Page Fifteen
THE UNITED AMERICAN
AUGUST 1925
Building America Through Americanized Immigrant Energy
A cooperative immigrant mining enterprise on an American plan that has turned wasteland into productivity
and given America a new growing industrial field and a thriving community of happy homes and contented
workers who are proud of the country of their adoption and love it for the opportunities they found here
By EUGENE S. BAGGER, in the Survey Graphic
[This little story of immigrant ingen
uity, fortitude and willingness to struggle
almost beyond the point of human
endurance for economic independence,
is giving an apt illustration of the
impediments that block the road for
those who venture beyond the employ
ment office of the big lords of finance.
The success achieved for the Magyar co
operative mining company at Himlerville
in Kentucky illustrates what can be
accomplished by immigrants who aquire
a sufficient knowledge of America, to
plan and work according to the American
code, placing honesty plus trained in
tellect at the helm. Pooling financial
and physical powers into what is called
cooperative action is nearly always the
sure way to succeed. What Himler has
accomplished can be accomplished every
where if the main asset to the. venture
is there—implicit faith and honesty.
Beyond the foreign colony confines are
waiting opportunities. Those who quit
being interested in the foreign societies
and foreign affairs and aquire a knowledge
of America and American interests will-
presently find themselves pushing for
ward along a new trail, the trail to
American independence. With their souls
wrapped up in America they will soon
discover where, besides material gain,
they can help in putting America right,
right for themselves and their children,
the Americans of tomorrow.—The Editor]
O MOVIE SCENARIO writer could
have invented a more dramatic
N
contrast than that afforded by the two
banks of the Tug River.
Martin County is the easternmost
salient of Kentucky. Local chroniclers
relate how in the early days of steam-
the trip down the Ohio. Yet for half
used to make a stop on the Kentucky
bank of the Tug, opposite Kermit, West
Virginia; how the mate and a gang of
deck hands would go on shore with a
pick and shovel and dig up, out of an
exposed seam of coal, a supply to last
the trip down the Ohio, Yet for half
a century the inhabitants of Martin
County were living poor amid all this
plenty. The railroad engineers avoided
the hills of Martin County as if by con
spiracy; the county, with all the riches
dormant in its soil, remained closed to
the outside world.
Today all this is changed. Thousands
of acres of coal and timber land, lying
fallow for half a century, are being
opened up, thanks to Martin Himler,;
Hungarian immigrant, newspaper editor
and mining promoter.
Mingo County, on the West Virginia
side, has been the scene qf one of the
bitterest episodes in American class war
fare, the battlefield of armed miners and
the detectives and gunmen of operators.
In Martin County, on the Kentucky side,
a small group of foreigners have found
their own solution of the problem of
capital vs. labor in what is .perhaps the
only cooperative coal mine in the United
States.
* * •
Sixteen years ago Himler, a young
Hungarian boy fresh from school, landed
in the port of New York with exactly
nineteen cents in his pocket. He was
eighteen years old and had originally
studied to become a grade school teacher;
but he changed his mind and came to
America, the land of his dreams. He
had no special training that he could
utilize in the new country; he did not
even speak a word of English. After
beating around in New York for a while
he did what the pluckier of his kind
usually do: he went to West Virginia
and got a job as a coal miner at Thacker.
There and at other places he stayed for
about two years; then he returned to
New York and for six years extracted a
living from odd jobs. He worked in a
shoe factory, he was a dishwasher, a
messenger, what not. At last he landed
as a clerk in a Hungarian-American
business concern; there he spent a year,
at the end of which he went into business
for himself.
With the magnificent
capital of eight dollars he inaugurated,
on the lower East Side, a Hungarian
weekly newspaper called Magyar Ban-
yaszlap (Hungarian Miners’ Journal).
For Himler had not forgotten the time
he had spent in the coal mines. When
he named • his little newspaper the
Miners’ Jorunal other Hungarian publi
cations scoffed at him, called him a
parlor miner and asked what the Hun
garian miners needed a special news
paper for anyway. But Himler had his
own ideas and kept them to himself—
for the time being.
There are approximately one million
Hungarians in the United States, and
about thirty thousand of them are said
to be engaged in the coal mining in
dustry. Most of them are located in the
West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio
coal fields.
The miner-editor had acquired a first
hand knowledge of the problems and
needs of his fellow countrymen in Ameri
ca. He saw them doubly uprooted—in
coming from Hungary to America, and
in turning, for livelihood, from agri
culture to an industry. He saw their
restlessness, their craving for inde
pendence—the craving that had urged
them on to the New World, only to find
them in new shackles. He began 'to
realize, dimly at first, that the only solu
tion of those problems would be one that
could unite the habituations acquired in
the new surroundings with those im
ported from the old; one that would be
based on the land-owning, home-making
instinct of the peasant.
These things were growing -upon his
mind when he set going his Miners’
Journal on the lower East Side of New
York.
To say simply that he was
publishing it is an understatement. For
he was publisher, editor, reporter, book
keeper, advertising agent all in one. But
the business expanded; the paper began
to gain circulation among the miners in
Pennsylvania and West Virginia. When
his readers came to New York they
looked him up. His modest office gradu
ally developed into a sort of labor ex
change and social center combined. All
the while the other Hungarian news
papers either ignored or ridiculed him.
Life within an immigrant community has
an element of harshness which is the
fruit of isolation; of people living too
near one another, inquiring too much and
knowing too much; it is, also, a fruit
of the frustrated desire for expansion
and self expression. Disillusionment is
the Leitmotiv; for the successful immi
grant, in most cases, leaves the colony
and becomes American; only the failures
remain. But Himler kept on; nothing
could swerve him from the straight line
of his plans.
Now the Hungarians, like the Poles,
are an eminently romantic and easy-going
people.
Individually the Hungarian
peasant is shrewd, industrious and
thrifty; he is as good as any. But he
is, or’ was until recently, slow to col
lective action. Corporate life with him
is merely an opportunity for oratory and
personal politics. In America he has
so far achieved nothing to vie with the
compact and elaborate organization of
the Finns or Japanese or Czechs;
nothing, in fact, apart from a few
fraternal ..societies,
doing insurance
business honestly enough but with anti
quated methods.
From time to time
there is an attempt to “do something”
in the way of organization; it usually
fizzles out in after-dinner speeches and
newspaper polemics.
Himler saw these odds against him
but he did not give in. He acquired a
reputation for honesty and a genuine
interest in the everyday affairs of the
working man; and he built up a fol
lowing.
About 1918- he finally sprang his plan
on the Hungarian-American community.
He announced, through his paper, the
formation of a cooperative mining com
pany, and offered stock for sale. The idea
was unique: a mining corporation where
the workers. would be stockholders and
the stockholders workers, where the
profits would be issued as dividends to
the miners themselves. The chief difficulty
he had to contend with, however, was
not the newness of his idea, but its age.
Selling stock to the immigrants through
newspaper advertising is an ancient and
dishonorable game. Honest promoters
are ruined by the distrust that grows
up in the wake of swindlers. But Himler