Edward Alfred Steiner

“ The Italian is sick and sore because the Church which has so long been his physician, acknowledges no error, and even its humble Pope will not persuade it that it must radically change its treatment; this not only for the sake of Italy but for the sake of America also. The most dangerous element which can come to us from any country, is that which comes smarting under real or fancied wrongs, committed by those who should have been its helpers and healers. Such an element Italy furnishes in a remarkably great degree, and I have no hesitation in saying that it is our most dangerous element. ”

“ All the older and newer invasions have left their traces, and wherever an alien army has come, it has plowed its way with the sword into the life of these impressionable people.
Where the Slav has touched the Italian, you see his heavy finger marks in a rougher exterior, a slower gait, a harsher speech, more industry and less art. Where the Austro-Germans have enthralled and governed him you will find him more governable, more sedate, more a statesman and less a revolutionist, “a captain of industry” rather than a leader of brigands, more a business man and less a dreamer. ”

“ How deep the American ideals have taken root among them, one cannot yet discern; how completely the second generation will come under their sway, how much of the old world spirit will disappear or remain, is difficult to determine. This is no time to be blindly optimistic nor hopelessly pessimistic; it is a time for facing the dangers and not fearing them; for this is the noontide of our day of grace. This is the time to bring into action the best there is in American ideals; for as we present ourselves to this mass of men, so it will become. ”

“ THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE STEERAGE
BACK of Warsaw, Vienna, Naples and Palermo, with no place on the world’s map to mark their existence, are small market towns to which the peasants come from their hidden villages. They come not as is their wont on feast and fast days, with song and music, but solemnly; the women bent beneath their burdens, carried on head or back, and the men who walk beside them, less conscious than usual of their superiority. ”

“ The Bohemian is here to stay, and scarcely any of those who come will ever stand again upon St. Charles bridge, and watch their native Moldava as it winds itself along the ancient battlements of “Golden Prague,” as they love to call their capital. America is their home, “for better or for worse”; they love it passionately; and yet one who knows their history, every page of it aflame with war, need not wonder that they turn often to their past and dwell on it, lingering there with fond regret. ”

“ I have not yet seen a village in Hungary, Russia or Italy, to which any number of men has returned even after a short sojourn in America, without that community’s gaining in some ways at least. Better houses certainly were built, with more or less sanitary improvements according to the conditions under which the men or women have lived in America. It makes a vast difference whether the men have lived in mining camps or in the cities. Undoubtedly the peasant who has lived in a small American city where he could easily feel and touch its life brings home the greatest spirit of progress. ”

“ Again, this does not assume that the immigrant is not a political problem; he is, but only because we are, and in this he rises and falls with us, and sometimes rises above us. All that which we call patriotism he quickly imbibes. He loves the Fourth of July, and he knows its meaning and its value often better than the native born. I have no fear on that score; and should America, God forbid, engage in war, you would find at the very front the Jew, the Slav, and the Italian with the Yankee, fighting the same battle; yes, and fighting his own people should they unjustly attack us. ”

“ There is no more sturdy stock in Europe than the Slav of Montenegro, none more ready to turn from gun to wood axe, from blood-revenge to citizenship.
The Wends, Poles, and Bohemians show in speech and life influences of their German neighbours; the Slovak in Hungary has a strong Magyar taint; the Croatian, Servian, Bulgarian, and the Montenegrin come dangerously near the Turk; the Dalmatian on the Adriatic, in spite of his resistance against it, shows influences of Venice, not only in the magnificent architecture of his churches, but also in language and character ”

“ Rarely will a Slav or Italian go to bed without committing himself to the special care of some patron saint.
Vice there is, crude, rough vice, down here in the steerage. Yes, they drink vodka,—even that rarely; but up in the cabin they drink champagne and Kentucky whiskies, the same devils with other names. Seldom do the steerage passengers gamble—a friendly game of cards perhaps, here and there; while up in the cabin, from sunlight until dawn, poker chips are piled and pass to and fro among daintily attired men and women. ”

“ What a nation we should be if we would take the Hungarian’s devotion to his native land and make it burn with just such a true fire upon the altar of this country; and finally, if we would mingle all the virtues that the nations bring us with the seriousness and loftiness of the Scandinavian’s mind and heart,—if we did this through one generation, in one city of our country we would bring the Kingdom of God down upon the earth. ”

“ The New York Ghetto looks remarkably decent from the outside, but pharisaic landlords have beautified the “outside of the cup and platter,” while within, the house is poorly prepared for human habitation. A good example is the house into which I lead my friend. It is an old fashioned front and rear tenement with fifty families as residents, and on climbing the stairway to the fifth story to which our address directs, our nostrils are greeted by a fragrance which, compared with the well remembered smells of the steerage, is like unto the odours of Araby the blest. ”

“ America is the best country. There we have white bread and butter and candy, and I can chew gum to beat the band;” and tears fill her eyes at the memory of the American luxuries which she has tasted. If she stays in her mountain village she will degenerate into the common life about her, and marry a peasant lad with whom she will hover between enough and starvation, all the days of her life. Yet she will never forget America, the white bread and butter, the candy and the chewing-gum. ”

“ The waters are of a quieter colour, and over them hovers the morning mist. The silence of the early dawn is broken only by the sound of deep-chested ferry-boats which pass into the mist and out of it, like giant monsters, stalking on their cross beams over the deep. The steerage is awake after its restless night and mutely awaits the disclosures of its own and the new world’s secrets. The sound of a booming gun is carried across the hidden space, and faint touches of flame struggling through the gray, are the sun’s answer to the salute from Governor’s Island. ”

“ The Slav is not a builder of empires, because he is not a citizen but a subject—a severe master or a submissive servant. As a rule, he bears oppression patiently, shrinks from overcoming obstacles, is seldom inquisitive enough to climb over the mountains which lock in his native village to see what is beyond them, never cares much for the sea and its perils, the Russian’s desire for harbours being a political necessity rather than a natural want. ”

“ Again we passed the Bowery, going on to the American section of New York, the Rialto. Here were horrors enough; whole blocks where there were no children; for both the very wicked and the very rich are not blessed by them. Young and old men, fashionably dressed and properly tipsy, went in to cheap shows, saloons and brothels, to have a “good time.” These young men, rich sons of rich fathers, and these old men, are idlers and perverters of their own passions. They and they alone are the great problem which we have need to fear; for it is a problem which cannot be solved. ”

“ I cannot regard the immigrant as a problem from this narrow economic view: while upon the broader question, of the general effect he has upon the condition of labour in America, I am at present in no position to be dogmatic. I recognize that it is natural for those engaged in the same pursuit to fear the competition which will lower their wage and consequently narrow their whole life. I believe that it is the business of the government to protect them against unjust competition, but first we must have tangible facts; and those we do not yet possess. ”

“ They are caught by the contagious enthusiasm of our patriotism, and will outdo us; for they love America as no native can love it. Neither do I fear that they will fail us in fighting our greater battles against injustice and against corruption in high places. What I fear is that they will fight, that they will become one with the tumultuous mob, which may at any time arise and blindly demand its long deferred dividends for its share of labour, toil and suffering. ”

“ Both peasant and Jew come from Russian, Austrian or Magyar rule, under which they have had few of the privileges of citizenship but many of its burdens. From valleys in the crescent shaped Carpathians, from the sunny but barren slopes of the Alps and from the Russian-Polish plains they are coming as once they went forth from earlier homes; peaceful toilers, who seek a field for their surplus labour or as traders to use their wits, and it is a longer journey than any of their timid forbears ever undertook. ”

“ The masses of the Jews are so cowed by fear that they are unmanned. They do not know the use of a weapon. Here and there a Jew, alert and keen, sees his misery and is brave enough to defend himself. Many of them advocate Socialism; it attracts them because it knows no race, because it preaches a certain kind of peace, because it is a brotherhood. The Jew does not find in the orthodox church the meek and lowly Nazarene, because the Messiah whom the church preaches, is masked behind church millinery ”

“ The Slovak lives an isolated life, sublimely ignorant of “wars and rumours of wars”; his breakfast is not spoiled by the glaring head-lines of the daily paper, nor does the magazine or novel press upon him the problems of human society. He knows his camp, his mine, his shop, and though he lives in America and in the most busy States in the Union, his world now is not much bigger than it was when its horizon touched his village pastures. ”

“ It is true that the Italian and Polish peasant may not be accustomed to better things at home and might not be happier in better surroundings nor know how to use them; but it is a bad introduction to our life to treat him like an animal when he is coming to us. He ought to be made to feel immediately, that the standard of living in America is higher than it is abroad, and that life on the higher plane begins on board of ship. Every cabin passenger who has seen and smelt the steerage from afar, knows that it is often indecent and inhuman ”

“ At last the passengers are stowed away, and into the excitement of the hour of departure there comes a silent heaviness, as if the surgeon’s knife were about to cut the arteries of some vital organ. Homesickness, a disease scarcely known among the mobile Anglo-Saxons, is a real presence in the steerage; for there are the men and women who have been torn from the soil in which through many generations their lives were rooted. ”

“ He is not a problem but a lesson. Crossing the ocean in December on the Red Star Line steamer Vaterland, I found among the mixture of steerage passengers over two hundred Magyars, or, as we more exactly call them, Hungarians. I was eager to know what they were carrying home to their native country after years of living with us, and I found that many of them seemed completely untouched by the American life. Their language, spoken by but a few people in Europe, is almost unknown in America, and the man without a language is almost always “the man without a country.” ”

“ Future generations will wonder at the process and will say: “A new gigantic race was being born between the Atlantic and the Pacific; a race born to build or to destroy, to cry to the world, ‘Ground Arms,’ or cast it into the hell of war; a race in which are welded all kindreds of the people of the earth, or a race which will destroy itself by mutual hate.” ”

“ Whether we shall enrich this New American by our own ideals, whether we shall implant in him the broad culture of our own spiritual and intellectual heritage, is a real problem whose solving may puzzle even future generations.
I do not believe that any of the people who come to us, speaking of races and nationalities as a whole, are degenerate, or so hardened that they are not capable of assimilation and transformation. ”

“ A Polish woman by my side has suddenly become aware that she has one child less clinging to her skirts, and she implores me with agonizing cries, to bring it back to her. In a strange world, at the very entrance to what is to be her home, without the protection of her husband, without any knowledge of the English language, and with no one taking the trouble to explain to her the reason, the child was snatched from her side. ”

“ Who doubts that the German Americans would fight in our war against Germany, if it were a just war—if war be ever just; and who would doubt for a moment that the Italians, Russians and French would fight on our side if their governments should land soldiers on this continent? ”

“ If the old New England stock is not willing to sacrifice as it used to, and if the New England boy is not as ambitious as his grandfather, I thank God that he is sending us those who are willing to sacrifice and anxious to rise; and that he is giving this challenge to the old stock: Rise up and show yourselves! If we do not see and feel it, it is to our shame. We are not the elect of God unless we prove our election, and if He can do better for the world through some other stock and religion than through the native stock and Protestant religion, let Him work in His own way. ”