Photograph by Hine
Slovak Girls
The Middle Ages are beginning to show among us. In twenty-one rural counties of Minnesota the Polish women have borne, on an average, seven children in the course of fourteen and a half years of married life. The full tale, no doubt, will come to nine or ten. Thanks to our child-pitying, child-saving civilization, the Polish mother will keep her brood nearly as well as her American neighbor with four or five. "The Irish for children," runs the proverb; and yet one Irish-American wife out of thirteen is childless, and one English-American wife out of twelve. But on the Minnesota farms only one Polish-American wife out of fifty-eight is barren!
In a county where the Poles, although but a third of the population, register 58 per cent. of the births, an old farmer said to me: "The Yankees here are too lazy to have kids. The Poles have from ten to fifteen in a family, and in a hundred years the people here will all be Poles." A hundred years? Even fourteen years ago Father Kruszka reckoned that there were in this country 700 such Polish communities, averaging a hundred families each. So there are hundreds of centers from which the Middle Ages spread. Farm by farm, township by township, the displacement of the American goes on—a quiet conquest, without spear or trumpet, a conquest made by child-bearing women. The fathers forage, but it is the mothers who have to face anguish, exhaustion, and even death in the campaign to possess the land. Spending their women brutally, the Slavs advance; pitying their women, the Americans retreat.
How can woman-worth go on rising as this country fills with people who have the brood-mare idea of woman? Yet leaders in the cause of womanhood are doing their best to hold the door open for the very tribes who most despise and misuse their sex! On the other hand, the new immigration may well find favor in the eyes of those who look upon the bearing of ten children as woman's best lot, and are complacent at seeing the stocks with low standards outbreed and crowd into oblivion the stocks with high standards.
SLOW ASSIMILATION
Eastern Europe is full of half-drowned nationalities, which only of late are regaining self-consciousness. Bohemians, Slovaks, Poles, Lithuanians, Servians, and Bulgarians—each have had an "awakening," in which language revival and the study of national literature and history have played a great part. The immigrants who come with this quickened sense of nationality make it a point of honor not to drift selfishly with the American current and so lose touch with their struggling brethren in the old home. After refusing to be Germanized, Russified, or Magyarized in the old country, the patriotic Bohemian or Pole is bound to resist absorption here. It was the Irish-Americans who got the leverage for freeing Ireland. Now the Bohemians here are hoping to win home rule for Bohemia; while the Polish-Americans expect to find on this side of the water the fulcrum for the lever that shall free Poland. What, then, more natural than to cling to their own speech and traditions in home and church and parish school?
The vernacular press, of course, harps ever on the chord of "the national speech," so that the second generation may not drift away to the reading of American newspapers. The church, too, which carries matters with a high hand among the Poles, holds the immigrants away from Americanization. The good priests fear lest some of their flock should turn away from religion, while the greedy priests dread lest the flock should become restless under priestly dictation.
Our million Poles outnumber all the rest of the Slavs in America, and the Poles are very clannish. When they settle in groups there is little association between them and their neighbors. "In the communities visited," reports the Industrial Commission, "farmers of German, Scandinavian, Irish, Bohemian, Belgian, Swiss, and American origin were found living in juxtaposition to Poles. In virtually every instance the Pole was considered one degree lower than his neighbors." "Neither the Poles as a body nor the others desire to fuse socially, and the Bohemians felt well above their Slavic brethren." The farmers look down on the Poles as uncleanly, intemperate, quarrelsome, ignorant, priest-ridden, and hard on women and children. When a few Poles have come into a neighborhood, the other farmers become restless, sell out, and move away. Soon a parish is organized, church and parish school arise, the public school decays, and Slavdom has a new outpost.
The core of the large settlement is likely to be a rancid bit of the Old World. Clerical domination to a degree not tolerated among other Roman Catholics, a stately church overlooking mean farm-houses, numerous church holidays, a tiny public school, built wholly out of State grant, with a sister in the garb of her order as schoolmistress, a big parish school, using only Polish and teaching chiefly the catechism, a high illiteracy and a dense ignorance among lads born on American soil, crimes of violence rather than crimes of cunning, horror of water applied inside or outside, aversion to fresh air, barefoot women at work in the fields, with wretched housekeeping as the natural result, saloons patronized by both sexes, the priest frequently urging his flock to "have as many children as God will give them," much loth motherhood, early death from excessive child-bearing, large families brought up by the third, fourth, or fifth wife, harsh discipline of children, political apathy, a controlled vote, and an open contempt for Americans and their principles.