lighter-handed, fairer, more delicately built than those of the metal
trades and the glass houses. These girls have rapid work to do. They
have the nervous energy to pack or to fill cans at high speed. They
stand beside the travelling conveyor which carries cans of beans, and
slip a bit of pork into each can as it passes. Without turning their
heads or changing their position, working with high concentration and
intensity, they can keep pace with the chains. While they do much of the
mechanical work, the hulling and stemming of berries, the preparing
of fruit, the filling and labeling of cans, they are found too among
the bottling girls on whom responsibility for the appearance of the
finished product largely rests. These latter place each pickle or piece
of preserved fruit after the model design taught them in the beginning.
They use a grooved stick to slip the pickles into place, and are obliged
to be accurate as well as quick, for they work under inspection on a
piece basis. A piece of onion misplaced in a bottle of mixed pickles is
held sufficient ground for requiring the bottler to do the work over at
the expense of her own time. The odor of vinegar and of preserves, an
odor that seems to have saturated the air in nearby streets, has made
the cannery unpopular among Americans who have acquired fastidiousness
in the choice of a trade.
It is possible that between the Polish women in this latter industrial
group and those in the metal trades, there is the difference between the
child of the city and the child whose life and the life of whose parents
has been near the earth. At any rate, there is the general difference
between the small, slight, fair-haired girl, and the rough-skinned
stolid women, whom even a piece-rate scarcely avails to keep up to the
pace of the machine. These latter are the women who with knee and hand
and metal-centered glove, open the sheets of tin still warm from the
furnaces of the sheet and tin plate mill; these are the women who screw
nuts on bolts by a fish-oil process, and these are the women who carry
trays of sand-cores in the foundries where they have displaced men.
They are the packers in glass factories, the riveters and foot-press
operators in lamp works. They have a hundred miscellaneous things to
do, no one of which is a trade, or can be a trade so long as a shifting
group of women, women with muscular strength and the readiness to do
disagreeable things, is at hand for the odd jobs about a factory. They
learn to operate one machine, but they are not among the hands who know
the ways of the shop, and work up to better occupations. Either through
the barrier of language, or in part through their own indifference,
they are used for the least desirable work in those occupations which in
a measure they have made their own.
Polish girls of both types are to be found in laundries, but in most
cases they are employed in the mangle room only. Their work is to feed
in sheets under the metal rolls, to shake them out before feeding, or to
receive and fold them at the other end while steam rises from the hot
metal and from the huge washing cylinders below.
There remain unaccounted for the workers in the candy industry, in many
of the miscellaneous trades, in telephone and telegraph offices, in the
wholesale millinery houses, and in press rooms and bookbinderies. Here
there is variation as the individual and the location rather than as
the trade group. In large measure, the employes are of American birth.
Telephone and telegraph work share with mercantile houses the advantage
of social esteem, and by reason of this, claim the American girl. The
same is true of the millinery workroom, in spite of its irregular
hours and short seasons. Perhaps a reflected "odor of sanctity," an
association by proxy with clerical work, has made press rooms and
binderies favored above more obviously manufacturing pursuits. Perhaps,
too, the location of the binderies in the business section of the city
has given them a force of American employes, for the Polish girl, like
her Jewish co-worker, is limited in her imaginings to factories and
shops within the few streets that make up the sum of her experience. Yet
to an extent press rooms and binderies employ girls of foreign birth,
and in the cork factory, many of the sorters are Poles. For some reason,
the candy trade is largely in the hands of Americans, and is in high
esteem among women workers.
[Illustration: SEMI-SKILLED AMERICAN GIRLS IN A GLASS DECORATING
FACTORY.]
Surveying the city, then, we see American and German girls holding the
positions for which a few months' training is needed, a knowledge of
English, or of reading and writing. We see them yielding the inferior
and unpleasant work to newcomers from Poland and Russia and we see
these same newcomers, sometimes by sheer physical strength, sometimes
by personal indifference and a low standard, competing on the basis of
lower wages with men. Work that otherwise would never have been given
to girls to do has come into the hands of Polish women. Workrooms that
would not long be tolerated by Americans,--they have been regarded with
indifference, perhaps because of inability to share the sensations of a
foreigner. The place of the Polish women, scrubbing floors and sorting
onions in a cannery, packing crackers, stripping tobacco for the stogy
makers, or making sand-cores in a machine shop,--this place is lowest
industrially among the women workers of Pittsburgh. It is the place of
the woman who is fighting her way but has not yet thought whither she is
going. A determination to work and to earn is uppermost. Marriage is not
suffered to act as a hindrance. There is notable absence of standard as
to conditions of work and rate of wages. With light foothold here and
there, the Italian girl scarcely figures, but within a limited circle
of industries immigrant Jewesses hold positions beside girls of native
birth.
From trading post and frontier settlement, from ambitious mill-town,
Pittsburgh has come to be a city whose workrooms number a force of
over 22,000 women. From home industry and from household work, the
younger generation of girls has entered the field of collective
service. From doing the whole of a thing and from knowing the user, the
younger generation has gradually found its work more and more minutely
subdivided; the individual worker makes not even a whole hinge but a
tenth part of it, and knows neither the use nor the destination of
the finished product. She does not know the relation of her fraction
of the work to the other fractions or to the interwoven threads of
industry that make up the plant. These younger women have pushed past
the traditional activities of cleaning and cooking and sewing; even the
congregate form of these industries engages but a few of them. They have
not only gone into press rooms and binderies, into cork factories, and
into workrooms where candies are made and where fruit is preserved, but
they help finish the glass tumblers that the men in the next room blow,
they make the cores for the foundry-men, and they are among the shapers
of metal for lamps and for hinges and bolts and screws. In a city that
is preeminent for the making of steel and iron and the products of steel
and iron, women have taken to-day a place in industries that seemed
wholly in the province of men.
[Illustration]
It means readjusting our angle of vision, but it is not a difficult
readjustment, to see Pittsburgh as a city of working women. From river
to river, women have their share in its industrial life. More than a
theory, more than a reform movement, is needed to turn back a tide that
is twenty-two thousand strong, that has its roots deep in commercial
methods and commercial success. Change in industrial method, when such
change makes for cheapness or for efficiency or for the utilization
of a hitherto only partially utilized labor force, cannot be stayed
by any theory as to its inappropriateness. Industrial forces, in that
they are the forces of production, are still dominant in America. There
is nothing in the Pittsburgh situation that looks toward undoing the
change that has come about in the industrial position of women; but we
can find out more exactly in this steel city how the work of women is
related to that of men, how far women have reached the point of being
self-supporting and independent, and what the social effect of labor
under these new conditions seems to be. Through change in some of these
conditions, much that seems evil in the nature of women's work may be
undone and the real value of it released as a permanent and useful
factor in industrial life.
IMMIGRANT TYPES IN THE STEEL DISTRICT
PHOTOGRAPHS BY LEWIS W. HINE
[Illustration: GOING HOME FROM WORK.]
[Illustration: CROATIAN.]
[Illustration: LITHUANIAN.]
[Illustration: _Photograph by Lewis W. Hine._
ITALIAN.]
[Illustration: RUSSIAN.]
[Illustration: SERVIAN.]
[Illustration: SLOVAK.]
[Illustration: A YOUNG SLAV.]
THE SLAV'S A MAN FOR A' THAT
ALOIS B. KOUKOL
SECRETARY SLAVONIC IMMIGRANT SOCIETY
Above one of the busiest corners in Pittsburgh, an immense advertisement
in Croatian solicits patronage for an American bank. In the railroad
stations and on the principal thoroughfares you can see groups of
people who bear unmistakably the Slavic physiognomy. But the Slav is
reserved; even the Southern Slav lacks the unrestrained animation so
characteristic of the Italian. He is slow in making an impress on the
imagination of the community. Though the Slavs are one of the three
largest racial elements that immigration is adding to our population,
though in the Pittsburgh district they constitute over one-half of the
workers in the steel mills, yet in spite of their large numbers and
their importance as an industrial and business factor, there is, I
believe, little actual understanding and appreciation of them on the
part of Americans. The bosses know them chiefly as sturdy, patient,
and submissive workmen; their American fellow-workmen hate and despise
them largely because of this patience and submissiveness to the bosses
and their willingness at the outset to work at any wages and under any
conditions; the public at large knows the Slavs by their most obtrusive
and objectionable traits,--especially by the newspaper stories of their
rows and fights when they get drunk on payday or when celebrating
a wedding or a christening. Few people realize that the "Hunkie"
in spite of his proclaimed "stolidity" is capable of all the finer
emotions,--that his aspirations are the same in character, though as yet
not so ambitious nor so definitely formulated as those of his neighbor
Americans.
It is my design in this article to present the immigrant Slavs as they
have not yet been generally seen,--as human beings even if crude, with
some virtues along with their widely recognized vices,--to present
something of their spirit, their character, their attitude toward
America, and the effect on them of the conditions under which as in
Pittsburgh and the neighboring mill towns they live and work. For
this design I feel I have at least the qualification of knowledge; in
preparation for this immediate task I visited some two hundred families;
moreover, I am a Slav by birth, and all my life I have lived and worked
among the Slavic people.
[Illustration]
The natural question rising in one's mind is, Why did these great
hordes come to America and to Pittsburgh? Let me answer in terms of
men. The main cause is of course economic. On the one side there is the
old world surplus of labor accompanied by low wages, the barrenness of
the land which every year becomes more insufficient to support growing
populations, and economic disasters affecting sometimes individuals
and sometimes whole communities; on the other side, the stories of
the wealth of some bolder pioneers and of the great opportunities
in this country, confirmed and exaggerated by the crafty agents of
transportation companies. An illustration of this economic impetus is
the simple story of Grigory Leshkoff. Grigory comes from a Russian
peasant family in which there were seven sons and twenty poor acres
of land. "What were we to do at home?" Grigory demanded of me with a
shrug. "Just look at one another,--hey?" One by one these sons left the
crowded farm and sought work in the few mines and factories located near
them. Grigory's younger brother was the first from the village to seek
America, coming here in 1902. But soon others followed him, "and now,"
said Grigory, "there are in Homestead at least fifty young men from our
village."
Grigory, by the way, is a veteran of the Japanese war, having come to
America immediately after its close. But he has little to say about
this one of the great conflicts of modern times; in fact, he looks upon
his experience upon battle fields as quite commonplace compared with
his experience in the steel mills. From the first he emerged without
a scratch; in the second he lost a leg. When I saw him he was deeply
concerned with what a strong man of twenty-seven with only one leg was
going to do with his future,--and the simple peasant was not seeing much
hope ahead.
Grigory came from Chernigov. From this government, and from Minsk
and Grodno, where the soil is exhausted and where the shares of the
villagers in the communes grow less with each redistribution of the
land, the Russians are setting out in increasing numbers. Not altogether
dissimilar causes operate in certain districts of Austria-Hungary.
Pribich used to be one of the richest wine growing regions in Croatia,
but some fifteen years ago the vines were devastated by a blight,
necessitating replanting with American stock. In this way hundreds of
once prosperous farmers were reduced to poverty. Many of them came to
the United States in the hope of earning enough money to pay for the
necessary replanting of their vineyards. Lazo Milutich, who gave me this
information, was himself one of those affected by the calamity. He came
to Allegheny about twelve years ago, where he tried different jobs, and
after two years wandering landed at Wilmerding. Here he has worked for
the last ten years in the same foundry.
Other causes than economic pressure have of course played their part
in this great migration. Political oppression is one. I have met a
number of political refugees among the older Slavs, many now persons
of importance. And another is the blandishment and trickery of the
steamship agent. John Godus, a Slovak living in Braddock, is one of a
group of twelve young men brought here in 1901, by the last influence.
To their village came a man dressed as a common workingman. We can
imagine him in high boots, wearing an embroidered shirt, and smoking a
long-stemmed pipe. He was a steamship agent, thus disguised to escape
the attention of the gendarmerie. He quietly found out what young men
were at the age when one has to present himself for conscription in the
army,--for such youths he had discovered, were the easiest induced to
be customers; secretly argued with them that it would be foolishness to
give three of their best years to the army, where they would be slapped,
kicked and cursed; and in the end sold them all tickets.
[Illustration: _Drawn by Joseph Stella._
PITTSBURGH TYPES.
LAD FROM HERZEGOVINA.]
It is perhaps but natural that Pittsburghers should believe that
the fame of their industries should draw these Slavs straight from
their villages to Pittsburgh. Yet this is rarely true,--true only in
exceptional cases, such as that of Joseph Sabata, a Bohemian. He was an
iron-worker at home and was employed in a large rolling mill in Moravia.
Their machinery was imported mostly from the United States and he,
noticing the name of an Allegheny firm on some of the pieces, thought
that in that city he could learn more about his business; and so five
years ago decided to come over. After being landed at Ellis Island, he
discovered while in line waiting to be questioned, that everybody was
asked to show an address. Such an address he did not have, but he does
have quick wits; he hastily scribbled on a piece of paper "Allegheny,"
and the name of a cousin still in the old country who had probably never
even heard the name of that city. He was readily admitted, went straight
to Allegheny, and when I saw him was earning $2.75 a day in a machine
shop.
In another case I met with, the coming straight to Pittsburgh was quite
accidental. Václav Málek, a Bohemian, who came here with his parents
eighteen years ago when a lad of sixteen, had intended to settle with
the rest of the family on a farm in Wisconsin. But on the way across
the ocean they became acquainted with another Bohemian family, bound
for Pittsburgh, who had been robbed of their money, and to these people
Málek's father loaned eighty dollars. In order not to lose the money
they decided to keep near their debtors and they too came to Pittsburgh.
John even to this day is sorry they didn't go on a farm,--and for a
double reason: first, he has a natural preference for farm labor which
is never to be gratified; second, in the course of his work for an
Allegheny company, an accident crippled him for life.
In the vast majority of cases the Slavs in Pittsburgh had not the
slightest intention of settling there when they first came to America.
Usually their location there has been preceded by a period of a year or
two or even longer during which they have wandered hither and thither,
from one factory to another, from town to town, looking for the right
place to settle.
Large numbers of the Slovaks come to Pittsburgh by way of the anthracite
fields. At the time of the strike,--and for several years before when
conditions were bad in hard coal mining, half-time, and the like of
that, the Slavic mineworkers drifted west,--across the state to the
steel mill district.
The experience of a Ruthenian named Koval is typical of a great
number of men. He came to America three years ago, and was sent by an
immigrant home in New York to work in the forests of West Virginia as a
woodcutter. The wages there were only fifty cents a day, and in other
ways the conditions were so bad that he and three other men ran away.
They wandered through the woods until they came to a little settlement
with a saw mill, where they were offered work and stayed for about two
months, earning $1.50 a day. Then a surveyor came to the village, who
spoke Polish, and told them that in Allegheny they could earn a good
deal more money than in the woods, so to Allegheny they decided to go.
There they obtained work as laborers in the locomotive works at $1.50
for a day of ten hours.
Such a wanderer also, was Smulkstis, a Lithuanian who started life as a
messenger boy in the telegraph service in St. Petersburg. He came to a
friend in Wilmerding four years ago, but, unable to get the kind of work
he wanted, he sought out another friend in Worcester, Mass., where he
got a job in a woolen mill. The next spring found him back in Pittsburgh
as a machine operator in an electrical plant. To-day,--he is still only
twenty-two,--he is a crane man in the Homestead steel mills. Similarly,
a Croatian who was spending the winter in Duquesne, was a type of the
migratory railroad laborer, who drifts from one contractor's gang to
another. He had been all over Indiana, Ohio and the Middle West and
had taken his wife and children with him. They made shift in cars and
shanties and construction camps of all sorts.
One fact that was continually striking me in Pittsburgh was the number
of ordinary men, earning low wages, who seem to be fitting themselves
permanently to their new environment. John Gerza, an engine cleaner in
the Fort Wayne yards, and his family impressed me as having, in their
five years in this country, adapted themselves very readily to the
atmosphere and to the life of Pittsburgh. There are no regrets nor
looking backward, nothing to draw him away from the present life. The
explanation for this adaptation is the explanation in so many other
cases that it is worth setting down. Gerza lived in a Moravian village
where till sixteen years ago there had been no impulse to move away from
the soil. The villagers were rooted to their ancient homes; they thought
only of the land, and they tilled it in the same old, primitive manner
of their forefathers. Then a railroad was built through the country, and
factories sprang up. These drew agricultural laborers from the villages,
and thereby unsettled the population; unsettled the old conditions of
life, and practically destroyed that love for, that almost physical
kinship with, the soil and the old home which I found so strong among
the Slavs in general. Gerza's wife used to work in a sugar factory at
home; he himself used to be a brakeman on a freight train. With them it
was not the severe and wrenching change from farm to factory, with the
involved breaking away from loved surroundings; it was the comparatively
simple change from one industrial pursuit to a comparatively similar
industrial pursuit.
Palinski, a Russian Pole of forty-five who has been in America eighteen
years, is another example of that really considerable class of ordinary,
low-paid workmen who have made a small success,--if owning a home and
having a happy family and being content is termed success. The highest
pay Palinski has ever received was $1.65 a day, and yet, though he has
five children, he managed five years ago to buy in conjunction with
his brother the house in which they live. They paid $1,600 for the
property, and now Jones and Laughlin want to buy it and Palinski expects
to sell for at least $3,000. The oldest child, a girl of fifteen, is
kept in public school, and the three other children of school age are
sent to the parochial school where tuition must be paid. The house is
strikingly clean and well arranged. Palinski seems to be well satisfied
with himself, his family and his work.
It was a marvel to me how a man with Palinski's wages could own such a
pleasant home, raise so large a family of children, educate them, and
keep them well-dressed and healthy. The explanation lies in a great
measure outside Palinski. He is a good man, but, as in so many of the
cases where the Slavs have wrought pleasant homes out of little wages,
the credit is largely due to the wife. Mrs. Palinski must have been a
wonderful manager; even to the casual eye, she was neat, bright and
energetic. In estimating the worth to America of this pair, one must
not consider alone the hardworking husband and the able wife; one must
consider their contribution of healthy, educated children.
These men are fixtures; in a generation or two their children and
children's children are likely to be an indistinguishable part of that
conglomerate product, the American citizen. In contrast to these men
are the great numbers who are not content, who are not fixtures,--whose
great dream it is some day to get back to their native village, live
out their years there and, what is no small consideration with many, be
laid at rest in friendly soil. Why these men, even though successful
here, have this yearning and take this action, presents a rather tough
question to most persons. That question, I think, I can best answer by
reciting the case of Mike Hudak.
Hudak is a Slovak who came to this country seventeen years ago when a
youth of nineteen. He is a fine type of a man in every way; physically
he could almost be classed as a giant, for he stands six feet two, is
deep of chest and broad of shoulders. He works in the Pennsylvania
repair shops at Oliver, earning eighty dollars a month, which is good
pay for a Slav when one considers that the work is regular and not
dangerous. He seems to be quite a figure in his neighborhood, for when
I walked home with him one day he was addressed from all sides in tones
that showed liking and respect. He dresses neatly and has a fluent
command of English. If there is any type of immigrant that we need above
all others it struck me that Mike Hudak is that type.
[Illustration: _Drawn by Joseph Stella._
PITTSBURGH TYPES.
OLD WORLDS IN NEW.]
I first discovered his yearning by asking him why he was not a citizen.
"Why should I forswear myself," said he.