"NO CAN LIVE"
I went into the employment office one day, to fix up the papers of my
transfer to the blast-furnace, and got into a talk with Burke, the
employment manager, about personnel work.
"What do you think of the game?" I asked.
"It's great," he returned; "it's working with human material--that's
what it is; there's nothing like it. But," he added, "if you have any
ideas about unions keep them in the back of your head--that is, if you
want a job in steel. They won't stand for that sort of thing."
He looked down on his desk, where there was a news-clipping of the
demands of the American Federation of Labor's Strike Committee--the
twelve demands. He pointed to it.
"We give them practically all of these here in Bouton," he said, "all
but two or three."
"The eight-hour day?" I queried.
"Yes, we give them the eight-hour day. Overtime for everything over
eight hours."
"Could I stop work to-day after eight hours' work on the furnace?" I
asked. "Could anyone before six o'clock, and hold his job?"
"Oh, no," he returned.
"I should call that a twelve-hour day," I said.
The "safety man" came in, and interrupted. He was a stocky young man
with the intelligent face of an engineer.
"That man might do something for the steel-worker," I thought.
The men on the furnaces were talking about the strike that day. One
young American said: "Well, strike starts Monday. Damned if I won't go
if the rest do."
There were no leaders about, and it was unlikely, perhaps, that any
would appear. There seemed to be a current opinion that any organizers
"get taken off the train before they get to Bouton."
The Old Home Week Carnival had been called off through the influence of
the mill authorities. They were afraid of a strike committee coming from
the next town, and having a parade to lead the men out.
A special train went through Bouton that day at about five o'clock.
Everyone watched it from the furnaces, and speculated what it meant. It
was a double-header and passed through at top speed.
"Troops going to quell strike riots," the Assistant Superintendent,
Lonergan, suggested. "A lot of those fellers are overseas men of the
National Guard. They're havin' trouble with 'em. I don't blame the boys
a damn bit for not wantin' 'to preserve order in the steel towns,' as
the papers call it," he concluded, with a grin.
Haverly, an American blower, came up. "Fight for democracy overseas and
against it over here," he said.
It is difficult to say what the men here would have done if they had had
leadership. They had none, since no organizers whatever appeared, and no
speechmaking occurred in town. There was pretty good feeling toward the
company itself, which is, I believe, one of the best. A deep-seated
hatred, however, existed against the whole system of steel. There was
anger and resentment that ran straight through, from the cinder-snapper
to the high-paid blowers, melters, and, in some cases, to the
superintendents.
I was quite amazed--because of what the newspapers were continually
saying--at the absence of any sociological ideas whatever. I remember
one day I met my first and only Socialist. He was a stove-tender of
great skill and long experience; he told me how bad he thought war was,
and how he couldn't understand why people didn't live in peace and be
sociable with one another. But, though there were few doctrines, except
in rare instances, there was a mighty stream of complaint against
certain things such as the company-owned town, the twelve-hour day, the
twenty-four-hour shift, the seven-day week, and certain remediable
dangers. It pervaded all ranks.
There were certain days in my summer in the mills that burned among the
others like a hot ingot of steel on the night-shift. One of them was the
cleaning out of No. 15 stove early in my gang apprenticeship.
Ordinarily, the duties of the stove gang were to move leisurely from
stove to stove while they were alight, and remove cinder from the
combustion chambers. It was pried up with a crowbar, and hoed out on to
a wheelbarrow. But when a stove was cooled for thorough cleaning, we did
our real work.
The gas was turned off in the combustion chamber on the night-shift, and
the stove allowed to cool for several hours. We prepared to go inside
her, the next morning, to cut away the hardened cinder. John, the Slav,
went in first, with pick and shovel, and worked an hour. Then Tony
turned to me.
"You go in with me, I show you," he said.
We put on wooden sandals, foot-shaped blocks an inch thick, with lacing
straps, donned jackets that buttoned very tight in the neck, and pulled
down the ear-flaps of our kersey caps. Over our eyes we wore
close-fitting goggles. We looked like Dutch peasants dressed for
motoring. The combustion chamber is a space eight or ten feet long by
three or four wide. It was partly filled with cooling cinder, some of it
yielding to the pick, some only to the bar and sledge. Someone shoved an
electric light through the hot-blast valve, and the appearance of the
place was like a mine gallery. The chamber was hot and gaseous, but it
was quite possible to work inside over an hour. After Tony had loosened
several shovelfuls, I could see that the pick failed against a great
shelf of the stuff that glowed red along its base.
"Bar," he called.
The bar came in through the little round door in three or four minutes.
He held it for me, and I sledged. It needed a little work like this to
make you yearn for real air. The heat weakened you quickly. We worked
about forty minutes, and then lay on our bellies and wriggled out. The
means of entrance and egress is a small door, about fourteen inches in
diameter, which means absorbing a good deal of cinder when you
caterpillar through.
We finished the whole job in three hours, and then went to the other
side of the stove and cleared out half a carload of flue-dust from the
brick arches that compose the groundwork of that side of the stove. The
dust lay a foot or two thick, and one man worked with a shovel in each
archway. Here it was hardly hot at all, but merely thick with the red
iron-dust. As you bent over inside the archways, knee-deep in the stuff,
it would rise and settle on your arms and shoulders; you kept up a
blowing with your nose to keep it out. Some of it was hard and soggy,
and pleasanter shoveling. Five or six of us could work inside the stove
at once, in the different archways, each with a teapot lamp near by, and
a large, light shovel. Men at the entrances hoed the stuff out as we
threw back.
But it was the next day's cleaning that I remember most strongly. The
word went about that we were to "poke her out," to-morrow. That night
the gang, and especially John, the Italian, instructed me very seriously
to bring a selected list of clothing the next morning: a jacket, a cap
with flaps for the ears, two pairs of gloves, and two bandanna
handkerchiefs.
We went on top of Number 15, and started to dress for the job of poking
her out. Over our faces we tied the handkerchiefs, leaving only our eyes
exposed. Our necks and ears were covered with the winter caps, our hands
with two pairs of gloves.
The stove, as I said, looked like a very tall boiler: half was a long
brick-lined flue, where the gas burned; half, a mass of brick
checkerwork for retaining the heat. Masses of flue-dust had clogged the
holes in the checkerwork and reduced its power for holding heat. It was
our job to poke out that dust.
John and Mike and I unscrewed the trap at the top very deliberately, and
dropped a ladder down. There was a space left at the top of the
checkerwork for cleaning purposes. We worked on top of that.
Jimmy, I think, went in first, taking a teapot lamp with him and a rod.
In three minutes he was out again, and Mike down. I began to wonder what
the devil they faced for three minutes in the chamber. Tony looked at me
and said, "I teach you, now."
I tied the handkerchiefs around my face, sticking the end of one in my
collar, and followed Tony.
My first sensation, as I stepped off the ladder to the checkerwork
inside the stove, was relief. It was hot, but quite bearable. I picked
my way slowly to Tony, and tried to study in the dull light his motions
with the rod. The dust was too thick and the lamp guttered too violently
for me to follow his hand. I bent over to watch the end of his rod, and
recoiled. I felt as I had when the ladle got under me on the manganese
platform--flame seemed to go in with breath. It was the hot blast that
continued to rise from the checkerwork, and made it impossible to work
beyond three minutes in the stove.
When I mounted the ladder, and moved out into the air, I thought, "I
haven't learned much from Tony, except that he somehow cleaned the
checkerwork, and it's best to keep the head high; no more bending."
Five minutes passed, and I was scheduled to take my turn alone. Every
man poked three holes and came up. I was full of resolutions for glory
and poked four, coming up rather elated. John looked at me sadly when I
stepped off the ladder.
"What's the matter, Charlie? You only poke 'em half out." He simulated
my motions with the rod. I hadn't qualified.
John, the Slav, was tying his handkerchief back of his ears.
"I show him; you come with me, Charlie, I show you all right."
I wasn't gleeful. The last time I had done a job with John, we had
carried pipes, many more at a time than anyone else. John, I
anticipated, would stay in the stove, poking away, till ordinary mortals
lost their lungs.
He picked up a poking rod, after very carefully putting on his gloves,
and went over to the ladder, descending slowly. I followed him with my
teeth in my lips, feeling for the rungs of the ladder with my feet, and
holding my poking rod in my right hand. When I stepped off at the
bottom, I felt my fingers closing over the bent handle of the rod in a
death grip. I determined on no half-way poking.
John set to work at once, and I after him, rattling my rod in the
checkerwork with all my strength, and pushing her in up to the hilt. I
did three holes, and John four. My lungs were like paper on fire, when
John turned to go up. We climbed out of the hole, and took down the
handkerchiefs. The gang looked at me, and then at John.
"He do all right," he cried rather loudly, "every time all right."
I felt extraordinarily elated, and much as if John had given me a
diploma, with a cum laude inscribed in gold letters.
There was later a trip down inside with Jimmy. He shouted a great many
things at me in Anglo-Italian, which caused me a good deal of anxiety
but no understanding. I learned on coming up that he was trying to tell
me not to approach the combustion chamber adjoining the checkerwork.
That is a clear shaft to the bottom. I was given in some detail the
story of the man who fell down a year ago, and was found with no life in
him at the bottom.
"Kill him quick," said John the Italian; "take him out through hot-blast
valve."
Two burns on my wrists were an embarrassing legacy of this affair, for
they required an explanation whenever I took off my coat. My arms were
too long and shot from my sleeves, when poking out, and got exposed to
the gas and flame, which were still rising in the checkerwork.
This incident put me into good standing with John, the Slav, I am
delighted to say. He was a stoical person, without much conversational
warmth, but he approached me at the foot of the furnace steps in the
late afternoon; "Some people, no show new man; I show him, I Slovene, no
Italian, been in this country eighteen year." That was about all, but
enough for a basis of friendship.
I sat on my bed and sewed up a rip in my trousers, eleven inches long.
It was lucky I had salvaged that khaki "housewife" from the army. My
gray flannel shirt lay on the bed. There were little holes, you could
pass matches through, all over it, with brown edges that sparks had
made.
Would that sleeve last?