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A DAY WITH A TRAMP
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A DAY WITH A
TRAMP
AND OTHER DAYS
BY
WALTER A. WYCKOFF
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL ECONOMY IN PRINCETON
UNIVERSITY; AUTHOR OF “THE WORKERS”
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1901
------------------------------------------------------------------------
COPYRIGHT, 1901, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER, 1901
TROW DIRECTORY
PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY
NEW YORK
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PREFACE
The following narratives, like those published in the series of “The
Workers,” East and West, are drawn from notes taken during an expedition
made ten years ago. In the summer of 1891 I began an experiment of
earning my living as a day laborer and continued it until, in the course
of eighteen months, I had worked my way from Connecticut to California.
In justice to the narratives it should be explained that they are
submitted simply for what they are, the casual observations of a student
almost fresh from college whose interest in life led him to undertake a
work for which he had no scientific training.
W. A. W.
PRINCETON, October, 1901.
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CONTENTS
PAGE
A DAY WITH A TRAMP 1
WITH IOWA FARMERS 41
A SECTION-HAND ON THE UNION PACIFIC 91
RAILWAY
“A BURRO-PUNCHER” 127
INCIDENTS OF THE SLUMS 163
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A DAY WITH A TRAMP
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A DAY WITH A TRAMP
He was an American of Irish stock; his name was Farrell; he was
two-and-twenty, a little more than six feet high, and as straight as an
arrow. We met on the line of the Rock Island Railway just west of
Morris, Ill.
But first, I should like to explain that in the course of eighteen
months’ experience as a wandering wage-earner, drifting from the
Atlantic to the Pacific, this was the only day that I spent in company
with a tramp.
It was in the character of a workingman and not as a tramp, that I
began, in the summer of 1891, a casual experiment, by which I hoped to
gain some personal acquaintance with the conditions of life of unskilled
laborers in America. Having no skill, I could count on employment only
in the rudest forms of labor, and I maintained consistently the
character of a laborer—a very indifferent one, I am bound to own—yet
finding it possible everywhere to live by the work of my hands.
I did tramp, it is true, walking in all some twenty-five hundred miles
of the distance from Connecticut to California; but I did it from set
purpose, discovering that in this way I could get a better knowledge of
the people and the country and of opportunities for work, than if I
should spend my savings in car-fare from place to place. It cost me
nothing to walk, and I not infrequently covered two hundred miles in the
course of a week, but it generally proved that, in actual cash from the
savings of my last job, I was out quite as much as I should have been
had I ridden the distance. This was because it was often necessary to
pay for food and lodging by the way, an odd job not always being
procurable, and the people being far readier to give a meal than to take
the trouble of providing work in payment for it. I could little blame
them, and I soon began to make use of the wayside inns, trusting for
contact with people more to chance acquaintance and the admirable
opportunities that came with every event of employment, when my savings
were gone.
_Tramp_ is a misnomer, I fancy, as descriptive of the mode of motion of
the members of the professionally idle class which in our vernacular we
call _hoboes_. The tramp rarely tramps; he “beats his way” on the
railroads.
Everyone knows of the very thorough-going and valuable work that Mr.
Josiah Flynt has done in learning the vagrant world, not only of
America, but of England, and widely over the Continent as well, and the
light that he has let in upon the habits of life and of thought of the
fraternity, and its common speech and symbols, and whence its recruits
come, and why, and how it occupies a world midway between lawlessness
and honest toil, lacking the criminal wit for the one and the will power
for the other.
That the hobo, in going from place to place, makes little use of the
highways, I can freely testify, so far as my limited experience goes.
His name was legion among the unemployed in Chicago, and he flocked
about railway centres, but he was a rare bird along the country roads
where work was plentiful.
It is easy to recount individually all that I met: a lusty Yankee beggar
who hailed me as a brother one blistering July day, not far from the
Connecticut border, when I was making for Garrisons; a cynical wraith,
who rose, seemingly, from the dust of the road, in the warm twilight of
a September evening, in eastern Pennsylvania and scoffed at my hope of
finding work in Sweet Valley; a threadbare, white-haired German with a
truly fine reserve and courtesy, who so far warmed to me, when we met in
the frosty air of late November, on the bare, level stretch of a country
road between Cleveland and Sandusky, as to tell me that he had walked
from Texas, and was on his way to the home of friends near Boston; then
Farrell, in central Illinois; and finally, a blear-eyed, shaggy knave,
trudging the sleepers of the Union Pacific in western Nebraska, his rags
bound together and bound on with strings, and a rollicking quality in
his cracked voice, who must have had difficulty in avoiding work among
the short-handed gangs of navvies along the line.
All this is by way of fruitless explanation that I myself was not a
tramp, but a workman, living by day’s labor; a fruitless explanation,
because a reputation once established is difficult to dislodge. I have
grown accustomed to references to my “tramp days,” even among those who
knew my purpose best, and I had no sooner returned to my university than
I found that to its members I was already known as “Weary,” in which
alliterative appellation I saw the frankest allusion to a supposed
identification with the “Weary Willies” of our “comic” prints. And
having incurred the name, I may as well lay bare the one day that I
tramped with a tramp.
I am not without misgivings in speaking of Farrell as a tramp. He had
held a steady job some weeks before, and our day together ended as we
shall see; but if I was a hobo, so was he, and although clearly not of
the strictest sect, and perhaps of no true sect at all, yet let us grant
that, for the time, we both were tramps.
The line of a railway was an unusual course, for I much preferred the
country roads as offering better walking, and far more hope of meeting
the people that I wished to know. Heavy rains, however, had made the
roads almost impassable on foot, and I was walking the sleepers from
necessity.
The spring of 1892 had been uncommonly wet. The rains set in about the
time that I quit work with a gang of roadmakers on the Exposition
grounds. So incessant were they that it grew difficult to leave Chicago
on foot, and when, in the middle of May, I did set out, I got only as
far as Joliet, when I had to seek employment again.
At the yards of the Illinois Steel Company I was taken on and assigned
to a gang of laborers, mostly Hungarians. But my chief association of a
week’s stay there is with a boarding-house, and especially its landlady.
She was a girlish matron, with a face that made you think of a
child-wife, but she was a woman in capacity. Her baby was a year old,
and generous Heaven was about to send another. Her boarders numbered
seven when I was made welcome; and to help her in the care of a crippled
husband and the child and guests, she had a little maid of about
fifteen, while, to add to the income from our board, she took in all our
washing, and did it herself with no outside help. She may have been
twenty, but I should have guessed eighteen, and every man of us stood
straight before her and did her bidding thankfully.
It was a proud moment, and one which made me feel more nearly on equal
terms with the other men, when one evening she came to me and,
“John, you mind the baby this time while I finish getting supper,” she
said, as she put the child in my arms.
On the sofa in the sitting-room we would lay the little wide-eyed, sunny
creature whom we rarely heard cry, and who never showed fear at the
touch of our rough hands, nor at the thundering laughter that answered
to her smiles and her gurgling attempts at speech.
The mother waited at the table, and joined freely in our talk. She had a
way of saying “By gosh!” that fairly broke your heart, and at times she
would stand still and swear softly, while her deep blue eyes widened in
innocent surprise.
They were haunting eyes, and they followed me far out on the rain-soaked
roads of the valley of the Illinois. The walking was not bad at first.
Over a rolling country the way wound past woodland and open fields,
between banks of rank turf and wild flowers; and, but for the evident
richness of soil, and the entire absence of rock, it might have been a
New England valley with nothing to suggest the earlier monotony of
undulating prairie.
But the walking became steadily worse, until by nightfall each step was
a painful pulling of a foot out of the mire then planting it in the mire
ahead, with Morris a good ten miles beyond. I was passing in the late
twilight a farm-house that stood close to the road. In his
shirt-sleeves, and seated in a tilted chair on the porch, was a young
farmer with a group of lightly clad children about him. He accepted the
explanation that I found the walking too heavy to admit of my reaching
Morris that evening, and, readily giving me leave to sleep on his
hay-mow, asked me in to have something to eat.
I was struck at first sight with a marked resemblance in him to my
friend Fitz-Adams, the manager of the logging camp in Pennsylvania. All
through our talk, while seated on the porch in the evening, there were
reminders in his manner and turns of speech and ways of looking at
things of that very efficient boss.
He was living in apparent poverty. The house was small and slightly
built and meanly furnished. Indeed, there was an effect of squalor in
its scant interior, and in the unkempt appearance of his wife and
children. But the man impressed you with the resolute reserve of one who
bides his time and knows what he is about. It appeared in his evident
contentment, joined with a certain hopefulness that was very engaging.
It is true that the spring was wet, so wet that he had not yet been able
to plant his corn, and it was growing late for planting, but, even if
the crop should fail completely, he had much corn in the best condition,
he said, left over from the uncommonly large crop of the year before,
which would be selling in the autumn at a better price. He was depressed
by the persistent rains, but not discouraged, and, as for the region in
which he had cast his lot, he clearly thought it one of the best for a
man beginning the world as a farmer. With land at fifty dollars an acre,
there was a good market near at hand, and money on the security of the
land could be had at five per cent. It was best to buy, he said. Four
thousand dollars would secure a farm of eighty acres, and two hundred
dollars would pay the interest, whereas the rental might reach three
hundred or even three hundred and fifty. Unmistakably he was poor, but
he was certainly not of the complaining sort, and I thought that it did
not require a long look into the future to see him in full possession of
the land and the owner of a more comfortable home besides.
When the barn-yard fowls wakened me in the morning the sun was rising to
a cloudless dawn. But, by the time that I took to the road, all the sky
was overcast again, and progress was as difficult as on the night
before. The stoneless soil was saturated, until it could absorb not
another drop, and water formed a pool in every foot-print and ran in
muddy streams in the wheel-tracks.
Two miles down the road was a railway. I reached it after an hour’s hard
walk and followed it to the tow-path of a canal, which afforded
comparatively firm footing over the remaining eight miles into Morris.
It was now ten o’clock, and for the past hour a steady drizzle had been
falling, which increased to a down-pour as I entered the town. There I
remained sheltered until nearly noon, when the rain ceased and I renewed
the journey. The roads I knew by experience to be almost impassable, so
I found the line of the Rock Island Railway and started west in the hope
of reaching Ottawa by night.
Dense clouds lay heavily upon the fields that stood, many of them, deep
in water. The moist air was hot and sluggish, but under foot was the
hard road-bed, and the course was the straightest that could be cut to
the Mississippi. The line was a double one, and the gutter between
formed a good cinder-track, so that I had not to measure the distance
from sleeper to sleeper at every step, which grows to be a horrible
monotony.
I had cleared the town by two miles or more and was settling to the
swing of a long walk when I saw, not far ahead, a gang of navvies at
work; almost at the same moment there appeared, emerging from the fog
beyond, the figure of a man. We were about equally distant from the
gang, and I had passed the workmen only a few yards when we met. The
impression grew as he drew near that here was a typical tramp, and,
being unaccustomed to his order and its ways, I wondered how we should
fare, if thrown together. But if I recognized him as a tramp, he had
done as much by me; for, when we met, he hailed me as a _confrère_ with,
“Hello, partner! which way?”
“I’m going to Ottawa,” I said.
“How long will you hold Ottaway down?” he asked.
“Oh, I’m only passing through on my way to Davenport.”
That was enough for Farrell as evidence of my being a hobo, however raw
a recruit; but there was a certain courtesy of the road which he wished
to maintain, if he could, in the face of my awkward ignorance. I was
conscious of an embarrassment which I could not understand.
“How far is it to Morris?” he asked next, and the opening should have
been enough for any man, but I answered dully, with painful accuracy as
to the distance that I had come.
Clearly nothing would penetrate such density but the frankest
directness, so out he blurted:
“Well, partner, if you don’t mind, I’ll go with you.”
Light dawned upon me then, and I tried to make up in cordiality for a
want of intuition. Embarrassment was gone at once, and with an ease, as
of long acquaintance, Farrell began to tell me how that, on the day
before, he had lost his partner and for twenty-four hours had been
alone. The loneliness was a horror to him, from which he shrunk, even in
the telling, and he expanded, in the companionship of a total stranger,
like a flower in light and warmth.
Without a moment’s hesitation he abandoned the way toward Morris and
turned back upon his former course, with a light-heartedness at having a
partner that was highly flattering.
Here certainly was life reduced to simple terms. As we stood at meeting
on the railway line, Farrell was as though he had no single human tie
with a strong hold upon him. The clothes that covered him were his only
possessions, and a toss of a coin might well determine toward which
point of the compass he would go. The casual meeting with a new
acquaintance was enough to give direction to an immediate plan and to
change the face of nature.
There was trouble in his blue eyes when we met, the fluttering, anxious
bewilderment that one sees in the eyes of a half-frightened child. It
was an appeal for relief from intolerable loneliness; all his face
brightened when we set off together. He had the natural erectness of
carriage which gives a distinction of its own, and, apart from a small,
weak mouth, slightly tobacco-stained, and an ill-defined chin, he was
good to look at, with his straight nose and well set eyes and generous
breadth of forehead, the thick brown hair turning gray about it and
adding to his looks a good ten years above his actual two-and-twenty. A
faded coat was upon his arm and he wore a flannel shirt that had once
been navy blue, and ragged trousers, and a pair of boots, through rents
in which his bare feet appeared. A needle was stuck through the front of
his shirt, and the soiled white cotton with which it was threaded was
wound around the cloth within the projecting ends.
However accustomed to “beating his way,” instead of going on foot,
Farrell may have been, he was a good walker. Stretching far ahead was
the level reach of the road-bed, with the converging lines of rails
disappearing in the mist. Our muscles relaxed in the hot, unmoving air,
until we struck the gait which becomes a mechanical swing with scarcely
a sense of effort. Then Farrell was at his best. Snatches of strange
song fell from him and remembered fragments of stage dialogue with
little meaning and with no connection, but all expressing his care-free
mood. It was contagious. Oh, but the world was wide and fair, and we
were young and free, and vagabond and unashamed! Walt Whitman was our
poet then, but I did not tell Farrell so; for the new, raw wine of life
was in his veins, and he sang a song of his own.
A breeze sprang up from the west, and the heavy mists began to move, but
from out the east great banks of clouds rose higher with the sound of
distant thunder, which drew nearer, until spattering raindrops fell,
fairly hissing on the hot rails. No shelter was at hand; when the storm
broke it came with vindictive fury and drenched us in a few moments. We
walked on with many looks behind to make sure of not being run down, for
we could scarcely have heard the approach of a train in the almost
unbroken peals of thunder that nearly drowned our shouts. Then the
shower passed; the thunder grew distant and faint again, and from a
clear sky the sun shone upon us with blistering heat, through air as
still and heavy and as surcharged with electricity as before the storm.
Farrell had been quite indifferent to the rain, accepting it with a
philosophic unconcern that was perfect. There was certainly little cause
to complain, for in half an hour our clothing was dry; meantime the
expression of his mood was changed. He had been friendly before, but
impersonal; now he wished to get into closer touch.
“Where are you from, partner?” he asked.
“I worked last winter in Chicago,” I said.
“What at?”
“Trucking in a factory for awhile, then with a road-gang on the Fair
Grounds. I had a job in Joliet, but I quit in a week,” I concluded. I
was short, for I knew that this was merely introductory, and that
Farrell was fencing for an opening.
“I’ve been on the road seven weeks now, looking for a job, and, in that
time, I ain’t slept but two nights in a bed,” he began.
“Two nights in a bed out of forty-nine?” I asked.
“Yes. In that time I’ve beat my way out to Omaha and back to Lima and up
and down; and one night a farmer near Tiffin, Ohio, give me a supper and
let me sleep in a bed in his wagon-house, and one wet night in Chicago I
had the price of a bunk in me jeans, and I says to meself, says I, ‘I’d
sooner sleep dry to-night than get drunk.’”
It came then of itself, needing only an occasional prompting question,
and the narrative was essentially true, I fancy; for, free from
embellishment, it moved with the directness of reality.
Born in Wisconsin of parents who had emigrated from Ireland, Farrell was
bred in an Illinois village, about fifty miles north of where we were
walking at the time. His two sisters lived there still, he thought, but
his mother had died when he was but a lad. His father was a day laborer
at work in Peoria, so far as Farrell knew. He had not seen him for many
years, and he kept up no contact with his people.
Much the most interesting part of the story to me was that which related
to the past year. Farrell was twenty-two; he had grown up he hardly knew
how, and was already a confirmed roadster, with an inordinate love for
tobacco, and a well-developed taste for drink.
In the early summer he had drifted into Ottawa, the very town that we
were nearing, and, being momentarily tired of the road, he sought and
found a job in a tile factory. At this point his narrative grew deeply
absorbing, because of the unconscious art of it in its simple adherence
to life; but being unable to reproduce his words, I can only suggest
their import.
It was a crisis in his history. The change began with an experience of a
mechanics’ boarding-house. He was a vagabond by breeding, with no
clearly defined ideas beyond food and drink, and immunity from work. He
was awaking to manhood, and there began to dawn for him at the
boarding-house a sense of home, and of something more in the motherly
care of the housekeeper.
“Say, she was good to me,” was his own expression, “she done me proud.
She used to mend me clothes, and if I got drunk, she never chewed the
rag, but I see it cut her bad, and I swore off for good; and then I used
to give her me wages to keep for me, and she’d allow me fifty cents a
week above me board.”
The picture went on unfolding itself naturally in the portrayal of
interests undreamed of beyond idleness, and enough of plug and beer. The
savings grew to a little store; then there came the suggestion of a new
suit of clothes, and a hat and boots, and a boiled shirt and collar, and
a bright cravat. Farrell little thought of the native touch of art in
his description of how, when all these were procured, he would fare
forth on a Sunday morning, not merely another man, but other than
anything that he had imagined. A sense of achievement came and brought a
dawning feeling of obligation, and a desire to take standing with other
men, and to know something and to bear a part in the work of a citizen
of the town.
Some glimmer had remained to him of religious teaching before his mother
died, and, in the conscious virtue of new dress, he sought out the
church, and began to go regularly to mass.
I knew what was coming then; there had been an inevitableness that
foretold it in the tale, and I found myself breathing more freely when
he began to speak without self-consciousness of the girl.
He said very little of her, but it was not at all difficult to catch the
ampler meaning of his words. Sunday began to hold a new interest, quite
apart from Sunday clothes. He found himself looking forward through the
week to a glimpse of her at church, but the week was far too long, and
in the autumn evenings he would dress himself in his best, regardless of
the jeers of the other men, and would walk past her father’s corner
grocery. Sometimes he saw her on the pavement in front of the shop, or
helping her father to wait on customers within.
All this was very disturbing; a new world had opened to him with a
steady job. It was unfolding itself with quite wonderful revelations in
the home-life of his boarding-house, and the friendship of the matron,
and the companionship of other workingmen, and the responsibility which
was beginning to replace his former recklessness. Moreover, he was
getting on in the tile factory. He was strong and active, and the
chances of being transferred to piece-work was a spur to do his best at
his present unskilled labor. Utterly unforeseen in its train of
consequences had come into this budding consciousness, the vision of a
girl. He had merely seen her at church, then seen her again, then found
himself looking forward to sight of her, and unable to wait patiently
for Sunday. The very thought of her carried with it a feeling of
contempt for his former life, and a distressing sense of difference in
their present stations, which developed, sometimes, into the temptation
to go back to the road and forget. That was the temptation that was
always in the background, and always coming to the fore when the craving
for drink was strongest, or when the monotony of ten hours’ daily labor
grew more than commonly burdensome. For four months and more he had
resisted now, and, as a reward, he had become just man enough to know
feebly that he could not easily forget, even on the road.
How he plucked up courage to meet her I do not know, for he did not tell
me, and not for treasure would I have asked him at this point of the
story. He did meet her, however, and the wonder of it was upon him
still, as he told me modestly, in quaint speech, that she smiled upon
him.
Oh, ineffable mystery of life, that he, a hobo of a few months before,
should be reading now in a good girl’s eyes an answering liking to his
own! He was little more than a lad, and she but a slip of a girl, and I
do not know what it may have meant to her, but to him it was life from
the dead. Very swiftly the winter sped and very hard he worked until he
earned a job at piecework in the factory, and then harder than ever
until he was making good wages. He could see little of her, for she had
an instinctive knowledge of her father’s probable displeasure, but there
grew up a tacit understanding between them that kept his hope and
ambition fired.
Nothing in experience could have been more wonderful than those winter
months, when he felt himself getting a man’s grip of things unutterable,
that came as from out a boundless sea into the range of his strange
awakening. And this new life was centred in her, as though she were its
source. He lived for her, and worked and thought for her and tried to be
worthy of her, and between his former and his present life was a gulf
which by some miracle she had created.
It came upon him with the suddenness of a pistol-shot one evening late
in March when they stood talking for a moment before saying good-night
at her father’s door. Thundering down the steps from the living-rooms
over the shop rushed the grocer, a large, florid Irishman. In a moment
he was upon them, hot in the newly acquired knowledge that Farrell was
“keeping steady company” with his daughter. His ire was up, and his
Irish tongue was loosed, and Farrell got the sting of it. It lashed him
for a beggarly factory laborer of doubtful birth, and, gaining
vehemence, it lashed him for a hobo predestined to destruction, and
finally, with strong admonition, it charged him never to speak to the
girl and never to enter her home again.
If only he could have known, if only there had been a voice to tell him
convincingly that now there had come a crucial test in his life between
character and circumstance, a voice “to lift him through the fight”! But
all his past was against him. In another hour he was dead drunk and he
went drunk to work in the morning, and was discharged.
The pleading of his landlady was of no avail. He thought that he had
lost the girl. Nothing remained but the road, and back to the road he
would go, and soon, with his savings in his pocket, he was “beating his
way” to Chicago. There he could live on beer and free lunches, and, at
dives and brothels, he would “blow in” the savings of ten months and try
to forget how sacred the sum had seemed to him, when, little by little,
he added to it, while planning for the future. Its very sacredness gave
a hellish zest to utter abandonment to vice while the money lasted; then
he took again to begging on the streets with “a hard-luck story,” until,
in the warm April days, he felt the old drawing to the open country and
began once more to “beat his way” up and down the familiar railway lines
and to beg his bread from the kind-hearted folk, who, in feeding him,
were fast completing his ruin.
We were entering Seneca now, and another thunder-storm was upon us, but,
as it broke in a deluge of rain, we ran for shelter under the eaves of
the railway station. A west-bound passenger-train drew in as we stood
there.
“That’s the way to travel,” I heard Farrell say, half to himself. It was
the sheltered comfort of the passengers that he envied, I supposed. But
not at all.
“See that hobo?” he continued, and, following the line of his
outstretched finger, I saw a ragged wretch dripping like a drowned rat
as he walked slowly up and down beside the panting locomotive.
“Yes,” I answered.
“The train’s got a blind baggage-car on,” he continued. “That’s a car
that ain’t got no door in the end that’s next the engine. You can get on
the front platform when the train starts, and the brakemen can’t reach
you till she stops, but then you’re off before they are and on again
when she starts up. The fireman can reach you all right, and if he’s
ugly, he’ll heave coal at you, and sometimes he’ll kick you off when the
train’s going full speed; but generally he lets you be. That hobo come
in two hours from Chicago and he’s got a snap for as long as he wants to
ride,” he concluded.
Nevertheless, I was glad to see the train go without Farrell’s saying
anything about joining our adventurous brother on the fore-platform of
the “blind baggage-car.”
In the seething sunlight that followed the storm we left the station and
walked along the village street which lay parallel with the railway. At
a mineral spring we stopped to drink, while a group of school-children
who were loitering homeward stood watching us, the fascination in their
eyes which all children feel in the mystery which surrounds the lives of
vagabonds and gypsies.
On the outskirts of the village, when we were about to resume the
railway, Farrell suggested that he should go foraging. He was hungry,
for he had eaten nothing since early morning, while I had bought food at
Morris. I promised to wait for him and very gladly sat down on the
curbstone in the shade.
Two bare-foot urchins, their trousers rolled up to their knees, who had
evidently been watching us from behind a picket-fence, stole stealthily
out of the gate when Farrell turned the corner. Creeping as near as they
dared, they gathered a handful of small, sun-baked clods and began to
throw them at me as a target. It was rare sport for a time, but I was
beyond their range and much absorbed in Farrell’s story. Disappointed at
not having the excitement of being chased back to the shelter of their
yard, they gave up the game and seated themselves on the curb, with
their naked, brown feet bathed in the pool which had formed in the
gutter. I had become quite unconscious of them, when I suddenly realized
that they were in warm discussion. It was about me, I found, for I heard
one of them raise his voice in stem insistence.
“Naw,” he said, “that ain’t the same bum, that’s another bum!”
Farrell returned empty-handed and a trifle dejected, I thought. His mind
was evidently on food. A little farther down the line he pointed out a
farm-house to the right and suggested our trying there. Along the edge
of a soft meadow, where the damp grass stood high, nearly ready for
mowing, we walked to a muddy lane which led to the barn-yard. A lank
youth in overalls tucked into top-boots and a gingham shirt and a
wide-brimmed straw hat stood in the open doorway of the barn, calmly
staring at us as we approached.
Farrell greeted him familiarly and was answered civilly. Then, without
further parley, he explained that we were come for something to eat.
“Go up to the house and ask the boss,” said the hired man.
The farmer was plainly well-to-do. His house was a large, square,
white-painted, wooden structure topped with a cupola, and with well-kept
grounds about it, while the farm buildings wore a prosperous air of
plenitude. Just then a well-grown watch-dog of the collie type came
walking toward us across the lawn, a menacing inquiry in his face.
“Won’t you go?” suggested Farrell.
The hired man had caught sight of the dog, and there was a twinkle in
his eye as he answered, airily,
“Oh, no, thank you.”
“Does the dog bite?” Farrell ventured, cautiously.
“Yes,” came sententiously from the hired man.
“We’d better get back to the road,” Farrell said to me, and we could
feel amused eyes upon us as we retraced our steps to the track.
Once more Farrell tried his luck; this time at a meagre, wooden, drab
cottage that faced a country lane, a hundred yards from the railway. I
watched him from the line and noticed that he talked for some time with
the woman who answered his knock and stood framed in the door.
When he returned he had two large slices of bread in his hand and some
cold meat.
“I didn’t like to take it,” he remarked. “Her husband’s a carpenter and
ain’t had no work for six weeks. But she says she couldn’t have me go
away hungry. That’s the kind that always helps you, the kind that’s in
hard luck themselves, and knows what it is.”
He was for sharing the forage and, hungry as he was, he had not eaten a
morsel of it when he rejoined me. That I would take none seemed to him
at first a personal slight, but he understood it better when I explained
that I had had food at Morris.
There was a cloudless sunset that evening, the sun sinking in a crimson
glow that foretold another day of great heat. The stars came slowly out
over a firmament of slaty blue, and shone obscurely through the humid
air. Farrell and I were silent for some time. Both of us had walked
about thirty-six miles that day, and were intent on a resting-place. At
last we began to catch the glitter of street-lights in Ottawa, and, at
sight of them, Farrell’s spirits rose. He was like one returning home
after long absence. The sound of a church-bell came faintly to us.
Farrell held me by the arm.
“You hear that?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“That’s the Methodist church bell.”
I could see his face light up, as though something were rousing the best
that was in him.
At the eastern end of the town, and close to the railway, we came upon a
brick-kiln. Farrell was perfectly familiar with his surroundings now,
and we stopped for a drink. For some reason the water would not run in
the faucet, so we went around to a barn-like building in the rear.
Through a large, open doorway he entered, while I remained outside. Soon
I heard him in conversation with someone, who proved to be the
night-watchman, and, finding that Farrell was not likely to rejoin me
soon, I also entered.
Some moments were necessary to accustom one’s eyes to the interior, but
I could see at once the figure of a white-bearded old man lying at full
length on a bed of gunny-sacks thrown over some sloping boards. His head
was propped up, and he held a newspaper which he had been reading by the
light of two large torches that hung suspended near him, and from which
columns of black smoke rose, curling upward into dark recesses among the
rafters. Everything was black with smut and grimy dust. Soon I could see
that on one side were great heaps of coal that sloped away to the outer
walls like the talus against a cliff.
Farrell was seated on a coal-heap, and was absorbed in the news of the
town, as he gathered it from the old man. Quite unnoticed, I sat down on
a convenient board and listened dreamily, hoping heartily the while that
we should not have to go much further that night.
Presently I found myself alert to what was being said, for they were
discussing the question of a night’s lodging. It was from the watchman
that the suggestion came that we should remain where we were, and very
readily we agreed. Taking a torch from its socket, he lighted us through
a long passage to another room that was used as a carpenter’s shop. A
carpenter’s bench ran the length of it, and the tools lay strewn over
its surface. From a corner he drew a few yards of old matting, which he
offered to Farrell as a bed; and he found a door off its hinges, which,
when propped up at one end as it lay on the floor, made what proved that
night a comfortable bed for me. With a promise to call us early, he left
us in the dark, and, quickly off with our boots, we wrapped ourselves in
our coats and were soon fast asleep.
The watchman was true to his word; for the stars were still shining when
Farrell and I, hungry and stiff, set off down the track in the direction
of the railway station. His mood was that of the evening before, as
though, after long wandering, he was returning to his native place.
Recollections of those ten months of sober industry crowded painfully
upon him, and he shrunk like a culprit from possible recognition. Yet
every familiar sight held a fascination for him. With kindling interest
he pointed out the locality of the boarding-house, and again held me by
the arm and made me listen, until I, too, could catch the sound of
escaping steam at the tile factory where he had worked.
The iron was entering into his soul, but he knew it only as a painful
struggle between a desire to return to a life of work and the inertia
that would keep him on the road. We walked on, in silence for the most
part, under the morning stars that were dimming at the approach of day.
When Farrell spoke, it was to reveal, unconsciously, the progress of the
struggle within him.
“It ain’t no use tryin’ for a job; I’ve been lookin’ seven weeks now.”
That was the lie to smooth the road to vagabondage.
“I’d have a hell of a time to get square in this town again. Everybody
that knowed me, knowed I got fired for drinkin’.” That was the truth
that made strait the gate and narrow the way that led to life.
In a moment of encouragement he spoke of the boarding-house keeper and
of her promise to take him back again, if he would return to work; but
his thoughts of the girl he kept to himself, and deeply I liked him for
it.
We were leaving Ottawa behind. With a sharp curve the railway swept
around the base of bluffs that rose sheer on our right from the
road-bed, rugged and grim in the twilight, the trees on top darkly
outlined against the sky. At our left were the flooded lowlands of the
Illinois bottom. We could see the decaying cornstalks of last year’s
growth just appearing above the water in the submerged fields, and, here
and there, a floating out-building which had been carried down by the
flood and was caught among the trees.
Was he man enough to hold fast to his chance, or would he allow himself
to drift? This was the drama that was unfolding itself there in the dark
before the dawn, under frowning banks beside a flooded river, while the
silent stars looked down.
We came to another brick-kiln, with its buildings on the bank just above
the railway. A light was shining from a shanty window, and a well-worn
foot-path led from the road up through the underbrush of the hillside to
the shanty door. A night-watchman was making a final round of the kiln
to see that all was right before the day’s work began.
Farrell stood still for a moment, the struggle fierce within him.
“Let’s get a drink of water,” he said.
The night-watchman led us to a spring and answered, encouragingly,
Farrell’s inquiry about a possible job.
“Go up and ask the boss,” he said. “He’s just finished his breakfast.
That’s his house,” he added, pointing to the shanty with the light in
the window.
From the foot of the path I watched Farrell climb to the shanty door and
knock. The door opened and the voices of two men came faintly down to
me. My hopes rose, for it was not merely a question and a decisive
reply, but the give and take of continued dialogue. The suspense had
grown to physical suffering, when I saw Farrell turn from the door and
begin to descend the path.
I could not see his face distinctly; but, as he drew nearer, I caught
its expression of distress. The half-frightened, worried bewilderment
that I had noticed on the day before was back in his eyes, as he stood
looking into mine, evidently expecting me to speak. I remained silent.
“I’ve got a job,” he said, presently, and I could have struck him for
the joy of it.
“Me troubles is just begun, for the whole town knows me for a bum,” he
added, while his anxious eyes moved restlessly behind frowning brows. I
said nothing, but waited until I could catch his eye at rest. Then out
it came, a little painfully:
“I’ll go to the boarding-house to-night, when me day’s work is done, and
put up there, if the missus can take me.”
“Good,” I said, and I waited again until his gaze was steady upon me.
For a day we had tramped together, and slept together for a night, and,
quite of his own accord, he had given me his confidence. We were
parting, now that he had found work, and I hoped that I might receive
the final mark of his trust, so I waited.
He read my question, and his eyes wandered, but they came back to mine,
and he spoke up like a man:
“I can’t, till I’m a bit decent again and got some clothes; but I’ll
hold down me job, and, as soon as I can, I’ll go back to her.”
A warning whistle blew; Farrell went up the path to take his place in
the brick-kiln, and I was soon far down the line in the direction of
Utica.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
WITH IOWA FARMERS
------------------------------------------------------------------------
WITH IOWA FARMERS
Scarcely a generalization with the least claim to value can be drawn
from my superficial contact with the world of manual labor in America.
If there is one, it is, that a man who is able and willing to work can
find employment in this country if he will go out in real search for it.
It may not be well paid, but it need not be dishonest, and it is
difficult to conceive of its failing to afford opportunities of making a
way to improved position.
And yet, one has no sooner made such a statement than it becomes
necessary to qualify it. Suppose that the worker, able and willing to
work, is unemployed in a congested labor market, where the supply far
exceeds the demand, and suppose that he must remain with his wife and
children, since he cannot desert them and has no means of taking them
away. Or imagine him newly landed, thrown upon the streets by an
emigrant agency, ignorant of the language and of our methods of work,
and especially ignorant of the country itself. To the number of like
suppositions there is no end. Actual experience, however, serves to
focus the situation. I have stood beside men whom I knew, and have seen
them miss the chance of employment because they were so far weakened by
the strain of the sweating system that they were incapable of the strain
of hard manual labor.
Even at the best, much of the real difficulty is often the subjective
one summed up in the sentence of a man who has wide knowledge of
wage-earners in America, to whom I once spoke of the surprising ease
with which I found employment everywhere, except in larger towns.
“Oh, yes,” he replied; “but you forget how little gifted with
imagination the people are who commonly form by far the greater number
of the unemployed.”
It merely serves to show again the futility of generalizing about labor,
as though it were a commodity like any other, sensitive to the play of
the law of supply and demand, while supported by a thorough knowledge of
markets and the means of reaching quickly those that, for the time, are
the most favorable.
The mass which men speak casually of as “labor” is an aggregation of
individuals, each with his human ties and prejudices and his congenital
weaknesses and strength, and each with his own salvation to work out
through difficulties without and within that are little understood from
the outside. You may enter his world and share his life, however rigid,
sustained by the knowledge that at any moment you may leave it, and your
experience, although the nearest approach that you can make, is yet
removed almost by infinity from that of the man at your side, who was
born to manual labor and bred to it, and whose whole life, physical and
mental, has been moulded by its hard realities.
It would be quite true to say that “the problem of the unemployed in
America is a problem of the distribution of workers,” taking them from
regions where many men are looking for a job, to other regions, where
many jobs are looking for a man. But it would be a shallow truth, with
little insight into the real condition of multitudes, whose
life-struggle is for day’s bread and in whom the gregarious instinct is
an irresistible gravitation. It is not difficult to show that congestion
in an industrial centre, with its accompanying misery, might be relieved
by an exodus to country districts, where an unsatisfied demand for hands
is chronic. But the human adjustments involved in the change would be
beyond all calculation; and, even were they effected, it would be not a
little disturbing in the end to find large numbers returning to the
town, frankly preferring want with companionship and a sense of being in
touch with their time to the comparative plenty and, with it, the
loneliness and isolation of country living. A part of the penalty that
one pays for attempting to deal with elements so fascinating as those of
human nature is in their very incalculability, in the elusive charm of
men who develop the best that is in them in spite of circumstances the
most adverse, and in an evasive quality in others who sometimes fail to
respond to the best devised plans for their betterment. But human nature
never loses its interest, and, as earnest of a good time coming, there
are always men in every generation who, through unselfish service of
their fellows, have won
The faith that meets
Ten thousand cheats,
Yet drops no jot of faith.
However little the fact may have applied to the actual “problem of the
unemployed,” it nevertheless was true, as shown in my own experience,
that there was a striking contrast throughout the country between a
struggle among men for employment and a struggle among employers for
men.
Early in the journey I began to note that every near approach to a
considerable centre of population was immediately apparent in an
increasing difficulty in finding work. I had never a long search in the
country or in country villages, and I soon learned to avoid cities,
unless I was bent upon another errand than that of employment.
I could easily have escaped Chicago and its crowded labor market. Offers
of places in the late autumn as general utility man on farms in northern
Ohio and Indiana were plentiful as I passed, and I well knew, during a
fortnight’s fruitless search for work in Chicago in early winter, that
at any time a day’s march from the city, or two days’ march at most,
would take me to regions where the difficulty would quickly disappear.
The temptation to quit the experiment altogether, or, at least, to go
out to the more hospitable country, was then strong at times; but I
could but realize that, in yielding, I should be abandoning a very real
phase of the experience of unskilled labor, that of unemployment, and
that I should miss the chance of some contact with bodies of organized
skilled workmen as well as with the revolutionaries who can be easiest
found in our larger towns. So I remained, and for two weeks I saw and,
in an artificial way, I felt something of the grim horror of being
penniless on the streets of a city in winter, quite able and most
willing to work, yet unable to find any steady employment.
With the return of spring I went into the country again, drifting on
with no more definite plan than that of going westward until I should
reach the Pacific; and here at once was the contrast. Opportunities of
work everywhere; with farmers, when one was on the country roads; in
brick-kilns, when bad walking drove one to the railway lines.
Farrell, a fellow-tramp for a day on the Rock Island Railway in
Illinois, had, for seven weeks, been looking for work from Omaha to Lima
and back again, he told me, and yet he got a job near Ottawa in response
to his first inquiry; while a few miles farther down the line I, too,
was offered work in a brick-kiln at Utica. I did not accept it, only
because I had savings enough from my last job to see me through to
Davenport.
It was on the afternoon of Saturday, June 4, 1892, that I reached
Davenport. I had followed the line of the Rock Island Railway from
Morris, sleeping in brick-kilns, and, one night, at Bureau Junction, in
a shed by the village church, and I was a bit fagged. I had developed a
plan to go to Minneapolis. I hoped to work the passage as a hand on a
river boat.
At the open door of a livery-stable I stopped to ask the way to the
office of the steamboat line, attracted, no doubt, by the look of a man
who sat just inside. With a kindly face of German type, he was of middle
age, a little stout, dressed in what is known as a “business suit,” and
when he spoke, it was with a trace of German accent.