a common school education which had been denied to her, because of her lowly origin. It is true, she did sweep the streets with her long skirts; but she did it gracefully. She walked as the women on Fifth Avenue walk, and she shook hands with me after the most approved fashion.

The older women on the ship returned without any of these graces. They had been pining for the Fatherland, and in spite of the fact that one of them was going back to a half-starved country, she said: "In Chicago, you no can get any tink to eat."

In a general way it may be said that it made a vast difference where and how the men had lived in America, as to whether they carried anything but American dollars back with them. Both the men and the women who had been in service in American homes showed the largest inheritance of our spirit; while those who lived in the congested foreign quarters had simply changed climates for a while, lost some robustness and a few native virtues, and gained a modest bank account.

Yet even among those I could notice changes and gains which cannot be tabulated and which at the first glance might be put down as losses; an indefinite something which has gone into their fibre for better or for worse. This was most crudely ill.u.s.trated by a Ruthenian who had lived twenty-five years in America; eleven years in a coal mining district and the rest of the time in a New England manufacturing town. He told me about his aspirations for his son, who is "very smart and will not work with his hands." He talked in Russian: "Yes, my son will be educated. I have money enough for that. I am stupid and must bear all sorts of things, but when a man is educated, he can raisovat h.e.l.le as much as he wants." The form in which he put the American phrase saves the necessity of writing it in dashes.

I have not yet seen a village in Hungary, Russia or Italy, to which any number of men has returned even after a short sojourn in America, without that community's gaining in some ways at least. Better houses certainly were built, with more or less sanitary improvements according to the conditions under which the men or women have lived in America. It makes a vast difference whether the men have lived in mining camps or in the cities. Undoubtedly the peasant who has lived in a small American city where he could easily feel and touch its life brings home the greatest spirit of progress.

Agricultural conditions have improved rapidly in Hungary and Poland; business in not a few instances has been put upon an American basis, which means not only more efficiency, but strange as it may seem, more honesty; and the scale of living has risen wherever a large number of people has gone to and fro across the sea.

The steerage holds numbers who go back because they have not succeeded, and many who are broken in health, who have been burned by the fires, scalded by the steam and parched by our heat. Men and women with spirits broken, who are not going back, but crawling back into the shelter of the Old World home.

"O! panye," cried one of those to whom I tried to minister: "it is an awful country! You don't know whether they walk on their heads or on their feet; they do not stop to eat nor sleep, and they drive one as the water drives the village mill. They build a house one minute and tear it down the next; the cities grow like mushrooms and disappear like gra.s.s before a swarm of locusts. The air is black in the city where I lived; black as the inside of the chimney in my cabin, and the water they drink looks like cabbage soup. The cars go like a whirlwind over the Puszta (prairie) and I should rather stand among a thousand stampeding horses on the plains, than on one of those dreadful street corners. How terribly those whistles blow in the morning and how dark and dismal are those shops, where they eat up iron and men out of bowls as big as the barn of our 'Pan' (master). The heat outside burns and the heat inside blisters, and when it is cold it freezes the blood. No, no,"

and he groaned in terror at the remembrance of it; "no more America for me. That's all I have," pointing to his scant clothing. "I am going back a beggar."

Women too there are whose bodies and spirits are nearly broken; and they go back to wait for their release. Among these, there was one Bohemian woman from New York, whose hollow cough and glowing cheeks betrayed the arch destroyer at work. She was one of six thousand cigar makers employed by one firm, and she had laboured five years in that shop and rolled many thousands of cigars into shape. As she had to bite the end of every cigar, she swallowed much tobacco juice, and breathed in much tobacco dust. She had attained great proficiency and could earn twenty dollars a week; but she had ruined her health, had spent all her savings for medicine and now was going home to die. She was in that stage where hope had not left her, and she was bent on making the last great fight for life in the shelter of her "Matushka's" love.

Two old genteel looking people always stood out from the coa.r.s.e ma.s.s because they kept clean in spite of the odds against them in the steerage, and because they were always together. Up and down the slippery stairs they went, like two lovers. Even seasickness did not separate them and when the sun shone they were on deck, solemnly smiling back to heaven. They had left their all in America; their children were sleeping in the strange soil, and now they were going back to the little town in Austria from which they had gone thirty-seven years before. They felt too rich in one another to rail against their fate, and their complaint was as gentle as their pain was deep. They had come to America full and now they were going home empty; three sons and two daughters they had brought, and childless they were going back; but "The Lord had given and the Lord had taken away," and they blessed the name of the Lord.

Those who had prospered in America, and they were the majority, carried home with them sums of money which in the aggregate, amounted, among 600, to four thousand dollars, which did not however represent all they had saved; for each week they had sent small sums to their homes, and the money sent from America to Austria and Italy has been a great economic factor in the life of those countries. The total sum must reach into many millions. Nor does this sum represent an entire loss to our country; for the more money there is in a Slav or Italian village the more and better cotton goods are bought. The daily diet contains more American lard, the household is likely to be enriched by an American sewing-machine, and the notes of the phonograph are "heard in the land,"--which too comes from America.

Perhaps the greatest gainers by this constant coming and going are the steamship companies, which for a comparatively large sum of money provide quarters that in a very short time become unfit for human beings. The thrifty pa.s.sengers, and there are not a few of them, who believe that the steerage going to Europe is not so crowded as coming to America, and that they can risk travelling that way, are very much mistaken. Even moderately rough weather makes the unsheltered deck impossible; the nether decks of the ship become full of sickening odours and seasickness claims nearly all the pa.s.sengers as victims. There is no escape; even on so large a ship as the _Kaiser Wilhelm II_ all must remain in their bunks. On my last trip I counted five bitter days when not one steerage pa.s.senger could go on deck, while the cabin pa.s.sengers were travelling over comparatively quiet waters.

When the sea has become as smooth as a mill-pond the steerage pa.s.sengers may venture out; 800 people, crowded in a small s.p.a.ce, soon become acquainted and need not wait for an introduction. Less, much less than on the outward journey have the races kept themselves apart; it is true you may still discover groups of Slavs, Italians or Jews; but they have approached the gates of the Kingdom of G.o.d and you may find your brotherhoods made up of all the nations of the earth. I had around me a group of forty men who belonged to seventeen nationalities, to four faiths and to many stations in life; yet we felt ourselves bound to one another by a meagre knowledge of the English language and by our common experience in America. Most of these men felt themselves intensely American; and that was what held us together and in a measure separated us from the ma.s.s. For the majority of these birds of pa.s.sage are not yet American, as the following instance will ill.u.s.trate. In taking a rough census of the politics of the steerage, I asked one man: "How do you like President Roosevelt?" He replied: "I no know him. I guess he good man, I get my pay at shop; I work, I get pay, I guess that all right."

A few expressed both admiration for the President and loyalty to him, and hoped he would run for another term. They had opinions in politics and some even declared themselves neither Republicans nor Democrats, but "Inepenny." My group of forty men, growing at the end of the journey to nearly fifty, were a loyal set, and an honest one.

Each of the men had earned the little money he had, by hard labour; not one of them by barter, and each had caught a glimpse of the higher life in America.

The Slavs were nearly all Democrats, the Italians were Republicans, and so were the Jews. There were six Social Democrats in the group, nearly evenly divided among the three races; and they were the best educated if not the most companionable of the number. The whole group was eager to know, and the questions asked were as pertinent as numerous. All of them expected to return to America before another year, and each of them will grow into the full stature of the American man.

The touch with the ma.s.s in the steerage can be but light; yet I have looked into the smiling faces of little children, I have played with the steerage boys and girls, I have talked with every one of the five hundred adult pa.s.sengers in the steerage, and I can still say that usually all of them return with some blessing, with some wealth gained, and better for having been in America.

The boys and girls are more boisterous and self-a.s.sertive, while the men and women are less cringingly polite than they were. They have lost some things but have gained more; and I am convinced that the country in which they have toiled these years has been enriched by the price of their labour.

How far these birds of pa.s.sage present an economic problem is at present difficult to determine. Those who remain form the greater problem, which is more than an economic one.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A SLAV OF THE BALKANS

Sometimes crude, often very rough human material. To mould him is the problem, a problem too, not so difficult as many think.]

XXIV

IN THE SECOND CABIN

If the man who said, "Give me neither poverty nor riches" had been a modern globe trotter he might have added: "And when I cross the ocean let me travel neither in the first cabin nor in the steerage but in the second cabin." That is if he cared more for the companionship of human beings than for the luxuries of modern life, and if he had not objected to the fact that the second cabin is located directly over the powerful driving gear of the ship.

Because of the latter fact one may experience a "continuous performance"

of an earthquake without its disastrous results, and yet not without consequences which at the moment seem very serious. The second cabin does not lapse into the silence of the steerage nor into the dignity of the first cabin, but begins its noisy comradery immediately; being interrupted only, when the earthquake plays havoc with good nature, and resumed as soon as the appet.i.te for food and drink returns.

The second cabin usually holds only one cla.s.s; the cla.s.s which has succeeded. It contains a sprinkling of native Americans, teachers and preachers, whose modest savings are to be spread thinly over Europe; its usual occupants are foreigners, who after a longer or shorter sojourn, return for a visit to the cradle home. The Hoboken saloon-keeper who was escorted by the band to the dock, and in whose honour it played "Lieb Vaterland magst ruhig sein," is a typical second cla.s.s pa.s.senger on a German ship; and his like in large numbers come from Cincinnati, St.

Louis, Milwaukee and other cities made famous by their output of sparkling lager.

I discovered on this journey more than thirty dispensers of drink who were at the bar from morning until midnight, and doing exactly as they like their customers to do by them; drinking and getting drunk. The Hoboken saloon-keeper bore the typical name of August, and every one of the ship's crew down to the smallest scullion, knew this famous August and delighted to bask in the uncertainty of his sunshine and to be the beneficiary of his spasmodic generosity. He was drunk from the moment he came on board the steamer until he left it, and in his melancholy moments confided in me, telling me the story of his life and the magnitude of his fortune. He was born in Bremerhaven, the terminus of that great ferry which begins at Hoboken. He boasted the friendship of the Commodore of the German Lloyd fleet, with whom he had gone to school, and the smoking room steward was called to a.s.sert this fact.

"Steward, you k-know me?" "Yes, you're August." "D-do you know about C-Captain Schmidt?" "Yes, you sailed under him to South Africa." "N-no, you f-fool; I went to school with him," and obediently the steward repeated: "Yes, you went to school with him." He told me the secrets of the liquor business, the misfortunes which had overtaken his boy who is following in his father's footsteps, and is travelling towards delirium tremens at even a faster rate than this robust, convivial sailor. I tried my arts on August, painting in wonderful colours the glories of the Mecca of his pilgrimage, that I might keep him from drinking himself to death with beer before he saw his Fatherland. And I succeeded; for when I saw August of Hoboken again, he was drinking whiskey.

Poles, Bohemians and Slovaks all travelled in the second cabin; but invariably they were saloon-keepers and displayed the demoralizing tendencies of their business to their full extent.

The first days of this journey were made memorable by the noisy behaviour of two Polish priests who were constantly mixing whiskey with beer, and who rose to a spiritual ecstasy which was both unpriestly and ungentlemanly. Among the many priests who were on board, but few were priests in the true sense of the word, the others bringing disgrace upon their calling and upon their Church. In spite of the fact that the steerage was full of their kindred and people of their faith, not a priest found his way to that neglected quarter. As a rule they were busier at the bar than at their prayers, a fact which of course must not be charged to priests as a cla.s.s; but the sooner the Church in America gets rid of most of its foreign born priests, especially those from Italy and the Slavic countries, and replaces them by Irish or Americans, the better for the Church and for our country.