With Poor Immigrants to America

by Stephen Graham

I was put into the charge of a very intelligent Welshman, who was a foreman, and we stepped into the cage and shot down the black shaft through a blizzard of coal-dust, crouching because the cage was so small, and holding on to a grimy steel bar to steady ourselves in the swift descent. In a few seconds we reached the foot—a place where there was ceaseless drip of water on glistening coal—and we walked out into the gloom.

Black men were moving about with flaming lamps at their heads, electric cars came whizzing out of the darkness, drawing trucks of coal. Whole trucks were elevated in the opposite shaft from that in which we had descended, elevated to the pit-mouth with a roar and a rush and a scattering of lumps of coal. I gained a lively realisation of one way in which it is possible to get a coal-bruise.

My guide showed me a map of the mine, and we went along dark tunnels to the telephone cavern, and were enabled to give greeting to miners as far as three miles away underground. Every man working in the mine was in telephonic communication with the pit-mouth. I saw the men at work, watched small trucks of coal being drawn by asses to the main line where the train was made up. I talked with Poles, Ruthenians, Russians—actually meeting underground several of those whom I had seen the day before in the Baptist Chapel. They were all very cheerful, and smiled as they worked with their picks. Some were miners, some labourers. The miner directs the blasting and drilling, puts in the powder and blows out the coal; the labourer works with pick and shovel. A man has to serve two years in a mine as a labourer before he can be a miner. Even a British immigrant, who has worked in South Wales or Northumberland or elsewhere, has to serve his term as a labourer. This discourages British men. Scranton used to be almost entirely Welsh; but it goes against the grain in an English-speaking man to fetch and carry for a Slovak or a Pole. On the other hand, this rule safeguards American strikers against imported miners.

After I had wandered about the mine a while I went up to the "Breaker's" tower, to the top of which each truck of coal was hoisted by the elevator; and I watched the fanning and screening and guiding and sifting of this wonderful machine, which in collaboration with the force of gravity can sort a ton of coal a second. I talked with Polish boys sitting in the stream of the rolling, hurrying coal; their task was to pick out bits of slate and ore; and I watched the platemen splitting lumps of coal with their long-handled hammers, and casting out the impurities. I saw the wee washhouse where the collier may bathe if he wish.

"Well, America or Russia, which is it?" I asked of almost every Russian I met. "Which do you prefer? Are you Americans now or Russians?"

And nearly all replied, "America; we will be Americans. What does one get in Russia?—fifty cents a day."[2] Only a few said that America was bad, that the mining was dangerous and degrading. Strange to say, the astonishment at America's wealth and the wages they get from her had not died away. They admired America for the wages she gave; not for the things for which the people of culture in the great cities admire her. America gave them money, the power to buy land, the power to buy low pleasures, the power to get back to Russia, or to journey onward to some other country—to the Argentine or to Canada.

I then spent a day visiting people at random. I went into Police Station No. 4, and found Sergeant Goerlitz sitting at a desk reading his morning paper, and he was very ready to talk to me. From him I gathered that the Slavs were the best citizens—quiet, industrious, and law-abiding. By Slavs he meant Huns, Bulgarians, Galicians, Ruthenians. The Russians were vulgar and pushing. He probably meant Russian Jews and Russians. The Italians were the most dangerous people; they committed most crimes, and never gave one another away to the police. The Poles and Jews were the most successful people.

I went to the house of a communicative, broad-nosed, broad-lipped little Ruthenian priest—an Austrian subject—and he told me that Russia could take India whenever she wanted to, America could take Canada, and that Germany would break our naval power. But the English would still be the greatest people in the world. In the near future the whole of North America would be one empire, and the whole of South America another—one Anglo-Saxon, the other Latin. He was evidently a student of contemporary possibilities. Despite his belief in America he was proud of his own nationality, and jealous of the loss of any of his flock. To his church there came three hundred Little Russians and about thirty Great Russians. He reckoned there were fifty families in Scranton purely Nihilist—by that he meant atheistic and pleasure-seeking. At his church the service was in Slavonic and the sermon in Ruthenian. He was sorry to say there were comparatively few marriages. People came to the town to make money rather than to live.

Then I went to the official Russian priest, away on Division Street. He shepherded one hundred and thirty-seven families, and four hundred and sixty-two unmarried people. His church had been burned down the year before, but had sprung up again immediately. Some of the congregation had succeeded in business, and having come as poor colonists were now rich and respected citizens, professional men, large storekeepers, responsible clerks. Scranton was more like a Russian city than an American, and it was possible to flourish as a lawyer or a doctor or an estate agent although you knew very little of the English language. And out in the country round about were many Russian farms with real Russian peasants on them; and he spent many weeks in the year travelling about in the rural districts giving the consolation of Orthodoxy to the faithful.

A pathetic thing happened whilst I was taking leave of the priest; a young workman came in to ask advice, and in salutation he took the priest's hand to kiss it, but the latter was ashamed to receive that homage before me, and so tried to pull his hand away. Despite the churchman's enthusiastic account of his work I felt that little action was symbolical of the ebb-tide. It was to me as if I had looked at the sea of faith, and said, "The tide is just turning."