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On the Trail of The Immigrant

<h2>XV THE BOHEMIAN IMMIGRANT</h2> 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.” My impression of New Prague is that it is neither “tough” nor infidel; it is true that it has saloons and too many of them, that the Continental Sabbath is the type of its rest-day, but in outward decency and in the degree of intelligence among its professional and business men, it rivals any other town of its size with which I am acquainted. It is surrounded by Irish and American settlements, the first of which it surpasses in order and decency, and is not far from the other in enterprise and an unexpressed desire to establish the kingdom of God upon the earth. Unfortunately the saloon holds an abnormally large place in the social life of the Bohemians, and beer works its havoc among them socially and politically. The lodges, of which there are legion, are above or beneath saloons, and all societies down to the building and loan associations are in close touch with them. It is the pride of Bohemian Chicago that two of its greatest breweries are in the hands of its countrymen, and brewers and saloon-keepers control much of the Bohemian vote. I asked one of the politicians whether that element was active in politics, and he replied, “Oh, yes; we have five aldermen and the city clerk.” The fact is that they have given Chicago a poor class of officials and have placed their worst infidels in the city council and on the school board. There is not a little avowed Anarchy among them, and a great deal more of Marxian Socialism, one of the daily papers advocating the latter political faith. Just as there is much dangerous half-knowledge on religious subjects, so there is on politics, and the worst and yet the most eloquent arguments I have heard on Socialism, have been by these agitators. Though the Bohemian is very pugnacious, he is easily led, or rather easily influenced, and in times of political excitement I should say that he would need a great deal of watching. He is much more tenacious of his language and customs than the German, and I have found children of the third generation who spoke English like foreigners. An appeal to his history, to the achievements of his people, awakens in him a great deal of pride, which he easily implants into the hearts of his children. This does not make him a worse American, and in the Bohemian heart George Washington soon has his place by the side of John Huss, and ere long is “first” with these new countrymen. The Bohemian is intelligent enough to know what he escaped in Austria, and thus values his opportunities in America. Undoubtedly too often he confuses liberty with license, but in this he is not a sinner above others. His greatest sin is his materialism, and he stunts every part of his finer nature to own a house and to have a bank account. Children are robbed of their youth and of the opportunity to obtain a higher education by this hunger after money, and parental authority among the Bohemians has all the rigour of the Austrian absolutism which they have transplanted, but which they cannot maintain very long, for young Bohemia is quickly infected by young America, and a small-sized revolution is soon started in every household. It is then that the first generation thinks its bitterest thoughts about this country and its baleful influence upon the young. In fact, the second generation is rather profligate in “sowing its wild oats,” which are reaped in the police courts in the shape of fines for drunkenness, disorderly conduct, and assault and battery. The Bohemian is among the best of our immigrants, and yet may easily be the worst, for when I have watched him in political riots in Prague and Pilsen, or during strikes in our own country I have found him easily inflamed, bitter and relentless in his hate, and destructive in his wild passion. He has lacked sane leaders in his own country, as he lacks well-balanced leaders in this. The settlement and missionary workers in Chicago find him rather hard material to deal with, for he is unapproachable, not easily handled, and repels them by his suspicious nature and outward unloveliness, although he is better than he seems, and not quite so good as he thinks himself to be, for humility is not one of his virtues. He develops best where he has the best example, and upon the farms of Minnesota and Nebraska he is second only to the German, whose close neighbour he is and with whom he lives in peace, strange as it may seem. 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. Some years ago, while I was in Prague, Antonin Dvorák, the composer, celebrated his sixtieth birthday, and the National Opera-house was the scene of a gala performance and a great demonstration in his honour. They gave his national dances in the form of a grand ballet, and to the notes of those wild and melancholy strains of the mazurka, the kolo, and the krakovyan, came all the Slavic tribes in their picturesque garb, and all were greeted by thunderous applause as they planted their national banners. At last came a stranger from across the sea, and in his hand was a flag, the Stars and Stripes, while to greet him came Bohemia, with Bohemia’s colours waving in her hands; and these two received the greatest applause of that memorable evening. These two are in the heart of this stranger. Faithful to the old, he will ever be loyal to the new. How to be loyal to this flag in times of peace; at the ballot-box, on the streets of Cleveland during a strike, as a citizen and alderman in Chicago, is the great lesson which he needs to learn, and we need to learn it with him. He will remain a Bohemian longest in the agricultural districts of Minnesota and Nebraska, where he holds tenaciously to the speech of his forefathers; but, in spite of that, I consider him a better American than his brother in the city. He needs to find here a Christianity which will satisfy his spiritual nature and which will become the law of his life, a religion which binds him and yet will make him truly free; and that we all need to find. Above all, he has to resist the temptation to make bread out of stone, to use all his powers to make a living and none of them to make a life; and that is a temptation which we must all learn to resist, for neither men nor nations can “live by bread alone.” <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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