With Poor Immigrants to America

by Stephen Graham

I visited the Y.M.C.A., so important an institution in America, giving a good room for fifty cents a day, and having its club-rooms, its swimming-baths, its classes for learning English. It wanted to raise seventeen thousand dollars in the forthcoming week, and many posters reminded passers-by that Scranton's greatest asset was not its coal or its factories or its shops, its buildings, its business, but its young men.

I walked the many streets at evening time when the wild crowd was surging in and out of the cinema houses and the saloons, and heard the American chaff and music-hall catch-words mixed with half a dozen Slavonic dialects. A young American engineer took me to several resorts, and initiated me in the mysteries of bull-dogs and fizzes, and as we went along the street he gave a running comment on the gaudily attired girls of the town, which he classified as "pick-ups," "chickens," and the like. At ten o'clock at night the streets were full of mirth, and all given over to sweethearting and flirting. Scranton's safety lies in the interest which the people have in one another, their sociability and general disposition to talk and hope. What it would be like if all these foreign mercenaries were mirthless and brutal it would be loathsome to picture. But I was surprised to find such lightness, such Southern frivolity in the people. It is strange that a people, most of whom are working all day in darkness, should take life so gaily. Even when they come up to the air of the outside world it is a bad air that is theirs, vitiated by the fumes of the burning mines; for at Scranton also the coal has been on fire ten years, and the smoke rolls from the slag-coloured wastes in volumes, and diffuses itself into the general atmosphere. One would think that the wretched frame-dwellings, ruined by the subsidence of the ground on which they were built, and begrimed with the smoke which factories belch all day, would disgust humanity. But it seems the man who works in dirt and ruin accepts dirt and disorder as something not wrong in themselves, quite tolerable, something even to be desired, a condition of freedom.

One day I met a young reporter, who was also a poet, and he took me to a point where there was a view of the city which he specially admired. It was a grey day—surely all days there are grey. We looked to the ridge of the West Mountain, a long dark wall built up to the sky, and many-roofed Scranton lay below it; the thin spires of many conventicles pointed upward, and from numberless chimneys and spouts proceeded hardly moving white steams and smokes, all in strange curls and twists. Here and there were black chutes and shafts and mountains of slag, and the slates of the roofs of the houses glimmered appallingly under the wanness and darkening dusty grey of the sky.

"This sight does my heart good," said the poet. "It's good to live in a place like this where we're doing something."

"It would be a beautiful place if there were no Scranton here at all," I ventured.

"That's the glory of it," said he. "We have the faith to smash up the beauty of Nature in the hope of getting something better. It would be a beautiful world entirely if there were no such thing as man. Nature's beauty has no need of us. But we happen to be here. We have something in us that Nature could never think of. Scranton expresses man's passion more truly than the virginal beauty of the Alleghany mountains or the valley of the young Susquehanna."

"A revolt against Eden," said I, "a fixed sullenness, man's determination to live in grime if he wants to—the children's infatuation for playing with the dirt."

"Oh, more than that," said the reporter poet. "Much more."

Perhaps.

That was perhaps a glimpse of the religion of America.