made up of Roman Catholics, Greek Catholics, Greek Orthodox and Jews.
More or less, usually more rather than less, they bring with them and
foster these ideas. This is undoubtedly true of nearly all the Slavs
whom the Church divides racially and who are enemies; remaining so a
long time on this side of the Atlantic. The Church, cognizant of this
fact, fosters it in no small degree, because it can hold its children
more loyally to itself by giving the national idea a large place.
Polish, Bohemian and Slovak church societies of a semi-military
character exist in large numbers, and many of their members carry arms.
Although in itself this may be a harmless way of keeping men loyal to
the Church, it does seem to clash with one of our religious ideals,
which is fundamental in maintaining religious liberty. I am judging only
as an outsider and am telling only what seems to me to be the case; but
I am speaking also for a large number of Catholic priests who see in
this no small menace and who have tacitly admitted it.
The sooner the Catholic Church can get rid of Polish and Italian priests
who have been trained in Europe, to whom religion is a sort of
politics,--and a certain kind of politics is religion,--the better for
the Church and of course the better for the State.
The immigrants free themselves from the autocracy of the Church and of
the priest more quickly than from the national idea, and they easily
breathe in the liberating atmosphere and sometimes manifest it in a very
disagreeable way. The close supervision which the priest exercises over
his parishioners, the respect they pay to him, the awe in which he is
held, are helpful rather than detrimental phases of their religious
life, where the priest is a true priest. There are, however, too many
who are not, and I am sure that the authorities of the Church concerned
are perhaps more anxious about this than are we, who are simply looking
over the fence at our neighbours’ affairs.
I am more concerned by the fact that in nearly all the immigrants with
whom I have dealt, forms and a certain blind faith, obscure the ethical
demands of Christianity. This is certainly true of the adherents of the
Greek Orthodox Church and not entirely untrue of those belonging to
other Churches. I am conscious of the fact that just here prejudice can
blind one completely; and I want to keep myself free from that charge.
My religious outlook cannot be called narrow, when one takes into
consideration that Roman Catholic priests were both my teachers and my
companions, that I have lived in a Russian monastery, that I know the
Slav, the Italian and the Jew better perhaps than I know the American,
and that to know them as sympathetically as I do, one must know them
without prejudice. Probably on the other hand I shall not escape the
charge of timidity when I say that in the countries in Europe from which
our present immigration flows the Church has fostered the form of
religion and has too often neglected its ethical demands; or perhaps
that it has laid greater emphasis upon the poetry of religion than upon
its stern prose.
Into the Easter celebration the Greek Orthodox churches have woven all
the charm which the religious mind can invent. I have seen almost the
third heaven opened on Easter eve in Russia and also in Poland. Yet
hardly had the last triumphant cry, “Christ is risen” died upon the gray
morning, when the same mob which shouted, “Christ is risen,” also cried,
“Kill the Jews.” Kisheneff, Bialistok, Sedlice and the scenes of small
and large pogroms in Poland, Austria and Hungary, which have remained
unrecorded, are sufficient proof of the fact that many of the Slavic
people have no idea of the teachings of Jesus; and that religion to them
is a matter of form necessary to observe, a sort of charm against evil
spirits and bad luck.
In this respect, however, the churches concerned are not sinners above
others; and the Protestant churches in America have also been more
successful with the millinery of religion than with its essence. It
would be wrong to say that the people who now come to us will dull our
religious faculties, and make them less impressionable. Nothing could
be further from the truth; for essentially they are a religious people
and even now there are taking place among them great religious
developments. I believe that in the crude state in which the present
immigrant comes, he is ready for the best the Church can give to him. No
one church is equal to the task, and antagonistic as they may be towards
one another, I believe the nation needs both the Protestant and Catholic
types; that the field now is so large and the problem so difficult, that
they both need to put forth their best efforts. Each needs to prove
Lessing’s story of the “Three Rings”; each needs to prove that it has
the true ring, the true message of redemption, and it can prove that
best by living its best, and by noblest endeavour for these children of
men who have brought to our doors the problem of Christianizing the
whole world.
The breadth of vision and the depth of conviction which animate a
certain section of America in this respect, are best illustrated by
these ringing words from a recent address by President Tucker of
Dartmouth College:
“If God were not pouring into New England out of the riches of other
countries, New England would be empty. While the latest foreigner may
not compare favourably with the native stock, what of the second and
third generations of foreigners? They are forging to the front, partly
because of their virility and ambition, and partly through the sacrifice
of the homes to educate their children. The rising scale of foreign
population is on a better level than the falling scale of the native
population. If the old New England stock is not willing to sacrifice as
it used to, and if the New England boy is not as ambitious as his
grandfather, I thank God that he is sending us those who are willing to
sacrifice and anxious to rise; and that he is giving this challenge to
the old stock: Rise up and show yourselves! If we do not see and feel
it, it is to our shame. We are not the elect of God unless we prove our
election, and if He can do better for the world through some other stock
and religion than through the native stock and Protestant religion, let
Him work in His own way.”
I need not say here how large a place the public school and the
settlement both have (in spite of the fact that they are often called
godless institutions) in making religious impressions upon the
immigrant. The glimpse of a higher world, the world of the spirit, has
been given to many eyes almost blind to the divine light, by modest men
and women who have worn neither cassock nor crosses, and who were
ordained to their holy task only as they felt the touch of needy
children resting upon their hearts.
I recall a little, sharp-eyed Jewish lad whom lured from his news stand
by recklessly buying his whole stock of evening papers. He had lived in
Boston five years and was Bostonese, to the dropping of his Rs, and the
picking them up again, to put where they did not belong. He was a
product of the public school, not yet finished, but in the making; and
over him hovered the benediction of some noble teacher, whose glory he
reflected. “Teacher? O yes! teacher was even more than parents, almost
like God. Teacher knew more than the stupid rabbi, who tried to drill
into him the Hebrew alphabet.”
The boy had neither church nor synagogue, nor priest nor preacher nor
rabbi; he had but two things to cling to, the school and the settlement.
Piteous was his scorn of the faith of his fathers, the accusation and
condemnation of everything Jewish, the contempt with which he called his
people “Sheney”; the horror of fast and feast days, and his delight in
the anticipation of a Jewish Sabbath meal. He will become what Max
Nordau calls a “stomach Jew,” in opposition to the “soul Jews,” who
alas! are growing fewer and fewer, on both sides of the sea.
This boy, grown up, or growing up in Boston, knew nothing of us, of our
type of Christianity, or of Christianity at all; except the fact that
the world is divided between Christians and Jews. The settlement has
done something for him; it has given his unskilled fingers the taste for
handicraft, and he told me with honest pride of the things he had made
with “his own hands.” It has also given him a knowledge of human
kindness, although he does not yet realize that the men and women in the
settlements are working because of the love they have for God’s
children.
I have found Jews everywhere who were Christian in spirit; and the
distance between synagogue and church is as great as it is, only because
of prejudices, which the church has not yet allayed and which
unconsciously it is increasing.
The Jew is suspicious of missions and missionaries and has good reason
to be, but he responds quickly to the notes of true religion whenever
they strike his heart; even as he responds quickly to the best things in
our national life.
I recall walking through Boston in the streets stretching South and far
North where Russia and Polish Jews live. They are keepers of shops of
all varieties, busy scavengers of second-hand articles; busier than we
know, with thread and needle in clothing and sweat shops. They are
dealers in junk, the refuse and wreckage of our industrial
establishments; creators of new avenues of trade and of some new
industries. Some of these Jews know that they live in Boston and act
like it. I had alighted at the North Station and was walking with a lady
whose luggage I had offered to carry to the car. She had a baby on one
arm and a large satchel in the other hand, so in order not to knock
against her with the heavy valise which I carried, I walked on the
inside. Suddenly from his shop door, a Russian Jew, in English strongly
tainted by Yiddish, called out: “You greenhorn, don’t you know that in
Boston men don’t walk on the insides of the ladies?” Promptly, as though
impelled by a command, I shifted my load, and “walked on the outside of
the lady.”
That Jew had been responsive to Boston’s spirit of decorum and would be
equally responsive to the best in its religious life if it were
presented to him. He likes least to be singled out as a Jew and to be
dealt with as such, either by churches or missions. He is most easily
approached from the standpoint of the average man, and not from the
peculiar racial and religious standpoint of the Jew.
[Illustration: ON THE DAY OF ATONEMENT.
The distance between synagogue and church is really not so great as some
suppose. Many a Jew is Christian in spirit if not in creed.]
Side by side with the religious problem is growing to menacing
proportions the problem of politics. A nation like our own, ideally
founded upon universal suffrage, is putting its destinies in the hands
of men untrained in citizenship; the very name citizen being so new to
them that they cannot easily grasp its meaning. The tutelage of Tammany
Hall and of its kind all over the United States has been a bad
preparation for so momentous a task. It does not diminish the greatness
of the problem in the least when I say that the foreigner is usually
the innocent tool, in a corrupting process which has been going on for
many years, and to the existence of which the nation is just awaking.
I have been offered citizenship papers in the city of New York for ten
dollars; and have seen them peddled by Americans who had back of them
the protection of political bosses of no less genuine American ancestry.
I have seen whole groups of Polanders marched to the ballot-box, when
they were so drunk that they had to be kept erect by a stalwart American
patriot who swore that they had the right to vote, when they had
scarcely been a year in this country. I have seen men who are respected
in their communities, buy votes wherever they could get them, corrupting
a mass of men who were as ignorant of the process of voting and as
unfitted for it, as little babes; and these very men I have heard loudly
proclaiming the corrupting influence of the foreign element.
With all that, the foreigner is rising in the scale of citizenship and
is not so bad as he has the right to be, considering the example set
him. Delaware is not controlled by foreigners, yet the peaches in its
political basket are rotten both at the top and at the bottom.
Connecticut, the “Constitution State” as it loves to call itself, is
still dominantly American, and yet there are so many “wooden nutmegs” in
the spice box of its magnificent State House that its best citizens are
hanging their heads from shame. New Hampshire and Vermont are not model
States, in spite of the fact that the foreign vote is almost “nil”;
while the city of Philadelphia cannot claim that it is better governed
than the city of New York, where the foreign population predominates and
dominates.
The immigrant, it is true, will sell his vote; but the American buys it,
and sells it too, and he is the greater traitor; because he is betraying
his native country.
Again, this does not assume that the immigrant is not a political
problem; he is, but only because we are, and in this he rises and falls
with us, and sometimes rises above us. All that which we call patriotism
he quickly imbibes. He loves the Fourth of July, and he knows its
meaning and its value often better than the native born. I have no fear
on that score; and should America, God forbid, engage in war, you would
find at the very front the Jew, the Slav, and the Italian with the
Yankee, fighting the same battle; yes, and fighting his own people
should they unjustly attack us.
Who doubts that the German Americans would fight in our war against
Germany, if it were a just war--if war be ever just; and who would doubt
for a moment that the Italians, Russians and French would fight on our
side if their governments should land soldiers on this continent? No
one doubts it.
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 mass 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 PASSAGE
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 passengers 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 passengers may be roughly divided into two classes: 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 class 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 class 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 class 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 passenger has grown to be
something more of a man, has more self-assertion 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 passage 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.
Anushka, 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.
“Anushka 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 butter 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 butter, 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 class, 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 illustrated 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 helle 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
grass 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.”