Ruthenians are single men, and that a large proportion of the other
races are similarly placed. Many are married but their wives are across
the seas. Their policy is to make all they can and spend as little as
possible. We have also seen that the wages of common labor are from
$1.35 to $1.65 a day and that those who have acquired a little skill
earn from $1.75 to $2.25. The monthly expenditure of single men bent
on saving will not exceed ten dollars a month. Some Russians complain
when their monthly bill amounts to eight dollars. The drinking bill will
not exceed five dollars a month; and the sum spent on clothing will
hardly equal that. Hence a common laborer can save from ten to fifteen
dollars a month; the semi-skilled workers from twenty to twenty-five
dollars; and boarding bosses accumulate what is to them a competence.
A banker doing business among the Servians of the South Side stated
that each pay day he sent back between $20,000 and $25,000 to the old
country on deposit. In September of 1907, one of the banks on the South
Side where the foreigners do business had $600,000 on deposit. Such a
showing has come only after a vigorous campaign on the part of the banks
of Pittsburgh to overcome the mistrust which foreigners feel toward
private institutions. Individual small banks conducted by men of their
own nationality were the rule for many years. The institutions were
ephemeral and the impression prevailed among the laborers that they were
schemes of sinister men to wheedle their money from them. Some men still
secrete their savings, trusting no one.
Through the kindness of one of the Pittsburgh bankers, this table of
twelve representative Slavic depositors is given:
_Single Men._ _Married Men._
=============================================+=========================
1906-1907. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 | 1 2 3 4 5
---------------------------------------------+-------------------------
Sept.-Nov. $95 $103 $45 $35 $110 $100 $60 | $240 $70 $100 $105
Dec.-Feb. 115 63 25 135 60 100 60 | 150 190 50
March-May 20 93 25 95 60 100 60 | 50 145 100 200 90
June-Aug. 207 76 105 73 50 55 | 115 120 200 140 40
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- | ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
Totals $437 $335 $200 $338 $280 $300 $265 | $555 $525 $300 $440 $285
=============================================+=========================
[Illustration: UNIFORMED NATIONAL SOCIETIES IN SESQUI-CENTENNIAL
PARADE.]
[Illustration: _Drawn by Joseph Stella._
IN THE CHURCH OF THE DOUBLE CROSS.]
[Illustration: A CHURCH OF THE DOUBLE CROSS.]
The fraternal organizations also among the Slavs, Lithuanians and
Italians provoke an increasing amount of thrift and provide various
forms of insurance. They are the dominant form of social organization
and afford opportunities for leadership to the stronger men. The
National Slovak Society, for instance, has a membership of 50,000, and
the Polish National Alliance one of 75,000. Pittsburgh has some thirty
locals of the latter alone, each with a list of from forty to 300
members. The lodge organizations of these people cannot be discussed in
detail in such a paper as this; here it is sufficient to note that in
case of sickness and death they look after their members; they provide
social centers for the more thrifty of the people, and tend generally to
raise the standard of life.
Outside these lodges, the Slavs, Lithuanians and Italians have their
organizations for enjoyment and amusement. Among the Poles there
are societies for self-culture, such as dramatic clubs and singing
societies.
There is reason to believe that the home governments of these people
foster the formation of organizations along racial lines; the church
also fosters these national societies. In so far as such organizations
perpetuate national customs and habits in America, they tend to make
assimilation difficult. A strong people swayed by racial consciousness
on foreign soil will either thrust its own concepts and ideals into
the social elements around it and modify them; or it will build around
itself a wall which the customs and habits of the country will find
difficulty in penetrating. This is seen going on in Pittsburgh. The
Poles and Italians form a city within a city; their customs and habits
are distinctly Polish and Italian.
When we come to political life, we must accord leadership to other than
the Slavic groups,--to the Italians. A political leader among them in
Pittsburgh claims that four fifths of all Italians who have been in
the country five years are naturalized. He held that the Italians of
Pittsburgh poll about 5,000 votes which are scattered over eleven
wards. Next to the Italians come the Poles. Many of them have been
voters for years, but of the influx that has come to Pittsburgh in the
last ten years not twenty per cent are naturalized. The Polish vote is
set at 4,000 and the Poles have two or three political clubs. Political
clubs are also found among the Lithuanians and Croatians. Too frequently
these racial leaders,--often saloon keepers,--are the satellites of
some English-speaking politician, and through them he controls "the
foreign vote." Some of the more intelligent of the foreign-speaking are
dissatisfied with this manipulation of their people; among these are
rising young men with political aspirations. It will not be long before
the city will feel their presence. If the Polish and Italian votes were
to be crystallized in some fifteen wards, the leaders there would have
the balance of power and control them.
Slavs, Lithuanians and Italians have a strong religious element in their
make-up which plays a never-ending part in such racial communities as
are to be found in the Pittsburgh district. Unless this element is
reckoned with they are not to be understood. The vast majority belong to
the Roman Catholic Church. Some Protestants are found among each of the
races, but they form only a small percentage.[5] Certain of the Southern
Slavs are subject to the Patriarch of Constantinople and the Russians
maintain a Greek Orthodox church. Religious ceremonies and observances
have strong hold upon the Poles and Lithuanians, the Croatians and
Servians.[6] We have seen that the number of males far exceeds that of
females among the immigrants from southeastern Europe. This the church
attendance corroborates. I have seen in Pittsburgh a congregation of one
thousand men, all in the prime of life, so intent upon the religious
exercises that the least movement of the priest at the altar found
immediate response in every member of the audience. The ritual of the
church has a deep hold upon Slav and Lithuanian; often the men go to
confession at six in the morning that they may go to communion the day
following. When men are so employed that they cannot attend mass on
Sundays, they will attend one on Saturdays. The home must be consecrated
once a year, and hundreds take their baskets laden with provisions to
church on Easter morning that the priest may bless the feast they hope
to enjoy that day.
[5] The Protestant denominations in the city are conducting mission work
among the Slavs and Italians. Several missionaries, colporteurs and
Bible readers are employed. There are among the Slovaks, Lithuanians,
Magyars and Italians, adherents of various Protestant churches.
[6] The Roman Catholic Church has not the influence over the Bohemians
and Italians that it has over the above mentioned people. The Bohemians
are many of them free thinkers. The Italians are deeply religious but
for the most part lukewarm in their attitude toward the church, and
their edifices do not compare with those of the Poles.
[Illustration: GREEK ORTHODOX CHURCH.]
[Illustration: A GREEK ORTHODOX PRIEST.]
If we measure the efficiency of the Roman Catholic Church among the
Slavs and Lithuanians in Pittsburgh by money spent on buildings and
maintenance, it cannot be equalled either by American Catholicism or
Protestantism. The people give freely of their hard earnings to erect
costly church edifices and support the priesthood. The Slavs and
Lithuanians have been on the South Side of Pittsburgh only for the
last twenty years, but to-day they possess church property valued at
three-quarters of a million dollars, and most of it is paid for. They
also give toward the erection of parochial schools and maintain them.
The priests have great power over the lives of their people. Some of
them are charged with accumulating riches, but taken as a whole, I view
them as a body of men loyal to their vows and honoring the profession
wherein they serve. With the great numbers constantly coming from
Europe, it is surprising how carefully they keep in touch with the
newcomers. Slav and Lithuanian priests whose parishes are constantly
changing take a census each year. They know the affairs of their people.
They know their housing conditions, their hardships in mine and mill;
are familiar with the wrongs they suffer. In trouble the priests are
their counselors; they sympathize with them in their struggles; they
institute and manage insurance societies against sickness and accident.
Some of the priests found and control building and loan associations.
They at all times stimulate their people to rise to the level of other
people around them. The priests are busy men. A parish of two thousand
or three thousand means endless activities. With the influx of Slavs and
Lithuanians into the country, and the necessity of organizing parishes
where many of them settle, the difficulty has been to secure properly
qualified priests to take charge of the work. Hence, many of the Slav
and Lithuanian clergy are overworked and no assistance can be furnished
them. Their influence lies first with the adults who come from the
fatherland. The children are not as amenable to the discipline of the
church; neither do they give their earnings as freely to its support.
The growing problem of the church is to meet the religious needs of
people of Slavic blood raised in a new country.
* * * * *
This sketch,--brief though it is,--of the foreign-speaking peoples of
Pittsburgh shows clearly how dependent the industries are upon a supply
of able bodied men from Europe. The enterprising from agricultural
communities freely bring their strength to the expansion of American
industries, and never was there an army more docile and willing than
these newcomers. They believe in mutual protection and organize and
conduct various societies for this purpose. They find their pleasure in
many crude ways. They are loyal to their church, and the many churches
owned by them represent offerings made by men who literally earn their
bread by the sweat of their brow. Many of them save money and the number
of those who own their homes is annually increasing.
There are imperative needs of this element of the city's population
which must be met if the cause of civilization is to be served. The
fatal and non-fatal injuries of the mills fall heavily upon these
peoples. Each week a tale of wrong and suffering, agony and death, is
sent across the water, which seriously reflects upon the industrial life
of America. The value placed on human life here will not bear comparison
with that of older countries whose civilization we say is lower than
ours. The great need of the hour is a current and detailed record of the
serious accidents of the district, that the public may know exactly at
what cost of life and limb industry is carried on, and may exhaust every
means for lessening the sacrifice.
[Illustration: A SLAVIC LABORER.]
We saw that the housing conditions of many of these peoples are a
disgrace to civilization. The insufficiency of houses, the greed of
landlords, the exigencies of some foreigners and the penury of others,
bring about this condition. There should be stricter regulation of
immigrant boarding houses. Men who coin money in shacks and those
foreign born who are too greedy to pay for decent quarters, should feel
the firm hand of the law. Crowding, dirt and filth are not American and
should not be tolerated in any American city.
But negative work is not enough; positive and aggressive work must
be done if the foreign-speaking are to rise to the measure of their
opportunity. Every nationality has its aesthetic side, and Pittsburgh
has done nothing to bring this to the fore. Other cities have fostered
the national dance, have encouraged works of art, and have induced
the foreigner to show the artistic side of his nature. Cannot this
be done in Pittsburgh? Give these people a chance to bring out their
needle-work, to show their artistic skill, to sing their national songs,
and to dance their native dances, and the life of the city will be
richer and stronger.
Then why should the people who gave Lafayette a welcome that has become
historical, and who championed the cause of Kossuth, not go forth
in sympathy to these people of Slav and Iberic extraction? They are
left in ignorance of our language, our laws, our government, and our
history. This rich inheritance we cherish, and we believe it is more
excellent than any of which the older countries of Europe can boast. If
this be so, is it not our privilege and duty to train these peoples of
southeastern Europe in the principles of democracy? Thousands of these
peoples yearn for a knowledge of our language and an insight into that
form of government that has made America great among the nations of the
earth, and we should be willing to go half way and meet the need.
The public school can take up this work with greater zeal; the social
agencies of all sorts can stretch the cords of their tents and take in
the men who are anxious to learn.
[Illustration: _Drawn by Joseph Stella._
PITTSBURGH TYPES.
IN THE LIGHT OF A FIVE-TON INGOT.]
SOME PITTSBURGH STEEL WORKERS[7]
JOHN ANDREWS FITCH
FELLOW, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN
It is estimated that between 70,000 and 80,000 men are employed
in the manufacture of steel in Allegheny county. Their homes are
clustered about the mills along the rivers, they are clinging to
the bluffs of the South Side, and they are scattered over Greater
Pittsburgh, from Woods Run to the East End. Up the Monongahela valley
are the mill-towns,--Homestead of Pinkerton fame, Braddock with its
record-breaking mills and furnaces, Duquesne where the unit of weight
is a hundred tons, and McKeesport, home of the "biggest tube works on
earth." Here are countrymen of Kossuth and Kosciusko, still seeking
the blessings of liberty, but through a different channel,--high wages
and steady employment. Here are English, German and Scandinavian
workmen, full of faith in the new world democracy; and here are
Americans,--great-grandsons of Washington's troopers, and sons of men
who fought at Gettysburg.
[7] This is a description of leading types of steel workers. A
discussion of the labor problem in the steel industry is reserved for a
later number.
Fully sixty-five per cent of these men are unskilled, but the remaining
thirty-five per cent, the skilled and semi-skilled, are the men who
give character to the industry. This is the class from which foremen
and superintendents and even the steel presidents have been recruited,
and it is the class that furnishes the brains of the working force. It
is of them that I write. To know these men you must see them at work;
you must stand beside the open-hearth helper as he taps fifty tons of
molten steel from his furnace, you must feel the heat of the Bessemer
converters as you watch the vessel-men and the steel pourer, and above
the crash and roar of the blooming mills you must talk with rollers
and hookers, while five-and ten-ton steel ingots plunge madly back and
forth between the rolls. You must see the men working in hoop mills and
guide mills, where the heat is intense and the work laborious; you must
see them amid ladles of molten steel, among piles of red hot bars, or
bending over the straightening presses at the rail mills.
But to know them best you should see them at home. There the muscular
feats of the heater's helper and the rough orders of the furnace boss
are alike forgotten, and you find a kindly, open-hearted, human sort of
men. You grow into an understanding of them as they tell of hopes and
plans or mistakes and failures, and understanding becomes sympathy as it
comes home to you how close some half-spoken disappointment presses in
upon them. It was in this way that for nine or ten months I lived among
the steel workers, and came to number some of them as friends.
The skilled workers are generally of Anglo-Saxon, German or Keltic
origin, the largest proportion being American born. They are not
educated, so far as school and university training are concerned, but
they are post graduates in the school of experience.
The visitor in a steel mill sees only faces reddened by the glare of
fire and hot steel, muscles standing out in knots and bands on bare
arms, clothing frayed with usage and begrimed by machinery. The men do
not differ materially from other workmen, and the visitor passes on
and forgets them. The world is full of men in greasy overalls. But a
workman is not merely a workman, any more than a business man is merely
a business man. He is also a man, whether he works in a mill or sits at
a desk. So I shall introduce some of these men and let them talk to you,
as they talked to me. Bear in mind that the things they talk about could
be taken up from another point of view. In the following interviews I am
making no interpretation of the workers from the employer's standpoint.
These are the issues of life as seen by the men themselves.
[Illustration: _Courtesy Carnegie Steel Co._
POURING MOLTEN IRON, JUST TAPPED FROM BLAST FURNACE, INTO BESSEMER
CONVERTER.]
Jack Griswold is a Scotch-Irish furnace boss who came to America and
got a laborer's position at a Pittsburgh blast furnace, when the common
labor force was largely Irish. Those were the days before the advent
of the "furriners." I sat in Griswold's sitting room in his four-room
cottage one evening and he told me about the men who work at the
furnaces, and about the "long turn."
"Mighty few men have stood what I have, I can tell you. I've been twenty
years at the furnaces and been workin' a twelve-hour day all that time,
seven days in the week. We go to work at seven in the mornin' and we
get through at night at six. We work that way for two weeks and then we
work the long turn and change to the night shift. The long turn is when
we go on at seven Sunday mornin' and work through the whole twenty-four
hours up to Monday mornin'. That puts us onto the night turn for the
next two weeks, and the other crew onto the day. The next time they get
the long turn and we get twenty-four hours off, but it don't do us much
good. I get home at about half past seven Sunday mornin' and go to bed
as soon as I've had breakfast. I get up about noon so as to get a bit
o' Sunday to enjoy, but I'm tired and sleepy all the afternoon. Now,
if we had eight hours it would be different. I'd start to work, say,
at six and I'd be done at two and I'd come home, and after dinner me
and the missus could go to the park if we wanted to, or I could take
the childer to the country where there ain't any saloons. That's the
danger,--the childer runnin' on the streets and me with no time to take
them any place else. That's what's driven the Irish out of the industry.
It ain't the Hunkies,--they couldn't do it,--but the Irish don't have to
work this way. There was fifty of them here with me sixteen years ago
and now where are they? I meet 'em sometimes around the city, ridin'
in carriages and all of them wearin' white shirts, and here I am with
these Hunkies. They don't seem like men to me hardly. They can't talk
United States. You tell them something and they just look and say 'Me
no fustay, me no fustay.' That's all you can get out of 'em. And I'm
here with them all the time, twelve hours a day and every day and I'm
all alone,--not a mother's son of 'em that I can talk to. Everybody says
I'm a fool to stay here,--I dunno, mebbe I am. It don't make so much
difference though. I'm gettin' along, but I don't want the kids ever
to work this way. I'm goin' to educate them so they won't have to work
twelve hours."
There is a considerable difference between a blast furnace foreman and a
Bessemer steel pourer. The furnace man gets rather low wages, while the
steel pourer is well paid and works eight hours a day for six days in
the week. It was Jerry Flinn who told me how he had worked up from his
first job as laborer, to a position as steel pourer. I met him just as
he got home from the mill one day, and I asked how he managed to work
only an eight-hour shift when other men had to work twelve. He told
me that attempts have been made to introduce a twelve-hour day in the
converting department but without success. Two Pittsburgh mills have
tried it and both went back to eight hours because the heat is so great
as to make it impossible for the men to work that long.
"It must be hard," said Flinn, "for the twelve-hour men to have to work
alongside of us eight-hour men. During the twelve hours of their day
they work with all three crews of the eight-hour men. One crew gets
through and goes home soon after the twelve-hour men come out, the next
crew works its eight hours and goes home, and the third crew comes out
before those twelve-hour fellows can quit. The eight-hour men get a lot
more pleasure out of life than the twelve-hour men do. We can go to
entertainments and social affairs as we couldn't if we had to get up
next morning and go to work at six o'clock."
Flinn is fifty-two years old, and tells you his strength is not up to
what it was, say fifteen years ago. The men who went to work with him as
young men are nearly all dead, and to-day he is one of the oldest men in
his mill. He speaks lightly of the danger of accidents, and says that
he has encountered only the minor ones. Once when they were changing
stoppers, the crane dropped the old one just as it swung clear of the
edge of the ladle. It fell on him, burning him and breaking his leg.
At another time he failed to lower the stopper in time, and the stream
of molten steel struck the edge of a mold as the train was shifted; it
splashed onto the platform, burning his legs so severely that, for six
weeks afterwards, he was unable to turn over in bed. It is a common
thing for metal to fly that way; the sparks strike his face, they lodge
in his nose or his ears, and once he nearly lost the sight of an eye. He
refers to these things as trifles.
What I said of the half concealed disappointments which are real and
tragic in the life of a steel worker, would have been clear to you had
you heard the story of Robert Smith, as he told it himself. As a boy
he went to work in the coal mines of eastern Pennsylvania and did not
get into the mills until he was about thirty years old. Then he came
to Pittsburgh, took a laborer's position, and began to work up slowly
year after year until he occupied a place of some importance, though
not in the first class of skilled men. After he had been there a few
years, there was a labor difficulty in this mill and he left and went
to another plant where he took a position similar to his last one. As a
new man he could not advance as rapidly as he might have done in the old
mill, and before he could get into the best of standing, he was thrown
out of work by further labor troubles. He secured a position in another
mill where he remained for two years till forced out by a strike to seek
work in a fourth mill. Here he remained for ten years in a subordinate
position. At the end of that time, he was promoted and became for the
first time in his life, the first man in the crew. Then, in some way, he
incurred the dislike of the superintendent, and the man on the opposite
shift worked against him because he wanted Smith's job for a friend.
So, after working for three years in a position for which, as he said,
he had served a ten years' apprenticeship, Smith again lost his place
and was obliged to apply for work in still another mill. He had been
a leader in the union, and it was a feeling almost religious in its
devotion that bound him to it. To get into this new mill he had to agree
to give up his union card. To-day he says that he is a strong union man
at heart, but his connection with it is over. Now, at nearly sixty years
of age, he is working in a semi-skilled position, although fitted to
take his place among the men of the best skill and to handle a crew.