A CITY BUILT OUT OF HAND
All up and down the Delaware, between Trenton and Philadelphia, the
"quality folks" in olden times used to build stately homes, with broad
acres at their backs and looking lordly, with their Grecian porticos,
out from the high banks that command the stream. You may see some of
them yet, faded and old and full of family history, most of which was
not so important as it seemed to the builders. In the little towns that
you pass on the trolley and the Camden and Amboy road, there is a
certain Eighteenth Century somnolence, and a dingy pride of priority.
They sleep on, as if it were creditable not to be busy. Bordentown, a
few minutes' ride from Trenton, sits complacent amid its memories of
the Bonapartes. It is there you change for Roebling.
[Sidenote: ROEBLING, THE TOWN, A STORY IN ITSELF]
Roebling--the town, not the plant--to which some attention has been
given, is a story in itself. It is an industrial disturbance in the
quietude of a sleepy and beauteous country. It is a rattler of the dry
bones of tradition, and pretty nearly the last word in corporation
communities. Roebling maintains no staff of highbrow sociologists to
discuss the things capital should do in order to make labor's pathway
broad and bright. There's a town superintendent to look after things
and he earns his pay.
[Sidenote: BUILT TO MAKE WIRE AND ROPE]
The town of Roebling was built to help along the making of wire and the
wire rope. Making good rope, it is a good town, without any fanciful
notions about "welfare work." The Delaware, flowing by in its beauty,
accounts for part of this. But to the Roeblings the Delaware means
plentiful water supply and river transportation. To the workmen in the
big mills which lie just at the back of the town, and to their
families, which grow phenomenally, it means bathing, boating, a cool
breeze on stifling midsummer nights, and a panorama that never ceases
to be lovely.
In both the city plants, as business grew, building followed building.
A compact and populous section had grown up at Trenton. More buildings
could not be crowded into the original ground space. More land was
needed, and as usual in such cases, men with land to sell all along to
the south of the Upper Works, saw the company's need and had a brain
storm about what the footage was worth.
The Roeblings tried a little farther down stream. But down stream
didn't mean down price. So they made a clean job of it. Ten miles down
the river was a little old station called Kinkora, where the real
estate infection had not appeared. There was land well up above high
water, and plenty of it. The Delaware was very cheap down there, as
compared with Trenton city water rates, to a concern that used as much
water as all the rest of the city put together.
[Sidenote: A LIKELY PLACE FOR A WIRE MILL]
It was a likely place for a wire mill, but if a dozen strangers had
struck Kinkora on the same evening the town would have had trouble to
find beds for them all. It meant twenty miles rail travel a day for the
workmen to live in Trenton. So the Roeblings decided to build. Charles
G. Roebling was then alive. The new site and the planning and building
of the town were his charge. But, again, they didn't go looking for any
welfare engineers. The whole job of planning plant and town alike was
done in the long engineering room of the Roebling offices. At first
they called the plant the Kinkora. They do yet, off and on, but the
mills were a little below the station, and when the new venture was
well under way, and the machinery had begun to squeeze out wire, and
perhaps a hundred brick houses of various types had been erected, the
place had to have a station of its own. The Pennsylvania Railroad said
it was Roebling, and stamped the tickets that way. Kinkora is wearing
off. It is still a sleepy little station just up the line. Between it
and Roebling there are a mile or so of distance and a whole century of
time.
The name "Kinkora" harks back to the year 1000, when King "Brian Boru"
of Ireland lost his life at the battle of Clontarf. His palace was
named "Kinkora." In 1836 an ambitious Irishman named Rockefeller (not
John D.) conceived the idea of an air line railroad from this spot
where Roebling now stands to Atlantic City. In fond remembrance of
Erin's Isle he named the terminus on the Delaware "Kinkora."
The enterprise itself died an early death.
The Roebling Company has more than 200 acres of land in the new
settlement, enough, in all conscience, to accommodate as big a business
as almost anyone would want to do, and houses to shelter all its
workmen. If the company should ever find it good business to shake the
dust of Trenton from its shoes altogether it certainly has a place to
go.
[Sidenote: NO TIME TO LET THE GRASS GROW]
From the day when the thing was decided on, no grass grew under
anybody's feet. There was sand along that bucolic and undeveloped river
bank, sand that ran well back, getting more and more like loam as you
left the river. It was broken and uneven. The freshets of centuries had
left hollows here and hummocks there. They were levelled. The
knolls--dunes they would call them along Lake Michigan--were scraped
down and dumped into the swales, and the excess was thrown into a sedgy
morass along the river front, to make it into solid ground and give a
clean, healthy shore, which is now one of the chief charms of the
place. For the sections where grass was meant to grow--for dooryards
and the like--tons upon tons of "top soil" were brought in to give a
fertile surface.
The mill buildings went up first, on a broad space of one hundred acres
levelled off for them, and then the town began to grow. That was
sixteen years ago, and it has kept on growing. Every year sees a lot of
new houses, of various values, and one and all well built and comely.
And in all grades they are better houses than a workman, or a mill boss
either, can get anywhere else in America for the same money.
[Sidenote: TO MAKE A PROFIT BUT TO SHOW A SAVING]
That has been the doctrine from the beginning. Charles G. Roebling said
at the time something to the effect that every workingman was a free
moral agent, and didn't want to be tied to anybody's apron-strings,
that he wanted a square deal and a chance to live his own life out of
business hours, and to get the worth of his money when he spent it. "We
purpose," he said, "to make a fair profit on our investment, but we can
do that and still show a man a saving. And we stop there."
It doesn't take long to realize that the Roeblings are living up to the
original schedule. The rents, the figures on all sorts of commodities
at the "village store," which sells everything from a pork chop to a
piano, and the drug store, which is just as "Riker-Hegeman" as any live
town could wish, are all below the current price scale in the rest of
the country, by a margin sufficient to mean something to a family when
they "tote up" at the year's end.
Electric light, coal and the other things a man has to pay for in any
town are charged for here, but it doesn't take a legislative fight or a
big row in the newspapers to keep the price down where a man can afford
to pay it. Water is supplied free. The idea is that the man owes the
company nothing but good work in return for his pay. After quitting
time he's his own boss. The company tries to make life in the town
pleasant enough so that he'll be glad to live there, and think he has a
good job. And it recognizes that life has many sides.
[Sidenote: AND THE TOWN HAD A BAR]
It was in pursuance of the general thesis that when the town opened it
had a hotel with a bar. "There's no use," they said, "in trying to make
a mollycoddle out of a mill man. When he wants a drink he's going to
get it, especially the foreign born. We don't propose to pick his
drinks for him. If he wants whiskey it's a good sight better for us
that he should be able to get it here like a human being than to trail
into Trenton and take a chance with the stuff that goes over the bars
where a workingman drinks. The whiskey here isn't gilt-edged, but it's
decent, and it's worth what it costs."
Prohibition settled the drink question, but while the cafe lasted in
Roebling it kept the men from going to town to battle with the
"embalming fluid," and not showing up for the customary three days.
That too was good business.
[Sidenote: FIRE, POLICE, BANKS, STREETS]
After the dirt and noise and disorder of a city street, it is like a
sedative to slip from the train into the peace and the wide spaces of
Roebling. The tidy station is at one side, at the other, beyond the
switch tracks, the little gate-house which gives ingress to the mill
enclosure--if you have the proper kind of pass. From here a trim
concrete walk leads on past the ground of the plant and its fence of
tall pickets, toward the river, and the town. As you go, you meet with
courtesy. It is not drawing the long bow to say everybody in
Roebling--outwardly at least--is civil and good natured. Just beyond
the mill grounds you come upon the police office, with trig coppers who
seem to have very little to do. Like the shining fire engines, which
stand in the adjoining building ready for service either in town or
plant, they seem to be maintained chiefly for insurance and ornament.
But they are practical organizations at that. The Roebling Company
learned what fire was during the war, when two of the biggest buildings
in the Upper Works were destroyed.
From this point the streets lead away, broad, clean streets with the
best of sidewalks, and drainage. The town has spread out now so that it
looks no more like a toy city. The streets are 80 feet wide, with the
exception of Main Street and Fifth Avenue, which are 100 feet wide.
Trees have been planted which already make it attractive. In front of
every house is a dooryard, a patch of green grass to remind a man that
God made the world.
[Sidenote: HOUSES]
Adjoining fire and police houses, there was formerly a trim little bank
whose business has expanded to such an extent that it has been enabled
to move to the centre of the business section of the town in an
attractive and up-to-date building of its own.
The houses, while of widely different types, are for the most part made
of brick. In order to avoid fire danger, the minimum of wood is used in
all the buildings of the town. The houses are all constructed on the
most improved plan of sanitation and hygiene. Through the block, giving
access to the back-doors, run clean alleys, wide enough to allow wagons
to pass for the delivery of coal, foodstuffs and other commodities, and
for the collection of waste. The company is now halting between the
erection of an incinerator plant to consume the garbage for its 700 and
odd homes, or a "hog farm" as part of its three or four hundred acres,
which without difficulty could turn out 1,000 to 2,000 head of swine a
year, and further reduce the cost of living. It is possible, too, that
it may some day produce its own milk.
There is a marked difference between some of the houses first erected
and those of more recent construction. At present the "bungalow" type
is in great favor, since it facilitates the labor of housekeeping. More
pretentious dwellings, for the men holding important positions in the
plant, are sufficient to make a rent-ridden, janitor-jaded, bell-boy
bossed New Yorker wonder what he is being punished for. One handsome
colonial home just built for a superintendent in one of the wire mills
would be a credit to any commuter town.
[Sidenote: BASEBALL, RECREATION BUILDING, THEATRE, BALLROOM]
Always as you pass through airy Roebling you encounter some new
institution built to make it seem like a regular place. There is a
baseball ground which would be a credit to any city, with its tidy
green grandstand and its carefully manicured diamond. The Wire Works
team is now prominent in one of the State Leagues. There is a
recreation building, with billiard and pool tables and the best bowling
alleys that can be built. There is a spacious assembly hall, with
theatre stage and a scrumptious curtain bearing a picture of the
Roebling Brooklyn Bridge. The gallery is commodious. The seats are
removable, leaving a ballroom of impressive size, and adjoining rooms
are equipped with ranges, refrigerators and dishes for the preparation
and service of suppers or of dinners great and small.
Take notice of the hotel, the boarding houses where single men live
well and cheaply, of the public school, the hospital, the doctors, the
nurses, the dispensary. And these last are busy functionaries.
[Sidenote: VERY LITTLE SICKNESS, VERY MANY BABIES]
There is very little sickness in Roebling. The sanitation is studiously
good, but when you are sick there they look after you, which is also
"good business," and babies are a favorite form of diversion. This is
impressively true. You sense it wherever you go. There are children
everywhere--good looking wholesome "kids." And something makes them
glad to live here, too.
[Sidenote: BEING A BOY SCOUT AT ROEBLING]
To be a boy scout in Roebling is about as good fun as a boy could have.
For a long time the company gave the boys too much. Then it woke up to
the fact that half the sport of being a boy scout was to do things. So
the Scouts were told if they wanted to keep the perfectly corking club
house on the river bank, with its big meeting room, its open mouthed
fireplace, its mounted deer heads, and banners, and books and guns and
spears and swords and all the other junk the boy soul loves, they'd
have to work for it. Goodness knows they do. The grounds around that
shack in spring are turned up like a golf links. What they have done in
the way of white birch rustic railings along the winding walks that
lead to the grounds would make a Chippewa Indian sick with envy. This
year they are to help build a long float from the club house to the
water, to launch their canoes on.
To the medical equipment is added a hospital for contagious diseases,
standing away out in the fields. And in the outskirts also is land set
apart for gardens, where the millworkers have allotted plots of ground
for the raising of their own vegetables. The manure from the stables,
where sixty horses are kept, helps to make gardening worth while. Even
to be a mule in Roebling is comfortable. There are old mules there--you
see them just wandering around the paddocks, eating and growing
older--that will never see thirty-five or forty again. Nobody ever will
send them down the long trail. They have worked hard for the Roebling
Company. It will feed them till they simply lie down and die of their
own accord.
Feeding--whether mules or people--is habitual. When John A. Roebling
first made rope, he had three or four men working with him. They had a
table in the shop. As the business has grown, this custom has
continued. Today the entire office force at the headquarters in
Trenton--some 230 persons of all ranks--gets a dinner every day that
for sheer quality cannot be equalled in any of the city hotels. It may
be a fad to feed that whole crowd fresh yellow cream brought in every
morning from the Roebling farms, but--it's good business.
[Sidenote: THE PARK]
The high land on the bluff overlooking the river at Roebling is a park,
with trees and benches, and a place where the band can play while the
folks sit taking the air on a hot summer night. In a neat enclosure of
Roebling wire, convenient to all parts of the town, are tennis courts,
for general use. There is a sanitary barber shop, where five shining
chairs are always full. Roebling has the best barbered lot of
foreign-born workmen in America.
[Sidenote: HOW THE FOREIGNER LIVES IN ROEBLING]
In a town like this are lessons for those who like to try to translate
the foreigner for the good of American industry. There are those who
cherish a superstition that the foreign workman in the United States
lives poorly. In Roebling it is remarked that it is the foreigner who
is the best customer in groceries and butcher's meat. He buys chickens
instead of beef brisket, and not one chicken, but two and three. It is
he also who buys the Hood River apples and the best grape fruit.
And as for bread--you should see the bakery. "Sunny Jim" would sing to
see it--clean and shining, and turning out all kinds of bakestuffs
besides the big round red-blond loaves of "European bread," which they
say "has the strength" in it. The baker's wagon, loaded to the very top
of the canvas cover, goes through the town and the workers' little
children run homeward from it with two, three, four loaves altogether
as big as themselves. Crescent rolls, which cost a nickel at a French
bakery in New York, are sold here for two cents apiece.
So it goes in Roebling. Over on the one side are the negro quarters.
They have everything anybody else has including a recreation house--and
when they recreate, they just recreate.
* * * * *
If Roebling was an experiment, it is not so any longer. It is full of
comfortable people, and in seventy years the Roebling theory as to what
a workman wants and how he should be treated has never proved itself
more conclusively than here. It is a suggestive fact that in all that
time, save for some insignificant incidents, the Roeblings have been
free from the nightmare of "labor troubles." It may be because its
workmen have nothing worth while to complain of. Every effort is made
to make them comfortable without making them feel like dependents.
It is the outworking of a great business theory. In these times it is
of impressive significance.
End of Project Gutenberg's Outspinning the Spider, by John Kimberly Mumford