THE CRIMINAL IMMIGRANT
To recall prison experiences is not pleasant, and would not be profitable, if this were merely a narration of what happened to one individual, a quarter of a century ago. Conditions are not sufficiently changed, either in judicial procedure or in methods of punishment, to make this account of historic importance. Its value lies only in the fact that no changes have occurred, and that my experience then is still the common fate of multitudes of immigrants, who swell the criminal records of their race or group, and are therefore looked upon with dislike and apprehension.
The jail in which I found myself was an unredeemed, vermin-infested building, crowded by a motley multitude of strikers and strike breakers,—bitter enemies all, their animosity begotten in the elemental struggle for bread, and hating one another with an unmodified, primitive passion.[8]
The strikers had the advantage over us, for they were more numerous and were acquainted with the ways of American officials. This gave them the opportunity (which they improved) to make it unpleasant for the “Hunkies.”
The straw mattress upon which I slept the first night was missing the second; salt more completely spoiled the mixture called by courtesy coffee, and the only thing which saved me from bodily hurt was the fact that there was no spot on me which was not already suffering.
I mention without malice and merely as a fact in race psychology, that the Irish were the most cruel to us, with the Germans a close second, while the Welsh were not only inoffensive, but sometimes kind.
One of them, David Hill—smaller than the ordinary Welshman, but with the courage of his Biblical namesake—stood between me and a burly Irish Goliath who wanted to thrash this particular “furriner, who came over here to take away the bread from the lips of dacent, law-abiding Americans.”
The jailer maintained no discipline and heeded no complaints. His task was to keep us locked up; the bars were strong and the key invariably turned.
The strikers gradually drifted from the jail, being bailed out or released, and I was not sorry to see them go.
Poor food, vermin of many varieties and the various small tortures endured, were all as nothing to me compared with the fact that for more than six weeks I was permitted to be in that jail without a hearing; without even the slightest knowledge on my part as to why I had forfeited my liberty.
From the barred jail window I could see the workmen going unhindered to their tasks; on Sunday pastor and people passed, as they went to worship their Lord who, too, was once a prisoner. None, seemingly, gave us a thought or even responded by a smile to the hunger for sympathy which I know my face must have expressed.
My letters to the Austro-Hungarian Consul remained unanswered, and the jailer gave my repeated questionings only oaths for reply.
The day of my hearing finally came, and I was dragged before the judge. The proceedings were shockingly disorderly, irreverent and unjust. I was charged with shooting to kill. The weapon which had been found in my pocket was the revolver bequeathed me by the dying man in the Pittsburgh boarding house. As all its six cartridges were safely embedded in rust, the charge was changed to “carrying concealed weapons.” I think my readers will agree with me that the sentence of one hundred dollars fine and three months in the county jail was out of all proportion to the offence.
The court wasted exactly ten minutes on my case, and then I was returned to my quarters in the jail, an accredited prisoner. Let me here record the fact that I carried back to my cell a fierce sense of injustice and a contempt for the laws of this land and its officials, feelings that later ripened into active sympathy with anarchy, which at that time occupied the attention of the American people. My knowledge of that subject came to me through old newspapers which drifted as waste around the jail.
In all those months, more than six, for my fine had to be worked out, or rather idled out, no one came to me to comfort or explain. For more than six months I was with thugs, tramps, thieves and vermin. I was a criminal immigrant, a component element of the new immigration problem.
I recall all this now in no spirit of vengeance; as far as my memory is concerned, I have purged it of all hate. I recall my experience because those same conditions exist to-day in more aggravated form, while multitudes of ignorant, innocent men suffer and die in our jails and penitentiaries.
Since then I have visited most of the county jails, prisons and penitentiaries in which immigrants are likely to be found. Intelligent and humane wardens, of whom there are a few, have told me that more than half the alien prisoners are suffering innocently, from transgressing laws of which they were ignorant, and that their punishment is too often much more severe than necessary.
The following narration of several incidents which recently came under my observation will be pardoned, I hope, when their full import is seen.
Not long ago I went to lecture in a Kansas town,—one of those irreproachable communities in which it is good to bring up children because of the moral atmosphere. The town has a New England conscience with a Kansas attachment. It boasts of having been a station in the underground railway, and it maintains a most uncompromising attitude toward certain social delinquencies, especially the sale of liquor.
Upon my arrival I was cordially received by a committee, and one of its members told me that the jail was full of criminal foreigners—Greeks. What crimes they had committed he did not know.
Recalling my own experience, I made inquiries and found that six Greeks were in the county jail. They had been arrested in September (it was now March) charged with the heinous crime of having gone to the unregenerate State of Nebraska, where they purchased a barrel of beer which they drank on the Sabbath day in their camp by the railroad.
Possibly these Greeks were just ignorant foreigners and now harbor no sense of injustice suffered; possibly they still think this country “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” They may even be ready to obey its laws and reverence its institutions. I do not know how they feel, but I do know this: those Greeks were kept in prison for breaking a law of which they were ignorant, and even if they were aware of its existence and broke it knowingly, the punishment did not fit the crime.
They were kept as criminals and regarded as criminals; they were unvisited and uncomforted; and they were incarcerated at a time when their country called for her native sons to do battle against the Turk.
Some day the sense of injustice suffered may come to them, and they will ask themselves whether every man in Kansas who drinks beer is punished as they were. They will wonder why real criminals go free, or escape with nominal punishment. I venture to predict that in some great crisis, when this country needs men who respect her laws and love her institutions, these men, and multitudes of others who have suffered such injustices as they have, will fail her.
I pleaded for those imprisoned Greeks that night, and my plea was effective. The just judge who condemned them pardoned them; but so just was he that the fine of one hundred dollars each, not yet paid, was left hanging over them, and to their credit be it said, they remained in that town and paid every cent of it. This judge no doubt knows his New Testament; he certainly made the Greeks pay the “uttermost farthing” before his outraged sense of justice was appeased.
Those Greeks spent, together, over three years in jail, forfeited more than fifteen hundred dollars in wages, and lost in bodily health and self-respect beyond calculation.
Another incident occurred last spring as I was passing through a border on one of those nerve-racking coal roads.
At a small, desolate mining village a group of men entered the car, unwillingly enough. They were chained to one another and were driven to their seats with curses and the butt of a gun. They were Italian miners, part of that human material now scattered all over the United States, carried by something swifter, though not less insistent than the glacial movements which graved the beds of the rivers and shifted so much of earth’s original scenery. There was some danger of violence, and the accompanying minions of the law held back the angry passengers. There was scarcely a moment, however, when they themselves did not apply some vigorous measure to assure themselves that three undersized Southern Italians, chained to one another, should not escape them.
The car was uncomfortably crowded and grew more so at every station; for the next day the new governor was to be inaugurated at the capital, toward which our train was leisurely travelling.
I had some difficulty in ethnologically classifying the man who shared my seat. He was large, the colonel and major type, although his head was rounder. The features, too, were of a different cast, his speech less refined and his manners less gentle.
He wore a broad, new hat, his hair was long, curling slightly, and he had an air of special importance, the cause of which I discovered later.
“I wonder why they are treating those poor fellows so roughly,” I audibly soliloquized, turning to him. He was studying a typewritten document and evidently did not relish the interruption.
“Is that any of your business?” he asked, punctuating the short sentence with a liberal supply of oaths.
“Yes, I have no other business,” I replied. “I travel about the world trying to find out why we people treat one another as we do, if we happen to be of different races.”
“What kind of business is that?” looking up from his manuscript and regarding me suspiciously.
“Well,” I said, “we call that ‘Social Psychology.’”
“That’s a new graft,” he replied with a laugh. “How much is there in it?”
“A little money and a great deal of joy,” I said with an answering smile.
Then he folded his manuscript and made ready to find out more about my “graft,” which I proceeded to explain.
“You see, from the beginning, when a man saw another who wasn’t just like him, he said: ‘Will he kill me or shall I kill him?’ Then they both went about finding out. The man who survived regarded himself as the greater man, and his descendants belonged to the superior race.
“We haven’t gone much beyond that point,” I continued. “We hide our primitive hate under what we proudly call race prejudice or patriotism, but it’s the old, unchanged fear and dislike of the unlike, and we act very much as the savages did who may have lived here before the glaciers ploughed up your State and helped to manufacture the coal you are now digging.
“I don’t know you,” I went on, “but I am pretty sure that you feel mean toward those poor ‘Dagoes’ just because you want to assert your superiority.
“I have discovered that a man isn’t quite happy unless he can feel himself superior to something, and these mountain folk of yours take those mangy, hungry looking dogs along just so they can have something to kick. Am I right?”
“Well,” he replied, clearing his throat and straightening himself, while into his eyes came a steel-like coldness, “you don’t mean to say that we are not superior to these Dagoes, these Black Hand murderers?”
“No, I am not ready to say that yet; but tell me about them. Whom did they kill, and how?”
Then he told me the story and he knew it well, for he was a re-elected State official now going to be sworn in. There was a coal miners’ strike—rather a chronic disease in that somewhat lawless State—and the militia was called out. Violence begat violence, and one of the militiamen, standing guard at night, was killed by a bullet, fired from a Winchester rifle at an approximately certain distance.
The Italians were found at that place the next day, were arrested, and were now on their way to the county seat to be tried.
My companion evidently had found my “graft” interesting, for he permitted me to interview the Italians.
None of them knew definitely of what crime they were accused, and all, of course, protested their innocence.
None of them had served as soldiers and all said they were unacquainted with the use of firearms.
When we reached the end of the road where we were all admonished to change cars and not forget our parcels, the officer graciously allowed me to make an experiment. The men were freed from their shackles, and I told them that a high and mighty official was watching them and that the best marksman of the group would find favor in his sight. They were then in turn given the Winchester rifle, which they handled as if it were a pickaxe. They did not know how to load it, and after it was loaded for them and I asked them to fire, they fell upon their knees and begged to be permitted to show their prowess with a stiletto, the use of which they understood. Within twenty-four hours additional testimony was furnished, which proved beyond doubt that the Italians were not implicated in the crime with which they were charged.
I felt deeply grateful to the man who permitted me to intervene in their behalf; but what would have happened if by chance, or the power we call Providence, I had not been thrown into the sphere of their suffering? Undoubtedly they would have been convicted of murder and paid the penalty for a crime which they never committed.
Not only is ignorance of our laws and language a fruitful cause of the delinquency of immigrants and their children, but the venality of police officials, the condition of our courts and prisons, not only fail to inspire respect, but contribute much to the development of those criminal tendencies with which nature has, to a degree, endowed all men....
Fortunately, I left the county jail with no thirst for blood; but with a fiercer passion to right the wrongs under which men suffer, and that, I think, was my one purpose in life when the prison door closed behind me.