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[Illustration: _From stereograph copyright--1904, by Underwood &
Underwood, N. Y._
AT THE GATE
With tickets fastened to coats and dresses, the immigrants pass out
through the gate to enter into their new inheritance, and become our
fellow citizens.]
ON THE TRAIL
OF
THE IMMIGRANT
EDWARD A. STEINER’S
Studies of Immigration
_From Alien to Citizen_
The Story of My Life in America
Illustrated net $1.50
In this interesting autobiography we see Professor Steiner
pressing ever forward and upward to a position of international
opportunity and influence.
_The wonderful varied Life-story of the author of
“On the Trail of the Immigrant.”_
_The Broken Wall_
Stories of the Mingling Folk.
Illustrated net $1.00
“A big heart and a sense of humor go a long way toward making
a good book. Dr. Edward A. Steiner has both these qualifications
and a knowledge of immigrants’ traits and character.”
--_Outlook._
_Against the Current_
Simple Chapters from a Complex Life.
12mo, cloth net $1.25
“As frank a bit of autobiography as has been published for
many a year. The author has for a long time made a close
study of the problems of immigration, and makes a strong
appeal to the reader.”--_The Living Age._
_The Immigrant Tide--Its Ebb and Flow_
Illustrated, 8vo, cloth net $1.50
“May justly be called an epic of present day immigration,
and is a revelation that should set our country thinking.”
--_Los Angeles Times._
_On the Trail of The Immigrant_
Illustrated, 12mo, cloth net $1.50
“Deals with the character, temperaments, racial traits, aspirations
and capabilities of the immigrant himself. Cannot fail to afford
excellent material for the use of students of immigrant
problems.”--_Outlook._
_The Mediator_
A Tale of the Old World and the New.
Illustrated, 12mo, cloth net $1.25
“A graphic story, splendidly told.”--ROBERT WATCHORN,
_Former Commissioner of Immigration_.
_Tolstoy, the Man and His Message_
A Biographical Interpretation.
_Revised and enlarged._ Illustrated, 12mo, cloth net $1.50
ON THE TRAIL
OF
THE IMMIGRANT
EDWARD A. STEINER
_Professor in Iowa College, Grinnell, Iowa_
_ILLUSTRATED_
[Illustration]
NEW YORK CHICAGO TORONTO
Fleming H. Revell Company
LONDON AND EDINBURGH
Copyright, 1906, by
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY
New York: 158 Fifth Avenue
Chicago: 125 No. Wabash Ave.
Toronto: 25 Richmond Street, W.
London: 21 Paternoster Square
Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street
_This book is affectionately dedicated to
“The Man at the Gate”
ROBERT WATCHORN,
United States Commissioner of Immigration
at the
Port of New York:
Who, in the exercise of his office has been loyal to the interests
of his country, and has dealt humanely, justly and without
prejudice, with men of “Every kindred and tongue and people and
nation.”_
_ACKNOWLEDGMENT_
_Cordial recognition is tendered to the editors of The Outlook for
their courtesy in permitting the use of certain portions of this
book which have already appeared in that journal._
CONTENTS
I. BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION 9
II. THE BEGINNING OF THE TRAIL 16
III. THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE STEERAGE 30
IV. LAND, HO! 48
V. AT THE GATEWAY 64
VI. “THE MAN AT THE GATE” 78
VII. THE GERMAN IN AMERICA 94
VIII. THE SCANDINAVIAN IMMIGRANT 112
IX. THE JEW IN HIS OLD WORLD HOME 126
X. THE NEW EXODUS 143
XI. IN THE GHETTOS OF NEW YORK 154
XII. THE SLAVS AT HOME 179
XIII. THE SLAVIC INVASION 198
XIV. DRIFTING WITH THE “HUNKIES” 213
XV. THE BOHEMIAN IMMIGRANT 225
XVI. LITTLE HUNGARY 238
XVII. THE ITALIAN AT HOME 252
XVIII. THE ITALIAN IN AMERICA 262
XIX. WHERE GREEK MEETS GREEK 282
XX. THE NEW AMERICAN AND THE NEW PROBLEM 292
XXI. THE NEW AMERICAN AND OLD PROBLEMS 309
XXII. RELIGION AND POLITICS 321
XXIII. BIRDS OF PASSAGE 334
XXIV. IN THE SECOND CABIN 347
XXV. AU REVOIR 359
APPENDIX 365
INDEX 371
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
_Facing page_
AT THE GATE _Title_
AS SEEN BY MY LADY OF THE FIRST CABIN 10
THE BEGINNING OF THE TRAIL 26
WILL THEY LET ME IN? 50
THE SHEEP AND THE GOATS 66
BACK TO THE FATHERLAND 92
FAREWELL TO HOME AND FRIENDS 114
ISRAELITES INDEED 140
THE GHETTO OF THE NEW WORLD 156
FROM THE BLACK MOUNTAIN 180
WITHOUT THE PALE 208
HO FOR THE PRAIRIE! 246
THE BOSS 270
IN AN EVENING SCHOOL, NEW YORK 294
A SLAV OF THE BALKANS 302
ON THE DAY OF ATONEMENT 330
ON THE TRAIL OF THE IMMIGRANT
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 compass 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 appétit” to its tempting tables. Then
suddenly, you stood transfixed, looking below you upon the deck from
which came rather pronounced 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.
[Illustration: _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 passing 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 passenger, 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 passing 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 impassable, 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 lust 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 shores 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 superstition, 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
classes of society. Most of the land as a rule, was held by a privileged
class, 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.
The hard rye bread, scantily cut and rarely unadulterated, with an
onion, was the daily portion, while meat to many of the people was a
luxury obtainable only on special holidays. I remember vividly the
untimely passing away of a pig, which belonged to a titled estate.
According to the law, which reached with its mighty arm to this small
village, the pig must be decently buried and covered by--not balsam and
spices, but quick lime and coal oil. Hardly had these rites been
performed when the carcass mysteriously disappeared--but meat was
scarce, and the peasants were hungry.
During this same period, the Jewish people who were scattered through
Eastern Europe, began to feel not only economic distress, but existence
itself was often made unbearable by the newly awakened national feeling,
which reacted against the Jews in waves of cruel persecution. Such trade
as could be diverted into other channels was taken from them and they
grew daily poorer, living became precarious and life insecure. It did
not take much agitation to induce any of these people to emigrate, and
when the first venturesome travellers returned with money in the bank,
silver watches in their pockets, “store clothes” on their backs, and a
feeling of “I am as good as anybody” in their minds, each one of them
became an agent and an agitator, and if paid agents ever existed, they
might have been immediately dispensed with.
Now one can stand in any district town of Hungary, Poland or Italy and
see, coming down the mountains or passing along the highways and byways
of the plains, larger or smaller groups of peasants, not all
picturesquely clad, passing in a never ending stream, on, towards this
new world. The stream is growing larger each day, and the source seems
inexhaustible.
Sombre Jews come, on whose faces fear and care have plowed deep furrows,
whose backs are bent beneath the burden of law and lawlessness. They
come, thousands at a time, at least 5,000,000 more may be expected; and
he does not know what misery is, who has not seen them on that march
which has lasted nearly 2,000 years beneath the burden heaped by hate
and prejudice. Both peasant and Jew come from Russian, Austrian or
Magyar rule, under which they have had few of the privileges of
citizenship but many of its burdens. From valleys in the crescent shaped
Carpathians, from the sunny but barren slopes of the Alps and from the
Russian-Polish plains they are coming as once they went forth from
earlier homes; peaceful toilers, who seek a field for their surplus
labour or as traders to use their wits, and it is a longer journey than
any of their timid forbears ever undertook.
The most venturesome of the Slavs, the Bohemians, in whom the love of
wandering was always alive, started this stream of emigration as early
as the seventeenth century, sending us the noblest of their sons and
daughters, the heroes and heroines of the reformatory wars; idealists,
who like the Pilgrim Fathers, came for “Freedom to worship God.” Their
descendants have long ago been blended into the common life of the
people of America, scarcely conscious of the fact that they might have
the same pride in ancestry which the descendants of the Pilgrims delight
to exhibit. Not until the latter part of the nineteenth century, in the
70s, did the Bohemian immigrants come in large numbers and in a steady
stream, bringing with them the Czechs of Moravia, a neighbouring
province. Together they make some 200,000 of our population, fairly
distributed throughout the country, and about equally divided between
tillers of the soil and those following industrial pursuits. Nearly all
Bohemian immigrants come to stay, and adjust themselves more or less
easily to their environment. The economic distress which has brought
them here, while never acute, threatens to become so now from the over
accentuated language struggle which diverts the energies of the people
and makes proper legislation impossible. The building of railroads and
other governmental enterprises have been retarded by parliamentary
obstructionists, to whom language is more than bread and butter.
Business relations with the Germanic portions of Austria have come
almost to a standstill; conditions which are bound to increase
emigration from Bohemia’s industrial centres.
The Poles were the next of the Western Slavs to be drawn out of the
seclusion of their villages; those from Eastern Prussia being the
earliest, and those from Russian Poland the latest who have swelled the
stream of emigration.
The largest number of the Polish immigrants is composed of unskilled
labourers, most of them coming from villages where they worked in the
fields during the summer time, and in winter went to the cities where
they did the cruder work in the factories. The Poles from Germany’s part
of the divided kingdom have furnished nearly their quota of immigrants,
and those remaining upon their native acres will continue to remain
there, if only to spite the Germans who are grievously disappointed not
to see them grow less under the repressive measures of the government.
They are the thorn in the Emperor’s flesh, and with social Democrats
make enough trouble, to verify the saying: “Uneasy lies the head that
wears a crown,” true! even with regard to that most imperial of
emperors.
The Austrian Poles who have retained many of their liberties and have
also gained new privileges, have had a national and intellectual
revival, under the impulse of which the peasantry has been lifted to a
higher level which has reacted upon their economic condition; and
although that condition is rather low in Galicia, as that portion of
Poland is called, immigration from there has reached its high water
mark. The largest increase in immigration among the Poles is to be
looked for from Russian Poland where industrial and political conditions
are growing worse, and where it will take a long time to establish any
kind of equilibrium which will pacify the people and hold them to the
soil.
The Slovaks, who were relatively the best off, and further away from the
main arteries of travel, are, comparatively speaking, newcomers and
furnish at present the largest element in the Western Slavic
immigration. They have retained most staunchly many of their Slavic
characteristics, are the least impressionable among the Western Slavs,
and usually come, lured by the increased wages. They are most liable to
return to the land of their fathers after saving money enough materially
to improve their lot in life.
From the Austrian provinces, Carinthia and Styria, come increasingly
large numbers of Slovenes who are really the link between the Eastern
and Western Slavs. They belong to the highest type of that race, but
represent only a small portion of the large Slavic family. Of the
Eastern Slavs, only the Southern group has moved towards America, the
Russian peasant being bound to the soil, and unable to free himself from
the obligation of paying the heavy taxes, by removal to a foreign
country. With the larger freedom which is bound to come to him, will
also come economic relief so that the emigration of the Russian peasant
in large numbers is not a likelihood.
Lured by promises of higher wages in our industrial centres, Croatians
and Slovenians come in increasingly large numbers, while in smaller
numbers come Servians and Bulgarians.
The only Slavs who are thorough seamen and who are coming to our coasts
in increasingly large numbers as sailors and fishermen, are the
Dalmatians; and last but most heroic of all the Slavs, is the
Montenegrin, who has held his mountain fastnesses against the Turk and
who has been the living wall, resisting the victories of Islam. His
little country is blessed by but a few crumbs of soil between huge
mountains and boulders, and in the measure in which peace reigns in the
Balkans, he is without occupation and sustenance; so that he is
compelled to seek these more fertile shores, where he will for the
first time in history and quite unconsciously, “Turn the sword into a
plowshare and the spear into a pruning hook.”
[Illustration: THE BEGINNING OF THE TRAIL.
The Wanderlust of the olden time still gets its grip on the peasants of
the great plains of Eastern Europe.]
Tennyson does not over-idealize this Montenegrin in his admirable
sonnet:
They rose to where their sovran eagle sails,
They kept their faith, their freedom, on the height,
Chaste, frugal, savage, arm’d by day and night
Against the Turk; whose inroad nowhere scales
Their headlong passes, but his footstep fails,
And red with blood the Crescent reels from fight
Before their dauntless hundreds, in prone flight
By thousands down the crags and thro’ the vales.
O smallest among peoples! rough rock-throne
Of Freedom! warriors beating back the swarm
Of Turkish Islam for five hundred years.
Great Tsernogora! never since thine own
Black ridges drew the cloud and brake the storm
Has breathed a race of mightier mountaineers.
From Lithuania, a province of Russia, come smaller groups of non-Slavic
emigrants; people with an old civilization of which little remains, and
with a language which leans closest to Sanscrit, yet who, because of
their subjection to Russia, have sunk to the level of the Russian
peasants. Then there are Magyars and Finns, rather close kinsmen, who
because one lives in the South and the other far North, are as different
as the South is from the North; Greeks and Syrians, traders all of them
and workers only when they must be. We shall follow them more closely as
they pass into our own national life.
The Italian emigration, the largest which we receive from any one
source, comes primarily from Southern Italy, from the crowded cities
with their unspeakable vices; the smallest number of emigrants come from
the villages where they have all the virtues of tillers of the soil. The
most volatile of our foreign population, and perhaps the most clannish,
they represent a problem recognized by their home government, which was
the first to concern itself with it, to study it systematically, and to
aid our government so far as possible in a rational solution. The number
of Italian emigrants is still undiminished, and in spite of the fact
that in recent years more than 200,000 of them have annually left their
native land, their withdrawal is scarcely felt and the number could be
doubled without perceptible diminution at home.
There are then upon this immigrant trail, many people of varied cultural
development; some of them coming from countries in which they have been
part of a very high type of civilization, while others come from the
veritable back woods of Europe, into which neither steam nor electricity
has entered to disturb the old order, nor has yet awakened a new life.
None of them starts for America tempted by wealth which can be picked
up in the streets. That mythical man who, upon landing, refused to take
a quarter from the side-walk, because he had heard that dollars were
lying about loose, in America, has found it true because he has gone
into politics.
The immigrant of to-day, be he Slav, Italian or Jew, starts upon this
trail, with no culture, it is true, but with a virgin mind in which it
may be made to grow. Not always with a keen mind, but with a surplus of
muscle, which he is ready to exchange at the mouth of the pit or by the
furnace’s hot blast, for a higher wage than he could earn in the miry
fields of his native village;--but it is by no means settled who gets
the best of the bargain.
III
THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE STEERAGE
Back of Warsaw, Vienna, Naples and Palermo, with no place on the world’s
map to mark their existence, are small market towns to which the
peasants come from their hidden villages. They come not as is their wont
on feast and fast days, with song and music, but solemnly; the women
bent beneath their burdens, carried on head or back, and the men who
walk beside them, less conscious than usual of their superiority.
The women have lost the splendour which usually marks their attire.
Their embroidered, stiffly starched petticoats, flowered aprons and gay
kerchiefs have disappeared, and instead they have put on more sombre
garb, some cast off clothing of our civilization. The men, too, have
left their gayer coats behind them, to wear the shoddy ones which
neither warm nor become them.
Beneath the black cross which marks the boundary of the Polish town,
they usually rest themselves. The cross was erected when the peasants
were liberated from serfdom, and beneath it every wanderer rests and
prays: every wanderer but the Jew, for whom the cross symbolizes neither
liberty nor rest.
These towns which used to be buried in a cloud of dust in the summer and
a sea of mud in the winter time; to which the peasant came but rarely,
and then only to do his petty trading or his quarrelling before the law,
are the first catch basins of the little percolating streams of
emigration, and have felt their influence in increased prosperity. They
are the supply stations where much of the money is spent on the way out,
and into which the money flows from the mining camps and industrial
centres in America. One little house leans hospitably against the other,
a two-story house marks the dwelling of nobility, and the power of the
law is personified in the gendarmes, who, weaponed to the teeth, patrol
the peaceful town.
In Russia, before one may emigrate, many painful and costly formalities
must be observed, a passport obtained through the governor and speeded
on its way by sundry tips. It is in itself an expensive document without
which no Russian subject may leave his community, much less his country.
Many persons, therefore, forego the pleasure of securing official
permission to leave the Czar’s domain, and go, trusting to good luck or
to a few rubles with which they may close the ever open eyes of the
gendarmes of the Russian boundary. Austrian and Italian authorities also
require passports for their subjects, but they are less costly and are
granted to all who have satisfied the demands of the law.
These formalities over, the travellers move on to the market square, a
dusty place, where women squat, selling fruits and vegetables; the
plaster cast and gaily decorated saints, stoically receiving the
adoration of our pilgrims, who come for the last time with a petition
which now is for a prosperous journey.
There also, the agent of the steamship company receives with just as
much feeling their hard earned money in exchange for the long coveted
“Ticket,” which is to bear them to their land of hope.
From hundreds of such towns and squares, thousands of simple-minded
people turn westward each day, disappearing in the clouds of dust which
mark their progress to the railroad station and on towards the dreaded
sea.
From the small windows of fourth-class railway carriages they get
glimpses of a new world, larger than they ever dreamed it to be, and
much more beautiful. Through orderly and stately Germany, with its
picturesque villages, its castled hills and magnificent cities they
pass; across mountains and hills, and by rushing rivers, until one day
upon the horizon they see a forest of masts wedged in between the
warehouses and factories of a great city.
Guided by an official of the steamship company whose wards they have
become, they alight from the train; but not without having here and
there to pay tribute to that organized brigandage, by which every port
of embarkation is infested. The beer they drink and the food they buy,
the necessary and unnecessary things which they are urged to purchase,
are excessively dear, by virtue of the fact that a double profit is made
for the benefit of the officials or the company which they represent.
The first lodging places before they are taken to the harbours, are
dear, poor and often unsafe. Much bad business is done there which might
be controlled or entirely discontinued. For instance in Rotterdam three
years ago, coming with a party of emigrants, we were met by an employee
of the steamship company and taken in charge, ostensibly to be guided to
the company’s offices near the harbour. On the way we were made to stop
at a dirty, third-class hotel (whose chief equipment was a huge bar) and
were told to make ourselves comfortable. While we were not compelled to
spend our money, we were invited to do so, urged to drink, and left
there fully three hours until this same employee called for us. I
complained to the company through the only official whom I could reach,
and who no doubt was one of the beneficiaries, for the complaint did not
travel far.
This is only the remnant of an abuse from which the emigrant and the
country which received him, used to suffer; for our stringent
immigration laws have made it more profitable to treat the immigrant
with consideration and to look after his physical welfare.
Yet, admirable as is the machinery which has been set up at Hamburg for
the reception of the emigrant, these minor abuses have not all passed
away and while care is taken that his health does not suffer and that
his purse is not completely emptied, he is still regarded as prey.
The Italian government safeguards its emigrants admirably at Naples and
Genoa; but other governments are seemingly unconcerned. When the
official has done with the emigrants, they are taken to the emigrant
depot of the company (which in many cases is inadequate for the large
number of passengers), their papers are examined and they are separated
according to sex and religion. At Hamburg they are required to take
baths and their clothing is disinfected; after which they constantly
emit the delicious odours of hot steam and carbolic acid. The sleeping
arrangements at Hamburg are excellent. Usually twenty persons are in one
ward, but private rooms which have beds for four people can be rented.
The food is abundant and good, plenty of bread and meat are to be had,
and luxuries can be bought at reasonable prices. At Hamburg music is
provided and the emigrants may make merry at a dance until dawn of the
day of sailing.
The medical examination is now very strict, yet seemingly not strict
enough; for quite a large percentage of those who pass the German
physicians are deported on account of physical unfitness.
I wish to make this point here, and emphasize it: that restrictive
immigration has had a remarkable influence upon the German and
Netherlands steamship companies, in that they have become fairly humane
and decent, which they were not; but improvement in this direction is
still possible.
The day of embarkation finds an excited crowd with heavy packs and
heavier hearts, climbing the gangplank. An uncivil crew directs the
bewildered travellers to their quarters, which in the older ships are
far too inadequate, and in the newer ships are, if anything, worse.
Clean they are; but there is neither breathing space below nor deck room
above, and the 900 steerage passengers crowded into the hold of so
elegant and roomy a steamer as the _Kaiser Wilhelm II_, of the North
German Lloyd line, are positively packed like cattle, making a walk on
deck when the weather is good, absolutely impossible, while to breathe
clean air below in rough weather, when the hatches are down is an equal
impossibility. The stenches become unbearable, and many of the emigrants
have to be driven down; for they prefer the bitterness and danger of the
storm to the pestilential air below. The division between the sexes is
not carefully looked after, and the young women who are quartered among
the married passengers have neither the privacy to which they are
entitled nor are they much more protected than if they were living
promiscuously.
The food, which is miserable, is dealt out of huge kettles into the
dinner pails provided by the steamship company. When it is distributed,
the stronger push and crowd, so that meals are anything but orderly
procedures. On the whole, the steerage of the modern ship ought to be
condemned as unfit for the transportation of human beings; and I do not
hesitate to say that the German companies, and they provide best for
their cabin passengers, are unjust if not dishonest towards the
steerage. Take for example, the second cabin which costs about twice as
much as the steerage and sometimes not twice so much; yet the second
cabin passenger on the _Kaiser Wilhelm II_ has six times as much deck
room, much better located and well protected against inclement weather.
Two to four sleep in one cabin, which is well and comfortably furnished;
while in the steerage from 200 to 400 sleep in one compartment on
bunks, one above the other, with little light and no comforts. In the
second cabin the food is excellent, is partaken of in a luxuriantly
appointed dining-room, is well cooked and well served; while in the
steerage the unsavoury rations are not served, but doled out, with less
courtesy than one would find in a charity soup kitchen.
The steerage ought to be and could be abolished by law. It is true that
the Italian and Polish peasant may not be accustomed to better things at
home and might not be happier in better surroundings nor know how to use
them; but it is a bad introduction to our life to treat him like an
animal when he is coming to us. He ought to be made to feel immediately,
that the standard of living in America is higher than it is abroad, and
that life on the higher plane begins on board of ship. Every cabin
passenger who has seen and smelt the steerage from afar, knows that it
is often indecent and inhuman; and I, who have lived in it, know that it
is both of these and cruel besides.
On the steamer _Noordam_, sailing from Rotterdam three years ago, a
Russian boy in the last stages of consumption was brought upon the sunny
deck out of the pestilential air of the steerage. I admit that to the
first cabin passengers it must have been a repulsive sight--this
emaciated, dirty, dying child; but to order a sailor to drive him
down-stairs, was a cruel act, which I resented. Not until after repeated
complaints was the child taken to the hospital and properly nursed. On
many ships, even drinking water is grudgingly given, and on the steamer
_Staatendam_, four years ago, we had literally to steal water for the
steerage from the second cabin, and that of course at night. On many
journeys, particularly on the _Fürst Bismark_, of the Hamburg American
line, five years ago, the bread was absolutely uneatable, and was thrown
into the water by the irate emigrants.
In providing better accommodations, the English steamship companies have
always led; and while the discipline on board of ship is always stricter
than on other lines, the care bestowed upon the emigrants is
correspondingly greater.
* * * * *
At last the passengers are stowed away, and into the excitement of the
hour of departure there comes a silent heaviness, as if the surgeon’s
knife were about to cut the arteries of some vital organ. Homesickness,
a disease scarcely known among the mobile Anglo-Saxons, is a real
presence in the steerage; for there are the men and women who have been
torn from the soil in which through many generations their lives were
rooted.
No one knows the sacred agony of that moment which fills and thrills
these simple minded folk who, for the first time in their lives face the
unknown perils of the sea. The greater the distance which divides the
ship from the fast fading dock, the nearer comes the little village,
with its dusty square, its plaster cast saints and its little mud huts.
From far away Russia a small pinched face looks out and a sweet voice
calls to the departing father, not to forget Leah and her six children,
who will wait for tidings from him, be they good or ill. From Poland in
gutteral speech comes a: “God be with you, Bratye (brother), strong oak
of our village forest and our dependence; the Virgin protect thee.”
The Slovak feels his Maryanka pressing her lips against his while she
sobs out her lamentation, and he, to keep up his courage, gives a
“strong pull and a long pull” at the bottle, out of which his white
native palenka gives him its last alcoholic greeting.
Silent are the usually vociferous Italians, whose glorious Mediterranean
is blotted out by the sombre gray of the Atlantic; they shall not soon
again see the full orbed moon shining upon the bay of Naples, sending
from heaven to earth a path of silver upon which the blessed saints go
up and down. In the silence of the moment there come to them the rattle
of carts and the clatter of hoofs, the soft voice of a serenade and then
the sweet scented silence of an Italian night. They all think, even if
they have never thought much before; for the moment is as solemn as
when the padre came with his censer and holy water, or when the acolytes
rang the bells, mechanically, on the way to some death-bed.
It is all solemn, in spite of the band which strikes the well-known
notes of “Lieb Vaterland, magst ruhig sein,” and makes merrier music
each moment to check the tears and to heal the newly made wounds. They
try to be brave now, struggling against homesickness and fear, until
their faces pale, and one by one they are driven down into the hold to
suffer the pangs of the damned in the throes of a complication of
agonies for which as yet, no pills or powders have brought soothing.
But when the sun shines upon the Atlantic, and dries the deck space
allotted to the steerage passengers, they will come out of the hold one
by one, wrapped in the company’s gray blankets; pitiable looking
objects, ill-kempt and ill-kept. Stretched upon the deck nearest the
steam pipes, they await the return of the life which seemed “clean gone”
out of them.--It is at this time that cabin passengers from their
spacious deck will look down upon them in pity and dismay, getting some
sport from throwing sweetmeats and pennies among the hopeless looking
mass, out of which we shall have to coin our future citizens, from among
whom will arise fathers and mothers of future generations.
This practice of looking down into the steerage holds all the pleasures
of a slumming expedition with none of its hazards of contamination; for
the barriers which keep the classes apart on a modern ocean liner are as
rigid as in the most stratified society, and nowhere else are they more
artificial or more obtrusive. A matter of twenty dollars lifts a man
into a cabin passenger or condemns him to the steerage; gives him the
chance to be clean, to breathe pure air, to sleep on spotless linen and
to be served courteously; or to be pushed into a dark hold where soap
and water are luxuries, where bread is heavy and soggy, meat without
savour and service without courtesy. The matter of twenty dollars makes
one man a menace to be examined every day, driven up and down slippery
stairs and exposed to the winds and waves; but makes of the other man a
pet, to be coddled, fed on delicacies, guarded against draughts, lifted
from deck to deck and nursed with gentle care.
The average steerage passenger is not envious. His position is part of
his lot in life; the ship is just like Russia, Austria, Poland or Italy.
The cabin passengers are the lords and ladies, the sailors and officers
are the police and the army, while the captain is the king or czar. So
they are merry when the sun shines and the porpoises roll, when far away
a sail shines white in the sunlight or the trailing smoke of a steamer
tells of other wanderers over the deep.
“Here, Slovaks, bestir yourselves; let’s sing the song of the ‘Little
red pocket-book’ or ‘The gardener’s wife who cried.’ ‘Too sad?’ you say?
Then let’s sing about the ‘Red beer and the white cakes.’” So they sing:
“Brothers, brothers, who’ll drink the beer,
Brothers, brothers, when we are not here?
Our children they will drink it then
When we are no more living men.
Beer, beer, in glass or can,
Always, always finds its man.”
Other Slavs from Southern mountains, sing their stirring war song:
“Out there, out there beyond the mountains,
Where tramps the foaming steed of war,
Old Jugo calls his sons afar;
To aid! To aid! in my old age
Defend me from the foeman’s rage.
“Out there, out there beyond the mountains
My children follow one and all,
Where Nikita your Prince doth call;
And steep anew in Turkish gore
The sword Czar Dushan flashed of yore,
Out there, out there beyond the mountains.”
If the merriment rises to the proper pitch, there will be dancing to the
jerky notes of an harmonica or accordion; for no emigrant ship ever
sailed without one of them on board. The Germans will have a waltz upon
a limited scale, while the Poles dance a mazurka, and the Magyar
attempts a wild czardas which invariably lands him against the railing;
for it needs steady feet as well as a steadier floor than the back of
this heaving, rolling monster.
Men and women from other corners of the Slav world will be reminded of
the spinning room or of some village tavern; and joining hands will sing
with appropriate motions this, not disagreeable song, to Katyushka or
Susanka, or whatever may be the name of this “Honey-mouth.”
“We are dancing, we are dancing,
Dancing twenty-two;
Mary dances in this Kolo,
Mary sweet and true;
What a honey mouth has Mary,
Oh! what joyful bliss!
Rather than all twenty-two
I would Mary kiss.”