Part 24

I watched them day after day coming from their work, wet, dirty, and blistered by the heat; dropping into their bunks at night, breathing in the pestilential air of a room crowded by fifteen sleepers, and in the morning crawling listlessly back to their slavish task.

No song escaped their parched lips, attuned to their native melodies, and the only cheer came on pay day, when the silver dollars looked twice as big as they were, when a barrel of beer was tapped at the boarding house and this hard world was forgotten. Then they tried to sing from throats made hoarse by the heat,

“Chervene Pivo Bile Kolatshe.”

With the song came memories of their native village, the inn and the fiddlers, the notes of the mazurka and krakowyan, and visions of the wives and children who awaited their return. To the town they went that day and sent $20 each, out of the month’s earnings, to Katshka and Susanka and Marinka, the anticipation of their gladness making them happy too.

It was the beginning of the second month and I had drifted back to watch my men at the furnaces. They were still carrying hot bars from one place to the other and had withered into almost unrecognizable dryness. I watched these gigantic monsters consuming them and as I watched a terrible thing happened. An appalling noise arose above the roar to which my ears had grown accustomed, and which seemed the normal stillness. White, writhing serpents shot out from the boiling furnaces and were followed by other monsters of their kind which burned whatever they touched, and before I knew what had happened the whole dark place was full of smoke and the smell of burning flesh. Eight men, my three among them, had been caught by the molten metal, scorched in its own fire and consumed by its unquenchable appetite. What happened? Nothing. A coroner came to view the remains,--of which there were practically none; out of the centre of the cooled metal, lumps of steel were cut and buried,--and that is all that happened; and oh, it happens so often!

As I write this, the daily paper lies before me; the Chicago Tribune of May 13th, 1906. It devotes six columns to the horrors of the steel mills in South Chicago. I could fill the whole paper with the horrors which I have witnessed in mill and mine; and I could fill pages with the names of poor “Hunkies” whom nobody knows and about whom nobody cares. I cannot write it; it makes me bitter and resentful; so I shall let this newspaper reporter speak, and he knows but half the story. I know the other half, but the whole truth would hardly sound credible.

CENTRE OF MILL HORRORS€

Here in this hospital building and its environment centres the horror of horrors of the untutored mill workman. Its inspiration is terror to the millman of the polyglot pay roll, as he enters the Eighty-eighth Street gate to his work.

Hun, Pole, Austrian, Bulgarian, Bohemian--the “Hunkies” of Illinois Steel colloquialism--indifferent to pain of shattered, burned, mangled body, grow frantic as the stretcher bearers near this fortress hospital. At its gates, over and over again, the frantic, hysterical wife and children of the victim have begged and pleaded for admission against the grim barrier of the guards.

Why is it? You cannot get the information in South Chicago unless it be that these men are “ignorant.”

South Chicago distinctly doesn’t like the “Hunkie.” He jams the money order window of the post-office for two long days after the bi-monthly pay day. He sleeps sometimes thirty deep in a single room after the day shift, and he sleeps again in the still warm floor bed, thirty deep, after the night shift. He has his grocer’s book on which are entered his scant, half offal meats, which day after day are prepared for him by his hired cook; he wears little and he sleeps in that; his bed is never made, for the reason that some one always is in it; his money goes to the saloon-keeper or through the foreign money order window at the post-office.

He is merely a “Hunkie” in Illinois Steel or in South Chicago. What if the Illinois Steel hospital is his conception of Inferno?

He doesn’t know much. He doesn’t know when he is spoken to, unless it is by an epithet which makes any other man fight. Then he moves doggedly and often with little understanding. Not understanding, he is the chosen, predestined occupant of the hospital bed.

FROM ACCIDENT TO HOSPITAL€

A “Hunkie” who has been “hunked” in Illinois Steel makes a lot of strictly corporation trouble. The chief “safety inspector” and his staff are alert and active at a moment’s notice of an unofficial accident report. The Illinois Steel photographer and his camera are made ready; the stretcher bearers seize stretchers to the necessary number and a hurried move is made towards the scene of the accident, of which the Chicago police department may never know.

On the scene, the camera is set and the photograph--which so seldom is ever seen beyond the gates of Illinois Steel--is made. Then the “Hunkie”--protesting if he be conscious enough--is picked up, put upon the stretcher, and the giant bearers of the body start for the hospital, which may be a mile away. There are difficulties in the march. Surface lines for ore and coal trains net the grounds. Often a train’s crew finds difficulty in breaking a train to let the body through; sometimes the crew balks and swears, and the stretcher bearers wait for the shunting of the cars.

In the hospital? Few people know and they don’t talk. There is a “visiting hour,” but the surly guard at the gate passes upon the applicant’s request long before the request may be repeated at the hospital door. And at the door they don’t encourage visitors.

THE BOHEMIAN IMMIGRANT

Whatever apprehensions one may have about the Slav in America, may be dispelled or accentuated by a study of the Bohemian immigrants. They began coming to us when, during the counter reformation under Ferdinand II, Austria sent her Protestants to the gallows or to America.

In Baltimore the churches they founded still stand, and a sort of Forefathers’ Day is observed by their descendants, who, though they have lost the speech of their fathers, still cling to the historic date which binds them to a band of noble pioneers--close comrades in spirit to the Pilgrims of New England. Under Austrian rule Bohemia became impoverished physically, mentally, and spiritually; and after the misgovernment of Church and State had done its worst, the flood-tide of immigration set in anew towards this country.

Bohemia grew to be in the last century an industrial state, and the immigrants who came here were half-starved weavers and tailors, who naturally flocked to the large cities. In New York nearly the whole Bohemian population turned itself to the making of cigars, and the East Side, from Fiftieth to about Sixty-fifth Streets, is the centre. In Cleveland, Ohio, more than 45,000 Bohemians live together, while Chicago boasts of a Bohemian population of over 100,000, who nearly all live in one district, which began on Twelfth and Halstead Streets, but now stretches southward almost to the stockyards, with a constant tendency to enlarge its boundary towards the better portions of the city. The large tenement-house is almost altogether absent from this locality, the little frame house of the cigar-box style being the prevailing type of dwelling, and most of the homes are owned by their tenants. This part of the city is as clean as the people can make it in a place where street-cleaning is a lost, or never learned, art. The prevailing dirt is clean dirt, with here and there an inexcusable morass which offends both the eye and the nostril. The whole district is typical of Chicago rather than of Bohemia, and if it were not for the business signs in a strange and unphonetic language, and occasionally a sentence in the same queer speech, one might imagine himself anywhere among any American people of the working class; nor is there a trace of the native country in the interiors, where one finds stuffed parlour furniture, plush albums, lace curtains, ingrain carpets, and a piano or organ--all true and sure indications of American conquest over inherited foreign tastes and habits.

Yet the conquest is only on the surface, for it takes more than a carpet-sweeper to wipe out the love of that language for which Bohemia has suffered untold agony; to which it has clung in spite of the pressure brought to bear upon it by a strong and autocratic government, and which it is trying to preserve in this new home, in which the English language is more powerful to stop foreign speech than is the German in Austria, though backed by force of law and force of arms. With many Bohemian daily newspapers, with publishing houses printing new books each day, with preaching in the native tongue, and with societies in which Bohemian history is taught, the Czechish language will not soon disappear from the streets of Chicago; and language to the Bohemian, as, indeed, to all the Slavs, is history, religion and life.

The Bohemian immigrant comes to us burdened by rather unenviable characteristics, which his American neighbour soon discovers, and the love between them is not great. Coming from a country which has been at war for centuries, and in which to-day a fierce struggle between different nationalities is disrupting a great empire, and clogging the wheels of popular government, he is apt to be quarrelsome, suspicious, jealous, clannish and yet factious; he hates quickly and long, and is unreasoning in his prejudices; yet that for which a people is hated, and which we call characteristic of race or nation, soon disappears under new environment, and the miracle which America works upon the Bohemians is more remarkable than any other of our national achievements. The downcast look so characteristic of them in Prague is nearly gone, the surliness and unfriendliness disappear, and the young Bohemian of the second or third generation is as frank and open as his neighbour with his Anglo-Saxon heritage. I rather pride myself upon my power to detect racial and national marks of even closely related peoples, but in Chicago I was severely tested and failed. I have addressed many Bohemian audiences to which I could pay this compliment, that they looked and listened like Americans; but what thousands of years have plowed into a people cannot be altogether eradicated, and the Bohemian, with all of us, carries his burden of good and evil buried in his bones.

Of all our foreign population he is the most irreligious, fully two-thirds of the 100,000 in Chicago having left the Roman Catholic Church and drifted into the old-fashioned infidelity of Thomas Paine and Robert Ingersoll. Nowhere else have I heard their doctrines so boldly preached, or seen their conclusions so readily accepted, and I have it on the authority of Mr. Geringer, the editor of the Svornost, that there are in Chicago alone three hundred Bohemian societies which teach infidelity, carry on an active propaganda for their unbelief, and also maintain Sunday-schools in which the attendance ranges from thirty to three thousand. One of the most painful and pathetic sights is this attempt to crush God out of the child nature by means of an infidel catechism, the nature of whose teaching is shown by one of the first questions and its answer: “What duty do we owe to God? Inasmuch as there is no God, we owe Him no duty.” As it is always possible to exaggerate the strength of such a movement I called on the editor referred to above, one of the leaders, whose paper, in common with two others, pursues this tendency and daily preaches its destructive creed. Calling at the office of the Svornost, I found Mr. Geringer, a Bohemian of the second generation, frank and open in acknowledging his leadership and the tendency of his paper, although he was less extreme than the statements about him by priests and preachers had led me to suppose. He certainly was much more willing to talk about his people than were the priests upon whom I had called, and I found that his views have not been without change in the fifteen years since I last read his paper. “We are fighting Catholicism rather than religion,” he said; and I added, “A Catholicism in Austria, with its back towards the throne and its face towards the Austrian eagle;” to which he replied, “You have hit the nail on the head.”

In reality, this hatred extends unreasonably to all religion, and among the less educated it amounts to a fanaticism which does not stop short of persecution and personal abuse. Blasphemous expressions and old musty arguments against the Bible are the common topics of conversation among many Bohemian working-men, who hate the sight of a priest, never enter a church, and are thoroughly eaten through by infidelity. They read infidel books about which they argue during the working hour, and the influence of Robert Ingersoll is nowhere more felt than among them. His “Mistakes of Moses” had taken the place of the usual newspaper story, and the editorials are charged by hatred towards the Church and towards Christianity as a whole. The unusual number of suicides among the Bohemians is said to be due to the fact that their secret societies encourage suicide. The books published in Chicago are of a rather low type, and among them are many whose sole purpose it is to vilify the Church.

An unusually coarse materialism pervades that colony. Professor Massarik, of the University of Prague, and a recent visitor to this country, makes this the chief note of his complaint against them. They have singing and Turner societies after the manner of the Germans, but the ideals they foster are really the causes of their materialism and infidelity. The Roman Catholic Church is fighting that spirit by maintaining strong parochial schools, encouraging the organization of lodges under its protection, and it now publishes a daily paper. The Protestants cannot boast of more than one per cent. of members among them, and the three small churches in Chicago are but vaguely felt and are practically no factors in the life of this large population. “We don’t know that they are here,” said one of the infidel leaders, and the Catholics take no notice of them at all. Some Protestant literature is scattered among them but it is not of the highest type, and is not calculated to reach those who need it most.

Chicago is as much a Bohemian centre for America as is Prague for the old Bohemia, and the type of thought found there is duplicated in all the Bohemian centres that I visited; everywhere there is a battle between free thought and Catholicism, and many a household is divided between the Svornost and the Catholic, yet I have good reason to believe that this infidelity is only a desire for a more liberal type of religion, only a strong reaction and not a permanent thing, and I found signs of weakening at every point. The little village of New Prague in southwestern Minnesota is a good example. It is the centre of a large Bohemian agricultural community, and has the reputation of being a “tough” town and quite a nest of infidelity. I found it a clean and prosperous place of 1,500 inhabitants, outwardly neater and better cared for than the ordinary Western village. It has a clean and wholesome-looking hotel, a little Protestant church and a big Catholic church, and the usual variety of stores. I was surprised to find the hotel without the customary bar, and to my question about it the hotel-keeper replied, “I have no use for bars; I ain’t no drinking man and I don’t want nobody else to drink.”

The editor of the New Prague Times had been pointed out to me as the chief infidel, yet I found him an interested reader of The Outlook and kindred literature, and a rather fine type of the liberal Christian. Indeed, while, of course, the Chicago Svornost and its kind find a great many readers, I came to the conclusion that with the infidels were classed all those who refused to go to confession, or had helped to secure a fine edifice for the public school. From the banker, the physician, the druggist, and the photographer, I received additional proof that my conjecture was correct, and the only one who had little to say in praise of these people and much in blame was the village priest, a true type of the Austrian Catholic, who would rule with an iron hand if he could, and who misses the strong support of government. Typical of him was the answer to my question as to his touch with the people in comparison with that of the Austrian priest at home. “You know in Austria the State pays us, and we don’t need to come in close touch with the people, but here it is different; here the people pay, and that alone brings us in closer touch.”