EDWARD ALFRED STEINER
None of our immigrant authors has written with more earnestness of America and things American than Edward A. Steiner, who was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1866. Unlike the average immigrant, before coming to the United States he had received considerable education in the public schools of his native city, in the gymnasium at Pilsen, Bohemia, and at the University of Heidelberg. After passing through most of the hardships incident to the life of an alien, he was graduated from the Oberlin Theological Seminary and was ordained a minister of the Congregational Church. Several years were then spent in pastoral work, and in 1903 he was elected to the Chair of Applied Christianity at Grinnell College, Iowa. He is widely known both as a lecturer and an author, and among his numerous books may be mentioned “On the Trail of the Immigrant,” 1906; “Against the Current,” 1910; “From Alien to Citizen,” 1914; “Introducing the American Spirit,” 1915; “Nationalizing America,” 1916; “Confession of a Hyphenated American,” 1916. This last voices the sensitiveness so commonly felt by Americans of foreign and particularly German birth in the face of much unreasonable suspicion and prejudice prior to and at the entrance of the United States into the European War. “Nationalizing America” is perhaps his most searching book; for in this almost every American institution is scrutinized, the State, the Church, the school, and the industrial life being examined in their relation to the immigrant.Selections from two chapters of this book (“The Stomach Line” and “History and the Nation”) have been combined under one title, “Industrialism and the Immigrant.” “The Criminal Immigrant” is taken from chapter fourteen of the autobiographical volume, “From Alien to Citizen.”[7]
None of our immigrant authors has written with more earnestness of America and things American than Edward A. Steiner, who was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1866. Unlike the average immigrant, before coming to the United States he had received considerable education in the public schools of his native city, in the gymnasium at Pilsen, Bohemia, and at the University of Heidelberg. After passing through most of the hardships incident to the life of an alien, he was graduated from the Oberlin Theological Seminary and was ordained a minister of the Congregational Church. Several years were then spent in pastoral work, and in 1903 he was elected to the Chair of Applied Christianity at Grinnell College, Iowa. He is widely known both as a lecturer and an author, and among his numerous books may be mentioned “On the Trail of the Immigrant,” 1906; “Against the Current,” 1910; “From Alien to Citizen,” 1914; “Introducing the American Spirit,” 1915; “Nationalizing America,” 1916; “Confession of a Hyphenated American,” 1916. This last voices the sensitiveness so commonly felt by Americans of foreign and particularly German birth in the face of much unreasonable suspicion and prejudice prior to and at the entrance of the United States into the European War. “Nationalizing America” is perhaps his most searching book; for in this almost every American institution is scrutinized, the State, the Church, the school, and the industrial life being examined in their relation to the immigrant.
Selections from two chapters of this book (“The Stomach Line” and “History and the Nation”) have been combined under one title, “Industrialism and the Immigrant.” “The Criminal Immigrant” is taken from chapter fourteen of the autobiographical volume, “From Alien to Citizen.”[7]
To recall prison experiences is not pleasant, and would not be profitable, if this were merely a narration of what happened to one individual, a quarter of a century ago. Conditions are not sufficiently changed, either in judicial procedure or in methods of punishment, to make this account ofhistoricimportance. Its value lies only in the fact thatno changeshave occurred, and that my experience then is still the common fate of multitudes of immigrants, who swell the criminal records of their race or group, and are therefore looked upon with dislike and apprehension.
The jail in which I found myself was an unredeemed, vermin-infested building, crowded by a motley multitude of strikers and strike breakers,—bitter enemies all, their animosity begotten in the elemental struggle for bread, and hating one another with an unmodified, primitive passion.[8]
The strikers had the advantage over us, for they were more numerous and were acquainted with the ways of American officials. This gave them the opportunity (which they improved) to make it unpleasant for the “Hunkies.”
The straw mattress upon which I slept the first night was missing the second; salt more completely spoiled the mixture called by courtesy coffee, and the only thing which saved me from bodily hurt was the fact that there was no spot on me which was not already suffering.
I mention without malice and merely as a fact in race psychology, that the Irish were the most cruel to us, with the Germans a close second, while the Welsh were not only inoffensive, but sometimes kind.
One of them, David Hill—smaller than the ordinary Welshman, but with the courage of his Biblical namesake—stood between me and a burly Irish Goliath who wanted to thrash this particular “furriner, who came over here to takeaway the bread from the lips ofdacent, law-abidingAmericans.”
The jailer maintained no discipline and heeded no complaints. His task was to keep us locked up; the bars were strong and the key invariably turned.
The strikers gradually drifted from the jail, being bailed out or released, and I was not sorry to see them go.
Poor food, vermin of many varieties and the various small tortures endured, were all as nothing to me compared with the fact that for more than six weeks I was permitted to be in that jail without a hearing; without even the slightest knowledge on my part as to why I had forfeited my liberty.
From the barred jail window I could see the workmen going unhindered to their tasks; on Sunday pastor and people passed, as they went to worship their Lord who, too, was once a prisoner. None, seemingly, gave us a thought or even responded by a smile to the hunger for sympathy which I know my face must have expressed.
My letters to the Austro-Hungarian Consul remained unanswered, and the jailer gave my repeated questionings only oaths for reply.
The day of my hearing finally came, and I was dragged before the judge. The proceedings were shockingly disorderly, irreverent and unjust. I was charged with shooting to kill. The weapon which had been found in my pocket was the revolver bequeathed me by the dying man in the Pittsburgh boarding house. As all its six cartridges were safely embedded in rust, the charge was changed to “carrying concealed weapons.” I think my readers will agree with me that the sentence of one hundred dollars fine and three months in the county jail was out of all proportion to the offence.
The court wasted exactly ten minutes on my case, and then I was returned to my quarters in the jail, an accredited prisoner. Let me here record the fact that I carried back to my cell a fierce sense of injustice and a contempt for the laws of this land and its officials, feelings that later ripened into active sympathy with anarchy, which at that time occupiedthe attention of the American people. My knowledge of that subject came to me through old newspapers which drifted as waste around the jail.
In all those months, more than six, for my fine had to be worked out, or rather idled out, no one came to me to comfort or explain. For more than six months I was with thugs, tramps, thieves and vermin. I was a criminal immigrant, a component element of the new immigration problem.
I recall all this now in no spirit of vengeance; as far as my memory is concerned, I have purged it of all hate. I recall my experience because those same conditions exist to-day in more aggravated form, while multitudes of ignorant, innocent men suffer and die in our jails and penitentiaries.
Since then I have visited most of the county jails, prisons and penitentiaries in which immigrants are likely to be found. Intelligent and humane wardens, of whom there are a few, have told me that more than half the alien prisoners are suffering innocently, from transgressing laws of which they were ignorant, and that their punishment is too often much more severe than necessary.
The following narration of several incidents which recently came under my observation will be pardoned, I hope, when their full import is seen.
Not long ago I went to lecture in a Kansas town,—one of those irreproachable communities in which it is good to bring up children because of the moral atmosphere. The town has a New England conscience with a Kansas attachment. It boasts of having been a station in the underground railway, and it maintains a most uncompromising attitude toward certain social delinquencies, especially the sale of liquor.
Upon my arrival I was cordially received by a committee, and one of its members told me that the jail was full of criminal foreigners—Greeks. What crimes they had committed he did not know.
Recalling my own experience, I made inquiries and found that six Greeks were in the county jail. They had beenarrested in September (it was now March) charged with the heinous crime of having gone to the unregenerate State of Nebraska, where they purchased a barrel of beer which they drank on the Sabbath day in their camp by the railroad.
Possibly these Greeks were just ignorant foreigners and now harbor no sense of injustice suffered; possibly they still think this country “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” They may even be ready to obey its laws and reverence its institutions. I do not know how they feel, but I do know this: those Greeks were kept in prison for breaking a law of which they were ignorant, and even if they were aware of its existence and broke it knowingly, the punishment did not fit the crime.
They were kept as criminals and regarded as criminals; they were unvisited and uncomforted; and they were incarcerated at a time when their country called for her native sons to do battle against the Turk.
Some day the sense of injustice suffered may come to them, and they will ask themselves whether every man in Kansas who drinks beer is punished as they were. They will wonder why real criminals go free, or escape with nominal punishment. I venture to predict that in some great crisis, when this country needs men who respect her laws and love her institutions, these men, and multitudes of others who have suffered such injustices as they have, will fail her.
I pleaded for those imprisoned Greeks that night, and my plea was effective. The just judge who condemned them pardoned them; but so just was he that the fine of one hundred dollars each, not yet paid, was left hanging over them, and to their credit be it said, they remained in that town and paid every cent of it. This judge no doubt knows his New Testament; he certainly made the Greeks pay the “uttermost farthing” before his outraged sense of justice was appeased.
Those Greeks spent, together, over three years in jail,forfeited more than fifteen hundred dollars in wages, and lost in bodily health and self-respect beyond calculation.
Another incident occurred last spring as I was passing through a border on one of those nerve-racking coal roads.
At a small, desolate mining village a group of men entered the car, unwillingly enough. They were chained to one another and were driven to their seats with curses and the butt of a gun. They were Italian miners, part of that human material now scattered all over the United States, carried by something swifter, though not less insistent than the glacial movements which graved the beds of the rivers and shifted so much of earth’s original scenery. There was some danger of violence, and the accompanying minions of the law held back the angry passengers. There was scarcely a moment, however, when they themselves did not apply some vigorous measure to assure themselves that three undersized Southern Italians, chained to one another, should not escape them.
The car was uncomfortably crowded and grew more so at every station; for the next day the new governor was to be inaugurated at the capital, toward which our train was leisurely travelling.
I had some difficulty in ethnologically classifying the man who shared my seat. He was large, the colonel and major type, although his head was rounder. The features, too, were of a different cast, his speech less refined and his manners less gentle.
He wore a broad, new hat, his hair was long, curling slightly, and he had an air of special importance, the cause of which I discovered later.
“I wonder why they are treating those poor fellows so roughly,” I audibly soliloquized, turning to him. He was studying a typewritten document and evidently did not relish the interruption.
“Is that any of your business?” he asked, punctuating the short sentence with a liberal supply of oaths.
“Yes, I have no other business,” I replied. “I travelabout the world trying to find out why we people treat one another as we do, if we happen to be of different races.”
“What kind of business is that?” looking up from his manuscript and regarding me suspiciously.
“Well,” I said, “we call that ‘Social Psychology.’”
“That’s a new graft,” he replied with a laugh. “How much is there in it?”
“A little money and a great deal of joy,” I said with an answering smile.
Then he folded his manuscript and made ready to find out more about my “graft,” which I proceeded to explain.
“You see, from the beginning, when a man saw another who wasn’t just like him, he said: ‘Will he kill me or shall I kill him?’ Then they both went about finding out. The man who survived regarded himself as the greater man, and his descendants belonged to the superior race.
“We haven’t gone much beyond that point,” I continued. “We hide our primitive hate under what we proudly call race prejudice or patriotism, but it’s the old, unchanged fear and dislike of the unlike, and we act very much as the savages did who may have lived here before the glaciers ploughed up your State and helped to manufacture the coal you are now digging.
“I don’t know you,” I went on, “but I am pretty sure that you feel mean toward those poor ‘Dagoes’ just because you want to assert your superiority.
“I have discovered that a man isn’t quite happy unless he can feel himself superior to something, and these mountain folk of yours take those mangy, hungry looking dogs along just so they can have something to kick. Am I right?”
“Well,” he replied, clearing his throat and straightening himself, while into his eyes came a steel-like coldness, “you don’t mean to say that we are not superior to these Dagoes, these Black Hand murderers?”
“No, I am not ready to say that yet; but tell me about them. Whom did they kill, and how?”
Then he told me the story and he knew it well, for he was a re-elected State official now going to be sworn in.There was a coal miners’ strike—rather a chronic disease in that somewhat lawless State—and the militia was called out. Violence begat violence, and one of the militiamen, standing guard at night, was killed by a bullet, fired from a Winchester rifle at an approximately certain distance.
The Italians were found at that place the next day, were arrested, and were now on their way to the county seat to be tried.
My companion evidently had found my “graft” interesting, for he permitted me to interview the Italians.
None of them knew definitely of what crime they were accused, and all, of course, protested their innocence.
None of them had served as soldiers and all said they were unacquainted with the use of firearms.
When we reached the end of the road where we were all admonished to change cars and not forget our parcels, the officer graciously allowed me to make an experiment. The men were freed from their shackles, and I told them that a high and mighty official was watching them and that the best marksman of the group would find favor in his sight. They were then in turn given the Winchester rifle, which they handled as if it were a pickaxe. They did not know how to load it, and after it was loaded for them and I asked them to fire, they fell upon their knees and begged to be permitted to show their prowess with a stiletto, the use of which they understood. Within twenty-four hours additional testimony was furnished, which proved beyond doubt that the Italians were not implicated in the crime with which they were charged.
I felt deeply grateful to the man who permitted me to intervene in their behalf; but what would have happened if by chance, or the power we call Providence, I had not been thrown into the sphere of their suffering? Undoubtedly they would have been convicted of murder and paid the penalty for a crime which they never committed.
Not only is ignorance of our laws and language a fruitful cause of the delinquency of immigrants and their children, but the venality of police officials, the condition of ourcourts and prisons, not only fail to inspire respect, but contribute much to the development of those criminal tendencies with which nature has, to a degree, endowed all men....
Fortunately, I left the county jail with no thirst for blood; but with a fiercer passion to right the wrongs under which men suffer, and that, I think, was my one purpose in life when the prison door closed behind me.
We talk much about the American home, which is even yet the basis of national well-being, although many of its functions are abrogated. The home still determines the good or ill of the child, and through him the good or ill of the nation. Yet we permit millions of people to work, with no chance to make a real home.
Children there will be, Nature sees to that; but what kind of children can be begotten in our slums?
The slums in America are as much a national disgrace as they are a national menace. The gunmen of New York were bred in hovels which even the home-making genius of the Jewish people could not turn into homes, or make fit for the training of children to decent living.
You who go slumming to see the sights, and turn up your sensitive noses at the bad smells, and your eyes to heaven, thanking God that you “are not as other men,” must not forget that the vast majority of our foreign-born workers are compelled to live as they do by economic and social forces, which they cannot control.
You remain ignorant of the brave struggles for the home, and the heroic stand for virtue behind those sooty walls. You know nothing of the fear of God, the desire to obey His law, and the love of their country, which filters in to those receptive souls.
The growth and power of the I. W. W., a revolutionary organization of the most radical type, anti-national, anti-religious, repudiating God and State with horrifying blasphemy, were made possible by the fact that our industrial leaders, our so-called “hard-headed business men,” have the hard spot in their hearts and a very soft spot in their heads.
Of all the blind men I have met, the blindest are those farsighted ones who see wealth in everything, and every common bush aflame with gold, and see nothing else. Blind they are to their own larger good, blind to the nation’s needs,blind to the signs of the times. The social weal of our country is in the hands of the most unsocial....
As I analyze my own relation to the nation of which I am as much a part as if I had been born under its flag, I find that it rests itself upon the feeling of gratitude. Not for the bread I eat, for I had bread enough in my native country; not for the comfort of home, for I had fair comforts before I came; not even for liberty and democracy as abstractions, or even as embodied in the State; for I have found that freedom is within, and democracy a matter of attitude towards one’s fellows.
I am grateful for the chance I have had here to develop unhampered my own self, for a certain largeness of vision which I think I would not have developed anywhere else; for the richness which a broad, unhindered contact with all sorts and conditions of men has brought into my life.
There is something more than gratitude in my heart now. There is a larger sense of the values I received which I have not yet appropriated. There is in my heart a sublime passion for America. Would it have grown into the burning flame it is, if I had always worked in New York’s sweat-shops?
If I had been beaten by New York’s police? If I had reared my family in a tenement, and had to send my children to work when they should have played and studied?
If I had known America only through her yellow journalism, and sensed her spirit only in ward elections? I do not know.
What has kept me from becoming an Anarchist, from being jailed or hanged for leading mobs against their despoilers, God alone knows. His guidance is as unquestioned as it is mysterious. There were disclosed to me, early in my career, in some strange way, the spiritual values latent here. In spite of the gross, granite-like materialism at the top, I discovered the richness of the heritage left by the fathers of this Republic; in spite of the poverty and hardship in which I had to share, I saw here the fine quality of its vision; in spite of the crudeness of its blundering ways, all the love aman may have for a country grew in my heart, and changed only in growing stronger. Yet I am not in the mood to call to account those toilers whose patriotism is less fervent than mine and whose ideals are still held in check by the “stomach line.”
Editors and preachers, teachers and capitalists, with all the loud if not mighty host of us who are yammering about the want of patriotism among the masses, and the weakness of our national spirit; we are the first who must move a notch higher in our love of country and above the “stomach line.” We must make real the spiritual ideals for which this country stands, or at least try to realize them, before we can teach the alien and his children, or even our own, the meaning of liberty and democracy. Before we can ask them to die for our country we shall have to learn to live for it, and the definite task we have before us is not the mere idolatry of our flag, or the making of shard and shell.
To provide an adequate wage for our men, to so arrange our industrial order that there shall not be feverish activity to-day, and idleness, poverty, bread lines and soup kitchens to-morrow. To make working conditions tolerable, to provide against accidents and sickness, unemployment and old age, and to be true to the life about us.
These are national factors, essential to the making of an effective national state in our industrial age. Capital, in common with labor, must learn how to lend itself to the national purpose; for we have come upon a time, or the time has come upon us, when we must learn how to melt all classes, all sections and all races into a final unit. This is the time to touch the hearts and gain the confidence of all the people by a high regard for all, so that together we may turn our faces towards our ultimate goal....
The Commonwealth Steel Company of Granite City, Illinois, one of those remarkable corporations with a soul, whose business is rooted in the ideal of service, found its foreign laborers quartered in what was called “Hungry Hollow.” This company so exemplified the American spirit of fair play that, when the foreign employees were aroused to proper civicpride, they rebaptized “Hungry Hollow” into “Lincoln Place,” because Lincoln’s spirit was manifested towards them.
The Lincoln Progressive Club, as they named their organization, has as its immediate aim the study of the English language, and Americanization.
I wish there might be erected in every industrial center a statue of Abraham Lincoln for masters and men to see and reverence, thus being reminded of their duty towards each other and towards their common country.
What a people we could become if the immortal words he spoke were graven upon the pedestal of such a statue, “With malice towards none, with charity towards all,” ... to greet our eyes daily, and to challenge our conduct.
The history of the United States since the Civil War has not yet been written, for it is the story of an epoch just closing. It marks the sudden leaping of a people into wealth, if not into power; the fabulous growth of cities, the end of the pioneer stage, the beginning of an industrial period, and the pressure of economic and social problems towards their solution.
At least twenty millions of people have come full grown into our national life from the steerage, the womb out of which so many of us were born into this newer life. Most of us came to build and not to destroy; we came as helpers and not exploiters; we brought virtues and vices, much good and ill, and that, not because we belonged to this or the other national or racial group, but because we were human.
It is as easy to prove that our coming meant the ill of the nation as that it meant its well-being. To appraise this fully is much too early; it is a task which must be left to our children’s children, who will be as far removed from to-day’s scant sympathies as from its overwhelming prejudices.
The great war has swung us into the current of world events, and it ought to bring us a larger vision of the forces and processes which shape the nations and make their peoples. As yet we are thinking hysterically rather than historically, and the indications are that we may not learn anything, nor yet unlearn, of which we have perhaps the greater need.
Thus far we have become narrower rather than broader, for the feeling towards our alien population is growing daily less generous, and our treatment of it less wise.
Nor am I sure in what wisdom consists; the situation is complex; for we are the Balkan with its national, racial and religious contentions. We are Russia with its Ghetto, its Polish and Finnish problem. We are Austria and Hungary with their linguistic and dynastic difficulties. We are Africa and Asia; we are Jew and Gentile; we are Protestant and Greek, and Roman Catholic. We are everything out of which to shape the one thing, the one nation, the one people.
Yet I am sure that we cannot teach these strangers the history of their adopted country, and make it their own, unless we teach them that our history is theirs as well as ours, and that their traditions are ours, at least as far as they touch humanity generally, and convey to all men the blessings which come from the struggle against oppression and superstition.
In their inherited, national prejudices, in their racial hates, in their tribal quarrels, we wish to have no share, except as we hope to help them forget the old world hates in the new world’s love.
None of us who have caught a vision of what America may mean to the world wish to perpetuate here any one phase of Europe’s civilization or any one national ideal.
Although our institutions are rooted in English history, though we speak England’s language and share her rich heritage of spiritual and cultural wealth, we do not desire to be again a part of England, or nourish here her ideals of an aristocratic society.
In spite of the fact that for nearly three hundred years a large part of our population has been German, and that our richest cultural values have come from Germany, in spite of her marvellous resources in science, commerce and government, we do not care to become German, and I am sure that Americans of German blood or birth would be the first to repudiate it, should Germany’s civilization threaten to fasten itself upon us.
We do not wish to be Russian, in spite of certain values inherent in the Slavic character, nor do we desire to be French.
We do crave to be an American people—and develop here an American civilization; but if we are true to the manifold genius of our varied peoples, we may develop here a civilization, richer and freer than any of these, based upon all of them, truly international and therefore American.
Historians tell us that the history of the United States illumines and illustrates the historic processes of all ages and all people.
To this they add the disconcerting prophecy that we are drifting towards the common goal, and that our doleful future can be readily foretold. We have had our hopeful morning, our swift and brilliant noon, and now the dark and gruesome end threatens us.
I will not believe this till I must.
I will not, dare not lose the hope that we can make this country to endure firmly, to weather the storm, or at least put off the senility of old age to the last inevitable moment.
When, however, the end comes, as perhaps it must, I pray that we may project our hopes and ideals upon the last page of our history, so that it may read thus: This was a state, the first to grow by the conquest of nature, and not of nations. Here was developed a commerce based upon service, and not upon selfishness; a religion centering in humanity and not in a church.
Here was maintained sovereignty without a sovereign, and here the people of all nations grew into one nation, held together by mutual regard, not by the force of law.
Here the State was maintained by the justice, confidence and loyalty of its people, and not by battleships and armaments. When it perished, it was because the people had lost faith in God and in each other.