On the Trail of the Immigrant

by Edward Alfred Steiner

It is a delightful sensation this; of being summoned to your meals by the notes of a bugle rather than by the jangle of a shrill bell; of looking over half a yard of menu, and ordering what you want, and whom you want, just as you please, rather than being ordered about as some one else pleases.

The first day out I found the first cabin as quiet as the steerage; only more dignified. The passengers were walking on tiptoe; many of them trying to adjust themselves to these labyrinthine luxuries; while the distinguished rustle of silken petticoats relieved the pressure of the atmosphere, which naturally was tense from the excitement of the beginning of a journey. Critically, almost with hostility, each passenger measured the other; the tables were buried beneath the loads of flowers and floral designs which were past the fading, and in the first melancholy stages of decay; so that all of it reminded me of a palatial home, to which the mourners have just returned from a rich uncle’s funeral.

As yet, no one had spoken to me, although I had volunteered a wise remark about the weather to one passenger, and the gentleman addressed recoiled as if I had struck him with a sledge hammer. I learned afterwards that he occupied a thousand dollar suite of rooms and that his name was Kalbsfoos or something like it. In choosing his seat at the table, I heard him remark to the head steward that he did not want to sit “near Jews,” nor any “second class looking crowd”; but that was a difficult task to accomplish.

More than a third of the passengers were Jews, and more than two-thirds were people whose names and bearing betrayed the fact that they were either the children of immigrants, or immigrants themselves, who too were returning to the Old World because they had succeeded. In the Vs. Mr. Vanderbilt’s name headed the list, but the name closest to his was Vogelstein; while between such American or English names as Wallace and Wallingford, were a dozen Woolfs and Wumelbachers, Weises and Wiesels. I need not tell you of the multitude of the Rosenbergs and Rosenthals there were in our cabin. Mr. Funkelstein and Mr. Jaborsky were my room-mates. First cabin after all is only steerage twice removed, and beneath its tinsel and varnish, it is the same piece of world as that below me; which you pity, and which you dread.

The staple conversation to-day is the size of the pool—which has reached the thousand dollar mark, and the fact that a certain actor lost fifteen thousand dollars at poker the night before. In the second cabin the pool was smaller, the limit in poker ten cents; while in the steerage they lived, unconscious of the fact that pools and poker are necessary accompaniments of an ocean voyage.

It is a stratified society in which I find myself up here, and the lines are marked—dollar marked. The stewards instinctively know the size of our bank accounts by our wardrobes. Around the captain’s table are gathered the stars in the financial firmament; those whom nobody knows, who travel without retinue are at the remote edges of the dining room, far away from the lime light.

In the steerage, everybody “gets his grub” in the same way, in the same tin pans—“first come first served”; and all of us are kicked in the same unceremonious way by the ship’s crew.

The first cabin and the society it represents are not all finished products. There are many of those who eat, even at the captain’s table, who are still in blessed ignorance of the fact, that knives were not made for the eating of blueberry pie; and who also do not know what use to make of the tiny bowls of water in which rose leaves float, when they are placed before them.

Then there are the maidens who walk about with mannish tread, talking loudly and violently through their noses; who assault the piano furiously with the notes of rag-time marches; and who waft upon the air perfumes which offend one’s olfactory nerves.

Yet beside them, and in strong contrast to them are those superb men and women, the flower of American civilization, whose like has never been created anywhere else in the world.