PETER ROBERTS
INDUSTRIAL DEPARTMENT, INTERNATIONAL YOUNG MEN'S CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION
The day laborer of a generation ago is gone,—a change which has been swifter and more complete in Pittsburgh than in many other of our industrial centers. "Where are your Irish? your Welsh? your Germans? your Americans?" I asked an old mill hand. "Go to the city hall and the police station," he said. "Some of them are still in the better paid jobs in the mills; but mostly you'll have to look for them among the doctors and lawyers and office holders; among clerks and accountants and salesmen. You'll find them there."
The day laborer in the mills to-day is a Slav. The foreign-born of the steel district comprise, it is true, every European nation, but I shall deal here only with the races from southeastern Europe, which for twenty years have been steadily displacing the Teutonic and Keltic peoples in the rough work of the industries. The tendency of the Italians is to go into construction and railroad work, a few entering the mines, rather than into the plants and yards; and my group narrows itself down to the dominant Slav and Lithuanian. What I have to say of them in Pittsburgh and Allegheny City is in the main representative of the manufacturing towns of the whole district.
Roughly speaking, one-quarter of the population of Pittsburgh is foreign-born. The foreigner is nowhere more at home than here, and nowhere has he been more actively welcomed by employers. The conflict of customs and habits, varying standards of living, prejudices, antipathies, all due to the confluence of representatives of different races of men, may be witnessed here. The most backward of these foreigners are superstitious and ignorant and are the victims of cunning knaves and unscrupulous parasites. On the other hand, the whole territory is thrown into a stern struggle for subsistence and wage-standards by the displacements due to these resistless accretions to the ranks of the workers. The moral and religious life of the city is not less affected by this inflow of peoples. Their religious training differs widely from that of peoples of Protestant antecedents, and institutions that were dear to the founders of the city are fast undermined by the customs of immigrants from southeastern Europe. Yet as a whole, they bring with them physical and cultural resources which the English-speaking community fails to elicit or thoughtlessly wastes.
Such an exhaustive study as could be made of the immigrant population of the steel district is outside the possibilities of this paper. I shall set down only what a month brought me as I visited the lodging-houses and the courts and the mills of Greater Pittsburgh; as I talked with priest and leader, policeman and doctor, banker and labor boss, the immigrants themselves and those who live close to them; but I shall put it before you in the light of many years' residence in the anthracite coal communities, where in another section of Pennsylvania, at Mahanoy City and Wilkes-Barre and Scranton, I have known the Slav and the Lett and their efforts to gain a foothold in America. I shall deal with the situation, not as I have seen it in my visits of the past year, during which the immigrants have returned home by thousands, but as I came to know it in the heyday of prosperity, the early fall of 1907, when conditions were as they are likely to be again when industrial prosperity returns. This is the situation which we must reckon with in a permanent way.
In 1880, Slavs, Lithuanians and Italians did not form one per cent of the population in either Pittsburgh or Allegheny. By 1890, they had reached four per cent, and out of an army of 90,000 wage earners, one in every ten was an immigrant from southeastern Europe. By 1900, one-third of the foreign-born were of this new immigration, and the movement of the Teutonic and Keltic races had practically ceased. We must wait until the census enumeration of 1910 before we may definitely know what proportion these newcomers form to-day, but it may safely be assumed that the percentage of foreign-born in the greater city will equal that of 1900, thirty per cent, or roughly, 200,000, half of whom will be from southeastern Europe.
Poles, Italians and Jewish immigrants lead the list. Lithuanians, Croatians, Servians, Slovaks and Ruthenians are numbered by the thousands, and Magyars, Greeks, Bohemians and Roumanians are here in lesser groups.
The representatives of these nations touch elbows in the streets so that the languages heard when the people are marketing in the foreign quarters on Saturday night are as numerous as those of a seaport town. Twenty dialects are spoken. Yet the polyglot mass that confuses the visitor and induces pessimistic impressions as to the future of the city, is each morning marshalled without tumult. The discipline of the industrial establishments converts this babel of tongues into one of the chief forces of production. Therein lies an appraisal not only of the American entrepreneur, but also of these men coming from nations of low efficiency, who are able so quickly to fall into line and keep step in an industrial army of remarkable discipline and output.
There is no way of knowing the annual inflow of immigrants into Pittsburgh, for the city is a distributing point. The records of the ports of entry show that in 1907, 187,618 persons gave Pittsburgh as their destination, but many of these scattered to the neighboring Pennsylvania towns and many undoubtedly went to the mills and mines of Eastern Ohio. Every day brings its quota of immigrants in normal times; occasionally they come by the carloads. Owing to the shifting of the newcomers, however, the outflow may often equal the inflow. Conditions of the local industries determine which of these two currents runs the swifter. During the first seven years of the century, the city possibly added 15,000 annually by immigration.