I did not understand and asked for an explanation. "As I am going back to my old country, it would not be right to give up my allegiance there and make myself a citizen here." I pressed him for his reasons for going back, and he gave them to me,—reasons that fit thousands and thousands of cases. With him that preliminary process of being separated from the soil had not taken place, as with John Gerza. He was a farmer by age-old instinct; his love for the land was a part of his being, was a yearning which would leave him only with death. Now, since over here he had been plunged straight into industry, the only land he had ever known in a way to become attached to it was the land in which he was born, and when the time came when he was able to gratify his longing for land his thoughts went only to the land in his old country. So, though socially as well off as he would be there, and economically much better off, he was going back. Undoubtedly he, too, would be a fixture in America could he have gone on a farm immediately upon his arrival here,—for then his instinctive land-love would have been weaned from the old country and fixed upon America. Few Slavs who settle upon the land ever change back to Europe.
The Slavs are strong, willing workers, and are generally considered by the steel mill officials the best laborers they get,—but now and then there is a man who is too slow for America. One of these was John Kroupa, a Bohemian who has been here twenty-two years. Faithful, strong, willing, it wasn't in him to keep up the race. He was in his earlier years here employed in a steel mill, but he was dropped. As he frankly said to me, "You have to be pretty quick in those mills, and it isn't a job for a man like me." Later he got a job as watchman on a Pennsylvania Railroad crossing in Woods Run, and there he worked for sixteen years, his wages forty dollars a month for a twelve hour day and a seven day week. (In the last two years, forty-four dollars.) All this while he hoped for promotion, but it did not come and this non-recognition rankled within him. "Other men, who were all sore from sitting down so much, were promoted," exclaimed he, "but I, who was always hustling, was never thought of, and I can tell you it wasn't an easy job to watch that no accident happened, as more than 300 trains passed that way every day and very often at full speed, disregarding the city ordinances,—thirty or forty miles an hour." Three years ago the crossing was abolished, the tracks having been elevated. The superintendent came to him at that time. "Well, John, I am sorry for you; going to lose your happy home. But you'll get another just as good." This was too much for John; his long smoldering disappointment burst out. "Go to hell!" said he, "A happy home! I could just as well have been in the penitentiary over there; I would have been much better off, without the responsibility and worry I have here. During sixteen years I didn't have a single day off. Sundays and weekdays both I have to be here for twelve hours. Do you call that a happy home?"
He refused the new-old job. He now keeps a little store in Woods Run, which he has established out of his savings and with the help of his children,—a store which might have served Dickens for one of his grotesque backgrounds, for here are on sale hardware, candy, crackers, bacon, eggs, molasses. Kroupa cannot be classed as a failure, for he has managed to buy a home and raise and educate a good sized family, but he has not made the success that his qualities of constancy, honesty and sobriety should have won him. His inborn slowness was too great a handicap.
Among the Slavs the Slovaks strike me as the most ambitious and pushing. This is all the more surprising when one remembers that the conditions out of which they come are as bad as the conditions surrounding any of the Slavs, and worse than most. The Slovaks when they come here, are poor, illiterate, have no training, are inured to oppression; yet they have pluck, perseverance, enterprise and courage. From their ranks are recruited many of the foremen in the mills and an ever increasing number of merchants. In the Woods Run district, with which I happen to be best acquainted,—a low-lying mill neighborhood along the Ohio in Allegheny City, probably one-half of the stores and saloons are in the hands of Slovaks, or their close neighbors, the Hungarian Rusnaks. They were all common laborers at one time. Most of the stores are well kept and, in general, prosperous-looking, and among their customers are not only Slavs, but Americans as well.
A type of this class of men, the men who succeed, is John Mlinek. When I first saw him I had not the least thought that he was a Slav, so well-dressed and thoroughly Americanized did he seem, and such good English did he speak. He came to America thirteen years ago when only fifteen years old. He worked successively as a breaker-boy and driver in the mines at Mahanoy City, then in the iron-works at Elizabeth, New Jersey, then as a riveter in the Pressed Steel Car Company at Allegheny, where he was soon making three to four dollars a day. As he neither drank nor indulged in any other form of dissipation he saved considerable money. In 1905, he married a Slovak girl born and brought up in this country who for several years before her marriage, had clerked in a store where they had foreign customers. She is a little more refined than the average English-speaking girl of the working class, and holds a high position in her own circle. She is quite ambitious and induced her husband to start a store in Woods Run. He sells cigars and candy and is doing very well; from what I could gather, they already must have several thousand dollars saved. These young people seem to be much liked in the community; they are prominent both in their social circle and in their church, and Mlinek is an influential man among the Slovak societies, though he does not at all push himself to the front. Mlinek, I would say, is at the beginning of a considerable success; his prospects and his personality favor his achieving it; only some untoward set of circumstances can keep him down.
A few paragraphs back, in the case of Hudak, I spoke of the powerful call their native bit of earth makes upon so many of the immigrants. But frequently when men go back, intending to stay, in response to this call, the old country is not strong enough to hold them. Such was the case with this same John Mlinek. It was his ambition to be a well-to-do farmer in Hungary in a few years, and recently he and his wife made a preliminary visit to his old home and bought a farm. They remained a few weeks,—but those few weeks were quite enough. He came back quite cured. "Every little clerk in the village looked down on me, because I didn't speak the official language, Magyar," Mlinek said to me. "He was an official while I was just a peasant. He didn't earn a quarter of what I do, yet I had to bow to him. That made me sore. In America I'm a free man. Besides, I've got a better chance to do well than in the old country. Yes, America is good enough for me."
Mike Mamaj is another successful man; he also returned to Hungary, expecting to live there, and he also turned his back on his native country and came again to America, this time to stay. He has learned to speak, read and write English, and he is full of energy, though rather rude and domineering in his manner. During the early part of his career in America (he came here twenty years ago) he had a hard time, but for the last seven years he has been a foreman in the car shops at Woods Run. He has seventy men working under him, and part of the time he has earned $100 a month. He owns the house in which he lives, worth about $2,500, has property in the old country to the value of $1,500, and has money in the bank.
Mamaj is proud of his success, of his home, of his children. So proud that, on the occasion of our first meeting, though the bed-time hour of nine had come, he dragged me off to show me the evidence of what he had done in America.
Drawn by Joseph Stella.