XVII From the Lovczin to Guinea Hill
According to ordinary railway standards the car was only half full, for each passenger was the fortunate possessor of an entire seat. Reluctantly enough, one or the other of my fellow travellers gave to some newcomer the space which allowed him some freedom for the movements of his body; but when a dozen foreigners entered the car at a wayside station, every man and woman moved defiantly to the outer edge of the seat, determined that not one of the intruders should share it.
Ordinarily the conductor sees to it that such monopoly of privilege is properly rebuked; but this time he apologized for the presence of the immigrants by saying that the smoking-car was “jam full of Dagos already.”
Meekly enough, the men stood in the aisle, glad of the privilege of standing in the car, which carried them from the scene of their labours to the distant city where the signora and the bambini awaited them. I made room for one of the men, and for a time employed all my senses to discover if possible the reason for their receiving such treatment. I smelled neither garlic nor whiskey, although I was soon engaged in conversation with my neighbour and thus had a good chance to detect either.
He wore blue jeans overalls, which, while not stylish garments, are certainly honest clothing. There was no crease down the middle, but they had creases all over. His hands were not unclean; although the soil of honest labour was upon them.
In no way was he different from the American working man of the same class, except that he did not chew tobacco and therefore did not indulge in the practice which usually accompanies that accomplishment.
In order to ascertain what chances there were for English conversation, I addressed him in that language, and his answers in broken English were certainly more entertaining than the abrupt “yes” or “no” which one often receives from the native fellow traveller, to whom it is usually a matter of indifference whether or not the time hangs heavily on one’s hands.
At the next station the smoking-car was relieved of its surplus passengers, and my neighbour with all his countrymen was driven into it with rough gestures. I am very proud of the courage I displayed by turning in my seat and addressing the man who sat behind me. “Won’t you please tell me,” I said, hesitatingly, “why you wouldn’t share your seat with one of those men?” I fully expected him to say, “It’s none of your business,” but his stern face relaxed for a moment as he replied, with a rising inflection, “Dagos,” and then looked as stern as before.
I was not satisfied by that answer and said so. This opened the way for an argument, and conversation was soon in full swing.
“What right have those Dagos to come to this country, anyway?” he retorted, when I pleaded that those men had paid their fares and had the same right that he had, to a seat. I soon discovered that neither logic nor ethics was his strong point; so I thought I would try him on history.
“Do you know,” I asked, “who was the first ‘Dago’ that came to this country?” For a moment he put his thinking apparatus to work; then he said, and I am quoting his words exactly:
“I suppose it was somebody by the name of Macaroni, who sold bananas when he landed in New York, and talked an outlandish gibberish.”
“No,” I replied, “his name was Christopher Columbus, and if it had not been for that ‘Dago’ you would still be undiscovered.”
I had great difficulty in making my fellow traveller believe that there are cities in Italy more beautiful than Pittsburg; but when I told him that a “Dago” built the largest church in the world, his materialistic sense was touched and he began to listen respectfully to what I said.
“The same ‘Dago’ who built that church carved statuary so beautiful that whenever any man wishes to free the ’imprisoned splendour of the stone’ (I did not quote Michael Angelo to him, however), he has to go to see what that ‘Dago’ has done.
“And that same man,” I continued, “painted a ceiling which is one of the great art wonders of the world. His name is Michael Angelo.”
“I never heard of him.”
“I know of another ‘Dago’” I continued, emphasizing “Dago,” “who painted a picture for which even you might be willing to pay $500.”
“I’d like to see it!”
When I mentioned Raphael and the Sistine Madonna, he did have some vague idea of what I was trying to convey to him; for these were fairly familiar names.
Then he fell upon me savagely. “But you don’t mean to say that these ‘Dagos’ that come over here are anything like Michael Angelo or Raphael!” To which I replied: “No, they are not; but neither are you anything like George Washington or Abraham Lincoln.” Then I returned to the perusal of my newspaper.
That man was an average American of the middle class, a representative of the bulk of our population, and he, in common with many of his countrymen, is criminally ignorant of the people who will soon have his weal and woe in their hands.
The Italian, the Greek, and the Syrian are usually called by the classic names “Dago,” “Roundhead,” or “Guinea,” and the Slavs, be they Poles, Servians, Slovaks, or Montenegrins, are called “Hunyaks,” “Hunkies,” and “Slabs”; and I once heard the owner of a great industrial establishment call them “Bohunks.” It was not an ignorant or malicious friend of mine who said of a Jew, a man of scholarly attainment and a common acquaintance, “He is a pretty decent Sheeny.”
I have no quarrel with the fact that the average American is ignorant of the historic place which these people hold among the nations, and of the great age-long struggle through which some of them have passed and are still passing, that they may preserve their identity as a people. I am thoroughly incensed, however, that nearly every one of the names applied to them is an expression of contempt, an offhand judgment of inferiority. After all, it is not even that which makes me take up the cudgel for them, because they must and will prove for themselves that they are perfectly human like the rest of us, and that in all essential things they will grow like us as soon as they have the same privileges which we have had, who came after the first “Dago” had discovered the way to this land of opportunity.
What really does burden me and make me cry out is the consequences which result from such ignorance as I have cited, and because of which I was on that train travelling to Guinea Hill.
Guinea Hill differs from Whiskey Hill in that it bears many other fantastic names and in that there are fewer saloons. The beer-kegs do not lie about in such unpicturesque confusion, and the Slavs who live there come from the shores of the Adriatic and the bleak mountains of Montenegro. The huts in which they live on Guinea Hill are even worse than those of the earlier comers from the north of the Slavic world. I am told that they were built some thirty years ago, and no sacrilegious hand has touched them since, to paint them or to change their original primitive, dry-goods-box architecture. They seem to have sunk into the refuse of the mines, and the sociological investigators, who know the housing conditions in Pennsylvania, declare them to be “the worst in the state,” which phrase would be eloquent from meaning were it not so common as to lose its force.
Living in these wretched huts among stunted trees, the leaves of which are shrivelled and blackened by coal dust, I found young men with whom I had walked among the olive groves near Spalato. These young men had rowed me across the Boche de Cattero, easily the most magnificent bay in Southern Europe, and had shared with me the luscious figs which they carried in their shirt bosoms. I saw many a man whom I first knew beneath the deep shadow of the Lovozin, the historic mountain of Montenegro, whence the spirits of departed heroes still call to fight against Christianity’s hereditary foe—the Turk.
When last I saw these youths they wore garments of red and white cloth, richly embroidered, with their belts full of costly weapons of ancient pattern, and their fierce mustachios stretching out defiantly like long, double-pointed daggers. Here on Guinea Hill they all wear the sober garb of miners, their mustachios are shorn of their fierceness, their weapons have disappeared, their shooting is done in the darkness of the mine, and they rarely shed any blood but their own.
I went to Guinea Hill because I am partly responsible for the presence there of some of these Southern Slavs. Many years ago, when I visited their mountain fastness, numbers of them were at the verge of starvation. The crops on their scant fields had failed; fighting the Turk had grown to be a fruitless and profitless occupation; Russia, their ally and the godmother of their little principality, who in the past sent thither what surplus of foodstuffs she possessed, was herself living on borrowed money and charity, so that nothing remained for these warriors except to starve or seek for work.
I suggested to Prince Nicolas that he permit them to go to the “land of the free and the home of the brave.” Not one of them, however, was then willing to leave his rocky cradle home for the unknown fabled land so far away, and they remained on their bleak mountains to take half-rations or none, waiting for the realization of Russia’s Asiatic dream in which lay wrapped their own future. The Japanese war and the subsequent Russian revolution were like the eagles’ stirring the nest, and the young eagles began to flutter in the exaltation of their first flight, as they sought the shores of our far-away country. Four or five thousand of these braves exchanged the hilt of the sword and the butt of the gun for the shovel and the pickax, and the shadow of the towering Lovczin for the shadeless Pennsylvania hills. There I found them digging coal as bravely as they had fought the Turk, but known to their American masters only as “Hunkies” or “Guineas”—no one discovering in their open, honest faces a superior race—every one scenting in them drunkards, brawlers, and incendiaries.
The usual results of such ignorance followed, in that they have been treated with an injustice which makes them quite unconscious of the fact that they have found the land of “liberty, equality, and fraternity.” I have verified nearly every complaint which they have made to me, for I know how easy it is for sensitive men to exaggerate their wrongs; but I found that they knew only about half of what they suffered, the other half being mercifully hidden from them by their ignorance of the language and the customs of our country.
After pay-days and feast-days the magistrates of the towns around seek them to arrest them, and the fine they must pay is always twice, three times, and in some cases ten times as great as that imposed upon the American offenders. After trials which make a Russian military court seem fairly decent, they are railroaded into jails and workhouses, and I now soberly confess that as a stranger I would rather fall into the hands of the police of Moscow or St. Petersburg than into those of the protectors of the law in most of our industrial centres in Pennsylvania and out of it.
The citizens of Pennsylvania may be comforted by knowing that Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois, in their lower courts, are as unjust to the stranger as their own state. In one town in Ohio there is, or was, a mayor who is reputed to have made $9,000 a year out of the fines imposed upon foreigners for petty offenses, usually for drunkenness or brawling. This ingenious official arrested alien drunkards under the statute of the state which allowed him to fine them as high as thirty dollars, while the native was arrested under the statute of the town and fined three dollars for his spree.
The Indianapolis police arrested a Slovak woman for the heinous crime of picking up coal on the tracks. On the coldest day of the year she was taken from her home and children and driven to the workhouse, in spite of the fact that she was in an advanced stage of pregnancy. The terrible results of this inhuman treatment were, of course, what might be expected. Such facts have led the citizens to organize an Immigrant Protection League, which makes it its business to see that the immigrant is not exploited by the courts.
On Guinea Hill every “Roundhead,” as he is commonly called, despises the court for its undignified procedures and its perspicuous dishonesty. The judges’ contempt for the immigrant, as well as that of other executive officers, rankles and hurts beyond the telling, causing people who might become stanch, loyal, and heroic citizens, to hate and despise our institutions. If in time of turmoil and economic distress they become lawless, as I firmly believe they will, we shall reap only what we have sown. In our present hysteria about Anarchy it is well to remember that it feeds on injustice, that it cannot grow—in sane minds at least—if a nation deals out justice impartially, and that it would die out completely if as a people we would live somewhere within hailing distance of Mount Sinai.
I do not ask any sentimental consideration in our law courts for the Slavic or the Italian offender. Deal with him firmly; punish him if punish we must; but let the man who steals a coal mine be not dealt with more leniently than the woman who picks up coal on the track. Let the Jewish thief suffer, if he has stolen the railway’s old iron; but let him who steals a whole railway also suffer in proportion to the magnitude of his crime.
I have asked for the aliens, and shall not cease asking until I am heard: First, that we learn to know them. The people of Montenegro, Poland, Hungary, and Italy are worth the knowing. If struggle for liberty means anything in the character of a nation, then these people have character; for their fields are drenched in martyrs’ blood. Where in Hungary the poppy grows reddest, or in Italy the figs are most luscious, there the common people have shed their blood heroically.
Besides that knowledge, which, if it did no more for us, would at least enlarge our mental horizon, I ask for common, fundamental justice; not only for the sake of the alien but for our own sake. I ask and shall continue to ask for justice—justice, which is the least if not the most that we are capable of giving them. At present I do not ask, for I cannot expect it, that enlightened justice which is love, the divinest human gift. I ask for just plain, common, every-day justice.
“As ye would that” your own offenders should be done by, so do ye even unto the alien. This is as far from the Golden Rule as Guinea Hill is from the Lovczin; but it is the most we may expect, although not the most for which we ought to ask.
Not a hundred miles away from Guinea Hill, at the Hazleton Young Men’s Christian Association, I want to show you what enlightened justice can do for the “Roundhead.” I came down from the Hill disheartened and sad, and, stepping into the office of that rather remarkable Young Men’s Christian Association building, I saw a man, with dust-cloth and broom, walking about with the peculiarly graceful stride of the mountaineer. “That’s Gabriel—not the archangel; but an angel, anyway,” Mr. Hill, the secretary, told me. “Go from garret to cellar and you will find no dust or disorder. The small boy, that bane of the Young Men’s Christian Association, fears him and loves him in turn. I don’t see how we could get along without Gabriel.”
“Kiss my cheek, Gabriel, and wish me well.” And Gabriel kissed my cheek and wished me well, just as he used to in his Montenegrin home, when kinsman met kinsman upon the war-path as they fought their ancient enemy, the Turk. Now, no weapons bulged from Gabriel’s belt, his clothing was faultlessly American, his once furious mustachios had fallen beneath an American barber’s shears, and his battle-field was this splendidly equipped building. Officially, he was the janitor; but he was also the self-appointed and beneficent dictator, feared by all evil-doers and breakers of rules, and beloved by all who could appreciate a faultlessly kept building.
“You must see his room,” the genial secretary said, with a twinkle in his eyes, and we followed Gabriel to the topmost story. He opened the door of his room with pardonable pride, for Prince Nicolas, the ruler of his country, whose bedroom I have seen and in whose throne-room I have had audience, cannot boast of an apartment so neat and clean or so gorgeously decorated. Besides the comfortable furniture, unrivalled in Gabriel’s home-land, the walls were hung with pictures which reflected prevailing American tastes. Celluloid toilet articles lay upon the bureau, while many books and newspapers betrayed how this janitor spent his spare time.
Gabriel’s face was radiant from pride, and so was mine; while added to my pride was a pleasurable feeling to which I could give no other expression than to ask for another fraternal kiss, which he gave me with a resounding smack. When we returned to the lobby, I looked over the group of men gathered there to meet me, and my wits were tested to place each man according to his nationality. I looked into the face of one young man, a veritable giant, and before he opened his lips I said, “You are a Dalmatian.” “Yes, yes,” he replied, “from Ragusa.”
Again I looked into his deep eyes and finely chiselled features. Yes, it was the type one sees beneath the half-ruined porticoes of ancient palaces, where young men play the tambouritza and young maidens listen behind latticed windows; where old men dream dreams of the Ragusan Republic and its vanished glory, when it vied with Venice in maritime power, although it never gained her ascendency. Now it is dying a slow and a forgotten death, beneath shading palm trees, while its warrior sons, the bluest blood of Dalmatia, are sent to dig coal in Pennsylvania, and its guslar minstrels make music for the merry-makers at Coney Island.
What a fine specimen this is which Ragusa has sent us! Ask the secretary about him and he will tell you that he is intelligent, cleanly, temperate, and frugal; yet in Pennsylvania he is just a “Hunky.” Other members of the Young Men’s Christian Association are loth to see him on the gymnasium floor with them, and to most Americans he is only an undesirable immigrant from Southern Europe—something to be dreaded.
“I am an Italian,” very proudly says the next man who grasps my hand, and, looking into his face, I ask doubtfully, “From Italy?” for his face shows Slavic lines. “From Triest,” he adds.
Ah! now I understand. That is where Italian, Slav, and German meet—and fight, as is the custom of all good Austrians; for each race claims superiority over the others, and in most of them flows the blood of all three races.
“You must come to see my kindergarten and my church.” I promise; for he is quite an important factor in the redemption of Little Italy. The next man is a Slovene from the neighbourhood of Agram, the next a Slovak, then a Pole, and “last but not least,” a Bohemian. All these are gathered here beneath the sheltering wing of this archangel Gabriel, janitor of the Young Men’s Christian Association and self-appointed, beneficent dictator and preserver of the peace. He preserves the peace by carrying out, bodily, offending or offensive visitors—a task for which he is well fitted. One of his ancestors plunged into the thick of Turkish foes, dragged a magnificent Pasha from his horse and carried him across the intervening space in the face of a rain of bullets, one of which struck him. He fell with his burden; but, quickly recovering his footing, held the Pasha safe by the throat with one hand, pulled a pistol with the other, and in a moment argued the distinguished prisoner into taking him upon his shoulders. Carried thus by the Turkish officer, he came riding into camp and presented his trophy to his commander, saying, “This is a fine horse I have brought to you, my captain;” and then fell swooning to the ground.
The building over which his descendant, Gabriel, watches, is as safe as a fortress. There are only two things which this brave fears. One is the steam boiler which provides the building with heat. Steam is an unknown force in his native land, which even the fiery horse has not yet invaded; so, no matter how often Gabriel is instructed, no matter how often he is reassured, when the steam bubbles and hisses he flees for safety; and to this day, valves, screws, wheels, and radiators are terrifying mysteries to him.
Gabriel’s other dread is—women. Not that he dislikes them; on the contrary, you should see his face all aglow from pleasure when a woman looks at him, and yet “trembling takes hold upon him as upon the inhabitants of Philistia,” and he returns to his task as if beaten by an enemy, all discouraged and distraught.
Rightly used and wisely directed, men like Gabriel can become a power among us. Over the various nationalities of Southern Europe now coming here in great numbers, such men can wield an influence more potent, perhaps, for the peace of the world than the Hague Tribunal.
Nine men of nine nationalities grasped hands in that Young Men’s Christian Association lobby at Hazleton, Pennsylvania, and formed a circular chain like unto the chain formed by the ancient Slavic heroes when they swore fealty to old “Duchan.” Thus did we pledge our faith to this new country as we exhorted one another to patience, to justice, and to love.
In leaving Hazleton I was asked by one of its citizens, “What will these foreigners do to America when they get the power?”
My answer was, “They will help you save it, or they will aid you in destroying it. It is very much in your own power whether they shall be ‘leaven’ or ‘dynamite.’”
P. S. Gabriel has left Hazleton. He is now in New York, a valuable member of the Immigrant Department of the Presbyterian church, and they say that this Montenegrin is “leaven” and not “dynamite.”