Part 19
I recall a little, sharp-eyed Jewish lad whom lured from his news stand by recklessly buying his whole stock of evening papers. He had lived in Boston five years and was Bostonese, to the dropping of his Rs, and the picking them up again, to put where they did not belong. He was a product of the public school, not yet finished, but in the making; and over him hovered the benediction of some noble teacher, whose glory he reflected. “Teacher? O yes! teacher was even more than parents, almost like God. Teacher knew more than the stupid rabbi, who tried to drill into him the Hebrew alphabet.”
The boy had neither church nor synagogue, nor priest nor preacher nor rabbi; he had but two things to cling to, the school and the settlement. Piteous was his scorn of the faith of his fathers, the accusation and condemnation of everything Jewish, the contempt with which he called his people “Sheney”; the horror of fast and feast days, and his delight in the anticipation of a Jewish Sabbath meal. He will become what Max Nordau calls a “stomach Jew,” in opposition to the “soul Jews,” who alas! are growing fewer and fewer, on both sides of the sea.
This boy, grown up, or growing up in Boston, knew nothing of us, of our type of Christianity, or of Christianity at all; except the fact that the world is divided between Christians and Jews. The settlement has done something for him; it has given his unskilled fingers the taste for handicraft, and he told me with honest pride of the things he had made with “his own hands.” It has also given him a knowledge of human kindness, although he does not yet realize that the men and women in the settlements are working because of the love they have for God’s children.
I have found Jews everywhere who were Christian in spirit; and the distance between synagogue and church is as great as it is, only because of prejudices, which the church has not yet allayed and which unconsciously it is increasing.
The Jew is suspicious of missions and missionaries and has good reason to be, but he responds quickly to the notes of true religion whenever they strike his heart; even as he responds quickly to the best things in our national life.
I recall walking through Boston in the streets stretching South and far North where Russia and Polish Jews live. They are keepers of shops of all varieties, busy scavengers of second-hand articles; busier than we know, with thread and needle in clothing and sweat shops. They are dealers in junk, the refuse and wreckage of our industrial establishments; creators of new avenues of trade and of some new industries. Some of these Jews know that they live in Boston and act like it. I had alighted at the North Station and was walking with a lady whose luggage I had offered to carry to the car. She had a baby on one arm and a large satchel in the other hand, so in order not to knock against her with the heavy valise which I carried, I walked on the inside. Suddenly from his shop door, a Russian Jew, in English strongly tainted by Yiddish, called out: “You greenhorn, don’t you know that in Boston men don’t walk on the insides of the ladies?” Promptly, as though impelled by a command, I shifted my load, and “walked on the outside of the lady.”
That Jew had been responsive to Boston’s spirit of decorum and would be equally responsive to the best in its religious life if it were presented to him. He likes least to be singled out as a Jew and to be dealt with as such, either by churches or missions. He is most easily approached from the standpoint of the average man, and not from the peculiar racial and religious standpoint of the Jew.
Side by side with the religious problem is growing to menacing proportions the problem of politics. A nation like our own, ideally founded upon universal suffrage, is putting its destinies in the hands of men untrained in citizenship; the very name citizen being so new to them that they cannot easily grasp its meaning. The tutelage of Tammany Hall and of its kind all over the United States has been a bad preparation for so momentous a task. It does not diminish the greatness of the problem in the least when I say that the foreigner is usually the innocent tool, in a corrupting process which has been going on for many years, and to the existence of which the nation is just awaking.
I have been offered citizenship papers in the city of New York for ten dollars; and have seen them peddled by Americans who had back of them the protection of political bosses of no less genuine American ancestry. I have seen whole groups of Polanders marched to the ballot-box, when they were so drunk that they had to be kept erect by a stalwart American patriot who swore that they had the right to vote, when they had scarcely been a year in this country. I have seen men who are respected in their communities, buy votes wherever they could get them, corrupting a mass of men who were as ignorant of the process of voting and as unfitted for it, as little babes; and these very men I have heard loudly proclaiming the corrupting influence of the foreign element.
With all that, the foreigner is rising in the scale of citizenship and is not so bad as he has the right to be, considering the example set him. Delaware is not controlled by foreigners, yet the peaches in its political basket are rotten both at the top and at the bottom. Connecticut, the “Constitution State” as it loves to call itself, is still dominantly American, and yet there are so many “wooden nutmegs” in the spice box of its magnificent State House that its best citizens are hanging their heads from shame. New Hampshire and Vermont are not model States, in spite of the fact that the foreign vote is almost “nil”; while the city of Philadelphia cannot claim that it is better governed than the city of New York, where the foreign population predominates and dominates.
The immigrant, it is true, will sell his vote; but the American buys it, and sells it too, and he is the greater traitor; because he is betraying his native country.
Again, this does not assume that the immigrant is not a political problem; he is, but only because we are, and in this he rises and falls with us, and sometimes rises above us. All that which we call patriotism he quickly imbibes. He loves the Fourth of July, and he knows its meaning and its value often better than the native born. I have no fear on that score; and should America, God forbid, engage in war, you would find at the very front the Jew, the Slav, and the Italian with the Yankee, fighting the same battle; yes, and fighting his own people should they unjustly attack us.
Who doubts that the German Americans would fight in our war against Germany, if it were a just war--if war be ever just; and who would doubt for a moment that the Italians, Russians and French would fight on our side if their governments should land soldiers on this continent? No one doubts it.
They are caught by the contagious enthusiasm of our patriotism, and will outdo us; for they love America as no native can love it. Neither do I fear that they will fail us in fighting our greater battles against injustice and against corruption in high places. What I fear is that they will fight, that they will become one with the tumultuous mob, which may at any time arise and blindly demand its long deferred dividends for its share of labour, toil and suffering. I fear that we are gathering inflammable material from the dissatisfied of all the nations, who here may endeavour to reek vengeance upon all governments; a mass easily inflamed by demagogues and made a scourge in the land, when the land needs scourging.
No nation has ever faced such a problem as we are facing; not only because of its gigantic proportions, nor because of its peculiar nature, but because of the fact that the nation’s weal or woe is being decided right before our very eyes; because its shroud or its wedding garment is now being woven, and we who live to-day may stretch our hands against the threads of the loom and say which it shall be.
XXIII
BIRDS OF PASSAGE
Again the ship’s band plays the songs of the Fatherland, while marching up the streets of Hoboken towards the dock, comes a long procession of men escorting one of the chief citizens of the town. He is the owner of the largest saloon and is about to visit his native land across the sea. The decks of the steamer are crowded by passengers and their friends, and through the discordant noise of rattling chains one hears the mingled notes of joy and sorrow, until finally at the stern command of the captain the long homeward journey has begun.
The steerage of the _Kaiser Wilhelm II_ is crowded to the limit; and Jews, Slavs, Italians and Germans are beginning to settle down in their congested quarters, in a somewhat closer fellowship than on the westward journey; for now they have a common experience and a few sentences of common language to bind them to one another.
The women all of them, have discarded the peasant’s dress and are bedecked in the spoils of bargain counters; while the men invariably wear “store clothes,” always carry huge watches and not rarely a revolver. Where you still see peasant’s clothing you will find a heavy spirit within it; for the wearer is one of the unfortunates who was turned back from “the gate which leads into the city.”
The steerage passengers may be roughly divided into two classes: those who go home because they have succeeded, and those who go home because they have failed. Those who have succeeded have not yet reached the point of achievement which lifts them from the steerage to the cabin, but still belong to that large class which goes back to the Fatherland for a season and then returns, to try again the road to fortune. More than one-fourth of all our immigrants belong to this class and have to be reckoned with when the sum total is counted. While I cannot give the exact figures I should say that nearly two hundred thousand men and women go back and forth each year.
This class has lost much of the Old World spirit and is neither so docile nor so polite as it was when first it occupied these quarters. The ship’s crew has become more civil towards it, which is due to the fact that the homeward bound steerage passenger has grown to be something more of a man, has more self-assertion and more dollars; all of which has power to subdue the over-officious crew. The men have learned more or less English, which is freely interspersed by oaths, while the women can say: “Yes, no, and good-bye” call their “Dum, de house” and are fairly versed in the language of the grocery and dry goods store. They can say “how much” and even “you bet”; but beyond that, the English language has remained “terra incognita” to them.
The women are the birds of passage who most go back; for they are loyal to their kinsmen, to their home and their traditions, not having been long enough in America to prize the great privileges of womanhood here.
The children are most loath to return; especially those who have gone to school here and who in their migrations to and fro, have learned the difference.
Anushka, a bright twelve year old girl goes from a Pennsylvania town, to the Frenczin district in Hungary. She is dressed “American fashion,” has gone to the public school and speaks English fairly well.
“Anushka moya, tell me, do you like to go back to Hungary?” and the little girl tells me: “No, siree. America is the best country. There we have white bread and butter and candy, and I can chew gum to beat the band;” and tears fill her eyes at the memory of the American luxuries which she has tasted. If she stays in her mountain village she will degenerate into the common life about her, and marry a peasant lad with whom she will hover between enough and starvation, all the days of her life. Yet she will never forget America, the white bread and butter, the candy and the chewing-gum.
In a little village in Hungary I know a woman who in her youth had tasted all these things and the freedom of life in Chicago. Now, although she has been married fifteen years and has lived away from America longer than that, she speaks with glowing eyes of the time when she lived on South Halstad Street, ate thin bread with thick jam on it, and the land was flowing with sausages, lager beer and chewing-gum.
Most blessed are the girls who have been in service in American families. They have learned English well, and also the ways of the American household. They have tasted of the spirit of Democracy which permeates our serving class, and when such an one returns to her native village she unsettles the relations of servant and mistress. Therefore, her coming is dreaded by the “Hausfrau” who has had one servant-girl through many years, paying her fifteen dollars a year and treating her like a beast. Shall I quote one of those mistresses? “What kind of country is that anyway, that America? These servant girls come back with gold teeth in their mouths, and with long dresses which sweep the streets, and with unbearable manners. They do not kiss our hands when they meet us, and when they speak of their mistress in America they speak of her as if they were her equals. When one of those girls comes home with her finery and her money, we are liable to lose every servant; and wages are going up fabulously.”
I met one of these servant-girls “with gold teeth in her mouth” after she had lived three years in America, and I found that she had acquired something besides gold teeth. She had learned to speak both German and English, she had manners which were refined, she had been uplifted by an American mistress out of her peasant life to a plane which women reach nowhere but in America, and she was the equal if not the superior, of any of the young women in her village, who had had the privilege of a common school education which had been denied to her, because of her lowly origin. It is true, she did sweep the streets with her long skirts; but she did it gracefully. She walked as the women on Fifth Avenue walk, and she shook hands with me after the most approved fashion.
The older women on the ship returned without any of these graces. They had been pining for the Fatherland, and in spite of the fact that one of them was going back to a half-starved country, she said: “In Chicago, you no can get any tink to eat.”
In a general way it may be said that it made a vast difference where and how the men had lived in America, as to whether they carried anything but American dollars back with them. Both the men and the women who had been in service in American homes showed the largest inheritance of our spirit; while those who lived in the congested foreign quarters had simply changed climates for a while, lost some robustness and a few native virtues, and gained a modest bank account.
Yet even among those I could notice changes and gains which cannot be tabulated and which at the first glance might be put down as losses; an indefinite something which has gone into their fibre for better or for worse. This was most crudely illustrated by a Ruthenian who had lived twenty-five years in America; eleven years in a coal mining district and the rest of the time in a New England manufacturing town. He told me about his aspirations for his son, who is “very smart and will not work with his hands.” He talked in Russian: “Yes, my son will be educated. I have money enough for that. I am stupid and must bear all sorts of things, but when a man is educated, he can raisovat helle as much as he wants.” The form in which he put the American phrase saves the necessity of writing it in dashes.
I have not yet seen a village in Hungary, Russia or Italy, to which any number of men has returned even after a short sojourn in America, without that community’s gaining in some ways at least. Better houses certainly were built, with more or less sanitary improvements according to the conditions under which the men or women have lived in America. It makes a vast difference whether the men have lived in mining camps or in the cities. Undoubtedly the peasant who has lived in a small American city where he could easily feel and touch its life brings home the greatest spirit of progress.
Agricultural conditions have improved rapidly in Hungary and Poland; business in not a few instances has been put upon an American basis, which means not only more efficiency, but strange as it may seem, more honesty; and the scale of living has risen wherever a large number of people has gone to and fro across the sea.
The steerage holds numbers who go back because they have not succeeded, and many who are broken in health, who have been burned by the fires, scalded by the steam and parched by our heat. Men and women with spirits broken, who are not going back, but crawling back into the shelter of the Old World home.
“O! panye,” cried one of those to whom I tried to minister: “it is an awful country! You don’t know whether they walk on their heads or on their feet; they do not stop to eat nor sleep, and they drive one as the water drives the village mill. They build a house one minute and tear it down the next; the cities grow like mushrooms and disappear like grass before a swarm of locusts. The air is black in the city where I lived; black as the inside of the chimney in my cabin, and the water they drink looks like cabbage soup. The cars go like a whirlwind over the Puszta (prairie) and I should rather stand among a thousand stampeding horses on the plains, than on one of those dreadful street corners. How terribly those whistles blow in the morning and how dark and dismal are those shops, where they eat up iron and men out of bowls as big as the barn of our ‘Pan’ (master). The heat outside burns and the heat inside blisters, and when it is cold it freezes the blood. No, no,” and he groaned in terror at the remembrance of it; “no more America for me. That’s all I have,” pointing to his scant clothing. “I am going back a beggar.”
Women too there are whose bodies and spirits are nearly broken; and they go back to wait for their release. Among these, there was one Bohemian woman from New York, whose hollow cough and glowing cheeks betrayed the arch destroyer at work. She was one of six thousand cigar makers employed by one firm, and she had laboured five years in that shop and rolled many thousands of cigars into shape. As she had to bite the end of every cigar, she swallowed much tobacco juice, and breathed in much tobacco dust. She had attained great proficiency and could earn twenty dollars a week; but she had ruined her health, had spent all her savings for medicine and now was going home to die. She was in that stage where hope had not left her, and she was bent on making the last great fight for life in the shelter of her “Matushka’s” love.
Two old genteel looking people always stood out from the coarse mass because they kept clean in spite of the odds against them in the steerage, and because they were always together. Up and down the slippery stairs they went, like two lovers. Even seasickness did not separate them and when the sun shone they were on deck, solemnly smiling back to heaven. They had left their all in America; their children were sleeping in the strange soil, and now they were going back to the little town in Austria from which they had gone thirty-seven years before. They felt too rich in one another to rail against their fate, and their complaint was as gentle as their pain was deep. They had come to America full and now they were going home empty; three sons and two daughters they had brought, and childless they were going back; but “The Lord had given and the Lord had taken away,” and they blessed the name of the Lord.
Those who had prospered in America, and they were the majority, carried home with them sums of money which in the aggregate, amounted, among 600, to four thousand dollars, which did not however represent all they had saved; for each week they had sent small sums to their homes, and the money sent from America to Austria and Italy has been a great economic factor in the life of those countries. The total sum must reach into many millions. Nor does this sum represent an entire loss to our country; for the more money there is in a Slav or Italian village the more and better cotton goods are bought. The daily diet contains more American lard, the household is likely to be enriched by an American sewing-machine, and the notes of the phonograph are “heard in the land,”--which too comes from America.
Perhaps the greatest gainers by this constant coming and going are the steamship companies, which for a comparatively large sum of money provide quarters that in a very short time become unfit for human beings. The thrifty passengers, and there are not a few of them, who believe that the steerage going to Europe is not so crowded as coming to America, and that they can risk travelling that way, are very much mistaken. Even moderately rough weather makes the unsheltered deck impossible; the nether decks of the ship become full of sickening odours and seasickness claims nearly all the passengers as victims. There is no escape; even on so large a ship as the _Kaiser Wilhelm II_ all must remain in their bunks. On my last trip I counted five bitter days when not one steerage passenger could go on deck, while the cabin passengers were travelling over comparatively quiet waters.
When the sea has become as smooth as a mill-pond the steerage passengers may venture out; 800 people, crowded in a small space, soon become acquainted and need not wait for an introduction. Less, much less than on the outward journey have the races kept themselves apart; it is true you may still discover groups of Slavs, Italians or Jews; but they have approached the gates of the Kingdom of God and you may find your brotherhoods made up of all the nations of the earth. I had around me a group of forty men who belonged to seventeen nationalities, to four faiths and to many stations in life; yet we felt ourselves bound to one another by a meagre knowledge of the English language and by our common experience in America. Most of these men felt themselves intensely American; and that was what held us together and in a measure separated us from the mass. For the majority of these birds of passage are not yet American, as the following instance will illustrate. In taking a rough census of the politics of the steerage, I asked one man: “How do you like President Roosevelt?” He replied: “I no know him. I guess he good man, I get my pay at shop; I work, I get pay, I guess that all right.” A few expressed both admiration for the President and loyalty to him, and hoped he would run for another term. They had opinions in politics and some even declared themselves neither Republicans nor Democrats, but “Inepenny.” My group of forty men, growing at the end of the journey to nearly fifty, were a loyal set, and an honest one.
Each of the men had earned the little money he had, by hard labour; not one of them by barter, and each had caught a glimpse of the higher life in America.
The Slavs were nearly all Democrats, the Italians were Republicans, and so were the Jews. There were six Social Democrats in the group, nearly evenly divided among the three races; and they were the best educated if not the most companionable of the number. The whole group was eager to know, and the questions asked were as pertinent as numerous. All of them expected to return to America before another year, and each of them will grow into the full stature of the American man.