Workers - An Experiment in Reality: The West — Chapter 5 - Part I - Among the Revolutionaries

AMONG THE REVOLUTIONARIES

No. -- SANGAMON STREET, CHICAGO, ILL.

, February 27, 1892. Again I am in the army of the unemployed, and have been there for the past three weeks and more, but on other than the terms of my first experience in Chicago.

I have been looking for work and testing many phases of this lurid life of enforced idleness, but with a wide difference from the original venture here.

My savings from wages earned in the factory have put me on quite another footing.

The room in which I am writing has been an adequate shelter, and I have paid for it only one dollar and a half a week.

Odd jobs have helped me often in the matter of securing food, and, when these failed, I have had my dwindling store of savings to fall back upon; and I have a not inconsiderable knowledge of the cheap eating-houses of the town.

All through my time of service in the factory, I saved scrupulously.

A

wage of nine dollars a week held out a hopeful prospect as the result of seven weeks of labor.

I did not miss even a fraction of a working day, and so the total of my earnings would have reached sixty-three dollars but for the unfortunate fact that, besides Sundays, there fell two holidays within the limits of that period.

On Christmas and New Year’s Day the factory was closed, and I found, to my surprise, that holidays, which I should have supposed were joyously welcome to all the world, are really of very doubtful blessedness to the vast number of workers who are paid for the actual amount accomplished, and by the detailed reckoning of time.

I lost three dollars in hard cash by Christmas Day and that of the New Year, while my living expenses were uninterrupted; and three dollars would pay for two weeks of comfortable housing from the cruelties of this inclement life.

It was three weeks before I could get appreciably ahead in the matter of saving.

Nearly all the first instalment of my wages was already due for board, and a bill for washing cut deep into the small remainder.

A

pair of shoes was an absolute necessity at the end of the next week, for I was going about almost barefooted, and some other articles of clothing were equally requisite.

And so my wages for week by week together were already mortgaged to nearly the last penny before I had actually earned them.

But at last the materials of a fairly respectable appearance had been secured, and then, out of the wages of the last four weeks of factory work, I managed, by closest economy, to save seventeen dollars and a half.

Gradation in respectability in the matter of dress, from the point at which a man is unmistakably in his working-clothes to that in which he readily passes as a workman in his Sunday best, has furnished the means of some range in the experiment of church-going.

From the first I have gone regularly to church.

But appearing in the garb of a day-laborer in the fashionable churches of a great city is far removed as a matter of experience from attending the service of a village meeting-house.

I am inclined to think that the latter would be the greater ordeal to a real workman.

Country parishioners turn out on Sundays with an amazing show of dress, and one of their own number in flannel shirt and labor-stained clothing would be oddly conspicuous; and he would feel his peculiarity much more, I imagine, than if he found himself among persons whom he did not know on equal social footing.

For me the case was different and was wholly artificial, but in going to church in the country, dressed in working clothes which had been carefully protected by overalls, and mended, and brushed, and cleaned to the utmost, I yet could but feel how intolerable to a workingman the actual situation would have been.

To slip early into a quiet corner of the village church which was usually free, and then out again before most of the congregation had well started for the door, was a widely dissimilar thing from regularly attending service with your neighbors.

In overalls and a “jumper,” a man is easily classified; without them, however plain may be the stamp upon him of attempted cleanliness, it is difficult to place him among a Sunday-dressed community, whether in the country or in town, unless he, too, is evidently in Sunday clothes.

It is not, in its general application, a question of fashion; the cut of a man’s garments may be that of ten years back, or may be foreign to any fashion known, but his clothing must not bear the marks of toil, and must have the linen accompaniments which render, while they are worn, all manual labor difficult.

If he would conform, a man must never worship in garments in which he could work.

A want of conformity might quite possibly expose him to aggressive criticism and ridicule among his accustomed fellows.

I never found it so myself in the country, where I always went to church in working clothes because I had no others, for never once was I made to feel the least embarrassment, while many times I wondered at the gracious courtesy which met me.

But I was always a stranger, and had never to face companions of long standing.

And so, as in many phases of my experiment, the unreality of my position marred, in large measure, the value of the result.

In Chicago, however, the circumstances were not so clearly against me, and they served to give to my own experience something of a normal character.

In entering a church door on Sunday mornings, I was objectively in no other station than that of any workingman who may have wished to worship there.

The treatment which I received is, therefore, a fair gauge of the reception which another worker might expect.

If it were a single instance I should not mention it, and I venture to offer no generalization, although I am speaking of tests which covered many Sundays and included all the principal churches of the town.

All that can be said, I think, is that the uniformity of result is some evidence of what a like-conditioned workingman might count upon in the way of treatment at the hands of fashionable churches.

I was sure, in the first venture or two, that the circumstances were exceptional, and that I had chanced upon churches which, although most evidently of the rich, were yet watchful for every opportunity of welcoming the poor.

It was not until I had made the rounds of many churches of many denominations that I realized how general and how sincere among them is the spirit of hospitality to the working poor.

In the vestibules, I always found young men who acted as ushers, and who were charged with the duty of receiving strangers.

Never once did I fail of a friendly greeting.

With every test I felt increasingly the difficulties of the situation for these young men, and my wonder grew at their graceful tactfulness.

A touch of the patronizing in their tone or manner would have changed the welcome to an insult, and any marked effusiveness of cordiality would have robbed it as effectually of all virtue.

It was the golden mean of a man’s friendly recognition of his fellow-man, with no regard for difference in social standing, which was the course so successfully followed by these young ushers.

[Illustration: NEVER ONCE DID I FAIL OF A FRIENDLY GREETING.

] I had always to avoid a more desirable seat by particularly asking for one far to the rear.

And in the pews there was no withdrawing of skirts, nor were there other signs of objection to me as a fellow-worshipper.

On the contrary, a hymnal, or a prayer-book would be promptly offered, and sometimes shared; and, at the service-end, a cordial invitation to come again would often follow me from the pew-door, although frequently I noticed that I was conspicuously lonely, as a representative of the poor.

How natural it was and how inevitable that the poor should not be there shone clear as day the moment that I regarded the matter from the subjective attitude of a genuine worker.

From their status as citizens in a free land, American workingmen have acquired, together with the sense of individual freedom, the quality, in very marked degree, of self-respect.

It exhibits itself sometimes in highly contradictory fashion, for it is sensitive and jealous in the making; but self-respect is none the less a fundamental characteristic.

Besides Dennis and three others, who were Roman Catholics, the men at Mrs. Schulz’s boarding-house did not go to church.

In talking with them I discovered that all had been more or less in the habit of church-going in their country homes, but that the habit had dropped completely from them upon coming to live in town.

The case was perfectly apparent.

The mere suggestion of a mission church was insulting to them and, from the new idea of churches for the rich, they had learned their first lesson in class distinctions.

Every feature of such a church, its richly dressed occupants in their high-priced pews, and the general atmosphere of merely social superiority, would have inflicted upon these men, in spite of a cordial welcome, as deep a wound to their self-respect as they would have felt in being decoyed to a formal reception in a lady’s drawing-room.

To them, the latter function could not be more obviously intended for another class than theirs.

One night, before I left the factory, Albert spoke his mind to me on the subject with much freedom.

Several times I had asked him to come with me to church, and on this particular Saturday evening I spoke of a preacher whom I hoped to hear in the morning, and who, I urged, would surely interest him.

“Look here, John,” he said, finally, “it’s all right you asking me to go to church, but I ain’t going.

I used to go regular when I lived to home, although I ain’t no church-member.

It was different out there, for most everybody went and chipped in what they could, and everybody sat where they liked, and it wasn’t one man’s church more than another’s. You go to church if you like.

That’s your own business.

But I ain’t going to no one-horse mission chapel that the rich has put up so they won’t be bothered with the poor in their own churches.

You say they treat you well when you go to church on Michigan Avenue.

I don’t doubt it.

What reason would they have for not treating you well?

But, all the same, they take you in for charity, for you couldn’t pay for a seat in one of them churches.

No, sir, the rich folks build their churches for themselves, and they keep them up for themselves, and I ain’t never going to interfere with that arrangement.

I don’t mind going to the meetings of the Association once in awhile, for there’s fellows of your own kind there, and you hear some good speaking and singing.

I ain’t got much use even for that, for it’s only a sideshow that’s run mostly by the rich, but I ain’t got no use at all for your churches.

” Nevertheless, on the whole, I was sorry the next morning that Albert was not with me.

There were moments when I did not regret it, but the sermon, for all its strange setting, was one which could scarcely have failed to impress him.

After a seven o’clock breakfast, which seemed luxuriously late, and which Dennis and I shared alone on Sunday mornings, I set out as usual for the South Side.

It was five miles to my destination in that section of the city, and I always walked both ways, for sometimes I had not the fare, and, in any case, ten cents saved was no mean item in a careful account of possible economy.

The Sundays of my term of service in the factory were, for the most part, splendid winter days, and this was of the best.

No snow lay on the ground, no winter wind stirred the dust in the long, quiet streets, and clear from out the cloudless sky came the glowing rays of the sun, tempering the cold air to the exquisite delicacy of reviving warmth wherein you catch your breath with wonder, so charged is it with the mystery of the coming spring.

Walking, on such a day, is of the essence of delight.

Some measure of bodily exercise is needed to keep one warm, and this forth-faring on a holiday, free from the necessity of labor, which begins almost with the dawn of consciousness after sleep and ends only as the night of sleep closes down upon one, is a form of pleasure which life does not often match.

The spell of it bore me company through the factory region, and where there opened to my view mile after mile of lumber-yards, with unsightly piles of seasoning timber stretching away to where the vessels lie in the canals which are fed from the river, and there rise the gaunt bulks of towering elevators, and the tall chimneys that everywhere send forth their ceaseless volumes of black smoke.

All this was eloquent of work, and wages, and the means of decent living, and it therefore had a beauty which will not be denied to it by one who knows something of the misery of the unemployed.

Even the grotesque ugliness of the long lines of buildings, as I entered the closely built-up sections of the town, could not rob me of the comforting sense of shelter and much legitimate business among the well-paid working poor.

But, before crossing thence to the South Side, there remains a belt through which even the stanchest optimism on its way to church on a bright Sunday morning could scarcely pass without misgivings.

A varying foreign population, chiefly from southern and eastern Europe, thickens here to a point of incredible crowding, and sweat-shops abound, and cheap bakeries, and there is a marked increase in the number of pawn-shops and saloons.

The crowds in the streets had been in Sunday dress thus far for the most part, and were evidently on the way to mass or just returning.

Many children were among them, uniformly well-booted and dressed, and here and there appeared the white veil and crowning flowers of a first communion.

There was no sharp transition to a region which knows no Sunday, for everywhere were the outward symbols of the day in closed shops, and streets free from the noise of traffic, and the presence of holiday garments; and yet more obvious on every hand became now the evidences of a poverty which finds no day of rest.

The unemployed, in the uniform of rags, were loafing on the streets--the long, relentless waiting which is an honest workman’s torment until he finds employment, or loses hope and self-respect, when it becomes his sure destruction.

Children who have scant knowledge of clean water or clean clothes were playing in the unclean streets, or emerging from the “family entrances” of saloons with pitchers or tin-pails of beer, destined for rooms swarming with workers whose labor never ceases, except for a few hours each night, unless there comes the calamity of no work at even a bare-living rate.

It was the age-old picture of the lot of the very poor, which alters not with the varying fortune of the State.

“The old order changeth, yielding place to new,” one epoch of society merges into another, and the lives of men are lived on other planes; but there is a constant quantity in it all at the point where the pressure upon the limits of subsistence is the strongest, and the weakest, driven to the wall, live from hand to mouth in squalid wretchedness.

How familiar to our day has the picture come to be of children who breathe moral death with every breath they draw, and grow up to certain crime and shamelessness from out the haggard struggle for daily bread in sordid attics where disease is born in reeking filth and in warrens of beastly incest!

Familiarity with it breeds no contempt, but rather a wondering recognition of the touch of better nature which reveals itself--the shouts of true delight from children hard at play; their rapt absorption in the game, an ecstasy in which all the hidden beauty of their faces is disclosed; the loving tending of a plant that grows in the fetid air of a working-chamber; and, more than all, the unfailing miracle of ministry, wherein the poor, out of cramping penury, relieve the grimmer needs of yet poorer brethren.