Workers - An Experiment in Reality: The West — Chapter 6 - Part I - A Road Builder on the World's Fair Grounds

COLUMBIAN ANNIVERSARY HOTEL--No. 1. , CHICAGO, ILL.

, Wednesday, April 27, 1892. From the time that I began work on the Exposition grounds, early in this month, it has grown increasingly difficult to hark back in imagination to the unemployed _régime_ of the winter.

The change is a revolution of condition.

Hundreds of us live all together within this vast enclosure, and have rare occasion to go out except on Sundays, and then only if we choose.

We get up in the morning to an eight-hour day of wholesome labor in the open air, and return in the late afternoon with healthy appetites to our temporary “hotel,” which is fragrant of clean, raw pine, and stands commandingly on the site of the future “court of honor” near the quiet waters of the lake.

About four hundred of us are housed and fed in this one building; men of half a score of nationalities and of as many trades, ranging from expert carpenters and joiners and staff-moulders and steel-workers to the unskilled laborers who work in gangs, under the direction of the landscape-gardeners or, as in my case, on the temporary plank roads which are built for the heavy carting.

Guarded by sentries and high barriers from unsought contact with all beyond, great gangs of us, healthy, robust men, live and labor in a marvellous artificial world.

No sight of misery disturbs us, nor of despairing poverty out in vain search for employment.

Work is everywhere abundant and well paid and directed with highest skill.

And here, amid delicate, web-like frames of steel which are being clothed upon with forms of exquisite beauty, and among broad, dreary wastes of arid dunes and marshy pools which are being transformed by our labor into gardens of flowers and velvet lawns joined by graceful bridges over wide lagoons, we work our eight hours a day in peaceful security and in absolute confidence of our pay.

Complete as the revolution is, it is yet in perfect keeping, in some strange way, with the general change wrought by the coming of the spring.

This spring, in its effect upon the labor market in Chicago, was like the heralding of peace and plenty after war.

There was no longer any real difficulty in securing work.

The employment bureaus offered it in abundance in the country, and there was some revival of demand even within the city limits.

This by no means solved the problem of the unemployed, however.

Many of the men were so weakened by the want and hardship of the winter that they were no longer in condition for effective labor.

Some of the bosses who were in need of added hands were obliged to turn men off because of physical incapacity.

One instance of this I shall not soon forget.

It was when I overheard, early one morning, at a factory-gate, an interview between a would-be laborer and the boss.

I knew the applicant for a Russian Jew who had at home an old mother and a wife and two young children to support.

He had had intermittent employment throughout the winter in a sweater’s den, barely enough to keep them all alive, and, after the hardships of the cold season, he was again in desperate straits for work.

The boss had all but agreed to take him on for some sort of unskilled labor, when, struck evidently by the cadaverous look of the man, he told him to bare his arm.

Up went the sleeve of his coat and of his ragged flannel shirt, exposing a naked arm with the muscles nearly gone, and the blue-white, transparent skin stretched over sinews and the outlines of the bones.

Pitiful beyond words was his effort to give a semblance of strength to the biceps which rose faintly to the upward movement of the forearm.

But the boss sent him off with an oath and a contemptuous laugh, and I watched the fellow as he turned down the street, facing the fact of his starving family with a despair at his heart which only mortal men can feel and no mortal tongue can speak.

Other men there were in large numbers who during the winter had swelled the ranks of the unemployed, but who now, in the reviving warmth and the growing demand for labor, drifted out upon the open country to their congenial life of vagrancy.

There still remained, however, and apparently in full force, the shrewd gentry who stop pedestrians on the street with apologetic explanations of hard luck and with begging appeals for a small sum wherewith to satisfy immediate wants.

Clark and I had soon come to know this as a recognized occupation among the men with whom we were thrown.

A highly profitable trade it often proved, for a dollar a day is a gleaning not at all uncommon to these men, and the more skilful among them can average a dollar and a half.

They are rather the sporting spirits among the professionally idle; gambling is their chief diversion, and their contempt for honest work is as genuine as that of a snob.

But within this chaotic maelstrom of the unemployed, which in every industrial centre seethes with infinite menace to social safety, is always a large element which is not easily classified.

It was still to be found on the streets and in the lodging-houses of Chicago when the winter was gone, in seemingly undiminished numbers and in much its accustomed thriftlessness.

The class has to be defined in negative terms.

The men are not physically incapable of work, nor are they habitual tramps, nor yet the beggars of the pavements, and they lack utterly the grit for crime.

If they have a distinctive, positive characteristic as a class, it is that they are victims of the gregarious instinct.

By an attraction which is apparently irresistible to them, they are drawn to congested labor markets, and there they cling, preferring instinctively a life of want and squalor in fellowship with their kind to one of comparative plenty in the intolerable loneliness of the country.

There is a semblance of sincerity in their search for work, but they are cursed with the rudiments of imagination which makes cowards of them all, and their incapacity is a weakness of will rather than of brawn.

Shrinkingly they walk the narrow ledge which in many planes of life separates from tramphood and crime, while lacking the wit for the latter and the courage for both lives, and looking ever for something to turn up instead of resolutely turning something up.

Civilization is hard on such men, and their sufferings are none the less real because chiefly due to their incapacity for the struggle for existence.

And not only their own misery must be reckoned with in any fair estimate of the case, but far more the misery of their women and children, for these men are proletarians in the literalest meaning of the word.

Finding now that I could not only get work, but that I could actually be eclectic in the matter, I gladly took advantage of an opportunity of employment among the unskilled laborers on the Exposition grounds.

A sharp-eyed, energetic American, who superintends the gangs of unskilled laborers, took me on, and at once assigned me to duty under an Irish sub-boss by the name of O’Shea.

When I became one of its number, Mr. O’Shea’s gang of eight or ten men had torn up a considerable section of the plank road near the Transportation Building, for the purpose of altering the level.

Most of us were put in charge of wheel-barrows.

These we filled with sand at a neighboring pile and then emptied it in heaps on the road-bed, while the remaining members of the gang spread the sand with shovels to the desired depth before replacing the planks.

It was a cloudy morning early in April, with a cold, raw wind blowing in from the lake, and the work, not very fatiguing in itself, kept one comfortably warm until noon.

We had a free hour for dinner then, and I simply accompanied the other gang-men to “Hotel No. 1,” where my employment ticket, issued by the general superintendent of construction, procured for me without delay a meal-and-lodging ticket on trust.

A large, zinc-lined trough half full of water stood against the wall in an ante-chamber.

Here men by the score were washing their hands and faces and drying them near by on roller towels.

They then passed singly through the wicket at the dining-room door, where stood a man who punched each boarder’s ticket as he entered.

Long wooden tables, heaped with dishes and lined with round-bottom stools, ran the great length of the room.

The men took places in the order of their coming, until they had filled one table, when they would begin upon another, and there arose a deafening clatter of knives and forks and dishes and a tumult of mingled speech.

That dinner serves as a good illustration of our fare, both in what it offered and in what it lacked.

A bowl of hot soup was at each man’s place when he sat down, and, after finishing this, he was given a choice between roast beef and Irish stew.

There were potatoes boiled in their jackets, and pork-and-beans, and bread in wide variety and in enormous quantity, and a choice of tea or coffee, and finally a pudding for dessert.

Some of this was good, but all of it smacked of wholesale preparation, and appetites nicer than those of workingmen would have found difficulties with the dinner.

Even ours were not proof against it all.

I was struggling with a slice of tough roast beef out of which the virtue had been cooked, when suddenly I caught an expression of comical dismay stealing over the ruddy, bristling face of the man opposite me.

He was eating a piece of meat from a plate of Irish stew, and he spat it out upon the floor with a deep-drawn oath, and a frank assurance to his neighbors that “the meat was rotten,” while his facial muscles were contorted with strong disgust.

And the pudding was of such uncertain nature as to recall vividly the oft-repeated saying of a classmate at a college eating-club, that “flies in a pudding are quite as good as currants.

” Still the pork-and-beans were excellent and the bread and potatoes fine, and the coffee, which was served in large cups with the roast, was not impossible; certainly 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.

[Illustration: IT WAS A WELL-FED CROWD WHICH SAT SMOKING FOR A QUARTER OF AN HOUR OR MORE ON THE ROUGH EMBANKMENTS.

] Our gang was divided in the afternoon, and Mr. O’Shea left three of us, a German, an Irishman, and me, to open up a way for the teamsters through two long piles of paving-stones, which obstructed the road near the Fisheries Building.

His parting word to us was that the stint was an afternoon’s job, and we could easily have finished it in the four hours from one o’clock until five, had we worked with moderate swiftness.

The German and the Irishman fell to lifting stones to one side of the desired opening and I to the other.

Every condition favored us.

We had a definite task and not a difficult one, and no one to watch us at our work, nor drive us in its doing.

The clouds had disappeared, and in the soft spring sunshine, with the bushes blossoming about us and the air full of the sounds of multiform labor, there was every stimulus to energetic effort for four hours.

Not that the hours seemed short--they never do, I am convinced, even to well-seasoned unskilled workmen--but the difference between four hours of manual labor at a stretch and five is enormous, and to see my _confrères_ quite as impatient of their flight, even under these most favoring conditions, and to mark that the sober business of their lives was still an abhorrent drudgery to be shirked if possible, led the way to very sad reflection.

Neither of them paid any attention to me until, late in the afternoon, there came a lull in their talk and I heard the Irishman’s call.

“Hey, John!

” “Hello,” I said.

“Was you going to shave off them whiskers for Easter?

” I told him that I had not thought of it.

“Well,” he went on, “I hear the boys as have whiskers say as how they must go on Easter morning, and I thought maybe it was the same wid you.

” “What are you after doing, getting yourself into a sweat?

” he continued, for he had drawn off from the German and was making my way.

“You be a fool to kill yourself; you don’t earn the more by it, and they don’t think any the better of you.

Take it easy, man, take it easy; there’s time enough.

” He was an authority on the time, for every few minutes he would walk slowly over to where his coat and waistcoat lay on a heap of stones, and drawing out a great silver watch, would critically examine it, and then announce the hour in a loud call to the German and me.

At a quarter to five the two picked up their coats and went off, dodging behind shrubs and piles of building materials, until they made their exit at the gate, leaving a good third of the job unfinished.

That was on a Saturday.

On Monday morning Mr. O’Shea singled out us three for as stiff a cursing as a boat’s crew often gets, but to little purpose, apparently, in its effect upon the other men.

On that very day I was again a member of a gang, a gang of four this time, which was left without an overseer.

We were ordered to unload a car of timber and pile the boards near the mammoth framework on the east side of the Manufactures Building.

Besides native inertia there was unusual cause for idling in the fact that one of our number, a young Englishman, Rosedale by name, proved to be uncommonly interesting.

He was rather a trim fellow, of the adventurous, jack-of-all-trades kind, that roam the world widely, and that always appear in numbers at great celebrations and in new regions.

How they live and secure the means of extensive travel is a secret which no member of the fraternity ever tells.

There was no mystery about Rosedale just then, for he was a fellow-lodger in Hotel No. 1, and was No. ---- in the gang of laborers in which I, for example, was No. 472, and he fell into as natural association with the men as though he had lived with us always.

He was just up from South Africa, where he had been in the diamond fields, he said.

Seventeen thousand dollars’ worth of diamonds was the loot he was bringing with him to Canada, when he was shipwrecked off the coast of Labrador and escaped with only his life.

Not one of us, I suppose, was anything but sceptical of much of Rosedale’s story, but the man told his tale of free, reckless, vicious living on the diamond fields, with a vividness of narrative and a rough wealth of local color that charmed us into most attentive listeners, and that sped the morning hours with little regard to our job.

Questions began to crowd in upon Rosedale as to the location of South Africa and the means of getting there, and great disappointment was evident in the discovery that it was not contiguous to any familiar point.

Noon found us with a pitiful showing for the morning’s work.

In the afternoon I secured the post inside the car, and passed the boards out to the three other men, who piled them near the building.

By hastening the work at that end, I hoped to quicken the pace at which the job was being done.

To be caught a second time in a delinquent gang I feared would endanger my position, and I was anxious to remain on the grounds, and even more anxious to secure a promotion if I could.

It was easy to keep ahead of the men, but it was impossible, apparently, to urge them beyond the languid deliberation with which they shouldered the timber and carried it to the piles.

“Let up on that, John,” they were shouting at me presently.

“Go easy with that; there ain’t no rush, and you’ll make nothing by your pains.

” It was the view which I had heard again and again in gangs of unskilled laborers.

One could understand it in a measure among the older men, who could hope at the best only to eke out an existence free from the poor-house to the end.

But these and many others from whom it came were relatively young men, with every chance, one would suppose, of winning some preferment through effective, energetic work.

At five o’clock, the end of the afternoon’s labor, we had an hour in which to make leisurely preparation for a supper which consisted of cold meats in unstinted plenty, and potatoes, and bread, and tea and coffee, and often some stewed fruit with a little cake.

After this most of the men loafed in the lobby until bedtime.

This sitting-room includes the entire upper floor of a large wing of the building.

An enormous base-burner heats it, and serves to render it stifling in the evening, when the men are smoking with every window closed.

Games and newspapers strew the tables, and the room is well lighted with electric lamps.

On the same level is the upper section of the main building, where are the sleeping-quarters for the men.

The provision here is similar in design to that of a cheap lodging-house; only this is almost immaculate in its cleanliness, and the cabins are large and well ventilated, and the ceilings high and airy, and the berths are supplied with new wire and clean corn-husk mattresses, and with sheets and pillow-cases fragrant from the wash.

Mine is a middle, lower berth in a cabin for six men, but it lodges at present only two besides myself.

In a bunk nearest the door sleeps an Irishman, whose acquaintance I made while getting ready for bed on the first night of my stay.

Opening the door that evening and seeing me seated in the middle bunk, he stood eyeing me for a time with obvious displeasure.

He was evidently not in the best of humors, and although but two of the six berths in the large cabin were occupied, he plainly regarded my coming as an intrusion.

Neatly dressed in dark blue, and with an old felt hat on the back of his head, he cut a fine figure of a workman as he stood in the open door, a man of five-and-thirty, with a massive frame bent slightly forward and with a frown wrinkling the low forehead, from which the thick hair grew in tawny masses.

“Who let you in here?

” was his first remark.

“The proprietor,” I answered.

“Did he say you could have that bunk?

” “Yes.

” “Well, ---- it, is he going to flood the place?

” I knew no answer to that question, and so I ventured to ask after the occupant of the bunk nearest the window.

“He’s an Englishman; works in the landscape gang wid me,” replied the Irishman, laconically.

By this time he had seated himself on his bed with his elbows on his knees and his head bowed with an air of weariness.

The change of subject had, fortunately, been effective, for he no longer objected to my presence, and for some time he sat talking freely in a droning, disjointed way.

I gathered that he was thoroughly dissatisfied with his work and wages and his boarding-place and with life in general.

He did not enter into details of his personal history; his mood spent itself in anathemas against his present lot: “Work, ceaseless, unprofitable, joyless work.

Eat and work; eat more and work; eat again and sleep and eat and work.

This and nothing more; body and soul sold at a dollar and a half a day.

And nothing else to look forward to, with chances only of a steadily hardening lot, throughout the on-coming of old age to death.

”