Part 8

Then every man is considered a booster. Boosting is accepted as a national and individual function. Towns are placarded: "Boost for your own city and its own industries. Make a habit of it." In Oil City, for instance, I found in every shop a ticket announcing "Booster Week June 9-16." In that week Oil City was going to do all it could to call attention to itself. Citizens would pledge themselves to speak of Oil City to strangers in the train and when on visits to other towns. The city of Newark, New Jersey, is always recommending its own people and visitors to "Think of Newark." Whenever you enter into conversation with an American you find him suddenly drifting towards telling you the name of a hotel to stay at, or of an establishment where they sell "dandy cream," or he is praising the bricks turned out by the local brick works, or the conditions of the employment of labour in some silk works on which his native town is dependent for prosperity. In a widely distributed "Creed of the American" I read, "I remember always that I am a booster." Even fathers refer to their new-born babies as "little boosters." It should be remembered when Americans are boasting of their native land and its institutions that they were cradled in boosting. It is a habit that in many ways has profited America. It has attracted the emigrant more than all that has ever been printed about it. It is a great commercial habit. But it is in the end degrading.

What is the name of the fairy who has muttered an incantation over the Pilgrim Father and changed him into a booster? And is a booster only a Pilgrim Father who brags about the stuff he manufactures?

It seemed to me that by substituting the idea _booster_ for the idea _man_ you get rid of so many of the weaknesses of flesh and blood. A man who is boosting day in and day out, using his tongue as a sort of living stores' catalogue, is necessarily loyal to the great machine. But loyalty to the machine has its dangers. On my journey to Chicago I made some interesting observations in Natural History. I got into the train at Franklin to go to Oil City, some five or six urban miles. What was my astonishment to see that each of the eight or nine passengers in my car had fixed their railway tickets in the ribbons of their hats, and they themselves were deep in their newspapers. The conductor came along and took the tickets from their hats and examined them, collected those that were due to be given up and punched those that were not, and stuck them back in the ribbons of the hats, the wearers reading their newspapers all the time and making not the slightest sign that they noticed what the conductor was doing. The only sign of consciousness I observed was a sort of subtle pleasure in acting so--the sort of mild pleasure which suffuses the faces of lunatics when they are humoured by visitors to the asylum. They were shamming that they were machinery, and in almost the same style as the man who is under the delusion that he is a teapot, one arm being his spout and the other his handle.

Thus the elevator man in the Department Store also thinks himself a bit of machinery. He seems to be trained to act mechanically, and never to alter the staccato patter that comes from his mouth at each floor. He speaks like a human phonograph.

Then all waiters, shop-attendants, barbers, and the like try to behave like manikins. Most of all, in the language of Americans is the mechanical obsession apparent. A man who is confined in a hospital writes: "I'm _holding down a bed_ in the hospital over here." The man who meets another and brings him along, simply "collects" him in America. The baseball team that beats another 6-0 "slips a six-nothing defeat" on them. Especially in baseball reports, commercialism and rhythms heard in great "works" abound.

The influence of great machinery gets to the heart of the people. A man when he joins a gang of workmen is taught to co-operate; he has to trim off any original or personal way of doing things, and fit in with the rest of the gang. When the gang is going mechanically and easily, a man quicker than the rest is taken as leader, and the speed of the work is raised. The mechanical action in each individual is intensified, is perfected. Cinematograph films are even taken of gangs at work; the pictures are shown before experts, who indicate weak points, recommend discharges or alterations and show how the gangs can be reconstituted to work more smoothly. Each man is drilled to act like a machine, and the drilling enters into the fibre of his being to such an extent that when work is over his muscles move habitually in certain directions, and the rhythm of his day's labour controls his language and his thought.

In the factory it is the same. In a vast mechanical contrivance there is just one thing that machinery cannot do; so between two immense complicated engines it is necessary to place a human link. A man goes there, and flesh and blood is grafted into steel and oil. The man performs his function all day, but he also senses the great machine in his mind and his soul; and when he goes out to vote for his President, or talk to men and women about the world in which he lives, he does so more as a standardised bit of mechanism, than as a tender human being.

Alas, for the men and women who wear out and cease to be serviceable! They are the old iron, and their place is the scrap-heap. "White trash" is the name by which they go.

Bernard Shaw, and indeed many others, look forward to the diminution of toil by machinery. The minimising of toil is to them a great blessing. Because machinery lessens toil they are on the side of machinery. Meanwhile life shows a paradox. The Russian peasant who works without machines toils less than the American who takes advantage of every invention. The Russian emigrant who comes to America simply does not know what work is, and he stares in amazement at the angry foreman who tells him, when he is at it at his hardest, to "get a move on yer."

In America the Americans slave; they slave for dollars, for more business, for advancement, but in the end for dollars only, I suppose. They will fill up any odd moment with some work that will bring in money. They will make others work, and take the last ounce of energy out of their employees. The machine itself is the size of America, and only in little nooks and corners can anything spring up that is not of the machine. Even millionaires know nothing more to do than to go on making millions. Yet there is not a feverish anxiety to get money. Losses are borne with equanimity. It's just a matter of "the apple tree's loaded with fruit. I'm going up to get another apple."

Present experience shows that machinery increases the toil of mankind. It need not increase it, but it does. It might diminish it, but there are many reasons why it does not. For one thing, it increases the standard of living. It makes rocking-chairs, porch-swings, automobiles, and the like indispensable things. First, machinery makes the things, then the things make the machinery duplicate themselves. So it raises the standard of living and increases the toil of mankind. It is going on increasing the standard of living for the rich, for the middle-class aping the rich, and for the working men aping the middle-class.

Is it good, then, that the standard of living is being raised? Well, no; because the standard of living now means the standard of luxury. I should have used that phrase from the beginning.

I said this to a man on the road, and he asked me what I thought a man should live for, but I could not answer him. Each man has his individual destiny to fulfil. Destiny is not a matter of the clothes you wear or of the cushions you sit upon. The beggar pilgrim going in rags to Jerusalem may be more happy than a Pierpont Morgan, who writes pathetically at the head of the bequest of his millions that he believes in the blood of Jesus.

One thing I noted in America, that the blossom of religion seems to have been pressed between Bible leaves, withered and dried long ago. What is called religion is a sort of ethical rampage. The descendants of the Puritans are "probing sin" and "whipping vice." The rich are signing cheques, the hospitals are receiving cheques. The women of the upper classes are visiting the poor and adopting the waifs. But seldom did I come in contact with a man or a woman who stood in humble relation to God or the mystery of life. Even the great passion to put things right, lift the masses, stop corruption, and build beautiful cities and states is begotten in the sureness of science rather than in the fear of the Lord. Far from fearing God, preachers announce from their pulpits that they are "working with Him," or "co-operating with the inevitable tendencies of the world," or "hastening on the work of evolution." For my part I believe that it is my sacred due to my brother that he be given an opportunity of facing this world, the mystery of its beauty and of his life upon it, that he find out God for himself and learn to pray to Him. But that is at once Eastern and personal.

The Y.M.C.A. informs me as I sit in a car that "The great asset of this town is the young men of this town." Must it be put that way? Is that the only way in which the people of the town can be got to understand how wonderful is the life and promise of any young man, how tender and gentle and lovable he is personally, how unformed, how fresh from his mother and his Creator?

As I go along the road I pick up tracts, sown by the devil, I suppose. Here is one of them:

Verily I say unto you that each and every one of you may be a Count of Monte Christo, and some day exclaim, "The World is mine!"

The world was made for you, that I know. That you were made for the world goes without saying.

Therefore hear me and believe me. If you desire wealth it _can_ be yours. If you desire _fame_ it can be yours.

But you cannot get something for nothing. You must pay for everything worth having. You must pay the price set upon it, and in the coin of the realm.

The coin of the realm is industry--just that. Industry and only industry. Nothing but industry.

Poor immigrant, who thinks it would be grand to be a Count of Monte Christo, or, to bring it nearer home, a John D. Rockefeller or an Andrew Carnegie, and who thinks that honest labour will take him there! Even were American success a thing worth striving for it is not won by that means. It is a game of halma. It's not the man who moves all his pieces out one square at a time who wins, but the sagacious player who knows both to plan in advance and to hop over others when the opportunity arises.

But the good American young man, "the greatest asset of the town," believes this gospel, and he gives his body and mind to the great machine, and fills the gap between two otherwise disconnected mechanisms. If he has been brought up "well," he just fits the gap and is standard size. He feels in his soul every throb of the engines, and registers in his integuments every rhythm and rhyme of the great, accurate, definite, circulating, oscillating machine. He behaves like a machine in his leisure hours. He even dances like a mechanical contrivance. On none of the occasions when the Fatherland requires his sober human judgment can he stand as a man. He seems spoilt for the true citizenship. What he does understand is the improvement, adjustment, and significance of machinery, and he can look intelligently at America the Great Machine. Perhaps this is his function whilst America is realising the dream of materialism and progress. But America would take care of itself if the American were all right. I could not but have that opinion as I left the cities and walked through the rich country, the new world, as yet scarcely visibly shopsoiled by commercialism.

VII

RUSSIANS AND SLAVS AT SCRANTON

I came into Forest City along a road made of coal-dust. A black by-path led off to the right down a long gradual slope, and was lost among the culm-heaps of a devastated country side. Miners with sooty faces and heavy coal-dusty moustaches came up in ones and twos and threes, wearing old peak-hats, from the centre of the front of which rose their black nine-inch lamps looking like cockades. They carried large tarnished "grub-cans," they wore old cotton blouses, and showed by unbuttoned buttons their packed, muscular bodies. Shuffling forward up the hill they looked like a different race of men--these divers of the earth. And they were nearly all Russians or Lithuanians or Slavs of one kind or another.

"Mostly foreigners here," said I to an American whom I overtook.

"You can go into that saloon among the crowd and not hear a word of white the whole night," he replied.

I addressed a collier in English.

"Are you an American?"

"No speak English," he replied, and frowned.

"From Russia?" I inquired, in his own tongue.

"And you from where?" he asked with a smile. "Are you looking for a job?"

But before I could answer he sped away to meet a trolly that was just whizzing along to a stopping-place. Presently I myself got into a car and watched in rapid procession the suburbs of Carbondale and Scranton. Black-faced miners waited in knots at the stations all along the road. I read on many rocks and railings the scrawled advertisement, "Buy diamonds from Scurry." Girls crowded into the car from the emptying silk-mills, and they were in slashed skirts, some of them, and all in loud colours, and over-decorated with frills, ribbons, and shoddy jewellery. We came to dreary Iceville, all little grey houses in the shadow of an immense slack mountain. We came into the fumes of Carbondale, where the mines have been on fire ten years; we got glimpses of the far, beautiful hills and the tender green of spring woods set against the soft darkness of abundant mountains. We dived into wretched purlieus where the frame-buildings seemed like flotsam that had drifted together into ridges on the bending earth. We saw dainty little wooden churches with green and yellow domes, the worshipping places of Orthodox Greeks, Hungarians, Ruthenians, and at every turn of the road saw the broad-faced, cavernous-eyed men and the bright-eyed, full-bosomed women of the Slavish nations. I realised that I had reached the barracks of a portion of America's great army of industrial mercenaries.

I stayed three days at Casey's Hotel in Scranton, and slept nights under a roof once more, after many under the stars. I suppose there was a journalist in the foyer of the hotel, for next morning, when I opened one of the local papers, I read the following impression of my arrival:

With an Alpine rucksack strapped to his back, his shoes thick with coal-dust, and a slouch hat pulled down on all sides to shut out the sun, a tall, raw-boned stranger walked up Lackawanna Avenue yesterday afternoon, walked into the rotunda of the Hotel Casey and actually obtained a room.

Every paper told that I was an Englishman specially interested in Russians and the America of the immigrant. So I needed no further introduction to the people of the town.

Just as I was going into the breakfast-room a bright boy came up to me and asked me in Russian if I were Stephen Graham. "My name is Kuzma," said he. "I am a Little Russian. I read you wanted to know about the Russians here, so I came along to see you."

"Come and have breakfast," said I.

We sat down at a table for two, and considered each a delicately printed sheet entitled, "Some suggestions for your breakfast." Kuzma was thrilled to sit in such a place; he had never been inside the hotel before. It was pretty daring of him to come and seek me there. But Russians are like that, and America is a free country.

As we had our grape-fruit and our coffee and banana cream and various other "suggestions," Kuzma told me his story. He was a Little Russian, or rather a Red Russian or Ruthenian, and came from Galicia. Three years previously he had arrived in New York and found a job as dish-washer at a restaurant, after three months of that he progressed to being bottle-washer at a druggist's, then he became ice-carrier at a hotel. Then another friendly Ruthenian introduced him to a Polish estate agent, who was doing a large business in selling farms to Polish immigrants. As Kuzma knew half a dozen Slavonic dialects the Pole took him away from New York, and sat him in his office at Scranton, putting him into smart American attire, and making a citizen out of a "Kike." I should say for the benefit of English readers that illiterate Russians and Russian Jews are called Kikes, illiterate Italians are "Wops," Hungarians are "Hunkies." These are rather terms of contempt, and the immigrant is happy when he can speak and understand and answer in English, and so can take his stand as an American. After six months' clerking and interpreting Kuzma began to do a little business on his own account, and actually learned how to deal in real estate and sell to his brother Slavs at a profit.

Kuzma, as he sat before me at breakfast, was a bright, well-dressed business American. You'd never guess that but three years before he had entered the New World and taken a job as dish-washer. He had seized the opportunity.

"You're a rich man now?" said I.

"So-so. Richer than I could ever be in Galicia. I'm learning English at the High School here, and when I pass my examination I shall begin to do well."

"You are studying?"

"I do a composition every day, on any subject, sometimes I write a little story. I try to write my life for the teacher, but he says I am too ambitious."

"Do you love your Ruthenian brothers and sisters here?"

"No; I prefer the Great Russians."

"You're a very handsome young man. I expect you've got a young lady in your mind now. Is she an American, or one of your own people? Does she live here, or did you leave her away over there, in Europe?"

"I don't think of them. I shall, however, marry a Russian girl."

"Have you many friends here?"

"Very many."

"You will take me to them?"

"Oh yes, with pleasure."

"And where shall we go first? It is Sunday morning. Shall we go to church?"

We left the hotel and went to a large Baptist chapel. When we arrived there we found the whole congregation engaged in Bible study. The people were divided into three sections,--Russians, Ruthenians, Poles. Russians sat together, Ruthenians and Little Russians together, and Poles together. I was most heartily welcomed, and took a place among the circle of Russians, Kuzma being admitted there also, though by rights he should have gone to the other Ruthenians. He was evidently a favourite.

We took the forty-second chapter of Genesis, reading aloud the first verse in Russian, the second in Ruthenian, and the third in Polish. When that was accomplished we prayed in Ruthenian, then we listened to an evangelical sermon in Russian, and then sang, "Nearer, my God, to Thee!" in the same manner as we had read the chapter of Genesis--first verse in Russian, second in Ruthenian, third in Polish. It was strange to find myself singing with Kuzma:

Do Ciebie Boze moj! Przyblizam sie.

I have never seen Poles and Ruthenians and Russians so happy together as in this chapel, and indeed in America generally. In Russia they more or less detest one another. They are certainly of different faiths, and they do not care about one another's language. But here there is a real Pan-Slavism. It will hold the Slavic peoples together a long time, and separate them from other Americans. Still there are not many cities in the United States resembling Scranton ethnologically. The wandering Slav when he moves to another city is generally obliged to go to a chapel where only English is spoken, and he strains his mind and his emotions to comprehend the American spirit.

After the hymn the congregation divided into classes, and talked about the Sermon on the Mount, and to me they were like very earnest children at a Sunday School. I was able to look round. There were few women in the place; nearly all of us were working men, miners whose wan faces peered out from the grime that showed the limit of their washing. At least half the men were suffering from blood-poisoning caused by coal bruises, and their foreheads and temples showed dents and discolorations. They had been "up against it." They would not have been marked that way in Russia, but I don't think they grudged anything to America. They had smiles on their lips and warmth in their eyes; they were very much alive. "Tough fellows, these Russians," wrote Gorky. "Pound them to bits and they'll come up smiling."

They were nearly all peasants who had been Orthodox, but had been "converted"; they were strictly abstinent; they sighed for Russia, but they were proud to feel themselves part of the great Baptist community, and knit to America by religious ties. None of them entirely approved of Scranton. They felt that a mining town was worse than anything they had come from in Russia, but they were glad of the high wages they obtained, and were saving up either to go back to Russia and buy land or to buy land in America. They craved to settle on the land again.

It seemed to me Kuzma's business of agent for real estate among the Slavs was likely to prove a very profitable one. I shall come back to Scranton one day and find him a millionaire. He evidently had the business instinct--an example of the Slav who does not want the land again. The fact that he sought me out showed that he was on the _qui vive_ in life.

When the service was concluded we went over the church with a young Russian who had fled to America to escape conscription, and who averred that he would never go back to his own country. His nose was broken, and of a peculiar blue hue, owing to blood-poisoning. His finger-nails were cut short to the quick, but even so, the coal-dust was deep between the flesh and the nail. He was most cordial, his handshake was something to remember, even to rue a little. He had been one of those who took the collection, and he emptied the money on to a table--a clatter of cents and nickels. He showed us with much edification the big bath behind the pulpit where the converted miners upon occasion walked the plank to the songs of fellow-worshippers. They were no doubt attracted by the holiness of water, considering the dirt in which they lived.

"He is a Socialist," said Kuzma, as we went away to have lunch. "A Socialist and a Baptist as well. He has a Socialist gathering in the afternoon and Russian tea and speeches, and he wants me to go. But they hold there should be no private property. I want private property. I want to travel and to have books of my own, so I can't call myself a Socialist."

In the afternoon Kuzma took me to the Public Library and showed me its resources. In the evening we went to supper at the house of a dear old Slovak lady, who had come from Hungary on a visit thirty years ago, and had never returned to her native land. She had been courted and won and married within three weeks of her arrival--her husband a rich Galician Slav. Now she was a widow, and had three or four daughters, who were so American you'd never suspect their foreign parentage.

She told me of the many Austrian and Hungarian Slavs in Pennsylvania, and gave it as her opinion that whenever a political party was badly worsted in south-eastern Europe the beaten wanted to emigrate _en bloc_ to the land of freedom. When they came over they held to the national traditions and discussed national happenings for a while, but they gradually forgot, and seldom went back to the European imbroglio.