supply take care of itself is a monetary drawback to the merchants of
the city. In the first place, it radically reduces the margin which
the workingman's family has to spend for commodities. Especially is
this true of immigrant tenants, who are obliged to pay more than
English-speaking. For instance, on Bass street, Allegheny, we found
Slavs paying twenty dollars a month for four rooms, as against fifteen
dollars paid by Americans. In the second place, it puts a premium on the
single men, drifters, lodgers, as against the man with a family. The
immigrant boarders who rent from a boarding-boss, and sleep eight or ten
in a room or sleep at night in the beds left vacant by the night workers
who have occupied them throughout the day,--such fellows can make money
in the Pittsburgh district. But the immigrant who wants to make his
stake here, bring his family over, create a household, must pay ten or
fifteen dollars a month for rooms; and must pay high prices for all the
other necessities of life. If I were asked by what means the merchants
of Pittsburgh could increase the volume of purchases of the buying
public, I should say that no one thing would affect that so impressively
as the multiplication of households, through the multiplication of low
cost, low rental, sanitary houses to meet the needs of stable family
groups as against the transient lodger.
My third point is that the housing problem is not a city problem alone.
It is repeated in each of the mill towns. I could cite instances in
Braddock, Duquesne, McKeesport, Sharpsburg, where old buildings are
filthy and overcrowded and where new buildings are put up in violation
of every canon of scientific housing,--back-to-back houses such as
were condemned in England seventy-five years ago as breeding places of
disease. Homestead, for instance, has no ordinance against overcrowding,
no ordinance requiring adequate water supply, or forbidding privy vaults
in congested neighborhoods. The foreigners live in the second ward
between the river and the railroads. In twenty-two courts studied in
this district, only three houses had running water inside. One hundred
and ten people were found using one yard pump. Fifty-one out of 239
families lived in one room each. Twenty-six of the two-room apartments
are used by eight or more people; one two-room apartment sheltered
thirteen; two, twelve; two, eleven. A crude reflection of the effect of
these conditions is indicated by the death rate in this second ward. Of
every three children born there one dies before it reaches two years
of age, as against one in every six in the rest of Homestead, where
detached, and livable dwellings prevail.
* * * * *
This comparison of health conditions in a small town is true in a large,
cruel way of Pittsburgh itself. In co-operation with the Typhoid Fever
Commission we have analyzed by wards the death certificates of people
dying in Pittsburgh for the past five years. We have grouped these
wards into districts, the living conditions of which are more or less
of a kind. Let me compare the mortality figures of wards nine and ten
and twelve,--a group of river wards in the old city, near the mills,
peopled for the most part with a wage-earning population of small
income,--compare these wards with ward twenty-two, a new residential
district in the East End. What are the chances of life of the men,
women and children living in the one and in the other? The chance of
a man's dying of bronchitis in the river wards is two and a half as
against one in the East End; it is four of his dying from pneumonia as
against one in the East End, five of his dying of typhoid as against one
in the East End, six of his dying a violent death as against one in the
East End. These are rough proportions merely, but they are of terrific
significance. Our American boast that everybody has an equal chance
falls flat before them. The dice are loaded in Pittsburgh when it comes
to a man's health; his health is the workingman's best asset; and the
health and vigor of its working population are in the long run the vital
and irrecoverable resources of an industrial center.
This brings us to a point where we can define more concretely the plain
civic responsibility of democracy in an industrial district. That
responsibility is to contrive and to operate the social machinery of the
community, and to make living conditions in the district, such as will
attract and hold a strong and vigorous labor force, for the industries
on which the prosperity of the district must depend. Here lie the
responsibility of the community to the individual manufacturer,--and the
responsibility of the community to its own future:--that the efficiency
of its workers shall not be mortgaged before they go to work in the
morning.
* * * * *
This carries a counter responsibility. In the interests of the community
as a whole, in the interests of all the industries as against the
interests of any single one, the public cannot afford to have such
a working force impaired or wasted by unsanitary or health-taxing
conditions during the working hours. What I mean will perhaps be
clearest by illustrating in the case of industrial accidents.
Pittsburgh cannot afford to have over 500 workingmen killed every
year in the course of employment, or the unknown number of men who
are seriously injured. During the past year, the Pittsburgh Survey
has made an intensive inquiry into the facts surrounding the deaths
of the entire roster of men killed in industry during twelve months,
and of the accident cases treated in the hospitals of the district
during three months,--not with the idea of raising anew the question
of responsibility for particular accidents, but to see if there are
any indications as to whether these accidents could be prevented and
whether the burden of them falls where in justice it should. The work
has been done by a staff of five people, including a lawyer, an engineer
and interpreters, and we have had the co-operation of claim agents,
superintendents, foremen, trade union officials and others. We found
that of the 526 men killed in the year studied in Allegheny county,
the accidents fell on Americans as well as foreigners; 224 were native
born. The ranks of steel workers and train men suffer most,--the pick of
the workmen in the district. There were 195 steel workers killed, 125
railroad men, seventy-one mine workers, and 135 in other occupations.
It was found that it was the young men of the district who went down in
the course of industry. Eighty-two were under twenty years of age, 221
between twenty and thirty. Over half the men killed were earning less
than fifteen dollars a week, a fact which raises the question if the
law is fair in assuming, as it does in Pennsylvania, that wages cover
risk. Fifty-one per cent of the men killed were married with families
to support; an additional thirty per cent were single men, partly, or
wholly, supporting a family. It was shown that the greatest losses were
not due to the spectacular accidents, but to everyday causes. In the
steel industry, for instance, forty-two deaths were due to the operation
of electric cranes, thirty-one to the operation of broad and narrow
gauge railroads in the mills and yards, and twenty-four to falls from
a height or into pits, vats, etc. Pittsburgh has stamped out smallpox;
its physicians are fighting tuberculosis; the municipality is checking
typhoid. Cannot engineers, foremen, employers and workmen come together
in a campaign to reduce accidents? Considerable has already been done
in this direction by progressive employers. The problem is that of
bringing up the whole district to progressive standards.
On the other hand we have put these industrial accident cases to that
same test of human measurement which we found of such significance in
gauging the losses due to typhoid fever. This steady march of injury and
death means an enormous economic loss. Is the burden of this loss justly
distributed? What takes the place of the wages of these bread-winners?
What resources of their own have these families to fall back on? What
share of the loss is shouldered by the employer? What share falls in
the long run upon the community itself, in the care of the sick and
dependent? Is the Pennsylvania law fair that exempts the employer from
paying anything to the family of a killed alien if that family lives
in a foreign country? Are the risks which the law supposes that the
workman assumes when he hires out for wages, fair risks under modern
conditions of production? Is it in the long run, to the interest of
the employer to leave to the haphazard, embittered gamble of damage
suits, this question of meeting in a fair way the human loss which
with even the best processes and the greatest care, is involved in the
production of utilities? I am not in a position here to put forward the
economic facts brought out by our inquiries; but I can say that on every
hand, among employers and claim agents and workmen, there is profound
dissatisfaction and an increasing open-mindedness toward some such sane
and equitable system of working-men's compensation as those in operation
in Germany and in England.
But this question of industrial accidents is only part of another and
larger question of the relation of industry to health. The workers of
Pittsburgh are dealing not with simple ploughs and wash tubs and anvils,
but with intricate machines or in great work rooms where hundreds work
side by side; dealing with poisons, with voltage, with heat, with
a hundred new and but half mastered agents of production. Are the
conditions under which some of this work is carried on directly inimical
to health? Could they be bettered without serious loss to the trades and
with great gain to the workers?
In the rapid development of factories in America, we have only begun
to devise our plants with reference to the health of the worker as
well as with reference to output. Let me illustrate from the women
employing trades. In only two of the twenty-eight commercial laundries
in Pittsburgh, is the wash room on the upper floor. In twenty-six,
rising steam and excessive heat not only cause discomfort in the other
departments, but tend to induce diseases of the respiratory organs.
Tobacco dried in many of the stogy sweatshops, makes the air heavy with
nicotine, fills the room with fine dust and increases the danger, always
present in the tobacco trades, from tuberculosis. In foundries and
machine shops, the custom of placing annealing ovens in the rooms where
the cores are made, causes excessive heat in the work room and fill the
air with a black dust. We have the statements of old employes that not
more than twenty-five girls of the 300 in the coil winding room in one
of the Pittsburgh electrical industries have been in the plant as long
as three or four years. The speeding-up tends to make the girls nervous,
weak and easily overcome by illness.
Apart from dangers of accident, of speeding and of injurious processes,
the health of a working force bears a direct relation to the length of
the working day. The tendency with respect to both hours and Sunday work
in the steel industry in Pittsburgh has been, for fifteen years, towards
an increase, and there is no indication that the end has yet been
reached. There is not the opportunity here to analyze the time schedule
of the varied departments of the steel industry, but in a majority
of them the day of twenty-four hours is split between two shifts of
workers; and the men work not six days, but seven a week. And a very
considerable share of them, once a fortnight in changing shifts, work a
long turn of twenty-four hours.
Employers may differ as to whether they can get the most work and the
most effective work out of a man if he works twelve hours a day, or ten,
or eight. But I hold that the community has something at stake here. How
much citizenship does Pittsburgh get out of a man who works twelve hours
a day seven days a week? How much of a father can a man be who may never
see his babies except when they are asleep; or who never gets a chance
to go off into the country for a rollick with his boys? The community
has a claim on the vigor and intelligence of its people, on their
activity in civic affairs, which I believe it is letting go by default.
It is getting only the tired out leavings of some of its best men.
My argument, then, is that if the civic responsibilities of democracy
in an industrial district are to be met, the community should do what
a first-rate industrial concern would do, figure out the ground it
can cover effectively and gear its social machinery so to cover it.
By social machinery I mean hospitals, schools, courts and departments
the city structure, and all that wide range of activities that have a
direct bearing on the living conditions of a people. Second, to hold
these agencies as closely accountable as are enterprises in the business
world; and to bring them to the ultimate touchstone of their effect on
the welfare of the average citizen. Unless a wage-earning population is
so insured against disease, its vigor and effectiveness so conserved,
the community is not meeting its responsibilities toward the industries
which must depend upon these workers for output and profit. In turn, the
public should see to it that the industries do not cripple nor exploit
the working force which constitutes the great asset of the community.
And further, if such a program is to be carried out in an American and
democratic way, the workers themselves must have greater leeway and
leisure in which to bear their share of the burdens and responsibilities
of American democracy.
I bear a message to Pittsburgh from John Burns, president of the Local
Government Board of England, one of the foremost labor leaders of Great
Britain, who has been hailed this fall as one of the conserving forces
of the present Liberal ministry in dealing with the vast economic
problems which are facing the British Empire. He has visited America and
Pittsburgh as a member of various commissions, and it was on the basis
of his knowledge of our situation here that I asked him for suggestions
as to ways of advance, which would lead to the improvement of civic and
labor conditions in the Pittsburgh steel district. "Six days work a
week instead of seven," he said. "Three shifts of eight hours instead
of two shifts of twelve; no twenty-four hour shifts; better housing;
counter-attractions to the saloon; more parks,--open spaces; the
improvement of the river front;--the humanizing of labor instead of the
brutalization of toil. There you are. Those are Pittsburgh's marching
orders."
Pittsburgh's three rivers and the great mineral resource's they tap
brought the people here. Environment is inevitable as a selective
agency; but the people once here, can by their willing, mould and
perpetuate or destroy the holding power of the district. Other cities
have large admixtures of clerks and trading classes. I doubt if there is
such another working force in the country as that which peoples these
valleys. Therein lies a civic resource worth conserving to the utmost
of its potential goods. Will Pittsburgh as a community, as a democratic
community, meet that responsibility?
Will the industrial communities of the nation, as democratic
communities, meet their responsibility?
THE TREND OF THINGS
The working woman is coming up as a result of her invasion of commercial
pursuits. While the department store pays poorer wages than the factory
or domestic service, it has a standing, its girls a position due to
their dress and their surroundings, which the others do not give. Grant
it every evil ever charged against it, say Mr. Hard and Mrs. Dorr in
the third article of their series on The Woman's Invasion, in the
January _Everybody's_, make the case out as bad as long hours, poor pay,
Christmas rush time, the need for expensive clothes, can total. Still
it is superior socially; its hours are shorter; it draws the American
as against the foreign-born girl; it offers better opportunity for
marriage, and all these things appeal to a girl because she is not,
consciously at least, in industry to stay, but to pass the time until
marriage. That's why "a store can get for six dollars the kind of girl
that will earn ten dollars in a shoe factory."
Low as the wages are,--and they are set by this social advantage and by
the predominant number of department store clerks who are not wholly
dependent on themselves,--there is a chance for real advancement. Woman
has been in factory work for a century, but she remains an operative
except for occasional forewomen, and as a result of piece work she
quickly reaches her maximum earning capacity and afterwards declines.
But in the department store, where she has been only a few years, she
has advanced to positions of real responsibility, particularly as a
buyer, and sometimes draws a salary of from $1,500 to $6,000; her wages
go steadily up, and the clerks in some departments draw good, living
wages with the ever-present example of the buyer and her kind just
ahead, elevated from their own ranks.
The article, in parts, in a stirring description of the life of the
20,000 department store clerks on State street, Chicago, and one of
the best parts of it is the contrast of the girl clerk who sells
handkerchiefs, and the girl machine operative who makes handkerchiefs,
the clerk "getting handkerchiefs out of boxes for querulous, exacting
customers, putting handkerchiefs back in boxes for querulous, exacting
stock inspectors, taking parcels to the cage of the wrapper girl,
pacifying purchasers waiting for their change, attracting new purchasers
coming down the aisle, discriminating between 'buyers' and 'shoppers,'
drawing the 'buyers' on, edging the 'shoppers' off, rearranging the
counter,--from eight or half-past in the morning to half past five in
the afternoon;" the factory girl sitting before a counter on which there
are a blue cross, a red cross and a machine with a clutching hand, who
"takes a handkerchief, places it on the blue cross, pushes it over to
the red cross, and the claw of the machine snatches it away. She takes
a second handkerchief, places it on the blue cross, pushes it over to
the red cross, and the machine snatches it away. She takes a third
handkerchief, a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, a seventh, an eighth, two a
second, 120 a minute, 7,200 an hour, all the morning hours, all the
afternoon hours, of every week, all the working weeks of every year....
The wide prevalence of this kind of sub-human toil in factories is one
of the two great reasons why department store managers can often pay
sub-human wages."
* * * * *
Mrs. Dorr has an article along very similar lines in the January
_Hampton's Broadway Magazine_, using with effect little stories of women
workers in many trades. Girls come out of school at fourteen and go to
work; after a short apprenticeship they are put at the machines, and
quickly earn the most they ever will earn. Gradually their nerves, their
muscles, their eyes, their efficiency decline, their wages follow. Later
they stand beside the young apprentices, earning the minimum wages after
a life spent in a factory.
Women do hard, manual work, too, much as we have been accustomed to
think of that as peculiar to some European and Asiatic countries. Indian
squaws no longer till the fields and do the heavy work in America, but
Mrs. Dorr has found a modern substitute: "Go into the iron and metal
working factories of American cities and see Polish women working in the
heat of horrible furnaces, handling heavy weights, doing work fit only
for strong men. Go into the rubber factories of Boston and see Greek
and Armenian women drunk in the fumes of naphtha. See them in non-union
hat factories with the skin scalded from their hands as they shrink the
felt in streams of boiling water. We do not want to see American women
doing such things. Yet not a year ago, in the first months of the panic
of 1907, I received a letter from an American woman out of employment,
asking if it were not possible for her to obtain work as a street
cleaner. That work, she said, seemed to her easier than the office
scrubbing she was doing then."
But to return to the factory girl, Mrs. Dorr declares she is not
arraigning those who own and operate factories, for they are keen for
skilled workers to replace the unskilled girls who must be driven at
a pace set by the machines; but rather the system under which our
industries are run and by which we make our workers. The skilled worker
can be made only by training, and in that she finds the keynote to
the whole situation. Let us establish a great network of industrial
training schools, such as the Manhattan Trade School for Girls and the
Hebrew Technical School for Girls in New York, and the school maintained
by the Woman's Industrial and Educational Union in Boston. Then we shall
have not only skilled workers, earning fair wages, but we shall be
safeguarding the mothers of to-morrow and the Children of the day after.
* * * * *
"The doctor," says Rudyard Kipling in the January _Ladies' Home
Journal_, "can hoist a yellow flag over a center of civilization and
turn it into a desert; he can hoist a red cross in the desert and turn
it into a center of civilization." He can break the speed limit, go
unmolested through riotous crowds, forbid any ship to enter any port in
the world and order whole quarters of cities to be pulled down or burned
up.
These are some of his conspicuous privileges. On the other hand, "in
all times of flood, fire, plague, pestilence, famine, murder and sudden
death it is required of the doctor that he report himself for duty, and
remain on duty till his strength fails him or his conscience relieves
him,--whichever shall be the longer period." There is no eight-hour law
for the physician, no one cares whether he is "in his bath, or his bed,
or on his holiday, or at a theater."
It is pretty well worth while, though, for "every sane human being
agrees that this fight for time which we call Life is one of the most
important things in the world, if not the most important. It follows,
then, that the doctors who plan and conduct and who re-enforce this
fight are among the most important men in the world."
* * * * *
The Immigration Department of the International Committee of the Young
Men's Christian Association has issued two attractive little pamphlets
for the newly arrived immigrant. The policy of the association is
neither to encourage nor to discourage immigration but to give a helping
hand to those who have fully made up their minds to immigrate or are
already in this country. The two new books are entitled The Country to
Which You Go, giving an elementary outline of some of our political and
social institutions, and How to Become a Citizen of the United States,
which gives the immigrant a clear idea of the process to be undergone in
order to become a voter.
Oscar Straus, secretary of the Department of Commerce and Labor, says
of the work of the Immigration Department, "No nobler, better or more
practical work can be done by the Young Men's Christian Association than
to teach our young men, be they either native-born or alien, a proper
understanding of the basic principles of our government."
* * * * *
The last issue of _The Outlook for the Blind_, published by the
Massachusetts Association for Promoting the Interests of the Blind and
edited by Charles F. F. Campbell, contains a chart showing in detail
all educational institutions for the blind in the United States and
Canada, with information of the training offered, the number of pupils,
number of instructors, and other information. Presented in this form,
the information is graphic and may readily be compared by states. The
same issue contains articles on industrial training for the blind, a new
typewriter for the blind, conferences here and abroad, reports of work
in different states, and some splendidly printed illustrations. Such an
issue seems indispensable to any one interested in the sightless.
* * * * *
It is to be expected that an anti-suffragist should take the particular
attitude toward woman clearly manifested by Dr. Lyman Abbott in The
Home Builder.[15] In speaking of the wife he says, "Her one dominating
desire is, not to be independent, but to be dependent on the man she
loves." It is true that Dr. Abbott speaks of the widest and most
perfect unity between man and wife but it is ever the attitude of the
dependent, the chattel, the possession of man as the end and aim of the
woman's existence. It is hardly a modern ideal for either the daughter,
the wife, the mother, the housekeeper or even the philanthropist, as
some of the headings are called. One of the most valuable points which
Dr. Abbott does bring out, however, is the preservation of the sense
of humor through all of the vicissitudes of the woman's life. If the
book is intended for a quaint old lady, far away from the confines of
civilization, it might meet her placid requirements. But it hardly
possesses the philosophy that the modern, active woman of the larger
communities can find use for.
[15] The Home Builder by Lyman Abbott. Small 12 mo. Boards. Houghton,
Mifflin and Co., 75 cents. Pp. 129. This book may be obtained at
publisher's price through CHARITIES AND THE COMMONS.