With Poor Immigrants to America

Stephen Graham's travel narrative follows poor Russian immigrants on their passage to America, turning their journey into a vivid study of migration, labor, and national character. Opening with sweeping contrasts between Russia and America—suffering and progress, spiritual depth and practical achievement—the book argues that each nation reveals something essential about the other. From the first anxious arrivals at the docks to the crowded crossing on a Cunard liner, Graham captures the bewilderment, hope, and sheer human scale of emigration. Along the way, he moves from shipboard scenes of Russians, Jews, Britons, Scandinavians, Italians, and Americans sharing a single uncertain future to hard-edged portraits of American life ashore. He explores immigrant neighborhoods and industrial Scranton, where smoke, grime, ambition, and pride in work define a rough modern city. He also records the country's mixed hospitality: cultivated Americans can be warmly welcoming, yet strangers without introductions often meet suspicion and refusal. In rain-soaked roads and lonely byways, a tramp's misery is relieved only by the spontaneous kindness of a Russian laborer, underscoring the book's enduring concern with charity, displacement, and the human cost of making a new world. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.