THE SLAVS
In the dim east of Europe, far from the vertical beams of
civilization, lies the melancholy Slavic world, with its 150,000,000
of human beings multiplying twice as fast and dying twice as fast
as the peoples of the West. Since the curtain of history rose, the
Slavs have been anvil rather than hammer. Subjugated by the Gauls in
the first century B. C., by the Germans early in the Christian era,
and by the Avars in the sixth century, they have played no master
rôle in history and their very name is a conqueror's insult. In the
temper of this race there appears to be something soft and yielding.
For all their courage, these peaceful agriculturists have shown much
less of the fighting, retaliating instinct than the Britons and the
Norsemen.
At a time when western Europe was sending forth armies to rescue the
Holy Sepulcher much of Slavland lay still in heathen darkness. Human
sacrifices and the practice of _suttee_ did not disappear until the
adoption of Christianity. Helmold, a priest of Lübeck, who in 1158
was sent to Christianize the Slavs, speaks of them as a "depraved
and perverse nation," and their country is to him "a land of
horror and a vast solitude." In 1108 the Archbishop of Magdeburg
writes in a pastoral letter, "These cruel people, the Slavs, have
risen against us."... "They have cut off the heads of Christians and
offered them as sacrifices."
[Illustration: Photograph by Hine
Slav Sisters]
[Illustration: Photograph by Hine
Slovak Girl]
Unlike the maritime peoples of the West, the Slavs had no easement
from the colonizing of the New World. When the era of machine
industry dawned, they were not able, as were the English, the
French, and the Germans, to get into the sunshine by catering to the
world's demand for cheap manufactured goods. Moreover, they have had
to bear the brunt of Oriental onslaught. The South Slavs--of Servia,
Bulgaria, Herzegovina, and Macedonia--fell under those Comanches of
Asia, the Turks, so that only within the last thirty-five years have
the spires and turrets of their submerged civilization reappeared
above the receding Ottoman flood.
While the Bohemians and the Moravians, thanks to a great
intellectual awakening, have come nearly abreast of the Germans,
the bulk of the Slavs remain on a much lower plane of culture.
In ignorance and illiteracy, in the prevalence of superstition
and priestcraft, in the harshness of church and state, in the
subservience of the common people to the upper classes, in the low
position of woman, in the subjection of the child to the parent, in
coarseness of manner and speech, and in low standards of cleanliness
and comfort, a large part of the Slavic world remains at the level
of our English forefathers in the days of Henry the Eighth.
According to mother-tongue, there were in this country in 1910,
941,000 Poles, 228,000 Bohemians and Moravians, 165,000 Slovaks
from the southern slopes of the Carpathians, 123,000 Slovenes from
the head of the Adriatic, 78,000 Croatians and Dalmatians, 56,000
Russians, 40,000 Bulgarians, Servians, and Montenegrins, 30,000
Slavonians, 25,000 Ruthenians, to say nothing of 140,000 Lithuanians
and Letts, who insist that they are a race apart. All told, there
are 2,000,000 Slavs among us, and, if we heed the estimates of the
leaders of the Slav groups, we should reckon at least 3,000,000. No
doubt, between five and six per cent. of the whites in this country
are of Slavic blood.
Of the Slav arrivals since 1899 nearly three-fourths are males.
Among the immigrants from the Balkans, the men are from ten to
twenty times as numerous as the women. Thirty-two per cent. have
been illiterates, the proportion ranging from 1.7 per cent. among
the Bohemians to 53.4 per cent. among the Ruthenians. Excepting the
Bohemians, few of them have had any industrial experience or bring
any valuable skill. It is as if great numbers of the English of the
sixteenth century had suddenly appeared among us.
OCCUPATIONS OF THE SLAVIC IMMIGRANTS
When, about fifteen years ago, the great Slav invasion began,
the American frontier was remote, shrunken, and forbidding. The
newcomers were not in quest of cheap land, with independence, so
much as of paying jobs from which they might hoard "big money" and
return well off to their homes. They gravitated, therefore, to
the mining, metal-working, and packing centers, where there is a
demand for unlimited quantities of raw labor, provided always it
be cheap. So these sturdy peasant lads came to be Nibelungs, "sons
of the gloom," haunting our coal-pits, blast-furnaces, coke-ovens,
smelters, foundries, steel-mills, and metal refineries, doing rough,
coarse work under skilled men who, as one foreman put it to me,
"don't want them to _think_, but to _obey orders_."
What irony that these peasants, straight from ox-goad and furrow,
should come to constitute, so far as we can judge from official
figures, three-fifths of the force in sugar refining, two-fifths of
the force in meat-packing, three-eighths of the labor in tanneries
and in oil refineries, one-third of the coal-miners and of the
iron- and steel-workers, one-fourth of the workers in carpet-mills,
and one-fifth of the hands in the clothing trade! On the other hand,
they are but one-seventh of the labor force in the glass-factories
and in the cotton-mills, one-ninth of the employees in copper-mining
and smelting (who are largely Finns), one-twelfth of our railway
labor, and only a handful in the silk and woolen industries.
For these manful Slavs, no work is too toilsome and dangerous.
Their fatalistic acceptance of risk has much to do with the
excessive blood-cost of certain of our industries. They are not
"old clo'" men, junk-dealers, hucksters, peddlers, and snappers-up
of unconsidered trifles, as are some of the people among us. They
have no nose for the small, parasitic trades, but with a splendid
work courage they tackle the heavy, necessary tasks. Large of body,
hard-muscled, and inexpert in making his head save his heels,
the Slav inevitably becomes the unskilled laborer in the basic
industries.
Unlike the Teutons and Scandinavians of the eighties, whose chief
location was the country beyond Chicago, the later Slavs have been
drawn to Pennsylvania, in the hard-coal fields and the Pittsburgh
district, and thence they have spread to the rising mining and
metal-working centers throughout the country. So many are single
men that they form an extraordinarily mobile labor force, willing
to go anywhere for an extra two cents an hour. Although they do not
build homes, and hence are dependent upon such housing as they can
find, they do not stagnate in slums, save as the conditions of their
employment impose congestion.
Bohemians and Poles come here to stay, so it is they who furnish the
farmers. The Bohemian current began as far back as the fifties, and
in 1900 a quarter of all the Bohemian-Americans were on the land.
The Poles came later, and with less money, so that only one-tenth
were then in agriculture. The immigrants of the seventies sought
wild, cheap land, and therefore the Slav settlements are thickest in
the Northwest and the Southwest. One-third of all the Polish farmers
are in Wisconsin, while in Texas Bohemian cotton-growers are so
numerous that in some localities even the negroes speak Bohemian!
Of late raw Poles, working up through farm labor and tenancy, are
coming to own "abandoned farms" in the Connecticut Valley. Crowded
with several other families in an old Yankee farm-house, the Pole is
raising, with the aid of his numerous progeny, incredible crops of
onions and tobacco. "In old Hadley," reports Professor Emily Balch
of Wellesley College, "all up and down the beautiful elm-shaded
street the old colonial mansions are occupied by Poles." In one year
these Poles, who were but one-fifth of the population, accounted for
two-thirds of the births.
EXCESSIVE ALCOHOLISM AMONG THE SLAVS
Coming from an Elizabethan world, the Slav is as frankly vinous
as Falstaff with his "cup o' sack." He is a Bacchus worshiper
unashamed, and our squeamishness about liquor strikes him as either
hypocrisy or prudery. He thinks, too, that without stimulant
he cannot stand up to the grueling work of mill and mine. A
steel-worker, when besought to give up drink, replied, "No beer,
no whisky, me no work." Hence an incredible amount of his wages
goes to line the till of the saloon-keeper. In a steel town of
30,000 population, $60,000 are left with the saloon-keepers the
Saturday and Sunday after pay-day. The Saturday brewery-wagon makes
the rounds, and on a pleasant Sunday one sees in the yard of each
boarding-house a knot of broad-shouldered, big-faced men about a keg
of liquid comfort.
It is at celebrations that the worst excesses show themselves. What
with caring for their large families and their boarders, the women
usually lose their attractiveness early, and therewith their power
to exercise a refining influence upon their men-folk. A wedding or
a christening-feast lasts an entire day, and toward the end men
beastly drunk bellow and fight in the presence of the terrified
women and children. During festivals, too, old feuds, rekindled
by drink, flare up in brutal and bloody rows. At such times one
realizes that the poet Kollár's famous phrase "the dove-blood of the
Slav" does not apply to the exhilarated.
Still, their heavy drinking is spasmodic, and they are said to
lose less time from work on account of intoxication than certain
other nationalities. Says a Jersey City doctor practising among the
Ruthenians, "They drink, but few die drunkards or hurt their health
with alcohol. If a man does get drunk he is likely to be violent. If
he strikes his wife she defends herself if she can, but she does not
complain, for she knows he has 'a right to hit her' and that makes a
great difference." In Slavic neighborhoods, American influence first
shows itself in the rise of a community sentiment against alcoholic
excess and in a growing refinement in festal customs.
CRIMES OF THE PRIMITIVE PASSIONS
For crime the Slav betrays no such bent as the South Italian.
Aside from petty thieving--noted in some cases--the complaints of
people near a Slav settlement center upon the affrays that follow
in the wake of convivial drinking. The Bohemians have about the
same criminal tendencies as the Germans. The other Slavs reveal
the propensities of a rude, undeveloped people of undisciplined
primitive passions. Animosity rather than cupidity is the motive of
crime. When the Slav seeks illicit gain he takes the direct path
of violence rather than the devious path of chicane; he commits
robbery or burglary rather than theft or fraud or extortion. From
crimes against chastity, and the loathsome knaveries that center
in the social evil, he is singularly free. Morally, the stock is
better than one would judge from the police records and from its
reputation. No doubt if the descendants of these immigrants have the
proper training and surrounding they will prove as orderly as the
old American stock.
SLAVIC BRUTALITY AND RECKLESS FECUNDITY
Among the South Slavs "every married man," says Vrčević, as
quoted by Professor W. I. Thomas, "strikes his wife black and blue
at least once a month, or spreads a box on the ear over her whole
face, or else people are likely to say that he is afraid of his
wife." Their popular proverbs corroborate this, as for example: "He
who does not beat his wife is no man." "Strike a wife and a snake on
the head." "One devil is afraid of the cross, the other (the wife)
of a stick." "The dog may howl, but the wife must hold her tongue."
In one wedding-song the bride begs her husband: "Strike your wife
only with good cause and when she has greatly vexed you." In another
folk-song the young wife sings: "What sort of husband are you to me?
You do not pull my hair, nor do you strike me!"
Although beating the wife with a wet rope is going out of practice,
the Galician peasant, says Von Hupka, "still regards her as a
thing belonging to him, which was made in the first place for his
service." No wonder the Slav mother averages eight children! No
wonder there is an appalling infant mortality, while a childbed
death is too often the fate of the forspent mother. Little cares
the stolid peasant. What is the woman there for? Nor is this view
strange in the New World. In Hungary the Slovak women "bear a child
a year--'always either bearing or nursing,' is the saying." But the
annual child arrives likewise in the Slovak families of New York.
The Slav wife in this country bears from two to two and a half
times as fast as the wife of American parentage. Her daughter born
under the Stars and Stripes is seven-eighths as prolific as her
barefoot immigrant mother. The average Slavic charity case involves
five persons, the German or Scandinavian case four persons, the
American case three and one-half persons. A drunken Pole said with
pride to the agent of a charitable society that was supporting his
family: "Just think what I've done for the State! I've given it ten
children!"
[Illustration: Courtesy of The Survey
Slav Woman and Italian Husband]
[Illustration: Photograph by Hine
Slovak Girls]
The Middle Ages are beginning to show among us. In twenty-one rural
counties of Minnesota the Polish women have borne, on an average,
seven children in the course of fourteen and a half years of
married life. The full tale, no doubt, will come to nine or ten.
Thanks to our child-pitying, child-saving civilization, the Polish
mother will keep her brood nearly as well as her American neighbor
with four or five. "The Irish for children," runs the proverb; and
yet one Irish-American wife out of thirteen is childless, and one
English-American wife out of twelve. But on the Minnesota farms only
one Polish-American wife out of fifty-eight is barren!
In a county where the Poles, although but a third of the population,
register 58 per cent. of the births, an old farmer said to me:
"The Yankees here are too lazy to have kids. The Poles have from
ten to fifteen in a family, and in a hundred years the people
here will all be Poles." A hundred years? Even fourteen years ago
Father Kruszka reckoned that there were in this country 700 such
Polish communities, averaging a hundred families each. So there
are hundreds of centers from which the Middle Ages spread. Farm by
farm, township by township, the displacement of the American goes
on--a quiet conquest, without spear or trumpet, a conquest made by
child-bearing women. The fathers forage, but it is the mothers who
have to face anguish, exhaustion, and even death in the campaign to
possess the land. Spending their women brutally, the Slavs advance;
pitying their women, the Americans retreat.
How can woman-worth go on rising as this country fills with people
who have the brood-mare idea of woman? Yet leaders in the cause of
womanhood are doing their best to hold the door open for the very
tribes who most despise and misuse their sex! On the other hand,
the new immigration may well find favor in the eyes of those who
look upon the bearing of ten children as woman's best lot, and are
complacent at seeing the stocks with low standards outbreed and
crowd into oblivion the stocks with high standards.
SLOW ASSIMILATION
Eastern Europe is full of half-drowned nationalities, which only of
late are regaining self-consciousness. Bohemians, Slovaks, Poles,
Lithuanians, Servians, and Bulgarians--each have had an "awakening,"
in which language revival and the study of national literature and
history have played a great part. The immigrants who come with
this quickened sense of nationality make it a point of honor not
to drift selfishly with the American current and so lose touch
with their struggling brethren in the old home. After refusing to
be Germanized, Russified, or Magyarized in the old country, the
patriotic Bohemian or Pole is bound to resist absorption here. It
was the Irish-Americans who got the leverage for freeing Ireland.
Now the Bohemians here are hoping to win home rule for Bohemia;
while the Polish-Americans expect to find on this side of the water
the fulcrum for the lever that shall free Poland. What, then, more
natural than to cling to their own speech and traditions in home and
church and parish school?
The vernacular press, of course, harps ever on the chord of "the
national speech," so that the second generation may not drift
away to the reading of American newspapers. The church, too,
which carries matters with a high hand among the Poles, holds the
immigrants away from Americanization. The good priests fear lest
some of their flock should turn away from religion, while the greedy
priests dread lest the flock should become restless under priestly
dictation.
Our million Poles outnumber all the rest of the Slavs in America,
and the Poles are very clannish. When they settle in groups there
is little association between them and their neighbors. "In the
communities visited," reports the Industrial Commission, "farmers
of German, Scandinavian, Irish, Bohemian, Belgian, Swiss, and
American origin were found living in juxtaposition to Poles. In
virtually every instance the Pole was considered one degree lower
than his neighbors." "Neither the Poles as a body nor the others
desire to fuse socially, and the Bohemians felt well above their
Slavic brethren." The farmers look down on the Poles as uncleanly,
intemperate, quarrelsome, ignorant, priest-ridden, and hard on
women and children. When a few Poles have come into a neighborhood,
the other farmers become restless, sell out, and move away. Soon
a parish is organized, church and parish school arise, the public
school decays, and Slavdom has a new outpost.
The core of the large settlement is likely to be a rancid bit
of the Old World. Clerical domination to a degree not tolerated
among other Roman Catholics, a stately church overlooking mean
farm-houses, numerous church holidays, a tiny public school, built
wholly out of State grant, with a sister in the garb of her order as
schoolmistress, a big parish school, using only Polish and teaching
chiefly the catechism, a high illiteracy and a dense ignorance
among lads born on American soil, crimes of violence rather than
crimes of cunning, horror of water applied inside or outside,
aversion to fresh air, barefoot women at work in the fields, with
wretched housekeeping as the natural result, saloons patronized
by both sexes, the priest frequently urging his flock to "have as
many children as God will give them," much loth motherhood, early
death from excessive child-bearing, large families brought up by
the third, fourth, or fifth wife, harsh discipline of children,
political apathy, a controlled vote, and an open contempt for
Americans and their principles.
Little better off are the Slavs clustered by themselves in some
"mining-patch" in the coal-fields or in the industrial quarter of
a metal town. The general population does not associate with them,
and they have their own church, school, customs, and festivals. The
men pick up a little English, the women none at all. It is really
the children that are the battle-ground of old and new. Let them
mingle freely with Young America, and no pressure from their parents
can make them remain different from their playmates. They dread the
nickname of "Hun," "Hunkie," or "Bohunk" as if it were poison, and
nothing will induce them to use their home tongue or take part in
the organized life of their nationality.
In the big rural settlement, however, the children can be kept from
outsiders, and the parents, who want them to settle on the farm,
usually have their way. A few of the more restless dive off the
island into circumambient America. For a little time the second
generation appears progressive; it dresses flashily and shows itself
"sporty." But after it marries it loses spirit, settles down, and
obeys priest and parent. Whether the system can hold the third
generation remains to be seen.
Obviously, the bird-of-passage Slovak or Croat who has left a
wife at home, and who roughs it with his compatriots in a "stag"
boarding-house in a dreary "black country," is a poor subject for
assimilation. His life is bounded by the "boarding boss," the
saloon-keeper, the private banker, and the priest--all of them
of his own folk. Aside from the foreman's cursing, American life
reaches him only through the eye, and then only the worst side of
it. But for the good pay, he would hate his life here; and he goes
back home with little idea of America save that it is a land of big
chances to make money.
SMALL ABILITY OF IMMIGRANT SLAVS
Without calling in question the worth of the Slavic race, one may
note that the immigrant Slavs have small reputation for capacity.
Many observers, after allowing for their illiteracy and lack of
opportunity, still insist that they have little to contribute to our
people. "These people haven't any natural ability to transmit," said
a large employer of Slavs. "You may grind and polish dull minds all
you want to in the public schools, but you never will get a keen
edge on them because the steel is poor." "They aren't up to the
American grade," insisted the manager of a steel-works. "We have
a 'suggestion box,' and we reward valuable suggestions from our
men, but precious few ever come from immigrant labor." The labor
agent of a great implement-works rates the immigrant 75 in ability
as compared with the American. A Bohemian leader puts his people
above the Americans in music and the fine arts, but concedes the
superiority of the Americans in constructive imagination, organizing
ability, and tenacity of purpose. "The Czechs," he says, "are
strong in resistance but are not aggressive."
A steel-town superintendent of schools finds the bulk of the
children of the Slavs "rather sluggish intellectually." They do well
in the lower grades, where memory counts most; but in the higher
grades, where association is called for, they fall behind. Of 23,000
pupils of non-English-speaking fathers, 43.4 per cent. were found
to be behind their grade; the percentage of retardation for the
children of Bohemian fathers was only 35.6 per cent.; but for Poles,
the retardation was 58.1 per cent., and for Slovaks 54.5 per cent.
While this showing is poor, there are good school men who stoutly
maintain that it is still too soon to judge what the Slav-American
can do.
THE ALARMING PROSPECT OF SLAVIC IMMIGRATION
An outflow of political exiles comes to an end when there is a turn
of the political wheel; but a stream squeezed out by population
pressure may flow on forever. So long as the birth-rate remains
high, the mother-country is not depleted by the hemorrhage. "What
has been the effect of emigration to America upon conditions in
Bohemia?" I asked of an intelligent Czech. "Bohemia," he replied,
with emphasis, "is just as crowded to-day; the struggle is just as
hard as if never a Bohemian had left for America." "Will Polish
emigration remain large?" I asked a leader of the Polish-Americans.
"Yes," he replied, "it will continue for a long time. The Poles
multiply at an extreme rate, and there is no room for them to expand
in Poland."
Still, these minor currents may be lost in the flood that is likely
to roll in upon us, once the great central Slavic mass of 80,000,000
"true Russians" is tapped. "This," observes the Immigration
Commission, "affords a practically unlimited source of immigration,
and one which may reasonably be expected to contribute largely to
the movement from Europe to the United States in the future." "The
economic conditions which in large part impel the emigration of
these races (Russian Hebrews, Poles, Lithuanians and Finns) prevail
also among true Russians, and already they are beginning to seek
relief through emigration."
So the tide from Slavland may swell, and the superfecund Slavs
may push to the wall the Anglo-Americans, the Irish-Americans,
the Welsh-Americans, the German-Americans, and the rest, until
the invasion of our labor market by hordes of still cheaper West
Asiatics shall cause the Slav, too, to lose interest in America,
even as the Briton, the Hibernian, the Teuton, and the Scandinavian
have lost interest in America.
[Illustration: Photograph by Hine
Russian Jews, Ellis Island]
[Illustration: Courtesy of The Survey
Hindoo Immigrants]