I WENT with him first to Homestead, then to some tenements there, later
to some other mill districts nearer Pittsburgh, the name of which I have
forgotten. What astonished me, in so far as the steel mills were
concerned, was the large number of furnaces going at once, the piles,
mountains, of powdered iron ore ready to be smelted, the long lines of
cars, flat, box and coal cars, and the nature and size and force of the
machinery used to roll steel. The work, as he or his friends the bosses
showed me, was divided between the “front” and the “back.” Those working
at the front of the furnace took care of the molten ore and slag which
was being “puddled.” The men at the back, the stock and yard men, filled
huge steel buckets or “skips” suspended from traveling cranes with ore,
fuel and limestone, all of which was piled near at hand; this material
was then trundled to a point over the mouth of the melting-vats, as they
were called, and “released” via a movable bottom. At this particular
plant I was told that the machinery for handling all this was better
than elsewhere, the company being richer and more progressive. In some
of the less progressive concerns the men filled carts with raw material
and then trundled them around to the front of a hoist, which was at the
back of the furnace, where they were lifted and dumped into the
furnaces. But in this mill all a man had to do to fill a steel bucket
with raw material was to push one of those steel buckets suspended from
a trolley under a chute and pull a rod, when the “stock” tumbled into
it. From these it was trundled, by machinery, to a point over the
furnace. The furnaces were charged or fed constantly by feeders working
in twelve-hour shifts, so that there was little chance to rest from
their labors. Their pay was not more than half of that paid to the men
at the “front” because it was neither so hard nor so skillful, although
it looked hard enough to me.
The men at the front, the puddlers, were the labor princes of this realm
and yet among the hardest worked. A puddling or blast furnace was a
brick structure like an oven, about seven feet high and six feet square,
with two compartments, one a receptacle into which pigiron was thrown,
the other a fuel chamber where the melting heat was generated. The
drafts were so arranged that the flame swept from the fuel chamber
directly upon the surface of the iron. From five to six hundred pounds
of pigiron were put into each furnace at one time, after which it was
closed and sufficient heat applied to melt down the iron. Then the
puddler began to work it with an iron rod through a hole in the furnace
door, so as to stir up the liquid and bring it in contact with the air.
As the impurities became separated from the iron and rose to the top as
slag, they were tipped out through a center notch. As it became freer
from impurities, a constantly higher temperature was required to keep
the iron in a liquid condition. Gradually it began to solidify in
granules, much as butter forms in churning. Later it took on or was
worked into large malleable balls or lumps or rolls like butter, three
to any given “charge” or furnace. Then, while still in a comparatively
soft but not molten condition, these were taken out and thrown across a
steel floor to a “taker” to be worked by other machinery and other
processes.
Puddling was a full-sized man’s job. There were always two, and
sometimes three, to a single furnace, and they took turns at working the
metal, as a rule ten minutes to a turn. No man could stand before a
furnace and perform that back-breaking toil continually. Even when
working by spells a man was often nearly exhausted at the end of his
spell. As a rule he had to go outside and sit on a bench, the
perspiration running off him. The intensity of the heat in those days
(1893) was not as yet relieved by the device of shielding the furnace
with water-cooled plates. The wages of these men was in the neighborhood
of three dollars a day, the highest then paid. Before the great strike
it had been more.
But the men who most fascinated me were the “roughers” who, once the
puddler had done his work and thrown his lump of red-hot iron out upon
an open hearth, and another man had taken it and thrown it to a
“rougher,” fed it into a second machine which rolled or beat it into a
more easily handled and workable form. The exact details of the process
escape me now, but I remember the picture they presented in those hot,
fire-lighted, noisy and sputtering rooms. Agility and even youth were at
a premium, and a false step possibly meant death. I remember watching
two men in the mill below Mt. Washington, one who pulled out billet
after billet from furnace after furnace and threw them along the steel
floor to the “rougher,” and the latter, who, dressed only in trousers
and a sleeveless flannel shirt, the sweat pouring from his body and his
muscles standing out in knots, took these same and, with the skill and
agility of a tight-rope performer, tossed them into the machine. He was
constantly leaping about thrusting the red billets which came almost in
a stream into or between the first pair of rolls for which they were
intended. And yet before he could turn back there was always another on
the floor behind him. The rolls into which he fed these billets were
built in a train, side by side in line, and as they went through one
pair they had to be seized by a “catcher” and shoved back through the
next. Back and forth, back and forth they went at an ever increasing
speed, until the catcher at the next to the last pair of rolls, seizing
the end of the rod as it came through, still red-hot, described with it
a fiery circle bending it back again to enter the last roll, from which
it passed into water. It was wonderful.
And yet these men were not looked upon as anything extraordinary. While
the places in which they worked were metal infernos and their toil of
the most intense and exacting character, they were not allowed to
organize to better their condition. The recent great victory of the
steel magnates had settled that. In that very city and elsewhere, these
magnates were rolling in wealth. Their profits were tumbling in so fast
that they scarcely knew what to do with them. Vast libraries and
universities were being built with their gifts. Immense mansions were
crowded with art and historic furniture. Their children were being sent
to special schools to be taught how to be ladies and gentlemen in a
democracy which they contemned; and on the other hand, these sweating
men were being denied an additional five or ten cents an hour and the
right to organize. If they protested or attempted to drive out imported
strike-breakers they were fired and State or Federal troops were called
in to protect the mills. They could not organize then, and they are not
organized now.
My friend Martyn, who was intensely sympathetic toward them, was still
more sympathetic toward the men who were not so skillful, mere day
laborers who received from one dollar to one-sixty-five at a time when
two a day was too little to support any one. He grew melodramatic as he
told me where these men lived and how they lived, and finally took me in
order that I might see for myself. Afterward, in the course of my
reportorial work, I came upon some of these neighborhoods and
individuals, and since they are all a part of the great fortune-building
era, and illustrate how democracy works in America, and how some great
fortunes were built, I propose to put down here a few pictures of things
that I saw. Wages varied from one to one-sixty-five a day for the
commonest laborer, three and even four a day for the skilled worker.
Rents, or what the cheaper workers, who constituted by far the greater
number, were able to pay, varied from two-fifteen per week, or
eight-sixty per month, to four-seventy-two per week, or twenty per
month.
And the type of places they could secure for this! I recall visiting a
two-room tenement in a court, the character of which first opened my
eyes to the type of home these workers endured. This court consisted of
four sides with an open space in the center. Three of these sides were
smoke-grimed wooden houses three stories in height; the fourth was an
ancient and odorous wooden stable, where the horses of a contractor were
kept. In the center of this court stood a circular wooden building or
lavatory with ten triangular compartments, each opening into one vault
or cesspool. Near this was one hydrant, the only water-supply for all
these homes or rooms. These two conveniences served twenty families,
Polish, Hungarian, Slavonic, Jewish, Negro, of from three to five people
each, living in the sixty-three rooms which made up the three grimy
sides above mentioned. There were twenty-seven children in these rooms,
for whom this court was their only playground. For twenty housewives
this was the only place where they could string their wash-lines. For
twenty tired, sweaty, unwashed husbands this was, aside from the saloon,
the only near and neighborly recreation and companionship center. Here
of a sweltering summer night, after playing cards and drinking beer,
they would frequently stretch themselves to sleep.
But this was not all. As waste pipes were wanting in the houses, heavy
tubs of water had to be carried in and out, and this in a smoky town
where a double amount of washing and cleaning was necessary. When the
weather permitted, the heavy washes were done in the yard. Then the
pavement of this populous court, covered with tubs, wringers, clothes
baskets and pools of soapy water, made a poor playground for children.
In addition to this, these lavatories must be used, and in consequence a
situation was created which may be better imagined than explained. Many
of the front windows of these apartments looked down on this center,
which was only a few yards from the kitchen windows, creating a neat,
sanitary and uplifting condition. While usually only two families used
one of these compartments, in some other courts three or four families
were compelled to use one, giving rise to indifference and a sense of
irresponsibility for their condition. While all the streets had sewers
and by borough ordinance these outside vaults must be connected with
them, still most of them were flushed only by waste water, which flowed
directly into them from the yard faucet. When conditions became
unbearable the vaults were washed out with a hose attached to the
hydrant, but in winter, when there was danger of freezing, this was not
always possible. There was not one indoor closet in any of these courts.
But to return to the apartment in question. The kitchen was steaming
with vapor from a big washtub set on a chair in the middle of the room.
The mother, who had carried the water in, was trying to wash and at the
same time keep the older of her two babies from tumbling into the tub of
scalding water that was standing on the floor. On one side of the room
was a huge puffy bed, with one feather tick to sleep on and another for
covering. Near the window was a sewing-machine, in a corner a melodeon,
and of course there was the inevitable cookstove, upon which was
simmering a pot of soup. To the left, in the second room, were one
boarder and the man of the house asleep. Two boarders, so I learned,
were at work, but at night would be home to sleep in the bed now
occupied by one boarder and the man of the house. The little family and
their boarders, taken to help out on the rent, worked and lived so in
order that Mr. Carnegie might give the world one or two extra libraries
with his name plastered on the front, and Mr. Frick a mansion on Fifth
Avenue.
It was to Martyn and his interest that I owed still other views. He took
me one day to a boardinghouse in which lived twenty-four people, all in
two rooms, and yet, to my astonishment and confusion, it was not so bad
as that other court, so great apparently is the value of intimate human
contact. Few of the very poor day laborers, as Martyn explained to me,
who were young and unmarried, cared how they lived so long as they lived
cheaply and could save a little. This particular boardinghouse in
Homestead was in a court such as I have described, and consisted of two
rooms, one above the other, each measuring perhaps 12 × 20. In the
kitchen at the time was the wife of the boarding boss cooking dinner.
Along one side of the room was an oilcloth-covered table with a plank
bench on each side; above it was a rack holding a long row of white
cups, and a shelf with tin knives and forks. Near the up-to-date range,
the only real piece of furniture in the room, hung the buckets in which
all mill men carried their noon or midnight meals. A crowd of men were
lounging cheerfully about, talking, smoking and enjoying life, one of
them playing a concertina. They were making the most of a brief spell
before their meal and departure for work. In the room above, as the
landlord cheerfully showed us, were double iron bedsteads set close
together and on them comfortables neatly laid.
In these two rooms lived, besides the boarding boss and his wife, both
stalwart Bulgarians, and their two babies, twenty men. They were those
Who handled steel billets and bars, unloaded and loaded trains, worked
in cinder pits, filled steel buckets with stock, and what not. They all
worked twelve hours a day, and their reward was this and what they could
save over and above it out of nine-sixty per week. Martyn said a good
thing about them at the time: “I don’t know how it is. I know these
people are exploited and misused. The mill-owners pay them the lowest
wages, the landlords exploit these boardinghouse keepers as well as
their boarders, and the community which they make by their work don’t
give a damn for them, and yet they are happy, and I’ll be hanged if they
don’t make me happy. It must be that just work is happiness,” and I
agreed with him. Plenty of work, something to do, the ability to avoid
the ennui of idleness and useless, pensive, futile thought!
There was another side that I thought was a part of all this, and that
was the “vice” situation. There were so many girls who walked the
streets here, and back of the _Dispatch_ and postoffice buildings, as
well as in the streets ranged along the Monongahela below Smithfield
(Water, First and Second), were many houses of disrepute, as large and
flourishing an area as I had seen in any city. As I learned from the
political and police man, the police here as elsewhere “protected” vice,
or in other words preyed upon it.
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