A ROAD BUILDER ON THE WORLD’S FAIR GROUNDS
COLUMBIAN ANNIVERSARY HOTEL--No. 1., CHICAGO, ILL.,
Wednesday, April 27, 1892.
From the time that I began work on the Exposition grounds, early
in this month, it has grown increasingly difficult to hark back in
imagination to the unemployed _régime_ of the winter. The change is
a revolution of condition. Hundreds of us live all together within
this vast enclosure, and have rare occasion to go out except on
Sundays, and then only if we choose. We get up in the morning to an
eight-hour day of wholesome labor in the open air, and return in the
late afternoon with healthy appetites to our temporary “hotel,” which
is fragrant of clean, raw pine, and stands commandingly on the site
of the future “court of honor” near the quiet waters of the lake.
About four hundred of us are housed and fed in this one building; men
of half a score of nationalities and of as many trades, ranging from
expert carpenters and joiners and staff-moulders and steel-workers to
the unskilled laborers who work in gangs, under the direction of the
landscape-gardeners or, as in my case, on the temporary plank roads
which are built for the heavy carting.
Guarded by sentries and high barriers from unsought contact with all
beyond, great gangs of us, healthy, robust men, live and labor in
a marvellous artificial world. No sight of misery disturbs us, nor
of despairing poverty out in vain search for employment. Work is
everywhere abundant and well paid and directed with highest skill. And
here, amid delicate, web-like frames of steel which are being clothed
upon with forms of exquisite beauty, and among broad, dreary wastes of
arid dunes and marshy pools which are being transformed by our labor
into gardens of flowers and velvet lawns joined by graceful bridges
over wide lagoons, we work our eight hours a day in peaceful security
and in absolute confidence of our pay.
Complete as the revolution is, it is yet in perfect keeping, in some
strange way, with the general change wrought by the coming of the
spring. This spring, in its effect upon the labor market in Chicago,
was like the heralding of peace and plenty after war.
There was no longer any real difficulty in securing work. The
employment bureaus offered it in abundance in the country, and there
was some revival of demand even within the city limits. This by no
means solved the problem of the unemployed, however. Many of the men
were so weakened by the want and hardship of the winter that they were
no longer in condition for effective labor. Some of the bosses who were
in need of added hands were obliged to turn men off because of physical
incapacity. One instance of this I shall not soon forget. It was when I
overheard, early one morning, at a factory-gate, an interview between
a would-be laborer and the boss. I knew the applicant for a Russian
Jew who had at home an old mother and a wife and two young children to
support. He had had intermittent employment throughout the winter in
a sweater’s den, barely enough to keep them all alive, and, after the
hardships of the cold season, he was again in desperate straits for
work.
The boss had all but agreed to take him on for some sort of unskilled
labor, when, struck evidently by the cadaverous look of the man, he
told him to bare his arm. Up went the sleeve of his coat and of his
ragged flannel shirt, exposing a naked arm with the muscles nearly
gone, and the blue-white, transparent skin stretched over sinews and
the outlines of the bones. Pitiful beyond words was his effort to give
a semblance of strength to the biceps which rose faintly to the upward
movement of the forearm. But the boss sent him off with an oath and
a contemptuous laugh, and I watched the fellow as he turned down the
street, facing the fact of his starving family with a despair at his
heart which only mortal men can feel and no mortal tongue can speak.
Other men there were in large numbers who during the winter had swelled
the ranks of the unemployed, but who now, in the reviving warmth and
the growing demand for labor, drifted out upon the open country to
their congenial life of vagrancy. There still remained, however, and
apparently in full force, the shrewd gentry who stop pedestrians on
the street with apologetic explanations of hard luck and with begging
appeals for a small sum wherewith to satisfy immediate wants. Clark and
I had soon come to know this as a recognized occupation among the men
with whom we were thrown. A highly profitable trade it often proved,
for a dollar a day is a gleaning not at all uncommon to these men, and
the more skilful among them can average a dollar and a half. They are
rather the sporting spirits among the professionally idle; gambling is
their chief diversion, and their contempt for honest work is as genuine
as that of a snob.
But within this chaotic maelstrom of the unemployed, which in every
industrial centre seethes with infinite menace to social safety, is
always a large element which is not easily classified. It was still
to be found on the streets and in the lodging-houses of Chicago
when the winter was gone, in seemingly undiminished numbers and in
much its accustomed thriftlessness. The class has to be defined in
negative terms. The men are not physically incapable of work, nor
are they habitual tramps, nor yet the beggars of the pavements, and
they lack utterly the grit for crime. If they have a distinctive,
positive characteristic as a class, it is that they are victims
of the gregarious instinct. By an attraction which is apparently
irresistible to them, they are drawn to congested labor markets, and
there they cling, preferring instinctively a life of want and squalor
in fellowship with their kind to one of comparative plenty in the
intolerable loneliness of the country.
There is a semblance of sincerity in their search for work, but they
are cursed with the rudiments of imagination which makes cowards of
them all, and their incapacity is a weakness of will rather than of
brawn. Shrinkingly they walk the narrow ledge which in many planes of
life separates from tramphood and crime, while lacking the wit for the
latter and the courage for both lives, and looking ever for something
to turn up instead of resolutely turning something up. Civilization is
hard on such men, and their sufferings are none the less real because
chiefly due to their incapacity for the struggle for existence. And not
only their own misery must be reckoned with in any fair estimate of the
case, but far more the misery of their women and children, for these
men are proletarians in the literalest meaning of the word.
Finding now that I could not only get work, but that I could actually
be eclectic in the matter, I gladly took advantage of an opportunity of
employment among the unskilled laborers on the Exposition grounds.
A sharp-eyed, energetic American, who superintends the gangs of
unskilled laborers, took me on, and at once assigned me to duty
under an Irish sub-boss by the name of O’Shea. When I became one
of its number, Mr. O’Shea’s gang of eight or ten men had torn up
a considerable section of the plank road near the Transportation
Building, for the purpose of altering the level. Most of us were put in
charge of wheel-barrows. These we filled with sand at a neighboring
pile and then emptied it in heaps on the road-bed, while the remaining
members of the gang spread the sand with shovels to the desired depth
before replacing the planks. It was a cloudy morning early in April,
with a cold, raw wind blowing in from the lake, and the work, not
very fatiguing in itself, kept one comfortably warm until noon. We
had a free hour for dinner then, and I simply accompanied the other
gang-men to “Hotel No. 1,” where my employment ticket, issued by the
general superintendent of construction, procured for me without delay a
meal-and-lodging ticket on trust.
A large, zinc-lined trough half full of water stood against the wall
in an ante-chamber. Here men by the score were washing their hands and
faces and drying them near by on roller towels. They then passed singly
through the wicket at the dining-room door, where stood a man who
punched each boarder’s ticket as he entered.
Long wooden tables, heaped with dishes and lined with round-bottom
stools, ran the great length of the room. The men took places in the
order of their coming, until they had filled one table, when they would
begin upon another, and there arose a deafening clatter of knives and
forks and dishes and a tumult of mingled speech.
That dinner serves as a good illustration of our fare, both in what it
offered and in what it lacked. A bowl of hot soup was at each man’s
place when he sat down, and, after finishing this, he was given a
choice between roast beef and Irish stew. There were potatoes boiled
in their jackets, and pork-and-beans, and bread in wide variety and in
enormous quantity, and a choice of tea or coffee, and finally a pudding
for dessert. Some of this was good, but all of it smacked of wholesale
preparation, and appetites nicer than those of workingmen would have
found difficulties with the dinner. Even ours were not proof against it
all. I was struggling with a slice of tough roast beef out of which the
virtue had been cooked, when suddenly I caught an expression of comical
dismay stealing over the ruddy, bristling face of the man opposite me.
He was eating a piece of meat from a plate of Irish stew, and he spat
it out upon the floor with a deep-drawn oath, and a frank assurance to
his neighbors that “the meat was rotten,” while his facial muscles were
contorted with strong disgust. And the pudding was of such uncertain
nature as to recall vividly the oft-repeated saying of a classmate at
a college eating-club, that “flies in a pudding are quite as good as
currants.” Still the pork-and-beans were excellent and the bread and
potatoes fine, and the coffee, which was served in large cups with
the roast, was not impossible; certainly it was a well-fed crowd which
sat smoking for a quarter of an hour or more on the rough embankments
overlooking the Agricultural Building before going back to work.
[Illustration: IT WAS A WELL-FED CROWD WHICH SAT SMOKING FOR A QUARTER
OF AN HOUR OR MORE ON THE ROUGH EMBANKMENTS.]
Our gang was divided in the afternoon, and Mr. O’Shea left three of
us, a German, an Irishman, and me, to open up a way for the teamsters
through two long piles of paving-stones, which obstructed the road
near the Fisheries Building. His parting word to us was that the stint
was an afternoon’s job, and we could easily have finished it in the
four hours from one o’clock until five, had we worked with moderate
swiftness.
The German and the Irishman fell to lifting stones to one side of the
desired opening and I to the other. Every condition favored us. We had
a definite task and not a difficult one, and no one to watch us at our
work, nor drive us in its doing. The clouds had disappeared, and in
the soft spring sunshine, with the bushes blossoming about us and the
air full of the sounds of multiform labor, there was every stimulus to
energetic effort for four hours. Not that the hours seemed short--they
never do, I am convinced, even to well-seasoned unskilled workmen--but
the difference between four hours of manual labor at a stretch and
five is enormous, and to see my _confrères_ quite as impatient of their
flight, even under these most favoring conditions, and to mark that the
sober business of their lives was still an abhorrent drudgery to be
shirked if possible, led the way to very sad reflection.
Neither of them paid any attention to me until, late in the afternoon,
there came a lull in their talk and I heard the Irishman’s call.
“Hey, John!”
“Hello,” I said.
“Was you going to shave off them whiskers for Easter?”
I told him that I had not thought of it.
“Well,” he went on, “I hear the boys as have whiskers say as how they
must go on Easter morning, and I thought maybe it was the same wid you.”
“What are you after doing, getting yourself into a sweat?” he
continued, for he had drawn off from the German and was making my way.
“You be a fool to kill yourself; you don’t earn the more by it, and
they don’t think any the better of you. Take it easy, man, take it
easy; there’s time enough.”
He was an authority on the time, for every few minutes he would walk
slowly over to where his coat and waistcoat lay on a heap of stones,
and drawing out a great silver watch, would critically examine it,
and then announce the hour in a loud call to the German and me. At a
quarter to five the two picked up their coats and went off, dodging
behind shrubs and piles of building materials, until they made their
exit at the gate, leaving a good third of the job unfinished.
That was on a Saturday. On Monday morning Mr. O’Shea singled out us
three for as stiff a cursing as a boat’s crew often gets, but to little
purpose, apparently, in its effect upon the other men. On that very day
I was again a member of a gang, a gang of four this time, which was
left without an overseer. We were ordered to unload a car of timber
and pile the boards near the mammoth framework on the east side of the
Manufactures Building. Besides native inertia there was unusual cause
for idling in the fact that one of our number, a young Englishman,
Rosedale by name, proved to be uncommonly interesting. He was rather a
trim fellow, of the adventurous, jack-of-all-trades kind, that roam the
world widely, and that always appear in numbers at great celebrations
and in new regions. How they live and secure the means of extensive
travel is a secret which no member of the fraternity ever tells. There
was no mystery about Rosedale just then, for he was a fellow-lodger in
Hotel No. 1, and was No. ---- in the gang of laborers in which I, for
example, was No. 472, and he fell into as natural association with the
men as though he had lived with us always.
He was just up from South Africa, where he had been in the diamond
fields, he said. Seventeen thousand dollars’ worth of diamonds was the
loot he was bringing with him to Canada, when he was shipwrecked off
the coast of Labrador and escaped with only his life. Not one of us, I
suppose, was anything but sceptical of much of Rosedale’s story, but
the man told his tale of free, reckless, vicious living on the diamond
fields, with a vividness of narrative and a rough wealth of local
color that charmed us into most attentive listeners, and that sped the
morning hours with little regard to our job. Questions began to crowd
in upon Rosedale as to the location of South Africa and the means of
getting there, and great disappointment was evident in the discovery
that it was not contiguous to any familiar point.
Noon found us with a pitiful showing for the morning’s work. In the
afternoon I secured the post inside the car, and passed the boards out
to the three other men, who piled them near the building. By hastening
the work at that end, I hoped to quicken the pace at which the job was
being done. To be caught a second time in a delinquent gang I feared
would endanger my position, and I was anxious to remain on the grounds,
and even more anxious to secure a promotion if I could. It was easy to
keep ahead of the men, but it was impossible, apparently, to urge them
beyond the languid deliberation with which they shouldered the timber
and carried it to the piles.
“Let up on that, John,” they were shouting at me presently. “Go easy
with that; there ain’t no rush, and you’ll make nothing by your pains.”
It was the view which I had heard again and again in gangs of unskilled
laborers. One could understand it in a measure among the older men,
who could hope at the best only to eke out an existence free from the
poor-house to the end. But these and many others from whom it came were
relatively young men, with every chance, one would suppose, of winning
some preferment through effective, energetic work.
At five o’clock, the end of the afternoon’s labor, we had an hour in
which to make leisurely preparation for a supper which consisted of
cold meats in unstinted plenty, and potatoes, and bread, and tea and
coffee, and often some stewed fruit with a little cake. After this
most of the men loafed in the lobby until bedtime. This sitting-room
includes the entire upper floor of a large wing of the building. An
enormous base-burner heats it, and serves to render it stifling in the
evening, when the men are smoking with every window closed. Games and
newspapers strew the tables, and the room is well lighted with electric
lamps.
On the same level is the upper section of the main building, where are
the sleeping-quarters for the men. The provision here is similar in
design to that of a cheap lodging-house; only this is almost immaculate
in its cleanliness, and the cabins are large and well ventilated,
and the ceilings high and airy, and the berths are supplied with new
wire and clean corn-husk mattresses, and with sheets and pillow-cases
fragrant from the wash.
Mine is a middle, lower berth in a cabin for six men, but it lodges at
present only two besides myself.
In a bunk nearest the door sleeps an Irishman, whose acquaintance I
made while getting ready for bed on the first night of my stay. Opening
the door that evening and seeing me seated in the middle bunk, he
stood eyeing me for a time with obvious displeasure. He was evidently
not in the best of humors, and although but two of the six berths in
the large cabin were occupied, he plainly regarded my coming as an
intrusion. Neatly dressed in dark blue, and with an old felt hat on the
back of his head, he cut a fine figure of a workman as he stood in the
open door, a man of five-and-thirty, with a massive frame bent slightly
forward and with a frown wrinkling the low forehead, from which the
thick hair grew in tawny masses.
“Who let you in here?” was his first remark.
“The proprietor,” I answered.
“Did he say you could have that bunk?”
“Yes.”
“Well, ---- it, is he going to flood the place?”
I knew no answer to that question, and so I ventured to ask after the
occupant of the bunk nearest the window.
“He’s an Englishman; works in the landscape gang wid me,” replied the
Irishman, laconically.
By this time he had seated himself on his bed with his elbows on his
knees and his head bowed with an air of weariness. The change of
subject had, fortunately, been effective, for he no longer objected
to my presence, and for some time he sat talking freely in a droning,
disjointed way.
I gathered that he was thoroughly dissatisfied with his work and wages
and his boarding-place and with life in general. He did not enter into
details of his personal history; his mood spent itself in anathemas
against his present lot: “Work, ceaseless, unprofitable, joyless work.
Eat and work; eat more and work; eat again and sleep and eat and work.
This and nothing more; body and soul sold at a dollar and a half a day.
And nothing else to look forward to, with chances only of a steadily
hardening lot, throughout the on-coming of old age to death.”
I had never heard a workman in pessimistic mood so coherent, and I felt
sure that the Irishman was ill; for commonly with our class, a full
meal and a pipeful at the end of a day’s labor are enough to banish
care and to tinge living with a glow of satisfaction. The suspicion
proved true enough, for the man soon began to shake with a malarial
chill in our cheerless barrack, and he told me that the ague laid hold
of him regularly on alternate days.
It was the loneliness of the fellow that impressed one as he lay
shivering in his bunk. There were hundreds of men in the house, but
not one of them was charged with any responsibility for him, and there
was no provision for illness. On his bad days he would force himself
through the usual routine, but, when the day was done, there was
nothing for him but to lie in lonely misery in his bed. Not that he
whined in the least. I gathered these facts by inference. It was the
barrenness of his life that he cursed, not its hardness, for this he
accepted as a matter of course.
And yet one could not fail to see where finer feeling inflicted a
sharper pain in his suffering. I had marked at once the neatness of
his dress, and especially the cleanliness of person by which one
distinguishes instantly between a workman and a tramp.
There are interesting degrees of cleanness in workingmen. One sees it
at its best, I think, among those of the building trades. The stains
of their labor are clean in themselves, and the men partake of the
wholesomeness of their employment. The workers at rougher jobs must
show the marks of soiling labor, but there is infinite difference
between the earth stains of a common laborer and the ingrained,
begrimed uncleanness of an unwashed vagrant. Having in the house,
however, so many men, and just at the end of the long period of
unemployment, it is inevitable, perhaps, that there should be a few of
the number whose status as between workingmen and tramps is not clearly
defined. And some of the consequences are unpleasant.
It was this that the Irishman had in mind as he looked me over
critically and was somewhat slow in welcoming me to the cabin.
The same concern showed itself again when he presently told me that the
Englishman and he always made up their berths themselves, instead of
leaving them for the regular bed-makers, who might communicate vermin
from other bunks. The hint was sufficient, and I hastened to set his
mind at rest by assuring him that I heartily endorsed the plan and
would follow it faithfully.
The Englishman I did not see until the next morning. Upon getting up
to the six o’clock call, I found that he had turned in without waking
me. We sprang out of bed at the same moment, and almost at a glance I
knew him for the ex-Tommy Atkins that he is. I shall call him Brown.
A wooden chest, studded with brass nails and made fast with a heavy
padlock, stood near the foot of his berth. On it lay his working
clothes, not thrown down in confusion, but neatly folded and lying in
the order of dress. He himself was as trim and straight and as clean
as a sapling, and when he returned from his wash he fairly sparkled
with the afterglow. Back went the sheets with a single movement of his
hand the moment that he was dressed, and over went the mattress, and
the pillows began rollicking in the shaking which he gave them. In
marvellously short time the bed was remade and the sheets turned back
over the foot of the bunk to admit of proper airing.
We have been thrown together by reason of the fact that neither of
us is proof against the lobby for long in the evening. It is usually
dark by the time I have finished supper, and I go first of all to the
sitting-room. It is ablaze with light, and the huge stove is going
under full head and all the windows are closed and some scores of men
are smoking old pipes. I have known nights when such a place would have
been a most welcome escape from exposure, but having now a choice it
is never long before I leave the lobby for the cabin. Here I generally
find Brown seated on the box at the foot of his berth, playing an old
fife which is singularly pliant to his touch. Throwing myself in my
bunk I have lain there by the hour together listening to his music and
watching him as he beat time to the “British Grenadiers” and the “Blue
Bells of Scotland,” and to tunes of no end of barrack-room ballads,
wondering the while what vision it was of India or of Burmah, perhaps,
or of the Soudan, or possibly of the Afghan frontier that brought that
look of longing to his eyes.
He is the soul of soldier-like precision; he never misses a day at work
except the one which immediately follows pay-day, and that because he
never misses his spree. The Irishman and I have come to count with
perfect regularity upon Brown’s not turning up on the evening when he
is paid. About three or four o’clock on the next morning we hear him
open the cabin door softly, and, supporting himself with a hand on
the upper berths, move slowly across the floor until he has reached
his bed, where he throws himself on his face as he is and sleeps for
twenty-four hours.
I was not long a member of Mr. O’Shea’s gang, for at the end of the
first week another laborer and I were singled out for special duty on
the roads. But on Wednesday afternoon of that week two men joined the
force of unskilled laborers who filled us all with curious interest.
There is another gang of about the same number as Mr. O’Shea’s, with
which we are often thrown in our work and which is under the command of
a Mr. Russell.
At one o’clock on Wednesday afternoon I went as usual to report with
the other men at the superintendent’s office where we receive our
orders. Mr. Dutton, the superintendent, always comes out and looks us
over and consults for a few minutes with the sub-bosses, and then
orders the various gangs to different sections of the grounds.
Two young men were standing near his office-door on that Wednesday
afternoon when I came up at a few minutes before one. I did not give
them a second glance at first, for I took for granted that they were
tourists who had entered the grounds by special permission and were
now waiting for a guide. But in another moment I happened to see Mr.
Dutton’s clerk beckon them within the office where he took their names
and gave to each a metallic disk upon which a number was stamped. Then
they came out again and, taking off their coats, stepped in among the
gathering company of workmen and waited to be assigned.
By this time we were all staring at them agape, but they stood the
ordeal with a frank unconsciousness which filled me with admiration.
They were about of age, two clean-cut, well-groomed, clear-eyed
English boys, who looked as though they might be public-school bred,
and I noticed that their coats bore the name of a London tailor. One,
a brown-haired lad, with large, sober, brown eyes and a manner of
considerable reserve, was exceedingly good-looking, and the other, a
fair-haired, fair-skinned, alert-looking boy, plainly the spokesman
for the two, had a face of unusually fine drawing.
Mr. Dutton hesitated a moment in their case, but finally ordered
them to join Mr. Russell’s gang, and in a few minutes we were widely
separated. Repeatedly in the early afternoon I found myself thinking
about them and wondering why it was that they must earn their bread by
unskilled labor. Two hours of the afternoon remained when there came
an order from Mr. Dutton to our gang to repair to the Transportation
Building. We found, upon getting there, that we had been summoned to
reinforce Mr. Russell’s men, who were unloading from a car two large
steam-rollers. Again I saw the young Englishmen, and I had a chance to
watch them at work.
By this time the gang-men had sated their curiosity in staring, and now
ignored the lads as being anything but laborers with themselves, which
was much the best-bred thing that they could have done.
As a preliminary to unloading, we had to carry to the car some heavy
wooden blocks to serve as supports to an inclined plane by which the
machines could be slid to the ground. It sometimes required four and
even six men together to lift these blocks, and repeatedly I found
myself next in line to the new-comers. Their linen collars were wilting
with the sweat of labor, and it had apparently not occurred to them
to take them off. Their shirts, of delicate color, were turned up
above their elbows with gold link-buttons dangling from the cuffs. The
rough wood was fretting their bare white arms cruelly. I had a chance
presently to speak to one of them, and I showed him how he could get a
hold which would not be so chafing. In a moment of leisure he came up
and thanked me frankly, and volunteered the information that his friend
and he were but a week over from England and, having failed utterly to
find other work in Chicago where they had supposed that employment was
plentiful, they were glad enough in an extremity to accept this means
of living.
Most pluckily have they stuck at it. I have never again been associated
with them in a job, but, I see them almost every day, and through rain
and shine they have been the steadiest members of their gang. Places
better suited to them will be found, no doubt, as the general work
progresses; and that will not be long, I hope, for just now the boys
are at a considerable disadvantage. It was only two or three mornings
ago that I happened to meet them again near Mr. Dutton’s office, where
they had been sent to fetch some tools. The fairer boy wore a bandage
which covered his left forearm and most of the hand. I asked him what
had happened, and he explained to me how that in handling some old
sleepers he had missed his hold in one case, and, with the fall of the
heavy timber, a rusty iron nail tore down through his arm and the palm
of his hand, leaving a ragged wound open nearly to the bone. He had had
it dressed promptly by a good surgeon, who reassured him as to danger
of complications. But it had taken all his companion’s savings and his
own to pay the original fee, and they were in arrears for the daily
dressing. Luckily, however, he was still able to work, and Mr. Russell
kept him employed, he told me, in ways which brought his injured arm
very little into play.
Those of us who belong permanently to gangs such as Mr. O’Shea’s and
Mr. Russell’s are known as “regulars,” to distinguish us from the hands
who are taken on, a day at a time, for some particular need. Quite the
most efficient “regular” in my gang is a certain Henry Jerkener, who is
that rare exception, so far as my experience goes, a native American
in a company of unskilled laborers. “Harry,” as he is called, and I
were early assigned to special duty. Mr. Dutton beckoned us aside
one afternoon and ordered us to report to him at ten o’clock the next
morning, telling us that our day, beginning henceforth at ten, would
last until seven in the evening instead of five o’clock. And our wages
would be raised from $1.50 to $1.75 a day.
Our work was to be the general care of all the plank roads on the
grounds. They had been put in fairly good condition, but they received
hard usage, and constant repairs were necessary. We were, therefore, to
give our attention, up to five o’clock in the afternoon, to particular
sections of the road which were most in need of mending, and after
five, when the work for the day had ceased, our duty was to go over all
the roads and see that they were in condition for the beginning of the
carting in the morning.
Harry appeared delighted with the arrangement. Not that he took any
special stock in me as an assistant, but because, however indifferent a
workman, at least I was an American, and he would be free of the gang
of Irish regulars and himself in charge of the work, instead of being
under the orders of Mr. O’Shea.
Harry’s good-humor is proof against anything, apparently, his
temperament being that of a sunny May morning. But if there is
anything which bores him, it is to be ordered about by an Irish
sub-boss.
I did not discover this until after we had left the gang. So long
as he was one of their number he was the life of the crew, jolly,
high-spirited, with a ready flow of banter that was never delicate and
never ill-tempered, always foremost in the work, having at command
a fund of resourceful ingenuity which made him the real leader and
director of the men while the boss looked on in silence. But after we
had been assigned to special duty he bloomed into new jollity, which is
at its best whenever in our work we heave in sight of the old gang. It
is deliciously funny at such times to watch Harry. The men are probably
fretting and straining over some heavy lifting or other difficult task.
He first lets fly some irritating raillery in which he addresses them
as “terriers;” and then, taking up a position within ear-shot, he
begins to sing with a capital Irish brogue:
“Oh, ye work all day for Paddy O’Shea,
Dhrrrill, ye terriers, dhrrrill!”
Human nature cannot endure this for long, and presently a shower of
sticks and tufts of turf drive Harry from his position and put an end
for the time to his song.
Our place is by no means a sinecure. The roads are constantly falling
into unrepair and a deal of hard work is necessary to keep them in
order. Pick and shovel work, that most heart-breaking of manual toil so
far as my experience goes, is mostly in demand, for the old trenches
must be kept open and new ones dug, and sometimes the sides of long
sections of the road must be buried under a layer of earth to prevent
the bare planks from warping in the sun. After six hours of such labor
there remain two in the early evening in which we go over every foot
of roadway on the grounds and make whatever immediate repairs are
necessary. At seven o’clock, Harry reports to the fire department, and
then we are free.
It is not altogether easy to account for Harry as a common laborer.
A well-set-up, muscular American of about fifty, with a singularly
intelligent, shrewd face and the merriest of blue eyes, he might be,
from his appearance, a well-to-do contractor. Only once with me has he
touched upon the general subject of his past, and then he intimated
that formerly he was well off, but that in his business relations he
had always passed as a “good fellow.” “And that means, you know,” he
said, turning upon me with a significant look, “that means a ‘damn
fool!’”
Among the workmen on the grounds whom I have come to know, none has
interested me more as a type than an American carpenter with whom I
sometimes spend an evening. The man is lonely and uncomfortable in
his new surroundings. The novel conditions which here beset him as a
workingman are quite as disturbing to him as the unfamiliar setting of
his daily life. He clings tenaciously to his individuality, and the new
order of things which confronts him here lightly makes strange havoc of
all that.
We had not been talking many minutes on the embankment, where one day
after dinner we first met, when the man’s case shone clear as day. He
is a master-carpenter from a village home in Ohio, and the certainty of
steady work for many months at four dollars a day was tempting enough
to induce him to leave his family behind and come here. He had arrived
a few days before and had found instant employment.
Seeing the man, a tall, fine-looking, self-respecting American
mechanic, and hearing him speak, and learning even this little of his
history, you had direct vision of his past. You could almost see a
comfortable, wooden cottage, of his own building, with a garden-plot
about it and flower-beds in front, standing on a well-shaded village
street. He owns the cottage and the plot of land, and his children
were born there, and he is an officer in the village church, and has
been justice of the peace, and more than once has served as “school
trustee.” Social inequality, as applying to himself, is a new idea, and
it gives him a hitherto unexperienced sense of self-consciousness. In
his native village his family meet the families of all his neighbors
on the same footing, except that they recognize in the minister, and
the doctor, and the village lawyer, and the schoolmaster, a distinction
which attaches to special education. His children study and play at
school with the children of all his neighbors, and mingle freely with
them at church and in their other social relations.
But here is something new and strange. He is no longer a man with a
name to distinguish him, but has become a “hand,” having a number
which he wears conspicuous on his jacket. He goes to his work as an
integer in an army of ten thousand numerals. Home has changed to a
barrack, where he, a number, sleeps in a numbered bunk, and eats, never
twice at the same place, as one of half a thousand men. His comfort
and convenience are never consulted, and his views have no smallest
bearing upon the course of things. The superintendent of the building
upon which he works, whose energy and skill he admires hugely, shifts
him about with scores of other men, with as little regard to him as
an individual as though he were a piece of timber. Once he spoke to
his superintendent about some detail of the work and found him a
most appreciative listener. Then he ventured, in conversation, upon
a subject of general interest, only to find that by some mysterious
change he was speaking to a stone wall.
And now there confronts him what he regards as another sacrifice of
individuality, which he is urged to make, and which gives him no little
concern. He had scarcely known of the existence of Trades Unions, and
now he is thronged with appeals to join one.
No discrimination is made by the management as between union and
non-union men in employing workers on the Exposition; but many of the
union men here are making the most of the present opportunity for
the propaganda of their principles, and for bringing the desirable
non-union men within their organization. My carpenter friend, whom I
shall call Mr. Ford, comes in for a large share of attention, and is,
as I have intimated, not a little perplexed by the situation.
Two or three times he has asked me to go with him in the evening to
meetings which are held near the Fair Grounds, and which are addressed
by delegates from the Central Labor Union. These we have not found
very enlightening. There has been a good deal of beer-drinking and
much aimless speech, which has grown heated at times in the stress of
hostile discussion; and now and then a plain, matter-of-fact workingman
has given us an admirable talk on the history of Trades-Unionism
and its beneficent results, and the imperative need of organization
among workers as the only means of safe-guarding their interests and
of meeting, on any approach to equal terms, the peculiar economic
relations which exist between labor and organized capital.
Mr. Ford, much bewildered, has listened to all this, and we have talked
it over together on the way back to our lodgings, and sometimes late
into the night. I have tried to explain to him, as well as I understand
it, the idea of organization, and the necessity of organization which
has grown out of the great industrial change since the middle of the
last century. But Mr. Ford, for all practical purposes, belongs to the
pre-revolutionary period; the industrial change has little affected
him. He served his apprenticeship, and was then a journeyman and then a
master-carpenter in due course. In his experience, work has always had
its basis in a personal relation, as, for example, between himself as a
contractor and the man whose job he undertook and to whom he looked for
payment. A like personal relation has always existed between himself
and the men whom he has employed.
This new relation between a workman and an impersonal, soulless
corporation which hires him, is one that he does not readily grasp.
And, for the sake of meeting the new relation, this “fusing all the
skirts of self” and merging individuality into an organization which
attempts to regulate the hours of labor, and its wages, and for whom
one shall work, and for whom not, is a thing abhorrent to him.
“Why,” he said to me, “I give up my independence, and I’m no better
than the worst carpenter of the lot. We all get union-wages alike.
There’s no incentive for a man to do his best. He ain’t a man any more,
anyway; he’s only a part of a machine. Why, such work as some I see
done here, I’d be ashamed to do by moonlight, with my eyes shut. But it
don’t make no difference in the union, you’re all on the same level, as
near as I can make out.”
Finally I proposed to him that we should go together, on some Sunday
afternoon, to the meeting of the Central Labor Union, where he could
become acquainted with some of the members and learn at first hand the
objects and ends of organization and something of its actual working.
The members whom I particularly wished him to know were some of the
Socialists there, who seemed to me to have a considerable knowledge of
Trades-Unionism, and who took, I thought, a judicial view of it.
As an unskilled laborer I was not eligible to membership in any
union, but I was admitted freely to the central meetings, to which I
sometimes went in company with Socialists who were delegates of their
respective orders. Under their tutelage, I was shown the operation of
an exceedingly complex system, which, seen without guidance, would have
appeared to me hopelessly chaotic. I was seeing it, I realized, from
the point of view of the Socialists, and I was interested immediately
in learning their attitude.
They are, I found, most ardent supporters of the principle of
organization among workingmen. They regard the fact of the organization
of wage-earners as among the most significant developments in the
evolution of a socialistic state. But they are very impatient of the
slow rate of progress in Trades-Unionism. The ignorance of the great
mass of workers of how to further their own interests is, to the
Socialist, the most discouraging feature in labor-organization. “Why,”
they ask, “when we working people already have so strong a nucleus of
organization for economic ends, do we not direct it at once into the
field of politics, and secure immediately, by our overwhelming numbers,
the legislation which we need, and so inaugurate a co-operative
commonwealth?”
Nowhere have the walking-delegates and the general agitators of their
class sincerer foes than among the Socialists who, more than to any
other active cause, attribute the comparative ineffectualness of
unionism to the influence of these men. Very readily they believe them
purchasable, and that often they are little else than the paid agents
of the capitalists. Their great influence over workingmen is used,
the Socialists seem to believe, chiefly in their own interests and
particularly for selfish political ends.
This habit of mind serves to illustrate what eventually appeared to me
to be highly characteristic of the general attitude of Socialists. The
key to their mental processes in considering things social, lies, I am
quite sure, in the idea of existing conditions as being maintained by
a vast capitalistic conspiracy. At all events this clew has cleared up
for me the mystery which at first I found in many of their ways of
thinking.
However natural may have been the social order in some of its historic
phases, they evidently regard it at the present as largely artificial.
There is no real vitality, they contend, in the political issues upon
which the great national parties are divided. The party cries of “free
trade” and “protection” and the like, are manufactured by professional
politicians who are in the employ of the capitalists. The purpose is to
divert the minds of the working classes by these sham contentions and
so keep them about evenly divided politically, and thus prevent their
coalescing in overwhelming force in political action for their own
interests. Nothing seems to anger a Socialist more than the spectacle
of workingmen roused to enthusiasm by the crowds and speeches and
processions and brass bands of the usual political campaign. They
see in them then only the ridiculous dupes of the capitalists, who
have contributed to the campaign funds for the very purpose of thus
befooling their employees, and who look with about equal indifference
upon the momentary triumph of one party or the other so long as no
labor party is in the ascendant.
However free in the past the play of purely natural evolutionary forces
may have been in determining social development, and however free
may be their course again in moulding a future state, their operation
is checked for the present to the Socialists’ vision by the active
intervention of the capitalists, who, in some way, have succeeded in
effecting a social structure which is highly favorable to themselves,
and for whose undisturbed continuance they unscrupulously employ
all the resources of wealth and craft and dark conspiracy. The idea
appeared at its plainest, perhaps, in their more vindictive speeches,
where the strong undercurrent of feeling was--“There is cruel injustice
and wrong in society as it is, and someone is to blame for it, and
unhesitatingly we charge the blame against the capitalists.”
It was with this interpretation in mind that I took Mr. Ford with me
one afternoon to the meeting of the Central Labor Union. I was curious
to see the effect of the gathering upon him. A child of another age in
his experience of certain economic relations, he was an interesting
phenomenon in the sudden contact with modern industrialism.
When we reached the building, in the upper floor of which in a large
hall are held the weekly meetings of the Central Labor Union, numbers
of workingmen in their Sunday clothes were passing in and out of
the neighboring saloons or loafing about the doors. The intersecting
streets were strewn with small handbills, which we found covering the
wide staircase leading to the hall and scattered over the seats and
floor of the room itself. They were printed notices instructing the
members to boycott the beer of certain breweries which were accused
of employing non-union men, and also the products of this and that
manufacturer, against whom similar charges were made.
We were a little early, but we chanced upon a Socialistic acquaintance
of mine, who took us in with him and seated us well to the front. As
the members entered I had a chance to point out to Mr. Ford those among
them who had been pointed out to me as the officers of their various
unions. He was deeply interested from the first, and much impressed
apparently by the size of the gathering and the enormous numbers of
organized workers which were represented there.
The stage of “new business” was barely reached that afternoon when
matters were well beyond the control of the president. Motions and
amendments and questions of privilege and points of order were fast
driving him mad, when in despair he called upon a fellow-member to take
charge of the meeting and become its temporary chairman. By this time
there was a good deal of confusion; men in many parts of the hall were
clamoring for the floor, and trying to drown one another’s voices. But
there was immediate recognition of a change of generalship. The man who
had taken the chair was a member of a union of musicians, a person of
excellent address and well-appearing, and, as it proved eventually, a
masterly parliamentarian. To reduce to quiet an assembly so excited was
beyond his power, but he did unravel the skein of its tangled business,
and through all the uproar and confusion he kept his temper perfectly,
and secured some actual disposition of the affairs in hand.
The intricacies of intermingling interests there represented were
beyond measure bewildering. The Cigarmakers’ Union had a grievance,
which its representatives insisted upon presenting and having righted
at once. But the Waiters’ Union claimed an antecedent right to the
presentation of a question with reference to admitting certain men to
their organization. And the Bricklayers’ Union demanded an immediate
investigation of the account of expenditure for a certain recent Union
picnic, charging directly, meanwhile, a flagrant misappropriation of
funds.
Passions were running high. The lie direct was passed repeatedly, and
men were all but shaking fists in one another’s faces. The shouting
rose sometimes to such a pitch that the chairman’s voice could not be
heard. But the passion was that of strong vitality. The Union, to its
members, was an intensely living thing, and its issues, touching them
so closely, most naturally roused comparatively untutored men to strong
emotion.
I watched Mr. Ford with curious interest. Instead of showing any
impatience or disgust at the show of temper and the loud disorder, he
sat through the long session deeply, intently absorbed. Every question
for debate, and every phase of discussion, and all the progress of
the business, and the varying claims of the many organizations, and
the widely differing personalities of the members, each won his vital
interest, and, with amazing discrimination, he seemed to follow them
with intelligent understanding. And when there came a report of
progress in a strike among certain workers in shoe factories, and a
statement of the causes of the strike and the measures which were being
taken to carry it to a successful issue, I could see that he was more
than ever roused.
“That’s the most interesting meeting I ever was to,” he said to me, as
we walked down the street together. “I ain’t never realized before how
mixed up things can be when there’s so many working people, and the
men that hire them are mostly all organized in big companies. Why, the
working people ain’t got nothing else they can do but organize too, to
get their just rights. They have a pretty hot time in their meetings,
if that’s a sample, but I guess they’ll know what they’re about. I
guess I’ll join.”
* * * * *
In a very few days I must leave Chicago. I own to a longing to go
and launch out upon the great farming regions between the Lakes and
the Rocky Mountains, which I hope to cover in my journey before the
autumn is far spent. I have been watching the coming of the spring
in the Exposition grounds and in the charming parks of the city and
along its beautiful boulevards, and I feel its subtle drawings to the
country, to a life once more of labor in the fields. But I am very
far from being prepared to go. Some little of a phase of life which
in all large centres of population accompanies the swift industrial
changes of the present I have seen here in Chicago, where it differs
but slightly from similar conditions in every congested labor market.
And under the play of the modern gregarious instinct there surely are
few centralized markets which are not congested. But of the real city
as a great positive force and a world-wide commercial power, whose
unfaltering energies have built a huge metropolis in a generation,
and are fast crowning their labors with splendid achievements in
education and in art, I have been able to see little, and I have given
no impression whatever. This much I have seen on the grounds where I
am now a workman: I have watched something of the slow emerging from a
scene of utter chaos of a co-ordinated scheme of landscape-gardening
and of architecture, which has long passed the experimental stage, and
is unfolding to the world, by a miracle of creative and constructive
genius, a real vision of beauty and power and grace, which certainly
holds for the living generation of civilized men a promise of rich
blessings.