On the Trail of the Immigrant
by Edward Alfred Steiner · English · Gutenberg #40887 · 530,448 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: On the Trail of the Immigrant
Author: Edward Alfred Steiner
Release date: September 28, 2012 [eBook #40887]
Language: English
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[Illustration: _From stereograph copyright--1904, by Underwood &
Underwood, N. Y._
AT THE GATE
With tickets fastened to coats and dresses, the immigrants pass out
through the gate to enter into their new inheritance, and become our
fellow citizens.]
ON THE TRAIL
OF
THE IMMIGRANT
EDWARD A. STEINER’S
Studies of Immigration
_From Alien to Citizen_
The Story of My Life in America
Illustrated net $1.50
In this interesting autobiography we see Professor Steiner
pressing ever forward and upward to a position of international
opportunity and influence.
_The wonderful varied Life-story of the author of
“On the Trail of the Immigrant.”_
_The Broken Wall_
Stories of the Mingling Folk.
Illustrated net $1.00
“A big heart and a sense of humor go a long way toward making
a good book. Dr. Edward A. Steiner has both these qualifications
and a knowledge of immigrants’ traits and character.”
--_Outlook._
_Against the Current_
Simple Chapters from a Complex Life.
12mo, cloth net $1.25
“As frank a bit of autobiography as has been published for
many a year. The author has for a long time made a close
study of the problems of immigration, and makes a strong
appeal to the reader.”--_The Living Age._
_The Immigrant Tide--Its Ebb and Flow_
Illustrated, 8vo, cloth net $1.50
“May justly be called an epic of present day immigration,
and is a revelation that should set our country thinking.”
--_Los Angeles Times._
_On the Trail of The Immigrant_
Illustrated, 12mo, cloth net $1.50
“Deals with the character, temperaments, racial traits, aspirations
and capabilities of the immigrant himself. Cannot fail to afford
excellent material for the use of students of immigrant
problems.”--_Outlook._
_The Mediator_
A Tale of the Old World and the New.
Illustrated, 12mo, cloth net $1.25
“A graphic story, splendidly told.”--ROBERT WATCHORN,
_Former Commissioner of Immigration_.
_Tolstoy, the Man and His Message_
A Biographical Interpretation.
_Revised and enlarged._ Illustrated, 12mo, cloth net $1.50
ON THE TRAIL
OF
THE IMMIGRANT
EDWARD A. STEINER
_Professor in Iowa College, Grinnell, Iowa_
_ILLUSTRATED_
[Illustration]
NEW YORK CHICAGO TORONTO
Fleming H. Revell Company
LONDON AND EDINBURGH
Copyright, 1906, by
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY
New York: 158 Fifth Avenue
Chicago: 125 No. Wabash Ave.
Toronto: 25 Richmond Street, W.
London: 21 Paternoster Square
Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street
_This book is affectionately dedicated to
“The Man at the Gate”
ROBERT WATCHORN,
United States Commissioner of Immigration
at the
Port of New York:
Who, in the exercise of his office has been loyal to the interests
of his country, and has dealt humanely, justly and without
prejudice, with men of “Every kindred and tongue and people and
nation.”_
_ACKNOWLEDGMENT_
_Cordial recognition is tendered to the editors of The Outlook for
their courtesy in permitting the use of certain portions of this
book which have already appeared in that journal._
CONTENTS
I. BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION 9
II. THE BEGINNING OF THE TRAIL 16
III. THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE STEERAGE 30
IV. LAND, HO! 48
V. AT THE GATEWAY 64
VI. “THE MAN AT THE GATE” 78
VII. THE GERMAN IN AMERICA 94
VIII. THE SCANDINAVIAN IMMIGRANT 112
IX. THE JEW IN HIS OLD WORLD HOME 126
X. THE NEW EXODUS 143
XI. IN THE GHETTOS OF NEW YORK 154
XII. THE SLAVS AT HOME 179
XIII. THE SLAVIC INVASION 198
XIV. DRIFTING WITH THE “HUNKIES” 213
XV. THE BOHEMIAN IMMIGRANT 225
XVI. LITTLE HUNGARY 238
XVII. THE ITALIAN AT HOME 252
XVIII. THE ITALIAN IN AMERICA 262
XIX. WHERE GREEK MEETS GREEK 282
XX. THE NEW AMERICAN AND THE NEW PROBLEM 292
XXI. THE NEW AMERICAN AND OLD PROBLEMS 309
XXII. RELIGION AND POLITICS 321
XXIII. BIRDS OF PASSAGE 334
XXIV. IN THE SECOND CABIN 347
XXV. AU REVOIR 359
APPENDIX 365
INDEX 371
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
_Facing page_
AT THE GATE _Title_
AS SEEN BY MY LADY OF THE FIRST CABIN 10
THE BEGINNING OF THE TRAIL 26
WILL THEY LET ME IN? 50
THE SHEEP AND THE GOATS 66
BACK TO THE FATHERLAND 92
FAREWELL TO HOME AND FRIENDS 114
ISRAELITES INDEED 140
THE GHETTO OF THE NEW WORLD 156
FROM THE BLACK MOUNTAIN 180
WITHOUT THE PALE 208
HO FOR THE PRAIRIE! 246
THE BOSS 270
IN AN EVENING SCHOOL, NEW YORK 294
A SLAV OF THE BALKANS 302
ON THE DAY OF ATONEMENT 330
ON THE TRAIL OF THE IMMIGRANT
I
BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION
_My Dear Lady of the First Cabin_:
On the fourth morning out from Hamburg, after your maid had disentangled
you from your soft wrappings of steamer rugs, and leaning upon her arm,
you paced the deck for the first time, the sun smiled softly upon the
smooth sea, and its broken reflections came back hot upon your pale
cheeks. Then your gentle eyes wandered from the illimitable sea back to
the steamer which carried you. You saw the four funnels out of which
came pouring clouds of smoke trailing behind the ship in picturesque
tracery; you watched the encircling gulls which had been your fellow
travellers ever since we left the white cliffs of Albion; and then your
eyes rested upon those mighty Teutons who stood on the bridge, and whose
blue eyes searched the sea for danger, or rested upon the compass for
direction.
From below came the sweet notes of music, gentle and wooing, one of the
many ways in which the steamship company tried to make life pleasant
for you, to bring back your “Bon appétit” to its tempting tables. Then
suddenly, you stood transfixed, looking below you upon the deck from
which came rather pronounced odours and confused noises. The notes of a
jerky harmonica harshly struck your ears attuned to symphonies; and the
song which accompanied it was gutteral and unmusical.
The deck which you saw, was crowded by human beings; men, women and
children lay there, many of them motionless, and the children, numerous
as the sands of the sea,--unkempt and unwashed, were everywhere in
evidence.
You felt great pity for the little ones, and you threw chocolate cakes
among them, smiling as you saw them in their tangled struggle to get
your sweet bounty.
You pitied them all; the frowsy headed, ill clothed women, the men who
looked so hungry and so greedy, and above all you pitied, you said
so,--do you remember?--you said you pitied your own country for having
to receive such a conglomerate of human beings, so near to the level of
the beasts. I well recall it; for that day they did look like animals.
It was the day after the storm and they had all been seasick; they had
neither the spirit nor the appliances necessary for cleanliness. The
toilet rooms were small and hard to reach, and sea water as you well
know is not a good cleanser. They were wrapped in gray blankets which
they had brought from their bunks, and you were right; they did look
like animals, but not half so clean as the cattle which one sees so
often on an outward journey; certainly not half so comfortable.
[Illustration: _From stereograph copyright--1905, by Underwood &
Underwood, N. Y._
AS SEEN BY MY LADY OF THE FIRST CABIN.
The fellowship of the steerage makes good comrades, where no barriers
exist and introductions are neither possible nor necessary.]
You were taken aback when I spoke to you. I took offense at your
suspecting us to be beasts, for I was one of them; although all that
separated you and me was a little iron bar, about fifteen or twenty
rungs of an iron ladder, and perhaps as many dollars in the price of our
tickets.
You were amazed at my temerity, and did not answer at once; then you
begged my pardon, and I grudgingly forgave you. One likes to have a
grudge against the first cabin when one is travelling steerage.
The next time you came to us, it was without your maid. You had quite
recovered and so had we. The steerage deck was more crowded than ever,
but we were happy, comparatively speaking; happy in spite of the fact
that the bread was so doughy that we voluntarily fed the fishes with it,
and the meat was suspiciously flavoured.
Again you threw your sweetmeats among us, and asked me to carry a basket
of fruit to the women and children. I did so; I think to your
satisfaction. When I returned the empty basket, you wished to know all
about us, and I proceeded to tell you many things--who the Slavs are,
and I brought you fine specimens of Poles, Bohemians, Servians and
Slovaks,--men, women and children: and they began to look to you like
men, women and children, and not like beasts. I introduced to you,
German, Austrian and Hungarian Jews, and you began to understand the
difference. Do you remember the group of Italians, to whom you said
good-morning in their own tongue, and how they smiled back upon you all
the joy of their native land? And you learned to know the difference
between a Sicilian and a Neapolitan, between a Piedmontese and a
Calabrian. You met Lithuanians, Greeks, Magyars and Finns; you came in
touch with twenty nationalities in an hour, and your sympathetic smile
grew sweeter, and your loving bounty increased day by day.
You wondered how I happened to know these people so well; and I told you
jokingly, that it was my Social nose which over and over again, had led
me steerage way across the sea, back to the villages from which the
immigrants come and onward with them into the new life in America.
You suspected that it was not a Social nose but a Social heart; that I
was led by my sympathies and not by my scientific sense, and I did not
dispute you. You urged me to write what I knew and what I felt, and now
you see, I have written. I have tried to tell it in this book as I told
it to you on board of ship. I told you much about the Jews and the
Slavs because they are less known and come in larger numbers. When I had
finished telling you just who these strangers are, and something of
their life at home and among us, in the strange land, you grew very
sympathetic, without being less conscious how great is the problem which
these strangers bring with them.
If I succeed in accomplishing this for my larger audience, the public, I
shall be content.
You were loth to listen to figures; for you said that statistics were
not to your liking and apt to be misleading; so I leave them from these
pages and crowd them somewhere into the back of the book, where the
curious may find them if they delight in them.
My telling deals only with life; all I attempt to do is to tell what I
have lived among the immigrants, and not much of what I have counted.
Here and there I have dropped a story which you said might be worth
re-telling; and I tell it as I told it to you--not to earn the smile
which may follow, but simply that it may win a little more sympathy for
the immigrant.
If here and there I stop to moralize, it is largely from force of habit;
and not because I am eager to play either preacher or prophet. If I
point out some great problems, I do it because I love America with a
love passing your own; because you are home-born and know not the lot
of the stranger.
You may be incredulous if I tell you that I do not realize that I was
not born and educated here; that I am not thrilled by the sight of my
cradle home, nor moved by my country’s flag.
I know no Fatherland but America; for after all, it matters less where
one was born, than where one’s ideals had their birth; and to me,
America is not the land of mighty dollars, but the land of great ideals.
I am not yet convinced that the peril to these ideals lies in those who
come to you, crude and unfinished; if I were, I would be the first one
to call out: “Shut the gates,” and not the last one to exile myself for
your country’s good.
I think that the peril lies more in the first cabin than in the
steerage; more in the American colonies in Monte Carlo and Nice than in
the Italian colonies in New York and Chicago. Not the least of the peril
lies in the fact that there is too great a gulf between you and the
steerage passenger, whose virtues you will discover as soon as you learn
to know him.
I send out this book in the hope that it will mediate between the first
cabin and the steerage; between the hilltop and lower town; between the
fashionable West side and the Ghetto.
Do you remember my Lady of the First Cabin, what those Slovaks said to
you as you walked down the gangplank in Hoboken? What they said to you,
I now say to my book: “Z’Boghem,” “The Lord be with thee.”
II
THE BEGINNING OF THE TRAIL
Some twenty years ago, while travelling from Vienna on the Northern
Railway, I was locked into my compartment with three Slavic women, who
entered at a way station, and who for the first time in their lives had
ventured from their native home by way of the railroad. In fear and awe
they looked out the window upon the moving landscape, while with each
recurring jolt they held tightly to the wooden benches.
One of them volunteered the information that they were journeying a
great distance, nearly twenty-five miles from their native village. I
ventured to say that I was going much further than twenty-five miles,
upon which I was asked my destination. I replied: “America,” expecting
much astonishment at the announcement; but all they said was: “Merica?
where is that? is it really further than twenty-five miles?”
Until about the time mentioned, the people of Eastern and Southeastern
Europe had remained stationary; just where they had been left by the
slow and glacial like movement of the races and tribes to which they
belonged. Scarcely any traces of their former migrations survive,
except where some warlike tribe has exploited its history in song,
describing its escape from the enemy, into some mountain fastness, which
was of course deserted as soon as the fury of war had spent itself.
From the great movements which changed the destinies of other European
nations, these people were separated by political and religious
barriers; so that the discovery of America was as little felt as the
discovery of the new religious and political world laid bare by the
Reformation. Each tribe and even each smaller group developed according
to its own native strength, or according to how closely it leaned
towards Western Europe, which was passing through great evolutionary and
revolutionary changes.
On the whole, it may be said that in many ways they remained stationary,
certainly immobile. Old customs survived and became laws; slight
differentiations in dress occurred and became the unalterable costume of
certain regions; idioms grew into dialects and where the native genius
manifested itself in literature, the dialect became a language. These
artificial boundaries became impassable, especially where differences in
religion occurred. Each group was locked in, often hating its nearest
neighbours and closest kinsmen, and also having an aversion to anything
which came from without. Social and economic causes played no little
part, both in the isolation of these tribes and groups and in the
necessity for migration. When the latter was necessary, they moved
together to where there was less tyranny and more virgin soil. They went
out peacefully most of the time, but could be bitter, relentless and
brave when they encountered opposition.
But they did not go out with the conqueror’s courage nor with the
adventurer’s lust for fame; they were no iconoclasts of a new
civilization, nor the bearers of new tidings. They went where no one
remained; where the Romans had thinned the ranks of the Germans, where
Hun, Avar and Turk had left valleys soaked in blood and made ready for
the Slav’s crude plow; where Roman colonies were decaying and Roman
cities were sinking into the dunes made by ocean’s sands. They destroyed
nothing nor did they build anything; they accepted little or nothing
which they found on conquered soil, but lived the old life in the new
home, whether it was under the shadow of the Turkish crescent, or where
Roman conquerors had left empty cities and decaying palaces.
In travelling through that most interesting Austrian province, Dalmatia,
on the shores of the Adriatic, opposite Italy, I came upon the palace of
Diocletian, in which the Slav has built a town, using the palace walls
for the foundations of his dwellings. In spite of the fact that both
strength and beauty lie imbedded in these foundations, the houses are
as crude and simple as those built in an American mining camp. Upon the
ruins of the ancient city of Salona, I found peasants breaking the
Corinthian pillars into gravel for donkey paths. These people although
surrounded by conquering nations were not amalgamated, and were enslaved
but not changed. Art lived and died in their midst but bequeathed them
little or no culture.
This is true not only of many of the Slavs but also of many of the Jews
who live among them and who have remained unimpressed and unchanged for
centuries; except as tyrannical governments played shuffle-board with
them, pushing them hither and thither as policy or caprice dictated.
The Italian peasant began his wanderings earlier than the other nations,
at least to other portions of Europe, where he was regarded as
indispensable in the building of railroads. These movements, however,
were spasmodic, and he soon returned to his native village to remain
there, locked in by prejudice and superstition, and unbaptized by the
spirit of progress.
But all this is different now; and the change came through that word
quite unknown in those regions twenty-five years ago--the word AMERICA.
Having exhausted the labour supply of northern Europe which, as for
instance in Germany, needed all its strength for the up-building of its
own industries, American capitalists deemed it necessary to find new
human forces to increase their wealth by developing the vast, untouched
natural resources. Just how systematically the recruiting was carried on
is hard to tell, but it is sure that it did not require much effort, and
that the only thing necessary was to make a beginning.
In nearly all the countries from which new forces were to be drawn there
was chronic, economic distress, which had lasted long, and which grew
more painful as new and higher needs disclosed themselves to the lower
classes of society. Most of the land as a rule, was held by a privileged
class, and labour was illy paid. The average earning of a Slovak peasant
during the harvest season was about twenty-five cents a day, which sank
to half that sum the rest of the time, with work as scarce as wages were
low.
If a load of wood was brought to town, it was besieged by a small army
of labourers ready to do the necessary sawing; other work than wood
sawing there practically was none, and consequently in the winter time
much distress prevailed.
The labour of women was still more poorly paid. A muscular servant girl,
who would wash, scrub, attend to the garden and cattle and help with the
harvesting, received about ten dollars a year, with a huge cake and
perhaps a pair of boots no less huge as a premium. These wages were
paid only in the most prosperous portion of the Slavic world, being much
lower in other regions, while in the mountains neither work nor wages
were obtainable.
The hard rye bread, scantily cut and rarely unadulterated, with an
onion, was the daily portion, while meat to many of the people was a
luxury obtainable only on special holidays. I remember vividly the
untimely passing away of a pig, which belonged to a titled estate.
According to the law, which reached with its mighty arm to this small
village, the pig must be decently buried and covered by--not balsam and
spices, but quick lime and coal oil. Hardly had these rites been
performed when the carcass mysteriously disappeared--but meat was
scarce, and the peasants were hungry.
During this same period, the Jewish people who were scattered through
Eastern Europe, began to feel not only economic distress, but existence
itself was often made unbearable by the newly awakened national feeling,
which reacted against the Jews in waves of cruel persecution. Such trade
as could be diverted into other channels was taken from them and they
grew daily poorer, living became precarious and life insecure. It did
not take much agitation to induce any of these people to emigrate, and
when the first venturesome travellers returned with money in the bank,
silver watches in their pockets, “store clothes” on their backs, and a
feeling of “I am as good as anybody” in their minds, each one of them
became an agent and an agitator, and if paid agents ever existed, they
might have been immediately dispensed with.
Now one can stand in any district town of Hungary, Poland or Italy and
see, coming down the mountains or passing along the highways and byways
of the plains, larger or smaller groups of peasants, not all
picturesquely clad, passing in a never ending stream, on, towards this
new world. The stream is growing larger each day, and the source seems
inexhaustible.
Sombre Jews come, on whose faces fear and care have plowed deep furrows,
whose backs are bent beneath the burden of law and lawlessness. They
come, thousands at a time, at least 5,000,000 more may be expected; and
he does not know what misery is, who has not seen them on that march
which has lasted nearly 2,000 years beneath the burden heaped by hate
and prejudice. Both peasant and Jew come from Russian, Austrian or
Magyar rule, under which they have had few of the privileges of
citizenship but many of its burdens. From valleys in the crescent shaped
Carpathians, from the sunny but barren slopes of the Alps and from the
Russian-Polish plains they are coming as once they went forth from
earlier homes; peaceful toilers, who seek a field for their surplus
labour or as traders to use their wits, and it is a longer journey than
any of their timid forbears ever undertook.
The most venturesome of the Slavs, the Bohemians, in whom the love of
wandering was always alive, started this stream of emigration as early
as the seventeenth century, sending us the noblest of their sons and
daughters, the heroes and heroines of the reformatory wars; idealists,
who like the Pilgrim Fathers, came for “Freedom to worship God.” Their
descendants have long ago been blended into the common life of the
people of America, scarcely conscious of the fact that they might have
the same pride in ancestry which the descendants of the Pilgrims delight
to exhibit. Not until the latter part of the nineteenth century, in the
70s, did the Bohemian immigrants come in large numbers and in a steady
stream, bringing with them the Czechs of Moravia, a neighbouring
province. Together they make some 200,000 of our population, fairly
distributed throughout the country, and about equally divided between
tillers of the soil and those following industrial pursuits. Nearly all
Bohemian immigrants come to stay, and adjust themselves more or less
easily to their environment. The economic distress which has brought
them here, while never acute, threatens to become so now from the over
accentuated language struggle which diverts the energies of the people
and makes proper legislation impossible. The building of railroads and
other governmental enterprises have been retarded by parliamentary
obstructionists, to whom language is more than bread and butter.
Business relations with the Germanic portions of Austria have come
almost to a standstill; conditions which are bound to increase
emigration from Bohemia’s industrial centres.
The Poles were the next of the Western Slavs to be drawn out of the
seclusion of their villages; those from Eastern Prussia being the
earliest, and those from Russian Poland the latest who have swelled the
stream of emigration.
The largest number of the Polish immigrants is composed of unskilled
labourers, most of them coming from villages where they worked in the
fields during the summer time, and in winter went to the cities where
they did the cruder work in the factories. The Poles from Germany’s part
of the divided kingdom have furnished nearly their quota of immigrants,
and those remaining upon their native acres will continue to remain
there, if only to spite the Germans who are grievously disappointed not
to see them grow less under the repressive measures of the government.
They are the thorn in the Emperor’s flesh, and with social Democrats
make enough trouble, to verify the saying: “Uneasy lies the head that
wears a crown,” true! even with regard to that most imperial of
emperors.
The Austrian Poles who have retained many of their liberties and have
also gained new privileges, have had a national and intellectual
revival, under the impulse of which the peasantry has been lifted to a
higher level which has reacted upon their economic condition; and
although that condition is rather low in Galicia, as that portion of
Poland is called, immigration from there has reached its high water
mark. The largest increase in immigration among the Poles is to be
looked for from Russian Poland where industrial and political conditions
are growing worse, and where it will take a long time to establish any
kind of equilibrium which will pacify the people and hold them to the
soil.
The Slovaks, who were relatively the best off, and further away from the
main arteries of travel, are, comparatively speaking, newcomers and
furnish at present the largest element in the Western Slavic
immigration. They have retained most staunchly many of their Slavic
characteristics, are the least impressionable among the Western Slavs,
and usually come, lured by the increased wages. They are most liable to
return to the land of their fathers after saving money enough materially
to improve their lot in life.
From the Austrian provinces, Carinthia and Styria, come increasingly
large numbers of Slovenes who are really the link between the Eastern
and Western Slavs. They belong to the highest type of that race, but
represent only a small portion of the large Slavic family. Of the
Eastern Slavs, only the Southern group has moved towards America, the
Russian peasant being bound to the soil, and unable to free himself from
the obligation of paying the heavy taxes, by removal to a foreign
country. With the larger freedom which is bound to come to him, will
also come economic relief so that the emigration of the Russian peasant
in large numbers is not a likelihood.
Lured by promises of higher wages in our industrial centres, Croatians
and Slovenians come in increasingly large numbers, while in smaller
numbers come Servians and Bulgarians.
The only Slavs who are thorough seamen and who are coming to our coasts
in increasingly large numbers as sailors and fishermen, are the
Dalmatians; and last but most heroic of all the Slavs, is the
Montenegrin, who has held his mountain fastnesses against the Turk and
who has been the living wall, resisting the victories of Islam. His
little country is blessed by but a few crumbs of soil between huge
mountains and boulders, and in the measure in which peace reigns in the
Balkans, he is without occupation and sustenance; so that he is
compelled to seek these more fertile shores, where he will for the
first time in history and quite unconsciously, “Turn the sword into a
plowshare and the spear into a pruning hook.”
[Illustration: THE BEGINNING OF THE TRAIL.
The Wanderlust of the olden time still gets its grip on the peasants of
the great plains of Eastern Europe.]
Tennyson does not over-idealize this Montenegrin in his admirable
sonnet:
They rose to where their sovran eagle sails,
They kept their faith, their freedom, on the height,
Chaste, frugal, savage, arm’d by day and night
Against the Turk; whose inroad nowhere scales
Their headlong passes, but his footstep fails,
And red with blood the Crescent reels from fight
Before their dauntless hundreds, in prone flight
By thousands down the crags and thro’ the vales.
O smallest among peoples! rough rock-throne
Of Freedom! warriors beating back the swarm
Of Turkish Islam for five hundred years.
Great Tsernogora! never since thine own
Black ridges drew the cloud and brake the storm
Has breathed a race of mightier mountaineers.
From Lithuania, a province of Russia, come smaller groups of non-Slavic
emigrants; people with an old civilization of which little remains, and
with a language which leans closest to Sanscrit, yet who, because of
their subjection to Russia, have sunk to the level of the Russian
peasants. Then there are Magyars and Finns, rather close kinsmen, who
because one lives in the South and the other far North, are as different
as the South is from the North; Greeks and Syrians, traders all of them
and workers only when they must be. We shall follow them more closely as
they pass into our own national life.
The Italian emigration, the largest which we receive from any one
source, comes primarily from Southern Italy, from the crowded cities
with their unspeakable vices; the smallest number of emigrants come from
the villages where they have all the virtues of tillers of the soil. The
most volatile of our foreign population, and perhaps the most clannish,
they represent a problem recognized by their home government, which was
the first to concern itself with it, to study it systematically, and to
aid our government so far as possible in a rational solution. The number
of Italian emigrants is still undiminished, and in spite of the fact
that in recent years more than 200,000 of them have annually left their
native land, their withdrawal is scarcely felt and the number could be
doubled without perceptible diminution at home.
There are then upon this immigrant trail, many people of varied cultural
development; some of them coming from countries in which they have been
part of a very high type of civilization, while others come from the
veritable back woods of Europe, into which neither steam nor electricity
has entered to disturb the old order, nor has yet awakened a new life.
None of them starts for America tempted by wealth which can be picked
up in the streets. That mythical man who, upon landing, refused to take
a quarter from the side-walk, because he had heard that dollars were
lying about loose, in America, has found it true because he has gone
into politics.
The immigrant of to-day, be he Slav, Italian or Jew, starts upon this
trail, with no culture, it is true, but with a virgin mind in which it
may be made to grow. Not always with a keen mind, but with a surplus of
muscle, which he is ready to exchange at the mouth of the pit or by the
furnace’s hot blast, for a higher wage than he could earn in the miry
fields of his native village;--but it is by no means settled who gets
the best of the bargain.
III
THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE STEERAGE
Back of Warsaw, Vienna, Naples and Palermo, with no place on the world’s
map to mark their existence, are small market towns to which the
peasants come from their hidden villages. They come not as is their wont
on feast and fast days, with song and music, but solemnly; the women
bent beneath their burdens, carried on head or back, and the men who
walk beside them, less conscious than usual of their superiority.
The women have lost the splendour which usually marks their attire.
Their embroidered, stiffly starched petticoats, flowered aprons and gay
kerchiefs have disappeared, and instead they have put on more sombre
garb, some cast off clothing of our civilization. The men, too, have
left their gayer coats behind them, to wear the shoddy ones which
neither warm nor become them.
Beneath the black cross which marks the boundary of the Polish town,
they usually rest themselves. The cross was erected when the peasants
were liberated from serfdom, and beneath it every wanderer rests and
prays: every wanderer but the Jew, for whom the cross symbolizes neither
liberty nor rest.
These towns which used to be buried in a cloud of dust in the summer and
a sea of mud in the winter time; to which the peasant came but rarely,
and then only to do his petty trading or his quarrelling before the law,
are the first catch basins of the little percolating streams of
emigration, and have felt their influence in increased prosperity. They
are the supply stations where much of the money is spent on the way out,
and into which the money flows from the mining camps and industrial
centres in America. One little house leans hospitably against the other,
a two-story house marks the dwelling of nobility, and the power of the
law is personified in the gendarmes, who, weaponed to the teeth, patrol
the peaceful town.
In Russia, before one may emigrate, many painful and costly formalities
must be observed, a passport obtained through the governor and speeded
on its way by sundry tips. It is in itself an expensive document without
which no Russian subject may leave his community, much less his country.
Many persons, therefore, forego the pleasure of securing official
permission to leave the Czar’s domain, and go, trusting to good luck or
to a few rubles with which they may close the ever open eyes of the
gendarmes of the Russian boundary. Austrian and Italian authorities also
require passports for their subjects, but they are less costly and are
granted to all who have satisfied the demands of the law.
These formalities over, the travellers move on to the market square, a
dusty place, where women squat, selling fruits and vegetables; the
plaster cast and gaily decorated saints, stoically receiving the
adoration of our pilgrims, who come for the last time with a petition
which now is for a prosperous journey.
There also, the agent of the steamship company receives with just as
much feeling their hard earned money in exchange for the long coveted
“Ticket,” which is to bear them to their land of hope.
From hundreds of such towns and squares, thousands of simple-minded
people turn westward each day, disappearing in the clouds of dust which
mark their progress to the railroad station and on towards the dreaded
sea.
From the small windows of fourth-class railway carriages they get
glimpses of a new world, larger than they ever dreamed it to be, and
much more beautiful. Through orderly and stately Germany, with its
picturesque villages, its castled hills and magnificent cities they
pass; across mountains and hills, and by rushing rivers, until one day
upon the horizon they see a forest of masts wedged in between the
warehouses and factories of a great city.
Guided by an official of the steamship company whose wards they have
become, they alight from the train; but not without having here and
there to pay tribute to that organized brigandage, by which every port
of embarkation is infested. The beer they drink and the food they buy,
the necessary and unnecessary things which they are urged to purchase,
are excessively dear, by virtue of the fact that a double profit is made
for the benefit of the officials or the company which they represent.
The first lodging places before they are taken to the harbours, are
dear, poor and often unsafe. Much bad business is done there which might
be controlled or entirely discontinued. For instance in Rotterdam three
years ago, coming with a party of emigrants, we were met by an employee
of the steamship company and taken in charge, ostensibly to be guided to
the company’s offices near the harbour. On the way we were made to stop
at a dirty, third-class hotel (whose chief equipment was a huge bar) and
were told to make ourselves comfortable. While we were not compelled to
spend our money, we were invited to do so, urged to drink, and left
there fully three hours until this same employee called for us. I
complained to the company through the only official whom I could reach,
and who no doubt was one of the beneficiaries, for the complaint did not
travel far.
This is only the remnant of an abuse from which the emigrant and the
country which received him, used to suffer; for our stringent
immigration laws have made it more profitable to treat the immigrant
with consideration and to look after his physical welfare.
Yet, admirable as is the machinery which has been set up at Hamburg for
the reception of the emigrant, these minor abuses have not all passed
away and while care is taken that his health does not suffer and that
his purse is not completely emptied, he is still regarded as prey.
The Italian government safeguards its emigrants admirably at Naples and
Genoa; but other governments are seemingly unconcerned. When the
official has done with the emigrants, they are taken to the emigrant
depot of the company (which in many cases is inadequate for the large
number of passengers), their papers are examined and they are separated
according to sex and religion. At Hamburg they are required to take
baths and their clothing is disinfected; after which they constantly
emit the delicious odours of hot steam and carbolic acid. The sleeping
arrangements at Hamburg are excellent. Usually twenty persons are in one
ward, but private rooms which have beds for four people can be rented.
The food is abundant and good, plenty of bread and meat are to be had,
and luxuries can be bought at reasonable prices. At Hamburg music is
provided and the emigrants may make merry at a dance until dawn of the
day of sailing.
The medical examination is now very strict, yet seemingly not strict
enough; for quite a large percentage of those who pass the German
physicians are deported on account of physical unfitness.
I wish to make this point here, and emphasize it: that restrictive
immigration has had a remarkable influence upon the German and
Netherlands steamship companies, in that they have become fairly humane
and decent, which they were not; but improvement in this direction is
still possible.
The day of embarkation finds an excited crowd with heavy packs and
heavier hearts, climbing the gangplank. An uncivil crew directs the
bewildered travellers to their quarters, which in the older ships are
far too inadequate, and in the newer ships are, if anything, worse.
Clean they are; but there is neither breathing space below nor deck room
above, and the 900 steerage passengers crowded into the hold of so
elegant and roomy a steamer as the _Kaiser Wilhelm II_, of the North
German Lloyd line, are positively packed like cattle, making a walk on
deck when the weather is good, absolutely impossible, while to breathe
clean air below in rough weather, when the hatches are down is an equal
impossibility. The stenches become unbearable, and many of the emigrants
have to be driven down; for they prefer the bitterness and danger of the
storm to the pestilential air below. The division between the sexes is
not carefully looked after, and the young women who are quartered among
the married passengers have neither the privacy to which they are
entitled nor are they much more protected than if they were living
promiscuously.
The food, which is miserable, is dealt out of huge kettles into the
dinner pails provided by the steamship company. When it is distributed,
the stronger push and crowd, so that meals are anything but orderly
procedures. On the whole, the steerage of the modern ship ought to be
condemned as unfit for the transportation of human beings; and I do not
hesitate to say that the German companies, and they provide best for
their cabin passengers, are unjust if not dishonest towards the
steerage. Take for example, the second cabin which costs about twice as
much as the steerage and sometimes not twice so much; yet the second
cabin passenger on the _Kaiser Wilhelm II_ has six times as much deck
room, much better located and well protected against inclement weather.
Two to four sleep in one cabin, which is well and comfortably furnished;
while in the steerage from 200 to 400 sleep in one compartment on
bunks, one above the other, with little light and no comforts. In the
second cabin the food is excellent, is partaken of in a luxuriantly
appointed dining-room, is well cooked and well served; while in the
steerage the unsavoury rations are not served, but doled out, with less
courtesy than one would find in a charity soup kitchen.
The steerage ought to be and could be abolished by law. It is true that
the Italian and Polish peasant may not be accustomed to better things at
home and might not be happier in better surroundings nor know how to use
them; but it is a bad introduction to our life to treat him like an
animal when he is coming to us. He ought to be made to feel immediately,
that the standard of living in America is higher than it is abroad, and
that life on the higher plane begins on board of ship. Every cabin
passenger who has seen and smelt the steerage from afar, knows that it
is often indecent and inhuman; and I, who have lived in it, know that it
is both of these and cruel besides.
On the steamer _Noordam_, sailing from Rotterdam three years ago, a
Russian boy in the last stages of consumption was brought upon the sunny
deck out of the pestilential air of the steerage. I admit that to the
first cabin passengers it must have been a repulsive sight--this
emaciated, dirty, dying child; but to order a sailor to drive him
down-stairs, was a cruel act, which I resented. Not until after repeated
complaints was the child taken to the hospital and properly nursed. On
many ships, even drinking water is grudgingly given, and on the steamer
_Staatendam_, four years ago, we had literally to steal water for the
steerage from the second cabin, and that of course at night. On many
journeys, particularly on the _Fürst Bismark_, of the Hamburg American
line, five years ago, the bread was absolutely uneatable, and was thrown
into the water by the irate emigrants.
In providing better accommodations, the English steamship companies have
always led; and while the discipline on board of ship is always stricter
than on other lines, the care bestowed upon the emigrants is
correspondingly greater.
* * * * *
At last the passengers are stowed away, and into the excitement of the
hour of departure there comes a silent heaviness, as if the surgeon’s
knife were about to cut the arteries of some vital organ. Homesickness,
a disease scarcely known among the mobile Anglo-Saxons, is a real
presence in the steerage; for there are the men and women who have been
torn from the soil in which through many generations their lives were
rooted.
No one knows the sacred agony of that moment which fills and thrills
these simple minded folk who, for the first time in their lives face the
unknown perils of the sea. The greater the distance which divides the
ship from the fast fading dock, the nearer comes the little village,
with its dusty square, its plaster cast saints and its little mud huts.
From far away Russia a small pinched face looks out and a sweet voice
calls to the departing father, not to forget Leah and her six children,
who will wait for tidings from him, be they good or ill. From Poland in
gutteral speech comes a: “God be with you, Bratye (brother), strong oak
of our village forest and our dependence; the Virgin protect thee.”
The Slovak feels his Maryanka pressing her lips against his while she
sobs out her lamentation, and he, to keep up his courage, gives a
“strong pull and a long pull” at the bottle, out of which his white
native palenka gives him its last alcoholic greeting.
Silent are the usually vociferous Italians, whose glorious Mediterranean
is blotted out by the sombre gray of the Atlantic; they shall not soon
again see the full orbed moon shining upon the bay of Naples, sending
from heaven to earth a path of silver upon which the blessed saints go
up and down. In the silence of the moment there come to them the rattle
of carts and the clatter of hoofs, the soft voice of a serenade and then
the sweet scented silence of an Italian night. They all think, even if
they have never thought much before; for the moment is as solemn as
when the padre came with his censer and holy water, or when the acolytes
rang the bells, mechanically, on the way to some death-bed.
It is all solemn, in spite of the band which strikes the well-known
notes of “Lieb Vaterland, magst ruhig sein,” and makes merrier music
each moment to check the tears and to heal the newly made wounds. They
try to be brave now, struggling against homesickness and fear, until
their faces pale, and one by one they are driven down into the hold to
suffer the pangs of the damned in the throes of a complication of
agonies for which as yet, no pills or powders have brought soothing.
But when the sun shines upon the Atlantic, and dries the deck space
allotted to the steerage passengers, they will come out of the hold one
by one, wrapped in the company’s gray blankets; pitiable looking
objects, ill-kempt and ill-kept. Stretched upon the deck nearest the
steam pipes, they await the return of the life which seemed “clean gone”
out of them.--It is at this time that cabin passengers from their
spacious deck will look down upon them in pity and dismay, getting some
sport from throwing sweetmeats and pennies among the hopeless looking
mass, out of which we shall have to coin our future citizens, from among
whom will arise fathers and mothers of future generations.
This practice of looking down into the steerage holds all the pleasures
of a slumming expedition with none of its hazards of contamination; for
the barriers which keep the classes apart on a modern ocean liner are as
rigid as in the most stratified society, and nowhere else are they more
artificial or more obtrusive. A matter of twenty dollars lifts a man
into a cabin passenger or condemns him to the steerage; gives him the
chance to be clean, to breathe pure air, to sleep on spotless linen and
to be served courteously; or to be pushed into a dark hold where soap
and water are luxuries, where bread is heavy and soggy, meat without
savour and service without courtesy. The matter of twenty dollars makes
one man a menace to be examined every day, driven up and down slippery
stairs and exposed to the winds and waves; but makes of the other man a
pet, to be coddled, fed on delicacies, guarded against draughts, lifted
from deck to deck and nursed with gentle care.
The average steerage passenger is not envious. His position is part of
his lot in life; the ship is just like Russia, Austria, Poland or Italy.
The cabin passengers are the lords and ladies, the sailors and officers
are the police and the army, while the captain is the king or czar. So
they are merry when the sun shines and the porpoises roll, when far away
a sail shines white in the sunlight or the trailing smoke of a steamer
tells of other wanderers over the deep.
“Here, Slovaks, bestir yourselves; let’s sing the song of the ‘Little
red pocket-book’ or ‘The gardener’s wife who cried.’ ‘Too sad?’ you say?
Then let’s sing about the ‘Red beer and the white cakes.’” So they sing:
“Brothers, brothers, who’ll drink the beer,
Brothers, brothers, when we are not here?
Our children they will drink it then
When we are no more living men.
Beer, beer, in glass or can,
Always, always finds its man.”
Other Slavs from Southern mountains, sing their stirring war song:
“Out there, out there beyond the mountains,
Where tramps the foaming steed of war,
Old Jugo calls his sons afar;
To aid! To aid! in my old age
Defend me from the foeman’s rage.
“Out there, out there beyond the mountains
My children follow one and all,
Where Nikita your Prince doth call;
And steep anew in Turkish gore
The sword Czar Dushan flashed of yore,
Out there, out there beyond the mountains.”
If the merriment rises to the proper pitch, there will be dancing to the
jerky notes of an harmonica or accordion; for no emigrant ship ever
sailed without one of them on board. The Germans will have a waltz upon
a limited scale, while the Poles dance a mazurka, and the Magyar
attempts a wild czardas which invariably lands him against the railing;
for it needs steady feet as well as a steadier floor than the back of
this heaving, rolling monster.
Men and women from other corners of the Slav world will be reminded of
the spinning room or of some village tavern; and joining hands will sing
with appropriate motions this, not disagreeable song, to Katyushka or
Susanka, or whatever may be the name of this “Honey-mouth.”
“We are dancing, we are dancing,
Dancing twenty-two;
Mary dances in this Kolo,
Mary sweet and true;
What a honey mouth has Mary,
Oh! what joyful bliss!
Rather than all twenty-two
I would Mary kiss.”
Greeks, Servians, Bulgarians, Magyars, Italians and Slovaks laugh at one
another’s antics and while listening to the strange sounds, are
beginning to enter into a larger fellowship than they ever enjoyed; for
so close as this many of them never came without the hand upon the hilt
or the finger upon the trigger.
When Providence is generous and grants a quiet evening, the merriment
will grow louder and louder, drowning the murmur of the sea and
silencing the sorrows of the yesterday and the fears for the morrow.
“Yes, brothers, we are travelling on to America, the land of hope; let
us be merry. Where are you going, Czeska Holka?” (a pet name for a
Bohemian girl). “To Chicago, to service, and soon, I hope, to matrimony;
that’s what they say, that you can get married in America without a
dowry and without much trouble.” Ah, yes; and get unmarried again
without much trouble; but of this fact she is blissfully ignorant.
“Where are you going, signor?” “Ah, I am going to Mulberry Street; great
city, yes, Mulberry Street, great city.” “Polak, where are you going?”
“Kellisland.” “Where do you say?” “Kellisland, where stones are and big
sea.” “Yes, yes, I know now: Kelly’s Island in Ohio. Fine place for you,
Polak; powder blast and white limestone dust, yet a fine sea and a fine
life.”
All of them are going somewhere to some one; not quite strangers they;
some one has crossed the sea before them. They are drawn by thousands of
magnets and they will draw others after them.
We have all become good comrades; for fellowship is easily begotten by
the fellows in the same ship, especially in the steerage, where no
barriers exist and where no introductions are possible or necessary. I
am sharing many confidences; of young women who go to meet their lovers;
of young men who go to make their fortunes; of bankrupts who have fled
the heavy arm of the law; of women hiding moral taint; of countless ones
who are hiding grave physical infirmities; and of some who have lost
faith in God and men, in law and justice.
Yet most of them believe with a simpler faith than our own; God is real
to them and His providence stretches over the seas. No morning, no
matter how tumultuous the waves, but the Russian Jews will put on their
phylacteries, and kissing the sacred fringes which they wear upon their
breasts, will turn towards the East and the rising Sun, to where their
holy temple stood.
Rarely will a Slav or Italian go to bed without committing himself to
the special care of some patron saint.
Vice there is, crude, rough vice, down here in the steerage. Yes, they
drink vodka,--even that rarely; but up in the cabin they drink champagne
and Kentucky whiskies, the same devils with other names. Seldom do the
steerage passengers gamble--a friendly game of cards perhaps, here and
there; while up in the cabin, from sunlight until dawn, poker chips are
piled and pass to and fro among daintily attired men and women. There
are rough jests in this steerage, and scant courtesy; but virtue is as
precious here as there, although kept under tremendous temptation. I
have crossed the ocean hither and thither, often in the steerage, more
often in the cabin; and I have found gentlemen in dirty homespun in the
one place, and in the other supposed gentlemen who were but beasts,
although they had lackeys to attend them, and suites of rooms in which
to make luxurious a useless existence. The steerage brings virtue and
vice in the rough. A dollar might not be safe, and yet as safe as a
whole bank up in the cabin; the steerage might steal a loaf of white
bread or a tempting cake, but it has not yet learned how to corner the
wheat market; the men in the steerage might be tempted to steal a ride
upon a railroad, but in the cabin I have met rascals who had stolen
whole railroads, yet were called “Captains of Industry.”
Down in the steerage there is a faith in the future, and in the despair
which often overwhelms them, I needed but to whisper: “Be patient, this
seems like Hell, but it will soon seem to you like Heaven.”
Yes, this Heaven is coming; coming down almost from above, on yonder
fringe of the sea, for far away trails the low lying smoke of the pilot
boat, and but a little farther off is--land--land. None but the
shipwrecked and the emigrants, these way-farers who come to save and be
saved, know the joy of that note which goes from lip to lip as it echoes
and reëchoes in thirty languages, yet with the one word of throbbing
joy,--land--land--AMERICA.
IV
LAND, HO!
The gay spirits soon flag when land is heralded; for Ellis Island is
ahead, with its uncertainties, and the men and women who were the
merriest and who most often went to the bar, thus trying to forget, now
are sober, and reflect. The troubled ones are usually marked by their
restless walk and by their eagerness to seek the confidences of those
who have tested the temper of the law in this unknown Eldorado.
Not long ago, on one of the ships in which I sailed, there was in the
steerage, a monk, who neither walked nor talked like one. He shunned me,
not because of my heresies, but because of my Latin, and although he
mumbled out of a prayer-book and unskillfully counted his beads, I knew
that “The devil a monk was he.”
On the eve of the great day of landing, he was pacing the deck,
evidently in an unreverential mood, and I too was there, being one of
those who prefer the biting wind of the night to the polluted air of the
steerage. He came close to me as we walked, and hesitatingly asked me in
a French to which clung a peculiar dialect never spoken in monasteries,
whether I had been in America before. When I replied in the affirmative,
he inquired all about the examination of baggage and of men, and when I
told him how strict it is, that nothing is hid from the lynx eyes of the
custom-house officials, and that nothing is sacred to them, not even the
body of a monk, he grew visibly excited.
Stealthily he drew from under the folds of his cassock, a stone, a
large, brilliant, tempting diamond, and said: “You may have that.” As I
took it between my fingers, I detected traces of the torn rim of its
setting, and passed it back into the trembling hand of his “Reverence.”
“You needn’t be afraid of that,” he said; “I am one of the monks driven
out of France, and I am taking the treasures of the Brotherhood over. I
am afraid of the high duty and it will be cheaper for me to give you
that diamond which is a pendant from the jewels of the Virgin, than to
pay for what I have; that is, if you will help me to pass this little
bag safely in.” With this he drew aside his cassock and fumbling in the
folds brought to light a little bag which he would have handed to me,
but I assured him that I was not a smuggler even for pious purposes, and
after darting at me an impious glance, he disappeared into the steerage.
The next day at Quarantine, a messenger boy of unusual size came on
board and calling out the names of a rather large number of steerage
passengers handed them telegrams which were written in English and were
rather suspiciously vague.--“Pavel Moticzka,--Ivan Kovaloff,--Isaac
Goldberg,” and last,--“Jaques Rosenstein.” My friend the monk nearly
jumped out of his cassock to reach for his message, and the “Boy,” who
made most remarkable haste for a telegraph messenger, slipped a pair of
handcuffs where only rosaries hung; and a Jewish jeweller’s clerk from
Paris, who was running away with the best part of his employer’s
diamonds,--was in the toils of the law.
Some years ago when the steerage of the Hamburg American Line had not
been made even partially decent by our stringent immigration laws, over
500 steerage passengers, booked for the _Fürst Bismark_, at that time
the swiftest boat of the line, were, without explanation or
notification, stowed away in a freight boat scheduled to cross in twelve
days, but never having actually made the trip in less than sixteen days.
The quarters were very close but the number of passengers was not
excessively large, the weather was favourable, and blissfully ignorant
of the slowness of the ship, we were comparatively happy.
[Illustration: WILL THEY LET ME IN?
It is a serious matter to many a man who has invested his all in a
ticket for the New World to face the possibility of rejection.]
We were divided about equally into Russian Jews, Slavs and Italians, and
there was very little choice so far as comradeship was concerned. The
passengers were all fairly dirty, the Italians being easily in the lead,
with the Russian Jews a good second, and the Slavs as clean as
circumstances allowed.
The Italians were from the South of Italy and had lost the romance of
their native land but not the fragrance of the garlic. They quarrelled
somewhat loudly and gesticulated wildly; but were good neighbours during
those sixteen days. They were shy and not easily lured into confidences
by one who knew their language but poorly, in spite of the fact that he
knew their country well and loved it. In sixteen days the average
American has a chance to discover at least one thing which he has found
it hard to believe; that all Italians are not alike, that they do not
look alike, and that they are not all Anarchists. When some relationship
was established between us, and I had to serve as the link among the
three races, we had a grand “Festa” to which the Slavs contributed some
gutteral songs and clumsy dances, and the Italians, sleight of hand
performances which made them appear still more uncanny to the Slavs.
They also supplied a Marionette theatre, of the Punch and Judy show
variety, and “last but not least,” music from a hurdy-gurdy which played
the dulcet notes of “Cavalliero Rusticana” and a dashing tune about
“Marghareta, Marghareta.” “Signors and Signorinas,” said Pietro, after
he had played all the tunes of his limited repertoire, “I have the great
honour of presenting to you the national anthem of the great American
country to which we are travelling.” He turned the crank, and out
came,--the ragtime notes of “Ta--ra--ra--boom--de--a.”
The last number on the program was a song by a Russian Jewess, a woman
whose beauty was marred by bleached hair which had grown rusty, and by a
complexion upon which rouge and powder had done their worst. Her voice
which was strong rather than melodious, had in it an element of
artificiality evidently begotten on the stage. She at once became the
star among our entertainers, and though her culture was superficial, she
was by far the best company for me.
Her parents, she told me, had been well to do Jews in a market town in
Russia. They had broken away from many of the observances and traditions
of their religion, they and their children followed all the latest
fashions, a governess imported from France brought with her Paul de
Kock’s novels and other elevating(?) Parisian literature; music teachers
came, who discovered in the only daughter a voice which of course, had
to be cultivated in Vienna. There were concerts which the father’s money
arranged, a few glowing press notices at so much a line, and finally
the fruitless struggle to appear in opera.
Then came one of those Anti-Semitic riots, those brutal outpourings of
human hate which she was unable to describe. All she could say over and
over again was, “Strashno, Strashno,” “it was terrible, terrible.” The
house in which she had lived was a wreck, her father beaten to death,
and she--she could not say it; but I knew. She told of women whose
mutilated bodies were torn open, and of children whose heads were beaten
together until they were a bleeding mass. Yes, indeed, it was “Strashno,
Strashno,” terrible, terrible.
Somewhat early in her girlhood, a clerk in her father’s store “had
looked upon her, and loved her” with a youth’s ardour; but she had
scorned him, as well she might scorn this uncultured, stupid looking son
of Abraham. Again and again he asked her to be his wife, until through
her entreaty, her father drove him out of the store. She told me much of
her life and perhaps many things which she told me were not true. I knew
for instance, that she had not sung before the Czar of Russia, that
Hanslick the great musical critic of Vienna did not predict for her a
Patti’s fame and fortune; nor did I believe that a young millionaire in
Berlin blew out his brains because she would not marry him. But I did
believe that the poor clerk went to New York, that he had worked day
and night in a sweat shop pressing cloaks, that out of his earnings he
had supported her in the vain struggle to attain Grand Opera, and that
now she was on her way to reward his faithfulness and become his wife.
“What is it like, this America?” “What kind of life awaits one on the
East-side?” “What social status has a cloak presser in New York?” “What
chance is there for one to reach the goal of Grand Opera?” These and
other questions she hurled at me while the line upon the horizon grew
clearer, and the hearts of men and women heavy from expectation.
On this ship too, Susanka, a Slovak girl nursed her way across the
Atlantic, giving food to a little Magyar baby which she despised; and
while she rocked the restless little one to sleep and sang her Slavic
lullaby, “Hi-u, Hi-u, Hi-u-shke-e-e”--one could see in her heavy face
her heart’s hunger for her own child. “Oh! Pany velkomosny (mighty sir),
my little child! I had to leave it with a stara baba (old woman) and it
was gray, ashen gray when I left it, and it will die, it will die!” and
she grew frantic in her grief as she rocked the Magyar child to and fro,
“Hi-u, Hi-u, Hi-u-shke-e-e-e.” “Who was to blame, Susanka?” The look of
pain changed to one of fiery anger as she sent back across the sea, a
curse, long and terrible, against her betrayer.
Yes, those are heavy hours and long, on that day when the ship is
circled by the welcoming gulls, and the fire-ship is passed, while the
chains rattle and the baggage is piled on the deck. “Will they let me
in, signor?” “Why should they not, Antonio?” “Ah! signor, I have not
always been a free man. They held me in jail for four years. Will they
know it in America? I stabbed a man,--yes, signor.”
“Will they let us in, Guter Herrleben?” anxiously asks Yankev: his wife
Gietel and six children are with him and one of the boys lies motionless
upon the hatch, pale, worn and almost gone. “Consumption? yes; he was so
well, but we were smuggled over and driven by the gendarmes, and had to
be out in the damp, and he caught cold and a cough came and you can see,
Guter Herrleben, quick consumption!”
Yankev, and Gietel his wife, had an appalling story to tell, and I
listened to it as we squatted on deck under the twinkling stars. The
moon shone in silvery splendour upon the quiet water, and I wondered why
the sea did not grow angry, the constellations pale, and why the moon
did not become red like blood at the horror of it all--a horror which
never can be told. Imagine an Easter night, a night when Yankev and
Gietel celebrated the liberation of Israel from Egyptian bondage. On the
same night their Russian neighbours were celebrating the liberation of
the human race from the power of death. The synagogue service was over.
They had told the story of Israel’s passing through the Red Sea, and of
the perishing of Pharaoh’s horsemen; Yankev had come home to the feast
of unleavened bread and bitter herbs; the neighbours had been to the
church where until midnight, in darkness and silence, they mourned at
the tomb of the slain Christ. Then with the passing of the long and
silent night they went from street to street shouting: “Christ is risen,
Christ is risen, Christ is risen, indeed.” But the mob came upon the
defenseless home plundering and burning all in its fury, although
mercifully sparing the lives of the now homeless and penniless family.
Others fared worse, for they had no money with which to bribe, while
their daughters were older and good to look upon. It was a little place
and just a little pogrom. It was not written about nor protested
against; but what would have been the use?
Dumb from agony we sat there and I had to breathe back into them the
faith which they had almost lost, and the courage which had almost left
them; a faith and courage which I myself did not possess. In the peace
of the night I could hear only the terror of the voice of the Lord
saying: “Vengeance is Mine.” The gentle Nazarene who came in love to
conquer by love, I could scarcely see, and I yearned to make the
Psalmist’s prayer my own. “Blessed be the Lord God which teacheth my
hands to war and my fingers to fight.”
That night and many another last night on board of ship, I listened to
the stories of men and women who were fleeing from the terror of
Russia’s law. Russians who had wrought in secret, who had planned great
things and who had risked everything--Bogdanoff, Philipoff, Lermontoff,
Lehrman, Loewenstern. Jews and Gentiles who had struck out in their
blind fury, who had felt the terror of the law and the greater terror of
taking, or trying to take, human life. Some guilty, some innocent; all
of them caught in the same net.
Characteristic is the story of a Warsaw merchant who sailed with me on
my last journey. On the evening of the 21st of April, 1906, he went to a
dentist to have some work done. He went in the evening because he was
busy in the daytime, and when he arrived the police were searching the
house; after which all the inmates, dentist and patients, were taken to
the police station and cast into prison. Two hundred and fifty persons
were together in a room large enough for twenty. The odours were
frightful, as in common with all Russian prisons there were no toilet
conveniences outside of that room, in which for three days they were
left. After bribing the officials, twenty fortunate men, my informant
among them, were given another room. Nine weeks he remained there
utterly unconscious of the reason for his detention; and only after the
hard and faithful struggle of his wife was he released,--without an
apology, to find his business ruined and only sufficient money left to
go to America.
On the same ship I met the widow of a Jewish physician, who was shot
down in the act of binding the wounds of those fallen in the uprising of
Moscow. Binding the wounds of soldiers and revolutionists alike, he was
shot in the back by a police lieutenant who afterwards was promoted to a
captaincy.
No, it is not easy to travel in the steerage; not because there is not
room enough, nor air enough, nor food enough, although that is all true;
but because it is hard to believe down there that the God of Israel is
not dead, nor His arm shortened, if not broken, like those of the Greek
deities.
Yet they still have faith in Him, these children of His, who have waited
for the fulfillment of His promises. They still wait, although
“Jerusalem the golden” is a far away dream, and they are scattered
wanderers over the face of the earth.
Friday night, with the coming of the first star, all those who believed,
met, to voice their faith in Jehovah.
In a corner of the steerage quarters, while the eyes of the Gentiles
looked inquisitively on, they turned towards Zion, and lifting up their
voices, greeted the Sabbath: “Come, my beloved, thou Sabbath bride,”
“Lcho dody L Crass Calo.” They sang this one joyous song of Israel, and
stretched out their arms as if to press this spiritual bride to their
rest-hungry souls.
They do not doubt that Jehovah will guide the destinies of Israel, and
that the Sabbath bride will some day descend upon the earth to abide
forever, bringing rest and peace to the Israel of God.
At last the great heart of the ship has ceased its mighty throbbing, and
but a gentle tremor tells that its life has not all been spent in the
battle with wind and waves. The waters are of a quieter colour, and over
them hovers the morning mist. The silence of the early dawn is broken
only by the sound of deep-chested ferry-boats which pass into the mist
and out of it, like giant monsters, stalking on their cross beams over
the deep. The steerage is awake after its restless night and mutely
awaits the disclosures of its own and the new world’s secrets. The sound
of a booming gun is carried across the hidden space, and faint touches
of flame struggling through the gray, are the sun’s answer to the salute
from Governor’s Island. The morning breeze, like a “Dancing Psaltress,”
moves gently over the glassy surface of the water, lifts the fog higher
and higher, tearing it into a thousand fleecy shreds, and the far
things have come near and the hidden things have been revealed. The sky
line straight ahead, assaulted by a thousand towering shafts, looking
like a challenge to the strong, and a warning to the weak, makes all of
us tremble from an unknown fear.
The steerage is still mute; it looks to the left at the populous shore,
to the right at the green stretches of Long Island, and again straight
ahead at the mighty city. Slowly the ship glides into the harbour, and
when it passes under the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, the silence is
broken, and a thousand hands are outstretched in greeting to this new
divinity into whose keeping they now entrust themselves.
Some day a great poet will arise among us, who, catching the inspiration
of that moment will be able to put into words these surging emotions;
who will be great enough to feel beating against his own soul and give
utterance to, the thousand varying notes which are felt and never
sounded.
On this very ship are women who have left the burdens which crippled
them, and now hope to walk erect; who have fled from the rough,
polluting hands of persecuting mobs, that they may be able to guard
their virtue and have it guarded by gallant men. Here are hundreds of
Slavs who never knew aught but the yoke of czar or other potentate,
whose minds have been enthralled by a galling autocracy, and whose
closed eyes have never been permitted to see their own downtrodden
strength. Now they shall have the opportunity to prove themselves and
show the nobility of a peasant race.
Here are Italians from shores where classic art is stored, and the air
is soft and full of melody; yet they were left uncouth, rough and
unhewn. They come to a rougher but freer air, that they may grow into a
gentler, stronger, nobler manhood and womanhood.
Melancholy Jews whose feet never knew a safe abiding place, are here,
and their hope is that they may find the peace which went out from their
race, when Jerusalem was laid waste and they were scattered among the
nations of the earth.
He who thinks that these people scent but the dollars which lie in our
treasury, is mightily mistaken, and he who says that they come without
ideals has no knowledge of the children of men.
I found myself close to hundreds of these people, closest to the Russian
Jews who most excited my sympathies; and one day when they heard that I
had been in Bialistok, Kishineff and Odessa, that I knew the horror of
it all and that I sympathized with them, they crowded around me almost
like wild animals. What did they ask for above everything? Money? No.
The one loud cry was for a speech about America. “Preach to us,” they
said, “preach to us about America.” It was a polyglot sermon which I
preached that Sunday from the covered hatch which was my pulpit, and
when I spoke to them of their new home and their new duties, they
cheered me to the echo.
I have passed through this gateway more than ten times; I have sounded
as far as a man can sound, the souls of men and women, and I have found
them tingling from emotions, akin only to those which we more prosperous
voyagers shall feel, when we have crossed the last sea and find
ourselves in the presence of the great Judge.
Many of these emigrants expect to find more liberty, more justice, and
more equitable law than we ourselves enjoy; they imagine that our common
life is permeated by a noble idealism; and while they cannot give
expression to their high anticipations they feel more loftily than we
think them capable of feeling. Many a time I have heard conversations
between those who had read about America and those who were ignorant of
its life, and invariably I have had to keep silence; for had I spoken I
must have destroyed blessed illusions. From the very people whom we call
Sabbath breakers, I have heard glowing descriptions of an ideal American
Sabbath, and from men to whom alcoholic beverages seemed essential to
life, I have heard a defense of laws regulating the sale of liquor. If,
in our superficial touch with them in our own country, we find them
materialistic and dulled to what we call our higher life, they are not
the only ones at fault.
* * * * *
Cabin and steerage passengers alike, soon find the poetry of the moment
disturbed; for the quarantine and custom-house officials are on board,
driving away the tourist’s memories of the splendour of European
capitals by their inquisitiveness as to his purchases. They make him
solemnly swear that he is not a smuggler, and upon landing, immediately
proceed to prove that he is one.
The steerage passengers have before them more rigid examinations which
may have vast consequences; so in spite of the joyous notes of the band,
and the glad greetings shouted to and fro, they sink again into
awe-struck and confused silence. When the last cabin passenger has
disappeared from the dock, the immigrants with their baggage are loaded
into barges and taken to Ellis Island for their final examination.
V
AT THE GATEWAY
The barges on which the immigrants are towed towards the island are of a
somewhat antiquated pattern and if I remember rightly have done service
in the Castle Garden days, and before that some of them at least had
done full service for excursion parties up and down Long Island Sound.
The structure towards which we sail and which gradually rises from the
surrounding sea is rather imposing, and impresses one by its utilitarian
dignity and by its plainly expressed official character.
With tickets fastened to our caps and to the dresses of the women, and
with our own bills of lading in our trembling hands, we pass between
rows of uniformed attendants, and under the huge portal of the vast hall
where the final judgment awaits us. We are cheered somewhat by the fact
that assistance is promised to most of us by the agents of various
National Immigrant Societies who seem both watchful and efficient.
Mechanically and with quick movements we are examined for general
physical defects and for the dreaded trachoma, an eye disease, the
prevalence of which is greater in the imagination of some statisticians
than it is on board immigrant vessels.
From here we pass into passageways made by iron railings, in which only
lately, through the intervention of a humane official, benches have been
placed, upon which, closely crowded, we await our passing before the
inspectors.
Already a sifting process has taken place; and children who clung to
their mother’s skirts have disappeared, families have been divided, and
those remaining intact, cling to each other in a really tragic fear that
they may share the fate of those previously examined.
A Polish woman by my side has suddenly become aware that she has one
child less clinging to her skirts, and she implores me with agonizing
cries, to bring it back to her. In a strange world, at the very entrance
to what is to be her home, without the protection of her husband,
without any knowledge of the English language, and with no one taking
the trouble to explain to her the reason, the child was snatched from
her side. Somewhere it is bitterly crying for its mother, and each is
unconscious of the other’s fate.
“Gdeye moya shena” (where is my wife?) an old Slovak cries as he looks
wildly about for her, whose physique was suspected of being below the
normal and who was passed on for further examination.
A Russian youth, stalwart and strong, is separated from his household
which came together to settle in Dakota; but now he, the mainstay of the
family, is gone and they are perplexed and distracted.
A little girl scarcely five years of age, cries: “Mitter, mitter, ich
will zu meiner mitter gehen”; she is there alone and uncomforted,
surrounded by rough-looking men, while not far away her mother is
working herself into hysterics because she must await in the detention
room the supreme decision.
A woman with three children has two of them taken from her because they
are suspected of disease and found to be afflicted by trachoma; the
mother also has the disease, but her husband, now an American citizen,
comes to claim her, and she passes in while the little ones are held in
custody by the immigration authorities.
One by one we pass the inspectors; we show our money and answer the
questions which are numerous and pertinent.
The average immigrant obeys mechanically; his attitude towards the
inspector being one of great respect. While the truth is not always
told, many of the lies prepared prove both inefficient and unnecessary.
[Illustration: THE SHEEP AND THE GOATS.
In the great examination hall, they wait, some with curiosity, some with
anxiety, the decision that shall give them entrance to the new home or
consign them again to the Old World strife.]
On one of the boats very recently a number of young women were
imported for immoral purposes, and each of them was supposed to be
married to the attendant agent of a firm which conducts an international
business. The young man having announced himself as married to the woman
accompanying him, was asked, “Where were you married?” “In Paris.” “Who
married you?” “Pere Abelard.” “When were you married?” “The fifteenth of
May.” “Were your wife’s parents present?” “Yes.” Next the young woman
was questioned, and announced the marriage as having taken place in
Brussels, some time in June, and that she is an orphan. The case is very
plain, and both will have to face the court of special inquiry.
A young Jewish girl who really escaped the torment of some Russian
persecutions conjures up in her mind a relative in New York whose name
and address are not discovered, and the more she is questioned the more
she entangles herself in a network of lies.
A dear old mother is held, because instead of the one son who awaits
her, she has announced three or four sons residing here; and continued
questioning more and more involves her in useless affirmation.
The examination can be superficial at best; but the eye has been trained
and discoveries are made here, which seem rather remarkable.
Four ways open to the immigrant after he passes the inspector. If he is
destined for New York he goes straightway down the stairs, and there his
friends await him if he has any; and most of them have. If his journey
takes him westward, and there the largest percentage goes, he enters a
large, commodious hall to the right, where the money-changers sit and
the transportation companies have their offices. If he goes to the New
England states he turns to the left into a room which can scarcely hold
those who go to the land of the pilgrims and puritans. The fourth way is
the hardest one and is taken by those who have received a ticket marked
P. C. (Public Charge), which sends the immigrant to the extreme left
where an official sits, in front of a barred gate behind which is the
dreaded detention-room.
The decision one way or the other must be quickly made, and the
immigrant finds himself in a jail-like room often without knowing just
why. There is not much time for explanation.
Imagine a room filled by at least fifty people, many of them doomed to
recross the terrible sea and to be landed upon strange territory, to
find the way unattended, to their obscure little village. When they
arrive there they are usually paupers with a stigma resting upon them;
for were they not rejected in America, and why? Ah, who knows why!
Let us pass through this room. “Brother, why are you here?” A stalwart
Lettish peasant boy answers demurely, “Because I haven’t money enough. I
had some money and they stole it out of my father’s pockets.” The father
and the boy have been marked by the inspector as likely to become a
public charge, because they had neither money in their pockets nor
friends waiting for them. A matter of ten or twenty dollars is between
these men and the fulfillment of all their desires.
The court may be lenient, but the father is old and the boy young and it
is more than probable that they will both end their days on the rough
Baltic, where society now is as turbulent as that northern sea.
A Servian peasant, browned by the hot sun which shone upon the Danubian
plains where he lived, edges up to me, for he hears a familiar Slavic
note in my speech, and he brings this bitter plaint. “How far I have
travelled from Budapest, Vienna, Berlin, and Hamburg. I have spent all
my money and now it looks as if I must go back. Must I go? Tell me.” The
court will tell him to-morrow that he has passed the dreaded dead line,
is over fifty years of age, not too well built, used up by the hardships
of his native country, and that as he is likely to become a public
charge he is marked for deportation. He will be sent back to Hamburg and
how he will find his way home I do not know.
A German woman with three children is the next whom I notice. She is at
the point of a nervous breakdown. She has a husband waiting for her, she
has over $100, but P.C. is marked on her slip; so she must face the
court which will admit her, but she has a long twenty-four hours to wait
and the strain is terrible. She needs to be reassured and comforted.
Two boys under ten years of age came unattended; fine looking boys. Over
their heavy blue coats hung tickets with the mother’s address. How happy
they were to be going to mother. She had preceded them by several years
to work out for herself and for them a new destiny on this side of the
sea; for on the other side life had been blighted by the unfaithfulness
of her husband. At last the hour came when she could send for her
children. How she watched their journeying, and how anxious she was
while they were on the sea! They are on this ship, and she is waiting
for them behind the iron grating at the island. Crowds pour into the
great hall, past the physician, towards the inspectors, towards the
great centre, to the east and the west. Now she sees them; the physician
looks at their faces, and bends low over their chests; but instead of
walking straight towards her they are turned aside with those suspected
of contagious disease.
“Where are you from, my boy?” “Russia.” One of the few real Russian
peasants whom I have met. He measures five feet six inches, is sound as
an oak, and having escaped through the cordons of gendarmes which
separate his native country from the rest of the world, came here to
meet his brother who was at work in the coal mines near Scranton, Pa.
“What about your brother?” “Ah! Barin (sir), my brother they say, was
killed in the mines and they are afraid to let me in; so I suppose I
shall have to go back to Russia,” and the big melancholy peasant cried
like a baby. “Buy this shirt from me, Barin, I need money.”
“What’s the matter with you, why are you so unhappy, you gay, care free
Roumanian?” Half Slav, half Latin, and the whole no one quite knows
what,--he is dressed in a shepherd’s garb, a heavy sheepskin coat over
him. “Look here, Panye (sir). This keeps me from going as a shepherd to
the West;” and he shows me a lacerated breast on which a wolf has
written the shepherd’s story of his faithfulness to the sheep. “Yes, the
wolves came round and round my sheep,” he says, “and I went round and
round between the sheep and the wolves and the nearer they came the
faster I went my rounds between them; but before the morning came they
tore many sheep though they tore me first. I bled and bled and have
remained sore as you see. A younger shepherd took my place and I sold
all and spent all to come here. Ah, well, I could still guard the
sheep.”
The most melancholy of all men are the detained Jews, for they usually
have strong family ties which already bind them to this new world, and
they chafe under the delay. Their children or friends are waiting
impatiently, crowding beyond their allotted limit, trying the severely
taxed patience of the officials, asking useless questions, and wasting
precious time in waiting; for the courts work their allotted tasks with
dispatch, but with care and dignity; and all must wait in deep
uncertainty through the long vigil of a restless night spent on the
clean, but not too comfortable bunks provided by the government.
Let no one believe that landing on the shores of “The land of the free,
and the home of the brave” is a pleasant experience; it is a hard, harsh
fact, surrounded by the grinding machinery of the law, which sifts,
picks, and chooses; admitting the fit and excluding the weak and
helpless.
Much ignorance needs to be dispelled regarding these immigrants. Not
long ago, I heard one of the secretaries of a certain home missionary
society say, with much unction as he pleaded for money for his work, “We
land annually on these shores, a million paupers and criminals.”
Unfortunately, much of such impression prevails. It was my privilege
recently, as a member of the National Conference on Immigration, to be
among the guests of the commissioner of the port of New York, and one of
the spectacles which we witnessed was the landing of a ship-load of
immigrants. We stood in the visitor’s gallery and looked down upon a
hall divided and subdivided by the cold iron railings. Many of the
visitors were beginning to hold their noses in anticipation of the
stenches which would come with these foreigners, and were ready to be
shocked by the horrors of the steerage.
Slowly the bewildered mass came into view; but strange to relate, those
who led the mass appeared like ladies and gentlemen.
The women wore modern, half acre hats a little the worse for wear, but
bought in the city of Prague a few months before; and they were more
becoming to these young Bohemian women than to the majority of their
American sisters.
The men carried band-boxes, silk umbrellas and walking canes, the
remnants of past glories. They were permitted to come in first because
they wore good clothing and passed out quickly into their freedom, the
members of our Congress welcoming them heartily by the clapping of
hands.
After them came Slavic women with no finery except their homespun,
rough, tough and clean; carrying upon their backs piles of feather-beds
and household utensils. Strong limbed men followed them in the
picturesque garb of their native villages; Slovaks, Poles, Roumanians,
Ruthenians, Italians, and finally, Russian Jews; but lo, and behold! no
smells ascended to our nostrils, and no horrors were disclosed.
Taking a group of delegates down among them, we found that they were
wholesome looking people, not devoid of intelligence, and when the
barrier between us was broken down by the sound of their native speech,
they were communicative, at ease, and very human. The first time I
entered New York was at Castle Garden, from the steamer _Fulda_, twenty
years ago; and having watched the tide of immigration ever since, I can
say that I never have seen, at any time, a ship-load of better human
beings disembark than those which came from the steamer _Wilhelm II_, on
December 7, 1905. And of the many who came on this ship, it is just
possible that those who wore neither fashionable hats nor trailing
skirts, and who were not politely treated,--it is just possible that
they may after all, make the best members of this democratic society.
A gentleman from Ohio, a member of the Conference on Immigration said on
the floor, in open debate, and he said it with menacing gesture: “We
don’t want you to send none of them yellow worms from Southern Europe to
our state, we got too many of them now.” No doubt the gentleman from
Ohio and the delegate from Rhode Island who said: “We don’t want no more
iv thim durrty furriners in this grand and glorious counthry of ourn,”
voiced the common prejudice which rests itself entirely upon its
ignorance.
It is true that many criminals come, especially from Italy. Many weak,
impoverished and poorly developed creatures come from among Polish and
Russian Jews, but they are only the tares in the wheat. The stock as a
whole is physically sound; it is crude, common peasant stock, not the
dregs of society, but its basis. Its blood is not blue, but it is red,
wholesomely red, which is more to the purpose. Blue blood we also
receive--thin, worn-out blood, bought at a high price for the daughters
of some of our multi-millionaires; but no one can claim that either they
or we have been specially blessed by it.
The hardships which attend the examination and deportation of immigrants
seem unavoidable, and would not be materially reduced if any other
method were devised. To examine them at the centres of immigration seems
a rather vague and not a feasible plan. First of all because the
immigrant can present himself as physically fit, more easily in his
native country where the agencies already exist, to prepare him for an
examination which most steamship companies rigidly enforce; because the
long journey makes artificial cleansing of diseased eyelids or the
hiding of other physical defects impossible. Again because of the fact
that such commissions would be hard to control so far from home and
would be in constant danger of exposure to “Graft”; a disease not
unknown among American officials at home and abroad. The next reason is,
that these countries might object to the presence of such alien
commissions, which would select the best material and leave the worst;
and the last reason is that it would give foreign governments a very
fine opportunity to detain those who emigrate for political reasons or
those who desire to avoid service in the army.
Much greater responsibility should be put upon the steamship companies,
many of which still practice their ancient wrongs upon their most
profitable passengers. One of the demands which should be made, and made
immediately, is the abolition of the steerage.
Future American citizens should be taught when they step on board of
ship, that people in America are expected to live like human beings, and
not like beasts.
The price they pay for their passage is large enough to entitle them to
better treatment, and if it is not, then the price should be raised to
such a figure as to permit it.
This humane treatment should follow the passenger until the last moment
of his stay under government supervision; for the more humanely the
immigrant is treated, the better citizen he is likely to become.
The steerage is responsible for not a little imported anarchy, and the
sooner it is abolished the better. The more humanely the immigrant is
treated at Ellis Island, the more humanely he will deal with us when he
becomes the master of our national destiny.
VI
“THE MAN AT THE GATE”
“What questions will he ask?” “How much money will he take?” “Will he
deal gently with us?” These are the questions which pass from lip to lip
among those detained; for the subjects of the Czar speak of the State in
the personal pronoun. In fact the State is scarcely known in their
vocabulary. It is the person of the ruler which they know, and which
they fear more than they revere. The State they have known, was to them
very personal; but to the new State, they are just so much human freight
which needs to be inspected. In the past this has been done not only
impersonally but inhumanely as well, and that it is now done more
humanely and justly so far as possible, we owe to “the man at the gate.”
He passed through the gate himself in the old Castle Garden days, when
not much system prevailed, when boarding-house keepers were let loose
upon us, frightening us half out of our senses and completely out of our
change. His dollars were few; but like the average immigrant of to-day
he possessed a buoyant spirit, a strong body, keen wits, and bright eyes
out of which shone good nature and the spirit of the mischievous boy.
He was admitted without difficulty, and drifted into Pennsylvania where
he shared the lot of the miner, his labour and his dangers. The miners
then were recruited from the strongest immigrant stock and when they
felt themselves strong enough to organize, he became one of the leaders.
The fact that he led many a rescue party to save his entombed comrades,
and that he displayed courage and intelligence brought him into
prominence, and the Governor of Pennsylvania chose him as State Factory
Inspector. In this position he made enemies enough among the employers
to prove that he was faithful to the task set before him, which was, to
enforce the laws regulating the conditions of labour in workshops and
factories. Later he was appointed inspector at Ellis Island at a time
when the condition of that federal post was anything but pleasing to
those of us who knew them, and who were concerned for the well-being of
the immigrant.
Roughness, cursing, intimidation and a mild form of blackmail prevailed
to such a degree as to be common. The commissioner in charge at that
time was far above all this, and though made conscious of the conditions
was seemingly powerless to discharge dishonest employees or in any way
improve the morale of the place.
The new spirit had not yet come into politics and the spoils still
belonged to the victors who made full use of the privilege. Among those
who did their full duty and who smarted under the wrong done to this
weak and helpless mass, was the once immigrant, now inspector.
The conditions steadily grew worse; at least the complaints grew more
numerous. Experiences like my own were not rare. I knew that the money
changers were “crooked,” so I passed a twenty mark piece to one of them
for exchange, and was cheated out of nearly seventy-five per cent. of my
money. My change was largely composed of new pennies, whose brightness
was well calculated to deceive any newcomer.
At another time I was approached by an inspector who, in a very friendly
way, intimated that I might have difficulty in being permitted to land,
and that money judiciously placed might accomplish something.
A Bohemian girl whose acquaintance I had made on the steamer, came to me
with tears in her eyes and told me that one of the inspectors had
promised to pass her quickly, if she would promise to meet him at a
certain hotel. In heart-broken tones she asked: “Do I look like that?”
The concessions were in the hands of irresponsible people and I remember
the time when the restaurant was a den of thieves, in which the
immigrant was robbed by the proprietor, whose employees stole from him
and from the immigrant also.
My complaints when I made them were treated with the same neglect as
were those of others, until with the coming in of the Roosevelt
administration they had their resurrection, a change was demanded and
the demand satisfied....
Mr. William Williams, who was just back from Cuba where he had rendered
distinguished service, and who had come under the notice of the
President, was tendered the office of Commissioner of Immigration at
Ellis Island. Upon his acceptance, the President’s instructions were to
“clean out the stables.” A large measure of reform was inaugurated
during the two and one half years of Mr. Williams’s incumbency of this
office.
In looking for a successor, the President consulted the records,
evidently with the purpose of discovering one thoroughly conversant with
the conditions, and of experience coupled with executive ability,
sufficient to further extend the needed reforms. Mr. Robert Watchorn was
chosen for this important office.
This official announcement in relation to the appointment appeared in
the daily press at this time:
“_Washington, January 16, 1905._
“Robert Watchorn will succeed William Williams as United States
Commissioner of Immigration at New York. The appointment will be
solely on merit. Mr. Watchorn is now United States Commissioner of
Immigration at Montreal. He has been in the immigration service for
many years, and his record is perfect.”
I ventured to ask the Commissioner one day if he had been given any
instructions by the President as to the course to be pursued. He
replied: “Yes, the President gave me instructions very brief but very
pointed. ‘Mr. Watchorn, I am sending you to Ellis Island.--You will find
it a very difficult place to manage.--I know you are familiar with the
conditions.--All I ask of you is that you give us an administration as
clean as a hound’s tooth.’”
Should one desire any further evidence that Ellis Island is a difficult
place to manage, let him turn to this incident and its sequel in Senator
Hoar’s “Autobiography of Seventy Years” (_Scribner’s_):
During the Christmas holidays of 1901 a very well-known Syrian, a
man of high standing and character, came into my son’s office and
told him this story:
A neighbour and countryman of his had a few years before emigrated
to the United States and established himself in Worcester. Soon
afterwards, he formally declared his intention of becoming an
American citizen. After a while, he amassed a little money and sent
to his wife, whom he had left in Syria, the necessary funds to
convey her and their little girl and boy to Worcester. She sold her
furniture and whatever other belongings she had, and went across
Europe to France, where they sailed from one of the northern ports
on a German steamer for New York.
Upon their arrival at New York it appeared that the children had
contracted a disease of the eyelids, which the doctors of the
Immigration Bureau declared to be trachoma, which is contagious,
and in adults incurable. It was ordered that the mother might land,
but that the children must be sent back in the ship upon which they
arrived, on the following Thursday. This would have resulted in
sending them back as paupers, as the steamship company, compelled
to take them as passengers free of charge, would have given them
only such food as was left by the sailors, and would have dumped
them out in France to starve, or get back as beggars to Syria.
The suggestion that the mother might land was only a cruel mockery.
Joseph J. George, a worthy citizen of Worcester, brought the facts
of the case to the attention of my son, who in turn brought them to
my attention. My son had meanwhile advised that a bond be offered
to the immigration authorities to save them harmless from any
trouble on account of the children.
I certified these facts to the authorities and received a statement
in reply that the law was peremptory, and that it required that the
children be sent home; that trouble had come from making like
exceptions theretofore; that the Government hospitals were full of
similar cases, and the authorities must enforce the law strictly in
the future. Thereupon I addressed a telegram to the Immigration
Bureau at Washington, but received an answer that nothing could be
done for the children.
Then I telegraphed the facts to Senator Lodge, who went in person
to the Treasury Department, but could get no more favourable
reply. Senator Lodge’s telegram announcing their refusal was
received in Worcester Tuesday evening, and repeated to me in Boston
just as I was about to deliver an address before the Catholic
College there. It was too late to do anything that night. Early
Wednesday morning, the day before the children were to sail, when
they were already on the ship, I sent the following dispatch to
President Roosevelt:
“_To the President,_
“_White House, Washington, D. C._
“I appeal to your clear understanding and kind and brave heart to
interpose your authority to prevent an outrage which will dishonour
the country and create a foul blot on the American flag. A
neighbour of mine in Worcester, Mass., a Syrian by birth, made some
time ago his public declaration for citizenship. He is an honest,
hard-working and every way respectable man. His wife with two small
children have reached New York.
“He sent out the money to pay their passage. The children
contracted a disorder of the eyes on the ship. The Treasury
authorities say that the mother may land but the children cannot,
and they are to be sent back Thursday. Ample bond has been offered
and will be furnished to save the Government and everybody from
injury or loss. I do not think such a thing ought to happen under
your Administration, unless you personally decide that the case is
without remedy. I am told the authorities say they have been too
easy heretofore, and must draw the line now. That shows they admit
the power to make exceptions in proper cases. Surely, an exception
should be made in case of little children of a man lawfully here,
and who has duly and in good faith declared his intention to become
a citizen. The immigration law was never intended to repeal any
part of the naturalization laws which provide that the minor
children get all the rights of the father as to citizenship. My son
knows the friends of this man personally and that they are highly
respectable and well off. If our laws require this cruelty, it is
time for a revolution, and you are just the man to head it.
GEORGE F. HOAR.”
Half an hour from the receipt of that dispatch at the White House
Wednesday forenoon, Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United
States, sent a peremptory order to New York to let the children
come in. They have entirely recovered from the disorder of the
eyes, which turned out not to be contagious, but only caused by the
glare of the water, or the hardships of the voyage. The children
are fair-haired, with blue eyes, and of great personal beauty, and
would be exhibited with pride by any American mother.
When the President came to Worcester he expressed a desire to see
the children. They came to meet him at my house, dressed up in
their best and glorious to behold. The President was very much
interested in them, and said when what he had done was repeated in
his presence, that he was just beginning to get angry.
The result of this incident was that I had a good many similar
applications for relief in behalf of immigrants coming in with
contagious diseases. Some of them were meritorious, and others
untrustworthy. In the December session of 1902 I procured the
following amendment to be inserted in the immigration law.
“Whenever an alien shall have taken up his permanent residence in
this country and shall have filed his preliminary declaration to
become a citizen and thereafter shall send for his wife and minor
children to join him, if said wife or either of said children
shall be found to be affected with any contagious disorder, and it
seems that said disorder was contracted on board the ship in which
they came, such wife or children shall be held under such
regulations as the Secretary of the Treasury shall prescribe until
it shall be determined whether the disorder will be easily curable
or whether they can be permitted to land without danger to other
persons; and they shall not be deported until such facts have been
ascertained.”
Senator Hoar had touched however, only one of the many phases of the
situation. As the President said, it was still “a difficult place.” Yet
under Commissioner Watchorn changes were soon visible. The place became
cleaner; a new and better system of inspection was organized, discipline
was maintained and strengthened, the comfort of the immigrants was
considered, the money changers were watched, dishonest, discourteous and
useless employees were discharged; and above all, the institution in its
remotest corner was open to any one who wished to come and inspect the
place which is so important in our economic and social life.
Heartier welcome than the Commissioner gives to the visitor cannot be
imagined; and you may take your place among the dozen or more who have
come and who are watching him as he decides the destinies of human
lives.
The cases which come before him are those upon which the special courts
have already passed; so you will see only the wreckage of humanity;
those who upon landing are barred by a law which is indefinite enough to
leave the way open to human judgment for good or ill.
Two undersized old people stand before him. They are Hungarian Jews
whose children have preceded them here, and who, being fairly
comfortable, have sent for their parents that they may spend the rest of
their lives together. The questions, asked through an interpreter, are
pertinent and much the same as those already asked by the court which
has decided upon their deportation. The commissioner rules that the
children be put under a sufficient bond to guarantee that this aged
couple shall not become a burden to the public, and consequently they
will be admitted.
A Russian Jew and his son are called next. The father is a pitiable
looking object; his large head rests upon a small, emaciated body; the
eyes speak of premature loss of power, and are listless, worn out by the
study of the Talmud, the graveyard of Israel’s history. Beside him
stands a stalwart son, neatly attired in the uniform of a Russian
college student. His face is Russian rather than Jewish, intelligent
rather than shrewd, materialistic rather than spiritual. “Ask them why
they came,” the commissioner says rather abruptly. The answer is: “We
had to.” “What was his business in Russia?” “A tailor.” “How much did
he earn a week?” “Ten to twelve rubles.” “What did the son do?” “He went
to school.” “Who supported him?” “The father.” “What do they expect to
do in America?” “Work.” “Have they any relatives?” “Yes, a son and
brother.” “What does he do?” “He is a tailor.” “How much does he earn?”
“Twelve dollars a week.” “Has he a family?” “Wife and four children.”
“Ask them whether they are willing to be separated; the father to go
back and the son to remain here?” They look at each other; no emotion as
yet visible, the question came too suddenly. Then something in the
background of their feelings moves, and the father, used to self-denial
through his life, says quietly, without pathos and yet tragically, “Of
course.” And the son says, after casting his eyes to the ground, ashamed
to look his father in the face, “Of course.” And, “The one shall be
taken and the other left,” for this was their judgment day.
The next case is that of an Englishman fifty-four years of age, to whom
the court of inquiry has refused admission. He is a medium-sized man,
who betrays the Englishman as he stands before the commissioner, and in
a strong, cockney dialect begins the conversation in which he is
immediately checked by the somewhat brusque question: “What did you do
in England?” “I was an insurance agent.” “How much did you earn?” “Four
pounds a week.” “Why do you come to America?” “Because I want a change.”
“How much change, that is, how much money have you?” “Forty dollars.”
“What do you expect to do here?” “Work at anything.” “At insurance?”
“Yes.” “The decision of the court is confirmed; deported, because likely
to become a public charge.” Evidently insurance agents are not regarded
as desirable immigrants.
The next case is a sickly looking Russian Jew over forty years of age,
with an impediment in his speech and physically depleted. He is
guaranteed an immediate earning of ten dollars a week. The commissioner
turns towards his visitors and asks, “What would you do in this case?”
The answers differ, the majority favouring his admission. Although he
values our judgment the commissioner is compelled to confirm the
decision of the court. It is all done quickly, firmly and decisively as
a physician, conscious of his skill, might sever a limb; but it is done
without prejudice.
He knows no nationality nor race, his business is to guard the interests
of his country, guarding at the same time the rights of the stranger.
Work of this kind cannot be done without friction, for intense suffering
follows many of his decisions. Yet I have found no one closely
acquainted with the affairs of the island, who does not regard the “man
at the gate” as the right man in the right place.
It is interesting to follow him on one of his rounds; for he watches
closely the workings of his huge machine. “Why don’t you let those
people sit down?” A long line of Italians had been standing closely
crowded against each other when they should have been seated to await
their turn.
“Open that box,” he says, to a lunch counter man, who forthwith opens
box after box containing luncheons bought by the immigrants as they are
starting westward; boxes containing rations enough for a day or two,
according to the length of the journey undertaken.
Out upon the roof, shaded, protected and guarded are many who still
await the decision of the court. Little children who came all alone and
who often wait for their parents, in vain; wives whose husbands have not
yet come as they promised they would; a promiscuous company of unhappy
mortals of various degrees. One child, a little girl, sees her father
far away among those who come to claim their loved ones; but the law
still holds the child, and she cries: “Tate, Tateleben,” and he calls
back to her; but his voice is caught by the wind, and the “man at the
gate” has to be the comforter for a season; and no one knows how long it
may be before her own father will comfort her.
A blind old mother here awaits tidings from her son that she may be
speeded on towards her destination, and when she hears his voice demands
to know just when she may go; and she, too, draws on the sympathies of
the “man at the gate.”
We follow him into a room which harbours some eight or ten young women
marked for deportation. They are gaily attired and betray at a glance
that they belong to the guild of the daughters of the street. They claim
to have come to America for all sorts of purposes; but they were caught
with the men who imported them, members of a firm whose business it is
to supply the New York market with human flesh. They know neither shame
nor remorse; it is all crushed out of them, and they brazenly demand to
know just when they may go into New York to begin their careers. America
will be none the worse for their speedy departure.
We have seen “the lame, the halt and the blind” and one is apt to think
that they represent the normal type of immigrants; while they are really
but a small fraction of the mass which is strong, young, industrious and
virtuous and which makes of the “man at the gate” an optimist. He does
not share the feeling that the immigration of to-day is worse than that
of the past; in fact he will say quite freely that it is growing better
every day. He has his fears and forebodings; but he knows that the
miracle of transformation wrought on us, can still be wrought on this
mass which is just like us, in that it is like clay in the hands of the
potter, which may be moulded just as millions of us have been moulded,
into the likeness of a new humanity. The danger, he does not hesitate to
say, lies less in the clay than in the potter.
The visit over, we take the little boat for the battery, crowding
through a mass of men who look up to the guarded roof where their loved
ones are detained. “Tate Tateleben” comes the painful cry of the little
children, and one envies the man at the gate who on the morrow may
answer these cries and give the children to their fathers and the wives
to their husbands; who may unite those who have been divided by long
years and a wide sea.... But what if he cannot answer the cry of the
children?
The “man at the gate” need not be envied for the hard, daily task which
awaits him; the task of opening or shutting the gates, of saying: “This
one shall be taken, and the other shall be left.”
Clear and vivid before his eyes constantly stands the law, commanding
him, on his allegiance, to refuse admission, not merely to those
physically or morally tainted in such degree as to endanger the nation’s
life, but to those “persons likely to become a public charge.” He is
not responsible for the law. He is responsible for its execution, even
though his decisions sometimes are not less hard for himself than for
those who find the gates shut against them.
[Illustration: BACK TO THE FATHERLAND.
Not merely the dangerous elements are refused admission, but those who
for reasons of ill health of mind or body, or inability to work, are
likely to prove a hindrance rather than a help.]
It requires a buoyant spirit, a steady hand, a tender heart, and a
resolute mind. He must be both just and kind, show no preferences and no
prejudices, guard the interests of his country and yet be humane to the
stranger. To be able to say of “the man at the gate” that he
accomplishes this in a very large measure is not scant praise; and if
here and there his judgment is questioned, it simply proves that he is
as human as his critics.
VII
THE GERMAN IN AMERICA
The past had its apprehensions about its various problems no less than
the present has, and our forefathers looked upon the non-English
speaking immigrants much as we look upon them to-day. No doubt they
spoke of them as an undesirable class.
Many of us remember when the German and the Scandinavian immigrants who
came, received no heartier welcome than we now give the Slav, the
Italian and the Jew.
This large tide of immigration from among our non-English speaking races
had its beginning long before there was a Castle Garden or Ellis Island,
and shortly after the Pilgrims and Puritans laid the foundations for
their colonies at Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay. Upon the path made by
English Quakers, came in 1682 the first German immigrants. They were
Mennonites, a Protestant sect which manifested in its tenets many of the
faults and virtues of both Quakers and Puritans.
They sailed up the shallow Delaware Bay, where a Penn, who was “mightier
than the sword,” had subdued the savages by his gentle spirit and had
made the flat shores peaceful for the habitation of these strangers.
They settled in what is now called Germantown, and soon their little
cottages were surrounded by gardens where the rosemary wafted its
fragrance on the air, and where no doubt the cabbage lifted its
astonished head above the ground, little dreaming that some day it would
be “monarch of all it surveyed.”
In some points these Germans out-Puritaned the Puritans; for while it is
said that the Puritans did not kiss their wives on the Sabbath, these
German Puritans did not kiss their wives at all. That they brought with
them noble ideals is proved by the fact that they were the first people
on this continent to oppose slavery, and sent to the Quakers a petition
to that effect. It contains the following quaint paragraph: “If once
these slaves (wch they say are so wicked and stubborn men) should joint
themselves, fight for their freedom and handel their masters &
mastrisses, as they did handel them before; will these masters &
mastrisses tacke the sword at hand & warr against these poor slaves,
licke we are able to believe, some will not refuse to doe? Or have these
negers not as much right to fight for their freedom, as you have to keep
them slaves?”
The Germans were also the first among us to legislate against the vice
of intemperance, and may be said to be the first Prohibitionists, a fame
which the modern German immigrant does not care to share with them.
One of the most ideal men of this time was Francis Daniel Pastorius, a
man who combined in himself all the graces and virtues of his noble
race; he was a lover of science and the finer pleasures, and was a
mystic who yearned for the closer communion with God. Pietists, Tunkers,
and others followed the Mennonites in the eighteenth century; and
Pennsylvania was soon dotted by communities in which these strangely
garbed people lived their peculiar and simple lives. To name them all
would require much space, and to describe their peculiarities would fill
a book. The Schwenkfelders, the Moravians, and the Amish were the most
important among the later arrivals, and Germany seemed to have exhausted
her ability to produce sects after their departure. Encouraged by good
Queen Anne, Lutherans and Roman Catholics came later, and these were
neither so pious nor so intelligent as their predecessors; but were the
advance guard of that vast horde of peasantry which ceased not its
coming for nearly two centuries, which moved from Pennsylvania to Ohio,
from there southward along the Mississippi to Louisiana, and northward
to Wisconsin and Minnesota, and which was a great factor in redeeming
the wilderness and making it to “blossom as the rose.”
Thousands of these peasants were sold into a semi-slavery as
Redemptionists, and thousands more laid down their lives in the attempt
to blaze paths through the forest and make the fever-stricken plains
habitable. Wherever they went they created wealth by their unremitting
industry, and by their skill in cattle-raising and farming, so that
where an English-speaking farmer starved and was forced to move
westward, they stayed and dug riches out of the neglected soil.
To-day, in travelling through this country, one can almost invariably
detect the German farm; and the German farmer is everywhere the standard
of excellence.
These immigrants were not idealists like their forefathers, but were
content to worship God as did their fathers, and by the honest sweat of
their brows eat the fruit from their own “vine and fig tree.” In 1848,
when the breath of freedom grew into a wind-storm, there came
involuntary immigrants, political exiles of whom the late Carl Schurz is
the best known, if not the best example. They were all educated men,
many of them real scholars, and whatever German culture there is among
the Germans to-day in our cities is in a large measure due to their
influence and example. They and their descendants are our real German
aristocracy, and in the German centres of Cincinnati and Milwaukee they
form the select society.
While these men were idealists politically, they were in a large degree
materialists religiously, and planted the seed of Marxian Socialism and
of infidelity among their countrymen. One whole colony in Minnesota made
it one of its tenets not to have a church or even to mention the name of
God, and the little city of New Ulm bore that distinction for a great
many years; but in spite of the most diligent efforts to keep God and
the churches out of their town, several houses of worship have been
built in late years. While much skepticism still prevails, the younger
generation almost as a whole has turned to its God.
The modern German immigrant comes pressed neither by hunger nor by his
conscience, but most often to escape irksome military service, or drawn
by the German “Wanderlust” which carries him beyond the mountains of his
Fatherland into all corners of the earth, although emigration from
Germany increases and decreases, as the economic times are good or bad.
On board ship he is the jolliest of passengers, and you will find him at
the bar in the morning for his beer and late at night in the
smoking-room with a crowd of jovial men and women, singing the songs of
the Fatherland, which grow sadder as he grows jollier. He carries with
him an exalted opinion of his own country, and has fully made up his
mind not to let anything crowd out his love for it, so that when New
York Harbour with its vastness and beauty rises before him he insists
that it is not half as big or as beautiful as the harbour at Hamburg,
and only at the sight of the sky-scrapers does he acknowledge our
superiority. I once stood before mighty Niagara with one of these
subjects of Kaiser Wilhelm, and, with a deprecating shrug of his
shoulders, he said: “Ve gots dem in Shermany too.” This attitude towards
our country lasts a long time, and is lost only when success comes.
The German immigrant invariably has a good common-school education,
although not always possessed of culture, and, if he has it, he does not
find much of it among those with whom his lot is cast. A young chemist
whom I met grew so despondent at the sight of his German boarding-house,
and at the lack of manners among the boarders that he returned to
Germany two weeks after he landed. Not many such young men come, and few
of such who come succeed, for the “hustle and bustle,” the common tasks
to be performed, and the common people whom they must meet as equals,
repel them. The weaning from aristocratic notions, the being thrown into
the hopper without being asked, “Who are you, and who are your parents?”
are painful processes, and only the fit survive. Although the process
is slow, it is sure. A young man who has come to this country to study
our way of doing business was employed in a large department store in
Chicago as a bundle-boy. At first he politely addressed the elevator man
thus: “Vill you blease let me off on de second floor?” but within two
months he said imperatively, “Second”; and he was on the road towards
complete Americanization.
The city of Milwaukee is probably the most German city in the United
States, although nothing in its business or residence portion suggests
the Germany across the sea and, with sixty per cent. of its population
German, it has not impressed upon the city the best things which we
usually associate with that nationality. The intellectual life of its
people does not receive that stimulus which one might expect; and
whatever German culture there is outside of the ever-diminishing circle
of the “forty-eighters” has been transplanted by Americans who have
travelled and studied in the Fatherland. The few Germans who try to
bring the Germany of America in touch with its glorious heritage across
the sea, usually fail most miserably. The cry I most often heard from
them was, “The idealists are dead, and the dollar reigns supreme.”
With a few exceptions, neither the German stage nor the German newspaper
has been able to keep alive that intellectual spirit; and, as a rule,
the German population falls below the American in its desire to keep in
touch with the intellectual life of Germany. “We have two kinds of
Germans in Milwaukee: soul Germans and stomach Germans, and the latter
are in the vast majority,” said a keen observer; and it does seem that
the national spirit rallies around social usages rather than around the
things which make Germany a world power in the noblest sense. The
editors upon whom I called were all intent upon telling me how great
their papers were and how many subscribers they had, and I could not go
beyond the business point with any of them, although I wasted two hours
upon one, trying to get a glimpse of his German soul; but if I saw it at
all, it had the American dollar-mark written all over it. Upon the
social side the German is abnormally developed, and to be a “good
fellow” is to him a high ideal. He usually belongs to numberless lodges
and societies, in few of which he receives any intellectual stimulus. He
retains his convivial habits and frequents the saloon, but is seldom
intemperate, although the American treating habit often works havoc with
his frugality.
That I have not misjudged the situation is proved by the fact that
similar conclusions have been reached by eminent German scholars who
have recently visited the United States.
Prof. K. Lamprecht, of the University of Leipsic, who has recently
published his notes under the title “Americana,” says: “Have the Germans
done much besides having a large share in making the soil tillable? A
visit to the great cities such as Chicago and Milwaukee compels to the
sad answer, no.
“The Germans, capable as they are, in their separate and narrower
activities have not held together and have been overcome by others;
overcome to the degree that they still make the stupid “Dutchman” the
target for their jokes. One need only to see the part he plays in the
American farce to be convinced of this. He is the man who is always too
late, who always wants much and at last gets but little, and who in
spite of the fact that he is portrayed as good natured, is laughed at.
This caricature tells some truth and is the product of some observation.
“Intellectually he does not stand very high; (the Negro also learns
reading and writing), but in intense thinking he is outdistanced by the
Englishman and presumably by the Slav also.
“Whoever has visited the beer gardens of Milwaukee, especially the
unfortunate Pabst Park, that pattern of stupidity, must say to himself
that a people which enjoys such things as are here offered, is not
capable of intellectual competition in America.
“Still sadder is the lack of political discernment. One need not speak
of the corrupt condition of American politics. If the Germans had really
had the desire they could greatly have improved the political morals of
the United States. That they did not use their opportunity is due
largely to the fact that when the early German immigrants came to us,
their country was not politically ripe; nevertheless they may be accused
of not having kept pace with the citizens of the mother country, who,
under more difficult conditions have reached a very high political
development. The common people from whom our immigrants sprang, now have
large powers in directing the political well-being of the Fatherland
under less favourable conditions. This is also true in regard to the
German intellectual development with which the German-American has not
kept in touch and to which he is now very slowly awaking.”
Another thing which this vast German population has failed to impress
upon our cities is the love of law and order which characterizes it in
its native home, and almost without exception it stands arrayed against
any attempt to curtail the privileges of the saloon; while lawmakers,
and officials, are usually kept from enforcing existing laws by their
fear of the German vote. One of the Milwaukee beer-brewers with whom I
talked in regard to his influence upon local politics naively said: “No,
we have no influence upon politics at all, but if a sheriff or a judge
should try to enforce laws against our saloons, he would simply lose his
head.” The fact is that a certain phase of municipal life is completely
controlled by the brewing interest in nearly every city where the German
element plays a political part, and that element always rallies to the
support and defence of the brewers. It is a strange but general
experience that the German immigrant is immediately arrayed against the
temperance element; this is due in no small measure to the facts that
his first lodging-place is usually connected with a saloon; that the
German newspaper almost always ridicules temperance effort and
misinterprets the motives of its leaders, and, lastly, that designing
politicians make their slogan, “personal liberty,” synonymous with “beer
at any time and anywhere.” Only very recently a large portion of the
German population of Chicago was the leading element in a mass-meeting
in which over ten thousand people took part, demanding the granting of
special licenses to dance-halls; a precedent which would be as illegal,
as dangerous.
Nevertheless, the German is a law-abiding citizen, although he has never
been convinced that temperance laws are either wise or just; and that,
in spite of the fact that his own Fatherland is making strenuous efforts
in that direction, and that temperance societies are coming to be as
numerous in Germany as they are in America, but much more sensible in
their agitation than with us. The average German comes, willing enough
to obey all the laws, and, if he has proper environment, develops
quickly into the best kind of citizen.
Neither in Milwaukee nor elsewhere did I find that the Church, whether
Lutheran or Roman Catholic, had kept pace with the intellectual
development of the home Church, nor has it come to feel its social
responsibility to the community. The German Lutheran pastors, in certain
synods, are often more exclusive than the Catholic priests in their
unwillingness to coöperate with other churches for the public good; and
while the churches in Germany are the most progressive on the continent,
here they are the most conservative, and correspondingly inactive in the
affairs which move society. Certain synods of the Lutheran Church, and
those the most prosperous, hold to the Augsburg Confession more
tenaciously than Luther ever did, and believe that beside that Church
there is no Church, and outside of that creed no salvation.
I attended a Lutheran church one Sunday evening when it was crowded
largely by young people, all of them wage-earners in the lower walks of
life. The whole burden of the sermon of nearly forty-five minutes’
length was the thought that salvation is not in morality or merit or
good deeds, but that the only thing necessary to it is a proper
definition of the nature of Jesus Christ. There was not one ethical note
in the whole sermon, and if it is a fair sample of that man’s
discourses, his flock of more than fifteen hundred souls is feeding upon
barren pasture. When I called upon a Lutheran pastor who was pointed out
to me as a liberal, I found, upon asking him to define his liberality,
that it turned entirely upon social habits and had nothing to do with
theology. “I want to drink my beer whenever I want to,” was the article
in his creed that had driven him into the arms of a more liberal synod.
Among the Germans of the Northwest there is a good deal of infidelity,
fostered by the Turner societies; but they are languishing and dying,
and with them dies the unbelief. I was told in Milwaukee by a business
man that the disappearance of those societies is due to the fact that
men of affairs discovered that it was poor business policy to belong to
them, because it arrayed against them the conservative church element,
and that the cessation of infidel agitation is not a sign of more faith,
but simply a sign of more common sense. One free-thinking paper is still
published in Milwaukee; but its constituency is gradually growing
smaller, and the lecturers on infidelity, of whom there used to be many,
have dwindled to one or two. They find it hard to make a living out of
a thing that has no life. Yet the German immigrant contributes positive
good to this nation’s life; he brings usually a sound body, and while
seldom intellectual, he is nearly always intelligent. He is scrupulously
honest in business affairs, and has elevated the business morals of his
community. By his love of music he has robbed the social life in America
of some of its sternness; and the German singing societies are known not
so much for the artistic quality of their performance, as for keeping
alive the spirit of good fellowship.
Unfortunately, the German falls an easy prey to the prevailing
materialistic spirit, and when he worships mammon he becomes the most
ardent of devotees. Then he has no time for his “Gesangverein,” nor for
anything else which is not utilitarian, and “Geldmachen,” the making of
money, is his great ideal. In his home life he still emphasizes those
virtues which have given inspiration to the German poets’ best songs.
His wife is, even in America, the model “Hausfrau”; for “she looketh
well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of
idleness.” Yet the Woman’s Club has touched her also, and the
“Kaffeeklatsch,” with its innocent neighbourhood gossip, has given way
to the formal reception and kindred social delusions. The German has
been the prime factor in dispelling the Puritan idea of the Sabbath,
which to many is a positive evil, but may at least be considered a mixed
good. Still, he ought not to bear the blame alone, for the average
American was ready to have his Sabbath broken for him and has easily
followed into the breach; just as it often takes four or five grown
persons to escort one child to the circus, so one may find four or five
natives at every Sunday base-ball game, helping the German to amuse
himself.
The disintegrating process has also been stimulated by the American
tourists who annually cross the ocean, and who, during their visits in
Continental Europe, leave much of the Puritan spirit behind them--too
much for their own good and the good of their country.
The German has not largely contributed to the deepening of the religious
life of the nation, although wherever he enters the life of the church
he makes its expression more honest. The one thing which he hates
desperately is hypocrisy, and because of that he guards himself very
jealously and seldom speaks of his religious experiences. The German
Methodist and Evangelical Churches, which are of the emotional type, are
not only failing to grow, but are perceptibly becoming smaller. This is
to be deplored, because they developed a somewhat deep if rather narrow
Christian character, and strove to counteract the cold and more formal
spirit of the majority of their brethren in other communions.
The German in America has not produced many great men, but he has filled
this country with good men, which is infinitely better. The cause of the
dearth of prominent German-Americans is due to the fact that they blend
more quickly than any other foreigner (except the Scandinavian) with the
nation’s life, especially if the German reaches any kind of eminence;
and the effect which he has upon the life of the nation is difficult to
trace just because of that.
The coarse, the crude and the low, retain their national stamp, while
the finer and better soon become part of us. Some of us seem to know the
German best and judge him most from the standpoint of the saloon and all
it implies; but I have almost always found him industrious, intelligent,
honest, frugal, patriotic, and God-fearing--noble qualities for American
citizenship. If he has not risen to the highest which he is capable of
reaching, and if he does not exert his influence for the best in all
directions, it is not due to the fact that he is not willing to do it;
but because he could not rise much higher than the highest marked out
for him by the native citizens, or because he could not quite comprehend
that this money-making, materialistic Yankee had ideals which he was
trying honestly to realize.
If we misjudge the German, he misjudges the American and rates him much
lower than he deserves. This has robbed him of a higher standard for
himself and made him exaggerate our national weaknesses, imitating which
has created a peculiar combination of character which does scant justice
to himself or to his American neighbour. When he revisits his
Fatherland, these weaknesses manifest themselves most; and then his
adopted Fatherland comes in for a good share of the blame for his lack
of manners. The following incident illustrates this point. In the lobby
of a fashionable hotel in Berlin a German-American of this type was
expectorating tobacco-juice with the exactness and frequency of an
adept. To a German who called his attention to this nuisance, he
replied: “Everybody does that in America.” He needs to know the American
and value him as he deserves, and he ought to know that which he does
not seem to, that the making of money is to the true American, after
all, not the greatest of achievements; that the hypocrisy with which he
charges him in his religious life is less frequent than he thinks it is,
and that the national ideal is slowly but surely gaining ascendency. He
ought also to know that, more than any other foreigner, he has impressed
upon us both his strength and his weakness, and that we are growing
quite definitely Teutonic. It is for us to find out what this strength
is and to appropriate it more; and it is for him to grow conscious of
his weakness and eliminate it from his social life, that he may become
indeed one of the strongest pillars of this Republic, which already,
like the coming Kingdom, is made up of “every nation and kindred and
tribe and people under heaven.”
VIII
THE SCANDINAVIAN IMMIGRANT
The steerage of an English vessel on which the Scandinavian immigrants
travel is not the forbidding place usually found on the steamers which
sail from Continental ports. The passengers have cabins assigned to
them, their meals are served in human fashion, and the general
appearance of everything is in keeping with that of the travellers who
come from the best peasant stock of Europe. The Scandinavian peasants
bear no taint of past slavery; and as far back as their “Saga” reaches,
they were freemen.
When the new light which first shone at Wittenberg travelled northward,
it found ready entrance into Swedish hearts, and Scandinavia has ever
been the bulwark of Protestantism, so that wherever its story is
written, the name of Gustave Adolphe has a prominent place. With
scarcely any exception the Scandinavian immigrant is a Protestant, a
confessed adherent of some church, and in most cases an ardent worker
and worshipper. Repeatedly during services on shipboard I have found
that every Scandinavian present took an active interest in it, and on
the Sabbath the number of Bible readers and students was astonishingly
large. There is practically no illiteracy among them and the steerage
passenger who read nothing on his journey was an exception; the quality
of the reading was also remarkable, for on one journey I counted among
fifty books, nine of Sheldon’s “What would Jesus do?” and only fourteen
novels of a purely secular character.
The demeanour of the Scandinavian immigrant is quiet, unobtrusive,
almost melancholy; and when he sings it is always in a minor key, his
folk-song having the dreaminess of the Orient and being as far removed
from the jig of his Irish fellow traveller as the North is from the
South. He is homesick from the time he steps on board of ship until he
reaches his home “in the land where there is no more sea”; and the
asylums of the Northwest are full of Scandinavian men and women who have
sunk into hopeless melancholia because of homesickness. Yet in spite of
this most of the immigrants remain in America and more than any other
foreigner blend completely into the national life.
There is scarcely such a thing as a second generation of Scandinavians,
although the first generation never loses its love and longing for fair
“Scandia.” A great many who come know the English language or at least
some words, and being in touch here with a spirit which is as serious
as their own it is no wonder that they remain, and become merged in the
national life. Not one who comes is a pauper, although not a few are
poor; yet nearly all are rich in a heritage of health and character
which unfortunately they do not always retain on this side of the
Atlantic. In fact it is proved that the second generation is weaker
physically, and many of the older immigrants claim that it has lost much
moral fibre also. This complaint which I have heard from all foreigners
about their descendants is largely due to the natural tendency to
overrate the past and to underrate the present. It is also true that the
second generation undervalues the heritage which the parents brought
with them from across the sea; and in not a few cases because of that,
it becomes morally and spiritually bankrupt.
[Illustration: _From stereograph copyright--1905, by Underwood &
Underwood, N. Y._
FAREWELL TO HOME AND FRIENDS
Close of kin to us are the Scandinavians, not only in race, but in
thought and in ideals. More than any other element do they blend quickly
and thoroughly with our national life.]
I have seldom seen Scandinavian immigrants of more than middle age, and
most of them are young men and women between eighteen and thirty-six.
Some remain in the large cities of the East where they are valued as
servants, gardeners and dairymen, more of them drift to Jamestown, N.
Y., as mechanics; but the large majority of immigrants go to the
Northwest where they have been “hewers of wood and drawers of water,”
where they have turned the sod of far stretching acres towards the sun
and where their cattle graze upon a thousand hills. They like the
melancholy plains of the Dakotas; the cold winters remind them of their
own far North, and if any strange country ever grows to them like home
it certainly is this hospitable region in whose mills and factories,
beginning at Chicago and ending in that West which each day comes nearer
to the true East across the Pacific, they are toilers, skilled labourers
and trusted foremen.
I have yet to find the shop where they are not liked; although their
less industrious fellow workmen of other nationalities call them
treacherous--a word which they themselves do not quite understand; but
which means that the Scandinavians “get ahead,” and that is often cause
enough to give them a bad name. In all my dealings with them I have
found them frank and generous, and while playing farmer in order to know
them better, my fellow labourer has many a time hitched the horses for
me, or shovelled my portion of the corn, and when he found that I was
only a make-believe farmer did not betray my confidence.
With such experiences and with such high esteem of the Scandinavian, I
joined a party of young Swedes who were travelling from Chicago to the
Northwest. They were disgusted by that city, by its moral and physical
filth, its noise and its few glimpses of God’s heaven, and I
congratulated them upon going to Minneapolis which I described in
glowing terms as a clean and godly city in which an American population
of New England descent combined with this wholesome Scandinavian element
in making a model city. Eager to have America shine to them in its very
best light I offered myself as their guide through the city, an offer
which they readily accepted. We had scarcely stepped out of the Union
Depot before I wished that I had not said anything about the godliness
of Minneapolis; for we were set upon by thugs, fakirs and lewd women in
such numbers and in such a disgusting manner that I thought for a moment
I had struck the Bowery in its palmiest days. Dozens of squares around
the depot and deep into the heart of the city were filled by brothels of
the most disgraceful kind; pictures were displayed in show windows and
in the open porticos of museums which would make a Paris street gamin
blush, and the whole city seemed to be stricken by some fatal disease.
Policemen were neither ornamental nor useful, city detectives were
employed by gamblers to hustle the fleeced stranger out of town, the
mayor, the sheriff and who knows who else were in league with gamblers
and thieves, while vice was everywhere rampant and did not even have to
defy the law for there was no law.
Newspaper men whom I interviewed, told me that Minneapolis was
considered by travelling men the “toughest” town this side of Butte,
Montana. Ministers said that they were helpless and many told me that it
was none of their or my business; officials were paralyzed, the mayor
was a fugitive from justice, the chief of police was about to be sent to
the penitentiary for safe keeping; and all of them agreed that these
conditions were in no small measure due to the Scandinavian population
which was not fitted for public responsibility.
I had just come from Jamestown, N. Y., which has about the same
population of Scandinavians, where they had elected a Swedish mayor who
gave great satisfaction, where many offices were held by Swedes, and
where I had heard no such complaints.
In Minnesota generally, no taint attached itself to such Scandinavians
as Knute Nelson, Lind and others who had served in high offices in state
and nation; therefore I was shocked, puzzled and disappointed. I found
the common verdict in Minnesota to be: “We can’t trust the Swedes in
public offices;” and the number of defaulting county and city treasurers
of Scandinavian nationality (especially Swedish) who spent a few years
in Stillwater prison, makes the generally accepted estimate of the high
character of the Swede as a citizen waver not a little.
If this estimate be true it may be due first of all to the Swedish
churches, which have not as a rule, in common with a large share of the
American churches, sufficiently emphasized the fact that “righteousness
exalteth a nation,” and that it can become exalted only through a
righteous citizenship. The Lutheran churches have been busy preaching
doctrines and have been so eager to maintain the Augsburg confession
that they have not laid much stress upon upholding the spirit of the
Sermon on the Mount and all that it means for the Kingdom of God. The
“Mission Friends,” as a large body of Swedish Christians calls itself,
has been so busy in common with Methodists and Baptists, doing
evangelizing work, and building up its local church membership, that it
has forgotten that it has something to do with saving the state or the
city.
The second cause may be ascribed to the clannish feeling fostered by
cunning politicians, which makes these people vote for a Scandinavian no
matter what his character is, just because he is one of their own. In
this as in the first case I do not wish it to appear that the
Scandinavian is a sinner above all others, but he has been remarkably
unfortunate in the character of the officials whom he has chosen, and it
will take a great deal of repentance and general betterment to make the
people of Hennepin County unsuspicious of the Scandinavian office
seeker.
The very worst thing in our national life, the most corrupting thing in
every way is this voting as Scandinavians or Hungarians, and not as
Americans. It amounts in many cases to a kind of treason and deserves to
be treated as such. The politicians and the political party which foster
that sort of thing are in a small but very dangerous business which does
more to hamper the American consciousness in the foreigner than any
other thing I know of; and is to-day the great poison which needs to be
eliminated from the national life. In nine cases out of ten the
foreigner is made a scapegoat by designing politicians who give him a
small office which pledges him to do an unfair and often a dishonest
thing. In the Northwest it has brought a stigma upon the Swedes: a bad
reputation which they do not deserve and which they must throw off for
their own good and for the good of the country.
The third and perhaps the best reason for this state of affairs is the
fact that in common with other foreigners they have had a poor example
set them by the Americans. Minneapolis citizens were so busy making
money that they did not realize that their city was in the hands of
thieves and robbers who not only “killed the body,” but cast many a soul
into hell. One is roused to anger by the disclosures of graft in St.
Louis, Philadelphia and other cities too numerous to mention; but when
city officials like the mayor of the city and the chief of police, both
of them of good American stock, are proved to be in league with gamblers
and other immoral folk who corrupt the youth and destroy the trustful
foreigner who comes from farm and forest, then one’s indignation ought
to know no bounds. Justly, the Swedes of Minneapolis say, “the big
rascals were Americans supported by American voters, many of them in
Christian churches and highly esteemed in business and social life.” Nor
can the contented citizen of that beautiful place take any satisfaction
in the fact that some of the rascals were brought to justice and that
the conditions have changed. This miserable state of affairs might still
exist if the aforesaid rascals had not quarrelled with each other and
finally destroyed themselves. Scarcely any one in Minneapolis deserves
the credit of having lifted his voice against it or raised a protest
because of the encroachment of a vice which has no bounds and which can
be made harmless only by being driven away. For a city to give up its
waterfront to palaces of shame where openly and defiantly, women plied
their fearful trade, is poor business, poor esthetics, poor ethics and
poor Christianity. Its encroachment upon the Union Depot where every
stranger enters, and its perfect freedom to obtrude itself, is all poor
politics as it certainly is a poor introduction to that beautiful city’s
life. How much the foreigner is to blame I cannot tell, but this is
true: that Minneapolis has the best foreign element and of course some
of the worst; it has a vigorous, earnest American population with a
noble heritage, and yet it has failed not only in making an all-around
citizen of that foreigner but even in governing its own city; and the
usual excuses of an ignorant, Sabbath-breaking foreign element do not
hold good here, for the foreigner in Minneapolis obeys the Sunday law,
goes to church (one church has over 4,000 worshippers on Sunday night),
is not ignorant or vicious, and yet he is said to be a poor citizen.
After all the blame must fall largely upon those Americans who have lost
the backbone of the Puritans and the vision of the Pilgrims, who feel
little responsibility towards the great city problem, and rest content
with the fact that they live in parks, that the saloon cannot encroach
upon their dwellings, and then are willing to let the rest go as it
pleases and where it pleases. If their pastors lift the prophetic voice,
they are “fired,” even as Savonarola was burned, and it amounts to the
same thing. There is a perfect stream of new ministers who come and go,
and many go away broken in body and in spirit.
In the politics of the state, the Scandinavian has a well-deserved and
honoured place, and the administration of Governor Johnson goes far to
disprove any aspersions cast upon his people.
One of the most interesting communities in Kansas is the Swedish town of
Lindsburgh, where Bethany College is located. It has become an
intellectual and musical centre, and its influence is as wholesome as it
is large.
I am not defending the foreigner; he has his faults, and too often does
not make the most of his great opportunity, but he is as clay in the
hands of the American who can make of him what he pleases.
In Jamestown, N. Y., you have a strong American community with firm
convictions, and this same Scandinavian becomes like it.
In Minneapolis you have no such strong convictions of righteousness and
you have a Scandinavian population which men in authority say is unfit
to exercise its citizenship. Our cities need to cultivate a twentieth
century Puritanism--broad and deep, intense yet sympathetic, unyielding
yet charitable; and they will find that the most ready imitators will be
the foreigners; especially these Scandinavians who were our kinsmen
before they came here and who are ready to be our brothers, and heirs of
the same Kingdom.
In everything which makes a strong people and a great state they have
taken an active and conscientious part. They are staunch supporters of
the public schools; their children finally become teachers and in every
academy and university of the northwest the Scandinavians are an
important contingent, industrious and faithful as students, scholarly
and loyal as professors. Their churches are well built, well supported,
and more and more their pastors are taking their places as true leaders
among the people. They are intensely interested in the larger mission of
the gospel and in the evangelization of the world; they believe in
missions, pray for missions, give to missions, and thus have a wide
horizon. In the Northwest they are the greatest foes of the liquor
traffic, and one can always count on many of them in an effort to
enforce existing laws or frame new ones for its restriction or
destruction. Neither they nor any nationality which has come to America
is alike good or free from serious faults, but a man would have to be
short-sighted indeed not to realize that they have brought to this
country rich moral treasures which we have not sufficiently used or
developed.
What a people we might be, if we would appropriate all that the Jew
brings of spiritual vision and cut down his business ardour and
craftiness by our own emphasis of the nobler gift; if we would receive
the Slav’s virgin strength and plant upon it all that we of older
civilization have learned to hold precious; if we would emulate the
German’s thoughtfulness and thoroughness and not imitate and encourage
him in the trade in lager beer and the use of it. What a nation we
should be if we would take the Hungarian’s devotion to his native land
and make it burn with just such a true fire upon the altar of this
country; and finally, if we would mingle all the virtues that the
nations bring us with the seriousness and loftiness of the
Scandinavian’s mind and heart,--if we did this through one generation,
in one city of our country we would bring the Kingdom of God down upon
the earth.
Nor is this all a pious wish or simply a flow of rhetoric: we shall have
to do that,--cultivate in one another the best gifts,--or we shall reap
a harvest of the worst; for in the Scandinavian we can see how the very
best may become like the worst simply through our own neglect. We must
believe about one another only the best, for people, like bad boys, live
up to their reputation.
This country ought to be no place for racial or national hatreds, and no
people must be branded as this or that simply because of one superficial
or even deep seated fault. How often I have heard from well meaning,
respectable people: “You can’t trust the Scandinavians, they are
immoral, they are treacherous;” when in fact they had no proof for
their assertions, and simply sowed seeds of discord of which they must
some day reap the harvest.
IX
THE JEW IN HIS OLD WORLD HOME
It is said of a certain English scientist that he began a work on
“Snakes in Ireland” by the sentence: “There are no snakes in Ireland”;
and one could easily without seeming to be facetious begin this chapter
by saying: “The Jew has no home.”
He is a man without a country, and without a king; he belongs to a
nation which, scattered over the face of the earth has yet retained the
chief elements of an ancient faith, although no centralized authority
guards it. Inheriting the cultural influences of his past, he absorbs
the culture of each race which harbours him for a season. Although
driven in turn from each insecure habitation, he has not degenerated
into a nomad, but begins the task of home and fortune making, wherever a
more hospitable people affords a resting place for his weary feet.
In his ancient home in Palestine, in the very citadel of his
faith,--Jerusalem, he is the greatest stranger, and people of alien
beliefs have built their monuments on the sites of his grandest
spiritual conquests, and over the tombs of his prophets and seers.
Weeping, he tears his garments and beats his head against a wall which
is all that is left of the temple thrice rebuilt, thrice ruined, and now
having upon its ancient foundations a mosque, with crescent crowned
minaret, from whose height the Muezzin cries: “Allah ho Akbar,” a sound
which vibrates against the ears of the Jew like the mocking of the
prophets who seem to say: “I told you so.”
Among the Arabs, his kinsmen, he is a stranger; for although in speech,
dress and bearing he is like them, in thought and feeling he is above
them; yet the coarsest Mohammedan servant will pronounce the word
“Yahudi,” with all the scorn of a superior and all the hatred of an
enemy.
His features have not changed since the time when Egyptian artists drew
with crude touch on their temple walls the story of the stranger’s
coming, his slavery and his exodus.
Wherever you find him, among the Arabs of North Africa or among the
Danes of Northern Germany, he still bears the marks of his race, with
the flame of Sinai in his look and the fire of the Southland on his
cheek.
In Africa he is most numerous in Morocco, where 300,000 souls struggle
for daily bread and are hated according to their number; while in Egypt
where once he was found in largest numbers, now only about 10,000 Jews
live.
The whole number for Africa does not exceed half a million; in Asia he
is 200,000 strong or weak, in America above 2,000,000, while Europe has
given him room enough to grow into 7,000,000. Between 10,000,000 or
11,000,000 is about the whole number of Jews now in existence, with the
city of New York as the largest Jewish centre in the world, having no
less than 600,000 of the faithful.
To describe the Jews in their varied environments means to draw many
pictures and yet one; for while they differ widely according to the
degree of civilization by which they are surrounded, certain
characteristics remain the same.
Everywhere the Jew becomes outwardly like his masters--but often remains
unlike them in his spiritual life and in those deeper things which
express themselves spontaneously and which are too well grounded in his
nature to be wiped out entirely by the mere touch of the stranger.
Physically he is usually smaller and weaker, has brown or gray eyes and
dark hair, although not seldom it is red and curly. Among the Europeans
his head and neck are always large; but his face is the smallest.
There are a vivaciousness in his manner, a rather emphatic and constant
gesticulation, and a certain something in his speech which always mark
him, and mark him unmistakably, the Jew.
He quickly reciprocates both good and evil, and is regarded with
apprehension because of his aggressiveness; for as both friend and foe
he is intense. Where an inch of approach is granted he may want an ell,
while where he hates he does not hate in moderation. His business
shrewdness is proverbial, although it is not his native genius for the
proverb current in the Orient: “It takes one Jew to cheat three
Christians, it takes one Armenian to cheat ten Jews, it takes one Greek
to cheat twenty Armenians,” while no more correct than such generalities
are likely to be, proves the assertion that he is not the champion in
the chief game of life.
He has had bad environment for the development of business honesty, yet
I know of scarcely a community in the world, in which the Jew plays any
part, where he would not have a strong representation, if a group of the
most trustworthy citizens was called together for any purpose.
The world in which he lives and in which he trades, is the world which
he reflects, and he has not always created the conditions which exist
there.
To “Jew down,” which is a synonym for beating down in price, is as
current in business where he is no factor, as where he is. In Italy it
is an economic disease, and in Russia, in those regions closed to the
Jewish tradesman, the native haggles with the priest about the price of
a funeral or a baptism, with the cab driver over the fare, and even
attempts to bargain on the railroad when he buys his ticket.
To generalize about the good or bad characteristics of the Jew is as
difficult as it is to portray those of any race. When he judges himself
he is either unjustly severe or profusely apologetic, for a people which
has lived for so many centuries under abnormal conditions, cannot be
known by the stranger, nor can it know itself.
At present the Jew is somewhere between Shakespeare’s Shylock and George
Elliot’s Daniel Deronda; and more Shylock where the hate of the middle
ages makes it impossible for him to grow into George Eliot’s ideal. He
is most uncomfortably felt in those countries where he is in the
transition period, when he is apt to be over-bearing and given to
sensuous pleasure; even then he is not so grasping as Shylock although
not so lovable as Daniel Deronda. He does not need much time to come to
his full development. His genius quickly manifests itself, and while he
is charged with superficiality, the fact that in all sciences there are
accurate scholars of the Jewish race, disproves that accusation,
although his emotional nature does not best fit him for the patient task
of the investigator.
His neighbours are quickly conscious of his faults because he is not yet
schooled in the art of suppressing them, and his virtues are often
unrecognized because they shine the brightest in the inner circle, from
which the neighbour is usually excluded by mutual consent.
In Northern Africa we find him to-day just as he was thirty-five or
forty years ago when Sir Moses Montefiore tried to alleviate his inhuman
treatment and his impoverished and miserable condition. The Moors
without knowing the prophecy concerning the fate of Israel are actively
engaged in fulfilling it with a cruel literalness. In every city and
village the Jews have their separate quarters and their own judges.
They are not permitted to study the reading and writing of Arabic lest
their eyes defile the sacred pages of the Koran; they are not allowed to
ride a horse although they may ride a donkey; and they must walk
barefooted before the mosques.
They are prohibited from going near a well when a Mussulman is drinking,
and must wear black, a colour despised by the Moors.
The men are all ugly because of the abject fear on their faces; their
eyes are always cast down and their walk is unsteady while the whole
posture is expressive of the worst kind of slavery.
They may be beaten, kicked and spit upon at any time without being able
to protect themselves or even having the spirit to do it.
The women are unusually handsome and some of the homes are splendidly
furnished and are hospitably opened to the traveller. The same
conditions existed in Algiers until it passed under the rule of France,
when the Jews asserted their superiority and became landowners,
manufacturers and business men, so that nearly half of the property in
Algiers is said to be in their hands, for which they are again beginning
to feel hatred and persecution.
The Egyptian Jews are found only in the two cities of Cairo and
Alexandria; but they have followed the victorious arms of England and
have entered the heart of Africa where in Khartum and the fabled
Timbuctoo there are Jewish communities.
In Asia Minor the largest Jewish population outside of Jerusalem is in
Smyrna; where there are over thirty thousand in the city and vicinity.
These Jews, like those of Morocco, are descendants of Spanish fugitives
and are considered, even by their enemies, honest and industrious,
performing the commonest and hardest labour.
Jerusalem remains to this day the unhappiest city in the world for the
Jew, who sees in it his glorious past and his present shame, and who
must feel the pangs of persecution most in the city in which once he was
master and lord.
Highly interesting is the story of the Jews in China. That they existed
there, was known as early as the sixteenth century when the Jesuit,
Ricci, found them in Khai Fung Fu, the old capital of Honan.
How they came to China is not definitely known, but according to Chinese
history they came as far back as 58 B. C.
In 1848 they were found by some English missionaries, who reported their
synagogues in ruins and the Jews unable to read the one scroll of the
law which remained. At present there are only about twenty families
left, and but a few years ago, a number of Jews came from the interior
to Shanghai, to be taught Hebrew by the English Jews and to have the
rite of circumcision performed.
The real Jewish world, and that which touches our own each day is in the
eastern part of Europe; in Hungary, Poland, Russia and Roumania.
While most of the Jews in the south of Europe and Asia are the
descendants of Spanish Jews, from whom they inherit a peculiar language
and certain tendencies of worship and belief,--those of Eastern Europe
are nearly all under the cultural influences of Germany, whose language
they speak, in a more or less corrupt form. They left Germany because of
the persecutions of the middle ages and settled among the Slavs, where
they have lived for many centuries; never quite sure of an abiding
place, and suffering ever recurring persecutions of varying degrees of
intensity.
The Jews of Bohemia, whose spiritual centre was the Ghetto of the city
of Prague, as well as the Jews of Hungary, exhibit certain liberal
tendencies in their faith, and are midway between orthodox and reformed
Judaism. They are generally classed among German Jews, while the Jews of
Poland, Lithuania and Bessarabia, are classed with the Russian Jews, by
far the largest number, and the one great source of Jewish immigration
to this country.
The cause of this immigration is found in the persecutions, not new in
the history of Israel, but like death, always holding a new terror.
In Russia the horrors of these persecutions are shared by other
non-Russians, yet there is in the Jewish persecutions an element of
hatred and contempt which makes them exceptionally galling, and affects
not only the Jews’ civic, social and economic condition but their
self-respect also. They are classed with the Kalmuks, the Samoyedes, the
Kirghese and other aboriginal tribes of low mental capacity and still
lower standards of civilization; while not sharing with them their legal
status, being as Jews, regarded as outlaws, for whom special repressive
legislation is necessary.
Above all else, these laws tend to keep them within the pale, which pale
is the old kingdom of Poland, and the western provinces originally
belonging to Poland. On this territory which is by far the smaller
portion of European Russia, over 5,000,000 Jews are virtually
imprisoned, entrance into the larger Russia being permitted only to:
1. Merchants of the first class, who have to pay an annual tax of nearly
$500.
2. Professional men who have university diplomas. As, however, of the
entire number of pupils admitted to the higher schools only from five to
ten per cent. are permitted to be Jews, this class is very small.
3. Old soldiers who have served twenty-five years in the army.
4. Students of higher education.
5. Apothecaries, dentists, surgeons and midwives.
6. Skilled artisans, who have no legal residence outside the pale but
who may follow their vocation anywhere, provided they earn their living
by their trade, and that they are members of their trade guilds; a
privilege rarely granted to Jews.
Worst of all is the element of uncertainty as to the interpretation and
operation of the laws, which are now lax, now severe, but always means
of extortion and a recognized avenue of income for numerous officials.
The greatest hardship suffered comes from the fact that in the villages,
only those residents who were there prior to a certain date, are
permitted to remain; while the vast majority is herded together in the
city Ghettos, which offer but a scant living to the normal population.
The Jewish part of the city, the Ghetto, is invariably sunk in mud or
dust, according as there is rain or sunshine, and is the picture of
melancholia. Cadaverous men in long, black, greasy cloaks, countless
children and women, who alone carry sunshine; for in the Jewish woman’s
heart the hope of giving birth to the Messiah is not yet dead.
All of these people are narrow chested, with the melancholy eyes deep
set; they have long bodies and short limbs with which they make ambling
strides like the camel in the desert.
It is a haggling, bargaining, pushing, crowding, seething mass; ugly in
its environment, hard for the stranger to love, cowed by fear, unmanned
by persecution; a thing to jeer at, to ridicule, to plunder and to kill.
This is no apology for the Jew. He carries the faults and the sins of
ages; not only his own, but those of his persecutors also. He is himself
the keenest critic of racial faults, and once awakened to them hates
them and his race most unmercifully. His people are greedy, greasy, and
pushing, or doggedly humble; as might be expected of hunted human
beings, who for 2,000 years have known no peace, wherever the cross
overshadowed them. They could escape torment in a moment by having a
few drops of holy water sprinkled over them, for baptism opens to all,
the door of opportunity. Whatever else may have died, the ancient fire
is not dead in them, and they prefer to suffer, to die, if need be,
rather than to enter a so-called Christian church through the door of
expediency. Sometimes that door has to be entered, but the Jews who
enter it are still Jews, and often they suffer agonies of mind and of
spirit, to which persecution might be preferable.
A friend of mine in Moscow, a manufacturer of tobacco, who had lived in
that city for thirty years, received sudden notice to dispose of his
business and leave the city. He was prosperous, his children were going
to school, they knew no home but Moscow, and the town to which they were
to go was in the crowded Jewish pale which he had left as a child.
He and his family were baptized, he became a full-fledged Russian, with
all the rights of citizenship, and his business went on as usual.
Soon afterwards, however, he became depressed, the depression increasing
each time that he had to take part in religious ceremonies which were
hateful to him, and it was not long before he grew violently insane.
I have no doubt that as soon as the Jewish disabilities are removed,
most of those who have entered the Greek Church will return to the
faith of their fathers which they have never really left.
It is said in Moscow of a certain Jew, that after the priest had
instructed him in the catechism, he asked: “Now what do you believe?”
and he replied: “I believe that now I shall not have to leave Moscow.”
Much more than this, these so-called converted Jews do not and cannot
believe.
Most of them prefer to live in dirty little hovels, hungry and wretched,
to brood over the ancient lore, the Psalms of David, the prophets’
messages from God, the law of Moses and the sayings of the sages. Day
and night, while hunger gnaws and poverty oppresses, they look to
Jehovah and fast and mourn and believe.
Minsk, Wilna, Kovno, and Warsaw contain Jewries in which from 80,000 to
200,000 souls are living--no one knows how; two-thirds by manual labour,
the commonest and the coarsest, for the lowest wage. To-morrow’s bread
is always an unknown quantity, and these people do “Walk by faith and
not by sight.” No labour is too heavy or too dirty; and the mournful
Jewish face will look out at you from the pit of a mine, from under a
burden of wood or water, from the margin of the river as boats are
unloaded, or from the seat of a miserable cab, whose horse and driver
are alike most pitiable. Because of their weak bodies they are not
regarded as good labourers, except at tailoring.
Locked in the city, hampered in their movements by unreasonable laws,
groaning under taxes too heavy to be borne, the government, labour,
religion--life itself a burden, they are living Egypt over again,
waiting and praying for their deliverance. Why are they persecuted? Can
any one answer that question? Has any one yet found the reason for blind
hate, that blindest of all,--the hate of race? They are hated because
they are supposed to be rich; yet seventy-five per cent. of them are
poorer than Chinese coolies.
They are hated because they have strange customs, because they hold
themselves, in a large measure, aloof from the common life. How can they
be anything but strangers to the adherents of a religion who choose a
holy day, the day of resurrection, to kill them? Easter time is almost
invariably the time of persecution. How can they be other than strangers
to a church, the ringing of whose bells marks the carnage of hundreds of
thousands--murdered for the glory of Jesus--a Jew.
How can they be anything but strangers to a government whose officials
will step among the mobs to encourage them, shouting: “Steady boys, keep
it up.”
They are hated by the government because they are supposed to be
revolutionists. If only they were! The masses of the Jews are so cowed
by fear that they are unmanned. They do not know the use of a weapon.
Here and there a Jew, alert and keen, sees his misery and is brave
enough to defend himself. Many of them advocate Socialism; it attracts
them because it knows no race, because it preaches a certain kind of
peace, because it is a brotherhood. The Jew does not find in the
orthodox church the meek and lowly Nazarene, because the Messiah whom
the church preaches, is masked behind church millinery; because the
representative of the lowly Nazarene sits upon the throne of the
haughtiest autocrat, and because the cross is an ornament and not an
element in the salvation of men.
The Jew in Russia is persecuted because he is supposed to use the blood
of Gentile children for his passover. This false accusation has followed
him through the years, in spite of the fact that those who promulgated
it knew that it was false. The shedding of human blood was never one of
Israel’s crimes, and killing is a desire which the Jew lost long ago,
having never been a master in this art.
[Illustration: ISRAELITES INDEED.
The root of the persecution of the Russian Jew is found in his superior
ability to cope with the difficulties of existence, in his thrift and
shrewdness which know no bounds.]
Frankly, the root of this persecution of the Jews is found in their
superior ability to cope with the difficulties of existence in Russia,
in their thrift and shrewdness which know no bounds and which have
almost crushed in them their spiritual longings, making them a byword
among the nations.
But a new inspiration has come to the Jews of Eastern Europe through the
Zionistic movement; a revival of Jewish nationalism, a desire to win
back the lost Palestine,--the Fatherland of their spiritual sires.
The way back to Palestine is a difficult one and neither their Maccabean
spirit nor the wealth they accumulate may avail them as a nation, to
reach their goal. But the way there is beautiful, the dream is glorious
and the spiritual and physical miracles wrought among the wealthiest and
the poorest of them are remarkable. A new literature and a new psalmody
are being born, a new Maccabean spirit is filling the emaciated bodies
of these sons of Israel, and one of them sings and he but one of
thousands:
“Arise, and shine, Jerusalem,
In costly jewelled diadem;
Put off thy ash strewn garb of gray,
In glorious dress, thyself array.
“Jehovah made thy people free;
Now that they long for liberty.
At end is all thy suffering night,
Jerusalem, send forth thy light.
“A note of ancient psalmody
Fills heaven and earth with melody;
A sacrifice of grateful praise
From altars old, we now upraise,
“And God looks pleased from glory down,
His smile oh! Israel is thy crown.
Put off thy ashen garb of gray,
Jerusalem, see thy glorious day.”
But for a long time to come, this Jerusalem will have to be New York,
and their Palestine, America.
One can but hope that the Jew will so live and act, as to become one
with the highest ideals of his new country, and so unwrap himself from
ancient faults that in the truest sense, Jerusalem will be the “Bride
adorned for her bridegroom,” and the city come down from heaven among
men, in whose midst the reign of God will be an acknowledged fact.
X
THE NEW EXODUS
In a little studio on the West side of New York, a Jewish sculptor
modelled the clay for a medal upon which he was to engrave for grateful
Israel, the memorial of its settlement in America two and a half
centuries ago. The face of the medal bore the veiled form of Justice,
casting the evil spirit of Intolerance from his throne and placing upon
it the Goddess of Liberty, who is bestowing on all alike the rich gifts
in her keeping. On the reverse side of the medal, Victory is engraving
the date 1655, the year of the landing of the Jewish forefathers. The
Victory modelled by this Jewish genius is not the triumphant,
over-bearing, conquering spirit; but in her noble form are embodied
graciousness, determination and a sincere gratitude.
At the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the landing of the Jews
in America, held in Carnegie Hall on Thanksgiving day, November 30,
1905, these feelings were given utterance in various ways by various
persons; but by none more truly than by the Rev. Dr. Joseph Silverman,
in his opening prayer.
“We thank Thee for America, this haven of refuge for the oppressed of
the world. We thank Thee for the blessings of a permanent home in this
country, its opportunities for development of life and advancement of
mind and heart, for its independence and unity, its free institutions,
the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We reverently
bow before Thy decree, which has taught us to find enduring peace and
security in the sure foundation of this blessed land.”
The Jewish pioneers were cultured and far travelled men, who came from
Portugal, Holland and England and their provinces. They were imbued by
the adventurous spirit of the people whom they had left, in order to
seek the undiscovered paths of the sea which led to fabled wealth.
It is no wonder if, at that early period when Jewish persecutions were
at their height and the Jewish name under the darkest cloud, they had
difficulty in gaining free entrance to their desired haven, and that the
charter which was granted them was given grudgingly. It reads thus:
_“26th of April, 1655._
“We would have liked to agree to your wishes and request that the
new territories should not be further invaded by people of the
Jewish race, for we foresee from such immigration the same
difficulties which you fear, but after having further weighed and
considered the matter, we observe that it would be unreasonable
and unfair, especially because of the considerable loss sustained
by the Jews in the taking of Brazil, and also because of the large
amount of capital which they have invested in the shares of this
company.[1] After many consultations we have decided and resolved
upon a certain petition made by said Portuguese Jews, that they
shall have permission to sail to and trade in New Netherlands and
to live and remain there, provided the poor among them shall not
become a burden to the company or the community, but be supported
by their own nation. You will govern yourself accordingly.”
These Jews, true to their religious instincts, built synagogues wherever
they settled and were called Sephardic Congregations. Until the
beginning of the nineteenth century, they were the dominating religious
and cultural type, and while yet retaining certain racial
characteristics, they blended into the national life, having no small
share in its development.
With the coming to this country of the German peasantry, there was
brought from the villages and towns a not inconsiderable number of Jews,
who scattered through the North and South upon all the highways of
commerce, and who finally became the second strata of the Jewish life
in America. At first, they were more or less amalgamated with the
Portuguese Jews, but as their numbers grew overwhelmingly great, they
developed their religious and social life after their own traditions and
were distinguished from their Sephardic brethren by the generic name
“Ashkenazim” (Germans).
Within this group developed the German Reform movement, which has in
greater or less degree attracted all the Germanic Jews, and from which
the merely traditional and ritualistic element has quite disappeared; so
that at the present time it is not far removed from Unitarianism in
faith and practice. Later, when the population of the Eastern portion of
Europe found its way across the sea, under the impulse of great
nationalistic movements in Austria, Hungary and Poland, a new factor was
introduced into the Jewish communities, which brought with it
Rabbinistic lore and faithfulness to the traditions of the Elders, and
this factor tended to strengthen the Jewish consciousness. In after
years a good portion of this group attached itself to the Reform
movement and cannot be differentiated from the Germanic group; while the
residue has become the link between it and the overwhelmingly large mass
of Russian Jews, which was to come and which now forms the greatest
proportion of the Jewish population.
This Russian Jewish group is not easily analyzed; it is neither
heterogeneous nor homogeneous; it is Polish, Roumanian, Lithuanian,
Bessarabian and Galician. It is steeped in traditionalism, overburdened
by ritualistic laws, loaded by the fetters of Rabbinism, held under the
spell of Kabalism and Wonder Rabbis, swayed now by this teacher and now
by that one. It has no common centre or common aim, and has not analyzed
itself nor its environment. Strongly individualistic, its members are
united to one another and to the other groups, only by their common
misfortune, an indefinable racial consciousness; intellectually and
culturally, far below the other groups, it bears the marks of oppression
and of the oppressor in its thought and in its action. Nevertheless, it
is destined to be the determining influence in the future of Judaism in
America, and as such, deserves special study and consideration.
The Jewish population may be divided into four large groups, some of
which are subdivided. I. The Sephardic or Spanish-Portuguese Jews, who
have not retained their native speech, but who have preserved certain
peculiarities in their worship, and distinctive ritualistic forms which
are dignified and stately. The Hebrew language which they use in their
service is pronounced in a peculiar way and in better harmony with the
spirit of the language than one hears elsewhere. They are the real
aristocracy among the Jews; rarely poor, with much of old time Spanish
pride remaining in their bearing and expressed in their attitude towards
the other Jewish groups. They are centred almost entirely in the Eastern
cities, where they are found in the upper world of finance and in
business and professional life.[2] The second group, the “Ashkenazim” or
German Jews, has most quickly adjusted itself to the life in America and
has developed what might be called an American Judaism, in which liberal
tendencies have prevailed and have played havoc with the traditions of
the past, very often at the expense of the spirit of Judaism. Some of
these congregations have made Sunday the Sabbath of their week, and the
service is conducted in the English language with the Hebrew almost
entirely eliminated. Out of this group have come most of the prominent
Jews in the United States, and in nearly every community of any size we
find German Jews, engaged in reputable business, most often owning dry
goods or clothing stores.[3]
The third group is composed of Austrian and Hungarian Jews many of whom
have remained orthodox without being slavishly attached to Rabbinism;
while their congregations are usually upon what is called the “Status
Quo” basis, which is neither extremely orthodox nor reformed, and
consequently is sterile.
They are apt to be more clannish than the German Jews, grouping
themselves into centres according to the districts from which they come,
strongly retaining the characteristics of the races among which they
lived so long, and bringing with them many of the antagonisms engendered
in that conglomerate of nationalities, the Austro-Hungarian monarchy.
This is especially true of the Hungarian Jews who have become convivial,
like the Magyars, and are not over fond of work. The coffee houses of
“Little Hungary” in New York, draw their revenue largely from these
Jews, to whom life without the coffee house would not seem worth the
living, and for whom each day must hold its pause for a friendly game of
cards or billiards, and a pull at a long and strong black cigar. Among
them are shrewd traders, pawn-brokers and a very small proportion of
peddlers; although the occupation of peddler entails a position not
agreeable to their proud spirits. In a larger degree than the other
groups mentioned, they are engaged in mechanical labour, being wood and
metal workers, and makers of artificial flowers and passementerie. In
these trades they have attained real proficiency. They are not so well
distributed as the German Jews, and are found largely in New York with a
slowly increasing number in Chicago and St. Louis. They have brought
with them many of the looser ways of such cities as Vienna and Budapest;
therefore they are less thrifty than the Russian Jews and less
intelligent than those from Germany. Their Judaism is apt to sit very
lightly upon them, as they have neither the spiritual vision of the
first group, nor the ethical conception of religion which the second
group possesses. Racially they are also less conscious of Judaism, and
easily intermarry with Gentiles or lose themselves among them where
their physique does not betray them. A Hungarian Jew usually prefers to
be called a Magyar; yet I know of many instances where that fact was
stoutly denied, though undoubtedly the Magyar spirit was grafted upon
Semitic stock.
The last and largest group, the Russian Jews, the youngest army of the
immigrants, is ultra orthodox, yet ultra radical; chained to the past,
and yet utterly severed from it; with religion permeating every act of
life, or going to the other extreme, and having “none of it”; traders by
instinct, and yet among the hardest manual labourers of our great
cities. A complex mass in which great things are yearning to express
themselves, a brooding mass which does not know itself and does not
lightly disclose itself to the outsider.
More broken into individualistic groups than the Austrians and
Hungarians, they have the strongest racial consciousness, and perhaps
are also the depository of the greatest Jewish genius. The synagogue is
the centre of each provincial or village group gathered in some Ghetto
and, being subject to no ecclesiastical law outside of itself, is
thoroughly Congregational. These synagogues vary in size and untidiness
as the services vary in monotony and disorder. Each man prays or chants
as fast or as slowly, as high or as low, as he pleases. Naturally, the
effect is not harmonious, neither is there much harmony in the
administration of ecclesiastical affairs.
Rabbi, Cantor and Shochet (the official slaughterer) are usually out
with each other and with various members of the congregation, and
quarrels during service are not unknown. While the worship seems
fervent, it is often spiritless, and only a small portion of the Russian
Jewish population works seriously at the business of its organized
religious life. The younger generation has much unsatisfied longing for
the real spiritual life, and there are a few Jewish Endeavour Societies
entirely apart from the synagogues, in which this spirit expresses
itself. A still larger number of the young people have slowly but surely
drifted into complete antagonism to the faith of their fathers, and here
lies the great conflict as well as the great problem.
Nothing in the whole story of immigration is so pathetic as this
growing breach between the old and the new; this ever widening gulf
which is not being bridged.
The Ethical Culture Society has a hold, although not a very vital one,
upon a small number; and here and there one or the other of the young
people drifts into a Christian church, but this makes no serious
impression upon the mass.
Zionism has become the strong rallying point for many of them, and has
gathered into its various lodges much of the radical element, which is
coming back to the law and the prophets by the way of an awakened
consciousness.
The Russian Jews are the busiest of our alien population, and although
at first among the poorest, a respectable middle class is growing up,
and is marching towards wealth, if not as yet enrolled among the
millionaires.
Of the total of 600,000 Jews in New York City, nearly 100,000 are
engaged in various branches of the clothing industry, and in mechanical
and manufacturing pursuits. This is a remarkable showing for people who
nearly all had to adjust themselves to manual labour for which they were
not physically fitted, and which they had no opportunity to perform in
Russia.
In the trades which they have entered they usually maintain a
satisfactory wage, and cannot be regarded as a serious economic menace.
If they remain crowded in the Ghettos of the Eastern cities, it is due,
not so much to their gregarious habits and to the needs springing from
their religious observances, as it is due to the fact that the trades in
which they find readiest employment are here concentrated, and the wages
most satisfying. The needle above all else is to blame for the
congestion of the Ghetto, and a great transformation must come over
Israel both physically and mentally, before the needle will be exchanged
for the plow.
XI
IN THE GHETTOS OF NEW YORK
At last we are free, although still upon Uncle Sam’s ferry boat, which
carries those of us who have passed muster, to the Battery, the gateway
into the gigantic city and the vast country which lies beyond where,
“sans ceremonie,” we are landed.
Boarding house “Runners” call out the names of their hostelries, express
men entreat us to entrust to them our belongings, the voice of the
banana peddler is heard in the land, and through the babel of sounds
there arise the joyous shrieks of those who welcome their dear ones.
Over in Hoboken, where the cool-blooded Anglo-Saxon awaits his wife, who
“toiled not neither did she spin” during her year abroad,--the joy
remains unexpressed. She may say to him: “Hello, old man!” and he will
reply: “How are you, old girl?” and that is all, so far as the public
knows. But here on the Battery, where Jacob meets his Leah, for whom he
has toiled and suffered these five years, for whose sake he ate hard rye
bread and onions that he might save money to bring her to him;--when
Jacob meets his Leah, there are warm embraces and kisses through the
tears. Here, men embrace and kiss each other, and children are held up
to the father’s gaze,--fathers who left them as infants and now see them
grown.
Half a dozen stalwart men and women will almost crush a little wrinkled
“Mutterleben,” their mother, coming to them for the sunset of her life,
which is to be bright and beautiful after many dark mornings and cloudy
noondays.
I attached myself to a young Russian Jew of about my own age, who had no
relatives waiting for him, but who had the address of his parents’
friends. They had come here a few years before, and now served as the
clearing house for that particular district in Russia, of which their
native town was the centre.
We went up Broadway, and after plunging into the whirlpool of its
traffic, emerged safe at the City Hall, crossed the Bowery and were at
the edge of the great Ghetto, the heart of the largest Jewish community
in the world. It numbers now nearly 700,000 souls, scattered through all
parts of Greater New York, and massed in four centres, commonly called
Ghettos; of which the one through which we are passing is the “Great
Original” one. It is less dirty, less suspiciously fragrant than the
Ghetto which my comrade has left, and in spite of squalor and visible
signs of poverty, a certain air of joyousness pervades its life which is
lacking in the old home. The hurdy gurdy grinder lures nimble footed
children from block to block, like the “Pied Piper of Hamelin,” and they
are happier and more graceful than the much be-starched children of the
rich who take lessons in dancing and in conventional deportment.
The sidewalks and driveways are packed by humanity, most of it children,
for the Abrahamitic promise that his “seed shall increase like the sands
of the sea” has not yet departed from Israel--only the illustration is
not quite complete, for while the Ghetto children are as numerous as the
sands (I counted almost two thousand in one block), they are not nearly
so clean.
The language of the Ghetto is Yiddish, a mixture of German, Hebrew, and
Russian; but with enough English mixed with it to make the immigrant
halt before such words as “gemovet,” “gejumpt,” “getrusted,” which
sooner or later will become part of his own vocabulary.
Street signs are written in Hebrew letters, and the passer-by is invited
by them to drink a glass of soda for a cent, to buy two “pananas” for
the same sum, to purchase a prayer-mantle or “kosher” meat, to enter a
beer saloon or a synagogue. Many of these signs are translated into
English, and Rabbi Levinson on Cannon Street has in large English
letters, “Performer of Matrimony;” in the same house one finds “wedding
dresses for hire,” and can have his “picture photographed,” and also
may buy “furnitings for pedrooms and barlours.”
[Illustration: THE GHETTO OF THE NEW WORLD.
East of the Bowery in New York City is the heart of the largest Jewish
community in the world. Sidewalks, street signs, language, all indicate
the process of development.]
Everything is for sale on the street, from pickled cucumbers to feather
beds, and almost all the work done in this Ghetto is done by Jewish
workmen. There are Jewish plumbers, locksmiths, masons, and of course
tailors; and work and trade are the watchwords of the Ghetto, where, in
all my wanderings through it, I have not seen that genus Americanum, the
corner loafer.
The prevailing type of dwelling, even after tenement-house legislation,
is much too crowded and too dirty. The New York Ghetto looks remarkably
decent from the outside, but pharisaic landlords have beautified the
“outside of the cup and platter,” while within, the house is poorly
prepared for human habitation. A good example is the house into which I
lead my friend. It is an old fashioned front and rear tenement with
fifty families as residents, and on climbing the stairway to the fifth
story to which our address directs, our nostrils are greeted by a
fragrance which, compared with the well remembered smells of the
steerage, is like unto the odours of Araby the blest.
We come into the kitchen, where the family of nine is just at dinner;
two of the number, a husband and wife, are regular boarders. I doubt
whether anywhere else, under similar circumstances, we would have
received so genuinely hearty a welcome, in spite of the fact that we
were practically strangers to them, and that I had no claim whatever
upon their hospitality.
One of the children has already been dispatched to the nearest store to
buy additional dainties, and room is made at the already crowded table
for two very hungry adults.
My Russian friend, amazed as he was at the turmoil of the streets and
the height of the buildings, is still more awed by the sight of such
abundant and wholesome food, to which he may help himself without stint.
There are large sweet potatoes which taste better than cake, and are
permeated by the delicate flavour of nuts; they are a greater contrast
to the small, gnarly, scant portion of potatoes which it has been his
lot to eat, than any forty story sky scraper can be to the tumble-down
shanty in which his father kept store. Meat,--a huge piece of meat, on
his plate,--and in the memory of his palate, only the soft end of a soup
bone, as a special delicacy. What a contrast!
“Last, but not least,” the pie, that apple pie, of which he had a whole
one for himself and knew not how to attack it; until finally, following
good precedent, he took it into his trembling hands and let his joyous
face disappear in its juicy depths. After the dinner, he was catechized,
all the inhabitants of the far away town were inquired after, and the
record of the living and the dead told to the news hungry hearers.
What a
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