aw, ' 7 j3 Itime THE Ifat- AMERICANIZATION OF ANDREW GAVLIK ETHEL DANIELS HUBBARD THE CONGREGATIONAL HOME MISSIONARY SOCIETY 287 FOURTH AVENUE, NEW YORK ECENT years have given us an unusual series of autobi- ographies: "The Making of an American," "The Promised Land," "From Alien to Citizen," and last of all, "The Americanization of Edward Bok." Presumably no other nation has pro- duced similar records of individual ex- perience. They are the beginnings of a literature possible only in the United States. But of greater import than these volumes, significant as they may be, are the unwritten lives of foreign-born men and women who have found in America emancipation from old bondages and incentive to high thinking and living. Among these immigrant citizens, an American of Americans in moral stature, is the subject of this biography, Rev. Andrew Gavlik, of Duquesne, Pennsyl- vania. Breaker Boy and Mill Hand Our country has the magnetic faculty to awaken and inspire, but also, alas ! to despoil and degrade immigrant lives. The experience of Andrew Gavlik con- firms this dual propensity. Coming from a village in Hungary, a lad of seventeen, stirred by the dreams and anticipations only a youthful immigrant can know, he had his first lessons in Americanization from an environment known as Hunkey Town. The worst that America can do for the young foreigner was done for this boy at the most 2 critical period of life, at seventeen, the age when Booth Tarkington makes his illuminating study of boy life. This boy picked slate in a breaker at Upper Lehigh, Pennsylvania, at a wage of fifty cents a day for a ten-hour day. He lived in a room with fifteen or twenty men who smoked, drank, played cards, cursed and swore. "An angel from heaven could not have preserved his purity among them," he declared in recounting the situation. To reach his living quarters he had to dodge through a back alley to avoid the stones which boys of the neighborhood flung at newcomers. This was America to the young Slovak and it awakened one fierce ambition, to return to the old country as soon as he could earn money for the passage. Meanwhile his industrial status under- went frequent change. He was trans- ferred from the slate breaker to a coal mine, where his wage increased to eighty-five cents a day, the standard wage for laborers in Upper Lehigh, in 1885. From the coal mine to a sewer in Minneapolis was the next shift, sea- sonal work, which was followed by a foundry, a charcoal blast furnace, and last in the series, a rail mill in Brad- dock, Pennsylvania. Five years had now passed, the five years that privileged boys spend in pre- paratory school and college. The boy Andrew was not even learning a trade, much less the lore of books. His man- 3 hood career was forecast; day-laborer in mine or mill, working only with his hands, brain and spirit undeveloped. A whole world of living, what we would call normal living, closed to this foreign boy! But was it closed? No; while he was still young and plastic, the door opened into the best America can give its immigrant or native born. "The best thing America has given to me," testi- fied Andrew Gavlik in after years, "is the religion of Jesus Christ and the next best thing is American citizenship." A Religious Experience In the summer of 1890, The Congre- gational Home Missionary Society sent its first worker to Braddock, Pennsyl- vania. Pioneer scenes on the foreign mission field were duplicated in this American industrial community: a humble meeting in a hired room to which a few solicited listeners came timidly and distrustfully and went away to scoff or — reflect. Andrew Gavlik was among those whose thoughts became in- vaded by the missionaries and their message. One night, upon his return from the rail mill, he lay down to read and turned the pages of his New Testa- ment to the crucifixion of our Lord. It was then the revelation came. "It was so plain to me," he said, "that Christ died for me also that I actually cried, turning my face to the wall like Hezekiah of old. There is not one thing 4 in my life more convincing than this, not even my own existence." From that evening the new life of Andrew Gavlik began, new throughout as if he were reincarnated, as doubtless was true. The metamorphosis com- menced with his naturalization as an American citizen. Then followed a Christian wedding ceremony, for when Mr. Gavlik married Miss Mary Furia in 1891, theirs was the first Slovak wedding to dispense with the intoxicants and revelry customary among their people. A Christian home was the next achieve- ment, a home which served the mission directly, for promising young men were sent there to live to escape the con- tamination of the usual boarding house. In the rail mill Mr. Gavlik preached many times a day to his fellow-workers, fortifying himself against opposition and cavil by hard study of the Bible. A period of probation followed, in which, unknown to himself, he was on trial for a rich promotion. He was asked to serve as colporter in Braddock and vicinity and then to go as regular missionary to Johnstown. There he and his wife spent nine lonely, difficult months with results lastingly to their credit: a regular serv- ice with fifty attendants and twelve out- right converts. The test was passed and in 1893 Andrew Gavlik was enrolled in the Slavic Department at Oberlin in preparation for the vocation of mission- ary. The six years at college were no mean gauge of the young man's caliber : he had a family to care for; he had an intricate language to battle with ; and he had often to augment the diminished funds for scholarships by mowing lawns, cleaning stoves and carpets and working on the Lake Shore railroad. The fine appreciation and heroic spirit of Mrs. Gavlik marked these years of study, enabling her husband to pass his academic work with credit, and con- triving for herself a period of study at the Schauffler Missionary Training School at Cleveland. In 1899 Mr. Gavlik graduated from Oberlin and entered upon that signal record of service at Duquesne, the sooty, blackened industrial community in the Pennsylvania steel district. Missionary to Pennsylvania Slovaks It is no credit to our churchmanship that our pioneer work should be so bleak and forbidding in outward setting. For most of us the term "mission chapel" evokes the memory of a bare, uninteresting room with no external in- centives to the dignity and beauty of worship. In Duquesne, the first meeting place of the Slovak people was a store- room, crudely furnished: a few benches, a decrepit organ, a system of ventila- tion dependent wholly upon the front door. In summer it was no unusual thing for women to faint at service. "As 6 I think of those things," said Mr. Gavlik recently, "I am persuaded that only spiritually hungry people can be ex- pected to attend religious services in such places." The little group of believers which gathered around Mr. Gavlik in the store- room became organized as a church in 1901, and a year later dedicated its own house of worship, a real church, though small and unpretending. "That church was a cathedral in our eyes," said Mr. Gavlik in reminiscence. "And when I think of decorating it for our first Christmas celebration I cannot help smiling in my heart. Oh, for the simple joy of the first love! That was a great day with us." Between the first Christmas in 1902 and the famous Young People's Rally Sunday in 1921, runs a series of "great days" in the Slovak Congregational Church of Duquesne. In external fea- tures and in inner spirit its history parallels that of the young Gentile churches in Antioch, Ephesus, Philippi. There are outstanding figures as staunch and intimately appealing as Aristarchus, Aquila and Priscilla. There is Brother Varga, that faithful Slovak Christian, Sunday School teacher of boys, lay preacher, convincing witness in his broken English to Americans as well as Slovaks. Brother Varga, that intrepid follower who patiently endured taunts and derision when he forsook the old 7 religion, the formal Lutheran faith of his fathers. There are the two sisters who traveled from South Fork to Duquesne, eighty-five miles, that they might for one Sunday hear the Gospel preached in their native tongue : a kind of pilgrimage to the shrine where once the older sister had heard the message and carried it away to husband, brother and sister in another town. There is the Roman Catholic girl who came once to Mr. Gavlik's church and thereafter could not stay away; who faced abuse and im- prisonment when she broke with the old faith, but who finally escaped to the Schauffler School and afterwards to a hospital for nurse's training. There is no end of story material in this Slovak parish, real life in its hard-working, ele- mental aspects, often with keen human appeal and dramatic intensity: men praying with their comrades while work- ing in the hot cinder-pits; a conversion occurring in the cinder-pit itself; the crises of life met amid the crash of the steel mill and coke furnace. Home Missions and Americanization ". We theorize about Americanization methods, but out of his life-time ex- perience Mr. Gavlik tells us that "missionary work itself is the best of all Americanizers, that the best friend of the foreigner is the church of Jesus Christ." In the McKeesport hospital there was found a Greek Catholic so 8 superstitious that he dared not touch the Bible when it was first offered him. Afterwards he accepted its message and decided, contrary to intention, to settle in America. He took out naturalization papers and later purchased a valuable farm which he is today operating; a productive citizen gained instead of a disaffected alien returning to his native land. His case is typical in Slovak and other foreign churches. "People out- side the church may teach the foreigner English and many other useful things," declares Mr. Gavlik, "but it is the church that supplies the love and sympathy for the country of his adoption, without which everything else counts for noth- ing." An accusation is sometimes brought against this Slovak pastor, an unusual accusation : "Everybody is a preacher in his church." It is a fair charge. Slovak Christians have no bent for half-heartedness. They cast in their whole lives with the cause of Christ when they decide to join the Salva- tionists, as they call this Protestant church. On no other basis could they pay the heavy price exacted for their choice. Relatives and friends brand them with treachery to the religion in which they were born, and in which tra- dition says they should die. Beneficial societies cancel their membership even though they may have been paying dues for years. Conversion to the Slovak 9 means a clear-eyed recognition of ignominy and ostracism, often among those he loves best. Consequently his decision is searching and sure. The church to which Mr. Gavlik has ministered for twenty years is not large in numbers but is dynamic in spirit. In more than outward lineaments does it reproduce the church of apostolic times. "With our little church," writes Mr. Gavlik, "we live like a family, as blood relatives, for the members are all our spiritual children." Although their homes are scattered, they come to every church service with notable regularity. "Not one of our young people could be charged with leaving church services for the sake of amusement throughout the summer." Such was the testimony of their pastor. "God bless the young people," he adds. Before the injunc- tion against street preaching, pastor and young people went every Sunday after- noon to needy sections of the city, gathered in a circle around the portable organ, and sang, prayed, and testified to a crowd of two or three hundred, an audience sometimes attentive, sometimes derisive. It was no light test of conse- cration. A Giving and Growing Church Mr. Gavlik's church has a membership of 107, of which the majority are day- laborers, principally workers in the steel mills. In 1920 this little company con- 10 tributed $768 for missionary work out- side their own church. They exceeded their apportionment for every one of the eight Congregational societies, sending two and a half times their share to their "Mother," as they fondly designate the Home Missionary Society. Their mis- sionary gifts per capita, including men, women and children, are ten times greater than the average for Congrega- tional membership in the state of Pennsylvania. "I know of no single resident member who does not have a share in contributions both to missions and the local church." Could this pastoral report be duplicated in English- speaking churches? Besides their gifts to missions and church support they have created in the last two years a building fund for a new church, a fund which now totals $2,800. Pledges of fifty and one hundred dollars have gone into this sacrificial fund. Under Mr. Gavlik's leadership these people are bound to shame us all with their generosity, but if their new church is not to be unduly postponed, they must have outside help at once. The old building, originally such a cathedral in their eyes, can no longer contain the con- gregation when fully present. Special services they must hold in a borrowed auditorium. With a larger and better equipped edifice results would be incalculably great. Half a million dollars could profitably be expended 11 upon the Duquesne mission: such is the estimate of a Home Missionary secretary who has studied the potential value of that crowded industrial section. Rev. Andrew Gavlik is the spiritual leader of all the Slovak work of the Congregational Church in the vicinity of Pittsburgh, a creative and far-reaching leadership with fruits in Czechoslovakia as well as the United States. In his own city everybody knows and honors him. His home life is an added source of in- spiration, for the six children uphold the ideals of father and mother. "Mr. Gavlik carries sunshine wherever he goes." "He is always ready for a good joke and a hearty laugh." "He never complains." "He is always on the job." "No sacrifice is too great for him to make." "His consecration impresses a stranger or an audience instantly." These are typical comments upon his work and character. The culminating testimonial comes from a life-long asso- ciate in missionary service: "I know no man who goes clear to the core of one's life with his message as does Andrew Gavlik."