Workers - An Experiment in Reality: The West — Chapter 1 - Part I - The Army of the Unemployed

Experiment in Reality.

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Title: The Workers: An Experiment in Reality.

The West Author: Walter A. Wyckoff Release date: February 8, 2021 [eBook #64493] Most recently updated: October 18, 2024 Language: English Other information and formats: www.

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) *** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WORKERS: AN EXPERIMENT IN REALITY.

THE WEST ***

THE WORKERS

[Illustration: THE SENSE OF INFINITY IS HEIGHTENED BY THE FLOATING MIST.

] THE WORKERS

AN

EXPERIMENT IN REALITY

BY

WALTER A.

WYCKOFF

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL ECONOMY IN PRINCETON UNIVERSITY _THE WEST_

NEW YORK

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

1909 COPYRIGHT, 1898 BY

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

[Illustration] CONTENTS

PAGE

CHAPTER I THE ARMY OF THE UNEMPLOYED 1

CHAPTER II LIVING BY ODD JOBS 40

CHAPTER III FINDING STEADY WORK 86

CHAPTER IV A HAND-TRUCKMAN IN A FACTORY 147

CHAPTER V AMONG THE REVOLUTIONARIES 190

CHAPTER VI A ROAD BUILDER ON THE WORLD’S FAIR GROUNDS 247

CHAPTER VII FROM CHICAGO TO DENVER 288

CHAPTER VIII FROM DENVER TO THE PACIFIC 338

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

THE SENSE OF INFINITY IS HEIGHTENED BY THE FLOATING MIST Frontispiece FACING PAGE

“THAT MEETING IS NOT FAR,” HE IS SAYING, “AND IT’S WARM THERE.

WON’T YOU GO?

” 16 IN THE CORNER NEAR US ARE THREE MEN, SLOUCHING, LISTLESS, WEARY SPECIMENS OF THEIR KIND, WHO ARE PLAYING “COMRADES” 24 SHE IS FACING US NEAR AT HAND, HER HEAD FRAMED IN THE DARK

UMBRELLA WHICH RESTS UPON HER SHOULDER 30 OVERFLOWING THROUGH THE OPEN DOOR OF THE FARTHEST PASSAGE UPON THE FLOOR OF THE MAIN CORRIDOR ARE THE SPRAWLING FIGURES OF MEN ASLEEP 36 THE POLICE-STATION BREAKFAST 42 “OUT YOU GO, NOW” 50 “WE’LL FEED, PARTNER, WE’LL FEED” 54 ALL OF THEM WERE SHOUTING OATHS AND VIOLENT ABUSE 60 SHE DREW BACK AND LOOKED AT ME PERPLEXED 66 HE WAS PUTTING THE MEN THROUGH A CATECHISM RESPECTING THEIR

NATIONALITIES, THEIR HOMES AND OCCUPATIONS, AND THEIR MOTIVES IN COMING TO CHICAGO 88 I THINK THAT THE COOK THOROUGHLY ENJOYED FEEDING US 94 IN THE MIDST OF THE APPLAUSE WHICH MARKED THE PASSAGE OF THE

RESOLUTION, SHE WAS ON HER FEET 106 “DON’T YOU TOUCH IT,” SHE SAID, FIERCELY 114 “WE’VE GOT SOME GRUB, MA!

” CRIED THE OLDER CHILD, IN A TONE OF SUCCESS, AS SHE RAN UP TO HER MOTHER WITH THE BASKET.

“RILEY’S BARREL WAS FULL TO-NIGHT” 118 WAITING FOR A JOB OUTSIDE THE FACTORY GATES 130 I WAS STRONG AND WARM IN THE WILD JOY OF THE LUST FOR BLOOD 136 LOADING THE BOX-CARS UNDER CRIST’S GUIDANCE 150 IN THE FACTORY 154 CROWDS OF MEN STREAMING FROM EVERY DOOR AND PRESSING SWIFTLY

THROUGH THE GATE 160 THE NOON HOUR 164 MRS.

SCHULZ’S BOARDING-HOUSE 168 NEVER ONCE DID I FAIL OF A FRIENDLY GREETING 196 HE HATED KINGS AND POTENTATES AND ALL GOVERNMENTAL AUTHORITY 214 THE SOCIALIST MEETING 222 THERE WAS NOTHING IN THE DOMESTIC SCENE WHICH MET US TO SUGGEST THE HOME OF A REVOLUTIONARY 232 AN EVASION OF THE FACTORY SYSTEM OF PRODUCTION 236 RETURNING WORK FROM SWEAT SHOPS 240 “DON’T TALK TO US ABOUT DISEASE;

IT’S _BREAD_ WE’RE AFTER, _BREAD_!

” 246 IT WAS A WELL-FED CROWD WHICH SAT SMOKING FOR A QUARTER OF AN HOUR OR MORE ON THE ROUGH EMBANKMENTS, OVERLOOKING THE

AGRICULTURAL BUILDING BEFORE GOING BACK TO WORK 256 THE FOURTH OF JULY--“TWO TOWNSHIPS WERE TO PLAY EACH OTHER” 318 PRICE COULD SPEAK THEIR LANGUAGE,

AND NOW AND THEN ONE JOINED US IN CAMP 370 THE WORKERS

CHAPTER I THE ARMY OF THE UNEMPLOYED

ROOMS OF THE YOUNG MEN’S CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION, CHICAGO, ILL.

Saturday Evening, December 5, 1891. A new phase of my experiment is begun.

Hitherto I have been in the open country, and have found work with surprising readiness.

Now I am in the heart of a congested labor market, and I am learning, by experience, what it is to look for work and fail to find it; to renew the search under the spur of hunger and cold, and of the animal instinct of self-preservation until any employment, no matter how low in the scale of work, that would yield food and shelter, appears to you the very Kingdom of Heaven; and if it could suffer violence, it would seem as though the strength of your desire must take that kingdom by force.

But it remains impregnable to your attack, and, baffled and weakened, you are thrust back upon yourself and held down remorselessly to the cold, naked fact that you, who in all the universe are of supremest importance to yourself, are yet of no importance to the universe.

You are a superfluous human being.

For you there is no part in the play of the world’s activity.

There remains for you simply this alternative: Have you the physical and moral qualities which fit you to survive, and which will place you at last within the working of the large scheme of things, or, lacking these qualities, does there await you inevitable wreck under the onward rush of the world’s great moving life?

That, at all events, is pretty much as it appears to-night to Tom Clark and me.

Clark is my “partner,” and we are not in good luck nor in high spirits.

We each had a ten-cent breakfast this morning, but neither has tasted food since, and to-night, after an exhausting search for work, we must sleep in the station-house.

We are doing our best to pass the time in warmth and comfort until midnight.

We know better than to go to the station-house earlier than that hour.

Clark is in the corner at my side pretending to read a newspaper, but really trying to disguise the fact that he is asleep.

An official who walks periodically through the reading-room, recalling nodding figures to their senses, has twice caught Clark asleep, and has threatened to put him out.

I shall be on the alert, and shall warn Clark of his next approach, for after this place is closed we shall have long enough to wait in the naked street before we can be sure of places in the larger corridor of the station, where the crowding is less close and the air a degree less foul than in the inner passage, where men are tightly packed over every square foot of the paved floor.

We are tired and very hungry, and not a little discouraged; we should be almost desperate but for one redeeming fact.

The silver lining of our cloud has appeared to-night in the form of falling snow.

From the murky clouds which all day have hung threateningly over the city, a quiet, steady snow-fall has begun, and we shall be singularly unfortunate in the morning if we can find no pavements to clean.

In the growing threat of snow we have encouraged each other with the brightening prospect of a little work, and for quite half an hour after nightfall we stood alternately before the windows of two cheap restaurants in Madison Street, studying the square placards in the windows on which the bills of fare are printed, and telling each other, with nice discriminations between bulk and strengthening power of food, what we shall choose to-morrow.

It is a little strange, when I think of it, the closeness of the intimacy between Clark and me.

We never saw each other until last Wednesday evening, and we know little of each other’s past.

But I feel as though the ties that bound me to him had their roots far back in our histories.

Perhaps men come to know one another quickest and best on a plane of life, where in the fellowship of destitution they struggle for the primal needs and feel the keen sympathies which attest the basal kinship of our common humanity.

Ours are not intellectual affinities--at least they are not consciously these--but we feel shrewdly the community of hunger and cold and isolation, and we have drawn strangely near to each other in this baffling struggle for a social footing, and have tempered in our comradeship the biting cold of the loneliness that haunts us on the outskirts of a crowded working world.

* * * * * Early on last Wednesday morning, in the gray light of a cloudy day, I began the last stage of the march to Chicago.

A walk of something less than thirty miles would take me to the heart of the city.

There is an unfailing inspiration in these early renewals of the journey.

Solid food and a night of unfathomable sleep have restored the waste of tissue.

I set out in the morning with a sense of boundless freedom, with an opening day and the whole wide world before me, with my heart leaping in the joy of living and in high expectancy of what the day may hold of experience and of insight into the lives of my fellow-men.

On this particular morning there is added fulness and freshness in that inbreathing which gives the zest of life.

Long had Chicago loomed large to my imagination, and now it stood before me, its volumes of black smoke mingling with the leaden sky in the northern horizon.

How much it had come to mean to me, this huge metropolis of the shifting centre of our population!

The unemployed were there, and I had not seen them yet; hundreds lived there who are fiercely at war with the existing state of things, and their speech was an unknown tongue to me, and my conventional imagination could not compass the meaning of their imaginings; and then the poor were there, the really destitute, who always feel first and last of all the pressure upon the limits of subsistence, and who in the grim clutch of starvation underbid one another for the work of the sweaters, until the brain reels at the knowledge of the incredible toil by which body and soul are kept together.

All this awaited me, the very core of the social problem whose conditions I had set out to learn in the terms of concrete experience.

Nor was I insensible to the charm of other novelties.

I have been pressing westward through a land unknown to me.

Gradually I am beginning to see the essential provinciality of a mind which knows the Eastern seaboard, and has some measure of acquaintance with countries and cities and with men from Ireland to Italy, but which is densely ignorant of our own vast domain, and shrinks from all that lies beyond Philadelphia as belonging to “the West,” which sums up the totality of a frontier, where man and nature share a sympathetic wildness, and sometimes vie in outbursts of lawless force.

I have not yet reached “the West” in any essential departure from the social and industrial structure of the East.

And from the new point of view, “the West” recedes ever farther from my sight, until impatient desire sometimes spurs me to a quicker journey, in the fear that the real West may have faded from our map before I reach it, and I may miss the delight of vital contact with the untamed frontier.

Moreover, I could but feel a student’s kindling interest in the larger vision of this great centre of industrial life.

--Its renaissance with augmented vigor from the ashes of its earlier history.

--The swelling tide of its swarming people until the fifteen hundred thousand mark is reached and passed, and the mounting waves of population roll in, each with the strength of an army of fighting men.

--The vastness of its productive enterprises, where all the shrewd economies of modern commerce reveal themselves, and where skill and organizing power and the genius of initiative win their quick recognition and rewards, and men of parts pass swiftly from the lowest to the highest places in the scale of productive usefulness and power.

--And then the splendid vigor of its nobler living, its churches and public schools and libraries and wise philanthropies, and its impatient hunger after art, which impels it to lay eager, unrelenting hands upon the products of a score of centuries, and, in a single day, to call them “mine.

” But I was fast nearing the goal of my desire, and the claims of pressing needs were crowding out the visions of the morning.

I had passed through the wilderness by which the Pittsburg & Fort Wayne Railroad enters the outskirts of Chicago.

As far as the eye could reach had stretched a dreary plain broken by the ridges of sand-dunes, among which stood dwarfed oaks, and gnarled and stunted pines, and the slender, graceful stems of white-barked birches, on whose twigs the last brown leaves of autumn rustled in the winter wind.

Upon my right I saw at last the broad bosom of the lake, gleaming like burnished steel under the threatening sky, and breaking into a line of inky blackness where it lapped the pebbles on the beach.

Presently I learn that I am in South Chicago, and I note the converging lines of railways that cross the streets on the level at every possible angle, and the surface cable-cars, and the long line of blast-furnaces by the lake, and elevators here and there, and huge factories, and the myriad homes of workingmen.

It is all a blackened chaos to my eyes, rude and crude and raw, and I wonder that orderly commerce can flow through channels so confused.

But the streets are soon more regular, and for some time I have been checking off, by their decreasing numerals, the approach to my journey’s end.

I am in the midst of a seemingly endless suburban region.

There are wide stretches of open prairie, cut through by city streets; there are city buildings of brick and stone standing alone, or in groups of twos and threes, stark and appealing in their lonely waiting for flanking neighbors; and there are comfortable wooden cottages set with an air of rural seclusion among trees, and having lawns and garden areas about them; and then there are whole squares built up like the _nuclei_ of new communities with conventional three-storied dwellings, and the varied shops of local retail trade, and abundant saloons.

Early in the afternoon I stop to rest on the platform of the Woodlawn station of the Illinois Central Railway.

For some time I have had glimpses within a highly boarded enclosure of towering iron frames, with their graceful, sweeping arches meeting at dizzy heights, and appearing like the fragmentary skeletons of mammoths mounted in an open paleontological museum.

The suburban trains are rushing in and out of the station with nearly the frequency of elevated trains in New York, and not far away are lines of cable-cars, where a five-cent fare would take me, in a few minutes, over the weary miles which intervene to the business portion of the town.

But I have not one cent, and much less five, and if I had so much as that it would go for food, for I am tired, it is true, but I am much hungrier than tired.

There is a hopeful prospect in the air of immense activity in this neighborhood.

I have easily recognized the vast enclosure beyond as Jackson Park, and the steel skeletons as the frames of the exposition buildings.

Thousands of men are at work there, and the growing volume of the enterprise may furnish a ready chance of employment.

I am but a few steps from the Sixty-third Street entrance, and, in my ignorance, I am soon pressing through, when a gate-keeper challenges me, civilly: “Let me see your ticket.

” “I have no ticket,” I reply.

He is roused in an instant, and he steps threateningly toward me, his voice deepening in anger.

“Get out of this, then, you d---- hobo, or I’ll put you out!

” At the gate I stand my ground in the right of a citizen and explain that I am looking for work, and am hopeful of a job from one of the bosses.

“This ain’t no time to see a boss,” is his retort; “they’re all busy.

If we let you fellows in here we’d be lousy with hoboes in an hour.

Come at seven in the morning, if you like, and take your chances with the others.

Only my private tip to you is that you ain’t got no chance, not yet.

” Not far away there are many new buildings going up, huge, unlovely shells of brick that even at this stage tell plainly their struggles with the purely utilitarian problem of a maximum of room accommodation at a minimum of cost.

I walk toward the nearest one, pondering, the while, the meaning of the word _hobo_, new to me, and having an uncomfortable feeling that, for the first time, I have been taken, not for an unemployed laborer in honest search of work, but for one of the professionally idle.

It has begun to rain, a dreary, sopping drizzle, half mist, half melting snow, heavy with the soot of the upper air, and it clings tenaciously, until my threadbare outer coat is twice its normal weight, and my leaking boots pump the slimy pavement water at every step.

For two hours or more I go from one contractor to another, among the new buildings, asking work.

The interviews are short and decisive.

The typical boss is he who is moving anxious-eyed among his men with attention fixed upon some detail.

He hears without heeding my request, and he shouts an order before he turns to me with an imperative “No, I don’t want you!

” and sometimes an added curse.