CERTAIN WORKERS
I
Those Who Do Not Get
Let us now look a little at another aspect of this process of
individualistic competition which is the economic process in America,
and which is giving us on its upper side the spenders of Fifth Avenue,
the slow accumulators of the Astor type, and the great getters of the
giant business organizations, the Trusts and acquisitive finance.
We have concluded that this process of free and open competition in
business which, clearly, the framers of the American Constitution
imagined to be immortal, does as a matter of fact tend to kill itself
through the advantage property gives in the acquisition of more
property. But before we can go on to estimate the further future
of this process we must experiment with another question. What is
happening to those who have not got and who are not getting wealth, who
are, in fact, falling back in the competition?
Now there can be little doubt to any one who goes to and fro in
America that in spite of the huge accumulation of property in a few
hands that is now in progress, there is still no general effect of
impoverishment. To me, coming from London to New York, the effect
of the crowd in the trolley-cars and subways and streets was one of
exceptional prosperity. New York has no doubt its effects of noise,
disorder, discomfort, and a sort of brutality, but to begin with one
sees nothing of the underfed people, the numerous dingily clad and
grayly housed people who catch the eye in London. Even in the congested
arteries, the filthy back streets of the East Side I found myself
saying, as a thing remarkable, "These people have money to spend." In
London one travels long distances for two cents, and great regiments of
people walk; in New York the universal fare is five cents and everybody
rides. Common people are better gloved and better booted in America
than in any European country I know, in spite of the higher prices for
clothing here, the men wear ready-made suits, it is true, to a much
greater extent, but they are newer and brighter than the London clerk's
carefully brushed, tailor-made garments. Wages translated from dollars
into shillings seem enormous.
And there is no perceptible fall in wages going on. On the whole wages
tend to rise. For almost all sorts of men, for working women who are
not "refined," there is a limitless field of employment. The fact that
a growing proportion of the wealth of the community is passing into
the hands of a small minority of successful getters, is masked to
superficial observation by the enormous increase of the total wealth.
The growth process overrides the economic process and may continue to
do so for many years.
So that the great mass of the population is not consciously defeated
in the economic game. It is only failing to get a large share in
the increment of wealth. The European reader must dismiss from his
mind any conception of the general American population as a mass of
people undergoing impoverishment through the enrichment of the few. He
must substitute for that figure a mass of people, very busy, roughly
prosperous, generally self-satisfied, but ever and again stirred to
bouts of irascibility and suspicion, inundated by a constantly swelling
flood of prosperity that pours through it and over it and passes by it,
without changing or enriching it at all. Ever and again it is irritated
by some rise in price, an advance in coal, for example, or meat or
rent, that swallows up some anticipated gain, but that is an entirely
different thing from want or distress, from the fireless hungering
poverty of Europe.
[Illustration: NEW YORK'S CROWDED, LITTERED EAST SIDE]
Nevertheless, the sense of losing develops and spreads in the mass of
the American people. Privations are not needed to create a sense of
economic disadvantage; thwarted hopes suffice. The speed and pressure
of work here is much greater than in Europe, the impatience for
realization intenser. The average American comes into life prepared
to "get on," and ready to subordinate most things in life to that. He
encounters a rising standard of living. He finds it more difficult to
get on than his father did before him. He is perplexed and irritated
by the spectacle of lavish spending and the report of gigantic
accumulations that outshine his utmost possibilities of enjoyment or
success. He is a busy and industrious man, greatly preoccupied by the
struggle, but when he stops to think and talk at all, there can be
little doubt that his outlook is a disillusioned one, more and more
tinged with a deepening discontent.
II
The Little Messenger-boy
But the state of mind of the average American we have to consider
later. That is the central problem of this horoscope we contemplate.
Before we come to that we have to sketch out all the broad aspects of
the situation with which that mind has to deal.
Now in the preceding chapter I tried to convey my impression of the
spending and wealth-getting of this vast community; I tried to convey
how irresponsible it was, how unpremeditated. The American rich have,
as it were, floated up out of a confused struggle of equal individuals.
That individualistic commercial struggle has not only flung up these
rich to their own and the world's amazement, it is also, with an equal
blindness, crushing and maiming great multitudes of souls. But this
is a fact that does not smite upon one's attention at the outset. The
English visitor to the great towns sees the spending, sees the general
prosperity, the universal air of confident pride; he must go out of his
way to find the under side to these things.
One little thing set me questioning. I had been one Sunday night
down-town, supping and talking with Mr. Abraham Cahan about the "East
Side," that strange city within a city which has a drama of its own
and a literature and a press, and about Russia and her problem, and I
was returning on the subway about two o'clock in the morning. I became
aware of a little lad sitting opposite me, a childish-faced delicate
little creature of eleven years old or so, wearing the uniform of a
messenger-boy. He drooped with fatigue, roused himself with a start,
edged off his seat with a sigh, stepped off the car, and was vanishing
up-stairs into the electric glare of Astor Place as the train ran out
of the station.
"What on earth," said I, "is that baby doing abroad at this time of
night?"
For me this weary little wretch became the irritant centre of a painful
region of inquiry. "How many hours a day may a child work in New York,"
I began to ask people, "and when may a boy leave school?"
I had blundered, I found, upon the weakest spot in America's fine front
of national well-being. My eyes were opened to the childish newsboys
who sold me papers, and the little bootblacks at the street corners.
Nocturnal child employment is a social abomination. I gathered stories
of juvenile vice, of lads of nine and ten suffering from terrible
diseases, of the contingent sent by these messengers to the hospitals
and jails. I began to realize another aspect of that great theory
of the liberty of property and the subordination of the state to
business, upon which American institutions are based. That theory has
no regard for children. Indeed, it is a theory that disregards women
and children, the cardinal facts of life altogether. They are private
things....
It is curious how little we, who live in the dawning light of a new
time, question the intellectual assumptions of the social order about
us. We find ourselves in a life of huge confusions and many cruelties,
we plan this and that to remedy and improve, but very few of us go down
to the ideas that begot these ugly conditions, the laws, the usages
and liberties that are now in their detailed expansion so perplexing,
intricate, and overwhelming. Yet the life of man is altogether made up
of will cast into the mould of ideas, and only by correcting ideas,
changing ideas and replacing ideas are any ameliorations and advances
to be achieved in human destiny. All other things are subordinate to
that.
Now the theory of liberty upon which the liberalism of Great Britain,
the Constitution of the United States, and the bourgeois Republic of
France rests, assumes that all men are free and equal. They are all
tacitly supposed to be adult and immortal, they are sovereign over
their property and over their wives and children, and everything is
framed with a view to insuring them security in the enjoyment of
their rights. No doubt this was a better theory than that of the
divine right of kings, against which it did triumphant battle, but it
does, as one sees it to-day, fall most extraordinarily short of the
truth, and only a few logical fanatics have ever tried to carry it
out to its complete consequences. For example, it ignored the facts
that more than half of the adult people in a country are women, and
that all the men and women of a country taken together are hardly as
numerous and far less important to the welfare of that country than
the individuals under age. It regarded living as just living, a stupid
dead level of egotistical effort and enjoyment; it was blind to the
fact that living is part growing, part learning, part dying to make way
and altogether service and sacrifice. It asserted that the care and
education of children, and business bargains affecting the employment
and welfare of women and children, are private affairs. It resisted the
compulsory education of children and factory legislation, therefore,
with extraordinary persistence and bitterness. The commonsense of
the three great progressive nations concerned has been stronger
than their theory, but to this day enormous social evils are to be
traced to that passionate jealousy of state intervention between a
man and his wife, his children, and other property, which is the
distinctive unprecedented feature of the originally middle-class modern
organization of society upon commercial and industrial conceptions in
which we are all (and America most deeply) living.
I began with a drowsy little messenger-boy in the New York Subway.
Before I had done with the question I had come upon amazing things.
Just think of it! This richest, greatest country the world has ever
seen has over 1,700,000 children under fifteen years of age toiling
in fields, factories, mines, and workshops. And Robert Hunter--whose
_Poverty_, if I were autocrat, should be compulsory reading for every
prosperous adult in the United States, tells me of "not less than
eighty thousand children, most of whom are little girls, at present
employed in the textile mills of this country. In the South there are
now six times as many children at work as there were twenty years ago.
Child labor is increasing yearly in that section of the country. Each
year more little ones are brought in from the fields and hills to live
in the degrading atmosphere of the mill towns."...
Children are deliberately imported by the Italians. I gathered from
Commissioner Watchorn at Ellis Island that the proportion of little
nephews and nieces, friends' sons, and so forth, brought in by them is
peculiarly high, and I heard him try and condemn a doubtful case. It
was a particularly unattractive Italian in charge of a dull-eyed little
boy of no ascertainable relationship....
In the worst days of cotton-milling in England the conditions were
hardly worse than those now existing in the South. Children, the
tiniest and frailest, of five and six years of age, rise in the morning
and, like old men and women, go to the mills to do their day's labor;
and when they return home, "wearily fling themselves on their beds, too
tired to take off their clothes." Many children work all night--"in
the maddening racket of the machinery, in an atmosphere unsanitary and
clouded with humidity and lint."
"It will be long," adds Mr. Hunter, in his description, "before I
forget the face of a little boy of six years, with his hands stretched
forward to rearrange a bit of machinery, his pallid face and spare form
already showing the physical effects of labor. This child, six years of
age, was working twelve hours a day."
From Mr. Spargo's _Bitter Cry of the Children_ I learn this much of the
joys of certain among the youth of Pennsylvania:
[Illustration: BREAKER BOYS AT A PENNSYLVANIA COLLIERY]
"For ten or eleven hours a day children of ten and eleven stoop
over the chute and pick out the slate and other impurities from the
coal as it moves past them. The air is black with coal-dust, and
the roar of the crushers, screens, and rushing mill-race of coal is
deafening. Sometimes one of the children falls into the machinery
and is terribly mangled, or slips into the chute and is smothered to
death. Many children are killed in this way. Many others, after a
time, contract coal-miners' asthma and consumption, which gradually
undermine their health. Breathing continually day after day the clouds
of coal-dust, their lungs become black and choked with small particles
of anthracite."...
In Massachusetts, at Fall River, the Hon. J.F. Carey tells us how
little naked boys, free Americans, work for Mr. Borden, the New York
millionaire, packing cloth into bleaching vats in a bath of chemicals
that bleaches their little bodies like the bodies of lepers....
Well, we English have no right to condemn the Americans for these
things. The history of our own industrial development is black with the
blood of tortured and murdered children. America still has the factory
serfs. New Jersey sends her pauper children south to-day into worse
than slavery, but, as Cottle tells in his reminiscences of Southey and
Coleridge, that is precisely the same wretched export Bristol packed
off to feed the mills of Manchester in late Georgian times. We got
ahead with factory legislation by no peculiar virtue in our statecraft,
it was just the revenge the landlords took upon the manufacturers for
reform and free trade in corn and food. In America the manufacturers
have had things to themselves.
And America has difficulties to encounter of which we know nothing. In
the matter of labor legislation each State legislature is supreme; in
each separate State the forces of light and progress must fight the
battle of the children and the future over again against interests,
lies, prejudice and stupidity. Each State pleads the bad example
of another State, and there is always the threat that capital will
withdraw. No national minimum is possible under existing conditions.
And when the laws have passed there is still the universal contempt
for State control to reckon with, the impossibilities of enforcement.
Illinois, for instance, scandalized at the spectacle of children in
those filthy stock-yards, ankle-deep in blood, cleaning intestines
and trimming meat, recently passed a child-labor law that raised the
minimum age for such employment to sixteen, but evasion, they told
me in Chicago, was simple and easy. New York, too, can show by its
statute-books that my drowsy nocturnal messenger-boy was illegal and
impossible....
This is the bottomest end of the scale that at the top has all the
lavish spending of Fifth Avenue, the joyous wanton giving of Mr. Andrew
Carnegie. Equally with these things it is an unpremeditated consequence
of an inadequate theory of freedom. The foolish extravagances of the
rich, the architectural pathos of Newport, the dingy, noisy, economic
jumble of central and south Chicago, the Standard Oil offices in
Broadway, the darkened streets beneath New York's elevated railroad,
the littered ugliness of Niagara's banks, and the lower-most hell
of child suffering are all so many accordant aspects and inexorable
consequences of the same undisciplined way of living. Let each man push
for himself--it comes to these things....
So far as our purpose of casting a horoscope goes we have particularly
to note this as affecting the future; these working children
cannot be learning to read--though they will presently be having
votes--they cannot grow up fit to bear arms, to be in any sense but
a vile computing sweater's sense, men. So miserably they will avenge
themselves by supplying the stuff for vice, for crime, for yet more
criminal and political manipulations. One million seven hundred
children, practically uneducated, are toiling over here, and growing
up, darkened, marred, and dangerous, into the American future I am
seeking to forecast.