On the Trail of the Immigrant

by Edward Alfred Steiner

Unfortunately they have imported into this country their racial prejudices which are keenest towards their closest kin, and each mining camp becomes the battle-ground on which ancient wrongs are made new issues by repeated quarrels and fights which become bloody at times, although premeditated murder is rather infrequent. In a large number of cases these unfortunate divisions are intermingled by religious differences, although the Slovak and the Pole do not speak well of one another even if they belong to the same church. The Pole regards himself as the especial guardian of the Roman Catholic Church, and while a majority of the Slovaks are of the same Church, Protestantism has made some inroads and the Greek Church claims many loyal adherents. Many of the Catholics belong to the Greek Catholic Church which is that portion of the Greek Church in Austria which united with Rome after the division of Poland, and which was permitted to use its own Slavonic ritual and retain its married clergy. Only a portion of the Greek Church entered this union so that nearly every large Slovak community has a number of Russian Greeks, who look upon the Roman Greeks with a great deal of scorn. In Marblehead, on Lake Erie, where these Slovaks are engaged in the limestone quarries, this division was discovered after all the Greeks had built one church, that of the Roman Greeks. A few of the wiser ones who arrived in this country later were dreadfully shocked when they saw this, and in Peter Shigalinsky’s saloon plans were made to gain possession of the church for the only true Greeks, the Russian; many pitched battles were fought, a long and fruitless litigation followed, and finally Peter Shigalinsky built next to his saloon a new church, whose orthodoxy is emphasized by one of the horizontal pieces of the cross slanting at a more acute angle than that of the Roman Greek church, in which of course there can be no salvation.

Where they have no church of their own they are usually found worshipping with the English or Germans, if they are Romanists, but in many cases the priests told me that they are not wanted and must keep to one corner of the building. There are not priests enough to shepherd them, and those they have are in many cases unfitted for the task. It is asserted that the Lutheran pastors are no better, and count for little or nothing in making these people Christians and citizens. They are naturally suspicious of strangers, but grateful for every kindness, and once a door is opened to their hearts it is never closed again. Unfortunately, their speech shuts them out from the touch with American people of the same community, but there are avenues of approach in which only one language is spoken—the language of love and kindness; one noble American woman whom I know ministers to them by nursing them and suggesting simple remedies when they are ill, and has thus become no small factor in their social and religious redemption.

Of literature little or nothing enters the mining villages, although among the Poles the hunger for it grows and many papers and magazines are coming into existence. The Slovak lives an isolated life, sublimely ignorant of “wars and rumours of wars”; his breakfast is not spoiled by the glaring head-lines of the daily paper, nor does the magazine or novel press upon him the problems of human society. He knows his camp, his mine, his shop, and though he lives in America and in the most busy States in the Union, his world now is not much bigger than it was when its horizon touched his village pastures.

As yet he is not a factor politically, though the political “boss” finds him the best kind of material, for he is bought and sold without knowing it, and votes for he knows not whom. At Braddock, Pa., it was told me that he is sold first to the Democrats and then to the Republicans, and afterwards is naïve enough to come back to the Democrats and tell of his bargain, willing to be bought back into his political family. Like almost all foreigners, he is a Democrat by instinct or by association, one scarcely knows which, although he is usually anything that a drink of liquor makes him. I asked one his political faith, “Are you a Democrat?” “No, me Catholic—Greek, not Russian,” was the reply. “What are your politics?” I asked a number. “Slovak,” was the invariable answer. Not twenty per cent. of those I interviewed knew the name of our President, not two per cent. the name of the Governor of the State in which they were residing. The Slovak does not know the meaning of the word citizen, and the limited franchise in Hungary is exercised for him by those shrewder than himself; he is just force and muscle, with all the roots of his heart in the little village across the sea, and with his brain wherever the stronger brain leads him.

At a recent election in Hungary, a district where the Slovaks were in a large majority, they were, nevertheless, defeated by the Magyar element which knew how to manage them; so that they may be said to have had just enough political training to fit them into the political life of the average American community.

Although the Slovak is a quiet and peaceful citizen, on feast day he does not consider his religious nature sufficiently stirred without a fight, which is usually a crude, bungling affair, devoid of the science which accompanies such an episode among the Irish, and also without the deadly results of an Italian fracas.

On the wedding day of Yanko and Katshka, the silence of the camp is broken by the sound of a screeching violin, followed by the wailing of a clarinet and the grunting of a bass viol. Above the discord of noise made by these instruments is heard the voice of the bridegroom, who leads the dances with the song: “I am so glad I have you, I have you, and I wouldn’t sell you to any one.” If you enter the house of the bride, you will find it full of sweltering humanity, all of it dancing up and down, down and up, while the fiddlers play and the bridegroom sings about “The sweetheart he is glad to have and wouldn’t sell to any one.”

Usually the Slav dancers provide the notes and the bank notes also; for at the end of the piece half a dozen stalwart men will throw themselves in front of the musicians, each one of them demanding in exchange for the money tossed upon the table, his favourite tune to which he sings his native song. The result is, half a dozen men, each singing or trying to sing, a different song, all of them pushing, crowding, and at last fighting, until in the middle of the room you will find an entanglement of human beings which beats itself into an unrecognizable mass. The wedding lasts three days, the ceremony often taking place after the first day’s festivities. The order of proceedings and the length of the feast vary, according to imported traditions which among the Slavs are different in every district.

Of course the whole mining camp is an interested spectator and guests usually do not wait for a formal invitation. The ceremony over, the wedding dinner is served, and never in all the Carpathian Mountains was there such feasting as there is in the Alleghanies. “Polak” steak, cabbage with raisins, beets, slices of bacon, links of sausages, sweet potatoes, and, “last but not least,” the great American dish, conqueror of all foreign tastes—pie; huge, luscious and full of unheard-of delicacies. Beer flows as freely as milk and honey flowed in the promised land; again the musicians play and if the bridegroom has voice enough left he will sing the song of “The sweetheart he is so glad to have and wouldn’t sell to any one, no, not to any one.” Barrel after barrel is emptied until the pyramids of Egypt have small rivals in those built entirely of beer barrels in the little mining town in Pennsylvania. Many of the drinkers fall asleep as soundly as Rameses ever did before he was embalmed, while others are making ready for the end of the feast—the fight, for “no fight, no feast” is the proverb. Somebody calls a Slovak a Polak, or vice versa; some young man casts glances at some young maiden otherwise engaged—and the fight is on. I have never discovered just the reason for the fight, and one might as well search for the cause of a cyclone, but the results are nearly the same: furniture, heads, and glasses all in the same condition—broken; everybody on the ground like twisted forest trees, while one hears between long black curses the peaceful snores of the unconscious drunk. The next day and the next the programme is repeated, and this is the Slovak’s only diversion, unless it be a saint’s day, when history repeats itself and he once more practices his two vices, drinking and fighting.