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

Among the workmen on the grounds whom I have come to know, none has interested me more as a type than an American carpenter with whom I sometimes spend an evening.

The man is lonely and uncomfortable in his new surroundings.

The novel conditions which here beset him as a workingman are quite as disturbing to him as the unfamiliar setting of his daily life.

He clings tenaciously to his individuality, and the new order of things which confronts him here lightly makes strange havoc of all that.

We had not been talking many minutes on the embankment, where one day after dinner we first met, when the man’s case shone clear as day.

He is a master-carpenter from a village home in Ohio, and the certainty of steady work for many months at four dollars a day was tempting enough to induce him to leave his family behind and come here.

He had arrived a few days before and had found instant employment.

Seeing the man, a tall, fine-looking, self-respecting American mechanic, and hearing him speak, and learning even this little of his history, you had direct vision of his past.

You could almost see a comfortable, wooden cottage, of his own building, with a garden-plot about it and flower-beds in front, standing on a well-shaded village street.

He owns the cottage and the plot of land, and his children were born there, and he is an officer in the village church, and has been justice of the peace, and more than once has served as “school trustee.

” Social inequality, as applying to himself, is a new idea, and it gives him a hitherto unexperienced sense of self-consciousness.

In his native village his family meet the families of all his neighbors on the same footing, except that they recognize in the minister, and the doctor, and the village lawyer, and the schoolmaster, a distinction which attaches to special education.

His children study and play at school with the children of all his neighbors, and mingle freely with them at church and in their other social relations.

But here is something new and strange.

He is no longer a man with a name to distinguish him, but has become a “hand,” having a number which he wears conspicuous on his jacket.

He goes to his work as an integer in an army of ten thousand numerals.

Home has changed to a barrack, where he, a number, sleeps in a numbered bunk, and eats, never twice at the same place, as one of half a thousand men.

His comfort and convenience are never consulted, and his views have no smallest bearing upon the course of things.

The superintendent of the building upon which he works, whose energy and skill he admires hugely, shifts him about with scores of other men, with as little regard to him as an individual as though he were a piece of timber.

Once he spoke to his superintendent about some detail of the work and found him a most appreciative listener.

Then he ventured, in conversation, upon a subject of general interest, only to find that by some mysterious change he was speaking to a stone wall.

And now there confronts him what he regards as another sacrifice of individuality, which he is urged to make, and which gives him no little concern.

He had scarcely known of the existence of Trades Unions, and now he is thronged with appeals to join one.

No discrimination is made by the management as between union and non-union men in employing workers on the Exposition; but many of the union men here are making the most of the present opportunity for the propaganda of their principles, and for bringing the desirable non-union men within their organization.

My carpenter friend, whom I shall call Mr. Ford, comes in for a large share of attention, and is, as I have intimated, not a little perplexed by the situation.

Two or three times he has asked me to go with him in the evening to meetings which are held near the Fair Grounds, and which are addressed by delegates from the Central Labor Union.

These we have not found very enlightening.

There has been a good deal of beer-drinking and much aimless speech, which has grown heated at times in the stress of hostile discussion; and now and then a plain, matter-of-fact workingman has given us an admirable talk on the history of Trades-Unionism and its beneficent results, and the imperative need of organization among workers as the only means of safe-guarding their interests and of meeting, on any approach to equal terms, the peculiar economic relations which exist between labor and organized capital.

Mr. Ford, much bewildered, has listened to all this, and we have talked it over together on the way back to our lodgings, and sometimes late into the night.

I have tried to explain to him, as well as I understand it, the idea of organization, and the necessity of organization which has grown out of the great industrial change since the middle of the last century.

But Mr. Ford, for all practical purposes, belongs to the pre-revolutionary period; the industrial change has little affected him.

He served his apprenticeship, and was then a journeyman and then a master-carpenter in due course.

In his experience, work has always had its basis in a personal relation, as, for example, between himself as a contractor and the man whose job he undertook and to whom he looked for payment.

A like personal relation has always existed between himself and the men whom he has employed.

This new relation between a workman and an impersonal, soulless corporation which hires him, is one that he does not readily grasp.

And, for the sake of meeting the new relation, this “fusing all the skirts of self” and merging individuality into an organization which attempts to regulate the hours of labor, and its wages, and for whom one shall work, and for whom not, is a thing abhorrent to him.

“Why,” he said to me, “I give up my independence, and I’m no better than the worst carpenter of the lot.

We all get union-wages alike.

There’s no incentive for a man to do his best.

He ain’t a man any more, anyway; he’s only a part of a machine.

Why, such work as some I see done here, I’d be ashamed to do by moonlight, with my eyes shut.

But it don’t make no difference in the union, you’re all on the same level, as near as I can make out.

” Finally I proposed to him that we should go together, on some Sunday afternoon, to the meeting of the Central Labor Union, where he could become acquainted with some of the members and learn at first hand the objects and ends of organization and something of its actual working.

The members whom I particularly wished him to know were some of the Socialists there, who seemed to me to have a considerable knowledge of Trades-Unionism, and who took, I thought, a judicial view of it.

As an unskilled laborer I was not eligible to membership in any union, but I was admitted freely to the central meetings, to which I sometimes went in company with Socialists who were delegates of their respective orders.

Under their tutelage, I was shown the operation of an exceedingly complex system, which, seen without guidance, would have appeared to me hopelessly chaotic.

I was seeing it, I realized, from the point of view of the Socialists, and I was interested immediately in learning their attitude.

They are, I found, most ardent supporters of the principle of organization among workingmen.

They regard the fact of the organization of wage-earners as among the most significant developments in the evolution of a socialistic state.

But they are very impatient of the slow rate of progress in Trades-Unionism.

The ignorance of the great mass of workers of how to further their own interests is, to the Socialist, the most discouraging feature in labor-organization.

“Why,” they ask, “when we working people already have so strong a nucleus of organization for economic ends, do we not direct it at once into the field of politics, and secure immediately, by our overwhelming numbers, the legislation which we need, and so inaugurate a co-operative commonwealth?

” Nowhere have the walking-delegates and the general agitators of their class sincerer foes than among the Socialists who, more than to any other active cause, attribute the comparative ineffectualness of unionism to the influence of these men.

Very readily they believe them purchasable, and that often they are little else than the paid agents of the capitalists.

Their great influence over workingmen is used, the Socialists seem to believe, chiefly in their own interests and particularly for selfish political ends.

This habit of mind serves to illustrate what eventually appeared to me to be highly characteristic of the general attitude of Socialists.

The key to their mental processes in considering things social, lies, I am quite sure, in the idea of existing conditions as being maintained by a vast capitalistic conspiracy.

At all events this clew has cleared up for me the mystery which at first I found in many of their ways of thinking.

However natural may have been the social order in some of its historic phases, they evidently regard it at the present as largely artificial.

There is no real vitality, they contend, in the political issues upon which the great national parties are divided.

The party cries of “free trade” and “protection” and the like, are manufactured by professional politicians who are in the employ of the capitalists.

The purpose is to divert the minds of the working classes by these sham contentions and so keep them about evenly divided politically, and thus prevent their coalescing in overwhelming force in political action for their own interests.

Nothing seems to anger a Socialist more than the spectacle of workingmen roused to enthusiasm by the crowds and speeches and processions and brass bands of the usual political campaign.

They see in them then only the ridiculous dupes of the capitalists, who have contributed to the campaign funds for the very purpose of thus befooling their employees, and who look with about equal indifference upon the momentary triumph of one party or the other so long as no labor party is in the ascendant.

However free in the past the play of purely natural evolutionary forces may have been in determining social development, and however free may be their course again in moulding a future state, their operation is checked for the present to the Socialists’ vision by the active intervention of the capitalists, who, in some way, have succeeded in effecting a social structure which is highly favorable to themselves, and for whose undisturbed continuance they unscrupulously employ all the resources of wealth and craft and dark conspiracy.

The idea appeared at its plainest, perhaps, in their more vindictive speeches, where the strong undercurrent of feeling was--“There is cruel injustice and wrong in society as it is, and someone is to blame for it, and unhesitatingly we charge the blame against the capitalists.

” It was with this interpretation in mind that I took Mr. Ford with me one afternoon to the meeting of the Central Labor Union.

I was curious to see the effect of the gathering upon him.

A child of another age in his experience of certain economic relations, he was an interesting phenomenon in the sudden contact with modern industrialism.

When we reached the building, in the upper floor of which in a large hall are held the weekly meetings of the Central Labor Union, numbers of workingmen in their Sunday clothes were passing in and out of the neighboring saloons or loafing about the doors.

The intersecting streets were strewn with small handbills, which we found covering the wide staircase leading to the hall and scattered over the seats and floor of the room itself.

They were printed notices instructing the members to boycott the beer of certain breweries which were accused of employing non-union men, and also the products of this and that manufacturer, against whom similar charges were made.

We were a little early, but we chanced upon a Socialistic acquaintance of mine, who took us in with him and seated us well to the front.

As the members entered I had a chance to point out to Mr. Ford those among them who had been pointed out to me as the officers of their various unions.

He was deeply interested from the first, and much impressed apparently by the size of the gathering and the enormous numbers of organized workers which were represented there.

The stage of “new business” was barely reached that afternoon when matters were well beyond the control of the president.

Motions and amendments and questions of privilege and points of order were fast driving him mad, when in despair he called upon a fellow-member to take charge of the meeting and become its temporary chairman.

By this time there was a good deal of confusion; men in many parts of the hall were clamoring for the floor, and trying to drown one another’s voices.

But there was immediate recognition of a change of generalship.

The man who had taken the chair was a member of a union of musicians, a person of excellent address and well-appearing, and, as it proved eventually, a masterly parliamentarian.

To reduce to quiet an assembly so excited was beyond his power, but he did unravel the skein of its tangled business, and through all the uproar and confusion he kept his temper perfectly, and secured some actual disposition of the affairs in hand.

The intricacies of intermingling interests there represented were beyond measure bewildering.

The Cigarmakers’ Union had a grievance, which its representatives insisted upon presenting and having righted at once.

But the Waiters’ Union claimed an antecedent right to the presentation of a question with reference to admitting certain men to their organization.

And the Bricklayers’ Union demanded an immediate investigation of the account of expenditure for a certain recent Union picnic, charging directly, meanwhile, a flagrant misappropriation of funds.

Passions were running high.

The lie direct was passed repeatedly, and men were all but shaking fists in one another’s faces.

The shouting rose sometimes to such a pitch that the chairman’s voice could not be heard.

But the passion was that of strong vitality.

The Union, to its members, was an intensely living thing, and its issues, touching them so closely, most naturally roused comparatively untutored men to strong emotion.

I watched Mr. Ford with curious interest.

Instead of showing any impatience or disgust at the show of temper and the loud disorder, he sat through the long session deeply, intently absorbed.

Every question for debate, and every phase of discussion, and all the progress of the business, and the varying claims of the many organizations, and the widely differing personalities of the members, each won his vital interest, and, with amazing discrimination, he seemed to follow them with intelligent understanding.

And when there came a report of progress in a strike among certain workers in shoe factories, and a statement of the causes of the strike and the measures which were being taken to carry it to a successful issue, I could see that he was more than ever roused.

“That’s the most interesting meeting I ever was to,” he said to me, as we walked down the street together.

“I ain’t never realized before how mixed up things can be when there’s so many working people, and the men that hire them are mostly all organized in big companies.

Why, the working people ain’t got nothing else they can do but organize too, to get their just rights.

They have a pretty hot time in their meetings, if that’s a sample, but I guess they’ll know what they’re about.

I

guess I’ll join.

” * * * * * In a very few days I must leave Chicago.

I own to a longing to go and launch out upon the great farming regions between the Lakes and the Rocky Mountains, which I hope to cover in my journey before the autumn is far spent.

I have been watching the coming of the spring in the Exposition grounds and in the charming parks of the city and along its beautiful boulevards, and I feel its subtle drawings to the country, to a life once more of labor in the fields.

But I am very far from being prepared to go.

Some little of a phase of life which in all large centres of population accompanies the swift industrial changes of the present I have seen here in Chicago, where it differs but slightly from similar conditions in every congested labor market.

And under the play of the modern gregarious instinct there surely are few centralized markets which are not congested.

But of the real city as a great positive force and a world-wide commercial power, whose unfaltering energies have built a huge metropolis in a generation, and are fast crowning their labors with splendid achievements in education and in art, I have been able to see little, and I have given no impression whatever.

This much I have seen on the grounds where I am now a workman: I have watched something of the slow emerging from a scene of utter chaos of a co-ordinated scheme of landscape-gardening and of architecture, which has long passed the experimental stage, and is unfolding to the world, by a miracle of creative and constructive genius, a real vision of beauty and power and grace, which certainly holds for the living generation of civilized men a promise of rich blessings.