The Immigrant Tide, Its Ebb and Flow

by Edward Alfred Steiner

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.