XVI From Ephrata to Whiskey Hill
That portion of our history, which began with the inflow of Germans from the Palatinate, seems to most of us a closed chapter; yet in the very heart of the Keystone State, where more than 200 years ago the German pietist began to build its cities, since grown to greatness, the German is still a foreigner.
Indeed, he is almost as complete a foreigner as the Slav who lives in the mining patches along the Wyoming arid Susquehanna Rivers. Germanic speech, habits and types survive, and it was in a crowded trolley car in Reading, Pa., just after I had finished a wearisome investigation among the Slavs, that a woman of generously Teutonic proportions said to me: “Setz dich a mahl zu mir her.”
Let me add that although I had never seen the lady before, I obeyed the summons. First, because there was no other seat vacant, and, second, because I have been long enough in America to obey implicitly when a lady commands.
“Du acts wie ein stranger,” the good woman continued, taking my hand; and then, discovering that I had a right to act like a stranger, she apologized profusely. She had mistaken me for her family physician. In spite of her evident embarrassment, we began a conversation, and my ears, accustomed as they now are to our rather monotonous and uneuphonic English, refreshed themselves by listening to this new speech—Pennsylvania Dutch. It required thinking in two languages, and that in their most archaic forms.
Four generations had passed since my neighbour’s ancestors came to this country; yet her English, whenever she attempted it, smacked strongly of the Fatherland, and in an unguarded moment, when my sentences seemed to her rather involved, she said, “Du talkst a bissel zu fast.”
The trolley took us through the manufacturing centre of Reading and out into the fruitful fields of Lancaster County, and the further I travelled in that state the more I realized the difference between the old and the new Pennsylvania, even in the names called into my ears by the prosaic conductor. Philadelphia does not now suggest Bible times so much as it might; but there are Bethlehem, Nazareth, Emmaus, and Ephrata, each name suggesting at once a sacred atmosphere. Then for the new Pennsylvania are the names of Johnstown, Coalton, Scranton, and Steelton, besides those yet unplaced on the map—names like Hunkeytown, Guinea Hill, Dago Roost, and Whiskey Hill, squatted close to the mines, flanked by culm heaps and huge breakers, and cut through and through by ravines and dirt-clogged rivers. All these towns are destined to disappear long before the last lumps of coal dug there, are burned.
The trolley stopped at Ephrata, and my neighbour, who had been in Reading, “bargains zu kaufe im grosse schtore,” left the car; but not without admonishing me to be sure to see the cloister of the German Baptist Brothers, which, she said, “is a grosse sight.” I needed no admonition, for I was there on a pilgrimage. I had come, to stand face to face with a great past, to visit the old haunts of these German mystics, to lose myself in the all-pervading peace of Ephrata, after having been in the thick of the great industrial war, whose presence was attested even here by the cloud of smoke on the western horizon. This cloud of smoke, although changing into a pillar of fire by night, does not seem to be the guide out of captivity. I suppose one easily reads something into the atmosphere of a place; but I am sure that, even without the pilgrim spirit which brought me there, I should have recognized Ephrata as one of the places in which dreamers have built air castles; and these are castles which have foundations. The archæologist does not see them in the dust; but the sociologist, if he has a sensitive spirit, feels them, especially if he has come from a week’s study of Whiskey Hill.
One of the men who has written of Ephrata before me says: “There is nothing peculiar about the village itself, or its people.” He evidently had no “inner sense,” and, moreover, he had never been at Whiskey Hill. Not only is the air of Ephrata “salubrious and the outlook delightful,” the street is full of gabled houses one close upon the other. Some of them are commonplace indeed; but many of them are quaint and clean, with deep-set windows full of flower-pots, the green foliage shining through latticed panes, in rich contrast to the white snow almost up to the window-sills. And the people one sees—“commonplace”? People who for nearly two hundred years have clung tenaciously to a strange garb, in the midst of a “perverse and crooked generation,” bent upon changing the cut of its coats with every passing season? Women who wear brown bonnets and look as modest as thrushes, whom one sees in single file following the men; women who have resisted the allurements of pokes and toques and picture hats for two hundred years—such women commonplace? Such women are as remarkable as they are rare, and such there are in Ephrata.
As I watched them they were going to the modest meeting-house at the edge of the village. I did not follow them, for my way led straight down the main street which ends in the turnpike, over which a toll-gate still hangs. The gatekeeper sits in a little hut among his cronies, smoking the native weed and talking politics—and he who is acquainted with the quality of either ought to know that they are strangely alike.
“The cloisters are across the meadow,” the toll-keeper informed me. And, pointing to one of his companions, a man of uncertain age and a rather doubtful degree of cleanliness, he said: “And he lives in one of them.”
“I am not a member,” the man volunteered, apologetically. “My wife is.”
This alone proved him a modern and commonplace. I left him disgustedly, and, stepping over the stile, walked through the snow-covered meadow and along the shores of the Cocalico towards a group of rather ill-shaped, weather-beaten buildings which suggested a deserted farm more than a cloister. The momentary disappointment vanishes, however, as soon as one has a clear view of the peaked-roof buildings in which no outer beauty is visible, but which, with their low doors, narrow cells, and roped stairway, recall to him who knows, the “Chronicon Ephratense,” the groping of this Brotherhood after the blessed life here below, seeking communion with God in self-denial, in good works and pious songs. These Brothers fell into all the errors of Christendom and practiced many of its virtues in a single generation. Conrad Beisel, a German mystic, came here to live as an anchorite. His pious life drew others to him, and they progressed to monasticism.
When women found them, they all became celibates. They were close to every heresy which threatened the early Church, and were not far from worshipping Conrad Beisel as a reincarnation of Christ; while in the mystic Sophia they came close to the adoration of the Virgin. They practiced communism successfully for over half a century, and branded property as sin long before Proudhon declared it to be theft. They printed Bibles, wrote ecstatic hymns, developed to a remarkable degree the art of illuminating letters, and organized a Sunday-school in which they used some of the so-called modern methods, such as promotion cards, long before the thought came into the mind of Robert Raikes, the founder of the Sunday-school of to-day. They were chaste, frugal, and non-resistant. One of them, Peter Miller, the successor of Conrad Beisel, went to George Washington to plead for the remittance of the death penalty of a man, Michael Wildman, accused of treason. The General told Peter Miller that the severest penalty must be dealt out at a time like that.
“If it were not so, I would gladly release your friend.”
“Friend!” replied Miller; “he is the only enemy I have.”
This, it is said, made such an impression on General Washington that the pardon was granted.
I lingered in the “Saal,” the place of worship. Simple and small it is, with plain pine pews, the beamed ceiling hanging far into the room. The walls are covered by charts on which, in exquisite ornamental lettering, Scripture verses and some of the mystic poetry of the Brothers are written. There are also allegorical pictures, naively drawn by the pen, suggesting the thought that in time a new school of religious art might have been developed here.
Scarcely half a dozen worshippers, I was told by the cronies at the toll-gate, gather here on Saturday; for the sect is that of the Seventh Day Dunkards, or German Baptists, and it cannot be very long before this sanctuary will be empty and forsaken and its ruin complete.
I braved the snow-banks and waded through an unmarked path towards the cemetery where they shall all soon lie. I wandered among the graves, among those who long ago went to their rest and their reward. Here among others are the Sisters Iphigenia and Anastasia and the Brothers Daniel and Gabriel, the headstones of their graves quite covered by the snow. In the centre of the cemetery a stone sarcophagus rises above the snow. It seems to have withstood the ravaging tooth of time, for it stands squarely upon the ground. I brushed aside as best I could the snow which covered the tablet, and read: “Here rests an outgrowth of the love of God, a solitary brother, afterwards a leader, ruler, teacher of the solitary and the congregation of Christ in and around Ephrata. Born in Eberbach, in the Palatinate. Called by his worldly name, Conrad Beisel; but according to his spiritual name, ‘Friedsam,’ the peaceful one.”
The snow and the frost clung closely. I could not read it all, but I saw plainly the beautiful German letters cut deep into the stone. “Friedsam”—it was this word which took me back to Whiskey Hill.
“Friedsam.” No one could be called that on Whiskey Hill. Weather-beaten wooden buildings there are, scaffolded structures, shaken by the vibration of coal-crushing machinery within. From their third or fourth stories down, young boys sit before troughs, along which the coal rushes and rumbles and tumbles. Nine hours a day, in an atmosphere black as night from coal dust, sitting in a cramped and unnatural position, the breaker-boys pick slate from the falling coal by the light of smoky oil lamps directly under their nostrils. Nine hours of this, and many of these boys, mere children, although sworn to be the legal age, which is fourteen, walk homeward like old men. They look so weary, so old, so wizened! They surely are not “Friedsam.”
An old man climbs down the breaker. He, too, is now a breaker “boy.” Only about fifty-six years of age, unfit for the harder work in the mine, he picks slate from the larger lumps. He clings to a bit of broken fence as soon as the fresh air strikes him and coughs so violently that his paroxysm shakes the fence. The boys stand about, jeering; but when a clot of blood comes from the old man’s mouth, and another followed by a stream, the boys take to their heels.
“Prach, dust, got into my lungs,” the Slovak miner says. “It can’t last much longer.” Looking after the boys, and then pointing to himself, he adds, “The beginning and the end of the breaker-boy.”
I shall never forget the pain written on that man’s face as he told me that he came to this country, a young Slovak boy from a village by the river Waag, strong and full of health. He is giving his life-blood drop by drop, drop by drop, for our enrichment. He is unable to walk home; so I lead him. Home! This is his home. A gray, weather-beaten hut, one of thirty, standing on a slant of the hillside, surrounded by culm piles, black and forbidding. There is a street, deeply sunk in mire; for there is no sewerage, and a sickening green scum has gathered in front of every house. I say there is no sewerage—there is not even a decent ditch which might carry the foul stuff away.
The hut has three stories, the lowest one built into the hillside, with windows only to the front; the rest of the rooms are damp and cold, not even fit for the storing of vegetables. In one of these holes lives the old, consumptive breaker-boy. Surely this suggests nothing “Friedsam.”
There are thousands and tens of thousands such “homes” in Pennsylvania, all the way from Pittsburg to Whiskey Hill. Each one of them brings rich revenue to somebody, and all of them reap a rich harvest of death. Six, eight, and ten dollars’ rent a month is paid by these miners for a place in which they often die by inches.
The battle against filth is not everywhere zealously prosecuted; but I challenge any American woman to do better than some of these Slovak women on Whiskey Hill. Let me take you into one such home—and I came upon it more often than you may think. The room is freshly papered, the work done by the miner’s wife, and not ill done. The floor is scrupulously clean; gorgeous pictures of the saints hang on the wall; there is a sewing-machine, and a woman busy at her task of making shirts for her miner husband.
There are two rooms, occupied by a family of five, and four boarders. I know the home of this woman in Hungary, and the very village from which she comes. I know the clean, straw-thatched cottage, the broad, dusty street, and the waving poppy-field back of the house; and I ask, “How are you getting along on Whiskey Hill?” This is the woman’s reply: “Chvala Bohu dobre.” Thank God, very well. I have never seen a more beautiful and grateful smile pass over a face, and have never heard a sentence which more fully suggested “Friedsam”; but suddenly her face grows dark; she hears the noise of hurrying horses and the beating of wheels against the rocky street. “The ambulance! O Virgin Mother, protect me!” she cries; for the ambulance stops at her door, and they bring in the mangled body of her husband.
He went out a few hours ago and she was “Naomi”—now he is brought home, and she is “Marah.” Bitter, very bitter.
What happens next on Whiskey Hill? Do people grow excited? Do the neighbours come rushing in? Do the newspapers in the town at the foot of Whiskey Hill take notice how this “Hunkey” came to his death? No, indeed. Nothing happens. The woman laments alone, even as another Marah laments alone in a similar row on another ridge. There are ten women anything but “Friedsam”; for on a neighbouring hill their husbands were slain together, by the fall of one huge rock or the same powder blast. “And nothing happens?” Yes, something happens. The coroner’s jury is summoned, and brings in the verdict; the same verdict always, with slight variations, rendered ever since the great companies absorbed the anthracite industry. This is it:
“Martin Horvat, aged forty-two, came to his death by a fall of rock in Mine No. 2 on Whiskey Hill, January 30, 1908. The jury finds that the company should have provided the deceased a safe place to work in. It was not the duty of the deceased to pass on the safety of the roof. The deceased is not to blame.” (What a comfort!) “We further find that the place in which the deceased worked should have been properly timbered” (which it was not when the accident occurred), “but we do not find that the company was to blame.”
Who was to blame? The deceased was not, the company was not. I have it—the rock was to blame. Somebody in Wilkes-Barre said, in answer to my query; “These Hungarians are so ignorant.” I see now—ignorance was to blame.
Every day there are funerals on Whiskey Hill, and after the funeral a feast, and after the feast a glorious spree. Whiskey Hill has earned its name, although it might be called Beer Hill just as appropriately. The saloons not only outnumber the churches; they outnumber the stores, schools, churches, undertakers’ shops, and culm hills combined, and a man might make a living by picking up the empty beer barrels that lie in the ravines. There are enough empty bottles lying in the runs, to clog the flow of the creek in the spring, when the current becomes strong enough to make its way through the ooze and slime.
Ignorance and beer are to blame—and avarice, especially avarice. For the first two the miner is to blame, but only in part. This ignorance is an inheritance, often a condition arising from the fact that he is in a strange country, to whose language he is deaf and dumb. The drinking, too, is an inheritance, and often also a condition arising from the circumstances under which he must live and work.
Granting, however, that he is ignorant and intemperate, up here on Whiskey Hill and on hundreds of other hills no attempt is being made by any one to dispel this ignorance. Neither his masters nor his priests are doing it. His priests, perhaps, are more content with his ignorance than his masters, for to the master he might be worth more if he knew more. The priest is sure of the opposite result as far as he is concerned. No one on Whiskey Hill tries to curb intemperance by teaching the “Hunkey” the hurt of it to his bank account, to his body, to his chances of coming alive out of the mine. His priest usually drinks freely, and many a saloon license in Pennsylvania bears the signature of the priest as one of the petitioners.
Even those people who are eager to make laws to curb or prohibit the sale of liquor, ignore entirely the education of the “Hunkey,” although he is now, and more and more will be, a great factor in the political and social life of the state.
Avarice is to my mind the basic fault in all the history of accidents in the mines of Pennsylvania. It is an avarice which thinks human life cheaper than timber, and considers it easier to pay funeral expenses than to support schools and pay teachers. It corrupts politicians to the degree that there is seemingly nothing more to corrupt; and if half the charges are true that are made openly by the newspapers in the coal regions, against the mine inspectors, they certainly are hopelessly debased.
Of the one thousand people slain annually in the anthracite coal region, two-thirds are chargeable to one of three causes: ignorance, intemperance, and avarice. Inasmuch as these causes could in a large degree be removed by the people of Pennsylvania, it follows that the people are to blame.
Twenty-three thousand lives have been sacrificed in the coal-mining industry in the United States in about ten years! Read it again! Twenty-three thousand people had to give up their lives for the light and heat and speed which we enjoyed in the last ten years. Twenty-three thousand men! Almost I envy the Brothers Daniel and Gabriel and the Sisters Iphigenia and Anastasia the time in which they lived, when the waters of the Cocalico turned their wheels, when they printed books and illumined letters, when they could do their share in pushing this world forward without sacrificing the lives of an army of men to what we call progress.
That time will never return, in spite of Rousseau and Ruskin and Tolstoy; but we must have a time, and have it soon, when we shall be able to do all that we are doing without such slaughter. Nothing is worth doing and nothing is worth having unless, like Conrad Beisel, we have a “new name in the Lord.” For myself, if I lived in Pennsylvania, it should not be “Friedsam” but “Streitsam”—not the peaceful one, but the fighter.