A HAND-TRUCKMAN IN A FACTORY
No. -- BLUE ISLAND AVENUE, CHICAGO,
Wednesday, February 3, 1892.
At half-past five this afternoon I completed seven weeks of service as
a hand-truckman in a factory. Mrs. Schultz, my landlady, tells me that
she is sorry that I am going away; and now that the long-looked-for end
is come, I am not in the least elated, as I thought that I should be.
But the days are lengthening markedly with the promise of the coming
spring, and I am forcefully reminded that the time grows short for the
study at close range of much that still awaits me in this great working
city before I can well set out again upon my westward journey.
Seven weeks as a factory-hand is very little. Like all phases of my
experiment, it is but the lightest touch upon the surface of the life
which I seek to understand. Strong and infinitely appealing are the
basal elements of existence, and yet mysterious, evasive, receding like
a spectre from your craving grasp. And in the secret of its veiled
presence speaks a Voice: “Only through living is it given unto men to
know; none but the heaven-sent may know otherwise. Not by experiment,
but only through the poignancy of real agony and joy is my secret
learned.”
As a witness of certain external conditions and as a sharer in them,
I may tell nothing but the truth, and yet the whole truth reaches far
beyond the compass of my vision--the joys and creature comforts of
men whose birth and breeding and life-long training fit them smoothly
to circumstances which seem to me all friction; the blind human agony
of these men, as necessity bears hard upon them, and, helpless, they
watch the sufferings of their wives and children, and have no hope
nor any escape but death; the unconscious delight in living intensely
in the present with easy adjustment to homely surroundings, and no
anxious thought for the future and no morbid introspection; the sharply
conscious endurance of grim realities, which baffle the untrained
reason and paralyze the will, and make of a strong man a terrified
child in the grip of the superstitious horrors of disease, and loss of
work, and the “bad luck” which plays so large a part in that sordid
thing which he calls life.
For seven weeks I have worked daily in the company of two thousand
hands, and have lived with half a score of them in a tenement-house
near the factory, and yet I am leaving them with but the slenderest
knowledge of their lives.
It was one bitter cold morning a little past the middle of December
that I was taken on. I had had a good supper on the night before and a
sound night’s sleep; and the pleasure of being set to work once more,
of being caught up again into the meaningful movement of men, was
tempered only by a lack of breakfast and a long walk through the cold
gray dawn.
Crist was my boss. Crist is foreman of the gangs of men who load the
box-cars which flank the long platforms beside the warehouses of the
factory. Wide sloping eaves project from the buildings’ sides to a
point nearly over the edge of the platforms, and under these are stored
the new mowers and reapers and harvesters, gay in gorgeous paint, and
reduced to the point of easiest handling, their subordinate parts near
by in compact crates and boxes, all ready for immediate shipment.
The proper loading of the cars is a work requiring great skill and
ingenuity on Crist’s part; for the men it is the mere muscular carrying
out of his directions. Under Crist’s guidance the superficial area of
a car is made to hold an incredible amount. By long practice he has
learned the greatest possible economy of space, in the nice adjustments
of varying bulks, so that each load is a maximum, in point of number,
of complete machines.
[Illustration: LOADING THE BOX-CARS UNDER CRIST’S GUIDANCE.]
There was like shrewdness, I thought, in his handling of the men.
After his first orders to me I came almost not at all under his direct
control through the few days in which I worked in his department. But
I had many opportunities then and later, too, of observing him. A
tall, old, lithe Norwegian, with a certain awkward, lanky efficiency
of movement, he had the mild manner and the soft, low speech of the
hard-of-hearing. He never blustered, certainly, and apparently he never
swore, but the men under him worked without hurry and without intervals
in a way which told superbly in the total work accomplished.
A gang of six or eight laborers under his direction was just beginning
the loading of an empty box-car when I was taken on. They were
stalwart, hardy workmen for the most part, their faces aglow in the
cold, their muscular bodies warmly clothed, and the folded rims of
their heavy woollen caps drawn down to protect their ears. Over their
work-stained overalls some of them wore thick leather aprons which were
darkened and polished by wear to the appearance of well-seasoned
razor-strops, and on their hands they all wore stout gloves or mittens,
which, through long use, had reached a perfect flexibility and fitness
to their work.
“John,” said Crist, addressing one of the gang, a short, rather slender
Irishman, with a smooth-shaven, sallow face, “John, you take this
man and fetch down the dry tongues from the paint-shop. There’s the
wagon-truck,” and he pointed to a vehicle whose heavy box, open at both
ends, and rising at the sides to a height of three feet, was supported
on two small iron wheels, while an iron leg under the heavier end kept
the bottom of the truck horizontal.
“Yes, sir,” came instantly from John, as he stepped alertly from among
the men and joined me, his small, gray eyes looking inquisitively into
mine and showing in their sudden light the pleasure which he felt in
being thus singled out for special work and put in charge of a new hand.
“Come this way,” he said to me. “Me and you is partners. What’s your
name? My name’s John, John Barry. Some calls me Jake, but my name’s
John,” he concluded, with an emphasis which made it clear that he had a
rooted objection to “Jake.”
Barry’s Christian name I considered a poaching upon my preserve, and I
was feeling about for a new handy prænomen; but without waiting for an
answer he continued swiftly on his loquacious way, calling me “partner”
the while, as Clark had done, and “partner” I remained through the days
of our co-labor.
Barry was an old hand; he knew his way about the factory perfectly.
We pushed the truck before us into a warehouse and through a long,
dim passage between piles of various portions of the various machines
which rose to the ceiling in compact stacks on both sides of us as we
walked the great length of the building. It was as dark as a tunnel,
except where an occasional gas-jet burned brightly in the centre of
a misty halo. The cold, unchanging air that never knew the sunlight
chilled us to the bone, and near the gas we could see our breath rising
in clouds of white vapor. We came at last to an elevator, and, having
pushed our truck aboard, we rose to the next landing. Then down another
long, dark, damp passage we passed until we reached a covered bridge, a
run-way, as the men call it, which sloped upward to the paint-shop in
the main building of the factory.
The spring-doors at the head of the bridge flew open to the sharp ram
of our truck, and we followed into a large room which was flooded with
sunlight from its serried windows. There appeared to be hundreds
of “binders” in the room, all painted white and extending in long,
straight rows on wooden supports which held them a few feet from the
floor. Among these rows moved the men who “stripe” the binders. Their
hands and clothing were daubed with paint, and even as we passed we
could see the slender, even lines of brilliant color appearing as by
magic along the white surface of the machines under the swift, sure
stroke of these skilled painters.
This is their sole occupation. Along a side-wall of the room moves
slowly, on a ceiling-trolley, a long line of steel binders, all grimy
from the hands of the men who join the different parts. In one corner
is a tank of white paint, and by a system of pulleys each binder, as
it passes, is lowered to the bath, completely immersed, and then drawn
dripping back to the trolley. Presently it is lowered to a support, and
is there allowed to dry. The stripers move down the lines, following
close upon the drying of the paint, and the machines, soon ready for
shipment from their hands, are transferred to the packing-rooms, the
vacant places being quickly occupied by binders fresh from the bath.
This is one phase of the endless chain of factory production under high
division of labor.
Barry and I passed on through a communicating door to another room of
about equal size and of equal light and airiness with the last. The
temperate air was pungent with the smell of varnish and new paint.
It passed with a pleasant sense of stinging freshness down into our
lungs. We had reached our destination; for large sections of the room
were closely stacked with tongues of various sizes, all standing on
end in an ingenious system of grooves on the floor and ceiling. Some
were newly come from the turning-mill; others had been painted, and now
awaited varnishing; some had passed both of these processes, and were
ready for the stripers; while in one corner stood those which had been
painted and varnished and striped, and which were dry and ready to be
taken to the platform, where Crist had ordered Barry and me to stack
them.
[Illustration: IN THE FACTORY.]
Barry soon taught me how to load them properly, and, having filled the
truck, we descended by an elevator to the ground-floor and passed out
again into the bracing air of the open platforms, where we carefully
stacked the tongues under the eaves, convenient to the loading of the
cars. Round after round we made, going always and returning by the same
course, loading the truck and stacking the tongues as quickly as we
could. The work was not hard. There was a knack in the proper handling
of the tongues, but it was readily acquired, and then one could
settle down easily to the routine of work, whose monotony was broken by
the recurring trips.
One incident checked us in the way. It was our happening to meet the
timekeeper on his rounds. Barry dropped everything until he had made
assurance doubly sure that his presence had been duly noted in the
book. Seeing that I was a new hand the timekeeper quickly took my
name, and then passed on with a parting word of caution to me about the
proper record of my time.
Barry was evidently in high enjoyment of the situation. The work suited
him, and the directing of a novice was hugely to his taste. There was
little stay in the even current of his talk. I began to feel not unlike
a “new boy” at school, for, with the air of a mentor, he pointed out
to me all the sections of the factory, and the different occupations
of the men, and the individual foremen as we chanced to see them.
Once, as we were busily stacking tongues, his voice fell suddenly to a
confidential tone, and his task was plied with tenser energy.
“Do you see that man talking to Crist?” he said to me, almost in a
whisper, and with his eyes intent upon his work.
I had noticed someone who seemed to be a member of the managing staff.
“That’s Mr. Adams,” Barry continued. “He ain’t the head boss, but he’s
next to the head. He’s an awful nice man. He was a workingman himself
once. I’ve heard that he was a carpenter in the factory when the old
man was alive, and that he was promoted to be next to the head boss. He
knows what work is, and he’s awful nice to the men, but you don’t never
want to let him catch you idle.”
We had just finished stacking the load and had started again for the
warehouse, when we caught sight of a neatly dressed man of medium
height who was crossing a temporary bridge, which joined the platform
by the main building over the railway-track to the one where we were at
work. I felt the truck shoot forward at a speed which I had to follow
almost at a run. In the dark passage of the warehouse Barry was soon
talking again, and again in an awed undertone.
“That was the head boss,” he said, impressively. “That was Mr. Young
himself.” And he looked surprised that I did not stagger under the
announcement, although, to do him justice, I did feel a good deal as
the new boy might, brought unexpectedly for the first time into the
presence of the head master.
“He ain’t never worked a day in his life,” Barry was continuing. “Only
he’s a terrible fine superintendent. You bet he gets big wages. They
say he can see when he ain’t looking, and he comes down like a thousand
of brick on any man who shirks his work. He ain’t never worked himself,
and so he don’t know what it is.”
The noon-whistle sounded soon after this, to my great relief, for a
fast of eighteen hours was telling on me. Barry left the truck where
it stood, and broke into a run. I followed him. In a moment the whole
building and the outer platforms were echoing to the tread of running
feet. When I reached the factory yard I found crowds of men streaming
from every door and pressing swiftly through the gate. A stranger to
the scene might at first sight have supposed the building to be on
fire and that the men were escaping, but a second glance would have
corrected the idea. There was no excitement in their mood; nor was
there any playfulness; but with set, serious faces they were running
for the careful economy of time. Barry had explained to me that, in
order to quit the day’s work at half-past five, the hands take but half
an hour for their mid-day meal, and that I must, therefore, be careful
to be within the factory gates by half-past twelve.
[Illustration: CROWDS OF MEN STREAMING FROM EVERY DOOR AND PRESSING
SWIFTLY THROUGH THE GATE.]
Interesting as was the scene, I had no time to note it carefully, for I
had caught the contagion of feverish hurry, and with the greater need
on my part, for in that half hour I must get food if I was to return to
work.
The situation was a little difficult. I had no money and no knowledge
of any neighboring boarding-house. On the avenue, immediately opposite
the wide entrance of the factory, was a line of cheap three-storied
wooden tenements, the ground-floors occupied by saloons or shops, and
the upper ones used evidently as the homes of factory-hands, for I
could see the men entering the dark passages where narrow staircases
connected the dwelling-rooms with the street.
Quite at random I walked into a barber-shop.
“Can you direct me to a boarding-house near by?” I asked the barber,
who, dressed in soiled white, sat reading a newspaper beside the stove.
“Sure,” he said, obligingly, as he rose to his feet and came to the
door and opened it. “You just go up them steps,” he added, pointing to
the entry next door, “and you’ll find a lady that keeps boarders. Her
name’s Mrs. Schulz. You tell her that I sent you.”
At the head of the landing I stood irresolute for a moment. It was
dark after the unclouded mid-day. The light that entered came through
the narrow opening of a door at the end of the passage, which stood
ajar and which communicated with a front room, where there seemed to
be a flood of sunlight. The prospect in the other direction was not
so bright. I was beginning to see faintly, and could eventually make
out the figures of a dozen or more workingmen, who sat about a table
in a dim dining-room, eating hurriedly their dinner, with a noise of
much clatter, and with bursts of loud talk and of hearty laughter. In
a deeper recess, and through a short, dark, communicating passage, was
a kitchen full of steam and the vapors of cooking food, through which
came the light from the rear windows with the effect of shining vaguely
through a fog.
Summoned, I know not how, Mrs. Schulz stepped out into the passage.
I knew instantly that I should be provided for. I could not see her
clearly, but her quiet, self-respecting manner was reassuring from the
start.
“I’ve just got a job in the factory,” I explained at once. “Can you
take me as a boarder?”
“I guess I can,” she answered, cordially. “Do you want your dinner?”
“Yes,” I said, and tried not to say it too eagerly.
“Then come right in. You haven’t any too much time,” she added,
considerately.
At the vacant place which she indicated for me at the table I sat
down between a workman of my own age and a hunchback operative who was
probably ten years our senior.
“How are you?” said the first man, in the midst of the momentary lull
which fell upon the room, while I passed my first inspection.
My reply was drowned for farther ears than his in the recurrent flow
of talk about the table. The men had just finished their first course,
but Mrs. Schulz brought in for me a plate of hot vegetable soup,
steaming with a savoriness which was reviving in itself. My cordial
neighbor dropped out of the general conversation and devoted himself
to me. Nothing could have been more agreeable. He was as natural as a
child, and genial to the point of readiest laughter. Like most of the
other men, he sat coatless in his working-clothes, his face and hands
black with the grime of the machine-shop where he worked, and his eyes
shining with a light all the merrier for their dark setting.
A young American, a farmer’s son, he was recently come to Chicago from
his home in central Iowa, and was making his way as a factory-hand
and liked it greatly. His name was Albert. All of this information I
gathered in barter for an equal share of my personal history, exchanged
while we both ate heartily of a dinner of boiled meat and mashed
potatoes, and stewed tomatoes and bread and coffee, and finally a
slice of pumpkin pie, all of them excellent of their kind and most
excellently cooked; and, although not neatly served, yet with as great
a regard to neatness as the circumstances allowed.
My interest through the meal, aside from the food, was chiefly in
Albert, but I caught, too, the drift of the general talk. It was
directed at one Clarence, a fair-haired, fair-skinned, well-mannered
youth who sat opposite us and at an end of the line. One noticed him
immediately in the contrast which he made with the other men, for he
was dressed in a “boiled” shirt and a collar, and he wore a neat black
coat and a black cravat. It appeared that he had been promoted, on the
day before, from a subordinate position in one of the machine-shops
to the supervision of the tool-room of the factory. On this morning
for the first time he had gone to work dressed, not in the usual
blue jeans, but as one of the clerical force. The men were chaffing
him on the change. Curiously enough, from their point of view, his
working-days were over. There was no least disturbance in their
personal attitude to the man nor in their feeling for him as a fellow.
They recognized the change of status as a promotion, and you readily
caught the note of sincere congratulation in their banter, and the
boy bore his honors modestly and like a man. Yet it was a change of
status most complete, for he had ceased to be a worker. To their way of
thinking there may be forms of toil which are hard and even exhausting,
but only that is “work” which brings your hands into immediate contact
with the materials of production in their making from the raw or in
their transportation. The principle is a broad one, incapable of
application in full detail, but, as a principle, it figures in the
minds of the workers as an unquestioned generalization that men work
only with their hands and in forms of begriming labor.
Like Albert, Clarence, too, was an American, a youth from a village
home in Ohio, and with the promise of a successful hazard of his
fortunes in the city. I employ my versions of their Christian names
because these were the only appellations in use about the table.
The meal was far too short for any general acquaintance among the men,
and at its end we all hurried back to the factory. Barry was awaiting
me beside the truck; as we began the rounds of the afternoon’s work he
questioned me with interest about my success in getting a dinner. For
another five continuous hours we carted tongues and stacked them.
The hands had been working by gas-light for nearly an hour when the
time came for quitting the day’s labor. There was no rush now in
leaving the factory. We crowded out through the gate, but under no
high pressure, and the moving mass disintegrated and disappeared as
magically as it had formed in the early morning. Beside the entrance
idle men were again waiting, but their number was very few in contrast
with the morning crowds, and their apparent purpose was a personal
interview with the superintendent.
Mrs. Schulz’s boarders had soon reassembled, this time in her kitchen.
Everything was in readiness for us. A row of tin basins stood in a
long sink which extended under the rear windows nearly the length of
the room; buckets of hot water were convenient, and at the pump at one
end of the sink we could temper the water in the basins to our liking.
Finally, there were cakes of soap cut from large bars, and the usual
coarse towels hanging from rollers on the walls. With sleeves rolled up
and our shirts wide open at the neck, we took our turns at the basins.
It was interesting to watch the faces of the mechanics emerge from the
washing in frequent changes of water to their natural flesh-color, in
which the features could be clearly distinguished.
The few minutes during which we had to wait before the call to
supper were spent in the front room, which was the sitting-room for
the boarders and answered to the lobby in the logging-camp. Two
windows looked out upon the street and commanded a farther view of the
factory yard and buildings. The room was heated by a cylindrical iron
stove, standing near the inner wall upon a disc of zinc, that served
to protect a well-worn carpet with which the floor was covered. From
a square wooden table in the centre a large oil-lamp flooded the room
with light and brought out in startling vividness the pink rose-buds
which in monotonous identity of design streaked the walls in long
diagonal lines, broken only by an occasional chromo or a picture cut
from an illustrated print. There was an abundant supply of wooden
chairs, on which the men were seated, for the most part about the
stove, and there was one large arm-chair on rockers, where sat Mr.
Schulz with the next to the youngest child in his arms, an infant of
between two and three. A girl of perhaps seven years, and a boy of
nearly five, were playing together on the floor, and there was yet
another child, for while we were washing in the kitchen I had heard the
fretful cry of a baby from a dark chamber opening from that room.
Two of the men were intent upon the girl who lay in her father’s
lap. They were rivals for her favor, and both were trying to coax her
away. When she at last put out her arms to one of them, he tossed her
toward the ceiling with a shout of glee at his triumph over the other
man.
After supper we all regathered in the sitting-room. None of the men,
so far as I could see, went out for the evening. Some of them read the
newspapers of the day, and four had presently started a game of “High,
Low, Jack,” at the table, with the result that most of the others
were soon gathered about the players in excited interest, watching
the varying fortunes of the game and giving vent to their feelings in
boisterous outbursts.
I sat beside the fire talking to Mr. Schulz. There was inexpressible
satisfaction in the feeling of _raison d’être_ which one had in being
a worker with a steady job once more and a decent place in which to
live. A boarding-house is not a synonym for home, and yet it may stir
the domestic instincts deeply in the contrasts which it offers with
the homeless life of the streets. The unquestioning hospitality with
which I had been accepted as a guest was in keeping with the best of
my experience so far. There was no suggestion of my paying anything in
advance, though I had no security to offer beyond the fact that I was
regularly employed in the factory and my promise to pay promptly out of
the first instalment of my wages.
Mrs. Schulz had offered me board and lodging at four dollars a week, or
at four dollars and a quarter if I wished a room to myself. It was the
last bargain with which I closed when I was shown the only vacant room.
It opened from the passage near the head of the landing and was perhaps
seven feet by six. A single bed filled most of its area, and the rest
was crowded with a chair and a small stand which supported an oil-lamp
under a mirror on the wall. Some nails driven into the door and along
the wall beside it, served the purpose of a closet. Light and air
entered by a window which opened only a foot or two from a side-wall of
the next building.
Cheerless as the room was and far from clean, it yet had about it all
the essentials of privacy, and at a little past eight o’clock I went to
bed with almost the sense of luxury after a fortnight’s experience of
station-houses and cheap lodgings.
At six in the morning we were called by Mrs. Schulz, who had already
been up for an hour or more preparing our breakfast, with the help of a
hired girl. The men turned out sleepy and half-dressed into the kitchen
to wash themselves, and then we sat down to a breakfast of “mush,”
meat and potatoes, coffee and bread. The factory-bell was ringing by
the time that we had finished, and there was a rush to get within the
gate before the last taps marked the advent of seven o’clock.
The routine of factory work does not lend itself to varied narrative,
and yet Barry’s work and mine was far from the monotony of much of the
labor which we saw about us. There was a growing supply of tongues in
the paint-shop, sufficient to keep us busy for several days, and while
the work of loading and carting and stacking them was not hard in
itself, ten hours of it daily was enough to send a man very hungry to
his meals and thoroughly tired to his bed.
I was soon transferred from Crist’s department to one of the
packing-rooms, where, through the remaining weeks of my service, I
worked as a general utility man under the orders of a short, muscular
foreman of singularly mild manner, who appeared to have scruples
against swearing, but who was none the less vigilant and effective
in his management. Most of the work of his department, as in all the
departments of the factory, came under the piece-work system, and I was
simply one of the two or three common laborers who, under his commands,
attended to the odds and ends of jobs.
In one corner a man was packing boxes with the subordinate parts
of mowers--a very interesting process, for the boxes were of such a
size as to exactly hold all the loose parts when packed in a certain
relation to one another, and the untiring swiftness with which the
packer drew his supplies from their various bins and adjusted them in
the box and nailed the lid upon them was fascinating in itself. I was
sometimes employed in carting these boxes on a hand-truck, through a
long run-way, to a warehouse and storing them there.
There were mowers to be shipped to foreign markets, and these had all
to be done up in boxes. Three or four of us would be employed for days
together in bringing the mowers up the run-way from the warehouse and
further separating them into their parts and packing them in large
boxes and nailing down the covers, upon which afterward appeared
directions to distant ports, some to Russia, and others as far off even
as Australian and New Zealand towns. A paint-shop was also connected
with this department of the factory, where painting was done in the
wholesale fashion employed for the binders, and from it I often carted
the portions of the machines which were ready for the warehouse.
Some of the jobs held steadily for days together, and the foreman was
never without work to give me. I could but feel a growing liking
for him, for, although I was far from being an efficient workman, he
was patient with my awkward efforts, and he accepted my mere dogged
perseverance as evidence of a willingness on my part which reconciled
him to me as a hand.
A like consideration had been shown me by the men at the
boarding-house. They accepted me unhesitatingly as a workingman, but
still I felt that I had my way to make among them, and very justly,
for they were piece-workers all of them, earning fifteen dollars a
week at the very least, some of them much more, while I was merely a
common laborer at a dollar and a half a day. Their superiority to me
was only the more apparent when there came among us, a few days after
my arrival, a young Englishman from Jamaica, who had secured a job at
common labor in the factory; for he, too, was far ahead of me, and
it was not long before he was promoted to piece-work in one of the
better-paid departments.
There was no discrimination against me. The men were perfectly
friendly, but for the most part they had been associated for some
time in their work and in their life in the boarding-house, and I was
simply not of their set. The barriers which prevented entire freedom of
intercourse were my own limitations and were never of their making,
for they made the most generous advances when we had lived together for
a time, and no doubt I could eventually have risen to be one of them on
equal terms.
They were nearly all young Americans. Clarence and Albert were
representative of the lot. Ned, the hunchback operative, was older
than most of us, but he, too, was a native, of public-school education
and decent antecedents, and he made a very good wage as a piece-worker
in some department of the factory. Nothing that I saw among the men
charmed me more than their treatment of Ned. He had an ungovernable
temper and a crabbed, sullen disposition, which had been fostered by
much suffering and an intense mortification due to his deformity,
which he rarely forgot, apparently. At times he was as exasperating
as a spoiled, petulant child, but the men endured him always with an
evenness of buoyant good-humor so genuine that it never chafed him,
and it sometimes transported him, in spite of himself, to a mood in
sympathy with their own, in which he could be one of the best fellows
of the lot.
It was not long before I knew that the man who was held in highest
regard by the others was Dennis. The reasons for this did not appear at
first. Dennis was of about the average age among us, a man of between
twenty-five and thirty, an Irish-American of good appearance and a
gentlemanlike reserve. The men looked up to him and paid a certain
deference to his views in a way which puzzled me, for he never played
the rôle of leader, being far less outspoken than some of the others,
and moving among them always in a quiet, unassuming manner which laid
no claim to distinction.
By chance I learned that he was the best-paid operative in the house,
having a position of some importance in a machine-shop of the factory,
and I noticed that he spent much of his leisure in the study of
mechanical problems. He did not hold himself aloof from the evening
game of cards, but he would quit it early and would soon be absorbed
in his book in one corner of the room, where the noise seemed never
to disturb him. Moreover, I came to realize that in certain important
social matters Dennis was an authority. He would leave his work as
black as the blackest man from the shops, but on Saturday afternoon,
when we got off at five o’clock, half an hour earlier than usual, he
would come out after supper ready for the evening’s gayety, dressed
in what was unhesitatingly accepted as the height of the fashion.
Saturday evenings were always devoted to pleasure, and none of the men
was better informed than was Dennis as to the public balls which were
available and which performance at the theatres (always spoken of as
a “show”) was best worth a visit. As a workman of high grade and as a
man of fashion and a social mentor with much occult knowledge of social
form, he was yielded the first place. There was, moreover, a certain
punctiliousness about him which only served to heighten his standing.
It mattered not how late he had been out on Saturday night, I always
found Dennis at his place for a seven o’clock breakfast on Sunday
morning, and saw him start promptly for mass.
He was very evidently a favorite with Mrs. Schulz, and with small
wonder, for he was always most considerately kind to her and to her
children; but I thought that her liking for him grew quite as much out
of her admiration for his strict regard to his church duties. She went
to early mass herself, but she never failed to have breakfast ready for
Dennis at exactly seven o’clock.
Mr. Schulz and she were devout Catholics, only I could but admire her
devotion the more. It seemed to me to be put to so crucial a test.
With but a raw Swedish girl to help her, she had the care of her five
children besides all the cooking and other housework for a dozen
boarders whose meals must be served on the minute. I am sure that
I never saw her lose her temper, and I think that I never heard her
complain, which is the greater wonder when one takes into account the
fact that she was the sole bread-winner of the family. Mr. Schulz had
had a job as a night watchman, but had lost it, and was now looking
for work--not too conscientiously, I fear, for he impressed me as a
weak man who found his wife’s support a welcome escape from a personal
struggle for existence. He had, at least, the negative virtue of
sobriety, and the positive one of loyalty to church duty, and in the
house he perhaps could not have served his wife to better purpose
than by taking care of the children as he did. He was certainly very
proud of Mrs. Schulz. One day he confided to me the fact that she was
a cook when he married her, and that in her day she had served in
some of the palaces on Michigan Avenue. Such an experience explained
the admirable cooking of the simple fare which she gave us, and the
homelike management of her house; and her knowledge and skill in these
domestic matters bore no small relation, I thought, to the spirit of
contentment among the men, which held them to their quiet evenings in
her sitting-room against the allurements of the town.
Her sheer physical endurance was a marvel. It was the unflinching
courage of a brave soul, for she had little strength besides. Very
tall and slight, emaciated almost to gauntness, she had a long, thin
face with sunken cheeks and a dark complexion and jet-black hair, and
round, soft, innocent eyes, which, matched with her indomitable spirit,
were eloquent of the love which is “comrade to the lesser faith that
sees the course of human things,” and seeing finds life worth living
and is willing to endure.
The absence of self-consciousness from the members of this household
lent a peculiar attractiveness to the life there. There was nothing
morbid in their attitude to themselves nor in their relation to one
another. Life was so obviously their master, and they so implicitly
obedient to its control. You could lose in a measure the thought of
self-directed effort to be something or do something, in the sense
that you got of nearness to the spontaneity of primal force. Mrs.
Schulz, for example, never impressed one as trying to exercise a
certain influence in obedience to a volition formed upon a preconceived
plan, but rather as being what she was as the expression of a life
within and exercising an influence which was dominant by reason of its
native virtue. And the men were never awkward and constrained in their
courteous manner toward her, as they would have been had this been
prompted by a sense of formal politeness, instead of being, as it was,
their spontaneous tribute to her gentle ladyhood.
One wondered at first how such serenity would weather the storms. And
when they came, the wonder grew at the further naturalness which they
revealed.
Monday mornings were apt to be prolific of bad weather. The long,
monotonous week loomed before us, and our nerves were unstrung with
the violent reaction bred of over-indulgence in the freedom of a
holiday. Our tempers, as a result, were all out of tune, and there
was no merging of individuality in the harmony of a home. One was
reminded of the discordant harping, each on its own string, of all
the instruments of an orchestra before they blend melodiously in the
accord of the overture. The hired girl, awkward and ungainly and dense,
had neglected the mush and let it burn, and now with stupid vacancy
in her dull eyes she moved about more in the way than of any service.
The children, half-dressed in their pitiful, soiled garments, were
sprawling underfoot, quarrelling among themselves and whimpering in
their appeals for their mother’s intervention. Mrs. Schulz, at her
wits’ end to get breakfast ready promptly, was bending over a stove
whose fire smouldered and smoked and would not burn briskly in the raw
east wind which was blowing down the chimney, and at the same time
there grated on her ears the wails of the children and the ill-tempered
complaints of the men and the stupid questions of the hired girl,
and all the while her nerves were throbbing to the dull agony of a
toothache. The men, roused from insufficient sleep, were crowding into
the over-crowded kitchen, hectoring one another for their slowness at
the basins; one loud in his complaint over the loss of some article
of dress, another insistent in his demand for a turn at the mirror,
and all of them perilously near the verge of a violent outbreak. There
was much swearing of a very sincere kind and much plain speaking of
personal views without circumlocution or reservation, but in the end
the storm would spend its fury and pass. And the marvel of it was in
the completeness of the clearing. The unrestrained vent of ill-temper
would be followed by no harboring of malice. It was as though the men,
who had freed themselves of a load of ill-feeling, were prepared to
continue unhampered in the ease of agreeable association. The secret
of it lay, I presume, in the absence of malignant antagonisms. The
distempers were merely the results of the common attrition of life. At
bottom these hard-working, self-respecting persons respected and liked
one another, and in the intimacy of the crowded tenement they lived in
relative comfort on no other possible terms than those of common liking
and respect.
The factory itself further illustrated the periodic unevennesses of
temper. Not that they were strictly periodic in the home. Mondays
were apt to witness them, but there was no normal regularity in their
occurrence, for they might crop out at any time. But Monday mornings
in the factory were almost fatally sure of their emergence. You could
not escape the feeling of unwonted disturbance both in the humor of
the men and in the progress of their work. But nothing could have been
more potent in coaxing them again into an accordant frame of mind than
the routine of factory labor. The very doing of what had become to
them a second nature by a quickness of hand which itself was a mark of
mastery, seemed to win them back to cheerful acceptance of life. I have
often seen the men at the boarding-house leave the breakfast-table in
moods that “varied mostly for the worse,” and return to it at noon in
high spirits that were finely attune.
There is a monotony about piece-work which must take on at times the
quality of a maddening horror. I can bear no personal testimony to
it, because I did not rise to the position of a piece-worker. The
phases of the system which I saw, however, in the limited insight
into its practical working to be gained in my range in the factory
as a common laborer, impressed me rather with its advantages. Among
the day-laborers here there was apparent at once the same deadly
uninterest in their work which is characteristic of their class in the
present ordering of such labor. The attitude is that of irresponsible
school-boys in their feeling of natural hostility to their masters in
the mutual struggle over the prescribed tasks. But among the laborers
it takes on the tragedy of the relation of grown men to the serious
business of their lives. Interest in their work? Not the faintest.
Sense of responsibility for it? Not the dimmest. Any day you could see
the bearded father of a family shirk his task in a momentary absence of
the boss, or steal truant minutes from his time in idling on an errand,
with as puerile a spirit as that which prompts a stroke of mischief in
school-hours.
The piece-system lifts the labor instantly from this plane to one
where the motive of self-interest conspicuously enters. A man is
insured from the first of at least the wage of day’s labor; his own
industry and deftness are then the factors in determining his earnings
up to a certain limit. For I soon found that a hand was not free to
employ his utmost skill when he became an expert. There seemed to
be a tacit agreement in each department of the factory as to what
should constitute the maximum of day’s labor. Below that a man might
fall if he chose, but beyond it he was not at liberty to go. And the
reason was very obvious. Even a few men in continually passing, by
any considerable margin, the accepted daily average would inevitably
produce the result of a cut in the _pro rata_ price until wages were
down again to the accustomed level. The system gives a man an incentive
to work and to develop his skill, but, in its practical operation, it
holds him rigorously to the level of mediocre attainment.
Barry incidentally pointed this out to me with striking clearness one
day while we were carting tongues. Two of the varnishers were missing
from the paint-shop when we went up for our first loads. Barry remarked
on their absence, with the comment that they were certain to be on hand
at half-past nine o’clock.
It appears that if an employee misses the open factory-gate in the
early morning by ever so little, he may not enter then until the end of
two hours and a half, which marks the close of the first quarter of the
day’s work.
True to Barry’s prediction, we presently found both varnishers at
their places, and when, in the late afternoon, he asked them, with
the frankness of working-people in such matters, as to how much they
had done, he again found himself verified, since each had achieved the
prescribed amount, and so had earned full pay. They had simply worked
at a greater speed than usual; and they might, so far as the time was
concerned, have accomplished this every day, except that a man would
soon gain a bad name by being habitually late, and his promptness at
seven o’clock would be quickly insured by a cut in the rate paid for
his form of labor.
It was a very limited view of the factory as a whole that I could get
from the post of an unskilled worker in one of its departments, but
what growing familiarity was possible served to increase the sense
of wonder at the possibilities of such highly organized methods of
production.
There were the great, substantial buildings themselves with their
ingenious adjustments of parts, so related as to facilitate to the
utmost the processes of manufacture and shipment at the lowest cost
and with the least friction. There were the lines of railway which
entered the grounds, by means of which the machines, loaded into cars
from the platforms of the factory, could be forwarded without change to
every quarter of the continent. All needed materials, to the smallest
detail, entered the factory in their raw forms, and passed out as
finished product, delicately adjusted machines ready for immediate use.
The imagination bounds to the conception of the miraculous ingenuity
of instruments, and the trained skill of operatives, and the shrewd
co-ordination of labor, and, above all, the marvellous captaincy by
which all this differentiation is systematized and is ordered and
directed to the effective achievement of its ends.
The large, well-ventilated rooms, comfortably warmed in winter and
admirably supplied with the means of light and air, are a part of the
general efficacy of the system, and the untiring dexterity of the men
gives to it its strongly human interest. There is a fascination in
their movements which determines the quality of the attractiveness of
the whole. You see no feverish haste in the speed with which they work,
but rather the even, smooth, unfaltering sureness which is the charm of
mastery, and which must be attended by its satisfaction as well.
I witnessed this with delight among the men with whom I lived.
Conversation at our meals was nearly always of shop; at dinner and
supper especially we discussed the details of the day’s work. Several
of us were employed at constructing binders. Albert was of that number.
He was making but little more than the wage of common labor when I
first knew him, but his income began to increase with his increasing
efficiency, and it was a matter of great, vital interest to us all to
hear his reports each day, as he told of a fraction of a binder and
then of a whole one in advance upon his previous work, until his daily
earnings rose to two dollars and a half, which was accepted in his
department as the normal sum.
Besides these elements of personal interest in piece-work as a scheme
of labor and the gratification of the sense of effective workmanship,
there entered here the stimulus of ambition based upon excellent
chances of promotion. The factory system of production creates strong
demand for manual skill, and stronger still for the capacity of
administration and control. Why the realization of these facts did
not possess more thoroughly the minds of the common laborers, I could
not understand. They were strangely impervious to their force, for
nothing could have been more noticeable than the alertness of the
managing staff in watching for evidences of unusual ability among
the men. It was not at all uncommon for a hand who had been taken on
as a day-laborer to be promoted, as a result of his intelligence and
industry, to some department of piece-work. Nearly every foreman in the
factory is said to have begun far down the scale, and Barry’s account
of the career of the assistant manager I have heard confirmed.
During my short stay I was actually witness to the progress of two
men who came in as day-laborers, the young Englishman from Jamaica
and a stalwart, handsome Swede who secured a job and joined us at the
boarding-house about a fortnight ago. Clarence earned a promotion
and got it at the time of my coming to the factory, and I have seen
Albert’s rise from a position removed by very little from that of
unskilled labor to that of a workman whose skill commands the sum of
fifteen dollars a week. Dennis is a type of craftsman whose future
it is not difficult to predict. Conscientious and industrious and
persevering, endowed with rare ability and real capacity for work, his
progress seems assured, and a well-paid, authoritative position an
ultimate logical certainty.
All these are of the best class of factory-workers that I came to
know. There are other classes quite as clearly defined, and most of
them have their representatives about our table. Men, for example,
who have an honest interest in their work as such, and who have risen
by force of ambition and sheer development of manual skill to good
positions in the factory, and have there stood still, their congenital
qualities incapable, presumably, of higher efficiency. But sadder far
than theirs is the case of men who are often best endowed with native
cleverness and aptitude, who rise quickly in the scale of promotion,
and who might rise far higher than they do but for the curse of their
careless living. They know no interest in their work nor pleasure
in its doing. To them it is the sordid drudgery by which they gain
the means of gratifying their real purposes and desires. With sullen
perseverance they endure the torment of labor, with pay-day in view and
then Saturday night and Sunday with their mad revels in what they call
life. The future is a meaningless word, with no claim upon them beyond
the prospect that it holds of more indulgence; the present is their
sole concern, and only with reference to what it can be made to yield
to ruling passions.
From some phase of this last attitude to life none of the men whom I
knew personally seemed to be entirely free. There is no improvidence
like the improvidence of the poor. Doubtless there is no thrift like
theirs, but among these young men, with all of life before them, their
reckless prodigality in money-matters assumed at times an appalling
nature. Some of them made no pretence of saving anything, and the few
who did save would show at times an audacity of extravagance to match
with the wastefulness of the worst. They were not a drinking set in any
sense of excessive indulgence, for not one of them had the reputation
of a drunkard, and their spending was much of it in comparatively
innocent channels, but it was monstrous in relation to their means and
to their prospects in the world.
A perfectly well-recognized philosophy justified it to their minds.
“We’ll never be young but once,” they would say, “and if we don’t have
a good time now, we never will.”
A good time was often secured at enormous cost. I do not know whether
it is the habitual dissipation, or whether it happens to be the vogue
for this winter, but it is very certain that to the men here the
fancy-dress ball is now the incomparable attraction. One or more such
functions within their range falls on nearly every Saturday night.
They are given for the most part by certain “Brotherhoods” and labor
organizations, and they are free, apparently, to all who come dressed
in a manner sufficiently “fancy” to meet the views of “the committee,”
and pay the price of a ticket, which admits “self and lady.”
As the men saw the night approaching, their talk would turn more and
more to the absorbing subjects of costume and the girls whom they
meant to take with them. There are shops which do business at letting
out ready-made disguises for such occasions, and I have repeatedly seen
these hard-working industrious fellows go deep into their pockets, to
the extent even of half a week’s pay, for the use for a few hours of
some tawdry make-up of velvet and spangles and lace, which reeked with
promiscuous wear. And the outlay did not end with dress, for there
remained tickets of admission, and the cost of at least two suppers
for each and of not a little drinking. It was exceptional for any one
of them to come home drunk, and the man who did was sure of a course
of steady bantering for days, but some drinking was the rule for the
Saturday nights that were given to masquerade. When a play would fall
in place in the order of amusement, the men were sure to return by
midnight, and there was always then less evidence of drink.
All forms of public gayety seemed scrupulously confined to Saturday
nights and Sundays. The men could not have been more punctual at their
work, and the habitual week-day evening was the far from exciting one
in Mrs. Schulz’s sitting-room, which I have described. There they
regularly gathered after supper, and smoked, and romped with the
children, and played cards, and read. I was usually off for bed by
eight o’clock, for nothing less than ten hours of sleep would fit me
for the ten hours of labor in the factory, and the others would follow
an hour or two later.
[Illustration: MRS. SCHULZ’S BOARDING-HOUSE.
There we regularly gathered after supper, and smoked, and romped with
the children, and played cards, and read.]
The morning brought the unwelcome summons to get up in what seemed the
dead of night and but an hour or two after the time of going to bed.
Cold water would have its rousing effect, as, also, a breakfast by
lamplight with an anxious eye on the clock, and then a rush through the
sharp air of the morning twilight until you were caught in the living
stream which poured through the factory-gate. Work was begun on the
minute, and your ear caught the sharp metallic clink of the mowers as
the workmen pushed the frames down the loading-platforms to the cars.
Even within the brick enclosures and in the stinging cold of the winter
air, there arose inevitably with the sound the association of meadows
fragrant with the perfume of new-mown timothy and clover drying in the
hazy warmth of a long summer afternoon.
Within the buildings, almost in a moment, would rise the turmoil of
production. You heard the deafening uproar of far-reaching machinery,
as, with wheels whirling in dizzy motion and the straps humming in
their flight, it beat time in deep, low throbs to the remorseless
measures of a tireless energy. Cleaving the tumult of the sounding air
you heard at frequent intervals the buzz-saws as they bit hard with
flying teeth into multiple layers of wood, rising to piercing crescendo
and then dying away in a sob. There was the din of many hammers, and
over the wooden floors and along the run-ways, and through the dark,
damp passages of the warehouses, and down the deep vistas of the
covered platforms, was the almost constant rumble of hand-trucks pushed
by men and boys.
All this unceasingly for five continuous hours, which always seem
unending, and then the abrupt signal for twelve o’clock, and the sound
of the machinery running down while the men are hastening to their
mid-day meal. About the factory-gate are always at this hour groups
of women and young children who have brought in pails and baskets hot
dinners for their men. On brighter days you can see long lines of
operatives sitting along the curbs or with their backs against the high
board fence, basking in the sunlight, as they eat their dinners in the
open air and converse among themselves and with their wives or children.
[Illustration: THE NOON HOUR.]
Then back to your place in the afternoon while the machinery is slowly
working up to its accustomed pace and the men about you reassembling to
take up again, on the stroke of the hour, the work of the afternoon.
Five more hours of the thundering rush of factory labor follow, and
you leave the gate at night almost too tired to walk. A wash is first
in your recovery, and it rests you more than would sleep. Then supper
brings its deep satisfaction and a smoke its peaceful content, and you
go to bed better off by a day’s wages.