beaten back and forth all the length and breadth of its hot and
inhospitable streets until their little money and their courage were
exhausted, and they had drifted back to the Battery, the place nearest
home which they could reach “without money and without price.”
They had come here for work and had sought it from shop to shop,
wherever men with a fair share of muscle were wanted; but they always
found that some stronger man had come before them so they were left,
like the sick man at the Pool of Bethesda, unhealed at the edge of the
water.
They had been my travelling companions across the sea, and I felt some
responsibility for them, besides being anxious to know what becomes of
men in America who have neither our speech which might be silver, nor
the silent gold which serves as power. So I cast my lot and my small
change among them. We travelled as far as a five cent fare would take us
and began looking for work among the large mansions and fancy farms
which line the shore of Long Island Sound. Barking dogs, frightened
house maids and discourteous lackeys we found everywhere, but neither
work nor food for the four of us. We did not look like tramps, although
our clothes were shabby and the dust and grime of the city did not tend
to improve our appearance; yet we spent a whole day looking
unsuccessfully for work, and when night came upon us nothing remained
but to return to the city, as bankrupt in our stock of courage as in our
finances.
That blessed and famous bread line, where the Lord answers His poor
people’s prayer for daily bread, kept us from starving, and there was
enough free ice water to be had to wash down the bread and benumb our
digestive organs into silence.
Union and Madison square park benches were our beds a few minutes at a
time, for the watchful policeman kept us moving as if we were drunk from
laudanum. We went the length of lower Broadway, to City Hall park, and
finally to the Battery where the next morning’s gray found us, wearier
and shabbier than ever. Twenty-four such hours as we lived were enough
to push us down the social scale to the level of the tramp, and we were
greeted as such by those birds of passage, one of whom proved to be a
“friend in need.” He really pitied my speechless companions and after
sharing with us his begged buns, he told us of the New Jersey paradise
where orchards and truck gardens were waiting for the toil of our
hands.
He promised to accompany us, and was generous enough to offer to pay our
way across the river. He seemed to enjoy the task of leadership and
unfolded his great plans for us as he led us along the railroad track by
the salt marshes of New Jersey, where we nearly perished from the
attacks of mosquitoes. The New Jersey mosquito is enough of a factor to
prevent the distribution of the immigrant. I certainly should not blame
any one who preferred the stenches of Rivington Street to the sting of
the mosquitoes on the New Jersey marshes. Nowhere was work given us,
although we were treated less rudely, and in a few cases were offered
food in exchange for a few chores; our travelled friend diligently
instructing us to do as little as possible in return for the kind of
food which we generally received. The day’s earning of food included:
smoked sturgeon, which was wormy, and ham bones to which clung a minimum
of meat and a maximum of tough skin. On the whole, we were soon made to
realize that the New Jersey farmer knew how to drive a good bargain, in
connection with what he was pleased to consider his charities.
When night came, our friend suggested an empty freight car as our
lodging place, and in lieu of a better one, we went to sleep for the
first time in this country, where the bed cost us nothing, and where
some one’s else property became temporarily our own. We slept, in spite
of the soreness of our muscles and the continued attacks of mosquitoes,
and when we awoke it was still dark; at least in the car, into which
neither starlight nor sunshine could penetrate,--for we were locked in,
our guide and guardian gone, and with him three watches, four coats and
our shoes.
After a long, long time, in answer to our cries, a railroad man opened
the car and found us more destitute than we had yet been, and in need of
a better friend(?) than the one we had lost. I told him our story, and
he directed us to a farmer on the Trenton road who always needed
labourers, and who he was quite sure would take us in, notwithstanding
our denuded condition.
Barefoot and coatless we reached the farm which we recognized by the
fact that a sign was tacked to the gate post, stating in four languages
that “Labourers are wanted within.” In the rear of the house we were
received by a be-aproned gentleman who proved to be the cook and
housekeeper of this strange establishment. After I had told him the
story of our adventures, we were invited to breakfast to which we did
ample justice, in spite of the fact that it was prepared by a man who
evidently knew little or nothing about the art of cooking. He told me
that he too, had drifted from the great city, an immigrant who had
found no standing room in the crowded shops. He told me also that every
man at work here was a “Green-horn,” as he expressed it, and that not
one of them had been longer than six months away from the Old Country.
At last the “Boss” came from the field; a rather portly man, red faced,
hard headed and with small, beady eyes. He made a poor impression upon
me, especially when he began to speak German, a language which he had
acquired to be able to deal with his help. He offered us the hospitality
of his farm and $10.00 a month, beside which he was ready to advance us
the necessary farm clothing which he kept in stock for such emergencies.
The clothing consisted of overalls, jacket, a straw hat and very coarse
shoes.
We were not told what he charged us for them, but I began to suspect the
man when that evening he drove me to the village to buy a pair of shoes,
none of those in his stock fitting me.
When we reached the store, he told the proprietor in English which I was
not supposed to understand, to tell me that the shoes were hand made and
cost $3.50. They were common, roughly made shoes which could be bought
in any store for $1.25 and I have no doubt that the profit was to be
divided between these gentlemen.
At night in the loft of the barn, a dozen men, representing about ten
nationalities met, and after looking at one another in stolid silence
for a time, went to sleep. In the morning we were initiated into our
task, which consisted of the customary chores, and finally, the field
work in the patches of garden stuff, where hoeing and pulling weeds were
the order of the twelve hours labour, with the beady eyes of the “Boss”
ever upon us. He grew more and more impatient with our unskillful ways,
and swore loudly in English and German, terrifying my Slavic friends
beyond my ability to calm them.
Each day was the same as the one just past; hard work in the field, poor
food in the kitchen, a hay bed at night, and the impatience of the
“Boss” manifesting itself in personal violence against those of us who
were the weaker among his slaves. Each day one or the other man
disappeared, some of them leaving behind the little bundle of clothing
bought from the farmer. This he immediately appropriated and sold to the
next comer; for one or more new men of the same type were sure to drift
in, to begin the labour which brought no wages.
According to the cook, the four of us broke the record, having stayed
nearly a month. About two days before pay day I came in at evening with
a broken cultivator. Whether running it into a tree stump had wrecked
it, or whether it had been ready to fall to pieces at the slightest
provocation I do not know; but the “Boss” grew violent in his anger and
attacked me with a pitchfork, driving me out of the very gate through
which I had come twenty-nine days before.
I went to the village and after finding a justice of the peace, laid
before him my complaint, but he discouraged any legal action on my part
because I did not have money enough to back it. When night came, I
returned to the farm and calling out my men, who were only too ready to
follow, we cut through a tall corn-field, and climbing a wire fence were
again on the Trenton road. We walked the whole night, into Trenton and
out of it, and far on our way to Pennsylvania. The next day we found
that our labour was indeed wanted, and a few weeks in the tobacco fields
of a Pennsylvania Dutch farmer put money into our purses and flesh upon
our muscle. Upon finishing our work we started again upon our journey
and soon entered the industrial region of Pennsylvania, where steel
furnaces lined the highway and coke ovens illumined the landscape,
making the air heavy by their fumes. Here for the first time my
companions saw labour in America at its highest tension. They were
frightened by the pots of glowing metal and made dizzy by the roar of
the furnaces.
Opportunity for labour was soon secured, but my companions entered into
it so timidly that I tried to dissuade them from it, but could not, as
here alone was steady employment offered to men of their class. I can
still see them in the great yard of one of the steel mills, pale and
trembling, as if facing the dangers of war. Half naked, savage looking
creatures darted about in the glare of molten metal, which now was
white, “Like the bitten lip of hate,” then grew red and dark as it
flowed into the waiting moulds. Close to these hot moulds the men were
stationed to carry away the bars still full of the heat of the furnace,
and they became part of a vast army of men who came and went, bending
their backs uncomplainingly to the hot burden.
I watched them day after day coming from their work, wet, dirty, and
blistered by the heat; dropping into their bunks at night, breathing in
the pestilential air of a room crowded by fifteen sleepers, and in the
morning crawling listlessly back to their slavish task.
No song escaped their parched lips, attuned to their native melodies,
and the only cheer came on pay day, when the silver dollars looked twice
as big as they were, when a barrel of beer was tapped at the boarding
house and this hard world was forgotten. Then they tried to sing from
throats made hoarse by the heat,
“Chervene Pivo
Bile Kolatshe.”
With the song came memories of their native village, the inn and the
fiddlers, the notes of the mazurka and krakowyan, and visions of the
wives and children who awaited their return. To the town they went that
day and sent $20 each, out of the month’s earnings, to Katshka and
Susanka and Marinka, the anticipation of their gladness making them
happy too.
It was the beginning of the second month and I had drifted back to watch
my men at the furnaces. They were still carrying hot bars from one place
to the other and had withered into almost unrecognizable dryness. I
watched these gigantic monsters consuming them and as I watched a
terrible thing happened. An appalling noise arose above the roar to
which my ears had grown accustomed, and which seemed the normal
stillness. White, writhing serpents shot out from the boiling furnaces
and were followed by other monsters of their kind which burned whatever
they touched, and before I knew what had happened the whole dark place
was full of smoke and the smell of burning flesh. Eight men, my three
among them, had been caught by the molten metal, scorched in its own
fire and consumed by its unquenchable appetite. What happened? Nothing.
A coroner came to view the remains,--of which there were practically
none; out of the centre of the cooled metal, lumps of steel were cut and
buried,--and that is all that happened; and oh, it happens so often!
As I write this, the daily paper lies before me; the _Chicago Tribune_
of May 13th, 1906. It devotes six columns to the horrors of the steel
mills in South Chicago. I could fill the whole paper with the horrors
which I have witnessed in mill and mine; and I could fill pages with the
names of poor “Hunkies” whom nobody knows and about whom nobody cares. I
cannot write it; it makes me bitter and resentful; so I shall let this
newspaper reporter speak, and he knows but half the story. I know the
other half, but the whole truth would hardly sound credible.
CENTRE OF MILL HORRORS
Here in this hospital building and its environment centres the horror of
horrors of the untutored mill workman. Its inspiration is terror to the
millman of the polyglot pay roll, as he enters the Eighty-eighth Street
gate to his work.
Hun, Pole, Austrian, Bulgarian, Bohemian--the “Hunkies” of Illinois
Steel colloquialism--indifferent to pain of shattered, burned, mangled
body, grow frantic as the stretcher bearers near this fortress hospital.
At its gates, over and over again, the frantic, hysterical wife and
children of the victim have begged and pleaded for admission against the
grim barrier of the guards.
Why is it? You cannot get the information in South Chicago unless it be
that these men are “ignorant.”
South Chicago distinctly doesn’t like the “Hunkie.” He jams the money
order window of the post-office for two long days after the bi-monthly
pay day. He sleeps sometimes thirty deep in a single room after the day
shift, and he sleeps again in the still warm floor bed, thirty deep,
after the night shift. He has his grocer’s book on which are entered his
scant, half offal meats, which day after day are prepared for him by his
hired cook; he wears little and he sleeps in that; his bed is never
made, for the reason that some one always is in it; his money goes to
the saloon-keeper or through the foreign money order window at the
post-office.
He is merely a “Hunkie” in Illinois Steel or in South Chicago. What if
the Illinois Steel hospital is his conception of Inferno?
He doesn’t know much. He doesn’t know when he is spoken to, unless it is
by an epithet which makes any other man fight. Then he moves doggedly
and often with little understanding. Not understanding, he is the
chosen, predestined occupant of the hospital bed.
FROM ACCIDENT TO HOSPITAL
A “Hunkie” who has been “hunked” in Illinois Steel makes a lot of
strictly corporation trouble. The chief “safety inspector” and his
staff are alert and active at a moment’s notice of an unofficial
accident report. The Illinois Steel photographer and his camera are made
ready; the stretcher bearers seize stretchers to the necessary number
and a hurried move is made towards the scene of the accident, of which
the Chicago police department may never know.
On the scene, the camera is set and the photograph--which so seldom is
ever seen beyond the gates of Illinois Steel--is made. Then the
“Hunkie”--protesting if he be conscious enough--is picked up, put upon
the stretcher, and the giant bearers of the body start for the hospital,
which may be a mile away. There are difficulties in the march. Surface
lines for ore and coal trains net the grounds. Often a train’s crew
finds difficulty in breaking a train to let the body through; sometimes
the crew balks and swears, and the stretcher bearers wait for the
shunting of the cars.
In the hospital? Few people know and they don’t talk. There is a
“visiting hour,” but the surly guard at the gate passes upon the
applicant’s request long before the request may be repeated at the
hospital door. And at the door they don’t encourage visitors.
XV
THE BOHEMIAN IMMIGRANT
Whatever apprehensions one may have about the Slav in America, may be
dispelled or accentuated by a study of the Bohemian immigrants. They
began coming to us when, during the counter reformation under Ferdinand
II, Austria sent her Protestants to the gallows or to America.
In Baltimore the churches they founded still stand, and a sort of
Forefathers’ Day is observed by their descendants, who, though they have
lost the speech of their fathers, still cling to the historic date which
binds them to a band of noble pioneers--close comrades in spirit to the
Pilgrims of New England. Under Austrian rule Bohemia became impoverished
physically, mentally, and spiritually; and after the misgovernment of
Church and State had done its worst, the flood-tide of immigration set
in anew towards this country.
Bohemia grew to be in the last century an industrial state, and the
immigrants who came here were half-starved weavers and tailors, who
naturally flocked to the large cities. In New York nearly the whole
Bohemian population turned itself to the making of cigars, and the East
Side, from Fiftieth to about Sixty-fifth Streets, is the centre. In
Cleveland, Ohio, more than 45,000 Bohemians live together, while Chicago
boasts of a Bohemian population of over 100,000, who nearly all live in
one district, which began on Twelfth and Halstead Streets, but now
stretches southward almost to the stockyards, with a constant tendency
to enlarge its boundary towards the better portions of the city. The
large tenement-house is almost altogether absent from this locality, the
little frame house of the cigar-box style being the prevailing type of
dwelling, and most of the homes are owned by their tenants. This part of
the city is as clean as the people can make it in a place where
street-cleaning is a lost, or never learned, art. The prevailing dirt is
clean dirt, with here and there an inexcusable morass which offends both
the eye and the nostril. The whole district is typical of Chicago rather
than of Bohemia, and if it were not for the business signs in a strange
and unphonetic language, and occasionally a sentence in the same queer
speech, one might imagine himself anywhere among any American people of
the working class; nor is there a trace of the native country in the
interiors, where one finds stuffed parlour furniture, plush albums, lace
curtains, ingrain carpets, and a piano or organ--all true and sure
indications of American conquest over inherited foreign tastes and
habits.
Yet the conquest is only on the surface, for it takes more than a
carpet-sweeper to wipe out the love of that language for which Bohemia
has suffered untold agony; to which it has clung in spite of the
pressure brought to bear upon it by a strong and autocratic government,
and which it is trying to preserve in this new home, in which the
English language is more powerful to stop foreign speech than is the
German in Austria, though backed by force of law and force of arms. With
many Bohemian daily newspapers, with publishing houses printing new
books each day, with preaching in the native tongue, and with societies
in which Bohemian history is taught, the Czechish language will not soon
disappear from the streets of Chicago; and language to the Bohemian, as,
indeed, to all the Slavs, is history, religion and life.
The Bohemian immigrant comes to us burdened by rather unenviable
characteristics, which his American neighbour soon discovers, and the
love between them is not great. Coming from a country which has been at
war for centuries, and in which to-day a fierce struggle between
different nationalities is disrupting a great empire, and clogging the
wheels of popular government, he is apt to be quarrelsome, suspicious,
jealous, clannish and yet factious; he hates quickly and long, and is
unreasoning in his prejudices; yet that for which a people is hated,
and which we call characteristic of race or nation, soon disappears
under new environment, and the miracle which America works upon the
Bohemians is more remarkable than any other of our national
achievements. The downcast look so characteristic of them in Prague is
nearly gone, the surliness and unfriendliness disappear, and the young
Bohemian of the second or third generation is as frank and open as his
neighbour with his Anglo-Saxon heritage. I rather pride myself upon my
power to detect racial and national marks of even closely related
peoples, but in Chicago I was severely tested and failed. I have
addressed many Bohemian audiences to which I could pay this compliment,
that they looked and listened like Americans; but what thousands of
years have plowed into a people cannot be altogether eradicated, and the
Bohemian, with all of us, carries his burden of good and evil buried in
his bones.
Of all our foreign population he is the most irreligious, fully
two-thirds of the 100,000 in Chicago having left the Roman Catholic
Church and drifted into the old-fashioned infidelity of Thomas Paine and
Robert Ingersoll. Nowhere else have I heard their doctrines so boldly
preached, or seen their conclusions so readily accepted, and I have it
on the authority of Mr. Geringer, the editor of the _Svornost_, that
there are in Chicago alone three hundred Bohemian societies which teach
infidelity, carry on an active propaganda for their unbelief, and also
maintain Sunday-schools in which the attendance ranges from thirty to
three thousand. One of the most painful and pathetic sights is this
attempt to crush God out of the child nature by means of an infidel
catechism, the nature of whose teaching is shown by one of the first
questions and its answer: “What duty do we owe to God? Inasmuch as there
is no God, we owe Him no duty.” As it is always possible to exaggerate
the strength of such a movement I called on the editor referred to
above, one of the leaders, whose paper, in common with two others,
pursues this tendency and daily preaches its destructive creed. Calling
at the office of the Svornost, I found Mr. Geringer, a Bohemian of the
second generation, frank and open in acknowledging his leadership and
the tendency of his paper, although he was less extreme than the
statements about him by priests and preachers had led me to suppose. He
certainly was much more willing to talk about his people than were the
priests upon whom I had called, and I found that his views have not been
without change in the fifteen years since I last read his paper. “We are
fighting Catholicism rather than religion,” he said; and I added, “A
Catholicism in Austria, with its back towards the throne and its face
towards the Austrian eagle;” to which he replied, “You have hit the
nail on the head.”
In reality, this hatred extends unreasonably to all religion, and among
the less educated it amounts to a fanaticism which does not stop short
of persecution and personal abuse. Blasphemous expressions and old musty
arguments against the Bible are the common topics of conversation among
many Bohemian working-men, who hate the sight of a priest, never enter a
church, and are thoroughly eaten through by infidelity. They read
infidel books about which they argue during the working hour, and the
influence of Robert Ingersoll is nowhere more felt than among them. His
“Mistakes of Moses” had taken the place of the usual newspaper story,
and the editorials are charged by hatred towards the Church and towards
Christianity as a whole. The unusual number of suicides among the
Bohemians is said to be due to the fact that their secret societies
encourage suicide. The books published in Chicago are of a rather low
type, and among them are many whose sole purpose it is to vilify the
Church.
An unusually coarse materialism pervades that colony. Professor
Massarik, of the University of Prague, and a recent visitor to this
country, makes this the chief note of his complaint against them. They
have singing and Turner societies after the manner of the Germans, but
the ideals they foster are really the causes of their materialism and
infidelity. The Roman Catholic Church is fighting that spirit by
maintaining strong parochial schools, encouraging the organization of
lodges under its protection, and it now publishes a daily paper. The
Protestants cannot boast of more than one per cent. of members among
them, and the three small churches in Chicago are but vaguely felt and
are practically no factors in the life of this large population. “We
don’t know that they are here,” said one of the infidel leaders, and the
Catholics take no notice of them at all. Some Protestant literature is
scattered among them but it is not of the highest type, and is not
calculated to reach those who need it most.