to my old country, it would not be right to give up my allegiance there
and make myself a citizen here." I pressed him for his reasons for going
back, and he gave them to me,--reasons that fit thousands and thousands
of cases. With him that preliminary process of being separated from the
soil had not taken place, as with John Gerza. He was a farmer by age-old
instinct; his love for the land was a part of his being, was a yearning
which would leave him only with death. Now, since over here he had been
plunged straight into industry, the only land he had ever known in a
way to become attached to it was the land in which he was born, and
when the time came when he was able to gratify his longing for land his
thoughts went only to the land in his old country. So, though socially
as well off as he would be there, and economically much better off, he
was going back. Undoubtedly he, too, would be a fixture in America could
he have gone on a farm immediately upon his arrival here,--for then his
instinctive land-love would have been weaned from the old country and
fixed upon America. Few Slavs who settle upon the land ever change back
to Europe.
The Slavs are strong, willing workers, and are generally considered
by the steel mill officials the best laborers they get,--but now and
then there is a man who is too slow for America. One of these was John
Kroupa, a Bohemian who has been here twenty-two years. Faithful, strong,
willing, it wasn't in him to keep up the race. He was in his earlier
years here employed in a steel mill, but he was dropped. As he frankly
said to me, "You have to be pretty quick in those mills, and it isn't a
job for a man like me." Later he got a job as watchman on a Pennsylvania
Railroad crossing in Woods Run, and there he worked for sixteen years,
his wages forty dollars a month for a twelve hour day and a seven day
week. (In the last two years, forty-four dollars.) All this while he
hoped for promotion, but it did not come and this non-recognition
rankled within him. "Other men, who were all sore from sitting down so
much, were promoted," exclaimed he, "but I, who was always hustling, was
never thought of, and I can tell you it wasn't an easy job to watch that
no accident happened, as more than 300 trains passed that way every day
and very often at full speed, disregarding the city ordinances,--thirty
or forty miles an hour." Three years ago the crossing was abolished,
the tracks having been elevated. The superintendent came to him at that
time. "Well, John, I am sorry for you; going to lose your happy home.
But you'll get another just as good." This was too much for John; his
long smoldering disappointment burst out. "Go to hell!" said he, "A
happy home! I could just as well have been in the penitentiary over
there; I would have been much better off, without the responsibility and
worry I have here. During sixteen years I didn't have a single day off.
Sundays and weekdays both I have to be here for twelve hours. Do you
call that a happy home?"
He refused the new-old job. He now keeps a little store in Woods Run,
which he has established out of his savings and with the help of his
children,--a store which might have served Dickens for one of his
grotesque backgrounds, for here are on sale hardware, candy, crackers,
bacon, eggs, molasses. Kroupa cannot be classed as a failure, for he has
managed to buy a home and raise and educate a good sized family, but
he has not made the success that his qualities of constancy, honesty
and sobriety should have won him. His inborn slowness was too great a
handicap.
Among the Slavs the Slovaks strike me as the most ambitious and pushing.
This is all the more surprising when one remembers that the conditions
out of which they come are as bad as the conditions surrounding any of
the Slavs, and worse than most. The Slovaks when they come here, are
poor, illiterate, have no training, are inured to oppression; yet they
have pluck, perseverance, enterprise and courage. From their ranks are
recruited many of the foremen in the mills and an ever increasing number
of merchants. In the Woods Run district, with which I happen to be best
acquainted,--a low-lying mill neighborhood along the Ohio in Allegheny
City, probably one-half of the stores and saloons are in the hands of
Slovaks, or their close neighbors, the Hungarian Rusnaks. They were
all common laborers at one time. Most of the stores are well kept and,
in general, prosperous-looking, and among their customers are not only
Slavs, but Americans as well.
A type of this class of men, the men who succeed, is John Mlinek. When
I first saw him I had not the least thought that he was a Slav, so
well-dressed and thoroughly Americanized did he seem, and such good
English did he speak. He came to America thirteen years ago when only
fifteen years old. He worked successively as a breaker-boy and driver
in the mines at Mahanoy City, then in the iron-works at Elizabeth,
New Jersey, then as a riveter in the Pressed Steel Car Company at
Allegheny, where he was soon making three to four dollars a day. As
he neither drank nor indulged in any other form of dissipation he
saved considerable money. In 1905, he married a Slovak girl born and
brought up in this country who for several years before her marriage,
had clerked in a store where they had foreign customers. She is a
little more refined than the average English-speaking girl of the
working class, and holds a high position in her own circle. She is
quite ambitious and induced her husband to start a store in Woods Run.
He sells cigars and candy and is doing very well; from what I could
gather, they already must have several thousand dollars saved. These
young people seem to be much liked in the community; they are prominent
both in their social circle and in their church, and Mlinek is an
influential man among the Slovak societies, though he does not at all
push himself to the front. Mlinek, I would say, is at the beginning
of a considerable success; his prospects and his personality favor his
achieving it; only some untoward set of circumstances can keep him down.
A few paragraphs back, in the case of Hudak, I spoke of the powerful
call their native bit of earth makes upon so many of the immigrants.
But frequently when men go back, intending to stay, in response to this
call, the old country is not strong enough to hold them. Such was the
case with this same John Mlinek. It was his ambition to be a well-to-do
farmer in Hungary in a few years, and recently he and his wife made a
preliminary visit to his old home and bought a farm. They remained a
few weeks,--but those few weeks were quite enough. He came back quite
cured. "Every little clerk in the village looked down on me, because
I didn't speak the official language, Magyar," Mlinek said to me. "He
was an official while I was just a peasant. He didn't earn a quarter of
what I do, yet I had to bow to him. That made me sore. In America I'm a
free man. Besides, I've got a better chance to do well than in the old
country. Yes, America is good enough for me."
Mike Mamaj is another successful man; he also returned to Hungary,
expecting to live there, and he also turned his back on his native
country and came again to America, this time to stay. He has learned to
speak, read and write English, and he is full of energy, though rather
rude and domineering in his manner. During the early part of his career
in America (he came here twenty years ago) he had a hard time, but for
the last seven years he has been a foreman in the car shops at Woods
Run. He has seventy men working under him, and part of the time he has
earned $100 a month. He owns the house in which he lives, worth about
$2,500, has property in the old country to the value of $1,500, and has
money in the bank.
Mamaj is proud of his success, of his home, of his children. So proud
that, on the occasion of our first meeting, though the bed-time hour of
nine had come, he dragged me off to show me the evidence of what he had
done in America.
[Illustration: _Drawn by Joseph Stella._
PITTSBURGH TYPES.
IMMIGRANT OUT OF WORK.]
First I had to inspect his home, which was neat and well-furnished. Then
he ordered his children (three daughters, eight, ten and thirteen) who
were going to bed, to dress and recite their lessons for the stranger.
While the girls rather sleepily displayed some of their English
learning, Mamaj stood by, hands in his pockets, and nodded proudly.
A quality that I have noted again and again among the Slavs is their
readiness to help their countrymen,--already instanced by the case of
Málek's father loaning money to a robbed fellow immigrant. Sometimes
this generosity shows itself amid the most adverse circumstances, as
it did with Koval. Koval (the same man that I mentioned as having
wandered about before settling in Pittsburgh) has himself had enough
misfortune during his three years in America to drive all unselfish
feeling for others out of a man's heart. Two years ago he sent for his
family and his younger brother. Immediately upon their arrival his three
children and his brother fell sick with typhoid fever. They were no
sooner well than Koval himself went down with the fever. This illness,
since it drained their resources, forced them to fill their home with
boarders,--which was a hardship on the slight wife, all the more keenly
felt because keeping boarders had been no part of their original plan.
Then all three of the children were taken ill with the croup. The usual
price for a doctor's call is one dollar, but the doctor charged three
dollars each visit inasmuch as he had three patients; Koval protested,
but had to pay. Two of the children died, and Koval, by this time
financially exhausted, had to go in debt to the undertaker for the
funerals. And then amid these last disasters came the financial crash,
with its misery of unemployment.
Certainly enough to sour the milk of human kindness in any man. But the
penniless Koval did not drive out his penniless boarders, now only a
burden. Instead, he gave them a sleeping place, divided with them the
food he could get on credit from the grocery, for since he was a steady
man and a householder Koval still had some credit; and for the rest of
the food, he and his boarders would go and stand in the bread line,
which had been established in Woods Run. Not only did Koval not throw
out the penniless boarders, who already encumbered him, but he took in
seven additional people who were in distress. Two of these latter were
young men from his native village who had landed in Pittsburgh in the
midst of the depression; two were Russians who had been found wandering
through the streets, nearly frozen, by a policeman, who brought them to
Koval; the others were a countryman, his wife and child of six, and to
accommodate these Koval had to give up his own bed. During the period of
my acquaintance with him Koval was supporting twelve boarders, only one
of whom was paying him a cent.
What he was doing seemed quite the natural thing to Koval; he hardly
seemed conscious of his generosity. "Why do you keep all these people?"
I asked him. "Why, what else could I do?" he returned. "They have no
work and no other place to go. I cannot throw a man into the street.
They will go themselves when they can."
Frequently circumstances throw the burden of the home upon the child. In
looking into an accident case I called at a home in Saw Mill alley,--a
cheerless, dingy neighborhood that is flooded every year by the high
water. I was received in the kitchen by a slight Polish girl of fifteen,
and soon discovered that she was the real head of the home. Annie had
just finished the wash, and at such a time even the best of houses are
apt to be in disorder, but here everything was neat and clean. She told
me her story willingly enough. Her father, who had been a laborer in one
of the mills, had been killed by an engine while working in the yard
at night. Her mother had remarried, and soon had herself been killed
by the explosion of a kerosene lamp. Annie was now keeping house for a
brother and her stepfather. As the seventeen-year-old brother was rather
shy, and as the stepfather was a night-watchman, naturally a man of no
authority and allowed by his work little opportunity to exercise it
even had he possessed it, the main control of the household has passed
into Annie's hands. That authority she was using well, as was shown not
only by the tidiness of the house, but by the fact that it is chiefly
through her influence that her brother is attending night school.
She has energy, determination and character. She reads and writes
both English and Polish. She said she liked to read books, history
especially, but that she hadn't the time.
Annie's stepfather is soon to marry a widow, but this further
complication of her already complicated family relations does not seem
to trouble her in the least. In fact she was quite enthusiastic over her
future stepmother. "She came to see me the other day," she said, "and
she was awful nice. Oh, she's fine all right, and she's rich!"
"Rich? How rich?" I asked.
"Oh, she's got a lot o' money! It's a benefit she got from a society
when her first man died. She's got $1,200!"
One deplorable trait I frequently met with among the Slavs was contempt
for American law. The existence of this trait is largely due to the
teaching of experience,--and experience of one particular sort. The
story of Vilchinsky, a Ruthenian boarding-boss, is such a common one, it
illustrates so well a wide-spread condition in the administration of law
by the petty aldermen's courts of the Pennsylvania industrial districts,
that it is worth repeating for the sake of its general significance.
October 14, 1907, one of the boarders was celebrating his patron saint's
day. This meant a lot of drinking by all, and during the festivities
they got more or less under the influence of liquor, but they were in
their own home, there was no public disturbance, and toward midnight
they all went to bed. About two o'clock in the morning, however, when
they were all asleep, policemen came to the house, wakened everybody
and loaded them into patrol wagons and buggies and took them to a
police station. The boarding-boss, four girls and three men were all
taken before the magistrate, charged with disorderly conduct. Without
any regular hearing,--none of them could speak English and there was
no interpreter,--the squire asked for twenty dollars apiece for the
boarders and fifty dollars for the boarding-boss. All but two girls paid
the fine immediately, and these two were then sentenced to the county
jail. During the following day, their friends succeeded in collecting
enough money to pay their fines and the $1.50 extra for board in the
jail.
Abuses such as this are generated by the fact that aldermen and
constables obtain fees out of the fines, which makes it to the financial
interest of these officials to get as many cases into court as possible.
Many men I have talked with have stated that the constables often
provoke disorder when none exists for the sake of the profit in the
arrests. The Slavs know that they are victimized, and at the same time
they realize their helplessness; the natural result is a bitter contempt
for law.
"Huh!" sneered Vilchinsky, "the police are busy enough all right
stopping disorder when the men have got money. But when there's hard
times, like there is now, a man can make all the noise he pleases and
the police won't arrest him. They know he hasn't money to pay a heavy
fine and costs. It ain't law they think about. It's money."
There are plenty of Slavs who are quarrelsome, just as there are among
other races; and when you have a combination of Slavic ill-temper and
the above-mentioned judicial practice, then there is basis for trouble
indeed. Zavatsky and Yeremin, Russians, and neighbors in a steel town,
drank more than was good for them one Saturday afternoon in a saloon,
and at last Zavatsky spoke his mind about Yeremin's wife, whom he did
not consider as good-looking as she should be, and indulged in drunken
threats against her if she did not stop throwing ashes on his side of
the yard. Yeremin repeated to his wife these threats and remarks and
Mrs. Yeremin, being a choleric woman, went to the squire in spite of
the fact that it was very late in the evening. But as it was payday, he
was in his office ready for business.
[Illustration: _Drawn by Joseph Stella._
PITTSBURGH TYPES.
RUSSIAN.]
A constable was sent to Zavatsky's house to arrest him. The constable
went into the kitchen and, finding nobody there or in the next room,
went upstairs. Here there were a number of boarders talking, but they
were not drunk. The constable, seeing these men, thought it would be
wisest to have assistance, so he brought two policemen and then went
for Zavatsky. They broke open the door of the room where Zavatsky was
sleeping, dragged him out of bed and told him to get up. He was in a
drunken stupor and claims that he did not resist the constable, in fact,
scarcely knew what was going on; but the constable felled him with so
heavy a blow that it made a scalp wound and the blood rushed out and
blinded him. While on the floor, Zavatsky remembered a revolver under
his pillow, and raised his hand and got it. The constable wrested it
from him and according to Mrs. Zavatsky's version, he exclaimed, "I'll
give you a revolver, you son of a gun," and shot Zavatsky in the chest.
Mrs. Zavatsky, catching up a hammer, rushed at the constable, but he
knocked her unconscious by a blow on the head and she fell down in a
swoon. Before that, she had screamed to the men, "Come down, boys,
come down, they're killing the gazda!" One of the first to come to
Zavatsky's assistance was his kum, (the kum is one who is godfather
to one's children, or one to whose children one is godfather; a very
close relationship,--generally the dearest friend). As the kum tried to
rush into the room, the two officers gave him several violent blows on
the head. The other men rushed down, but they were all seized by the
officers, with the exception of one whose flight was suddenly stopped by
a shot in the leg.
As a result of the melee, the whole household of ten men and one woman
was taken in patrol wagons to the squire's court and committed to jail,
charged with disorderly conduct, felonious assault and interference with
an officer in performance of his duty. Zavatsky and the boarder who
was shot in the leg were sent to the hospital for treatment. At first
it looked as if Zavatsky were not going to live. After a hearing four
days later they were all committed to the grand jury, and my reports say
that they were all sentenced to jail for varying periods. None of the
policemen or the constable had even a scratch to show, although they
charged these ten men with felonious assault. The house, when I saw it
just following the affair, looked like the day after a battle.
Not even so brief a sketch as this would be complete without an instance
or two of the men who have been handicapped by industrial accident.
Such men are met everywhere in Pittsburgh,--they are so common as to
excite no comment. In proportion to their numbers, the Slavs are the
greatest sufferers from accident in the Pittsburgh region, for to their
lot falls the heaviest and most dangerous work. The report for 1905-1906
of the National Croatian Society, to give a general example of what
industrial accident means to the Slav, shows that out of its membership
which averaged about 17,000 for that period ninety-five men were killed
by accident [almost a third of the deaths from all causes] and that
ninety-seven died from consumption, the inception of which is often
traceable to the character of their work. In addition, eighty-five other
men were permanently disabled.
Andrew Jurik's job was to run a "skull-cracker" in the Homestead mill.
This is a contrivance to break up scrap so that it can be easier melted,
and its main feature is a heavy steel ball which is hoisted into the air
and then allowed to drop upon the scrap which has been heaped beneath
it. This crash of the ball throws pieces of the scrap in all directions.
The work is very dangerous, especially at night when it is hard to see
and dodge the flying scrap. One Monday night [the day before he had
worked on a twenty-four hour shift] Jurik failed to see and dodge. A
chunk of scrap weighing four or five hundred pounds struck his leg and
so crushed it that it had to be amputated.
Almost a year after the accident I went to visit Jurik, and found a
mild-faced, kindly-looking, not very intelligent man of forty, sitting
in his landlady's kitchen rocking his landlady's baby. That was Jurik's
job now, to take care of his landlady's children in part payment for his
board; and that was all he was good for yet, for he had only a leg and a
stump. He had been paid $150 by the Carnegie Relief Fund; of this he had
sent fifty dollars to his wife in Hungary and had used the balance to
pay his board. The company had promised him an artificial leg and light
work as soon as he was able to get around, but as his stump was not
yet entirely healed, as he had not a cent, as his wife was writing him
letters begging for money for the children, Jurik seemed worried.
Jurik looks at the future blankly, helplessly. He had at first planned
to bring his family here, but now he can never get the money for that.
Nor can he go back to them. He would be more useless, more helpless,
on a farm than here. The only solution Jurik can see to the lifelong
problem suddenly thrust upon him by that flying piece of scrap, is for
him and his family to remain indefinitely apart: he working at whatever
poor job and at whatever low wage he can get, and sending a little to
Hungary to help out,--his wife to continue working as a laborer on a
farm at twelve or fifteen cents a day.
Often the handicapped man's problem is thrust directly upon the wife
for solution, as it has been upon the wife of John Hyrka. Hyrka is a
Ruthenian of thirty; his wife is twenty-eight. He was making fair wages
in the Duquesne mills; they were both healthy and strong, and they had
high hopes for the future as is natural with the young. But May 26,
1907, John, who was working on a platform directly over a limestone
mill, stepped on a rotten plank and both his legs shot down into the
mill. Before he could be extricated the flesh had been torn from the
soles of both his feet.
Since then (or at least up to the time of my last report) Hyrka had
been in the McKeesport hospital, where attempts were made to graft
flesh upon his soles. When I last heard about him his feet were still
not healed, and it was practically certain that the grafting would be a
failure and that he would be a cripple for life.
When this tragedy descended upon Mrs. Hyrka she was within a month of
confinement. Into this grim situation entered the baby, adding its
cares. Until months after the accident she was in no condition to work,
and when she did regain her strength the demands of the infant would
not permit her to take up regular employment. For six months she lived
upon thirty dollars a month the company paid her, then the company
cut off this allowance, and after she had felt the pinch of want for
a time, she demanded a final settlement. They offered her $600, she
to pay all further hospital bills, which up to then had been paid by
the company. She talked the matter over with John, and between them
they decided that to have the flesh scraped from your feet and to be a
lifelong cripple ought to be worth as much as $1,000. But this seemed an
exorbitant estimate to the company, and as Mrs. Hyrka held firm to her
own figures, the matter was still unsettled when I left Pittsburgh. She
was then living on what she could borrow; the high hopes of twenty-eight
were all blasted; she knew she had a cripple on her hands for all his
life, thirty or forty years perhaps, and she was wondering, desperately
wondering, how she was going to be able to support him.
* * * * *
In citing these various types I have not tried to make out the Slavs as
better than they are. I have, to repeat my opening statement, merely
tried to show that these generally unknown people are above all human
beings,--that they have not alone vices and undesirable qualities, but
virtues,--that though crude, they have their possibilities.
[Illustration: _Drawn by Joseph Stella._
PITTSBURGH TYPES.
THE STRENGTH OF THE NEW STOCK.]
THE NEGROES OF PITTSBURGH
HELEN A. TUCKER
FORMER MEMBER TEACHING STAFF OF HAMPTON INSTITUTE