On the Trail of the Immigrant

by Edward Alfred Steiner

Anushka, a bright twelve year old girl goes from a Pennsylvania town, to the Frenczin district in Hungary. She is dressed “American fashion,” has gone to the public school and speaks English fairly well.

“Anushka moya, tell me, do you like to go back to Hungary?” and the little girl tells me: “No, siree. America is the best country. There we have white bread and butter and candy, and I can chew gum to beat the band;” and tears fill her eyes at the memory of the American luxuries which she has tasted. If she stays in her mountain village she will degenerate into the common life about her, and marry a peasant lad with whom she will hover between enough and starvation, all the days of her life. Yet she will never forget America, the white bread and butter, the candy and the chewing-gum.

In a little village in Hungary I know a woman who in her youth had tasted all these things and the freedom of life in Chicago. Now, although she has been married fifteen years and has lived away from America longer than that, she speaks with glowing eyes of the time when she lived on South Halstad Street, ate thin bread with thick jam on it, and the land was flowing with sausages, lager beer and chewing-gum.

Most blessed are the girls who have been in service in American families. They have learned English well, and also the ways of the American household. They have tasted of the spirit of Democracy which permeates our serving class, and when such an one returns to her native village she unsettles the relations of servant and mistress. Therefore, her coming is dreaded by the “Hausfrau” who has had one servant-girl through many years, paying her fifteen dollars a year and treating her like a beast. Shall I quote one of those mistresses? “What kind of country is that anyway, that America? These servant girls come back with gold teeth in their mouths, and with long dresses which sweep the streets, and with unbearable manners. They do not kiss our hands when they meet us, and when they speak of their mistress in America they speak of her as if they were her equals. When one of those girls comes home with her finery and her money, we are liable to lose every servant; and wages are going up fabulously.”

I met one of these servant-girls “with gold teeth in her mouth” after she had lived three years in America, and I found that she had acquired something besides gold teeth. She had learned to speak both German and English, she had manners which were refined, she had been uplifted by an American mistress out of her peasant life to a plane which women reach nowhere but in America, and she was the equal if not the superior, of any of the young women in her village, who had had the privilege of a common school education which had been denied to her, because of her lowly origin. It is true, she did sweep the streets with her long skirts; but she did it gracefully. She walked as the women on Fifth Avenue walk, and she shook hands with me after the most approved fashion.

The older women on the ship returned without any of these graces. They had been pining for the Fatherland, and in spite of the fact that one of them was going back to a half-starved country, she said: “In Chicago, you no can get any tink to eat.”

In a general way it may be said that it made a vast difference where and how the men had lived in America, as to whether they carried anything but American dollars back with them. Both the men and the women who had been in service in American homes showed the largest inheritance of our spirit; while those who lived in the congested foreign quarters had simply changed climates for a while, lost some robustness and a few native virtues, and gained a modest bank account.

Yet even among those I could notice changes and gains which cannot be tabulated and which at the first glance might be put down as losses; an indefinite something which has gone into their fibre for better or for worse. This was most crudely illustrated by a Ruthenian who had lived twenty-five years in America; eleven years in a coal mining district and the rest of the time in a New England manufacturing town. He told me about his aspirations for his son, who is “very smart and will not work with his hands.” He talked in Russian: “Yes, my son will be educated. I have money enough for that. I am stupid and must bear all sorts of things, but when a man is educated, he can raisovat helle as much as he wants.” The form in which he put the American phrase saves the necessity of writing it in dashes.

I have not yet seen a village in Hungary, Russia or Italy, to which any number of men has returned even after a short sojourn in America, without that community’s gaining in some ways at least. Better houses certainly were built, with more or less sanitary improvements according to the conditions under which the men or women have lived in America. It makes a vast difference whether the men have lived in mining camps or in the cities. Undoubtedly the peasant who has lived in a small American city where he could easily feel and touch its life brings home the greatest spirit of progress.

Agricultural conditions have improved rapidly in Hungary and Poland; business in not a few instances has been put upon an American basis, which means not only more efficiency, but strange as it may seem, more honesty; and the scale of living has risen wherever a large number of people has gone to and fro across the sea.