Back Aa

On the Trail of The Immigrant

<h2>II THE BEGINNING OF THE TRAIL</h2> 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.” <ANTIMG src="images/ill_pg_026_sml.jpg" width-obs="500" height-obs="354" alt="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." title="THE BEGINNING OF THE TRAIL" /> 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: <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> 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. </div> </div> 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. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

1 of 2

2 of 2

Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.