Drawn by Joseph Stella.
PITTSBURGH TYPES.
LAD FROM HERZEGOVINA.
It is perhaps but natural that Pittsburghers should believe that the fame of their industries should draw these Slavs straight from their villages to Pittsburgh. Yet this is rarely true,—true only in exceptional cases, such as that of Joseph Sabata, a Bohemian. He was an iron-worker at home and was employed in a large rolling mill in Moravia. Their machinery was imported mostly from the United States and he, noticing the name of an Allegheny firm on some of the pieces, thought that in that city he could learn more about his business; and so five years ago decided to come over. After being landed at Ellis Island, he discovered while in line waiting to be questioned, that everybody was asked to show an address. Such an address he did not have, but he does have quick wits; he hastily scribbled on a piece of paper "Allegheny," and the name of a cousin still in the old country who had probably never even heard the name of that city. He was readily admitted, went straight to Allegheny, and when I saw him was earning $2.75 a day in a machine shop.
In another case I met with, the coming straight to Pittsburgh was quite accidental. Václav Málek, a Bohemian, who came here with his parents eighteen years ago when a lad of sixteen, had intended to settle with the rest of the family on a farm in Wisconsin. But on the way across the ocean they became acquainted with another Bohemian family, bound for Pittsburgh, who had been robbed of their money, and to these people Málek's father loaned eighty dollars. In order not to lose the money they decided to keep near their debtors and they too came to Pittsburgh. John even to this day is sorry they didn't go on a farm,—and for a double reason: first, he has a natural preference for farm labor which is never to be gratified; second, in the course of his work for an Allegheny company, an accident crippled him for life.
In the vast majority of cases the Slavs in Pittsburgh had not the slightest intention of settling there when they first came to America. Usually their location there has been preceded by a period of a year or two or even longer during which they have wandered hither and thither, from one factory to another, from town to town, looking for the right place to settle.
Large numbers of the Slovaks come to Pittsburgh by way of the anthracite fields. At the time of the strike,—and for several years before when conditions were bad in hard coal mining, half-time, and the like of that, the Slavic mineworkers drifted west,—across the state to the steel mill district.
The experience of a Ruthenian named Koval is typical of a great number of men. He came to America three years ago, and was sent by an immigrant home in New York to work in the forests of West Virginia as a woodcutter. The wages there were only fifty cents a day, and in other ways the conditions were so bad that he and three other men ran away. They wandered through the woods until they came to a little settlement with a saw mill, where they were offered work and stayed for about two months, earning $1.50 a day. Then a surveyor came to the village, who spoke Polish, and told them that in Allegheny they could earn a good deal more money than in the woods, so to Allegheny they decided to go. There they obtained work as laborers in the locomotive works at $1.50 for a day of ten hours.
Such a wanderer also, was Smulkstis, a Lithuanian who started life as a messenger boy in the telegraph service in St. Petersburg. He came to a friend in Wilmerding four years ago, but, unable to get the kind of work he wanted, he sought out another friend in Worcester, Mass., where he got a job in a woolen mill. The next spring found him back in Pittsburgh as a machine operator in an electrical plant. To-day,—he is still only twenty-two,—he is a crane man in the Homestead steel mills. Similarly, a Croatian who was spending the winter in Duquesne, was a type of the migratory railroad laborer, who drifts from one contractor's gang to another. He had been all over Indiana, Ohio and the Middle West and had taken his wife and children with him. They made shift in cars and shanties and construction camps of all sorts.