This is an excerpt from a first-person account of coming to America around 1900 from a Lithuanian immigrant named ‘Antanas Kaztauskis.’ The full testimony was originally published in 1904 in The Independent magazine.
[After I arrived in the United States, e]verything got quicker – worse and worse – till then at last I was in a boarding house by the stockyards in Chicago with three Lithuanians, who knew my father’s sisters at home.
That first night we sat around in the house and they asked me, “Well, why did you come?” I told them about that first night and what the ugly shoemaker said about “life, liberty and the getting of happiness.” They all leaned back and laughed. “What you need is money,” they said. “It was all right at home. You wanted nothing. You ate your own meat and your own things on the farm. You made your own clothes and had your own leather. The other things you got at the Jew man’s store and paid him with sacks of rye. But here you want a hundred things. Whenever you walk out you see new things you want, and you must have money to buy everything.”
Then one man asked me, “How much have you?” and I told him $30. “You must buy clothes and look rich, even if you are not rich,” he said. “With good clothes you will have friends.”
If you want to read the whole story, it is online here.