The Workers: an Experiment in Reality. the West

CHAPTER VIII. From Denver to the Pacific 338

FROM DENVER TO THE PACIFIC 338

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

THE SENSE OF INFINITY IS HEIGHTENED BY THE FLOATING MIST Frontispiece

FACING PAGE “THAT MEETING IS NOT FAR,” HE IS SAYING, “AND IT’S WARM THERE. WON’T YOU GO?” 16

IN THE CORNER NEAR US ARE THREE MEN, SLOUCHING, LISTLESS, WEARY SPECIMENS OF THEIR KIND, WHO ARE PLAYING “COMRADES” 24

SHE IS FACING US NEAR AT HAND, HER HEAD FRAMED IN THE DARK UMBRELLA WHICH RESTS UPON HER SHOULDER 30

OVERFLOWING THROUGH THE OPEN DOOR OF THE FARTHEST PASSAGE UPON THE FLOOR OF THE MAIN CORRIDOR ARE THE SPRAWLING FIGURES OF MEN ASLEEP 36

THE POLICE-STATION BREAKFAST 42

“OUT YOU GO, NOW” 50

“WE’LL FEED, PARTNER, WE’LL FEED” 54

ALL OF THEM WERE SHOUTING OATHS AND VIOLENT ABUSE 60

SHE DREW BACK AND LOOKED AT ME PERPLEXED 66

HE WAS PUTTING THE MEN THROUGH A CATECHISM RESPECTING THEIR NATIONALITIES, THEIR HOMES AND OCCUPATIONS, AND THEIR MOTIVES IN COMING TO CHICAGO 88

I THINK THAT THE COOK THOROUGHLY ENJOYED FEEDING US 94

IN THE MIDST OF THE APPLAUSE WHICH MARKED THE PASSAGE OF THE RESOLUTION, SHE WAS ON HER FEET 106

“DON’T YOU TOUCH IT,” SHE SAID, FIERCELY 114

“WE’VE GOT SOME GRUB, MA!” CRIED THE OLDER CHILD, IN A TONE OF SUCCESS, AS SHE RAN UP TO HER MOTHER WITH THE BASKET. “RILEY’S BARREL WAS FULL TO-NIGHT” 118

WAITING FOR A JOB OUTSIDE THE FACTORY GATES 130

I WAS STRONG AND WARM IN THE WILD JOY OF THE LUST FOR BLOOD 136

LOADING THE BOX-CARS UNDER CRIST’S GUIDANCE 150

IN THE FACTORY 154

CROWDS OF MEN STREAMING FROM EVERY DOOR AND PRESSING SWIFTLY THROUGH THE GATE 160

THE NOON HOUR 164

MRS. SCHULZ’S BOARDING-HOUSE 168

NEVER ONCE DID I FAIL OF A FRIENDLY GREETING 196

HE HATED KINGS AND POTENTATES AND ALL GOVERNMENTAL AUTHORITY 214

THE SOCIALIST MEETING 222

THERE WAS NOTHING IN THE DOMESTIC SCENE WHICH MET US TO SUGGEST THE HOME OF A REVOLUTIONARY 232

AN EVASION OF THE FACTORY SYSTEM OF PRODUCTION 236

RETURNING WORK FROM SWEAT SHOPS 240

“DON’T TALK TO US ABOUT DISEASE; IT’S BREAD WE’RE AFTER, BREAD!” 246

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 256

THE FOURTH OF JULY--“TWO TOWNSHIPS WERE TO PLAY EACH OTHER” 318

PRICE COULD SPEAK THEIR LANGUAGE, AND NOW AND THEN ONE JOINED US IN CAMP 370

THE WORKERS

CHAPTER I. The Army of the Unemployed

THE ARMY OF THE UNEMPLOYED

ROOMS OF THE YOUNG MEN’S CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION, CHICAGO, ILL. Saturday Evening, December 5, 1891.

A new phase of my experiment is begun. Hitherto I have been in the open country, and have found work with surprising readiness. Now I am in the heart of a congested labor market, and I am learning, by experience, what it is to look for work and fail to find it; to renew the search under the spur of hunger and cold, and of the animal instinct of self-preservation until any employment, no matter how low in the scale of work, that would yield food and shelter, appears to you the very Kingdom of Heaven; and if it could suffer violence, it would seem as though the strength of your desire must take that kingdom by force. But it remains impregnable to your attack, and, baffled and weakened, you are thrust back upon yourself and held down remorselessly to the cold, naked fact that you, who in all the universe are of supremest importance to yourself, are yet of no importance to the universe. You are a superfluous human being. For you there is no part in the play of the world’s activity. There remains for you simply this alternative: Have you the physical and moral qualities which fit you to survive, and which will place you at last within the working of the large scheme of things, or, lacking these qualities, does there await you inevitable wreck under the onward rush of the world’s great moving life?

That, at all events, is pretty much as it appears to-night to Tom Clark and me. Clark is my “partner,” and we are not in good luck nor in high spirits. We each had a ten-cent breakfast this morning, but neither has tasted food since, and to-night, after an exhausting search for work, we must sleep in the station-house.

We are doing our best to pass the time in warmth and comfort until midnight. We know better than to go to the station-house earlier than that hour. Clark is in the corner at my side pretending to read a newspaper, but really trying to disguise the fact that he is asleep.

An official who walks periodically through the reading-room, recalling nodding figures to their senses, has twice caught Clark asleep, and has threatened to put him out.

I shall be on the alert, and shall warn Clark of his next approach, for after this place is closed we shall have long enough to wait in the naked street before we can be sure of places in the larger corridor of the station, where the crowding is less close and the air a degree less foul than in the inner passage, where men are tightly packed over every square foot of the paved floor.

We are tired and very hungry, and not a little discouraged; we should be almost desperate but for one redeeming fact. The silver lining of our cloud has appeared to-night in the form of falling snow. From the murky clouds which all day have hung threateningly over the city, a quiet, steady snow-fall has begun, and we shall be singularly unfortunate in the morning if we can find no pavements to clean.

In the growing threat of snow we have encouraged each other with the brightening prospect of a little work, and for quite half an hour after nightfall we stood alternately before the windows of two cheap restaurants in Madison Street, studying the square placards in the windows on which the bills of fare are printed, and telling each other, with nice discriminations between bulk and strengthening power of food, what we shall choose to-morrow.

It is a little strange, when I think of it, the closeness of the intimacy between Clark and me. We never saw each other until last Wednesday evening, and we know little of each other’s past. But I feel as though the ties that bound me to him had their roots far back in our histories. Perhaps men come to know one another quickest and best on a plane of life, where in the fellowship of destitution they struggle for the primal needs and feel the keen sympathies which attest the basal kinship of our common humanity. Ours are not intellectual affinities--at least they are not consciously these--but we feel shrewdly the community of hunger and cold and isolation, and we have drawn strangely near to each other in this baffling struggle for a social footing, and have tempered in our comradeship the biting cold of the loneliness that haunts us on the outskirts of a crowded working world.

* * * * *

Early on last Wednesday morning, in the gray light of a cloudy day, I began the last stage of the march to Chicago. A walk of something less than thirty miles would take me to the heart of the city.

There is an unfailing inspiration in these early renewals of the journey. Solid food and a night of unfathomable sleep have restored the waste of tissue. I set out in the morning with a sense of boundless freedom, with an opening day and the whole wide world before me, with my heart leaping in the joy of living and in high expectancy of what the day may hold of experience and of insight into the lives of my fellow-men.

On this particular morning there is added fulness and freshness in that inbreathing which gives the zest of life. Long had Chicago loomed large to my imagination, and now it stood before me, its volumes of black smoke mingling with the leaden sky in the northern horizon.

How much it had come to mean to me, this huge metropolis of the shifting centre of our population! The unemployed were there, and I had not seen them yet; hundreds lived there who are fiercely at war with the existing state of things, and their speech was an unknown tongue to me, and my conventional imagination could not compass the meaning of their imaginings; and then the poor were there, the really destitute, who always feel first and last of all the pressure upon the limits of subsistence, and who in the grim clutch of starvation underbid one another for the work of the sweaters, until the brain reels at the knowledge of the incredible toil by which body and soul are kept together. All this awaited me, the very core of the social problem whose conditions I had set out to learn in the terms of concrete experience.

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