When, about fifteen years ago, the great Slav invasion began, the American frontier was remote, shrunken, and forbidding. The newcomers were not in quest of cheap land, with independence, so much as of paying jobs from which they might hoard "big money" and return well off to their homes. They gravitated, therefore, to the mining, metal-working, and packing centers, where there is a demand for unlimited quantities of raw labor, provided always it be cheap. So these sturdy peasant lads came to be Nibelungs, "sons of the gloom," haunting our coal-pits, blast-furnaces, coke-ovens, smelters, foundries, steel-mills, and metal refineries, doing rough, coarse work under skilled men who, as one foreman put it to me, "don't want them to think, but to obey orders."
What irony that these peasants, straight from ox-goad and furrow, should come to constitute, so far as we can judge from official figures, three-fifths of the force in sugar refining, two-fifths of the force in meat-packing, three-eighths of the labor in tanneries and in oil refineries, one-third of the coal-miners and of the iron- and steel-workers, one-fourth of the workers in carpet-mills, and one-fifth of the hands in the clothing trade! On the other hand, they are but one-seventh of the labor force in the glass-factories and in the cotton-mills, one-ninth of the employees in copper-mining and smelting (who are largely Finns), one-twelfth of our railway labor, and only a handful in the silk and woolen industries.
For these manful Slavs, no work is too toilsome and dangerous. Their fatalistic acceptance of risk has much to do with the excessive blood-cost of certain of our industries. They are not "old clo'" men, junk-dealers, hucksters, peddlers, and snappers-up of unconsidered trifles, as are some of the people among us. They have no nose for the small, parasitic trades, but with a splendid work courage they tackle the heavy, necessary tasks. Large of body, hard-muscled, and inexpert in making his head save his heels, the Slav inevitably becomes the unskilled laborer in the basic industries.
Unlike the Teutons and Scandinavians of the eighties, whose chief location was the country beyond Chicago, the later Slavs have been drawn to Pennsylvania, in the hard-coal fields and the Pittsburgh district, and thence they have spread to the rising mining and metal-working centers throughout the country. So many are single men that they form an extraordinarily mobile labor force, willing to go anywhere for an extra two cents an hour. Although they do not build homes, and hence are dependent upon such housing as they can find, they do not stagnate in slums, save as the conditions of their employment impose congestion.
Bohemians and Poles come here to stay, so it is they who furnish the farmers. The Bohemian current began as far back as the fifties, and in 1900 a quarter of all the Bohemian-Americans were on the land. The Poles came later, and with less money, so that only one-tenth were then in agriculture. The immigrants of the seventies sought wild, cheap land, and therefore the Slav settlements are thickest in the Northwest and the Southwest. One-third of all the Polish farmers are in Wisconsin, while in Texas Bohemian cotton-growers are so numerous that in some localities even the negroes speak Bohemian! Of late raw Poles, working up through farm labor and tenancy, are coming to own "abandoned farms" in the Connecticut Valley. Crowded with several other families in an old Yankee farm-house, the Pole is raising, with the aid of his numerous progeny, incredible crops of onions and tobacco. "In old Hadley," reports Professor Emily Balch of Wellesley College, "all up and down the beautiful elm-shaded street the old colonial mansions are occupied by Poles." In one year these Poles, who were but one-fifth of the population, accounted for two-thirds of the births.
EXCESSIVE ALCOHOLISM AMONG THE SLAVS
Coming from an Elizabethan world, the Slav is as frankly vinous as Falstaff with his "cup o' sack." He is a Bacchus worshiper unashamed, and our squeamishness about liquor strikes him as either hypocrisy or prudery. He thinks, too, that without stimulant he cannot stand up to the grueling work of mill and mine. A steel-worker, when besought to give up drink, replied, "No beer, no whisky, me no work." Hence an incredible amount of his wages goes to line the till of the saloon-keeper. In a steel town of 30,000 population, $60,000 are left with the saloon-keepers the Saturday and Sunday after pay-day. The Saturday brewery-wagon makes the rounds, and on a pleasant Sunday one sees in the yard of each boarding-house a knot of broad-shouldered, big-faced men about a keg of liquid comfort.
It is at celebrations that the worst excesses show themselves. What with caring for their large families and their boarders, the women usually lose their attractiveness early, and therewith their power to exercise a refining influence upon their men-folk. A wedding or a christening-feast lasts an entire day, and toward the end men beastly drunk bellow and fight in the presence of the terrified women and children. During festivals, too, old feuds, rekindled by drink, flare up in brutal and bloody rows. At such times one realizes that the poet Kollár's famous phrase "the dove-blood of the Slav" does not apply to the exhilarated.
Still, their heavy drinking is spasmodic, and they are said to lose less time from work on account of intoxication than certain other nationalities. Says a Jersey City doctor practising among the Ruthenians, "They drink, but few die drunkards or hurt their health with alcohol. If a man does get drunk he is likely to be violent. If he strikes his wife she defends herself if she can, but she does not complain, for she knows he has 'a right to hit her' and that makes a great difference." In Slavic neighborhoods, American influence first shows itself in the rise of a community sentiment against alcoholic excess and in a growing refinement in festal customs.