AMONG THE REVOLUTIONARIES
No. -- SANGAMON STREET, CHICAGO, ILL.,
February 27, 1892.
Again I am in the army of the unemployed, and have been there for
the past three weeks and more, but on other than the terms of my
first experience in Chicago. I have been looking for work and testing
many phases of this lurid life of enforced idleness, but with a wide
difference from the original venture here. My savings from wages
earned in the factory have put me on quite another footing. The room
in which I am writing has been an adequate shelter, and I have paid
for it only one dollar and a half a week. Odd jobs have helped me
often in the matter of securing food, and, when these failed, I have
had my dwindling store of savings to fall back upon; and I have a not
inconsiderable knowledge of the cheap eating-houses of the town.
All through my time of service in the factory, I saved scrupulously. A
wage of nine dollars a week held out a hopeful prospect as the result
of seven weeks of labor. I did not miss even a fraction of a working
day, and so the total of my earnings would have reached sixty-three
dollars but for the unfortunate fact that, besides Sundays, there fell
two holidays within the limits of that period. On Christmas and New
Year’s Day the factory was closed, and I found, to my surprise, that
holidays, which I should have supposed were joyously welcome to all
the world, are really of very doubtful blessedness to the vast number
of workers who are paid for the actual amount accomplished, and by
the detailed reckoning of time. I lost three dollars in hard cash by
Christmas Day and that of the New Year, while my living expenses were
uninterrupted; and three dollars would pay for two weeks of comfortable
housing from the cruelties of this inclement life.
It was three weeks before I could get appreciably ahead in the matter
of saving. Nearly all the first instalment of my wages was already due
for board, and a bill for washing cut deep into the small remainder. A
pair of shoes was an absolute necessity at the end of the next week,
for I was going about almost barefooted, and some other articles of
clothing were equally requisite. And so my wages for week by week
together were already mortgaged to nearly the last penny before I
had actually earned them. But at last the materials of a fairly
respectable appearance had been secured, and then, out of the wages of
the last four weeks of factory work, I managed, by closest economy, to
save seventeen dollars and a half.
Gradation in respectability in the matter of dress, from the point at
which a man is unmistakably in his working-clothes to that in which he
readily passes as a workman in his Sunday best, has furnished the means
of some range in the experiment of church-going. From the first I have
gone regularly to church. But appearing in the garb of a day-laborer
in the fashionable churches of a great city is far removed as a matter
of experience from attending the service of a village meeting-house.
I am inclined to think that the latter would be the greater ordeal
to a real workman. Country parishioners turn out on Sundays with an
amazing show of dress, and one of their own number in flannel shirt and
labor-stained clothing would be oddly conspicuous; and he would feel
his peculiarity much more, I imagine, than if he found himself among
persons whom he did not know on equal social footing. For me the case
was different and was wholly artificial, but in going to church in the
country, dressed in working clothes which had been carefully protected
by overalls, and mended, and brushed, and cleaned to the utmost, I yet
could but feel how intolerable to a workingman the actual situation
would have been. To slip early into a quiet corner of the village
church which was usually free, and then out again before most of the
congregation had well started for the door, was a widely dissimilar
thing from regularly attending service with your neighbors.
In overalls and a “jumper,” a man is easily classified; without them,
however plain may be the stamp upon him of attempted cleanliness, it is
difficult to place him among a Sunday-dressed community, whether in the
country or in town, unless he, too, is evidently in Sunday clothes. It
is not, in its general application, a question of fashion; the cut of
a man’s garments may be that of ten years back, or may be foreign to
any fashion known, but his clothing must not bear the marks of toil,
and must have the linen accompaniments which render, while they are
worn, all manual labor difficult. If he would conform, a man must never
worship in garments in which he could work.
A want of conformity might quite possibly expose him to aggressive
criticism and ridicule among his accustomed fellows. I never found it
so myself in the country, where I always went to church in working
clothes because I had no others, for never once was I made to feel
the least embarrassment, while many times I wondered at the gracious
courtesy which met me. But I was always a stranger, and had never to
face companions of long standing. And so, as in many phases of my
experiment, the unreality of my position marred, in large measure, the
value of the result.
In Chicago, however, the circumstances were not so clearly against
me, and they served to give to my own experience something of a
normal character. In entering a church door on Sunday mornings, I
was objectively in no other station than that of any workingman who
may have wished to worship there. The treatment which I received is,
therefore, a fair gauge of the reception which another worker might
expect.
If it were a single instance I should not mention it, and I venture to
offer no generalization, although I am speaking of tests which covered
many Sundays and included all the principal churches of the town. All
that can be said, I think, is that the uniformity of result is some
evidence of what a like-conditioned workingman might count upon in the
way of treatment at the hands of fashionable churches.
I was sure, in the first venture or two, that the circumstances were
exceptional, and that I had chanced upon churches which, although
most evidently of the rich, were yet watchful for every opportunity
of welcoming the poor. It was not until I had made the rounds of many
churches of many denominations that I realized how general and how
sincere among them is the spirit of hospitality to the working poor.
In the vestibules, I always found young men who acted as ushers, and
who were charged with the duty of receiving strangers. Never once did
I fail of a friendly greeting. With every test I felt increasingly the
difficulties of the situation for these young men, and my wonder grew
at their graceful tactfulness. A touch of the patronizing in their tone
or manner would have changed the welcome to an insult, and any marked
effusiveness of cordiality would have robbed it as effectually of all
virtue. It was the golden mean of a man’s friendly recognition of his
fellow-man, with no regard for difference in social standing, which was
the course so successfully followed by these young ushers.
[Illustration: NEVER ONCE DID I FAIL OF A FRIENDLY GREETING.]
I had always to avoid a more desirable seat by particularly asking
for one far to the rear. And in the pews there was no withdrawing
of skirts, nor were there other signs of objection to me as a
fellow-worshipper. On the contrary, a hymnal, or a prayer-book would
be promptly offered, and sometimes shared; and, at the service-end,
a cordial invitation to come again would often follow me from the
pew-door, although frequently I noticed that I was conspicuously
lonely, as a representative of the poor.
How natural it was and how inevitable that the poor should not be there
shone clear as day the moment that I regarded the matter from the
subjective attitude of a genuine worker.
From their status as citizens in a free land, American workingmen have
acquired, together with the sense of individual freedom, the quality,
in very marked degree, of self-respect. It exhibits itself sometimes in
highly contradictory fashion, for it is sensitive and jealous in the
making; but self-respect is none the less a fundamental characteristic.
Besides Dennis and three others, who were Roman Catholics, the men
at Mrs. Schulz’s boarding-house did not go to church. In talking
with them I discovered that all had been more or less in the habit
of church-going in their country homes, but that the habit had
dropped completely from them upon coming to live in town. The case
was perfectly apparent. The mere suggestion of a mission church was
insulting to them and, from the new idea of churches for the rich, they
had learned their first lesson in class distinctions. Every feature
of such a church, its richly dressed occupants in their high-priced
pews, and the general atmosphere of merely social superiority, would
have inflicted upon these men, in spite of a cordial welcome, as deep
a wound to their self-respect as they would have felt in being decoyed
to a formal reception in a lady’s drawing-room. To them, the latter
function could not be more obviously intended for another class than
theirs.
One night, before I left the factory, Albert spoke his mind to me on
the subject with much freedom. Several times I had asked him to come
with me to church, and on this particular Saturday evening I spoke of a
preacher whom I hoped to hear in the morning, and who, I urged, would
surely interest him.
“Look here, John,” he said, finally, “it’s all right you asking me to
go to church, but I ain’t going. I used to go regular when I lived to
home, although I ain’t no church-member. It was different out there,
for most everybody went and chipped in what they could, and everybody
sat where they liked, and it wasn’t one man’s church more than
another’s. You go to church if you like. That’s your own business. But
I ain’t going to no one-horse mission chapel that the rich has put up
so they won’t be bothered with the poor in their own churches. You say
they treat you well when you go to church on Michigan Avenue. I don’t
doubt it. What reason would they have for not treating you well? But,
all the same, they take you in for charity, for you couldn’t pay for
a seat in one of them churches. No, sir, the rich folks build their
churches for themselves, and they keep them up for themselves, and I
ain’t never going to interfere with that arrangement. I don’t mind
going to the meetings of the Association once in awhile, for there’s
fellows of your own kind there, and you hear some good speaking and
singing. I ain’t got much use even for that, for it’s only a sideshow
that’s run mostly by the rich, but I ain’t got no use at all for your
churches.”
Nevertheless, on the whole, I was sorry the next morning that Albert
was not with me. There were moments when I did not regret it, but the
sermon, for all its strange setting, was one which could scarcely have
failed to impress him.
After a seven o’clock breakfast, which seemed luxuriously late, and
which Dennis and I shared alone on Sunday mornings, I set out as usual
for the South Side. It was five miles to my destination in that section
of the city, and I always walked both ways, for sometimes I had not the
fare, and, in any case, ten cents saved was no mean item in a careful
account of possible economy.
The Sundays of my term of service in the factory were, for the most
part, splendid winter days, and this was of the best. No snow lay on
the ground, no winter wind stirred the dust in the long, quiet streets,
and clear from out the cloudless sky came the glowing rays of the sun,
tempering the cold air to the exquisite delicacy of reviving warmth
wherein you catch your breath with wonder, so charged is it with the
mystery of the coming spring. Walking, on such a day, is of the essence
of delight. Some measure of bodily exercise is needed to keep one warm,
and this forth-faring on a holiday, free from the necessity of labor,
which begins almost with the dawn of consciousness after sleep and ends
only as the night of sleep closes down upon one, is a form of pleasure
which life does not often match.
The spell of it bore me company through the factory region, and where
there opened to my view mile after mile of lumber-yards, with unsightly
piles of seasoning timber stretching away to where the vessels lie in
the canals which are fed from the river, and there rise the gaunt bulks
of towering elevators, and the tall chimneys that everywhere send forth
their ceaseless volumes of black smoke. All this was eloquent of work,
and wages, and the means of decent living, and it therefore had a
beauty which will not be denied to it by one who knows something of the
misery of the unemployed. Even the grotesque ugliness of the long lines
of buildings, as I entered the closely built-up sections of the town,
could not rob me of the comforting sense of shelter and much legitimate
business among the well-paid working poor.
But, before crossing thence to the South Side, there remains a belt
through which even the stanchest optimism on its way to church on a
bright Sunday morning could scarcely pass without misgivings. A varying
foreign population, chiefly from southern and eastern Europe, thickens
here to a point of incredible crowding, and sweat-shops abound, and
cheap bakeries, and there is a marked increase in the number of
pawn-shops and saloons.
The crowds in the streets had been in Sunday dress thus far for the
most part, and were evidently on the way to mass or just returning.
Many children were among them, uniformly well-booted and dressed, and
here and there appeared the white veil and crowning flowers of a first
communion.
There was no sharp transition to a region which knows no Sunday, for
everywhere were the outward symbols of the day in closed shops, and
streets free from the noise of traffic, and the presence of holiday
garments; and yet more obvious on every hand became now the evidences
of a poverty which finds no day of rest. The unemployed, in the uniform
of rags, were loafing on the streets--the long, relentless waiting
which is an honest workman’s torment until he finds employment, or
loses hope and self-respect, when it becomes his sure destruction.
Children who have scant knowledge of clean water or clean clothes
were playing in the unclean streets, or emerging from the “family
entrances” of saloons with pitchers or tin-pails of beer, destined for
rooms swarming with workers whose labor never ceases, except for a few
hours each night, unless there comes the calamity of no work at even a
bare-living rate.
It was the age-old picture of the lot of the very poor, which alters
not with the varying fortune of the State. “The old order changeth,
yielding place to new,” one epoch of society merges into another, and
the lives of men are lived on other planes; but there is a constant
quantity in it all at the point where the pressure upon the limits of
subsistence is the strongest, and the weakest, driven to the wall, live
from hand to mouth in squalid wretchedness.
How familiar to our day has the picture come to be of children who
breathe moral death with every breath they draw, and grow up to certain
crime and shamelessness from out the haggard struggle for daily bread
in sordid attics where disease is born in reeking filth and in warrens
of beastly incest! Familiarity with it breeds no contempt, but rather
a wondering recognition of the touch of better nature which reveals
itself--the shouts of true delight from children hard at play; their
rapt absorption in the game, an ecstasy in which all the hidden
beauty of their faces is disclosed; the loving tending of a plant
that grows in the fetid air of a working-chamber; and, more than all,
the unfailing miracle of ministry, wherein the poor, out of cramping
penury, relieve the grimmer needs of yet poorer brethren.
Once through the belt, and over a narrow river which flows black with
the noisome sewage of the city, and past the region of unceasing
railway traffic, and through the chilling gloom of streets which are
like sunless caverns between sheer walls of stone, almost a single
step in an eastward walk brought to sudden view the revelation of new
order. A long, wide avenue, bathed in winter sunlight, lay radiant
from polished windows and the garnished pavements of all its length.
Glimpses were had of an inland sea which reflected, as from clearest
crystal, the infinite serenity of unclouded skies. Down the far extent
of the thoroughfare, blending into indistinguishable unity in distant,
gleaming haze, were homes where, in quiet and comfort, some in high
refinement and some in barbaric splendor, live the strong of their
generation, working out life’s fateful ends.
It was down this avenue that I passed on the way to church. An outward
calm, as of perfect peace, possessed it. There was no hint of hunger
there, nor of the cruel need which eats into the living souls of men
until it devours them or leaves them maimed and stunted of their
rightful growth. Plethora here took the place of want. Then quickly
came the sense of excess, with its end in sad satiety, and hard upon
the sight of lavish luxury followed the impression of a world of men
seeking at any cost to hedge themselves with unstinted plenty from all
sight and knowledge of their kindred who know but little relief from
pangs of plague and famine.
Among the first to enter it, I walked up the steps of a large stone
church and into an inviting vestibule. Several young men were grouped
in conversation between the inner doors, and the one who first marked
my entrance stepped out at once to meet me. A little painfully
regardful of his dress, he yet was frank and cordial, and the ease
with which he greeted me could not have become him better had he spent
his life in leading workingmen up the aisles of rich churches.
“I have a seat well up on this side, where you can hear perfectly,” he
suggested, looking me full in the eyes, as we stood for a moment at the
door. “May I show you to that?”
“I should like to sit here if I may,” I said, and I pointed to the
corner of the first seat from the wall.
“I am sorry,” he answered, “but that seat is reserved for an old
gentleman who has occupied it for years, and who always prefers to sit
there. Would you mind taking the seat just in front of it?”
“Certainly not,” I said. “That will suit me quite as well,” and I sat
myself down in the place in question.
Not half a dozen persons were in the building, and its restful quiet
was unbroken even by the prelude from the organ. Two ladies in
deep mourning entered now, in the company of the church treasurer.
It appeared, from their conversation, that they had met him by
appointment; and, although they were speaking in low tones, yet they
stood so near me that I could not help overhearing what they said.
The point in discussion among them related to a pew, and the treasurer
politely pointed out a small one not far from where I sat, which was
at their service for two hundred dollars a year, and also two sittings
farther to the front, which they might have on the same terms. There
was much considering of the _pros_ and _cons_ of this alternative, and,
incidentally, the treasurer indicated the range of prices in the pews,
from two hundred dollars near the door to sixteen hundred where seats
were most in demand.
In growing numbers the congregation was assembling, and above the
gentle breathing of the organ, which began to spread in soothing waves
of prayerful music through the church, rose the soft rustle of rich
dress, and the air, glowing with deep colors from stained glass, took
on a subtle perfume.
When the pews were dense with worshippers, scarcely a vacant seat
remaining, and my closest watchfulness had failed to note the presence
of a single other person of my class, there broke faintly on the
waiting company the clear, uplifting sweetness of a rare contralto
voice. Vague and lightly stirring at the first, as when some deeply
buried feeling, recalled to life, gives utterance to new being in “the
language of a cry,” it rose to ever fuller power, unfaltering and pure
in every tone, until it smote with the touch of truth each silent chord
of life and waked them all to perfect harmony, wherein they sing the
mystic unity of things, where the senses mix and whence they radiate,
and where,
... in the midmost heart of grief
Our passions clasp a secret joy.
I was not present, however, merely as a worshipper, but also as a
member of my chosen order. I tried to see with their eyes, and then
to think their thoughts and feel their emotions. When I held myself
honestly to this task, with the aid of what I had learned directly from
the men and caught of their ways of thinking, it was another revulsion
of feeling which set in.
I thought of my nine dollars a week, and of the meagre pittance which
resulted from utmost care in saving, even when my own support was the
only claim upon me, and how far beyond my reach was all possibility of
a seat in the pews which were held for barter. The image of Mrs. Schulz
rose up to me, worn, and wan, and almost ill, yet always cheerful, and
I remembered the patient, unflinching courage with which she faced the
obligations of her life, and the heart-breaking economies by which she
must meet many of its duties. On that very day, the two older children
had gone at different hours to church, because there was but one pair
of shoes and stockings between them, and Mrs. Schulz herself went out
to mass, through the tingling cold of the early morning, in clothing
which would have been light for summer.
While here, on every hand, was dress whose cost, as indicating
not warmth and comfort but mere conformity to changing fashion,
represented, in scores of cases, more of annual individual expenditure
than the whole net income of many a workman’s family. And even more
poignant to a mind made sensitive by this train of thought was the
impression which weighed upon it of a company well-fed to a degree of
comfort beyond the sense of sympathy with hunger that rarely learns the
meaning of enough. The mere suggestion of a breakfast of rich food in
wide variety, and served often at great cost in almost wasteful plenty,
to be followed soon after the hour of worship by another meal yet more
varied, and abundant, and rich, seemed the very pitch of heartless
mockery, in the full presence almost of hundreds of men and women to
whom bare day’s bread is an agony of anxious seeking, and of multitudes
of little children to whom, not nourishing food alone but even food
enough to stay the pangs of hunger, is a luxury.
These familiar feelings, roused, as always, by the common contrasts
of life, which one follows in close study through the bewildering
complexities of casual relations, were dominant, from the new point of
view, as the outcome of patent facts. Superficial and undiscriminating,
and yet most real and living, is the thought of the actual workman, as
his mind responds to the obvious leading of the things he sees. I was
glad at this point that Albert was not with me. A few minutes later I
deeply regretted his absence.
The minister had begun his sermon. I scarcely heard the opening
sentences, so oppressed was my mind with the workman’s sense of the
ruthless Philistinism of this phase of modern Christianity. It was the
preacher’s tone which first attracted me. There was quiet in it and a
great reserve, and he spoke as a pastor who holds earnest conversation
with his flock. I was all attention in a moment, and I saw that I
listened to a man who knew his fellow-men, and whose words made strong
appeal to their intelligence.
It was as though he spoke from a heart well-nigh broken with personal
grief, but chastened to new love and truth, and tenderness, by the
sorrow which it had borne.
He was speaking of the needs of men, and through his thoughts there
breathed a knowledge of the _Weltschmerz_ of to-day, and deep sympathy
with it. There was no weak ignoring of the difficulties of honest
doubt, and no false claims for the basis of belief; and, when he spoke
of the awful suffering of our time, his words were true to the high
dignity of man through the infinite consequences of free choice in his
life upon the earth. His appeal was no emotional blending of the false
and true, wherewith to blind men’s eyes to the eternal verities, and
to cause to rest lightly upon comfortable consciences the sense of
personal responsibility for one’s fellows, but rather the sure claim of
clear conviction which comes from out the facts of daily life seen in
the light of their true meaning.
The effect upon his hearers was unmistakable. I was unaware of it
for a time, so engrossed was I in the speaker’s words, and in the
strongly human personality of the man, but by degrees I awoke to
the fact that all about me were listeners as eagerly intent as I.
The sense of hardened, pampered, Philistinism gave way before the
overwhelming consciousness of a sympathetic unity of thought and
feeling. Indifferent to the vital needs of the world and to the
pressing problems of its life? No emotion could have been farther from
these men and women, the intensity of whose interest could be felt in
almost an agony of breathless attention to the sober truthfulness
of the minister. The very stillness was charged with mute appeal for
guidance from hearts wrung with the hurt of the world and pleading for
some useful outlet to the tide of generous feeling. It was as though
distress had ceased to be for them the visible sufferings of the poor,
and had grown, through the deepening sense of brotherhood, into an
anguish of their own, which must find healing in forms of effective
helpfulness. Very clearly dawned the conviction that, if one could but
point out to the members of this waiting company some “way,” “something
to do,” which would square well with their practical business sense
of things, instant and unmeasured would be their response for the
furthering of an end which would work them such glad relief!
From the church my destination was the meeting of the Socialists. But
not immediately, for I stopped on the way at the well-known haunt in
Madison Street for the usual Sunday dinner.
By this time I had attended several of the Socialists’ meetings, and
had come to know personally a number of the members of the order,
and I was not surprised, upon taking a seat in the restaurant, to
catch sight of three Socialists who were nodding pleasantly to me
from a neighboring table. One was the broad-minded Pedler, whose
good impression made in the first speech of his which I had heard
was heightened by all my later knowledge of him. Another I had
learned to know as a near approach to my original preconception of a
revolutionary. He was a Communistic Anarchist, and just what peculiar
variation of individual belief it was which led him to ally himself
with the Socialists I could never make clearly out.
It puzzled me not a little; for, by this time I had thoroughly in mind
the fundamental fact that Socialism and Anarchy, as two schools of
social doctrine, are at the very poles of hostile opposition to each
other. And, if I may judge from the little that I have seen and heard
between them, the vituperative heat of their controversies is equalled
only by the warmth and malignancy which has marked the history of
theological debate.
I soon learned that Socialist and Anarchist are not interchangeable
terms, to be used with light indifference in describing the general
advocate of revolution against established order. Indeed, to my great
surprise, I found that a policy of active, aggressive revolution among
these men had almost no adherents. Certainly none among the Socialists,
for they repudiated the bare suggestion of violence as being wholly
inadequate and absurd, and pinned their faith instead to what they
called the “natural processes of evolution.” These, to their belief,
would, in any case, work out the appointed ends with men, but their
operation could be stimulated by education, they said, and helped on
by organized effort toward the achievement of manifest destiny in the
highly centralized and perfected order which is to result from the
common ownership and administration by all the people of all land and
capital used in production and distribution, for the common good of all.
And even among the Anarchists the upholders of a policy of bloody
revolt against social order were rare. Most of those whom I came to
know were distinctly of a metaphysical turn of mind. It was easy to
trace their intellectual kinship with the Physiocrats of the last
century, in their implicit confidence in the universal efficacy of
_laissez faire_. Their views, reduced to simplest terms, seemed to take
the form of the epigram--that “the cure for the evils of freedom is
more freedom.” The removal of all artificial restraint in the form of
man-made laws would result eventually, to their thinking, in a society
as natural and as wholesome as is all physical order, which is the
exact resultant of the free play of natural law.
It was the Socialist’s conception of a highly centralized
administration which drove the Anarchist into a frenzy of vehement
antagonism. And it was the Anarchist’s _laissez faire_ ideal which
roused the latent fighting-spirit of the Socialist. The Anarchist would
maintain with stout conviction that centralized administration is
already the core of the malady of the world, and that our need is for
freedom in the absence of artificial limitations wherein natural forces
can work their rightful ends. And the Socialist would retort, with
rising anger, that it is from anarchy--the absence of wisely regulated
system--that the world even now suffers most, and that the hope of men
lies in the orderly management of their own affairs in the interests of
all, and in the light of the revelations of science. They were heartily
at one in their dislike for what they were fond of calling the present
“_bourgeois_ society,” and for the existing rights of private property,
which they regarded as its chiefest bulwark, but they parted company at
once, and with sharp recriminations, on the grounds of their dislike,
and of their purposes and hopes for a regenerated state of things.
Such Anarchists were of the “Individualistic” type. Not all of those
I met were so philosophical, however. The Communistic one, who was
nodding at me in a friendly manner from a near table, notably was not.
Very much the reverse. He was for open revolution to the death, and
he made no secret of it. He had little patience for the slow pace of
evolution believed in by the Socialists, but he had less, apparently,
for the _laissez faire_ conception of his brother Anarchists. At all
events, I found him most commonly in the meetings of the former sect,
where his revolutionary views were frowned down, but his invectives
against society were tolerated in a spirit of free speech, and as being
warranted by the evils of the existing state.
He was a German, of tall, muscular frame, erect, square-shouldered,
well-poised, as a result of long service, most bitterly against
his will, in the Prussian Army, and he hated kings and potentates
and all governmental authority, with a burning hatred. His was the
broad-featured likeness of his race, and his stiff, fair hair was
brushed back in straight lines from a well-shaped forehead, while his
beard, brown and streaked with white, bristled from his lower face like
the bayonets of a square in full formation. He was a mechanic by trade,
and a good one, as I had happened to learn.
[Illustration: HE HATED KINGS AND POTENTATES AND ALL GOVERNMENTAL
AUTHORITY.]
The last of the three, like the Pedler, was a Socialist, but was
very unlike his two companions as a man. My acquaintance among
the Socialists had not gone far before I began to observe that I was
meeting men who, whatever their mental vagaries, were craftsmen of no
mean order. They were machinists and skilled workmen mostly, and some
were workers in sweat-shops. All of them had known the full stress of
the struggle for bread, but they were decidedly not the inefficients of
their class, having fought their way to positions of some advantage in
the general fight.
Here, however, was an exception in this third “comrade,” and I
marvelled at the rarity of his type. Incompetence was stamped on every
feature. His long, lank, flabby figure, with its disjointed movements,
suggested no virility. The hair grew thin and blonde from his head and
from his colorless face, and his large, pale-blue eyes flitted in their
movements, as though there were behind them not intelligence enough
to hold them in fixed attention. The man’s emotions were boundless.
He had, moreover, a gift of utterance, and, when he spoke in meeting,
it was sheer feeling that expressed itself in words which were
marvellously void of any sane concatenation. It was a psychological
phenomenon, this public speech of his. We had premonitory warnings
of it, for we could see him writhing in his seat when his emotions
were aroused, and starting nervously until he had gained the floor,
when a half-suppressed, general groan would greet the torrent of his
sentences, which flowed directly from chaotic feeling which had never
reached his mind.
We four left the restaurant together, and walked on to Waverley Hall. I
fell in with the Pedler, and from him I was glad to learn that the Poet
was to read that afternoon his long-deferred paper on the “Opening of
the Exposition Grounds on Sunday.”
It was a little before the appointed hour when we reached the hall,
but already there was promise of an uncommon meeting. The audience was
larger than usual, the benches on both sides of the central aisle being
well filled nearly to the door. The Pedler and I had some difficulty in
finding seats near the front. More than ever marked was the atmosphere
of keen alertness, which, from the first, had so attracted me in the
gatherings of the Socialists. They might be futile, but their meetings
were never dull. And, while they could not have been more orderly, they
might easily have proved far less engaging than they were, had a saving
sense of humor been more conspicuously a characteristic of the members.
There was a sense of pleasurable excitement in sinking back into my
seat, whence, by turning a little to the right, I could command the
hall. The afternoon sun was streaming through the two large windows
in the south end. The heavy draperies, looped up to admit the light,
were in perfect keeping with the carpet on the daïs and the pulpit
chairs upholstered with plush, on one of which sat the Leader, behind a
reading-desk. There were other paraphernalia of the Masonic lodge which
habitually held its meetings there, and among the life-sized portraits
on the walls was one of Washington in the full regalia of a Mason. At
small wooden tables, resting on the floor at the Leader’s right, sat a
few young reporters, sharpening their pencils in preparation for any
points which could be turned to good account as “copy.”
To the pleasure of excited interest was added the ease of some
familiarity, for, besides the heads of meeting, I recognized among
the gathering company the faces of _habitués_. In a seat across the
aisle the Poet sat in earnest conversation with the Citizeness,
holding fast a roll of manuscript in both hands. And at the end of
the bench behind them was a young man who interested me far more
than any of the Socialists whom I had met. A long black overcoat of
cheap material concealed his work-worn garments to the knees, and his
hands, dark with the dye of clothing, lay folded in his lap. His face
showed faintly the marks of Jewish origin, and, although he was full
three-and-twenty, he bore a strange resemblance to the Christ-child in
Hoffmann’s picture of “Jesus among the Doctors in the Temple.”
Quite oblivious to what was passing about him, he sat in his usual
mood, with an expression of much serenity on his pale face, and his
great, dark, luminous eyes glowing with the ardor of his thought.
I have never lost the first impression which he made upon me; it was
in one of these meetings, when an idle slur had been cast upon his
race and the Leader had given him an opportunity to reply. He rose
modestly to his feet, and from the first my attention was riveted by
the convincing quality in his rich, deep voice. Without a word of cheap
rejoinder, he simply restated the issues of debate in clear, incisive
sentences, which seemed to gather force from their broken English,
until he had shown the entire irrelevance of the insulting charge, even
had it been true.
I had waited for him on that afternoon at the meeting’s end, and we
began an acquaintance which to me has been of great value. It is easy
to predict for such a man an eventual escape from the bondage of a
sweat-shop, but, inasmuch as he has been held in slavery to that work
from his earliest infant memories of a crowded den in Poland, where he
was born, I feel some measure of justice in naming him “The Victim.”
Promptly on the hour the Leader called the meeting to order, and
introduced the Poet, whose paper presented the topic of the day’s
debate. In a few moments we were all following in close attention the
ready flow of the Poet’s voice as it passed with clear articulation
over the well-chosen words of his introductory sentences. There was
admirable precision in the statement of the case at issue, and we were
bracing ourselves with pleasure for the logical sequences of detailed
discussion, when, to our surprise, the Poet broke abruptly from all
judicial treatment of his theme. At a single leap, he took the ground
that certainly the Exposition should be accessible every day--that its
opening on Sundays was not a subject for debate.
Then there followed a storm of hot invective. Christianity was assailed
as the giant superstition of historic civilization, still, daring, to
the shame of high intelligence, to hold its fetich head aloft in the
light of modern science. Its ministers were attacked as sycophantic
parasites, whose only motive, in urging the closing of the Fair on
Sundays, was the fear of the spread among working people of that
enlightenment which will achieve the overthrow of capitalistic society
and with it the tottering structure of the Church. Most of all, his
bitterness spent itself upon these “blind leaders of the blind,” as he
called them, who will not themselves enter into a knowledge of a better
state nor suffer others to enter it, and who grievously break the law
of rest on Sundays in befooling their fellow-men, and then live through
the remaining days in luxurious unproductiveness upon the labor of
their dupes.
What was coming next we could not guess, and it seemed a long cry to
any shout of exultation from all this, but he accomplished it with
facility, for his paper closed with a peroration, wherein he rose to
fervid panegyric upon the increasing intellectual emancipation of
workingmen. The Romish Church, he said, keeps many of them in bondage
yet, but the Protestant organizations have all but lost their hold upon
them; and the widening gulf between the two great classes in society
has left these churches in the nakedness of their true character, as
mere centres of the social life of the very rich and of the upper
_bourgeoisie_, and as a prop to the social order from which these idle
classes so richly profit, at the merciless cost of the wage-earners.
Instantly this was accepted as the dominant note of the meeting. The
applause which greeted it was genuine and prolonged. With light-hearted
disregard of the subject appointed for debate, men began ardently to
speak to this new theme: Modern Christianity a vast hypocrisy--a cloak
made use of by vested interest to conceal from the common people the
real nature of the grounds on which it stands.
But for the masterly qualities of the Leader, who held the meeting to
strict parliamentary order, it might have degenerated into a mob. Men
were crowding one another in their desire to gain the floor, but not
for a moment was the peaceful conduct of the gathering disturbed. With
accurate knowledge of the shades of social belief there represented and
of the personalities of the men, the Leader chose for recognition with
discriminating justice.
At one moment an American workman was speaking, a Socialist of the
general school of Social Democracy. There was self-respecting dignity
about him and a calm reserve as he began.
The Christian Church served as well as any institution of the
capitalistic order, he said, to measure the growing cleavage between
the classes in society. But, to his mind, the paper of the afternoon
had emphasized unnecessarily the existence of the _bourgeoisie_;
for, economically considered, there is no longer a middle-class to be
reckoned with in vital questions. There remain simply the capitalists
and the proletarians. The old middle-class, which had made its living
by individual enterprise, was fast being forced (by the play of
natural laws, which showed themselves in the increasing centralization
of capital) out of the possibility of successful competition with
aggregated wealth, and down, for the most part, to the level of those
who can bring to production, not land nor capital, but merely their
native qualities of physical strength, or manual skill, or mental
ability--proletarians, all of them, whether manual or intellectual, and
coming surely, in the slow development of evolution, to a conscious
knowledge of their community of interest as against the vested “rights”
of monopoly in the material instruments of production. But athwart this
path of progress rose the hardened structure of the Christian Church,
bringing to bear against it all her temporal power and the full force
of her accumulated superstitions.
But now the speaker’s calm deserted him, and, with fist uplifted in
threatening gesture, and his strong, bronzed face working with the
fervor of his hate, he cried out against the ministers of Christ, who
preach to the wronged and downtrodden poor the duty of patience with
their “divinely appointed lot,” and who try to soothe them to blind
submission with promises of an endless future of ecstatic blessedness,
when the rich of this world shall burn in the unquenchable fires of
hell.
[Illustration: THE SOCIALIST MEETING.]
“Oh! the fiendishness of these men,” he shouted, “who hide from
ignorant minds the truth, which they themselves know full well, that
for no mortal man is there any heaven or hell which he does not realize
in the span of his earthly history, and if he misses here the happiness
to which he was rightly born, he misses it forever! And the miserable
paltriness of their motive in working this cruel wrong--merely that
they may exempt themselves from toil and live in comfort upon the labor
of others, instead of being, where most of them belong, out in the open
fields hoeing corn!”
In another moment a man of widely different cult was speaking. For
some time he had been trying to gain the floor, and now the Leader
recognized him. He was a Christian Socialist, chief spokesman of
the little band of his persuasion, who were very regular in their
attendance upon these meetings. An insignificant Englishman he was,
whose h’s transposed themselves with consistent perversity, and whose
general qualities of physique, and tone, and manner reminded one
strongly of the type of parson with weak lungs and a large family who
is incumbent in out-of-the-way English churches on the Continent. He
was not wanting in pluck nor in a certain strength of conviction, but
the gentleness of the dove was his without the wisdom of the serpent,
and the words he spoke, in weak voice and apologetic manner, while they
would have met with sympathy in a company of believers whose emotions
were already stirred, served here only to inflame the antagonisms of
men whose views were stoutly materialistic.
The Communistic Anarchist was the first to rise when the Christian
Socialist sat down, and the Leader gave to him the privilege of the
floor. There was the power of primal force in the suppressed passion
of the man, and joined to this the exciting struggle of a human will
in keeping rage in bounds. His heavy frame heaved with paroxysms of
volcanic wrath, and the sibilants of English speech, augmented by
the z’s in Teutonic struggle with the sound of th, came hissing and
sputtering through his teeth from a tongue which could not frame words
fast enough for his impatience.
I have no power to reproduce his actual sentences, and at best I can
but suggest the purport of his talk, which was in full sympathy with
most of what had gone before:
“God a decaying myth, and the Bible a silly legend, and Jesus a good
man seeing some human truth, but gone mad in the credulous ignorance of
his age, and dead these two thousand years, and Christianity a hoary
superstition, made use of in its last days by _bourgeois_ civilization
to stave off a little longer its own fateful day of reckoning! And here
is a man, who calls himself a Socialist, who dares to bring before us
this enfeebled monster of worn-out faith, which has been the tyrant of
the poor from the moment of gaining temporal power, trying to hide its
oppressions under a guise of so-called charity! It has been, too, from
the beginning the stubbornest foe of scientific knowledge, and even
now, in the last hour of its heartless cruelties, employs its utmost
craft to put off the manifest dawn of freedom to the workers.”
Breaking through the forced restraint of the beginning, his feelings
bore him in resistless course until, in the full sweep of his long
arms, his fingers were clutching wildly at the empty air, and his
blood-shot eyes were rolling in a frenzy, and his hair stood straight
on end, while his voice rose to its highest pitch in fierce scorn and
denunciation.
The hall was still echoing to the roar, when a scattered number of
us were on our feet, straining forward in our efforts to catch the
Leader’s eye. The Victim was recognized, and almost immediately the
meeting began to feel the calming effect of a cool, conciliatory mind.
Clearness was highly characteristic of the Victim’s mental processes,
and, as his ideas slowly framed themselves, in translation to English
from the native language in which he thought, they took on a charming
piquancy and precision, in the oddest mixtures of strange idioms and
bookish phrases and the current coin of common slang.
“The assigned subject for debate this afternoon,” he was saying (in a
paraphrase which wholly lacks his strongly individual character), “is
one which opens up questions of great economic value and importance.
It is a pity, it seems to me, that the time has been consumed in a
discussion of side issues, rather than of the fundamental question of
the observance of Sunday as an economic institution, and the relation
borne to that great issue by the present agitation over the opening of
the Exposition grounds on Sundays. It is well to remember that this
is a meeting of Socialists. Freedom of speech is one of our cardinal
beliefs. But a freedom of speech which ignores the subject appointed
for debate would make better use of its liberty by asking for a
particular afternoon to be devoted to the theme which it wishes to
discuss.
“Not only has the talk of to-day been wide of the mark, but it has
been out of harmony with the genius of Socialism. I am proud to own
myself a Scientific Socialist, and a disciple of Karl Marx. To my way
of thinking, there can be no verified truth which the mind of man can
accept as such aside from the established results of naturalistic
science. I, therefore, attach no more value to Christianity, as an
authoritative source of truth, than I do to the sacred writings of my
race. Both are merely historical facts, to be dealt with precisely as
are all the facts of history. This afternoon, however, they have been
dealt with in a spirit of intolerance, as malignant and uncompromising
as the spirit which is charged against historic Christianity. It will
be well for us who profess Socialism to be on our guard, lest there
grow up among us an intolerance bred of dogmatic science, which may
prove in the future as destructive of free thought and of true progress
as has proved in the past the bigotry of dogmatic theology.”
It was now well past the ordinary time for adjourning. The Leader
announced the fact, and I feared that he meant to call for a motion to
adjourn without making his usual closing speech. It was his habit to
sum up the discussion, and we always looked forward to that address,
for the Leader had the gift of speech and a liking for it, and a
knowledge, moreover, of the minds of Socialists which was by no means
common. There was little of the declamatory in his habitual speaking,
and he lacked the analytical skill of some of the other members, but he
had a shrewd perception of the dramatic, and he could make use of it to
striking purpose. He had been born and bred a workingman, and was an
artisan of much ability, and he knew thoroughly the workmen’s point of
view. I have watched him play upon their feelings with the skill of a
native orator.
He spoke now in high commendation of what The Victim had said, and
deplored the fact that the afternoon had passed without discussion of
the appointed theme. As a Socialist, he regretted, he said, that the
talk had taken the form of an attack upon Christianity. Such a spirit
was directly counter to the tolerance of Socialism. For his own part,
although he had been brought up under the influence of the Protestant
religion, he found himself very little in sympathy with modern
Christianity. Supernaturalism he was willing to regard as a question
apart, and as being entitled to fair, dispassionate discussion, but
the Christian Church, as a practical embodiment of the teachings of its
founder, he felt justified in judging in the light of every-day facts,
and in their light he was free to say that Christianity was a failure.
“Let us take an illustration,” he went on. “A very urgent problem
in our city just now is that of ‘the unemployed.’ Certain of the
newspapers have made a careful investigation in the last few weeks, and
the result of their inquiry shows that, within the city limits to-day,
there are at least thirty thousand men out of work. There may be fifty
thousand, but the first estimate is well within the truth.
“It is a matter primarily of supply and demand. Among these idle men
there may be many inefficients and many chronic loafers, and many who,
from one cause and another, are incapable of effective work. But the
nature of the present status is unaffected by these considerations. It
means, in its last analysis, that the local labor market is overstocked
to the extent of thirty thousand men. However willing to work, and
however efficient as workmen they might be, these men, or their
equivalent in number, under existing conditions, would invariably find
themselves unemployed.
“And how does the Christian Church among us hold itself in relation to
this problem? Its members profess themselves the disciples of ‘the meek
and lowly Jesus,’ whom they call ‘divine.’ He said of Himself that ‘He
had not where to lay His head,’ and He was the first Socialist in His
teaching of universal brotherhood.
“His followers build gorgeous temples to His worship in our city, and
out of the fear, apparently, that some of the shelterless waifs, whom
He taught them to know as brothers and who are in the very plight their
Master was, should lay their weary heads upon the cushioned seats,
they keep the churches tight locked through six days of the week, and
then open them on one day for the exclusive purpose of praising that
Master’s name!
“Nor is this condition truer of Chicago than it is of any large
industrial centre in this country, or even in all Christendom,” he
went on, warming to his theme as the intently listening company
hailed vociferously the name of the Redeemer as the first teacher of
Socialism. “Only last week news came from London that the unemployed
there had grown to an army of one hundred thousand men. Picture the
horror of it, and the suffering, and the awful degradation, not in
these men alone, but among the women and children whom they represent!
Cold, and hunger, and the ravages of disease were bad enough, in
the ferocity of this inclement winter; but imagine, if you can, the
pitiless despair which is eating the hearts out of these our brothers,
and then tell me whether we have not here a fairly good imitation of
the hell where ‘the worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.’
“Suppose, for a moment, that the Christ were to appear in the heart
of that ‘Christian’ city. Most certainly He would be found among the
poor, ministering to their needs, and comforting them in their sorrows,
and bringing life and hope among them. I can imagine His perplexity at
sight of the man-inflicted suffering and degradation, and the Godless
tyranny of men over their brother men, in the very stronghold of
Christianity and two thousand years after He had taught that, under the
Fatherhood of God, to love our neighbor as ourselves is the fulfilling
of the law to all who have need of our sympathy and help.
“I hear Him ask in His amazement for some authoritative head of the
brotherhood which He established upon earth. I hear men tell Him that
He must see the Archbishop of Canterbury. I watch Him as He walks to
the palace of the Archbishop, along narrow streets which thunder to the
din of mammon-worship and which are blackened with the smoke from off
its countless altars, seeing everywhere the hideous contrasts between
rich and poor, and the lives of His toiling ones worn out in ceaseless
labor.
“Weighed down with the heartless misery of the world, I see Him stand
patiently at the palace-gate. A footman in rich livery answers to His
knock.
“‘I would see the Archbishop,’ says the Christ.
“‘And who shall I say wishes to see his Lordship?’ asks the flunky.
“‘Tell him that his Master is at the gate.’
“‘Oh,’ replies the servant, ‘but his Lordship has no “master”; he is
the primate of all England!’”
Here the speaker abruptly ceased, but for that gathered company the
picture was complete, and the cheers with which the hall had rung at
the mention of Christ, the social teacher, were changed to hisses
against the church which calls itself by His name.
On the crowded stairs, as we descended to the street, I found myself
beside a young German mechanic whose acquaintance I had made in these
meetings. My knowledge of him was limited to the fact that he was a
Socialist and was employed in a large factory on the North Side.
“What are you going to do, this evening?” he asked, after our exchange
of greetings.
“I have no definite plan,” I said.
“Then come home with me,” he suggested, and I assented gladly.
We were a long time getting there, but when, at last, we reached his
door, the journey was quickly forgotten.
As flat as the untroubled sea, the open prairie lay about us, browned
and seared by frosts and gleaming faintly under the winter stars. Long
parallels of street-lamps, cutting one another at right angles, marked
the outlines of city “blocks,” and threw into stronger relief the deep
black of clustered trees and the forms of lonely cottages with lights
glancing dimly from their windows.
When my friend opened the door of his house, there was nothing in the
domestic scene which met us to suggest the home of a revolutionary.
It was the typical home, rather, of the prosperous American workman.
The living-room, which we entered, was aglow with light, and redolent
of dry, unwholesome, excessive heat from a closed iron stove, and
it seemed at first to be already crowded by occupants. The wife was
standing over a cradle, in which she softly rocked her baby, whose
sleep was undisturbed by the conversation between two young men of
the family. An old couple, seated in easy chairs, were reading to
themselves, and formed a feature of the picture that fitted well with
the books which stood ranged in swinging brackets on the wall. There
was the usual floral paper, with a border sad enough to move one to
tears, and the worsted tidies, and the prints wherein sentimentality
has so long and so often posed as sentiment. But the plain, rough
furniture was redeemed by the marks of long usefulness, and the room,
as a whole, had all the cosey homeliness of fitness to those whom it
served.
[Illustration: THERE WAS NOTHING IN THE DOMESTIC SCENE WHICH MET US TO
SUGGEST THE HOME OF A REVOLUTIONARY.]
Soon we were seated at supper, and the family, accustomed, apparently,
to the presence of a stranger brought home from the meeting, left my
friend and me to our own discussion of Socialistic themes. I found
this deeply interesting, for my host was finely representative of the
views of the majority of the Socialists whom I saw at Waverley Hall.
In the main he was a Social Democrat. His economic views were drawn,
I found, entirely from Karl Marx. “_Das Kapital_” was his Bible, and
he seemed to know it by heart. To question Marx’s theory of value or
his treatment of labor in relation to production was blasphemy akin to
casting doubt before a devout believer upon the plenary inspiration of
the Scriptures.
He was a Socialist of serene temperament, with boundless faith in the
silent processes of development. Propaganda was hysterical from his
point of view.
“There could be no propaganda in behalf of Socialism,” he said to me,
“one hundredth part so effective as the unchecked activity of men who
imagine themselves the bulwarks of social order and the bitterest foes
of Socialism. We have no quarrel with the increasing centralization
of capital. The opposition to ‘trusts’ and the like comes mainly from
the _bourgeoisie_, who feel themselves being forced out of independent
business. We Socialists are already of the proletariat, and we see
clearly that all trusts and syndicates are the inevitable forerunners
of still greater centralization. The men who are employing their rare
abilities in eliminating the useless wastes of competitive production,
by unifying its administration and control, and so reducing greatly the
cost of the finished article, and who are perfecting the machinery of
transportation and distribution by like unity of administration, are
doing far more in a year to bring about a co-operative organization of
society than we could do, by preaching the theory of collectivism, in a
hundred years.
“The collectivist order of society may be distant, but, at least, we
have this comfort--that the day of the old individualist, anarchical
order is past. We can never return to it. The centralization of
capital has proved the inadequacy of all that, in the present stage of
progress. We have no choice but to go on to further centralization, and
the logical outcome must be eventually, not the monopoly of everything
by a few, but the common ownership of all land and capital by all the
people.”
* * * * *
It was in the middle of the next morning that I chanced to meet, in
the thick of a sweat-shop region of the West Side, an old acquaintance
of the Socialist meetings. “The Unionist” I shall call him, for
he had much to do with organizing the workers in sweat-shops into
labor-unions. A victim of the sweaters himself, earning his living at a
sewing-machine in a densely crowded shop, he yet managed to get about
among the other victims and further their organization. More than once
he had taken me with him on his rounds, and I had grown familiar with
the sight of rooms, in all the poorer sections of the city where the
rent is relatively low, turned into factories on a small scale for the
manufacture of ready-made garments.
And this idea of miniature factories is really the key to the
situation. The industry of ready-made clothing is an enormous one,
involving millions of dollars of invested capital, and competition
among the merchants is very keen. The difference of a fraction of
a cent in the cost of production, by the piece, of a given garment
may mean the difference between profit and loss in the whole output.
Cheapness of production is, therefore, of the first necessity.
Merchants of the greatest executive ability and highest efficiency are
able to secure the maximum of cheap production through the legitimate
factory system. Men of less business ability, in order to compete
successfully, avoid the factory system of production and make use of
the sweat-shops instead. The sweat-shop is, therefore, in a single
word, an evasion, under the stress of competition, of the factory
system of production.
[Illustration: AN EVASION OF THE FACTORY SYSTEM OF PRODUCTION.]
There are few industries which could profit any longer by this system
as opposed to that of the factory, but the manufacture of ready-made
clothing is an exception; and, in it, the less fit to survive are sure
to take advantage of the sweat-shops, until they have been driven
out of the business altogether by those whose superior abilities
enable them to undersell the product of the shops with the product of
legitimate factories.
The manufacturer who makes use of the factory system at once subjects
himself to certain regulations. His work-rooms must show a certain
cubic area to every operative employed; certain sanitary provisions
must be regarded; children under a certain age must not be set to work,
and a prescribed number of hours must be accepted as the limit of the
working day.
But the manufacture of ready-made clothing lends itself to an easy
escape from all this. Instead of having his work done in a factory,
subject to wholesome but costly restrictions, a merchant may give it
out to the lowest bidders among the sweaters. These men take it to
their homes, and secure there the services of their wives and children,
and employ the families of their neighbors. Thousands of rooms are
thus closely packed with workers who have underbid one another in the
struggle for existence, until, in the cheapest quarters available,
without regard to light and air, and decent sanitation, the work is
hurried forward at feverish haste by human wretches whose utmost toil
through excessive hours can often earn them little more than the means
of bare subsistence.
The Unionist was leading me in a brisk walk through a labyrinth of city
squalor. Over unswept wooden pavements we passed, along uncleaned,
wooden streets, in whose broken surfaces lay heaps of decaying
garbage. Wooden houses for the most part flanked the way, hideous,
blackened shanties which leaned grotesquely on insecure foundations,
with rickety flights of broken steps clinging to the buildings’ sides,
where, on warmer days, the teeming population can be seen overflowing
from work-rooms and sewing ceaselessly, even in their search for fresh
air.
Opening directly upon the black rot of crumbling pavements were the
steep descents to dark cellars which undermine these reeking hovels.
From many of them, as we passed, came the hot breath of furnaces laden
with the wholesome smell of baking bread. These were the underground
bakeries of the region, and down their wooden steps, whose surfaces
were buried under layers of hardened filth, were ranged the great round
loaves of dark bread on which this population largely lives. While
through the open doors, which admitted freely the floating germs from
off the putrid streets, we caught glimpses of baking-tins full of soft
muffins ready for the oven, and bakers in white dress who moved about
in the gloomy, fetid air over floors strewn with ashes and the crumpled
shells of eggs and crumbs of unbaked dough.
Mingling in the squalid crowds upon the streets were other figures
peculiar to the scene. Women they were for the most part, with ragged,
faded shawls tied round their heads and falling over their shoulders,
and limp skirts, dangling about their legs and brushing the surface
slime of the pavements. Some upon their shoulders, and others in
Oriental fashion upon their heads, they bore large bundles of clothing
which had been cut at the great dealers’ shops, and which they were
taking now to be made up in the sweaters’ dens.
[Illustration: RETURNING WORK FROM SWEAT SHOPS.]
The Unionist was talking rapidly, almost vehemently, at my side, with
the swift, nervous gesticulation of his race, for he was a young
Polish Jew, of short, sturdy figure, with wiry black hair, and eyes
which were like burnished coals. The scenes about us, which were far
more interesting to me, concerned him not at all in contrast with the
delight he felt in picturing the outcome of political change. Like
so many of the Socialists whom I met, he was an admirable workman,
and thoroughly practical in his views of life, and hugely energetic
and efficient in the organization of his trades-union; but yet he
was possessed, as most of them are, of a strange faculty of living
intensely at times in dreams of a fulfilment of preconceptions of
another social order. He was hard at it now, and was completely blind
to the significant facts about us. With an amazing acquaintance
with contemporaneous political history, he had been sketching for me
what he regarded as a great economic revolution in America. The drift
of what he said was simply that in this country, from colonial days to
the present, the middle-class, who are the small owners of land and
capital, have been the main support of the society in which we have
lived, and that the chief strength of the middle-class has been the
farmer.
In every movement in this country wherein the wage-earners have
sought for separate political action in their own interests, they
have invariably found the farming classes in opposition to them and
supporters of conservatism. But there are marked indications of a
change, he went on. The farming classes are no longer economically
independent, in the sense of owning their land and capital, but
are tenants of the capitalists who hold their mortgages. And, with
this change in economic standing, they have begun to find that
their interests lie, not in maintaining rights of private property,
which have robbed them of their own, but in joining forces with all
wage-earners to bring about a state of things wherein property shall be
a monopoly of all.
And having touched once more in prophetic spirit the beatific vision of
the Socialist, he waxed eloquent in high praise of it, and then turned
to me with an impatient:
“Can’t you see it, Comrade Vikoff--can’t you see it?”
He sympathized with me as one of the countless seekers for employment
in the city, and he had cultivated me because of my interest in the
meetings. Really admirable in their sincerity were his patient efforts
to convert me to Socialism; and when, at last, he gave me up, I am
sure that it was from the conviction that he was dealing with a mind
hopelessly Philistine, whose constant appeal to dry facts marked it
as wholly incapable of appreciation of the charming theory of human
perfectability.
We turned now and passed down a flight of wooden steps to the basement
of a small, brick building. I knew that we were going into a sweater’s
den, for I had visited many of them under the lead of the Unionist, and
many of them on my own account in futile search for work.
There was nothing exceptional in this one beyond the fact that, more
commonly than in the cellar, I had found the shops on the ground floor,
and oftener still in the upper stories of tenements.
As we neared the door, there was the usual sound of the clattering
rush of sewing-machines going at high speed--starting and stopping
abruptly, at uneven intervals, and giving you the impression, in the
meantime, of racing furiously with one another.
The opened door revealed the customary sight of a room perhaps twenty
feet square, with daylight entering faintly through two unwashed
windows, which looked out upon the level of the street. The dampness
showed itself in dew-like beads along the walls and on the ceiling,
which I could easily reach as I stood erect. In spite of its being
winter, the dingy walls were dotted with black flies, which swarmed
most about a cooking-stove, over which, stirring a steaming pot, stood
a ragged, dishevelled woman, who looked as though she could never
have known any but extreme old age. In the remaining floor-space
were crowded a dozen machines or more, over which, in the thick,
unventilated atmosphere, were the bending figures of the workers.
Oil-lamps lit up the inner recesses of the room, and seemed to lend
consistency to the heavy air. From an eye here and there, which caught
his in a single movement, the Unionist received a look of recognition,
but not a head was turned to see who had entered, and the whir of
feverish work went on, unchecked for an instant by our coming.
While the Unionist was talking to the sweater, I walked between the
close lines of machines over a floor covered with deep accumulations of
dirt, and shreds of cloth, and broken threads, to where, in a corner, a
group of girls were sewing. The oldest among them may have been twelve,
and the youngest could have been a little over eight, and their wages
averaged about seventy-five cents a week for hours that varied widely
according to the stress of work.
Near the corner was a passage, and through it I could see into a small
room which had no window, nor any opening but the door; there, in
perpetual darkness lit up by one oil-lamp, was a man who, for twelve
(and sometimes fifteen) hours a day, pressed the new-made clothing for
a living.
It was ladies’ cloaks that the sewers were making; of course, they
worked by the piece, and the best among them could earn a dollar in
the day, and sometimes more by working over-time. They were very
smart-looking garments, and their air of jaunty stylishness was a
most incongruous intrusion upon their surroundings. When I asked the
Unionist for whose trade they were being made, he seemed to think
nothing of the fact that he mentioned, in answer, one of the foremost
merchant-citizens of the town.
We were on the point of leaving, when a heavy foot-fall sounded on
the wooden steps, and the door opened to the touch of an inspecting
officer, whose glowing health and neat, warm uniform were as though a
prosperous breeze were sweeping the stagnant room. The work, however,
was as unaffected by his coming as it had been by ours. Not a sewer
noticed him, and the stitching of machines went racing on with unabated
swiftness. Only “the old man” watched nervously the movements of the
officer, as he walked about the shop, making note of the bad air, and
the filth upon the floors, and the group of little girls, and the dark,
unventilated chamber beyond.
The Unionist had caught me by the arm.
“We’ll wait,” he said; and we stood together in the shadow of the open
door.
Returning finally to the side of the old sweater, the officer handed
him a printed form.
“You must make out this blank,” he said, “and have it ready for me when
I call again.” And without another word he started for the stairs. But
on the way some evidence of unsanitary condition more shocking than
any met with yet--a heap of offal on the floor, or a fouler gust of
poisoned air--checked him, and he turned, indignantly, to the nearest
worker.
“Look here,” I could hear him say, “you’ve got to clean up here, and
right away. The first thing you know you’ll start a fever that will
sweep the city before we can stop it.”
The young Hebrew had stopped his work and turned half round in his
chair until he faced the officer. There were deep lines in his haggard,
beardless face, and his wolfish eyes were ablaze with the sense of
sharp injustice.
“You tell us we’ve got to keep clean,” he answered, in broken English,
lifting his voice to a shout above the clatter of machines. “What time
have we to keep clean when it’s all we can do to get bread? Don’t talk
to us about disease; it’s _bread_ we’re after, _bread_!” And there
sounded in the voice of the boy the cry of the hungry for food, which
no man hears and can ever forget.
[Illustration: “DON’T TALK TO US ABOUT DISEASE;
IT’S _BREAD_ WE’RE AFTER, _BREAD_!”]
The officer passed, speechless, up the steps, and we followed into the
clean, pure air, under the boundless blue of smiling skies.