PERRY, A NEW YORK MILL TOWN
No place in America could have afforded better than Pittsburg a chance
to study the factory life of American girls, the stimulus of a new
country upon the labourers of old races, the fervour and energy of a
people animated by hope and stirred to activity by the boundless
opportunities for making money. It is the labourers' city _par
excellence_; and in my preceding chapters I have tried to give a clear
picture of factory life between the hours of seven and six, of the
economic conditions, of the natural social and legal equipment of woman
as a working entity, of her physical, moral and esthetic development.
Now, since the time ticked out between the morning summoning whistle to
that which gives release at night is not half the day, and only
two-thirds of the working hours, my second purpose has been to find a
place where the factory girl's own life could best be studied: her
domestic, religious and sentimental life.
Somewhere in the western part of New York State, one of my comrades at
the pickle works had told me, there was a town whose population was
chiefly composed of mill-hands. The name of the place was Perry, and I
decided upon it as offering the typical American civilization among the
working classes. New England is too free of grafts to give more than a
single aspect; Pittsburg is an international bazaar; but the foundations
of Perry are laid with bricks from all parts of the world, held together
by a strong American cement.
Ignorant of Perry further than as it exists, a black spot on a branch of
a small road near Buffalo, I set out from New York toward my destination
on the Empire State Express. There was barely time to descend with my
baggage at Rochester before the engine had started onward again,
trailing behind it with world-renowned rapidity its freight of travelers
who, for a few hours under the car's roof, are united by no other common
interest than that of journeying quickly from one spot to another, where
they disperse never to meet again. My Perry train had an altogether
different character. I was late for it, but the brakeman saw me coming
and waved to the engineer not to start until my trunk was checked and
safely boarded like myself. Then we bumped our way through meadows
quickened to life by the soft spring air; we halted at crossroads to
pick up stray travelers and shoppers; we unloaded plowing machines and
shipped crates of live fowl; we waited at wayside stations with
high-sounding names for family parties whose unpunctuality was
indulgently considered by the occupants of the train.
My companions, chiefly women, were of the homely American type whose New
England drawl has been modified by a mingling of foreign accents. They
took advantage of this time for "visiting" with neighbours whom the
winter snows and illnesses had rendered inaccessible. Their inquiries
for each other were all kindliness and sympathy, and the peaceful,
tolerant, uneventful way in which we journeyed from Rochester to Perry
was a symbol of the way in which these good people had journeyed across
life. Perry, the terminus of the line, was a frame station lodged on
stilts in a sea of surrounding mud. When the engine had come to a
standstill and ceased to pant, when the last truck had been unloaded,
the baggage room closed, there were no noises to be heard except those
that came from a neighbouring country upon whose peace the small town
had not far encroached; the splash of a horse and buggy through the mud,
a monotonous voice mingling with the steady tick of the telegraph
machine, some distant barnyard chatter, and the mysterious, invisible
stir of spring shaking out upon the air damp sweet odours calling the
earth to colour and life. Descending the staircase which connected the
railroad station with the hill road on which it was perched, I joined a
man who was swinging along in rubber boots, with several farming tools,
rakes and hoes, slung over his shoulder. A repugnance I had felt in
resuming my toil-worn clothes had led me to make certain modifications
which I feared in so small a town as Perry might relegate me to the
class I had voluntarily abandoned. The man in rubber boots looked me
over as I approached, bag in hand, and to my salutation he replied:
"Going down to the mill, I suppose. There's lots o' ladies comes in the
train every day now."
He was the perfection of tact; he placed me in one sentence as a
mill-hand and a lady.
"I'll take you down as far as Main Street," he volunteered, giving me at
once a feeling of kindly interest which "city folks" have not time to
show.
We found our way by improvised crossings through broad, soft beds of
mud. Among the branches of the sap-fed trees which lined the unpaved
streets transparent balls of glass were suspended, from which, as
twilight deepened, a brilliant artificial light shot its rays, the
perfection of modern invention, over the primitive, unfinished little
town of Perry, which was all contrast and energy, crudity and progress.
"There's a lot of the girls left the mill yesterday," my companion
volunteered. "They cut the wages, and some of the oldest hands got right
out. There's more than a thousand of 'em on the pay-roll, but I guess
you can make good money if you're ready to work."
We had reached Main Street, which, owing to the absence of a trolley,
had retained a certain individuality. The rivers of mud broadened out
into a sea, flanked by a double row of two-story, flat-roofed frame
stores, whose monotony was interrupted by a hotel and a town hall. My
guide stopped at a corner butcher shop. Its signboard was a couple of
mild-eyed animals hanging head downward, presented informally, with
their skins untouched, and having more the appearance of some
ill-treated pets than future beef and bouillon for the Perry population.
"Follow the boardwalk!" was the simple command I received. "Keep right
along until you come to the mill."
I presently fell in with a drayman, who was calling alternately to his
horse as it sucked in and out of the mud and to a woman on the plank
walk. She had on a hat with velvet and ostrich plumes, a black frock, a
side bag with a lace handkerchief. She was not young and she wore
spectacles; but there was something nervous about her step, a slight
tremolo as she responded to the drayman, which suggested an adventure or
the hope of it. The boardwalk, leading inevitably to the mill, announced
our common purpose and saved us an introduction.
"Going down to get work?" was the question we simultaneously asked of
each other. My companion, all eagerness, shook out the lace
handkerchief in her side bag and explained:
"I don't have to work; my folks keep a hotel; but I always heard so much
about Perry I thought I'd like to come up, and," she sighed, with a
flirt of the lace handkerchief and a contented glance around at the rows
of white frame houses, "I'm up now."
"Want board?" the drayman called to me. "You kin count on me for a good
place. There's Doctor Meadows, now; he's got a nice home and he just
wants two boarders."
The middle-aged woman with the glasses glanced up quickly.
"Doctor Meadows of Tittihute?" she asked. "I wont go there; he's too
strict. He's a Methodist minister. You couldn't have any fun at all."
I followed suit, denouncing Doctor Killjoy as she had, hoping that her
nervous, frisky step would lead me toward the adventure she was
evidently seeking.
"Well," the drayman responded indulgently, "I guess Mr. Norse will know
the best place for you folks."
We had come at once to the factory and the end of the boardwalk. It was
but a few minutes before Mr. Norse had revealed himself as the pivot,
the human hub, the magnet around which the mechanism of the mill
revolved and clung, sure of finding its proper balance. Tall, lank and
meager, with a wrinkled face and a furtive mustache, Mr. Norse made his
rounds with a list of complaints and comments in one hand, a pencil in
the other and a black cap on his head which tipped, indulgent, attentive
to hear and overhear. His manner was professional. He looked at us,
placed us, told us to return at one o'clock, recommended a
boarding-house, and, on his way to some other case, sent a small boy to
accompany us on future stretches of boardwalk to our lodgings. The
street we followed ended in a rolling hillside, and beyond was the
mysterious blue that holds something of the infinite in its mingling of
clouds and shadows. The Geneseo Valley lay near us like a lake under the
sky, and silhouetted against it were the factory chimney and buildings.
The wood's edge came close to the town, whose yards prolong themselves
into green meadows and farming lands. We knocked at a rusty screen door
and were welcomed with the cordiality of the country woman to whom all
folks are neighbours, all strangers possible boarders. The house, built
without mantelpiece or chimney, atoned for this cheerlessness with a
large parlour stove, whose black arms carried warmth through floor and
ceiling. A table was spread in the dining-room. A loud-ticking clock
with a rusty bell marked the hour from a shelf on the wall, and out of
the kitchen, seen in vista, came a spluttering sound of frying food. Our
hostess took us into the parlour. Several family pictures of stony-eyed
women and men with chin beards, and a life-sized Frances Willard in
chromo, looked down at our ensuing interview.
Board, lodging, heat and light we could have at $2.75 a week. Before the
husky clock had struck twelve, I was installed in a small room with the
middle-aged woman from Batavia and a second unknown roommate.
Now what, I asked myself, is the mill's attraction and what is the power
of this small town? Its population is 3,346. Of these, 1,000 work in the
knitting-mill, 200 more in a cutlery factory and 300 in various flour,
butter, barrel, planing mills and salt blocks. Half the inhabitants are
young hands. Not one in a hundred has a home in Perry; they have come
from all western parts of the State to work. There are scarcely any
children, few married couples and almost no old people. It is a town of
youthful contemporaries, stung with the American's ambition for
independence and adventure, charmed by the gaiety of being boys and
girls together, with an ever possible touch of romance which makes the
hardest work seem easy. Within the four board walls of each house, whose
type is repeated up and down Perry streets, there is a group of factory
employees boarding and working at the mill. Their names suggest a
foreign parentage, but for several generations they have mingled their
diverse energies in a common effort which makes Americans of them.
As I lived for several weeks among a group of this kind, who were
fairly representative, I shall try to give, through a description of
their life and conversation, their personalities and characteristics,
their occupations out of working hours, a general idea of these unknown
toilers, who are so amazingly like their more fortunate sisters that I
became convinced the difference is only superficial--not one of kind but
merely of variety. The Perry factory girl is separated from the New York
society girl, not by a few generations, but by a few years of culture
and training. In America, where tradition and family play an unimportant
part, the great educator is the spending of money. It is through the
purchase of possessions that the Americans develop their taste, declare
themselves, and show their inherent capacity for culture. Give to the
Perry mill-hands a free chance for growth, transplant them, care for
them, and they will readily show how slight and how merely a thing of
culture the difference is between the wild rose and the American beauty.
What were my first impressions of the hands who returned at noon under
the roof which had extended unquestioning its hospitality? Were they a
band of slaves, victims to toil and deprivation? Were they making the
pitiful exchange of their total vitality for insufficient nourishment?
Did life mean to them merely the diminishing of their forces?
On the contrary, they entered gay, laughing young, a youth guarded
intact by freedom and hope. What were the subjects of conversation
pursued at dinner? Love, labour, the price paid for it, the advantages
of town over country life, the neighbour and her conduct. What was the
appearance of my companions? There was nothing in it to shock good
taste. Their hands and feet were somewhat broadened by work, their skins
were imperfect for the lack of proper food, their dresses were of coarse
material; but in small things the differences were superficial only. Was
it, then, in big things that the divergence began which places them as a
lower class? Was it money alone that kept them from the places of
authority? What were their ambitions, their perplexities? What part does
self-respect play? How well satisfied are they, or how restless? What
can we learn from them? What can we teach them?
We ate our dinner of boiled meat and custard pie and all started back in
good time for a one o'clock beginning at the mill. For the space of
several hundred feet its expressionless red brick walls lined the
street, implacable, silent. Within all hummed to the collective activity
of a throng, each working with all his force for a common end. Machines
roared and pounded; a fine dust filled the air--a cloud of lint sent
forth from the friction of thousands of busy hands in perpetual contact
with the shapeless anonymous garments they were fashioning. There were,
on their way between the cutting-and the finishing-rooms, 7,000 dozen
shirts. They were to pass by innumerable hands; they were to be held and
touched by innumerable individuals; they were to be begun and finished
by innumerable human beings with distinct tastes and likings, abilities
and failings; and when the 7,000 dozen shirts were complete they were to
look alike, and they were to look as though made by a machine; they were
to show no trace whatever of the men and the women who had made them.
Here we were, 1,000 souls hurrying from morning until night, working
from seven until six, with as little personality as we could, with the
effort to produce, through an action purely mechanical, results as
nearly as possible identical one to the other, and all to the machine
itself.
[Illustration: "THEY TRIFLE WITH LOVE"]
What could be the result upon the mind and health of this frantic
mechanical activity devoid of thought? It was this for which I sought an
answer; it is for this I propose a remedy.
At the threshold of the mill door my roommate and I encountered Mr.
Norse. There was irony in the fates allotted us. She was eager to make
money; I was indifferent. Mr. Norse felt her in his power; I felt him in
mine. She was given a job at twenty-five cents a day and all she could
make; I was offered the favourite work in the mill--shirt finishing, at
thirty cents a day and all I could make; and when I shook my head to see
how far I could exploit my indifference and said, "Thirty cents is too
little," Mr. Norse's answer was: "Well, I suppose you, like the rest of
us, are trying to earn a living. I will guarantee you seventy-five cents
a day for the first two weeks, and all you can make over it is yours."
My apprenticeship began under the guidance of an "old girl" who had been
five years in the mill. A dozen at a time the woolen shirts were brought
to us, complete all but the adding of the linen strips in front where
the buttons and buttonholes are stitched. The price of this operation is
paid for the dozen shirts five, five and a half and six cents, according
to the complexity of the finish. My instructress had done as many as
forty dozen in one day; she averaged $1.75 a day all the year around.
While she was teaching me the factory paid her at the rate of ten cents
an hour.
A touch of the machine's pedal set the needle to stitching like mad. A
second touch in the opposite direction brought it to an abrupt
standstill. For the five hours of my first afternoon session there was
not an instant's harmony between what I did and what I intended to do. I
sewed frantically into the middle of shirts. I watched my needle,
impotent as it flew up and down, and when by chance I made a straight
seam I brought it to so sudden a stop that the thread raveled back
before my weary eyes. When my back and fingers ached so that I could no
longer bend over the work, I watched my comrades with amazement. The
machine was not a wild animal in their hands, but an instrument that
responded with niceness to their guidance. Above the incessant roar and
burring din they called gaily to each other, gossiping, chatting,
telling stories. What did they talk about? Everything, except domestic
cares. The management of an interior, housekeeping, cooking were things
I never once heard mentioned. What were the favourite topics, those
returned to most frequently and with surest interest? Dress and men. Two
girls in the seaming-room had got into a quarrel that day over a packer,
a fine looking, broad-shouldered fellow who had touched the hearts of
both and awakened in each an emotion she claimed the right to defend.
The quarrel began lightly with an exchange of unpleasant comment; it
soon took the proportions of a dispute which could not give itself the
desired vent in words alone. The boss was called in. He made no attempt
to control what lay beyond his power, but applying factory legislation
to the case, he ordered the two Amazons to "register out" until the
squabble was settled, as the factory did not propose to pay its hands
for the time spent in fights. So the two girls "rang out" past the
timekeeper and took an hour in the open air, hand to hand, fist to fist,
which, as it happens to man, had its calming effect.
We stitched our way industriously over the 7,000 dozen. Except for the
moments when some girl called a message or shouted a conversation,
there was nothing to occupy the mind but the vibrating, pulsing,
pounding of the machinery. The body was shaken with it; the ears
strained.
The little girl opposite me was a new hand. Her rosy cheeks and straight
shoulders announced this fact. She had been five months in the mill; the
other girls around her had been there two years, five years, nine years.
There were 150 of us at the long, narrow tables which filled the room.
By the windows the light and air were fairly good. At the centre tables
the atmosphere was stagnant, the shadows came too soon. The wood's edge
ran within a few yards of the factory windows. Between it and us lay the
stream, the water force, the power that had called men to Perry. There,
as everywhere in America, for an individual as for a place, the
attraction was industrial possibilities. As Niagara has become more an
industrial than a picturesque landscape, so Perry, in spite of its
serene and beautiful surroundings, is a shrine to mechanical force in
whose temple, the tall-chimneyed mill, a human sacrifice is made to the
worshipers of gain.
My _vis-à-vis_ was talkative. "Say," she said to her neighbour, "Jim
Weston is the worst flirt I ever seen."
"Who's Jim Weston?" the other responded, diving into the box by her side
for a handful of gray woolen shirts.
"Why, he's the one who made my teeth--he made teeth for all of us up
home," and her smile reveals the handiwork of Weston.
"If I had false teeth," is the comment made upon this, "I wouldn't tell
anybody."
"I thought some," continues the implacable new girl, unruffled, "of
having a gold filling put in one of my front teeth. I think gold
fillings are so pretty," she concludes, looking toward me for a
response.
This primitive love of ornament I found manifest in the same
medico-barbaric fancy for wearing eye-glasses. The nicety of certain
operations in the mill, performed not always in the brightest of lights,
is a fatal strain upon the eyes. There are no oculists in Perry, but a
Buffalo member of the profession makes a monthly visit to treat a new
harvest of patients. Their daily effort toward the monthly finishing of
40,000 garments permanently diminishes their powers of vision. Every
thirty days a new set of girls appears with glasses. They wear them as
they would an ornament of some kind, a necklace, bracelet or a hoop
through the nose.
When the six o'clock whistle blew on the first night I had finished only
two dozen shirts. "You've got a good job," my teacher said, as we came
out together in the cool evening air. "You seem to be taking to it."
They size a girl up the minute she comes in. If she has quick motions
she'll get on all right. "I guess you'll make a good finisher."
Once more we assembled to eat and chat and relax. After a moment by the
kitchen pump we took our places at table. Our hostess waited upon us.
"It takes some grit," she explained, "and more grace to keep boarders."
Except on Sundays, when all men might be considered equals in the sight
of the Lord, she and her husband did not eat until we had finished. She
passed the dishes of our frugal evening meal--potatoes, bread and butter
and cake--and as we served ourselves she held her head in the opposite
direction, as if to say, "I'm not looking; take the biggest piece."
It was with my roommates I became the soonest acquainted. The butcher's
widow from Batavia was a grumbler. "How do you like your job?" I asked
her as we fumbled about in the dim light of our low-roofed room.
"Oh, Lordy," was the answer, "I didn't think it would be like this. I'd
rather do housework any day. I bet you won't stay two weeks." She was
ugly and stupid. She had been married young to a butcher. Left alone to
battle with the world, she might have shaken out some of her dullness,
but the butcher for many years had stood between her and reality,
casting a still deeper shadow on her ignorance. She had the monotony of
an old child, one who questions constantly but who has passed the age
when learning is possible. The butcher's death had opened new
possibilities. After a period of respectful mourning, she had set out,
against the wishes of her family, with a vague, romantic hope that was
expressed not so much in words as in a certain picture hat trimmed with
violet chiffon and carried carefully in a bandbox by itself, a new,
crisp sateen petticoat, and a golf skirt she had sat up until one
o'clock to finish the night before she left home. It was inevitable that
the butcher's widow should be disappointed. There was too much grim
reality in ten-hour days spent over a machine in the stifling mill room
to feed a sentimentalist whose thirty odd years were no accomplice to
romance. She grumbled and complained. Secret dissatisfaction preyed upon
her. She was somewhat exasperated at the rest of us, who worked cheerily
and with no _arrière pensée_. At the end of the first week the picture
hat was tucked away in the bandbox; the frou-frou of the sateen
petticoat and the daring swish of the golf skirt were packed up, like
the remains of a bubble that had reflected the world in its brilliant
sides one moment and the next lay a little heap of soap-suds. She had
gone behind in her work steadily at the factory; she was not making more
than sixty cents a day. She left us and went back to do housework in
Batavia.
My other roommate was of the Madonna type. In our class she would have
been called an invalid. Her hands trembled, she was constantly in pain,
and her nerves were rebellious without frequent doses of bromide. We
found her one night lying in a heap on the bed, her moans having called
us to her aid. It was the pain in her back that never stopped, the ache
between her shoulders, the din of the machines in her ears, the
vibration, the strain of incessant hours upon her tired nerves. We fixed
her up as best we could, and the next day at quarter before seven she
was, like the rest of us, bending over her machine again. She had been a
school-teacher, after passing the necessary examination at the Geneseo
Normal School. She could not say why school-teaching was uncongenial to
her, except that the children "made her nervous" and she wanted to try
factory work. Her father was a cheese manufacturer up in the Genesee
Valley. She might have lived quietly at home, but she disliked to be a
dependent. She was of the mystic, sentimental type. She had a broad
forehead, straight auburn hair, a clear-cut mouth, whose sharp curves
gave it sweetness. Though her large frame indicated clearly an
Anglo-Saxon lineage, there was nothing of the sport about her. She had
never learned to skate or swim, but she could sit and watch the hills
all day long. Her clothes had an esthetic touch. Mingled with her
nervous determination there was a sentimental yearning. She was an
idealist, impelled by some controlling emotion which was the mainspring
of her life.
Little by little we became friends. Our common weariness brought us
often together after supper in a listless, confidential mood before the
parlour stove. We let the conversation drift inevitably toward the
strong current that was marking her with a touch of melancholy, like all
those of her type whose emotional natures are an enchanted mirror,
reflecting visions that have no place in reality. We talked about
blondes and brunettes, tall men and short men, our favourite man's name;
and gradually the impersonal became personal, the ideal took form. Her
voice, like a broken lute that might have given sweet sounds, related
the story. It was inevitable that she should love a dreamer like
herself. Nature had imbued her with a hopeless yearning. She slipped a
gold locket from a chain on her throat. It framed her hero's picture,
the source of her courage, the embodiment of her heroic energy: a man of
thirty, who had failed at everything; good-looking, refined, a personage
in real life who resembled the inhabitants of her enchanted mirror. In
the story she told there were stars and twilight, summer evenings,
walks, talks, hopes and vague projects. Any practical questions I felt
ready to ask would have sounded coarse. The little school-teacher with
shattered nerves embodied a hope that was more to her than meat and
drink and money. She was of those who do not live by bread alone.
Among the working population of Perry there are all manner of American
characteristics manifest. In a country where conditions change with
such rapidity that each generation is a revelation to the one which
preceded it, it is inevitable that the family and the State should be
secondary to the individual. We live with our own generation, with our
contemporaries. We substitute experience for tradition. Each generation
lives for itself during its prime. As soon as its powers begin to
decline it makes way with resignation for the next: "We have had our
day; now you can have yours." Thus in the important decisions of life,
the choosing of a career, matrimony or the like, the average American is
much more influenced by his contemporaries than by his elders, much more
stimulated or determined by the friends of his own age than by the older
members of his family. This detaching of generations through the
evolution of conditions is inevitable in a new civilization; it is part
of the country's freedom. It adds fervour and zest and originality to
the effort of each. But it means a youth without the peace of
protection; an old age without the harvest of consolation. The man in
such a battle as life becomes under these circumstances is better
equipped than the woman, whose nature disarms her for the struggle. The
American woman is restless, dissatisfied. Society, whether among the
highest or lowest classes, has driven her toward a destiny that is not
normal. The factories are full of old maids; the colleges are full of
old maids; the ballrooms in the worldly centres are full of old maids.
For natural obligations are substituted the fictitious duties of clubs,
meetings, committees, organizations, professions, a thousand unwomanly
occupations.
I cannot attempt to touch here upon the classes who have not a direct
bearing on our subject, but the analogy is striking between them and
the factory elements of which I wish to speak. I cannot dwell upon
details that, while full of interest, are yet somewhat aside from the
present point, but I want to state a fact, the origin of whose ugly
consequences is in all classes and therefore concerns every living
American woman. Among the American born women of this country the
sterility is greater, the fecundity less than those of any other
nation in the world, unless it be France, whose anxiety regarding her
depopulation we would share in full measure were it not for the
foreign immigration to the United States, which counteracts the
degeneracy of the American.[1] The original causes for this increasing
sterility are moral and not physical. When this is known, does not the
philosophy of the American working woman become a subject of vital
interest? Among the enemies to fecundity and a natural destiny there
are two which act as potently in the lower as in the upper classes:
the triumph of individualism, the love of luxury. America is not a
democracy, the unity of effort between the man and the woman does not
exist. Men were too long in a majority. Women have become autocrats or
rivals. A phrase which I heard often repeated at the factory speaks by
itself for a condition: "She must be married, because she don't work."
And another phrase pronounced repeatedly by the younger girls: "I
don't have to work; my father gives me all the money I need, but not
all the money I _want_. I like to be independent and spend my money as
I please."
[Footnote 1: George Engelman, M.D., "The Increasing Sterility of
American Women," from the Journal of the American Medical
Association, October 5, 1901.]
What are the conclusions to be drawn? The American-born girl is an
egoist. Her whole effort (and she makes and sustains one in the life of
mill drudgery) is for herself. She works for luxury until the day when a
proper husband presents himself. Then, she stops working and lets him
toil for both, with the hope that the budget shall not be diminished by
increasing family demands.
In those cases where the woman continues to work after marriage, she
chooses invariably a kind of occupation which is inconsistent with
child-bearing. She returns to the mill with her husband. There were a
number of married couples at the knitting factory at Perry. They
boarded, like the rest of us. I never saw a baby nor heard of a baby
while I was in the town.
I can think of no better way to present this love of luxury, this
triumph of individualism, this passion for independence than to
continue my account of the daily life at Perry.
On Saturday night we drew our pay and got out at half-past four. This
extra hour and a half was not given to us; we had saved it up by
beginning each day at fifteen minutes before seven. In reality we worked
ten and a quarter hours five days in the week in order to work eight and
a half on the sixth.
By five o'clock on Saturdays the village street was animated with
shoppers--the stores were crowded. At supper each girl had a collection
of purchases to show: stockings, lace, fancy buckles, velvet ribbons,
elaborate hairpins. Many of them, when their board was paid, had less
than a dollar left of the five or six it had taken them a week to earn.
"I am not working to save," was the claim of one girl for all. "I'm
working for pleasure."
This same girl called me into her room one evening when she was packing
to move to another boarding-house where were more young men and better
food. I watched her as she put her things into the trunk. She had a
quantity of dresses, underclothes with lace and tucks, ribbons, fancy
hair ornaments, lace boleros, handkerchiefs. The bottom of her trunk was
full of letters from her beau. The mail was always the source of great
excitement for her, and having noticed that she seemed especially
hilarious over a letter received that night, I made this the pretext for
a confidence.
"You got a letter to-night, didn't you?" I asked innocently. "Was it
the one you wanted?"
"My, yes," she answered, tossing up a heap of missives from the depths
of her trunk. "It was from the same one that wrote me these. I've been
going with him three years. I met him up in the grape country where I
went to pick grapes. They give you your board and you can make
twenty-seven or thirty dollars in a fall. He made up his mind as soon as
he saw me that I was about right. Now he wants me to marry him. That's
what his letter said to-night. He is making three dollars a day and he
owns a farm and a horse and wagon. He bought his sister a $300 piano
this fall."
"Well, of course," I said eagerly, "you will accept him?"
She looked half shy, half pleased, half surprised.
"No, my! no," she answered, shaking her head. "I don't want to be
married."
"But why not? Don't you think you are foolish? It's a good chance and
you have already been 'going with him' three years."
"Yes, I know that, but I ain't ready to marry him yet. Twenty-five is
time enough. I'm only twenty-three. I can have a good time just as I am.
He didn't want me to come away and neither did my parents. I thought it
would 'most kill my father. He looked like he'd been sick the day I
left, but he let me come 'cause he knew I'd never be satisfied until I
got my independence."
What part did the love of humanity play in this young egoist's heart?
She was living, as she had so well explained it, "not to save, but to
give herself pleasure"; not to spare others, but to exercise her will in
spite of them. Tenderness, reverence, gratitude, protection are the
feelings which one generation awakens for another. Among the thousand
contemporaries at Perry, from the sameness of their ambitions, there was
inevitable rivalry and selfishness. The closer the age and capacity the
keener the struggle.
[Illustration: AFTER SATURDAY NIGHT'S SHOPPING]
There are seven churches in Perry of seven different denominations. In
this small town of 3,000 inhabitants there are seven different forms of
worship. The church plays an important part in the social life of the
mill hands. There are gatherings of all sorts from one Sunday to
another, and on Sunday there are almost continuous services. There are
frequent conversions. When the Presbyterian form fails they "try" the
Baptist. There is no moral instruction; it is all purely religious; and
they join one church or another more as they would a social club than an
ordained religious organization.
Friday was "social" night at the church. Sometimes there was a "poverty"
social, when every one put on shabby clothes, and any one who wore a
correct garment of any sort was fined for the benefit of the church.
Pound socials were another variety of diversion, where all the
attendants were weighed on arriving and charged a cent admission for
every pound of avoirdupois.
The most popular socials, however, were box socials, and it was to one
of these I decided to go with two girls boarding in the house. Each of
us packed a box with lunch as good as we could afford--eggs, sandwiches,
cakes, pickles, oranges--and arrived with these, we proceeded to the
vestry-room, where we found an improvised auctioneer's table and a pile
of boxes like our own, which were marked and presently put up for sale.
The youths of the party bid cautiously or recklessly, according as their
inward conviction told them that the box was packed by friend or foe.
My box, which, like the rest, had supper for two, was bid in by a tall,
nice-looking mill hand, and we installed ourselves in a corner to eat
and talk. He was full of reminiscence and had had a checkered career.
His first experience had been at night work in a paper mill. He worked
eleven hours a night one week, thirteen hours a night the next week, in
and out of doors, drenched to the skin. He had lost twenty-five pounds
in less than a year, and his face was a mere mask drawn over the
irregular bones of the skull.
"I always like whatever I am doing," he responded at my protestation of
sympathy. "I think that's the only way to be. I never had much appetite
at night. They packed me an elegant pail, but somehow all cold food
didn't relish much. I never did like a pail.... How would you like to
take a dead man's place?" he asked, looking at me grimly.
I begged him to explain.
"One of my best friends," he began, "was working alongside of me, and I
guess he got dizzy or something, for he leaned up against the big belt
that ran all the machinery and he was lifted right up in the air and
tore to pieces before he ever knew what struck him. The boss came in and
seen it, and the second question he asked, he says, 'Say, is the
machinery running all right?' It wasn't ten minutes before there was
another man in there doing the dead man's work."
I began to undo the lunch-box, feeling very little inclined to eat. We
divided the contents, and my friend, seeing perhaps that I was
depressed, told me about the "shows" he had been to in his wanderings.
"Now, I don't care as much for comedy as some folks," he explained. "I
like 'Puddin' Head Wilson' first rate, but the finest thing I ever seen
was two of Shakespeare's: 'The Merchant of Venice' and 'Julius Cæsar.'
If you ever get a chance I advise you to go and hear them; they're
great."
I responded cordially, and when we had exhausted Shakespeare I asked
him how he liked Perry people.
"Oh, first rate," he said. "I've been here only a month, but I think
there's too much formality. It seems to me that when you work alongside
of a girl day after day you might speak to her without an introduction,
but they won't let you here. I never seen such a formal place."
I said very little. The boy talked on of his life and experiences. His
English was good except for certain grammatical errors. His words were
well chosen. There was between him and the fortunate boys of a superior
class only a few years of training.
The box social was the beginning of a round of gaieties. The following
night I went with my box-social friend to a ball. Neither of us danced,
but we arrived early and took good places for looking on. The barren
hall was dimly lighted. In the corner there was a stove; at one end a
stage. An old man with a chin beard was scattering sand over the floor
with a springtime gesture of seed sowing. He had his hat on and his coat
collar turned up, as though to indicate that the party had not begun. By
and by the stage curtain rolled up and the musicians came out and
unpacked a violin, a trombone, a flute and a drum. They sat down in the
Medieval street painted on the scenery back of them, crossed their legs
and asked for _sol la_ from an esthetic young lady pianist, with whom
they seemed on very familiar terms. The old man with the chin beard made
an official _entrée_ from the wing, picked up the drum and became a part
of the orchestra. The subscribers had begun to arrive, and when the
first two-step struck up there were eight or ten couples on the floor.
They held on to each other closely, with no outstretched arms as is the
usual form, and they revolved very slowly around and around the room.
The young men had smooth faces, patent leather boots, very smart cravats
and a sheepish, self-conscious look. The girls had elaborate
constructions in frizzed hair, with bows and tulle; black trailing
skirts with coloured ruffled under-petticoats, light-coloured blouses
and fancy belts. They seemed to be having a very good time.
On the way home we passed a brightly lighted grocery shop. My friend
looked in with interest. "Goodness," he said, "but those Saratoga chips
look good. Now, what would you order," he went on, "if you could have
anything you liked?" We began to compose a ménu with oysters and chicken
and all the things we never saw, but it was not long before my friend
cried "Mercy! Oh, stop; I can't stand it. It makes me too hungry."
The moon had gone under a cloud. The wooden sidewalks were rough and
irregular, and as we walked along toward home I tripped once or twice.
Presently I felt a strong arm put through mine, with this assurance:
"Now if you fall we'll both fall together."
After four or five days' experience with a machine I began to work with
more ease and with less pain between my shoulders. The girls were kind
and sympathetic, stopping to help and encourage the "new girl." One of
the shirt finishers, who had not been long in the mill herself, came
across from her table one day when I was hard at work with a pain like a
sword stab in my back.
"I know how you ache," she said. "It just makes me feel like crying when
I see how you keep at it and I can guess how tired you are."
Nothing was so fatiguing as the noise. In certain places near the eyelet
and buttonhole machines it was impossible to make one's neighbour hear
without shouting. My teacher, whose nerves, I took it, were less
sensitive than mine, expressed her sensations in this way:
"It's just terrible sitting here all day alone, worrying and thinking
all by yourself and hustling from morning until night. Lots of the girls
have nervous prostration. My sister had it and I guess I'm getting it. I
hear the noise all night. Quite a few have consumption, too, from the
dust and the lint."
The butcher's widow, the school-teacher and I started in at about the
same time. At the end of two weeks the butcher's widow had long been
gone. The school-teacher had averaged seventy-nine cents a day and I
had averaged eighty-nine. My best day I finished sixteen dozen shirts
and netted $1.11. My board and washing cost me three dollars, so that
from the first I had a living insured.
There was one negress in the factory. She worked in a corner quite by
herself and attended to menial jobs, such as sweeping and picking up
scraps. A great many of the girls and boys took correspondence courses
in stenography, drawing, bookkeeping, illustrating, etc., etc. The
purely mechanical work of the mill does not satisfy them. They are
restless and ambitious, exactly the material with which to form schools
of industrial art, the class of hand-workers of whom I have already
spoken.
One of the girls who worked beside us as usual in the morning, left a
note on her machine at noon one day to say that she would never be back.
She was going up to the lake to drown herself, and we needn't look for
her. Some one was sent in search. She was found sitting at the lake's
edge, weeping. She did not speak. We all talked about it in our leisure
moments, but the work was not interrupted. There were various
explanations: she was out of her mind; she was discouraged with her
work; she was nervous. No one suggested that an unfortunate love affair
be the cause of her desperate act. There was not a word breathed against
her reputation. I would have felt impure in proposing what to me seemed
most probable.
The mill owners exert, as far as possible, an influence over the moral
tone of their employees, assuming the right to judge their conduct both
in and out of the factory and to treat them as they see fit. The average
girls are self-respecting. They trifle with love. The attraction they
wish to exert is ever present in their minds and in their conversation.
The sacrifices they make for clothes are the first in importance. They
have superstitions of all kinds: to sneeze on Saturday means the arrival
of a beau on Sunday; a big or little tea leaf means a tall or a short
caller, and so on. There is a book of dreams kept on one table in the
mill, and the girls consult it to find the interpretation of their
nocturnal reveries. They are fanciful, sentimental, cold, passionless.
The accepted honesty of married life makes them slow to discard the
liberty they love, to dismiss the suitors who would attend their wedding
as one would a funeral.
There is, of course, another category of girl, who goes brutally into
passionate pleasures, follows the shows, drinks and knocks about town
with the boys. She is known as a "bum," has sacrificed name and
reputation and cannot remain in the mill.
We discussed one night the suitable age for a girl to become mistress of
herself. The boy of the household maintained that at eighteen a girl
could marry, but that she must be twenty-one before she could have her
own way. All the girls insisted that they could and did boss themselves
and had even before they were eighteen.
Two chums who boarded in my house gave a charming illustration of the
carelessness and the extravagance, the independence and love of it which
characterizes feminine America. One of these was a _deracinee_, a child
with a foreign touch in her twang; a legend of other climes in the
dexterity of her deft fingers; some memory of an exile from France in
her name: Lorraine. Her friend was a _mondaine_. She had the social
gift, a subtle understanding of things worldly, the _glissey mortel
n'appuyez jamais_ attitude toward life. By a touch of flippancy, an
adroit turn of mind, she kept the knowing mastery over people which has
mystified and delighted in all great hostesses since the days of Esther.
When the other girls waited feverishly for love letters, she was opening
a pile of invitations to socials and theatre parties. Discreet and
condescending, she received more than she gave.
As soon as the posters were out for a Tuesday performance of "Faust,"
preparations began in the household to attend. Saturday shopping and
supper were hurried through and by six o'clock Lorraine was at the
sewing machine tucking chiffon for hats and bodices. After ten hours'
work in the mill, she began again, eager to use the last of the spring
twilight, prolonged by a quarter moon. There was a sudden, belated gust
of snow; in the blue mist each white frame house glowed with a warm,
pink light from its parlour stove. Lorraine's fingers flew. A hat took
form and grew from a heap of stuff into a Parisian creation; a bolero
was cut and tucked and fitted; a skirt was ripped and stitched and
pressed; a shirt-waist was started and finished. For two nights the
girls worked until twelve o'clock so that when the "show" came they
might have something new to wear that nobody had seen. This must have
been the unanimous intention of the Perry populace, for the peanut
gallery was a bower of fashion. Styles, which I had thought were new in
Paris, were familiarly worn in Perry by the mill hands. White kid gloves
were _en regle_. The play was "Faust." All allusions to the triumph of
religion over the devil; all insinuations on the part of Mephistopheles
in regard to the enviable escape of Martha's husband and of husbands in
general, from prating women in general; all invocations of virtue and
moral triumph, were greeted with bursts of applause. Between the acts
there was music, and the ushers distributed showers of printed
advertisements, which the audience fell at once to reading as though
they had nothing to talk about.
I heard only one hearty comment about the play: "That devil," said
Lorraine, as we walked home together, "was a corker!"
I have left until the last the two friends who held a place apart in
the household: the farmer and his wife, the old people of another
generation with whom we boarded. They had begun life together forty
years ago. They lived on neighbouring farms. There was dissension
between the families such as we read of in "Pyramus and Thisbe," "Romeo
and Juliet." The young people contrived a means of corresponding. An old
coat that hung in the barn, where nobody saw it, served as post-office.
Truman pleaded his cause ardently and won his Louisa. They fixed a day
for the elopement. A fierce snowstorm piled high its drifts of white,
but all the afternoon long the little bride played about, burrowing a
path from the garden to her bedroom window, and when night came and
brought her mounted hero with it, she climbed up on to the saddle by his
side and rode away to happiness, leaving ill nature and quarrels far
behind. Side by side, as on the night of their wedding ride, they had
traversed forty years together. Ill health had broken up their farm
home. When Truman could no longer work they came in to Perry to take
boarders, having no children. The old man never spoke. He did chores
about the house, made the fire mornings, attended to the parlour stove;
he went about his work and no one ever addressed a word to him; he
seemed to have no more live contact with the youth about him than
driftwood has with the tree's new shoots. He had lived his life on a
farm; he was a land captain; he knew the earth's secrets as a ship's
captain knows the sea's. He paced the mild wooden pavements of Perry,
booted, and capped for storm and wind, deep snow and all the inimical
elements a pioneer might meet with. His new false teeth seemed to shine
from his shaggy gray beard as a symbol of this new town experience in a
rough natural existence, out of keeping, ill assorted. Tempted to know
what his silence hid, I spent an hour with him by the kitchen stove one
Sunday afternoon. His memory went easily back to the days when there
were no railroads, no telegraphs, no mills. He was of a speculative turn
of mind:
"I don't see," he said, "what makes men so crazy after gold. They're
getting worse all the time. Gold ain't got no real value. You take all
the gold out of the world and it wouldn't make no difference whatever.
You can't even make a tool to get a living with, out of gold; but just
do away with the iron, and where would you be?" And again, he
volunteered:
"I think Mr. Carnegie would have done a deal nobler if he had paid his
men a little more straight along. He wouldn't have had such a name for
himself. But don't you believe it would have been better to have paid
those men more for the work they were doing day by day than it is now to
give pensions to their families? I know what I think about the matter."
[Illustration: SUNDAY EVENING AT SILVER LAKE
The mill girls' excursion resort. A special train and 'busses run on
Sundays, and "everybody" goes.]
I asked him how he liked city life.
"Give me a farm every time," was his answer. "Once you've seen a town
you know it all. It's the same over and over again. But the country's
changing every day in the year. It's a terrible thing, being sick," he
went on. "It seems sometimes as though the pain would tear me to pieces
when I walk across the floor. I wasn't no good on the farm any more, so
my wife took a notion we better come in town and take boarders."
Thus it was with this happily balanced couple; as his side grew heavier
she took on more ballast and swung even with him. She had the quick
adaptability common to American women. During the years of farm life
religious meetings and a few neighbours had kept her in touch with the
outside world. The church and the kitchen were what she had on the farm;
the church and the kitchen were what she had in town; family life
supplemented by boarders, a social existence kept alive by a few
faithful neighbours. She had retained her activity and sympathy because
she was intelligent, because she lived with the _young_. The man could
not make himself one of another generation, so he lived alone. He had
lost his companions, the "cow kind and the sheep kind"; he had lost
control over the earth that belonged to him; he was disused; he
suffered; he pined. But as they sat together side by side at table, his
look toward her was one of trust and comfort. His glance traveled back
over a long vista of years seen to them as their eyes met, invisible to
those about--years that had glorified confidence in this life as it
passed and transfigured it into the promise of another life to come.
* * * * *
MAKING CLOTHING IN CHICAGO
* * * * *