EDWARD ALFRED STEINER
None of our immigrant authors has written with more earnestness of America and things American than Edward A. Steiner, who was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1866. Unlike the average immigrant, before coming to the United States he had received considerable education in the public schools of his native city, in the gymnasium at Pilsen, Bohemia, and at the University of Heidelberg. After passing through most of the hardships incident to the life of an alien, he was graduated from the Oberlin Theological Seminary and was ordained a minister of the Congregational Church. Several years were then spent in pastoral work, and in 1903 he was elected to the Chair of Applied Christianity at Grinnell College, Iowa. He is widely known both as a lecturer and an author, and among his numerous books may be mentioned “On the Trail of the Immigrant,” 1906; “Against the Current,” 1910; “From Alien to Citizen,” 1914; “Introducing the American Spirit,” 1915; “Nationalizing America,” 1916; “Confession of a Hyphenated American,” 1916. This last voices the sensitiveness so commonly felt by Americans of foreign and particularly German birth in the face of much unreasonable suspicion and prejudice prior to and at the entrance of the United States into the European War. “Nationalizing America” is perhaps his most searching book; for in this almost every American institution is scrutinized, the State, the Church, the school, and the industrial life being examined in their relation to the immigrant.
Selections from two chapters of this book (“The Stomach Line” and “History and the Nation”) have been combined under one title, “Industrialism and the Immigrant.” “The Criminal Immigrant” is taken from chapter fourteen of the autobiographical volume, “From Alien to Citizen.”[7]
THE CRIMINAL IMMIGRANT
To recall prison experiences is not pleasant, and would not be profitable, if this were merely a narration of what happened to one individual, a quarter of a century ago. Conditions are not sufficiently changed, either in judicial procedure or in methods of punishment, to make this account of historic importance. Its value lies only in the fact that no changes have occurred, and that my experience then is still the common fate of multitudes of immigrants, who swell the criminal records of their race or group, and are therefore looked upon with dislike and apprehension.
The jail in which I found myself was an unredeemed, vermin-infested building, crowded by a motley multitude of strikers and strike breakers,—bitter enemies all, their animosity begotten in the elemental struggle for bread, and hating one another with an unmodified, primitive passion.[8]
The strikers had the advantage over us, for they were more numerous and were acquainted with the ways of American officials. This gave them the opportunity (which they improved) to make it unpleasant for the “Hunkies.”
The straw mattress upon which I slept the first night was missing the second; salt more completely spoiled the mixture called by courtesy coffee, and the only thing which saved me from bodily hurt was the fact that there was no spot on me which was not already suffering.
I mention without malice and merely as a fact in race psychology, that the Irish were the most cruel to us, with the Germans a close second, while the Welsh were not only inoffensive, but sometimes kind.