WHAT'S ON 
 THE WORKER'S MIND
 
 WHITING WILLIAMS
 
 WHAT'S ON 
 THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 WHITING WILLIAMS 
 
 FORMERLY PERSONNEL DIRECTOR OF THE HYDRAULIC 
 PRESSED STEEL COMPANY 
 
 ILLUSTRATED 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 1920
 
 CoprmioHT, 1920. BT 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'8 SONS 
 
 Published September, 1920
 
 PREFACE 
 
 "WORSE than at any time in history" that seems the 
 only proper way to describe the present relations between 
 the various persons commonly grouped, hi these industrial 
 times, as Labor, Management, Capital, and the Public 
 the investors of brawn, brains, and bullion, and the "bour- 
 geoisie." 
 
 For that reason it has seemed, on the whole, desirable to 
 make public hi this way records and observations put down 
 at the close of strenuous days and nights, in the belief that 
 the chief causes of the troublesome factors of the situation 
 are as deep as human nature and no deeper. If, some- 
 how, the experiences described may help to a better under- 
 standing of each other's minds and hearts, the effort will 
 be accounted not in vain. C^tainly such a better under- 
 standing of the fundamental humanness of all the persons 
 connected with the industrial process, whether in one group 
 or another and most of us are hi two or three of those 
 groups at different tunes is indispensable to both the pres- 
 ervation and the upbuilding of the life of our nation and, 
 perhaps, through it, of the world. 
 
 Because neither commendation nor criticism of communi- 
 ties or companies is intended or desired, names are not 
 given correctly and geography is purposely obscured. 
 
 Some effort has been made to restrain the temptation to 
 draw conclusions from the various experiences and testi- 
 monies at the tune encountered. At the close of their re- 
 cital I shall make bold to set forth what seem to me proper 
 interpretations, but not without giving then, as now, my
 
 vi PREFACE 
 
 full blessing to any and all readers who may find themselves 
 arrived at very different conclusions. 
 
 The particular reason for trying to get at the whole mat- 
 ter hi this particular way arises from the belief that men's 
 actions spring rather from their feelings than from their 
 thoughts, and that people cannot be interviewed for their 
 feelings. The interviewer can only listen, and then try to 
 understand because he is not only hearing but experiencing 
 and sympathizing. 
 
 Since the period described jobs have become more plen- 
 tiful. This does not at all weaken my conviction of the 
 fundamental importance to the worker of the daily job as 
 the axle of his entire world. On the contrary, it serves, I 
 believe, only to complicate the whole industrial problem in 
 certain ways ways which shall receive attention before 
 the book is ended. 
 
 WHITING WILLIAMS. 
 
 June, 1920.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PART I OVERALLS 
 
 CHAPTER PAQB 
 
 I. HUNTING A JOB 3 
 
 II. IN A TEN-THOUSAND-MAN-POWER STEEL PLANT ... 11 
 
 III. IN A ROLLING-MILL 39 
 
 IV. "STEEL STILL SLOW MINERS WANTED" 71 
 
 V. A SECOND COAL TOWN 106 
 
 VI. THE CIRCLE OF THE HIRINQ-GATES 150 
 
 VII. WITH THE BUILDERS OF SHIPS 157 
 
 VIII. IN AN OIL REFINERY 175 
 
 IX. IN THE IRON-MINES 205 
 
 X. AMONG THE INGOTS AND BILLETS AGAIN 238 
 
 PART II FINDINGS 
 
 XI. SOME OUTSTANDING IMPRESSIONS 281 
 
 XII. SOME DEEPER FACTORS 293 
 
 XIII. THE WAY OUT AND MANAGEMENT 309 
 
 XIV. THE WAY OUT AND THE PUBLIC . 319
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Whiting Williams Frontispiece 
 
 FACING PAGE 
 
 Charging an open-hearth furnace 24 
 
 Pouring the metal into the moulds 34 
 
 Some types from the coal and steel towns 62 
 
 About to descend into the mine 82 
 
 Taking down the first shot 98 
 
 Going to the day's work 110 
 
 A freight engine lifted by a crane 132 
 
 Migratory workers 154 
 
 Laying the keel 228 
 
 "Where coal and ore meet" 254 
 
 "Any chance of a man's gettin' on 'round here to-day?" . . . 264 
 
 The author as a steel worker 264
 
 PART I 
 OVERALLS
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 HUNTING A JOB 
 
 Cleveland, Ohio, 
 January 30, 1919. 
 
 I SUPPOSE the reason why that song, "Hanging Danny 
 Dee-ver hi the mor ning" keeps coming into my mind 
 is that early to-morrow I walk the plank off the good ship 
 "White Collar" into some seven months of what ought to 
 prove interesting and worth-while adventure on the rough 
 seas of "Common Labor." 
 
 With fair luck some kind of unskilled job in a steel plant 
 should come along before my twenty-five dollars and the 
 "hocking" possibilities of my grip of old clothes give out. 
 If peace orders fail to take the place of the cancelled war 
 contracts and the present unemployment spreads, I'll hope 
 to pick up enough to eat, at least, in the way of "hand- 
 outs" from the country's kindly housewives. 
 
 With job or without, the chief point and purpose of it all 
 must not escape me. It is not to learn what feelings my 
 new surroundings will give me. This is of no interest, and 
 can easily be discounted, as due to my years of soft-handed 
 college and social work. Instead, and on the contrary, 
 the constant aim must be to use the job and its surround- 
 ings to carry me so close to my fellow-workers or fellow- 
 hoboes, if necessary that they will tell me about them- 
 selves their thoughts and especially their feelings; for 
 these, I am sure, have a lot more to do with the doings of 
 all of us than our thoughts. 
 
 Most of our morning's news Bolshevists in Russia and 
 Germany, rebels in Roumania, rioters in Ireland, strikers in 
 
 3
 
 4 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 England and here means that large groups of people are 
 misbehaving because they feel they're being abused and 
 overlooked or misunderstood. If "men are square," then 
 something must be on their mind hunger, hopelessness, or 
 sense of injustice or they would behave as reasonably 
 and normally and decently as any of us; they would be 
 just as anxious to count and "get on" and be thought well 
 of by their fellow-citizens. 
 
 Maybe they won't let me get close enough to see what's 
 the trouble. But I have a hunch that they will somehow 
 sense that I believe in them and their wish to be square, 
 exactly as I believe in myself and everybody else. 
 
 Well, we shall see what we shall see and it's time to 
 get some sleep before that train begins to whistle ". . . in 
 the mor ning." 
 
 Steelville, 
 
 3.00P.M., Friday, 
 January 31. 
 
 Not much progress yet toward the discovery of Steel, 
 but already some good findings in Humanity. Expected 
 fists, but have found hands ! 
 
 The railway people were, if anything, a little more 
 friendly for my sheepskin overcoat. The policemen take 
 me in a friendly way by my shoulders and point with a 
 jolly "There ye are, me friend, see it?" The public em- 
 ployment clerks say, "Not a job in the place," as if they 
 were sorry. Up-stairs, there, a lorgnetted woman (a vol- 
 unteer worker) wanted almost to pour me tea while giving 
 addresses for a rooming-house. Workers assure me con- 
 cernedly of their belief that getting a job is going to be 
 "the devil, all right," but give all the pointers they can. 
 
 One man did yell at me. It was when the employment 
 clerk referred me to him to do some steel chipping out of 
 town. 
 
 " You-a no-a cheepah ? Veil den not'ing ! No-a cheepah,
 
 HUNTING A JOB 5 
 
 no-a go-a !" he shouted, as though I was deaf. But I guess, 
 at that, the information required giving to the whole room- 
 ful of about seventy-five laborers of every conceivable 
 nationality and of every degree of respectability and lack 
 of it. 
 
 " Previous experience? Yes, sir, I used to work in a 
 Tube Mill in S . But I'll take anything." 
 
 "Well, there's nothing here to-day." 
 
 That's the way it has been nearly all day here in the 
 different employment offices with the streets full of work- 
 less men. To get away from so much competition I walked 
 a long distance out to a plant of the Company, prac- 
 tising on the way my new working man's walk a sort of 
 swinging drawl of a gait. By that time I began to see 
 myself in the bread line which will be forming very soon 
 unless business picks up. 
 
 "If you're here to-night at six, or to-morrow morning at 
 seven, perhaps we can use you," somebody in the superin- 
 tendent's corridor told me; "we're often short when the 
 shift goes on." 
 
 So I've taken a dollar room at this hotel because the 
 lorgnetted woman's only other address would probably 
 want a week's rent in advance. 
 
 Believe me, I'm going to be on hand at six! And I'll 
 either be weary after ten hours' work to-morrow morning 
 or a waiter at those gates at seven. Because every hollow- 
 chested derelict you see is a human sign-board which says: 
 "Where I have been there is no work." 
 
 And it scares you. 
 
 Everybody seems to accept me for what I'm trying to be, 
 though I'm still rather deficient in grammarless lingo. 
 But it is most surprising that everybody is so kindly. I 
 wonder if it means that a pressed coat and a shaved face 
 work to keep a fellow away from the real friendliness of 
 ordinary human beings.
 
 6 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 A Public Library, 
 Steelville, 
 Feb. 1. j 
 
 I've kept recalling that "same old cat yet" story of the 
 boy who ran away and, after what seemed to be years of 
 absence, returned that same evening to marvel that the 
 same tabby was still under the home roof. It makes me 
 want to laugh and mourn at the same time to think that I 
 entered this new world only yesterday. 
 
 In the absorption of trying to "live a life," as the college 
 presidents call it on Commencement Day, I had forgotten 
 how endless a day could be when all your thought must go 
 merely to trying to earn a living. It has to go slowly, just 
 because every move is so deadly serious. You will either 
 get that job or you won't. If you get it great joy ! Life 
 is then and thereby re-established. If you don't then 
 more pinching and wandering and worry about the future 
 and bum-land. So you watch all the harder for the arrival 
 of the gang-boss who is to come out and, maybe, settle 
 your problem. 
 
 Last night for an hour I stood at the gate with twenty- 
 five others, negroes and foreigners, peering steadily into 
 that plant while the two policemen looked at us from above 
 their blue-coated stomachs as though we were so many 
 hogs threatening to rush in and eat up the place. Men 
 don't seem to chat or make friends then because each feels 
 the other his competitor so we all stood shivering, silent, 
 and intent. Whenever we saw any one we thought might 
 be the boss, we all hunched up our shoulders so as to look 
 husky and tried to catch his eye. 
 
 The gulf there is between men at such a time ! Between 
 those who came proudly out of the gate swinging their 
 dinner-buckets and feeling themselves members of the 
 privileged class of job-holders, and us who looked on in 
 envy. The only bigger gulf I can imagine to-night is be-
 
 HUNTING A JOB 7 
 
 tween such as us and the lordly potentate known as the 
 plant policeman. It just took my breath away to see some 
 of them (the job-holders, of course) positively familiar with 
 these policemen ! 
 
 Finally all of us had to give up, ten minutes or so after 
 the big gate closed, and only three (all negroes) had been 
 taken on. Altogether it was one of the longest and most 
 wearing hours of my life. I walked wearily back through 
 a very deserted street, safe in the knowledge that nobody 
 would think me worth holding up. 
 
 By six-forty this morning I again had my eyes glued 
 on that gate together with almost seventy-five others. 
 After the slowest and almost the most serious half -hour of 
 my life, the labor-boss failed to show up completely. We 
 were a disappointed and blasphemous crowd. 
 
 "Look at them hands!" said one muscular fellow. 
 " Ain't they good enough to earn a living for my wife and 
 kids! But I been in every place in this whole district. 
 Ain't that a h - of a country for a man to live in?" 
 
 "It's these - - Democrats," spoke up a boy. 
 
 "No, it's those - - Republicans," said another. 
 
 After consuming my beer in a near-by saloon as slowly as 
 possible, so as to get the lay of the land, I asked a drunken 
 young Pole how could a fellow get a job around here, any- 
 ways. He looked me over carefully. 
 
 "If you got education, ask for Mr. B ." 
 
 The power of a name ! They say that primitive peoples 
 believe you have power over a spirit if you know its name. 
 Sounds reasonable. Anyway it worked. When I asked 
 
 the policeman for "Mr. B ," I seemed to rise miles 
 
 in his estimation instantly. Action was immediate. Mr. 
 B - seemed mystified by me though I'd rubbed my 
 hands on the floor to make them dirtier before he came out 
 until I said I'd failed at clerking and selling and wanted 
 to make my hands earn my living now.
 
 8 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 "The men latest hired have all been laid off, and must 
 have first chance on," he said in a kindly voice. "Steel is 
 slow just now. War contracts cancelled, no peace orders 
 in. Walk up to the blast furnaces." 
 
 No job at the furnaces nor at the rolling-mills farther 
 on. By this tune I was thinking too much about bread 
 lines to spend even a nickel of my fast-vanishing pile for 
 beer and the bar-keep's help in the saloon where I 
 stopped for a rest. 
 
 "I should say not!" shot back a customer with much 
 heat when asked if he knew of a job. 
 
 Back hi town the employment office told of 3,000 just 
 laid off at one plant, and of other hundreds elsewhere. 
 Such things, aided and abetted by those bums who line the 
 streets and haunt the gates, do rub the terror of joblessness 
 into a fellow's system. I know now just how bitterly one 
 of them felt when there at the common labor desk the clerk 
 told him: 
 
 "Say, where was you? just signed up thirty-seven 
 
 whites and twenty-seven blacks for the Railroad a 
 
 minute ago." 
 
 The man's oaths were not of anger but of the deepest 
 
 anguish and despair: "Oh, the luck ! I been here 
 
 six hours, and I had to step out for only two minutes! 
 Oh, my God!" 
 
 At the near-free lunch-counter hi a crowded saloon I 
 understood the glow of joy in a young fellow who pro- 
 claimed himself the "luckiest man on earth" for having 
 found a job that morning which paid him "one dollar and 
 six bits" for a few hours' work. The bar-tender became my 
 friend when I told him of my luck: 
 
 "Say, I could 'a' placed you if you'd run in here last 
 night twenty- two a week and found" (board and room). 
 
 "Oh, bar-tendin', of course" when I asked, "What 
 doin'?"
 
 HUNTING A JOB 9 
 
 He seemed much disappointed by my inexperience in 
 that line. But he has a friend, so he told me an hour ago, 
 and if I'll drop in Monday 
 
 Meanwhile he begs me, if my purse is limited, to "go 
 mighty careful with every penny you got." 
 
 "You see we fellers get to know the signs. I been pan- 
 handled for more free drinks or bowls of soup in the last 
 three weeks than in the whole year before. You take it 
 from me we're to have an awful hard winter." 
 
 I'm guessing he's right. This afternoon, after spending a 
 good dollar to go to a big plant outside of town, I found the 
 same hopeless situation. A week or so more of this and I'll 
 have to sew up my last five dollars and try for a dish- 
 washer's job to keep me until the sales-managers can tell 
 a happier tale than yesterday, when one was quoted as 
 having "the first week in our entire history without one 
 single steel order !" I'm watching my money hard. Going 
 without even a dollar watch. What has tried me most 
 sorely these cold days has been the loss of one of my thick 
 mittens. To-morrow I must find a cheaper room. Yes- 
 terday I saw some hoboes warming their hands around a 
 fire by the railroad. I certainly hope I won't have to join 
 their open-air club. 
 
 Getting on with my grammar. "Ain't there no job around 
 here now'ures?" comes now with fair ease, also some mild 
 but passable profanity if I make a good run and jump for 
 it. But the biggest thing in the world to me just now is a 
 job preferably in a steel-mill. 
 
 The next biggest things of the day are the hopelessness, 
 the foreboding disastrousness of joblessness, with its threat- 
 ened entrance into the evil-smelling army of hoboes; the 
 endlessness of the jobless day of constant trudgings, ask- 
 ings, and turn-downs; and the ease with which all this leads 
 into the saloon. 
 
 A saloon is usually warm, and a jobless man is usually
 
 10 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 cold. I certainly was this morning at the gate, though 
 many's the time to-day I've blessed the man who sold me 
 my sheepskin. It's also, usually, well-lighted. That 
 seems to give the eyes the feeling of a sort of spiritual heat 
 well-desired after straining them to watch for the gang- 
 boss to appear. 
 
 My particular bar-keep friend here by the labor office in 
 the cheap rooming-house district seems a sort of traffic 
 cop, Bradstreet's, and Pilgrim's Progress. He appears to 
 think it all a part of his job. 
 
 "See what Jim gave to me to keep for him," said another 
 bar-tender to him and showed him a fat roll of bills. 
 
 "Yes," said my friend, "he asked me to keep it for him 
 last night, but I was too well tanked myself to make it 
 safe to take it. The fellow was a friend o' mine, you know," 
 he added to me. 
 
 To-day my three days' beard made me appear too rough 
 to dare look in decent people's faces on the street. A little 
 girl I passed in a nice residential district was evidently 
 afraid of me. That's not pleasant.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 IN A TEN-THOUSAND-MAN-POWER STEEL PLANT 
 
 Stackton, 
 
 Monday, February 3. 
 
 I feel a lot better than most princes feel nowadays a 
 whole lot better. I've got a job ! 
 
 After lying awake most of the night in a dirty, top-story, 
 stale-smelling, enormously noisy three-dollars-a-week room, 
 I went over to that same plant gate again at six-forty-five, 
 and after an endless hour tried to wig-wag the labor gang- 
 boss and later the works superintendent. 
 
 "Nothin' doing to-day," was the answer. "Try again at 
 six this evening." 
 
 The same thing at another big mill a few doors down. 
 
 By luck a car came by just then, labelled for a famous 
 steel town; so I jumped on and shortly found myself in an 
 employment office filled to the ceiling with a coughing, 
 swearing, smoking, ill-smelling gang of fifty representatives 
 of all the known races, including Mexicans, negroes, Indians, 
 and Turks. Up at the window finally I was taken on as 
 "labor." 
 
 The boy was slow enough in asking all manner of ques- 
 tions talking through two misplaced holes in plate-glass 
 certainly makes a bad go for any real exchange of facts or 
 ideas. The young clerks supposed to do the hiring gave 
 most of their time to tickling the backs of the necks or the 
 much-exposed chests of the young stenographers, while my 
 newly hired or unhired associates looked on and let out 
 grunts of impatience and disapproval hi as many tongues 
 as Babel ever knew. 
 
 11
 
 12 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 Finally a policeman came in and very roughly ordered: 
 "Everybody out clean outa here, you! Unless you got 
 a ticket or are a-waitin' to see the doctor." 
 
 Nobody could tell whether it was because they had hired 
 enough for the day or what. Having a ticket I stayed for 
 the doctor. My, but he is a sour one ! When one fellow 
 looked at the numbers with one eye (the other being cov- 
 ered with a card) and mistook an "8" for a "6," he exploded 
 with an oath, as if he considered it a personal insult. Later 
 we undressed and were tested for heart, lungs, hernia, de- 
 formities, identifying marks, etc. Then we dressed and 
 got cards to a company boarding-house until we could get 
 settled. 
 
 The dirtiest, rankest outfit imaginable! Even the "fo'- 
 castle" on our cattle-boat out of Boston was less so. 
 
 I asked the fat, jolly woman in charge if she had any 
 single or small rooms. She threw up her hands and laughed : 
 
 "My God, no! Man alive, no!" 
 
 However, she's a good sort. She showed me out past the 
 spilled garbage-cans and pointed to another street where I 
 could rent a better room if I had the money. I've found a 
 fair place there with an American housewife in charge- 
 much better and cleaner than the city room where I sit 
 now. Both cost three dollars, and both required the money 
 in advance. To-morrow morning, after ten or twelve hours' 
 work in the labor gang, I guess it won't make much differ- 
 ence where or what my room is. 
 
 Yesterday, by the way, at a meeting for organizing the 
 steel workers, the speaker was apparently willing to be a 
 Bolshevist or anything else if that would help his case for 
 unionism. 
 
 "We've got Chicago all in, also Joliet; Gary is eighty 
 per cent ours. A fine beginning in Cleveland and Youngs- 
 town. We're after an eight-hour day and higher wages. 
 When we get eight hours we'll go after seven and, if there
 
 IN A STEEL PLANT 13 
 
 are idle men still, then six. . . . No man's wife or baby 
 has a better right to anything in this world anything 
 than yours. If we could rid the world of bankers, lawyers, 
 brokers parasites all we'd have all that we earn. But 
 if you will join the union we'll get everything anyway." 
 
 All delivered hi a smooth, jolly, and most effective way. 
 The men seemed to think it very " straightforward and 
 blamed sensible!" I hadn't supposed many union men 
 were so extreme as that. Of course, I don't suppose he'd 
 shoot the bankers and others, but he sure would make 'em 
 go to work that is, with their hands. What function or 
 reward would be left for brains and other than manual 
 ability was not mentioned. Still I had the feeling that if 
 he thought he could get men into his union without talk- 
 ing so much violence he'd be happy to drop the rough stuff. 
 
 Stackton, 
 
 Tuesday, February 4. 
 
 Did I work? Why, I found more work than I had sup- 
 posed was still in the civilized world ! Twelve hours of the 
 hardest kind of back-testing labor under what I would call 
 difficult conditions. 
 
 Here's what has happened to me and my search for the 
 experience of hard labor: 
 
 At four-thirty I sat down in the company boarding-house 
 to meat stew, plenty of bread and stewed tomatoes, with 
 two white men may have been Americans, but probably 
 weren't and ten Mexicans of various classes, including a 
 couple of Indians. 
 
 With the landlady's package of thick sandwiches, cake, 
 and an apple, I reported as per orders to the employment 
 office and was shortly sent with others under a foreign-born 
 worker to the labor boss. 
 
 After getting our brass numbers we took our shovels out 
 of a shanty, went up past most of the fourteen big open-
 
 14 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 hearth furnaces, and finally reached one being torn down 
 for rebuilding. We deposited our coats in various places 
 there were no lockers and proceeded to get busy. 
 
 We began at five-thirty three of us Americans, one 
 Italian boy, one Mexican, one Greek, and several Slavic 
 and Russian fellows all of them hardly able to say more 
 than a very few English words, though they had all been in 
 this country a number of years. It was bricks and brick- 
 bats, and then more bricks and more "bats." We shovelled 
 or pitched broken bricks into big ladles or boxes in the 
 "cinder-pit" beneath us at the back of the furnace; we 
 piled good ones; we took turns getting into the hot rums 
 of the furnace substructure and lifted and tossed and 
 shovelled them up to the platform for the others to carry 
 and shovel. Occasionally we rested a few moments. At 
 all tunes we sweat especially when down hi the ruins. 
 Indeed we had trouble to keep from fainting with the heat 
 as we got farther down into the hot "down- take" or ver- 
 tical passageway at the end of the furnace. After an hour 
 or two the Greek grew so dizzy that he was let off from his 
 turn of going down which meant more frequent turns for 
 the rest of us. 
 
 Always bricks, bricks, and more bricks hot, cold, and 
 medium till back and arms whispered to suggest that we 
 double-cross bricks the rest of our natural lives. After a 
 day or two of bricks had passed, I asked somebody, "What 
 tune?" and was informed "Oh, about nme-t'irty." I never 
 was so surprised and disapppinted. But I couldn't stop 
 moving those bricks (I hate to think how I feel about 
 bricks) until finally, at the end of a Philadelphia week, 
 twelve o'clock came and we could eat our lunch out of our 
 bags a half-hour and then start moving more bricks 
 until six A. M. 
 
 At that, I came through as well as any, partly, perhaps, 
 because I had more in my mind. In between I was learning
 
 IN A STEEL PLANT 15 
 
 about open hearths in which the steel is made, and cinder- 
 pits in which it is " tapped" from the furnaces into the great 
 ladles, and then poured into the ingot moulds. I wished 
 for my painter friends for more magnificent scenes there 
 never were! Too many bricks in my back to try to de- 
 scribe it now but I was happy to be at last in the midst 
 of, and a part of, so fiery and stupendous a spectacle. 
 
 Must not take time, either, to give my first impressions 
 of what is mainly responsible for the attitude of all of us 
 toward brick-bats namely, the twelve-hour shift. When 
 I started in I figured I'd keep going as long as I could and 
 loaf after I was played out. I couldn't get on with the pro- 
 gramme. First the little Italian boy tapped me on the 
 shoulder and advised "Lotsa time! Take easy!" I 
 slowed down a notch or two. A little later the Russian, 
 wiping off the sweat as he sat for a moment on a pile of 
 bricks, cautioned: "You keel yourself. Twelve hours long 
 time." Finally, after every one had remonstrated, I got 
 down to a proper gait so you'd have to sight by a post 
 to see if I was moving. But at that I guess they knew 
 better than I I'm certainly tired enough as it is. 
 
 But we were not the only ones who tried to adapt the 
 job to our capacities. A large part of the after-midnight 
 portion, our boss sat with his head on his hands and slept 
 while we kept on working at, say, fifty-five per cent regular 
 "load." At about four he varied the monotony by taking 
 us out in the rain to carry in some back-breaking iron roof- 
 beams for the rebuilt furnace. After that it was a contest 
 to see who could keep out of his sight and move the fewest 
 bricks. At five everybody sat down and smoked and 
 dozed, waiting for five-fifty to start back with our shovels 
 to the shanty. As a matter of fact, we had given all the 
 energy we had. 
 
 I was, of course, new and green. That's true; and that's 
 why I came through so well. Those on the turn day after
 
 16 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 day or night after night gave considerably less than I 
 because they had less to give. After several hours of sleep 
 I have less to give to-night than I had last night. 
 
 I'll take another hour of sleep and get into my working- 
 clothes for supper at my new boarding-house, take my 
 package, and start again to cover that long, long trail 
 a-winding between five-thirty and midnight, and that 
 longer, longer trail from twelve-thirty to six. And at the 
 end of the week of night work and of another week of day 
 work I'll talk it over with my back and my bones and my 
 muscles, and my hopes of happiness in this life, and get my 
 Greek and Mexican and Italian friends to do the same, 
 and we'll see what we think; or better, enormously better, 
 what we feel (because a fellow can't think and work twelve 
 hours with a shovel and brick-bats, but goodness, how he 
 can feel /) about the twelve-hour shift for manual labor. 
 Remembering, of course, that we get 45 cents an hour, 
 and time-and-a-half for over eight hours that's forty-five 
 tunes fourteen, which equals $6.30 per turn. Not bad pay. 
 
 Stackton, 
 February 5. 
 
 Too dog-tired for pushing a tram of thought with a pen. 
 Here's why: 
 
 Midnight. Eating a good lunch packed by my new 
 landlady (seven dollars the week) while seated up by the 
 warm "slag-vent" at the back of a hot furnace after shovel- 
 ling, throwing, and carrying brick-bats and hard "cinder" 
 out of the bottom of our same old torn-down No. 13, steadily 
 from 5.30. 
 
 12.30 A. M. Back to the shovel and cinder, and aching, 
 shovel-worn forearms. 
 
 2.30. Constant shovelling, always within a few feet of 
 a noisy chisel eternally put-put-ing like a machine gun, 
 chattering and biting and scolding at the adamantine
 
 IN A STEEL PLANT 17 
 
 "cinder." (Taught how to operate it very heavy, hard, 
 jumpy work by a negro and a friendly Spaniard.) Sorer 
 forearms. Less supervision boss reported asleep. 
 
 Wonderful views of pourings across the cinder-pit, up- 
 turned empty ladles soaring back to their stands, like views 
 of heaven for beauty (too tired to describe now); dragon- 
 like "mixer" which tilts its mouth and its hulk to receive 
 or give out its 250 tons of yellow hot iron; glorious graphite 
 sparklets poured from small ladle, which goes from the 
 mixer to the fronts of the furnaces to give the drink of hot 
 "pig" as needed for the steel. 
 
 Less shovellings, more carryings and throwings wrists 
 too tired for shovelling; head thumping from that eternal 
 machine gun of a drill. 
 
 4.00 o'clock. Thank God ! Only one hour more ! 
 
 5.00. Everybody swears, quits, sighs for six. 
 
 5.55. Shovel shanty shovels deposited. Wait for 
 whistle around small stove everybody silent, groggy, 
 heads on hands. Bosses loud hi Slavic mixed with American 
 profanity. 
 
 6.00. Ah ! whistle at last ! Everybody jumps and 
 wearily starts home through the dark and snow. 
 
 6.45. Bath finished. (Thank the Lord for hot water!) 
 Go for sausage and cakes. 
 
 7.45. Into bed. (Thank the Lord also for clean sheets !) 
 
 3.30. Awake. Go to work? All hi favor ? Wrists 
 vote "No." Neck and shoulders vote "No." Compro- 
 mise arranged more sleep. 
 
 4.15. Write diary in bed. 
 
 4.45. (Three minutes from now) get up, put on dirty 
 clothes laid off only a few minutes on other side of that 
 blessed sleep. Boarding-house, supper, package lunch, 
 and 
 
 5.30. Show number check to gate policeman, report to 
 labor shanty and repeat as before till midnight.
 
 18 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 There's one day from the life of the open-hearth laborer 
 in Stackton. 
 
 Stackton, 
 
 Wednesday, February 12. 
 
 Well, I will say that the ten-hour day turn is enormously 
 easier than the twelve-hour night shift. But when begun 
 Monday morning immediately after a week of night work 
 totaling eighty-seven hours we did seventeen hours up 
 to Sunday noon it is not particularly conducive to an en- 
 thusiastic picture of life in general. A hot bath and clean 
 clothes, after taking off unbelievably dirty and sweaty 
 working togs, and shaking them out of the window (shovel- 
 ling up soot at the bottom of a hot, drafty chimney is hot 
 and dirty /) does marvels to set you up sufficiently to eat 
 supper ravenously. But shortly after that you again feel 
 as though it might be well to go to bed to get ready for 
 more labor or else try a movie or some other form of passing 
 tune removed as far as possible from both mental and 
 physical effort. 
 
 If this town were asked to put its views into words it 
 would ponder hardly a moment before condensing it into 
 three words "What the hell?" From top to bottom that 
 seems the general formula and prescription. It is, I'm 
 sure, only the result, or at least the symptom, of the general 
 overwork. 
 
 The gang bosses, at least those of the labor gangs, seem 
 to be the worst examples of the what-the-hell philosophy. 
 Of course no question is, apparently, ever asked regarding 
 any matter whatsoever in the plant except in the name of 
 the Devil's abode. But our bosses can put into it an amount 
 of heat and steam which makes it really terrifying to the 
 tired worker who perhaps took ten or fifteen more minutes 
 than positively necessary to "catch-drink-water" as these 
 bosses would say in their broken English or who sat down 
 because no boss gave him any orders at the moment. But
 
 IN A STEEL PLANT 19 
 
 "what-the-hell" can come from anything whatever very 
 often from the foreman's own failure to give proper instruc- 
 tions. 
 
 "T'row bricks off a track over dere!" 
 
 Everybody throws bricks hi the general direction of 
 boss's fingers. 
 
 Fifteen minutes later, boss returns 
 
 "What da hell! Why you t'row bricks over damn ven- 
 tilator? No can work furnace. Me tell you t'row bricks 
 over dere." 
 
 I presume the bosses are quite as tired as the rest of the 
 crowd because they spend just as many hours in the plant 
 as we do though they seldom touch shovel, bar, or brick 
 and are supposed to worry about getting the job done. 
 Which last is the very last thing any of us under them ever 
 worry about unless it's an especially easy job, when whis- 
 pers go 'round "Dees fine job take easy mebbe make 
 last all day." 
 
 But don't get the idea that the average labor boss really 
 does any head work or lets anybody else do it. 
 
 To-day six or eight of us were taking the very heavy 
 checker-brick out of one of the checker-chambers, or large 
 rooms under the "floor" of the furnaces, and so on a level 
 with the cinder-pit. Here the bricks are laid at right angles 
 to each other with square air spaces in between like checker- 
 boards. The great roomful of square-set fire-brick thus 
 serves to catch and retain the heat from the air and smoke 
 passing through it from the furnace on the way to the stack 
 hi order to give it back to the cold air from outside which en- 
 ters the furnace during every alternate half -hour or so when 
 the draft is reversed by the first or second helpers hi charge 
 that alternate direction of the draft through alternate sets 
 of the "checkers" enables the "regenerating furnace" to 
 keep getting hotter and hotter till the "charge" of metals 
 is melted, the carbon brought to the right proportion, and
 
 20 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 the steel is made. Another dozen or more of us were tossing 
 these bricks from man to man till they were piled up high 
 against the wall of the building the soot having dropped 
 off them meanwhile. At the same time an Indian (from 
 Mexico) high up on practically the same pile, was tossing 
 them down via an equally long line of men into the next 
 checker-chamber of the same furnace. When I diplomati- 
 cally suggested that the piling up seemed unnecessary, the 
 answer of course was, "What the hell!" Later the piling 
 was stopped, and a great long line of about ten men pitched 
 brick from one to another needlessly for a distance of thirty 
 feet till I lost my temper and the boss finally arranged a 
 line of about ten feet, whereby the bricks came from one 
 chamber and went back into the other with a saving of 
 about eight men's tune. 
 
 The men, of course, get to feeling that their work is never 
 done. They have not the slightest interest in what it 
 means or how it affects the operations of the mill around 
 them because, I will say, nobody tries very hard to give it 
 to them. It is all just a matter of doing as little work as 
 the boss will allow. 
 
 Last week I tried to get the good notice of the different 
 overseers by sticking close to my knitting. The bunch, of 
 course, discouraged it "What the hell! Lotsa time"- 
 and the bosses noticed me only when, after a long turn of 
 work, I rested a moment. Their notice was the usual 
 "Hey, dere! What da hell! Do you fink dis sleeping 
 place?" 
 
 Not always is this query put in a mean way. But it 
 simply expresses complete lack of effort to secure interest 
 or to give instruction. The only thing in the world these 
 "boys" have to give, or are asked to give, is their physical 
 strength. They are hardly to be blamed if they try to 
 guard their only capital by as many breathing-spells and as 
 slow motions as the boss will stand for.
 
 IN A STEEL PLANT 21 
 
 Here's an example in " physical arithmetic": 
 From Monday evening to Monday evening, on night 
 turn, a man here works eighty-seven out of the week's one 
 hundred and sixty-eight hours. Of the remaining eighty- 
 one he sleeps, at seven hours a day, a total of forty-nine; 
 eats not over ten; walks or travels hi a street-car, say, ten; 
 dresses, shaves, tends furnace, undresses, winds alarm- 
 clock and gets occasional drink, say eight. What does he 
 think the rest of the time during all those remaining four 
 hours ! 
 
 To save turning over to the end of the book, I'll slip any- 
 body the answer: "What the hell !" 
 
 Stackton, 
 Thursday, Feby 13. 
 
 We laborers spend most of our tune down-stairs around 
 the checker-chambers beneath the furnace floor. Lately 
 I summoned my courage and butted into what I supposed 
 was a company restaurant, but which I now find is run by 
 a group of open-hearth men. They are not listless like the 
 workers down-stairs; they're very husky and seem trained 
 down to the bone. But even the cattle-boat fo'c'sle never 
 furnished such profanity. As they eat, their language is a 
 goulash of blasphemy, obscenity, and filth. Of course, it's 
 mostly in fun and for show. But even at that I would 
 not have believed it possible of "bums" and these are 
 mostly Americans earning around ten to fifteen dollars a 
 day. 
 
 Of course, every man working down in the hot and 
 sooty checker-chambers with a boss's eye everlastingly on 
 him, dreams to become a helper on the "floor" up-stairs, 
 where a man is a part of a crowd which gets paid according 
 to the tonnage of good metal it gets out of the furnace 
 and paid well. But if he can't be up there on the floor with 
 him, the checker-brick tosser can at least begin to talk and 
 think and swear like him so, what the hell !
 
 22 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 Any attempt to abate this line of talk should be based 
 on the proper understanding of it. I am sure it has two 
 causes. First, it is a sort of psychological "protective be- 
 havior." It is the mind's way of saying: "The only way I 
 can accommodate myself to this fatigue is by not caring 
 by not taking it seriously." By the same token it is a way 
 of pouring pep into yourself by putting, as it were, a whip 
 into your language by steam-heating your talk. It makes 
 your words, in a short-sighted sort of way, more galvanic 
 on yourself, and presumably on others, and so makes a 
 short cut to the maximum effect of your breath on yourself 
 and others which ordinarily can be secured, or at least aimed 
 at, by the appeal of logic or good-will these last being im- 
 possible because of fatigue. 
 
 Then, second: Some one having started the ball rolling 
 because he was tired and needed either the protection or 
 the stimulus of super-heated language, standards are created 
 for a sort of God-and-man-insulting upstandingness which 
 requires everybody else to measure up by going him one 
 better. The trouble is that, like the dope fiend, who gets 
 no "kick" at all from what was once a huge dose, these 
 "helper" chaps now have a hard tune finding any emphatic 
 way to express themselves. What can a man do when the 
 most ordinary and inoffensive chair or tea-cup or sandwich 
 is condemned to the uttermost, and when you call your 
 best friend flippantly a triple or quadruple compound of 
 the foulest and loathsomest possible conceptions what can 
 a fellow do when he really wants to use strong language ? 
 
 As it looks now, the whole thing seems a combination of 
 hard-working, husky humans trying to lessen the friction 
 of circumstance by throwing out a sort of oil film of "I 
 don't care," and then trying to hold their own in association 
 with each other in meeting the husky demands of their 
 husky jobs. 
 
 It will be interesting to see if this appears true after my 
 observations are better seasoned with the later months.
 
 IN A STEEL PLANT 23 
 
 If what is here set down doesn't make good sense, it's 
 because of the disease described overwork. 
 
 And now that I've begun too late to get proper relief 
 from profanity, I'll try the only other available remedy, 
 sleep. 
 
 Stackton, 
 
 Saturday eve, February 15. 
 
 If I recall rightly, I set down a complaint some time ago 
 about the finishing of a seventeen-hour turn of work, after 
 twelve-hour nights. I apologize, in the light of what is 
 soon to get under way, so soon that I must shortly jump 
 into bed and try to be a sort of slumber camel, and store 
 up sleep for the long desert trip ahead. 
 
 I am instructed to report to-morrow morning at seven, 
 ready to be on the job until seven Monday morning ! 
 
 And everything requires my following instructions. 
 
 I have been promoted, thanks to my friend, Bill, the 
 only English-speaking boss on the gang. During the last 
 few days he has been sending me, as almost the only white 
 American in the gang, about the plant on various errands, 
 with his kindly "Keep your eyes open and learn the plant." 
 Twice I went on the little dinky engine and helped get coal 
 from the chutes over in the yard, hitherto unknown. There 
 for the first time I saw the gang which handles the new 
 brick and consists of about thirty women, mostly foreign, 
 fat, and of course smudgy, hi their bloomer overalls, sweat- 
 ers, and "boudoir caps" ! 
 
 Twice he named me to go with small gangs that loaded 
 great chains onto a hand-car and pushed them or in one 
 place coasted down-hill with them, yelling gleefully like 
 children, all of us away over to the blacksmith's shop. 
 Yesterday the same gang moved other things, including a 
 great quantity of nickel used for giving a certain consistency 
 to the armor-plate for battleships. 
 
 These trips gave a chance to see the hugeness of the 
 plant and to duck hi and see some of the monster rolling-
 
 24 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 mills where ingots of five to fifteen tons, lemon hot, are 
 swung up out of the "soaking-pits" where they are re- 
 heated after being brought from the open-hearth pits, and 
 are carried through the air like mere checker-brick, to come 
 out of the rolls as finished angle-iron, "I" beams, or "chan- 
 nels" for great construction enterprises. They also helped 
 me see various jobs as one day when I worked hi the 
 " stock-yard." 
 
 This is where the iron "charging-boxes" are loaded with 
 the various things which go into the furnaces for " com- 
 posing" the steel. It is interesting and also, I'd say, fairly 
 dangerous. Hook in hand, you stand on top of the "boxes" 
 as the huge magnet comes soaring along with a ton or two 
 of iron and steel beams, or plates, or a dozen sheaves of 
 iron scrap clinging to it from the unseen force of magnetism 
 caused by the electric current. Some of the plates seem to 
 be hanging only by the skin of their magnetic teeth, as it 
 were by "the hair of their magnetized heads" might be 
 better, because all the scale and other particles on the sur- 
 face of the metal are standing upright exactly like the hair 
 of a man's head when he passes near a flying belt, or any 
 other electric "field." But everything hangs there until 
 you help, by your long hook, to swing it around so every- 
 thing can fall into the boxes, and you yell or motion, 
 "Drop!" Then the current stops and everything clatters 
 down with the hollow noise which is the distinctive sound of 
 the town. Then you jump down into the boxes and hook and 
 push and lift the various pieces until they are even enough 
 to be pushed into the furnace-doors, and emptied like so 
 many dust-pans by the charging-machine meanwhile duck- 
 ing or jumping to keep from being under the next load that 
 sails by overhead to your "buddy," or to avoid being run 
 over by the dinky train on its way to some hungry furnace 
 inside. 
 
 I was sorry to learn that the following day Mike, our
 
 IN A STEEL PLANT 25 
 
 very strenuous and dare-devil Irish crane-man, had his 
 face burned, though not badly, by the monster current he 
 makes perform for him. It is thrilling to see the doings of 
 an unseen force on such familiar terms. It makes you 
 shiver, somehow, to see a great plate of steel, weighing sev- 
 eral hundred pounds, rise up and fly a foot or so upward 
 in order to obey the beckoning of the unseen Force ! 
 
 The Slavic boy, however, seemed little thrilled by his 
 job. 
 
 "I wor'rk, wor'rk always every day, every week, ten 
 hours days and twelve hours nights alia tune no 'spell' 
 (rest) lak' you have in labor gang and alia time every damn 
 furnace hongry." 
 
 This knowledge of the plant's doings and geography 
 helped, doubtless, to Bill's taking me to the head millwright 
 of our department this morning. That gentleman gave me 
 an interesting and quick-moving day. I was very proud 
 to pass my brick-tossing friends who looked with envious 
 eyes on my oil-can or wrench. These are, it seems, nothing 
 less than badges of nobility in the steel-mill peerage. Like 
 a hawk I studied the every move of my superiors as they 
 took me around and told me how to grease the various 
 plungers that raise the furnace-doors, and to oil the pumps 
 or the mixer, which lowers its great hulk and pours out of 
 its head, precisely like a grand-opera dragon, the yellow 
 pig-iron for those insatiable furnaces. 
 
 In fact, I'm getting on quite familiar terms with the 
 whole open-hearth establishment and more and more 
 anxious not to disappoint my kindly " buddies." American, 
 Greek, Spanish, Mexican, Italian, Irish black and white 
 we talk over our hearts' desires and the good and bad points 
 of our respective jobs hi a polygot but expert language, and 
 come surprisingly close to each other. My foreign lan- 
 guages help a lot. Not that I can carry on a deep conver- 
 sation with my Italian, Greek, or Spanish friends. But
 
 26 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 being able even to start and go some distance in their 
 tongue, and to talk about their country "a ship I worked 
 on made them ports, ya see" seems to prove to them my 
 good-will, and to help immensely toward getting theirs. 
 
 It's going to be hard to leave the place and these new 
 pals when the tune is up. But meanwhile I must play the 
 game as if my physical, and especially my financial, life 
 depended on it if I am to get the "feel" as the other boys 
 have it and to them a millwright's job at two cents an 
 hour more, with less strain on back and arm and leg, less 
 dirt, and with tools to carry around in the sight of all men, 
 is something to dream about during the long hours of throw- 
 ing, tossing, and shovelling brick. 
 
 So the biggest thing before me just now hi all the world 
 is to come out under the wire day after to-morrow morning 
 with my head still up and ready, after a few hours' sleep 
 Monday, to report again Monday night and so make sure 
 of my millwright's job. 
 
 And that means set the alarm-clock for six, as usual, and 
 jump into bed this minute. 
 
 Stackton, 
 Feby. 17. 
 
 Too busy to get much time for my diary; but here are a 
 few things which go on in the work: 
 
 Apparently, a labor gang in a steel-plant does surprisingly 
 little conversing. But the occasional discussions cover a 
 broad field. One night, for instance, one of the Mexicans 
 and a West Indian negro argued whether there is a heaven 
 or hell. 
 
 "You say hell after die?" The Mexican sounded both 
 his "H" and also a guttural "K" in his "hell." "I say 
 now and no more after die. We work over dere on dat 
 furnace. We burn shoes. We sweat. Dat hell hell now. 
 When we die, no more sweat no more work no more 
 not'ing all dead, no feel not'ing, just dead."
 
 IN A STEEL PLANT 27 
 
 To the rest of us taking our " spell" after a half -hour of 
 wielding sledge or crowbar on the bricks of a furnace-roof, 
 which had fallen in on the "bath" of hot metal, while 
 standing on boards which frequently caught fire from the 
 heat of the bath which still lay beneath us, it sounded 
 reasonable. The negro, however, was too well grounded 
 in his faith to be floated away by the Mexican's conviction, 
 even aided by his own perspiration, and stood pat in good 
 style. The Mexican made it evident that he had not got 
 his advanced thinking out of books when, a moment later, 
 he expressed his belief that by virtue of their "forty, fifty, 
 mebbe sixty, year of alia time study boo-k," doctors could 
 restore the dead to life at will, and only let people die, be- 
 cause, forsooth, people insist on having children, so that 
 that is the only way to keep the country from becoming 
 too congested. 
 
 But mostly the gang talks of jobs how many hours, 
 how much pay, any chance to "catch sleep," hot or cold, 
 hard or easy, dirty or clean, good boss or bad, etc., etc., 
 without end. Every one has had personal experience with 
 a surprising number, to be sure, so that they can weigh 
 good points against bad with the expert's eye. 
 
 Now that the permanent owner of the millwright vacancy 
 has returned it was a bad burn that laid him off, I learn 
 I am reduced to the ranks again. But I can be thankful 
 for the glimpse the week gave of another line of working 
 and thinking around an open-hearth. 
 
 The job was to keep the furnaces, pumps, and other mon- 
 sters of the show in good humor by seeing that they get all 
 the gas, steam, water, and grease they needed. A certain 
 pleasurable sense of power and familiarity comes from tak- 
 ing a great oil-can and perhaps a bucket of grease, and 
 going down among the wheels and cylinders that turn the 
 colossal mixer. Likewise from clambering in under the 
 powerful charging machines to tighten their bolts with
 
 28 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 wrench and sledge so that they can properly feed the huge 
 dust-pans of scrap-iron, billets, etc., into the furnaces. 
 
 The real work came with the care of the "guns," which 
 shot hot tar by steam pressure into the furnaces. When 
 my chief first adjusted these, I could do little more than 
 hand up tools, or go " catch" water to pour on the occa- 
 sional flames of the scaffold where he stood to work! so 
 near was he to the hot furnace end wall. Later I got to 
 changing, myself, these guns or burners when clogged by 
 the fierce heat. A hot job, for sure ! Through the hole in 
 the bricks the heat would burn gloves or face or hand almost 
 in an instant. When used to stop the heat, a board would 
 blaze hi a few seconds. Otherwise clothes began to steam 
 and smoke. But it was all worth learning. I'm only sorry 
 to have become familiar with a pipe-wrench so late in life 
 in spite of the fact that a burning glove made me drop 
 it on my toe, so it's as sore as its mate on my other foot, 
 which suffers from a checker-brick that broke and fell on 
 it ten days ago, and sent me limping off to the doctor's. 
 
 As in the labor gang the outstanding feature of mill- 
 wrighting is the long hours: 
 
 Sunday double turn (every other week) 24 hours 
 
 5 nights at 13 hours 65 " 
 
 Saturday night 15 " 
 
 104 hours 
 
 Night-turn week you do nothing but work and eat and 
 sleep and not too much of the last two, either. You have 
 a half-hour each night for your dinner meaning, by the 
 way, three more, or 107, hours under the plant roof. And 
 you are pretty tired for a heavy breakfast. Unless you cut 
 down your sleep, you have a short time for supper at four- 
 forty-five or five before going to work again. By saving 
 part of my "midnight supper" for a morning snack, I cut 
 out breakfast, got into a bath-tub at seven- ten, and then
 
 29 
 
 into bed at seven-thirty for sleep until three-thirty or four, 
 with only a few minutes for letters or papers before putting 
 on working clothes again. I'm told that ordinarily mill- 
 wrights get more sleep "on turn" than our tar-guns gave 
 us though we did get some. 
 
 With nothing but sleep in between the various nights, 
 one turn seemed only the continuation of another, and the 
 whole week felt like one continuous performance. 
 
 In talking with the open-hearth floorworkers I found 
 they felt the same way about their fourteen-hour night- 
 turn. 
 
 "This week just don't count a man ain't no good to 
 nobody, including himself, and how the nights of the day- 
 turn week do go by before you get around to enjoyin' 
 'em," said one first helper. 
 
 "It's bearable," said another, "when you can really 
 catch your sleep. But when the flu was here, 'twas awful ! 
 Nearly all of us had to wait on our sick families if we didn't 
 have it ourselves and for weeks we just went without 
 sleep, seemed like, unless we could catch some around here 
 on turn; and that was hard because, of course, every shift 
 was short-handed." 
 
 I know now that such a worker simply doesn't have time 
 to study or to grow or to learn English, or to keep a live 
 eye on anything. I am constantly surer that one result of 
 it all is that " what-the-hell " attitude a man has got to 
 take on the self-protection of the callousness which pro- 
 fanity represents or else get out of the long-hour end of the 
 business. 
 
 Another result of eight working-days one week and six 
 the next, year in and year out, is, I'm sure, the local and 
 highly familiar celebrity known as the "whiskey-beer." 
 After every shift the saloon at the corner has its customers 
 lined up three deep and fully one-half take a "large small" 
 glass of whiskey followed by a big beer. They down it
 
 30 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 quickly and walk away straight for home without the slight- 
 est joviality. But all say one or two of these "shots" helps 
 them get a good day's sleep. 
 
 Frequent discussion is given to which saloon serves the 
 best and biggest whiskey. Otto, who has millwrighted 
 here for nearly thirty years, has worked his fourteen-turn 
 fortnights with only two days off in two years. That's 
 every day except two Sundays and holidays not excepted. 
 He with others says you've "got to be blamed careful 
 about getting lay-offs or they'll tell you there's others at 
 the gate that wants your job more'n you do." He seems 
 to believe one whiskey-beer pretty regular stuff for him, 
 and that, if particularly tired three can be carried without 
 discomfort or loss of decorum. Four requires hurrying 
 home and to bed to avoid trouble. 
 
 "Five or six whiskey-beers, yes, all right. Fifteen? too 
 much," a Slavic laborer argued yesterday quite seriously. 
 
 The heaters and other regular steel-workers tell of want- 
 ing everything to have a "kick" in it: 
 
 "Why, I remember last summer I had to do something 
 for a good time, and damn me if I didn't go off for a trip 
 to Cleveland and spend $100 in three days!" 
 
 I know how they feel. If you're tired and are going to 
 meet the financial loss of laying off for a day or two, you 
 don't want just ordinary amusements. You want some- 
 thing with a punch; you want something to jar you and 
 give you a real sensation. An ordinary show or movie is 
 too tame. I'll gamble that the eight-hour shift will bring 
 an improvement in the local burlesque show ! 
 
 Stackton, 
 February 26. 
 
 Four weeks is a short time for any serious diagnosis, but 
 I'll wager my two arms and throw in two bruised toes 
 that there is a big and vital connection between all three
 
 IN A STEEL PLANT 31 
 
 of the outstanding institutions of this town to wit, the 
 alarm-clock and long hours, the whiskey-beer, and the 
 God-damn. Garbage would make a fourth in the quarters 
 where most of the workers the foreign-born live. 
 
 I came here with the feeling that good treatment by 
 company and foremen is what the workers want above all. 
 The company evidently believes that what they want most 
 is lots of work to get lots of money. We're both right and 
 both wrong. Men won't appreciate anything under heaven 
 not even good pay and steady work when they are dead- 
 dog tired, or suffering from that chronic listlessness which 
 is not exactly fatigue but comes from the two-days-off-in- 
 two-years habit. And no boss can be asked to treat his 
 men decently if the hours make both them and him stale 
 and crabby, and if almost everything around them all (with 
 the exception of clean toilets and cold drinking water) is 
 dirty and disorderly. So it's futile to argue which is more 
 important pay, hours, treatment, or shop conditions. 
 They're all indispensable like all four cylinders. If each 
 helps the other, the load is carried easily; everybody's 
 happy, and no knocks develop. But no one or two cylin- 
 ders can do it alone against the drag of the others. 
 
 Even the huge mixer it always makes me think of some 
 vast machine from Mars has to have gas to burn in it 
 that's its food and drink, its money. Also bricks and metal 
 and water of the right sort they determine its conditions. 
 And, finally, lots and lots of grease that's good treatment. 
 It has to have them all. 
 
 The rumor keeps up that the "floor" will go to the eight- 
 hour shift next month. But there are many sceptics be- 
 sides Terence at the boarding-house. 
 
 "Aw, sure an' I've heard tell o' thot for the last few 
 years. I'll belave it when I see the signed notice and not 
 a day before !" 
 
 When it does come it will, of course, bring the need of
 
 32 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 finding thousands more men and that won't be easy as 
 soon as times get good again. Those thousands more men, 
 too, will make necessary a lot more houses than this town 
 has and they'll pretty surely be expensive to build and 
 high to rent. And, still further, the shorter hours, even 
 with some kind of a compromise on wages, will make steel 
 cost the public more and so raise the H. C. L., unkss the 
 workers do more per hour. But, personally, I am sure 
 they will do just that if the change is accompanied by 
 bosses who depend more on leadership, head-work, and skill 
 for getting their results from their men than on proddings 
 and strong, superheated language. These are necessary 
 on tired, long-hour men; something else can be counted on 
 to obtain proper results with active, short-houred workers. 
 If this is given hi a way to get the co-operation of the work- 
 ers, the price of steel need not be greatly increased, and a 
 lot of workers and their families will be made happier than 
 they now are. I know it should be done. I'm sure anything 
 with so much human "should" behind it can be done. 
 
 It's possible these long hours have "got" me more than 
 they have the others. But I honestly don't believe it 
 I'm greener than they, but not so listless to begin with. 
 It's more likely because I have been doing more work than 
 they; almost every day with the unskilled men gives more 
 skill in learning from them how not to work. I find, for in- 
 stance, that we two new men shovelled just twice as much on 
 that "cinder" in the down-take as a more experienced man 
 and I did a few nights later. He insisted that each of us 
 take turns at sleeping while the other worked especially 
 while our boss slept. With their whiskey and listlessness 
 they feel the work, I'm sure, as much as I do, if not more. 
 And they were more tired than I when I began.
 
 33 
 
 Stackton, 
 February 28. 
 
 My fellow-workers seem to have trouble believing I'm 
 an American because, they say, "No white American work 
 in steel-plant labor gang unless he' nuts or booze-fighter." 
 
 One Mexican is sure I'm French, and asks me in Spanish: 
 "For why do you deny your Patrida?" 
 
 But the point is this: none of them hesitates a moment 
 to talk freely to me about plant or other matters about 
 how he feels and thinks about all sorts of things. That dis- 
 poses of what was my chief fear when I started out. 
 
 Among the upper group of workers the foremen, mill- 
 wrights and furnace-helpers every one seems to dislike 
 our Slavic labor boss, Pete. He is said to have no friends 
 and to care for none. He certainly is a tyrant, scolding or 
 firing somebody most of the time. 
 
 "Say you, there, Andy, you go to work to-day, huh?" 
 he yelled a few days ago to a harmless young Slavic boy 
 as usual at the top of his voice, with his eyes blazing. 
 
 "What the h you mean come here with necktie on! 
 
 Me foreman and me no necktie. You take dat one off 
 
 - quick, or I give you 'time' and you go home and 
 wear it so long you - - please !" 
 
 Mike, one of the Polish bosses under him and he hates 
 him, too was kicking about the H. C. L. : 
 
 ' ' Wy , poor working man no can get drunk now. Whiskey- 
 beer twenty cents!" 
 
 When I suggested that almost any man could afford a 
 good spree on four or five he came back with: 
 
 "Four five ! Wy, I bet you hundred dollars my friend 
 and me we drink fifteen whiskey-beer, go home twelve 
 o'clock, and be here seven o'clock morning go to work!" 
 
 "Well, Ah don't know how Ah'm goin' to do with only 
 eight hours as long as groceries stay up unless Ah gets
 
 34 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 more per hour," says George, the colored laborer, when the 
 crowd talked of the rumored short day. 
 
 Mac, one of the most successful first helpers his pay- 
 checks for every fifteen days, based mainly on tonnage, 
 run around $175 to $225 opines: 
 
 " "Fine! Of course the shorter day will probably cost me 
 money, but it will give me more chance to enjoy bein' 
 alive. And it will give more men work, too." 
 
 "Unless they get the eight-hour shift," my landlady ad- 
 vises me, "don't bring your wife and kids here. They 
 ain't no easy jobs here. Everybody has to work dreadful 
 hard even the women. They never get through at all 
 keepin' things clean. It's a dirty, dirty place." 
 
 She is pale, with sunken eyes. She has four children to 
 provide for in her widowhood, and from four-thirty A. M. 
 works a long shift cooking meals for us hungry workers. 
 
 My month's experience certainly confirms her. After 
 the millwright helper returned I tried to get one of the 
 furnace jobs. Yesterday and to-day I succeeded. But 
 arms and neck and shins have paid the price of the 
 work of the man in the "cinder-pit." Though connected 
 with one furnace, I am expected to help with the tapping 
 of every one of the active six furnaces, the seventh being 
 "down" and under repair. That means, usually, helping 
 work the "rabbles," or huge iron pokers, to stir the bath or 
 open the tap-hole, shovelling hi the heavy manganese, and, 
 after the "heat" is run out (which means the steel and not 
 the heat, for that stays to burn your face), "making 
 bottom" by shovelling hi the dolomite to give the "cinder- 
 lining" or unmeltable hearth and walls for holding the 
 "bath" of molten metal. On his own and one other fur- 
 nace the "cinder-pitter" or "third helper" is supposed 
 to "work at the back." That means to help open up 
 the tap-hole, shovelling out the red-hot dolomite; then 
 when the white-hot steel is roaring and blazing into
 
 POURING THE METAL INTO THE MOULDS 
 
 After the " heat " of " hot metal " is " tapped " out of the open-hearth furnace, 
 the ladle is carried over to the platform (across the cinder-pit) where it is 
 poured or " teemed " into the ingot moulds
 
 IN A STEEL PLANT 35 
 
 the huge ladle, placed properly in its stand in the cinder- 
 pit with its lip even with the floor, he must lift large 
 paper sacks of coal to his shoulder, run toward the ladle, 
 and with all his strength hurl them into the blazing, 
 scorching torrent. Thereupon the flames, fed by the car- 
 bon, leap to the roof and the heat is fearful. Yesterday I 
 certainly thought my face was gone for good and all when 
 I tried to get near enough to get my sack with every 
 ounce of my strength exerted into the ladle and not too 
 near! To-day I learned how to keep the sack before my 
 face, watch carefully the platform's edge at my feet, and 
 then, the moment it leaves my hands, to turn and run for 
 a moment's cover behind the steel stanchion or pillar. After 
 the coal is in, you and your buddy turn up your coat-collars, 
 put your heads down, run out near the ladle, and madly 
 shovel manganese into it one hot job if ever I saw one ! 
 To-day, when I left a sweater on the steel post during the 
 tapping, it was burned by sparks and ruined. 
 
 In all of these jobs there comes finally a skill which en- 
 ables the experienced worker to do with sleight what the 
 greenhorn has to do by main strength. The trouble is 
 that no arrangements seem to be made for giving the green- 
 horn the proper instruction. So he learns only after the 
 discomfort and more or less disgrace of initial failure. 
 That causes him, as the Chinese say, to "lose face," just as 
 I thought I had actually lost my face when I walked out to 
 that ladle. Figuratively, too, I did "lose face," because, 
 be it confessed sorrowfully, that first sack did not reach the 
 ladle. That failure made me nervous the next time and 
 the railless platform and the blazing ladle full of splashing 
 white metal makes it a bad place to be nervous in ! So, 
 too, hi shovelling dolomite to reach the back wall of the 
 biggest furnaces. To do it requires exactly the right com- 
 bination of left foot far forward, arms and shovel swung far 
 back just before your body stops advancing, immediate
 
 36 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 full swing forward and upward, and then a quick get-away 
 from the heat. To see a trained man do it is as satisfying 
 as to see a golf expert perform. The boys whisper direc- 
 tions, but the first helper gets a man fussed by his curses. 
 The whole gang sweats profusely, but the greenhorn suffers 
 also from an inner sweat of the spirit and his muscles pay 
 the price in the extra effort until the trick is learned, at 
 least to the point of quieting the boss helper. To-day I 
 nearly broke my leg by driving my shovel into my shin- 
 bone with all my strength caused by the boss's oaths. 
 
 I believe instruction could be given even to the labor 
 gang I'd like to give a talk on the art of shovelling. It 
 would probably eliminate the foreman whose only word is 
 an oath. That oath confuses the beginner and hardens the 
 old hand by robbing him of his interest in the fine points of 
 his job and forcing him, for his own self-respect, to take 
 refuge in his "Aw, what the hell!" 
 
 But even as it is the men do take interest in their job. 
 Yesterday two helpers had a knock-down fight over a 
 shovel! After six men had succeeded in pulling them 
 apart each with his hands full of the other fellow's clothes 
 the superintendent got nowhere at all by reminding them 
 that the shovel actually belonged to the company. Each 
 insisted : 
 
 "My shovel! I use it free mont's. My shovel He 
 take it." 
 
 The satisfaction of possession surely does run strong in 
 all these chaps. The charging-machine man fixes whirli- 
 gigs and flags, and all sorts of paraphernalia on his machine. 
 The laborer who gets hold of any excuse for a locker fixes 
 it up with flags, looking-glass, and pictures from calendars, 
 cigarette-boxes, and such like. 
 
 With the management's doings generally few seem to 
 find much fault. "They're straight enough that is, they 
 won't rob you. Yes, they are good about giving steady
 
 IN A STEEL PLANT 37 
 
 work, and that's a big thing. Of course, they're out for 
 the big money, and they'll do most anything for that." 
 
 Incidentally, I think that last is one reason for a lot of 
 soldiering the everywhere visible disorder and waste of 
 bricks, lumber, screws, bolts, etc. "Dees company wanta 
 only beega money." "Why should they worry about gettin' 
 back the six-thirty they pay me, huh?" is the answer of 
 the men. 
 
 Beyond these few fundamentals, the workers seem to 
 expect nothing from the company whatever. Nobody here 
 has heard of representative committees of workers, and 
 few seem to think it interesting. They have no relief 
 society. To-day they were selling twenty-five-cent chances 
 on a raffle for a five-dollar gold piece for the benefit of a 
 sick worker ! 
 
 Well, it all makes me feel that last Sunday's labor-leader 
 has more justification than he should be allowed to have 
 when he said: 
 
 "The Bolshevists, I tell you, men, will have a show here 
 in this country only if industrial managers forget that we 
 workers feel it our duty to think more highly of ourselves 
 take ourselves more seriously now that the war has 
 been won to make the world safe for democracy." 
 
 And yet very little evidence of anything like unrest is to 
 be seen. Personally, from former acquaintance, I know 
 that the highest company officials here are honest gentlemen, 
 sincerely anxious to have friendly relations with their men. 
 I am equally sure they do not realize how hard it is for 
 men who work such long hours to have friendly relations 
 with any thing or any body nor how much organization 
 there must be before the good-will of the officials can be 
 transmitted far enough down along the line to touch the 
 mind and the feelings the life of the member of the 
 labor gang, especially if that member possesses the sus- 
 picions of a foreign tongue. For certainly these distrusts
 
 38 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 of misunderstanding ought easily to be corrected. They 
 ought not to be charged as inherent in the industrial system. 
 They are simply the defects due to a lack of proper adjust- 
 ment to certain requirements of human beings especially 
 when brought together in large numbers from all over the 
 earth. 
 
 Here goes for a few more fine points with that wonderful 
 symbol of civilization called a shovel. Then we'll call it 
 enough for "Episode I" and try to find some other field 
 for our labors.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 IN A ROLLING-MILL 
 
 AFTER a month at the steel plant it seemed proper to 
 try for work at some other place. The rumor among the 
 gang, however, was to the effect that jobs were very scarce. 
 In order to play safe, therefore, I allowed the company to 
 owe me the pay for the last two weeks, and so secured the 
 promise of a job in case I failed to get the one I hoped for 
 "back home in Cleveland." 
 
 After a few days there of passing most of my friends 
 without their recognition, I took the train back to the same 
 steel centre as before. 
 
 Millvale, 
 March 12th. 
 
 If there is one thing I have learned on my labor travels 
 it is that "the job's the thing." Wages are interesting, but 
 the job is the axis on which the whole world turns for the 
 working man. If he has a job even a poor one he is at 
 least established on a platform where he can stand for the 
 present and plan for a better future. Without a job he is 
 dislocated from his bread and butter, and also from his 
 community and society in general. It's hard for him even 
 to walk along the street with the same confidence he 
 feels as I imagine a bee feels that has been fired from the 
 hive. If he has no job at a time like this, it's like a blow 
 in the face to read in the morning paper: 
 
 "Pittsburgh reports a surplus of 12,000 laborers and 1,000 
 clerks, with a shortage of 1,700 miners. Cleveland reports 
 surplus of 60,000, etc." 
 
 He reflects on the unattractiveness of mining, and 
 
 39
 
 40 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 slouches all the more as he walks along the street and thinks 
 about the sad possibility of saving his family by getting 
 into the bread line a little later. 
 
 Yesterday the common-labor clerk in the U. S. Employ- 
 ment Office told me in tones purposely loud enough to 
 be heard by all the seventy-five or eighty negroes and 
 others in the room: "Not a job in the house here" and 
 very considerately added as he looked me over: "Was you 
 hi the semi-skilled department?" 
 
 I went up, but got a discouraging answer. 
 
 "Not a request for a millwright in the place. 'Now if 
 you was a tailor, or a baker, a busheler, egg-candler, or a 
 die-maker I've requirements for 200 like them here, and 
 those cards are another 200 there and nobody yet to 
 fill 'em." 
 
 In the hallway the blackboard called for "25 chippers" 
 and others of the like, but specified "Only foreigners." 
 
 At several private agencies it was "Not a single job to 
 be had no, nothin' of no kind at all" usually in a foreign 
 accent. At one place a shipment was being made up of 
 workers on a railway labor gang at forty cents an hour, 
 but the man was letting it appear that he was very par- 
 ticular. 
 
 This morning I took the train up here. After sizing up 
 what is a very well located and laid out town I went to a 
 near-by garage in the absence of the saloon to get any 
 helpful hints. Again the power of the name. When all 
 the clerks of the employment office assured me there was 
 
 no request for more workers, I asked to see Mr. L , the 
 
 superintendent of the open-hearth, as per the garage man. 
 It worked. A policeman took me to him where I assured 
 him I could be a very useful man to him. But there were 
 "too many now, and I'm afraid I'll have to lay off sorr.e 
 now that the soldier boys are coming back." 
 
 On my repeated cataloguing of my virtues as an "Ameri-
 
 IN A ROLLING-MILL 41 
 
 can-born, with high-school education," he said, "Well, 
 maybe, if you can get a job meanwhile in some other de- 
 partment, for a lot of the boys tell me especially the 
 Greeks that they're going back to the old country just 
 as soon as they can." 
 
 So he gave me the name of the hot-mill superintendent. 
 That man shook his head, but, on my pleading, gave my 
 policeman escort the name of the cold-roll boss "Take 
 
 him to Jack J and see if he can use him for a little till 
 
 L - can take him." 
 
 And Jack a hard-working but honest and square-looking 
 chap after several turn-downs, finally gave heed and said, 
 "Well, mebbe to-morrow morning." 
 
 So I'm hoping that to-morrow's sun will look upon me 
 in the respectability of the man with a job. 
 
 Millvale, 
 March 13th. 
 
 My present guide, companion, and boss, my alarm-clock, 
 called me at five, and at six I was taken on ! A few minutes 
 after the doctor's examination my new boss assigned me 
 to a quartet of men to run nice-looking bluish steel sheets 
 of various lengths and thickness, or gauges, through the 
 big and shining steel rolls on their way to go into the sides 
 of automobiles. The whole group seemed to be Americans, 
 and Dan, whose buddy I became, was fine hi telling what 
 was to be done and how. 
 
 So I've been picking up several thousand of these rec- 
 tangular steel or "soft iron" sheets, shaking each loose so 
 Dan could get his hands on it, and then together turning 
 it over and on to the wooden stand or skid leading to the 
 rolls, watching meanwhile for imperfections that mar the 
 smooth and sensitive surface of the huge rolls or spoil the 
 sheet's usefulness in an auto body. It gives a lot of exer- 
 cise for the fingers in getting the thin sheet always from the
 
 42 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 top, while the "simple twist of the wrist" required to turn 
 the sheet over brings, finally, a lot of weariness and some 
 pain to a few muscles. But outside of that the work is 
 certainly not wearing nor unpleasant. And it's stimulat- 
 ing, too, to feel that besides my forty-two cents per hour, 
 I share hi the sum paid the group according to the num- 
 ber of sheets rolled. 
 
 So altogether I seem to be in the midst of a happy work- 
 ing community, both inside the plant and out, so far, at 
 least, as first impressions are concerned. The town has a 
 multitude of clean and pleasant-looking homes and yards 
 except the district where many foreign-born workers live, 
 as dirty and unprosperous a place as one could wish to see. 
 
 The Americans seem friendly and surprisingly talkative, 
 like the waitress in the restaurant who reported yesterday 
 to a friend: 
 
 "Well, I was born bawlin' and my mouth ain't been shut 
 since ! If you don't believe it, ask my mother." 
 
 In the plant the cold rolls with the hot mills make a row 
 nearly a quarter of a mile long. All the officials seem very 
 much on the job, but very friendly. Drinking-water, sani- 
 tation, and restaurant all seem very good, and the whole 
 place surprisingly clean. Also, I've so far heard nobody 
 swear at me or anybody else. 
 
 All things taken together, although I've done a good turn 
 of work since six o'clock, I feel almost as much a man of 
 leisure as yesterday. Then I walked into the country where 
 I finally hailed two men hi charge of a coal-mine. They 
 were apparently as much interested hi my ignorance of 
 coal-mines as I was hi their knowledge, so they promptly 
 filled their little lamps with carbide and water, and a few 
 minutes later were answering my questions as we squatted 
 on the coal-covered floor of a "room" with a low slate ceil- 
 ing and a few hundred feet or so of solid hill above us. It 
 made a highly educational afternoon as well as a delightful
 
 IN A ROLLING-MILL 43 
 
 loaf, for the hills at sunset were beautiful, and the ah* full 
 of spring and pleasant promises. 
 
 To-day I felt like any working man would feel if his 
 friends could be informed, an hour or two before quitting- 
 time, that he was "Gone for the day." Because at three- 
 thirty Dan said : ' ' That's all they got for us to-day, boys. So 
 we can quit, and these here slips of mine show that it's been 
 a mighty good day for all of us." 
 
 Millvale, 
 Sunday morning, 
 March 16. 
 
 Two things are uppermost in my mind, after my two days 
 as "roller's helper" on the cold rolls. 
 
 One is that as the result of the constant turning of those 
 sheets, with the required twist o' the right wrist, I find my- 
 self for the first time hi my life wishing I had a valet so he 
 could negotiate all my buttons. They seem to exercise 
 those same muscles and so exact a high cost in pain. But 
 I imagine a few days more will make them used to it by 
 which time I'll hope to get a boost in the direction every- 
 body covets the hot mills, the home of heat the sheets 
 are rolled there out of the small, thick "sheet bar" of hard 
 work and "big money." 
 
 The other thing on my mind a sort of soreness that is 
 amazingly like the soreness in my muscles is that my 
 roller played me a low trick. After I had worked myself 
 something more than half sick, broken several finger-nails, 
 skinned several fingers and, of course, ruined a pair of 
 canvas gloves in picking the sheets off the pile with con- 
 stantly greater speed, I have learned to-day from better 
 authority that he and his catcher get then* bonus but not 
 we helpers. In fact, the harder we work and the sooner we 
 get through the day's run, the sooner our work and our 
 pay stop ! 
 
 Besides being sore at my immediate superior, I am won-
 
 44 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 dering whether I should believe his other assurance "If 
 you work hard here, you're sure to get an early chance at 
 the hot mills." 
 
 I wonder ! 
 
 It will probably take a longer stay to know the town's 
 possibilities for killing time. One of the movie emporiums 
 seems to have good pictures and good music. At one of the 
 two others, the pictures are O. K., but the music is excruci- 
 ating. If I ever get the chance I think I'll suggest to the 
 management that they endow good music in the town's 
 movies. I know of no expenditure that would count so. 
 much here unless it is a better library. 
 
 Pool-rooms and bowling-alleys are busy but apparently 
 attract mostly young boys. In the Greek quarter the 
 coffee-houses are evidently well patronized. I guess the 
 Greeks, like their forebears in St. Paul's day, are addicted 
 to discussing "some new thing." The skating-rink, ac- 
 cording to my talkative waitress, "looks like a stable and 
 gets pretty rough." 
 
 The main amusement factors seem to be the movies and 
 the phonographs. There seems to be hardly a home with- 
 out one of these last, and from appearances, an imposing and 
 costly one. At almost any hour and in every street you 
 hear them. The stores that sell them have customers in 
 them, apparently, so long as they are open. And they cer- 
 tainly do give a lot of pleasure. I'm sure they are especially 
 appreciated by rolling-mill men, who work in the midst 
 of a rumble-clank-rumble that makes conversation prac- 
 tically impossible. A doctor friend in Boston claims to 
 have made experiments which justify him in prognosticating 
 what kind of recreation a worker's ears will hanker for if 
 he can ascertain the noises of the daily job. Our ears, he 
 says, crave a change of diet just as do our palates or our 
 stomachs. I found myself, by the way, ordering at a hotel 
 last week a dinner of peach fritters, ice-cream, cocoanut pie
 
 - IN A ROLLING-MILL 45 
 
 and French pastry ! Of course it was my palate's attempt 
 to "get even" after four weeks of my Stackton landlady's 
 veal stew and beans. 
 
 Listen ! The phonograph down-stairs is reminding us of 
 the "Long, long trail, a- winding. " That means that the 
 children are dressed, breakfast is over, and the day's loaf 
 begun. 
 
 Considering that the State law closes all the movies, 
 pool and billiard places, skating-rinks and library, and evi- 
 dently the news-stand, I guess there's nothing for a non- 
 club member to do but betake himself to church. 
 
 Later : I was the only one there who refused to stand up 
 and vote in favor of a resolution affirming that the Christian 
 Sabbath is the bulwark of our civilization, and calling down 
 punishment on the pagan hands now being raised at the 
 capital to overturn it by permitting the sacrilege of Sunday 
 concerts and movies. As long as so many thousands are 
 working eighteen and twenty-four-hour shifts on Sunday I 
 can't seem to get "het up" over Sunday movies. 
 
 Millvale, 
 
 Wednesday Night, 
 March 19. 
 
 It's queer how little conversation I've run into anywhere 
 about capital and labor, Bolsheviki and such things. There 
 was certainly more of it at the boarding-house in Stack- 
 ton than I've yet found here. But even there it was 
 comparatively slight outside of the general and complete 
 conviction that the same crowd that did everything in the 
 mill to make "big money" was running the town, the 
 State, and the country from the same single motive. 
 "Vote? Why, they'll change or destroy everybody's vote 
 here if they feel like it!" Only one speaker was extreme 
 at the labor meetings, and even at these I never saw more 
 than 400 in a hall seating a thousand.
 
 46 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 No, I think Harden had it right when he said the other 
 day: "Give the people food and work, and Bolshevism will 
 vanish." At a boarding-house the men talk surprisingly 
 little about anything, whether from distrust of each other 
 or fatigue. A man eats silently, gets up, takes his dinner- 
 pail, and walks out without a "So long" or anything. But, 
 as far as I can see, the chaps who have regular jobs talk 
 not about capital and labor, but about hours and wages, 
 especially eight and twelve hour shifts, cost of living, pro- 
 hibition and beer, vacations, lay-offs, tools, movies, and such- 
 like matter-of-fact affairs. It was the unlucky men there 
 at those old factory gates who showed their teeth when 
 they were not taken on. To them a country which could 
 show no way for converting brawn into bread seemed to be 
 failing sadly and seriously. For them, I know, even a few 
 days of such failure burns deep into their souls. 
 
 But on the job well, take yesterday: 
 
 At five-thirty in the morning I was sitting with a mill 
 man at my "coffee and cakes and two fried." We were en- 
 joying the comic, where the man comes back from vacation, 
 tells his secretary his desk is stacked high with work so he 
 must not be disturbed and, being just returned from the 
 strain of vacation, goes to sleep in his chair. 
 
 "He's got it right at that," says my mill man "but 
 still, I'd like to have one oftener, all the same. 
 
 "Why, when you ask for a lay-off here you'd think they 
 was goin' to have to shet the mill down and wait for ye to 
 come back ! But when they want to fire you it don't make 
 no trouble with the mill a-tall. Last winter I wanted a 
 week off, and they let out a turable holler about my bein' 
 off a good deal. 'Yes,' I says (and he fairly yelled) 'I was 
 off three weeks takin' care o' the sick, and now I want a 
 week for a vacation from it." : 
 
 "Only the salary men gets 'em with pay," he concluded. 
 The tone of voice and his other comments make me feel
 
 IN A ROLLING-MILL 47 
 
 constantly surer that one of the best possible acknowledg- 
 ments of a worker's term or excellence of service is a week 
 or two of vacation with pay. In any event, the man is 
 only a vacationist and not a Bolshevist. 
 
 "Yes, them's good tongs," said the "rougher" of the 
 hot-mill crew next my cold rolls a few hours later. He is 
 the one who starts the hot sheet bar into the big rolls to 
 be received and handed back to him over the rolls by 
 the "catcher" on the other side. "But we have to wear 
 them out fast when we work on so many different sizes of 
 iron. Why, you know" (and his face lighted) "there was 
 a time when this place had the best tools, and give 'em the 
 best attention o' any mill in the country. It was a plea- 
 sure ! But now well, the same feller keeps 'em, you see, 
 and the mill has growed and he's overworked he can't do 
 it all and he don't seem to be given no help." 
 
 (Such talk, the fight over the company shovel at Stack- 
 ton, and other things make me feel sure that manager 
 chaps overlook a good chance in this matter of the worker's 
 delight in his tools, though I know the detail of it, compli- 
 cated by the worker who doesn't care, is mighty difficult.) 
 
 Usually such conversations continue with "Where did 
 you work 'fore you come here? What could you make a 
 day there? Did you like it better than here?" 
 
 Or else the talk runs about bosses except that hot-mill 
 rollers are pretty much their own bosses, apparently. 
 
 "When a man quits here he's asked why. If he says he 
 don't like the company, they may fix it so it's hard for him 
 to get a job here in the district. 'Course what he oughta 
 say is he don't like the company's bosses, and that's the 
 fact. Some of the guys bossin' right in this plant is mean 
 ones, I'll say" this from the breakfast man again. 
 
 A few hours later I found myself absorbed in a difficulty 
 with a roller boss which lasted busily for hours and made 
 it one of the hardest days yet.
 
 48 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 I was helping him as any helper should, working hard to 
 loosen the metal sheets and put them onto the skid, using 
 the patented can-opener blade on my army knife to gain 
 speed, and breaking it in the cause. For long runs all 
 would go well, then perhaps my hand or his would slip, and 
 once or twice he got a slight cut. Then he would look dag- 
 gers at me or say something I couldn't understand ; for this 
 roller was a handsome Greek to whom I had been trans- 
 ferred. I couldn't say anything except " Sorry," and I 
 wasn't sure he could understand that. But it made me 
 indignant that for all my efforts to increase his earning power 
 with my speed lessening my own wages by getting through 
 earlier and so stopping my pay still he had nothing but 
 a curse-look when there was a miscue. So for hours I 
 fought with him in a conversation entirely mental. Hardly 
 a word passed between us the noise makes it practically 
 impossible at the distance of a few feet between us. But 
 all the tune I kept going over it all till it made me sore 
 on nearly everything imaginable. Perhaps, with an effort, 
 I'd finally ease off into some other line of more pleasant 
 thinking, and then would make another miscue and again 
 get a nasty look and exclamation from him, when off I'd 
 go for another half-hour or hour of imaginary quarrelling, 
 usually ending with my quitting and walking off the job 
 in my mind. 
 
 Finally, after one of his exclamations, I went hi open 
 wrath to the cold-roll boss and complained. He quieted 
 me down by a friendly " Don't mind him you're all right." 
 And the Greek too began to smile hi my direction occa- 
 sionally. So finally I began to plan a get-together party 
 in which I could explain my dislike of his tactics, but my 
 willingness to work if treated right. It was hard because 
 of the language trouble, but he got it all right. 
 
 "Look here," I said, "when you smile" (and I showed 
 him, a little sourly, I fear) ' good polu kala all right,
 
 IN A ROLLING-MILL 49 
 
 then I work like devil. When you go so" (and I copied him 
 at his worst) "then, polu kaka very bad nothing doing 
 not with me. See?" 
 
 "Yes, I knowa," he smiled. "You see when sheets very 
 short I want work hard, go fast, because no money for me. 
 When sheets long good money we go easy. You all 
 right." 
 
 So we worked happily ever afterward but the work-day, 
 unfortunately, was nearly over by that time. 
 
 If he could have given a few words of instruction, or if 
 the language trouble could have permitted better under- 
 standing, the day's strain would have been easily twenty 
 per cent less. I wonder how many hundreds of thousands 
 of workers must constantly be in the very fix I was where 
 they are foreigner and the boss is American, but where all 
 that passes to the eye is the curse look and profanity, while 
 inwardly the worker is going through the same mental 
 quarrelling I did and with the same result soreness on all 
 his friends, on America, and the whole world. If so, it's a 
 certainty he's accomplishing twenty per cent less for the 
 company while at the same time causing twenty per cent 
 more wear and tear on his own muscles and "mentals" 
 than if good relations were in operation. 
 
 To-day another Greek "catcher" was boss over me on the 
 other side of the rolls. Nothing but smiles and easier work. 
 The easiest, best day yet. Have joined a boarding-house 
 circle which looks interesting. 
 
 Millvale, 
 
 Sunday, March 23. 
 
 My only promotion on this job to date has been from 
 one side of the rolls to the other from helping the roller 
 to helping the catcher. That's not very much, though it 
 is, I think, a bit easier, and is free from the fumes and 
 smoke of the gas-jet which is turned on occasionally to con- 
 trol the contraction and expansion of the bottom roll for
 
 50 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 getting even pressure across the cold sheet. Especially 
 when the hot mills are closed down and the crane is able 
 to fetch a fresh pile of sheets to roll as soon as one is finished, 
 it makes your "spell" of rest in between jobs very short, 
 and so sends you home tired enough after nine hours. 
 
 But the loaf from Saturday morning to Monday morning 
 makes it all perfectly possible and very close to enjoyable. 
 In fact, I think it would be positively enjoyable if I didn't 
 have to carry around this other alias and personality of 
 mine which makes me keep silent many times when I'd 
 like to talk freely. 
 
 But, of course, if I were genuinely one of the workers I'd 
 be doing more of the worrying that they do. This is mainly 
 about the job it does seem almost impossible to over- 
 estimate the all-importance of the job to the worker. 
 
 "By gad, them fellows on the hot mills is in hard luck," 
 says one of my busy cold-rollers. "No work since Wednes- 
 day of this week, and now we come out Monday and they 
 don't! That's tough!" 
 
 "Aw, but think of the money thay make when they're 
 makin' it!" says another. "What's worryin' me is how 
 long are we goin' to have work !" 
 
 Steady work is just about as important, it seems, as good 
 day wages. It seems to be felt, also, that this steadiness of 
 the job is often more subject to the management's good-will 
 than good wages. 
 
 Listen to my neighbor at a long and crowded bar in a 
 neighboring town. He happened to be an old machinist 
 I'd seen in the mill. 
 
 "Yes, sir," said he, "I'm near seventy years old, and I've 
 been in the steel line, one way or 'nother, forty- two of them 
 sheet floors mostly, I guess. I've made big money, too, 
 but I never saved nothin' till just lately now that my chil- 
 dren are all well married and I hain't no bad habits to spend 
 nothin' on 'cept my board and room and that's less'n
 
 IN A ROLLING-MILL 51 
 
 ten dollars a week. Look here !" and he pulled out the re- 
 ceipts for four Liberty Bonds. "I've got enough insurance 
 money to pay every cent o' puttin' me away in good style, 
 and mebbe something left for the girls and boys to divide 
 amongst 'em. 
 
 " Just two year I been here in the mill, and for a seventy- 
 year-older I'm making pretty good money. The fore- 
 man ! why I wish't you could see the long hours he gives 
 me an' pay-and-a-half for everything over eight hours! 
 I tell you he's fine. Sometimes I work eighteen hours and 
 take home money for, let's see, yes, that's right, twenty- 
 three hours. Yes, sir, you're right, that's $9.86. And 
 it's steady work, too. And when one job gets too heavy 
 for me he puts me on somethin' easier." 
 
 It's mainly that Saturday and Sunday rest which makes 
 him like the boss for giving him long hours and therefore 
 extra long pay, because he doesn't need the money so badly. 
 After a week of soberly and sadly watching the real jobs 
 slip past him, Saturday's dissipation at the bar helps him 
 to think himself still in the game and going strong 
 stronger with every glass emptied. 
 
 "No, sir, I'm one steel man that ain't never chewed 
 tobacco. And I ain't never cared for these here ' wild women' 
 neither. But I do like to come here of a Saturday after- 
 noon and take a little beer and mebbe a bit o' liquor. 
 4 How much ? ' Oh, only enough to make me feel as though 
 I had my old position back like, you know." 
 
 "Now it's my turn, young fellow. What'll you have? 
 anything you like; I never tell a man what he's to take 
 when I'm payin' not me." 
 
 And then the job again: 
 
 "Now, you're a likely-lookin' fellow. You take my ad- 
 vice allus take it as easy as ye can, but allus keep your 
 eye out, and whenever the boss comes your way, work like 
 the devil. Show him you're interested and he'll put you
 
 52 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 on 'ketchin" the first thing you know. That's good money. 
 And say, don't fergit, you show interest in your work 
 when the boss comes up. He's a good fellow and he'll see. 
 And don't say I told you nothin'." 
 
 And that was his final word again the summing up of 
 his forty-two years of dealing with foremen ! as we parted. 
 
 On the job and off it, such men seem to have a lot more 
 sense of honor than most people looking across the usual 
 gulf of social and economic difference would judge. My 
 old friend told at great length how he left his job of police- 
 man in a city because he would not electioneer for his su- 
 perior's candidate against an old personal friend. 
 
 Likewise a big wholesome and husky American, shovelling 
 coal from a wagon onto a car on the station siding: 
 
 "Oh, I bring down four or five of these loads from that 
 mine over yonder and every one of 'em weighs about 
 6,200, too. But at that, it's better'n doin' what they 
 wanted me to do in there" and he pointed to the mill. 
 
 When he called it "dirty work" I thought of my own 
 clothes at Stockton, and didn't blame him much for refus- 
 ing, though shovelling coal all day didn't look very clean 
 or attractive, either. But he didn't mean that kind of dirt. 
 
 "No, I was on the open-hearth when they asked me, and 
 I told 'em I'd been one of the boys all my life, and money 
 wouldn't make me go back on 'em. 
 
 "A little later," he went on, as he paused and straightened 
 his back a moment, "I asked a big chap who came onto the 
 floor what his job was, and when he said, 'Oh, not much o' 
 anything' I told him I knew what he was doin', and he 
 called me a liar. But I backed up my proposition, and 
 after we'd fought for thirty-five minutes he said he reckoned 
 I was right. 'Course then he had to git out or the boys 
 'ud a mobbed him for sellin' 'em out that way No, I 
 reckon I'm better off here in the air, pretty much my own 
 boss, than spyin' on my pals."
 
 IN A ROLLING-MILL 53 
 
 Like so many of the workers, he had seen many different 
 kinds of labor: so many years a puddler "hard, husky 
 work, but it pays you good when it's goin'" so many years 
 in a coal-mine; "and in six or seven hours I c'ud get out 
 enough coal to satisfy me, five or six dollars before the war, 
 as much as ten or twelve dollars now, and loaf around home 
 the rest of the day," etc. Some regrets he had that he had 
 not kept at this or that work longer, or taken this or that 
 chance, but on the whole he seemed pretty well satisfied 
 with life. 
 
 A lot of workers must find good, steady work here and 
 stay by it or there could not be so many streets of simple 
 but well-kept houses and yards. Certainly there is a big 
 help, too, in the closer acquaintance between the managers 
 and the men which is made possible by the smallness of the 
 town. 
 
 "Oh, we're not worryin'," said a roller to-day. "We'll 
 soon be at work again. The boss called us hi the other day 
 and told us all just why it was our gang had to be off. It's 
 all right." 
 
 Not everybody is as enthusiastic as my sixty-five-year 
 friend Jover the company bosses, but as far as I can see 
 there is general agreement that the company pays good 
 wages, gives steady work on a very decent schedule of hours, 
 and keeps just about the cleanest plant in the whole in- 
 dustry. The workers seem to know little about the man- 
 agers, and the higher-ups seem a long way off with their 
 headquarters in another city. But at that, the distance 
 between capital and labor is enormously less than at Stack- 
 ton. If the Bolshevists ever get a hearing here they'll have 
 to use a lot of gas-bombs first. 
 
 With my Saturday-Sunday "spell" nearly gone and it 
 included a climb up one of the big hills and a stretch with 
 a book on the grass in the spring sun it is genuinely 
 pleasant to think of a hot breakfast with Mrs. B. to-morrow
 
 54 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 at five-thirty, and then, with her appetizing handiwork in 
 my dinner-bucket, "ring in" for the day's work. The only 
 trouble is that with the crane man so active in bringing us 
 fresh iron to roll it is hard to get time to empty that bucket. 
 We have no lunch hour. Here's what the good soul puts 
 into it: 
 
 Four bread-and-butter sandwiches, 
 
 Dish of meat, 
 
 Glass of jelly, 
 
 Glass of preserves, 
 
 An orange, an apple, three or four cookies, 
 
 Two pieces of pie, 
 
 One or two pieces of cake, 
 
 And pint of coffee. 
 
 There's a big chance here for some one to organize a trust 
 of boarding-house keepers so they can stand their ground 
 as they do hi the average college town. Barring that, I 
 may be fat if my landlady, at one dollar per day, continues 
 to give me such a bucket every day, and then at supper 
 sets a groaning table and stands over it urging and re-urging 
 her good food on her boarders ! 
 
 Same Place, 
 Thursday, March 27. 
 
 In spite of the nasty snow and rain here I've been having 
 a most luxurious and enjoyable day I've been my own 
 boss in charge of a grand and glorious lay-off. 
 
 And part of the day I've been trying to figure out just 
 why it happened. Perhaps it was the heat and mugginess 
 of the weather the mill was certainly hot and unusually 
 smoky. Probably it was that, together with the Greek 
 roller boss's desire to make a big run and a big bonus, 
 combined, still further with the fact that for long periods 
 the heavy sheets had to be lifted off the runway and then 
 up high onto the top of the pile; ordinarily the crane takes 
 the pile away before it gets so high. Then, too, it happened
 
 IN A ROLLING-MILL 55 
 
 several times that just as the catcher and I were gritting 
 our teeth in the attempt to finish the high pile without call- 
 ing for a " spell," the roller would send them through too 
 fast and make a mess on the floor, or else, just at that 
 moment, Jo, the boss, would happen by and proceed to tell 
 us to lift them higher and toss them further back onto the 
 pile! 
 
 Anyway, by noon the helper, a young returned soldier, 
 and I were "all in" also very cross at everything and every- 
 body. As a result, I'm pretty sure, of my temper as much 
 as my tiredness, every movement during the afternoon 
 went hard I spent it mostly quarrelling mentally to my- 
 self with nobody in particular, but with all the bosses and 
 management in general particularly for their paying roller 
 and catcher on the amount of work done while we helpers 
 got no reward whatever for our extra effort, except shorter 
 tune and therefore less money, by reason of getting that 
 much sooner to the place where the roller and catcher, after 
 figuring their earnings, decided they had done enough for 
 the day. 
 
 Finally I thought the occasion might help get me a differ- 
 ent job with less work or more money or more interest. 
 So when at last we were through for the day I said to the 
 biggest boss I could find: "I guess I'd better have either a 
 new job or a lay-off to-morrow. I've got a 'mad on* 
 against that Greek and everything else." 
 
 To my surprise he didn't smile as usual, but showed his 
 teeth and told me I'd better go look for somethin' else if I 
 thought I could find it. He, too, seemed sore on things, 
 so I compromised by saying I'd feel better, mebbe, if he'd 
 give me a turn's lay-off. I guess many foremen would have 
 fired me on the spot. In any case I think he was feeling 
 just as nasty as I was; he had had a very hot, busy day, 
 too; so we both had the makin's of trouble and a bust-up. 
 
 There surely is a mighty connection between tiredness and
 
 56 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 temper everywhere. It figures, of course, most of all where 
 men are paid for doing hard physical work. I almost think 
 I could catch with a stop-watch the moment when the work 
 produces such a soreness of muscle that it induces a sore- 
 ness of mind, which then proceeds to make me think about 
 this or that unfairness between me and the bosses and the 
 company. Just as they say bad teeth spread infection to 
 the body's unhealthy or weak spots, so the physical poison 
 of fatigue seems to infect, in a short while, the feelings and 
 the thinkings if there is in them any little raw or sore 
 spot. 
 
 A sort of "reverse English" confirmation of this came 
 to-day when I was telling of my temper at the boarding- 
 house. The landlord was a hot-mill man for a number of 
 years. 
 
 "The next time you get that way," he advised, "you go 
 out and see how far you can jump or how high. And a few 
 minutes later you'll come back without your grouch." 
 
 "That's right," said a handsome young heater on the 
 hot mills. "Often when our crew gets sore at everything 
 the iron's bad or somethin' we try to see who's the best 
 at jumpin' over one of them safety gates, and pretty soon 
 we've forgotten all about our troubles." 
 
 If I weren't so anxious to find the big thing which I'm 
 sure is at the bottom of this combination of muscular weari- 
 ness and mental irritability, I would not be willing to con- 
 fess here that when I came home from the plant, and for 
 several hours after, the question was w r hether I should curse 
 or cry and, like the big football half-backs I've seen ex- 
 hausted after a losing game, I ended by doing a shameful 
 amount of both ! 
 
 There's surely something wrong when men come out of 
 a day's work like that, and there's no doubt others do it 
 besides myself. A man in that mood isn't anxious to do 
 straight thinking about capital and labor he's too far
 
 IN A ROLLING-MILL 57 
 
 gone for that; but he does want to feel sore at all bosses 
 and capitalists and managers, and such like. 
 
 The more I see of the foreman the more I feel he's a very 
 complex proposition. It almost looks to me as though he 
 can never be expected to help do the job of solving the 
 factory manager-man problem unless he's given an entirely 
 new deal. 
 
 There's my roller boss, the Greek, a sort of unit boss in 
 charge of our quartet. He works hard to get his tonnage 
 money; his two weeks' pay yesterday was $138. If he 
 could express himself well and didn't have to depend on 
 dagger looks to show what not to do, he wouldn't be bad. 
 Evidently they can't find Americans for his job. But then 
 Jo seldom smiles at him in telling him about the roll screws 
 which control the pressure, and very often yells and swears. 
 So the Greek rides us just as he is ridden by his boss. Jo, 
 in turn, is old and just about the hardest-worked person I 
 ever saw unless it is his boss, the department superin- 
 tendent, Jack, who keeps sharp after Jo, besides having 
 many miles to walk and look after, up and down the length 
 of the quarter-mile building. He is helped by Shorty and 
 another, both of whom run a great deal and are very ner- 
 vous and worried-looking. 
 
 As I see them all inspect our sheets, I find myself saying : 
 "Somebody's riding these bosses. Somebody's riding these 
 bosses." Still the men who are over these are apparently 
 friendly they were very fine to me when I asked to get a 
 chance on the hot mills. Maybe it's heavy responsibility 
 with small salaries, or trouble getting thoughtful workers 
 a big lot of sheets came back rejected last week but some- 
 thing is riding these bosses, I'm sure, and has been for years. 
 
 That being the case, it isn't fair to expect them to be 
 sweet-tempered and full of careful instruction for safety 
 (day before yesterday, on the morning turn, one leg and 
 two toes were broken, and four fingers cut off for three
 
 58 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 men!) on rolling or anything else. And still everybody 
 says, "Go to your foreman," when you want an advance 
 or a change of job, or a lay-off. Just because he has your 
 whole well-being in his hands he can fire or freeze-out or 
 promote you, so you could sure enough sing to him, "I 
 need thee, every hour I need thee" you don't like to take 
 a chance of spoiling your stand-in by asking him about this 
 or that when he's busy and worried, especially considering 
 the fact that when the day's been hard on you it's probably 
 been the same on him, as yesterday, when I lost my care- 
 fully cultivated stand-in with my friend. 
 
 The foreman is everything to the worker, all right, but 
 it doesn't fix matters any for the worker if the manager 
 says, " Speak to your foreman about that," and then turns 
 around and rides him down too hard. 
 
 "Alia time ' hurry-up, hurry-up, hurry-up' no good!" 
 said my Greek "catcher" the other day, with a grimace as 
 we walked out together, both very tired. He has to "hurry- 
 up, hurry-up" me because the roller hurry-ups him, because 
 Jo hurry-ups him, because Shorty hurry-ups him, because 
 Jack shakes his head and makes a wry face as he looks at 
 the sheets and hurry-up-hurry-ups him. Who or what does 
 it to Shorty and Jack I don't know, but it's something or 
 somebody, and it looks to me as though all of us from Jack 
 down are doing the best we can, though I'm mighty sure 
 that nobody is very happy about it. 
 
 Anyway it's certain that to-morrow's sheets will go better 
 for to-day's rest, unless Jack's still sore at me. "Aunty 3" 
 at the boarding-house was shocked at my taking the liberty 
 of a lay-off on my four dollars a day. Her star boarder 
 said: 
 
 "I've only had two days off in a year except Sunday 
 and I made them up by overtime." 
 
 But he's a boiler-fixer and practically has no boss. Maybe, 
 by the way, that's the reason so many on all sides speak
 
 IN A ROLLING-MILL 59 
 
 enthusiastically of coal-mining "You go down and get your 
 coal and when you've got it you're through and nobody to 
 say nothin' to you." 
 
 To-morrow Friday it's work from six till three or four, 
 and then again from midnight to eight or nine Saturday 
 morning. That's because Saturday is given to the changing 
 of the rolls in order that their imperfections can be taken 
 out in the big lathes. 
 
 I wish I could go out in our shop back home and see if 
 our foremen look as though they were happy; if they aren't 
 it's pretty sure nobody else is. 
 
 Millvale, 
 Wednesday, April 2. 
 
 Several of my friends at the mill tell me of their pro- 
 motion from helper to catcher or roller with tonnage pay 
 after only a few days' work. I am sorry to report that after 
 all these weeks I am still only a helper, earning about four 
 dollars. In order to get more experience I have gone to 
 the employment department and then on their direction 
 to various department foremen asking to be taken on, but 
 am told by all that they are either unable to use those they 
 have, or are hiring men in the company's plants in near-by 
 towns now shut down. 
 
 "As soon as it gets hot a lot of the boys will go back to 
 the farm, and then I'll take you to the hot mills 'bout a 
 month from now," say the sheet-floor bosses. 
 
 Meanwhile I've met many workers and "helped" with a 
 variety of catchers and rollers. Once in the same turn I 
 was so changed around that I worked at different rolls 
 under two Greeks, one Italian, and one Spaniard all pretty 
 good fellows except mine enemy the Greek. (Of course it 
 should be mentioned that red-haired Irish Jo is over them 
 all !) Just now I am regularly under another Greek roller, 
 Matthew, with an American boy, Arthur, as catcher, and 
 an Italian as the other helper.
 
 60 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 In learning the ways of all these, two points stand out. 
 One is how quickly a man's personality is shown in the way 
 he gets another man to work with him. My Italian roller, 
 Tony, was able by his smiles at the right moment to get 
 my wish to perform up to the hilt with, later, somewhat 
 of a disappointment to find that he was lazy and expected 
 little of himself or his helpers. My present Greek knows 
 less English than my first one, but he is jolly; he also takes 
 time off to rest occasionally, so that our qujartet is a happy 
 one which puts almost as many sheets through the rolls 
 with enormously less wear and tear on muscles and " men- 
 tals" and rolls. 
 
 The other point is how much the wear and tear depend 
 on mental conditions and attitudes. For instance, my first 
 day with Tony I was unhappy to feel that he did not like 
 my way of loosening the sheets for him, and yet he could 
 not make clear his wishes. Finally, the catcher's helper 
 asked to trade places so he could show me. In a few minutes 
 Tony asked me to come back and showed that he was 
 well pleased with my way. His approval changed the work 
 at once from laborious to easy. Then a few hours later it 
 became a wearing chore again to go and help my original 
 Greek, who never smiled approval, looked dirks at every 
 pause and cursed me roundly when in open defiance to him 
 I finally mutinied and loafed for one "spell" of not more 
 than fifteen seconds while all the rest of the crew looked 
 at me ! When the mind goes over and over the sore spots 
 of such bad handling, reflecting all the while on the com- 
 pany's cutting off the helper from sharing in bonus, even a 
 few hours of effort is almost as ruinous as a machine's run- 
 ning without oil unless the worker, in order to spare him- 
 self this friction, schools himself to the I-don't-give-a-hang 
 state of mind. And that is the state of mind which for 
 many workers has become chronic, and which offers stony 
 ground for the seed of ambition of good workmanship or 
 anything else than Bolshevistic new deals.
 
 IN A ROLLING-MILL 61 
 
 If the worker doesn't protect himself in this don't-care 
 way, and so works with an unhappy mind for long hours, 
 his mind becomes stony anyway with fatigue. Last week 
 I noticed that the roll- turner's helper looked "all in." He 
 is a returned soldier and was badly gassed. He assured me 
 that there will be a Bolshevik uprising in this country ! 
 "Why, they's 10,000 soldiers on the streets of New York 
 every day, and no jobs for 'em. 'Taint right!" 
 
 This week he told me of the long turns of eighteen and 
 twenty hours he'd had to work last week because somebody 
 had had the flu. He had caught up his sleep. Bolshevism 
 didn't seem to interest him. To him the country seemed 
 saved ! 
 
 My sixty-five-year-old friend and also "Uncle Zeke" of 
 about the same years, have both been complaining of their 
 overtime, though some of my younger friends on a near-by 
 furnace tell me, with evident pride, of their "fifty-two cents 
 an hour, twelve hours work and pay for fourteen." To the 
 eight-hour hot-mill men these long hours in such as the 
 open-hearth appear very disgusting as they are also, I'm 
 told, to the young wives with which the town is said to be 
 filled. It seems that the young husky chaps of the neigh- 
 borhood can very early earn good money (six dollars to ten 
 dollars per day, and up) on either the hot mills or the 
 furnaces, and so marry very young girls with divorces 
 frequently resulting. 
 
 Such high wages for hard work evidently discourage 
 "higher education." Arthur, my catcher, is eighteen, and 
 because he's on tonnage he makes eight or nine dollars a 
 day. 
 
 "Aw, I was playin' hookey or goin' fishin', or somethin', 
 ten days out of twenty, so my family said I'd better quit 
 with first year high school. The only study I ever enjoyed 
 was history An' I'm goin' up to B - to see my queen 
 next month if I can make it !" 
 
 When I asked whether it didn't look as though a fellow
 
 62 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 got on better if he took all the schooling he could, his come- 
 back put me away down and out, and brought the talk to 
 a quick stop : 
 
 "I should say not! And you prove it. Your language 
 shows you've had more education than /, but just look at 
 your job and look at mine ! I'd say you ain't no argument 
 for education!" 
 
 All his bearing speaks of satisfied superiority to the riff- 
 raff earning less than he. Furthermore, it seems that his 
 dignity as an eight-dollar man rather frowns upon his 
 working too hard and making too much; that would appar- 
 ently show him greedy and tight-fisted would hurt his 
 reputation as a good fellow. He takes pains to tell us how 
 his roller's appetite for money would work us all to death 
 if he himself didn't insist on moderation in earning and 
 working : 
 
 "I like work and I'm not afraid of it, but I ain't goin' to 
 be none of your hogs for it !" 
 
 With him and many of the other rollers my strenuous 
 Greek is very unpopular though not with his foreman who 
 is interested hi production for pushing himself and his crew 
 so hard for his $138 per fortnight. It is possible that this 
 willingness of the Greek to "hog" work hi spite of unpop- 
 ularity is behind the opinion of a group of Americans 
 warming themselves around the salamander this morning: 
 
 "Yessir, the company is always lettin' good Americans 
 go men who have been here fifteen or twenty years and 
 holding these - - Greeks. No wonder there's hundreds 
 of 'em here." 
 
 "Tired?" said Matthew, my Greek roller, to-day as we 
 came out together. (He got $131 last pay.) "Yes, every 
 day tired. But next month I go to old country for stay 
 mebbe all time." 
 
 Arthur's father has been a boss roller for many years, and 
 probably earns a net total of $3,500 or $4,000 yearly. There
 
 From photographs by Lewis W. Hine 
 
 SOME TYPES FROM THE COAL AND STEEL TOWXS
 
 IN A ROLLING-MILL 63 
 
 are many fathers and sons here at work. According to 
 that, this town and the mill with its above-average condi- 
 tions of work, may not be in line with the situation mentioned 
 recently by an authority: 
 
 "It has been noticed that the personnel in the steel-mills 
 is falling off." 
 
 That remark was called out, I think, by my saying that 
 from my experience with foremen at Stackton, a young 
 American could hardly hope to start at the bottom and work 
 up into practical steel-making successfully until the public 
 made it possible for him to understand and make a hit 
 with his bosses by teaching Slavic in the public schools ! 
 
 It's nearly nine an hour past bedtime on an eight- 
 hour sleep schedule. It's up at four these days, in the plant 
 and at work at five, out again at three or, possibly, two 
 and to-morrow, being Friday, back to the mill again at 
 midnight. 
 
 Well, at least going to bed is a little simpler than at home. 
 After helping to catch and pile somewhere around thirty 
 tons of steel sheets every day fifteen or twenty pounds at 
 a tune it doesn't seem necessary to devote five minutes 
 to bedroom exercises ! 
 
 Millvale, 
 Thursday, April 10. 
 
 It must be a sign of a good plant when a man who quits 
 makes even a mild sensation. It seemed as though I was 
 making that this morning when, in my street clothes, I saw 
 my friends on my way to the boss for the "quit slip" re- 
 quired for getting my "time" this afternoon. 
 
 I felt sorry to have to answer the surprised queries of 
 my policeman and other friends with a lie: 
 
 "Well, you see, if I'm goin' to get on, I gotta get both 
 coin and experience. And I can't see neither one in bein' 
 four weeks on a helper's job at four dollars per! I ain't 
 kickin' on the treatment, y' understand you're all fine.
 
 64 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 But I gotta beat it first over to X , and if there's 
 
 nothing there, down to M or B ." 
 
 A pair of journeymen roll- turner friends at the boarding- 
 house advised: 
 
 "If you go to any mills where there's a sign of a union 
 don't ever mention these boys if you want a job a-tall. 
 . . . Well, because they say these chaps here won't join 
 
 'em.' 
 
 But after four weeks with them I'm sure it's because the 
 "boys" here are treated too well to care to bother about 
 fighting for more. Certainly they are all enormously hap- 
 pier than at Stackton. 
 
 One reason is that the hot-mill men the most numerous 
 and most capable of all the several thousand workers 
 work only eight hours and, by means of piece rates which 
 include all the crew, earn good money in what look like 
 jolly and contented gangs. The cold-rollers and catchers 
 make good money with seldom more than ten hours. The 
 annealers and open-hearthers seem to work twelve hours. 
 I'm sorry my best efforts failed to get me a job there to see 
 if they feel as much and give as little as at Stackton. At 
 any rate, I have noticed that the men hi charge of these 
 departments are spoken of very highly. 
 
 Another reason for their fair contentment is steady 
 work. 
 
 "No like-a at " (one of the town's other big plants), 
 
 says one Italian. "Some-a tune work too mooch-a tune 
 no work. No goo-d. Here alia time job." 
 
 "Me here sixteen year in dees plant. Good-a place," 
 says another, one of the several Italian families who have 
 been here a long time, and seem to have some very good 
 jobs. One of them, of the second generation, says he could 
 sell, on the side, a hundred tickets back to Italy, but is 
 allotted only one or two berths on each boat. 
 
 "Since the company joined a merger," said a husky
 
 IN A ROLLING-MILL 65 
 
 hot-mill heater, "they ain't so good as they used to be, 
 but they're still pretty blamed good in spreading what work 
 they is around so that everybody gets his share and no 
 hoggin'. Just now our furnace is laid off so that you cold- 
 rollers can get out more stuff. They's already so many 
 on the extra list that it means a lay-off for our crew. So I 
 went to work with a carpenter friend this morning for a 
 while." 
 
 Another reason is the attractive condition of the plant 
 as mentioned. Sweepers (forty-six cents per hour for twelve 
 hours) are always in sight. They are almost troublesome 
 hi the way they insist on picking up sticks you had counted 
 on using as props for your piles of sheets. Painters are fix- 
 ing pipes, furnace fronts, benches, etc., "for the annual 
 inspection of the big fellows from the head offices," as my 
 heater friend put it. Shrubbery and grass are hi evidence 
 in every possible place. 
 
 " Wy, when we has visitors," said "Uncle Zeke," "course 
 we allus brings 'em down to see the plant, and they all 
 tell us they never seen no such plant as this nowhures. 
 Makes us fellows proud to be here, I tell ye." 
 
 Certainly the close relations with the foremen favored 
 by the small town are also a big factor for general content- 
 ment. No worker seemed to know the present group of 
 general manager and other higher-ups, who are apparently 
 changed rather over-rapidly. But everybody, apparently, 
 could, either as a fellow-worker or a fellow-citizen, soon get 
 on to friendly terms with the bosses interfered with only 
 by the overworked condition of at least the cold-roll 
 bosses. 
 
 "When I decided it was up to me to cut out the khaki 
 and get busy," said one of my buddies, "I 'phoned Jack at 
 his house. As soon as I mentioned 'returned soldier' he 
 told me to come down in the morning. My father's been 
 a roller here many years."
 
 66 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 The restaurant is clean, well served and managed, though 
 not used a great deal "too much money to tie up in 
 tickets," some said. 
 
 The Relief Association gives different weekly benefits 
 for different payments, with a big death benefit following a 
 fifty-cent monthly assessment. 
 
 Many had bought company stock and regularly asked 
 each other, "How is she to-day?" like millionaires, though 
 the amount held seemed, usually, extremely small. 
 
 Few unions probably can offer conditions much better 
 than these. The disadvantages I observed would probably 
 not be noticed much by unions. 
 
 The first of these is the discontent general among us 
 cold-roll helpers because we do not share bonus. The idea 
 that our rollers and catchers will supply us with all the in- 
 centive required hardly works out. It simply makes us 
 hope that they will somehow stub their toes or cut their 
 fingers ! The more they nick the rolls, and so require short 
 lay-offs while the polishers restore them, the better we 
 helpers like it. (These great steel rolls, weighing around a 
 ton each, are of so sensitive a surface that the old roller says 
 a hair laid on a sheet as it goes through will show a slight 
 indentation on both the sheet and the roll !) 
 
 "You helpers are supposed to work your heads off, and 
 so get the place of the first roller or catcher who drops out," 
 explained one foreman. 
 
 "Do you want to know how to get your roller's or catch- 
 er's job?" asked an old retired roller at the boarding-house. 
 "Why, just knock his block off and send him to the hos- 
 pital then they'll give you his job. That's the only way 
 unless you can sweat for a few years." 
 
 "It just ain't fair," said an old helper working next to 
 me. u The other day my roller worked me so that he abso- 
 lutely cheated me out of at least one hour's work at time 
 and a half, that's sixty-three cents."
 
 IN A ROLLING-MILL 67 
 
 The plant's other weak spot seems to me the way the 
 management refers you constantly to your boss: 
 
 "Ask your boss about transferring you to another job 
 or correcting your time-card," etc., etc. 
 
 The trouble with that is that he is just the last man in 
 the world you want to discuss questionable matters with. 
 If you get his ill-will, you might as well go jump in the river 
 as expect to get farther hi your work. Furthermore, he is 
 so busy that what appears to you a perfectly simple state- 
 ment may chance to appear the exact reverse to him. In 
 the nature of the case he is pretty sure to be touchy, es- 
 pecially when overworked. You, accordingly, occupy your 
 mind for hours deciding whether to risk your prospects for 
 the future by bothering him about anything. If you are 
 wise you pretty surely decide not to do it; whereupon you 
 continue to be chafed by this or that obvious ill-adjustment 
 up to the moment when you either get disgusted and quit, 
 or curse yourself into the "don't-give-a-hang" state of 
 mind. So far as efficiency for the company is concerned, 
 one is about as bad as the other. 
 
 Most of the foremen have been for long years regular 
 workers. They apparently believe in "mystery." All of 
 us agree that they "wouldn't none of 'em tell a fella nothin' 
 even when you asked 'em." Even the rollers learned only 
 what not to do by a certain number of call-downs. The 
 "why" of anything they did not know. 
 
 "Whenever one of 'em comes to me I say, 'Yes, sir; no, 
 sir; no, sir; yes, sir/ as if they know everything and I 
 didn't know nothin'. They like that. When they go 
 away I do as I would-a done anyway," said one catcher. 
 
 His boast was that he knew how to circumvent foremen 
 and women and had many accounts in detail of his 
 successes with both. His one failure with the former was 
 when a foreman who had hired a man asked him to fire 
 him. He refused, and was himself fired on the spot.
 
 68 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 The day before leaving I wandered over into the finish- 
 ing department to see what they did to our sheets. The 
 young inspector took delight in showing how little defects 
 played hob. I feel sure it would have greatly increased my 
 value if I could have been shown these processes before I 
 began helping. That would probably have had the opposi- 
 tion of the bosses whose " mystery" would thus be lessened. 
 But such instruction would certainly save some of the money 
 now required to have a boss on hand every minute to prevent 
 mistakes, besides increasing the dignity and attractiveness 
 of the cold-roll work and possibilities. (When a, policeman 
 found me hi the finishing department he politely but firmly 
 told me to "Beat it! Against the rules.") I guess I was 
 ignorant, but I hadn't known until then that a bad sheet 
 meant a cracked spot of paint on somebody's auto's doors 
 or sides. 
 
 As to the town: The schools certainly do not sell their 
 wares well, though I confess they have stiff competition 
 when an untaught eighteen-year-older can become a catcher 
 at eight dollars. The town morals are certainly bad unless 
 most of the men I meet are tall liars. This is partly be- 
 cause of the usual small-town lack of intellectual interests. 
 Another reason is the cloud under which intellectual inter- 
 ests must live where so little education is required for good 
 wages. Another factor is the large number of very young 
 married women (also one result of the above) who have 
 little or nothing to interest them during the long hours of 
 their husbands' work, many of whom must come home, 
 I'm sure, too tired to be satisfactory husbands or good 
 fathers. Another factor, I'm inclined to think, is the ab- 
 sence of the opportunity to find a satisfactory sense of man- 
 liness and personal worth-whileness through the solving of 
 the real problems and the overcoming of man-sized ob- 
 stacles in the factory work. These satisfactions seem
 
 IN A ROLLING-MILL 63 
 
 jealously reserved for the foremen. But more of that at 
 some other time. 
 
 In some ways I'm sorry to have got "my time" and 
 packed my grip for the close of " Episode II." The work 
 has been immensely more enjoyable than that of "Episode 
 I." Perhaps I would have found similar conditions if I had 
 gotten a job on the open-hearth again, but I think not. 
 Even the foreign workers seem mostly to have been here a 
 long time, and to have adjusted themselves in better rela- 
 tions all around. 
 
 After about nine weeks of it I have grown a little more 
 used to carrying a different name and status. The lone- 
 someness of this is something hard to bear, though very 
 difficult to describe. My story of unsuccessful selling and 
 other "head" work seems to find no doubters. In fact, I 
 am so easily accepted as a perfectly proper four-dollar a 
 day man that it greatly hurts my pride. Yesterday, at 
 last, I did have the satisfaction of finding one man who 
 saw through my disguise. He was drunk ! 
 
 I was waiting in the shoe-shop while the repairer was 
 giving me an additional pair of soles, when a local merchant 
 walked in, in the midst of one of his occasional two weeks' 
 sprees. He transfixed me with his eye: 
 
 "Say, stranger, I have never seen you before, but I'd like 
 to tell you about yourself. Now as to brains you'd stand, 
 I'd say, so and so here. As to education, so and so; sales- 
 manship, etc." giving me what I hope was a very good 
 character-reading. 
 
 When I asked him where he "got the stuff," referring to 
 the source of his intuition only, he stood up straight and 
 said with pride: "For five years, sir, I was a bartender." 
 
 "Now," he continued, "there's something wrong here. 
 It's perfectly evident to me, young fellow, that either you 
 have committed some serious crime and are at this moment
 
 70 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 a fugitive from justice, or else you are the sad victim of 
 some deep, disgraceful, secret sin or you'd not be working 
 in this town at four dollars a day ! 
 
 "But" after a pause "in spite of that crime or that 
 secret sin o' yours, whatever it is, I'll lend you whatever 
 money you need and, furthermore, I'll offer you fifty dollars 
 a week and commission to canvass this town for my goods." 
 
 I felt that my self-respect had at last been vindicated, 
 though I was sorry it required the "in vino veritas" genius 
 of the grape to do it.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 "STEEL STILL SLOW MINERS WANTED" 
 
 THE unskilled jobs in the district's steel-mills still seemed 
 closed and surrounded with applicants. Getting inside with 
 the help of a letter of introduction would have been easily 
 possible, but would probably have lessened the value of 
 the contacts with the men. Such a letter, however, seemed 
 practical as well as necessary for entering the strange field 
 of the coal-miner, in the hope that it might give light on 
 the matter of the foremen, the shorter day, living condi- 
 tions, etc. Before the letter could operate, however, a few 
 days had to be given to loafing and listening. 
 
 Steelville, 
 April 22. 
 
 The rebuffs expected from my rough clothes when I 
 started out on my adventure in January haven't arrived 
 yet. Latterly it has not seemed necessary to appear quite 
 so rough, but people still seem to be more willing to tell me 
 about themselves than I used to find them. 
 
 Nicola, an Italian, beckoned me over to his seat in the 
 smoker to tell me about his fourteen years of coal-mining: 
 
 "Yes, coal-mine fine place to work een Ohio: bad in 
 Eeleenois. Too much-a gas in Eeleenois and too much-a 
 accident there. My leg he crush and break No, never 
 no monee for heem I do no read-a da English, and no 
 sign-a da paper get no monee. Here in C - seex Italian 
 families we work-a da mine free feet seam alia time 
 bend but alia time so much-a coal so much-a monee. Alia 
 time no hot no cold. But I t'ink coal man feefty year he 
 look seexty cheek alia time white too littla sun." 
 
 71
 
 72 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 He had definite ideas about personal liberty, as set forth 
 after his pint bottle had been offered and perforce of 
 friendship accepted. As we came into a smoky town he 
 exclaimed : 
 
 "Oh, smokee! Dees good-a town for poor peopla. No 
 smoke? no work for poor peopla and no monee. Too 
 littla smoke in Eetalee no good for poor man. But I get 
 passaport to-day for go back and see my family near Udine." 
 
 George, a husky but wholesome-looking workman also on 
 the smoker: 
 
 "Well, I was eighteen and had no trade in a little Iowa 
 town, so I joined the navy. Here's my certificate 'First- 
 class electrician.' See? And hi those four years I saw 
 almost the whole world. You bet it takes the juice to run 
 a cruiser a big generator to turn every turret besides all 
 the other things. Now I get good money, eight-hour day 
 and interesting work. . . . 
 
 "Oh, yes, you start in with a little tattooing on your hand 
 or wrist, and before you get back you're pretty well covered. 
 Course it hurts ! Yes, you can prick it out if you like. I 
 know one fellow, every time he smoked a cigar or cigarette 
 he'd touch his tattooing with it. Course even then he'll 
 show a white scar of the same design where he's burnt out 
 the Chinese ink." 
 
 Thomas, colored, on one of the bridges: 
 
 "Well, the company always done treated me all right. I 
 been there fo'ah yeahs. Wi'ah (wire) workah now and make 
 ma' ten dollars every turn just now we're wo'kin' only 
 fo'ah turn a week. That ain't bad when so many men out 
 o' wo'k everywheah. . . . Shuah, it's dangerous when 
 them wires gets loose and flyin' around, but I ain't never 
 been hurt yet. S' better'n bein' a sailor den you gotta 
 spend all you makes when you gets on shore after a long 
 cruise 'tain't possible to hold back nohow. Seems lak yo 
 just gotta even up, somehow. . . . Yes, I had a wife, but
 
 " STEEL STILL SLOW MINERS WANTED" 73 
 
 she got away from me. I reckon to get another 'foh long 
 seein's how I got a thousand-dollar bond. . . . Shuah, 
 you can get on, mebbe as labor and if you watch sharp 
 they'll mebbe give you a chance at drawin' wi'ah. I'll be 
 right glad to see you yes, the Works. So long." 
 
 Elizabeth, in the information-booth at the railway station : 
 
 "Polite? Well, I'll tell the world people ain't polite to 
 us girls! No, we never get any thanks, and lotsa time 
 they tell us, 'Well it was five-ten and not five-fifteen yes- 
 terday, 'cause I looked at my watch.' And all the fool 
 things they expect us to know and get sore if we don't! 
 (Yes, sir, one at five-forty and another at five-fifty-five.) 
 We get some training inside answering the 'phone. (Blank- 
 burg? track 4, madam.) Oh, I've wanted to hang up on 
 'em many's the time." 
 
 Pearl interrupted here to say that she's taking tonic for 
 her frazzled nerves, but all she got for her pains was Eliza- 
 beth's "Aw, you get out ! Your nerves are as good as mine, 
 and I can keep this up a long tune yet. (Next train to 
 Beeville? Seven-fourteen, sir.)" 
 
 So it goes. They all seem glad to find any one interested 
 in their work just as if they were editors or college pro- 
 fessors or captains of industry or snake-charmers for all 
 of those are delighted, I know from experience, to talk to 
 anybody about their jobs. 
 
 Steelville, April 27. 
 
 To my surprise the British prison-ship, Success, anchored 
 in the river, and helping to recruit for the marines, gave 
 some side-lights on the labor and general social situation. 
 From about 1802 to 1850 it carried criminals from England 
 to Australia. With its wire-wrapped cat-o'-nine-tails, its 
 salt-water bathtub where the prisoner had to wash his 
 flayed back and often took the opportunity to drown him- 
 self, its "black hole," its "tiger cage" for crazy ones, and
 
 74 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 its various instruments for confining chins and heads and 
 wrists while the boat's tossings wrenched flesh and bone, 
 it must have been well called the floating hell. The first 
 two years of every sentence was spent below the water-line 
 with thirty-five pound leg-chains in "solitary," with one 
 hour's exercise dragging an enormous iron ball. After that, 
 the other years during the later career of the boat were 
 spent by the prisoner working by day in the quarries ashore 
 and sleeping on board. 
 
 This boat carried the famous Dorsetshire farmers, who 
 are credited with calling the first English strike in 1834. 
 (Moses, it is understood, was the leader of the first strike 
 and walk-out in history.) These men were a half-dozen 
 farm laborers at seven shillings the week. They asked for 
 eight. For their pains they were cut to six. They went 
 before a judge with the protest that they could not live. 
 He spoke thus: 
 
 "Not for what you have done, but for what may come 
 after you and your example, and that those in authority 
 may be obeyed, I sentence each of you to be transported 
 for seven years of penal servitude!" 
 
 That was only eighty-five years ago. 
 
 No wonder our present law restricts the judge from using 
 his own judgment as to the kind of punishment he will 
 choose. 
 
 I'm told we had labor troubles here a great deal earlier. 
 
 Another case was Captain Melville, a mischievous lad 
 who took a tuppenny tart off a baker's cart and was sent 
 off on the Success for seven years ! At the end of them he 
 was an embittered and confirmed criminal. He committed 
 scores of murders, and finally killed himself in his cell after 
 twenty-nine efforts at escape. 
 
 There may be something of a hang-over memory of this 
 sort of thing even in our Anglo-Saxon minds, and certainly 
 an enormously nearer memory of it in the Russian mind.
 
 " STEEL STILL SLOW MINERS WANTED" 75 
 
 At the meeting of Socialist-Bolshevik! Sunday afternoon, 
 the chief speaker, Ruthenberg, of Cleveland, argued in 
 regard to it: 
 
 "How mistaken are our capitalistic friends if they think 
 that hard prison walls will soften our belief in a better chance 
 for everybody ! Every month I was in jail made my con- 
 victions harder and my whole soul bitterer. Now I can 
 hope for nothing better than that great numbers of us might 
 be imprisoned; that would give us an army which would 
 want nothing better than to fight to the last drop for our 
 beliefs in another system of society." 
 
 His audience of about a thousand was mainly of Russian 
 "intellectuals" young fellows with pompadours and heavy- 
 rimmed glasses crude-looking young Russian Jews and a 
 number of industrial under dogs of various nationalities. 
 The sad-eyed chap next to me was a bartender. Although 
 they applauded vociferously all the appeals for protesting 
 against the imprisonment of Debs and for inaugurating 
 immediately the Soviets here, still there seemed, somehow, 
 to be a lack of seriousness in the meeting. For instance, 
 they were a little too ready to laugh at the interruptions of 
 a drunken Scotch-Irishman. 
 
 While Ruthenberg made a pretty good speech, still every- 
 body seemed to feel that a lot of hard work had to be done 
 to awaken the worker to his opportunity. Somehow the 
 machinery of the meeting and of the whole revolutionary 
 programme seemed to creak and squeak. Said the organizer: 
 
 "Now's the time, comrades ! Thousands of men are out 
 of work. We must get them interested before they get 
 busy again. Now their minds are open. We have asked 
 you all to send in lists of prospects especially those out 
 of work; but, comrades, only a few of you have sent in those 
 lists! Please do so at once." 
 
 And Ruthenberg: "After I got out of jail we leaders in 
 Cleveland discussed what could we do to make now the
 
 76 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 supreme effort to attack the capitalistic slavery around us. 
 We decided to ask every member for one dollar. And I 
 want to report that we now have 1,000 new members and 
 $5,000 in the treasury!" 
 
 A pretty small mouse for the mountain of Socialism to 
 labor and bring forth in an attempt to persuade the Ameri- 
 can working man that the League of Nations should be 
 overthrown and local Soviets put hi its place ! 
 
 Nothing but dollars was asked for in the collection, but 
 nickels certainly had the best of it hi the tin pan which 
 passed me. I saw four people buy "a dollar's worth of 
 Trotzky's and other literature for seventy-five cents." 
 
 Almost with tears in their eyes and voices, Jewish "bark- 
 ers" urged one and all to "don't forget next Sunday's meet- 
 ing last of the season. Be sure to bring your friends and 
 fill the house." 
 
 At the employment offices State and private lots of 
 jobs, skilled and unskilled, were open miners, machinists, 
 carpenters, plumbers, etc. 
 
 "100 Railroad Laborers at once. New 
 camp. Good cooking. Only men with 
 baggage taken. Shipment Monday noon" 
 
 said one window. The "baggage test" for respectability 
 and stability is often got around, they say, by men who 
 put rocks into the cheapest of suitcases. 
 
 Only the steel business seems slow. But in steel or coal, 
 somehow, I'll hope to find a place shortly. Meanwhile a 
 dirty, dreary, stag hotel at one dollar and fifty cents for- 
 merly about fifty cents, probably makes any unoccupied 
 moment hang heavy, and draws one onto the streets. At 
 all times, however, these play on every note in the scale of 
 American present-day life; from the broken-down man of 
 sixty, wearing often the suit of a messenger-boy and the 
 expression of a one-tune fighter who knows he's beaten
 
 "STEEL STILL SLOW MINERS WANTED" 77 
 
 (and Foch says no army's beaten until it knows it), down to 
 the happy and swift black lad, who slides through the 
 crowds on his one skate, with his piccaninny brother sitting 
 comfortably on the skated foot, clasping his big brother's 
 leg with one hand and holding with the other the cookie 
 to his mouth, enjoying his ride immensely. 
 "I'll tell the world" it's an interesting place. 
 
 Steelville, 
 April 28. 
 
 In between times my meals here bring a chance to talk 
 with the waitress about her job which means life as she 
 sees it through her job or, perhaps, vice versa. 
 
 Gertrude that is, Gertie is tall and looks very strong, 
 altogether considerable of a person for her twenty-one 
 years. She is perfectly willing to show how complex her 
 affairs are: 
 
 "Oh, about nine hours a day. And say, I'm all hi every 
 night. And lately, the minute I lie down I cough for two 
 or three hours before I get to sleep. . . . Oh, I'll let it go 
 until it gets worse I always do. . . . Why, these heels ain't 
 high at all. You see, I've got an awful bad corn, and 
 these old shoes are comfortable. Gee, they nearly let my 
 toes out on the floor. . . . She? Oh, she says she don't 
 mind them high heels a-tall. (Good even'n. . . . Where 
 you been? Oh, I've been right here on the job. What is 
 it to-night? . . . Yes, sir. All right, in a minute.) 
 
 "Well, of course, the regular pay is seven dollars a week, 
 but it's the tips that make it a job about three dollars a 
 day now. Where I was before, they was four to six dollars 
 on the night turn. You see, there I had my same tables 
 regular, and my friends come hi and ask for me. (Worces- 
 tershire sauce? Just a minute, ma'am.) 
 
 "Oh, I been makin' my living a long tune ever since I 
 ran away from home in Chicago, when I was fourteen. I
 
 78 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 get on fine with my mother and everybody at home but my 
 father he and I, we don't make it. They don't know I 
 married a soldier three years ago goin' to tell 'em when he 
 gets back next month. Naw, the soldier's wife's allowance 
 don't help much unless you help it out yourself. (Is that 
 all ? let's see, that's seventy-five.) ... I guess you're right, 
 I have been lookin' at the clock a good deal. Well, you see, 
 he's waitin' outside for me. ... I mean my 'Sweet Potato.' ' 
 
 In the little shop Rachel, a homely but bright-eyed and 
 interesting girl, did all the honors. In her childish voice, 
 which seemed somehow to carry the memory of weary 
 young years, she thanked her stars that she wasn't quite as 
 small as the dapper and very fresh young dwarf who told 
 his tougher companion as they went out that the next time 
 he came back he'd "take a certain red-haired young lady 
 out to a movie." Her weariness of voice did not prevent 
 a very appealing smile. 
 
 "Well, of course, I don't remember nothin' hardly of it 
 'cause we left Russia when I was eight that's twelve years 
 ago. But it's such a terrible place. God, but they're 
 mean to us Jews no schools, no nothing. And now it's 
 worse. My mother she ain't had no word from her brothers 
 and sisters in four years nothing. We try to send money 
 but no word ever comes. We think they're all dead. 
 What a country ! 
 
 "Only a few months of night school here that's all. I 
 had to work you know, in private families, scrubbin' and 
 cleanin' up, mostly. But the dollar and fifty cents I got 
 helped me to buy clothes, and my father he got only about 
 seven dollars a week then. Then I worked in a factory. 
 Five years I been here. Yes, it's much better, and I learn 
 the business the boss he trusts me in everything. Yes, 
 my father he saves money enough that he could buy a 
 store, but he's afraid he lose it all. So now he clerks in a 
 nice furniture store for twenty-five dollars a week. My
 
 "STEEL STILL SLOW MINERS WANTED" 79 
 
 brother he works, too. So we get on very well now . . . .Yes, 
 sir, they'll be ready to-morrow at four. Good-day, sir." 
 
 Wednesday night as I dropped into a saloon to see if 
 anybody was there who wanted somebody to, listen to him, 
 who should be on hand but one of my buddies at my first 
 steel plant ? As we treat back and forth he eyes me keenly 
 "Well, what you doin' for a livin' now" and I have to do 
 some quick thinking to keep ahead of him with the explana- 
 tion of my failure to stay either on the open-hearth with 
 him, or in the later sheet-mill. 
 
 '"You're right," he agrees, "I'd quit, too them hours 
 on the floor is too long. But my boss, he got me exempted 
 from the draft, and I can't leave him." 
 
 After hearing all about my old pals and seeing him off 
 on his train to the steel town, I ask Elizabeth how the 
 questions are coming, and whether her public grows any 
 more polite: 
 
 "Say, I've had the funniest bunch o' human beings you 
 ever saw to-night. What do you think? With all these 
 questions about every place hi the world every half second, 
 up comes one lady and says, ' Did any person ask you about 
 a Brown ville train to-night?' 's if I could remember! 
 'N a nice lookin' party comes sailin' up 'n asks how can she 
 send her mother to Florida. 'Well,' I says, 'she can go to 
 Washington and then take the Seaboard Ah* Line down.' 
 You should 'a' seen her face. I wondered what to goodness 
 I'd done. She says: 'Why, she's my mother! I wouldn't 
 let her go that way. I want to send her by passenger 
 train!' 
 
 "Tired, well, I'll say I am. But just you wait until 
 Saturday. I'm goin' to deck out in some new duds and 
 show myself a little attention. Believe me, I ain't going 
 to work or anything but just walk down street. . . . Money? 
 Well now you're right. It does take money. My new hat 
 cost eighteen dollars and fifty cents, and I paid my good
 
 80 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 twelve dollars for a nifty little hand-bag to carry. But I 
 gotta have 'em all. That girl over there, she buys perfume 
 at six dollars and fifty cents per for just a tiny little bottle. 
 
 "So you're married? Aw, you married men! Say, I 
 just wish I had right here now" and she made a large pile 
 with her hands "all the dollar bills married train-men and 
 others have given me to call up their wives and tell 'em any 
 excuse I'd a mind to. Once a fellow threw down a nickel 
 right here in this station, and says, 'When you get that 
 number tell her Jersey City's on the wire?'. . . Not me not 
 for no nickel! Then he goes in a booth and in a far-away 
 voice says, 'Why, hello, Dearie yes, I'm in Jersey City. 
 I'm awful sorry but I can't get home till Tuesday. Are 
 you all right? That's good.' And then he joins another 
 man and two lady friends ten feet away! Makes me 
 sick!" 
 
 Here the well-groomed buyer of six-fifty perfume re- 
 turned, ready to leave in a hurry for the end of her turn: 
 
 "I got to sit up all night with mother. She's sick with 
 gastritis whatever that is and has dreadful pains. My 
 brother's been sitting up with her, but he can't do it another 
 night without havin' to lose time from his job. I guess 
 I'll be sleepy around here to-morrow night all right." 
 
 And to think the old tune economists used to tell us about 
 the "economic man" or woman who left all his ordinary 
 relationships behind him as soon as he got on the job to 
 earn a living ! The wonder is that we all do as well as we 
 can with such a network of personal connections around us 
 to be kept from snarling on the job and off. 
 
 Thursday was spent in a near-by coal town. Came away 
 with board and lodging arranged for, and with instructions 
 to report in working clothes and my new miner's cap at 
 No. 4 mine about six- thirty Monday. 
 
 I'd hardly go as far as to say my first impressions were 
 good. I have hi mind the dirty geese and the assortment
 
 " STEEL STILL SLOW MINERS WANTED" 81 
 
 of rusted tubs, basins, cans, bottles, and dead cats in the 
 ditches. But there are beautiful hills on all sides, white 
 lace curtains in all the windows all front-room windows 
 and electric lights going in many houses all day. The woman 
 who cooked a very good dinner for me, extended her half- 
 dried hand with a very friendly smile, and spoke of the early 
 coming of new paper and paint. Like every other mother 
 she was happy that the baby had got fat again so quick 
 after his "bronical pneumonia." When I thought the 
 baby's crib represented the discovery of perpetual motion, 
 she explained: 
 
 "You wind it up, Mister, with a spring, an' it keeps 
 a-goin' without any attention. It's fine when you've got 
 a washin' or somethin' like that, but it does spoil the baby 
 and makes it hard to get him to sleep in anybody else's 
 house." 
 
 Weather is pretty cold here, but they say it's neither hot 
 nor cold 120 feet below ground. 
 
 White collars are nice, but I hate to think of all the in- 
 teresting people I've evidently been missing because of 'em. 
 
 Bitumenburg, 
 April 30. 
 
 Well, for several days I've been a coal-miner and so far 
 as the work is concerned, have enjoyed it. 
 
 It's positively queer how little thought you give down 
 there below ground to the things you think you'd bother 
 about. After you strap your little tin-covered battery to 
 your belt, run the rubbered wire up your back, strapping 
 it to the rear of your cap and then inserting the cute little 
 electric lamp into the visor, you sort of forget it's there. 
 So when you get into the "cage" or hoist with the other 
 miners and drop down 120 feet suddenly often with a 
 feeling that your stomach is saying "I don't quite follow 
 you!" and start off down the butt, or main passageway,
 
 82 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 to your location, you forget that your tiny lamp is all there 
 is between you and the densest blackness. Somehow it 
 seems a perfectly proper place for you to be at that moment 
 except when you fail to stoop low enough and so get a 
 bump on your head. 
 
 Monday I was told to be buddy to the wire-man. Pick 
 and dinner-pails hi hand we started off and walked a mile 
 and a half or more through one passageway after another, 
 till we reached the place where some wires for bringing 
 current to the coal-cutting machines had to be taken down. 
 It was, for sure, a mile and a half in the school of hard 
 knocks, but each helped to pound in the lesson of how to 
 walk in a mine, bending over but still keeping an eye out 
 and up for a low spot hi the roof. 
 
 My lamp seemed to make a perfect circle of light and 
 darkness as though I carried a hoop like a sort of tunnel's 
 mouth straight up and down from my head to my feet, 
 in such a way that, as I moved, one foot was overtaken in 
 the blackness while the other stepped forward into the 
 moving tunnel of light. And out from the blackness farther 
 ahead of us would march the silent procession of mute, 
 coal-shiny walls, with occasionally an entrance to a side- 
 chamber or a group of timbers holding up the rock from 
 our heads. And then these, after advancing silently to 
 meet us out of the farther dimness, would pass on from the 
 edge of the tunnel of light at my side and in an instant step 
 silently into the tunnel of absolute darkness at my elbow. 
 
 It made me think of Ulysses: 
 
 "Much I have seen and known cities and men yet 
 all experience is an arch wherethrough gleams that untrav- 
 elled world whose margin fades forever and forever as I 
 move." 
 
 Only this seemed to go the other way the untravelled 
 world kept coming toward us up to us and then silently 
 and suddenly stepping past us into oblivion.
 
 
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 "STEEL STILL SLOW MINERS WANTED" 83 
 
 And yet, as I say, perhaps because you can't see your 
 own lamp, you seem to forget that a mine is always dark 
 unutterably dark. You walk and you work always with 
 things in view, or perhaps you take out a newspaper from 
 your pocket always you see it plainly. It wasn't until I 
 was left alone that first morning for a half-hour, and hap- 
 pened to take off my cap so that it fell face in on my coat. 
 Then what a blackness! I thought I had suddenly gone 
 blind till I recalled that, of course, I was in a mine, and 
 'twas my lamp that had been doing such noble service. 
 As I hid my lamp again I found myself quickly whistling 
 or singing or jiggling my leg. Why so? Well, because if I 
 didn't make some noise or some motion sitting there with- 
 out seeing or feeling or hearing anything at all, I would 
 begin to feel just as if / wasn't there myself as though I 
 was dead and gone and dried up and blown away. Ideas 
 and thoughts are all right, and nice things to have around, 
 but somehow we seem to require something in the way of 
 physical matters such as are reported to us by eye or ear 
 or muscle in order to really prove to us that we're alive and 
 on the job. 
 
 When somebody comes near, you understand how much 
 his lamp counts because that's all you can see of him until 
 he comes within the three or four feet where your own lamp 
 discloses his body. Even then it's hard to see his features, 
 partly through lack of light and partly through the grime 
 on his face. 
 
 My first morning we saw few other workers because we 
 were taking wires out of a worked-out passage. The work 
 was hard only when I had to use my pick to dig the insulator- 
 pins out of the roof above me a very awkward position 
 and bound to put dust hi the eyes. At noon, after five 
 hours' work, we sat down on some lumber with our dinner- 
 buckets in our laps. 
 
 "You've always got to have a good-fittin' cover on your
 
 84 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 bucket 'round here," said the wire-man, an energetic and 
 ambitious chap of about twenty. "These rats are all-fired 
 educated, and if you don't watch out they'll get in and 
 take everything but your coffee. They don't like coffee.". 
 
 After eating, we loafed and talked till one o'clock. Some- 
 how the time did not drag when we got to work again. A 
 few minutes before four we cleaned up the job and started 
 back to the hoist. I certainly felt less tired and was also 
 much less dirty than when I finished my first twelve hours 
 on the open-hearth, or my second ten hours on the cold 
 rolls. Me, I'm for the mines and the eight-hour day. 
 
 Yesterday the boss gave me a harder day on "the bot- 
 tom." That's near the shaft where the little, low-built 
 motors run by trolley wires and bring their trams or 
 "trips" of fifteen or twenty cars of coal. My job was to 
 uncouple each of these cars and at the right moment give 
 it a push down the track, where another chap passed it on 
 to the "eager" who ran it on to one of the two hoists. 
 Then he gave the signal to the engineer up above, who 
 whisked it up to the tipple where it was weighed, credited 
 to the miner whose check was found in the car, and then 
 emptied into a railroad car for shipment to Cleveland or 
 elsewhere. Some of the cars were very mean to move and 
 required a good deal of back work. One part of the job 
 also called for quickness. That was to get down on your 
 knees and, at the precise instant when the motor had gone 
 onto a side-track, throw a little switch or "latch," as they 
 call it, so that the "trip" of cars would go straight on 
 toward the shaft. Once the motor-man came too fast for 
 my inexperience and several cars went off the track much 
 to my dismay. But the boys only laughed and yelled to 
 Mike to come back with his motor and push 'em on again. 
 Later another motor-man came hi very swiftly. I had a 
 quick picture of the cars piled up again, with me between 
 them and the loaded cars standing on the other track.
 
 "STEEL STILL SLOW MINERS WANTED" 85 
 
 It was a thick instant. Luckily my buddy saw the danger 
 and quickly took my place at the latch, while I breathed 
 prayers of thankfulness and ran to set the brakes, or put 
 the wooden blocks or sprags into the wheels before the cars 
 ran into the bottom of the shaft. 
 
 But even yesterday's pushing was easier than many days 
 I've seen in the steel-mills. 
 
 To-day I went again with the wire-man and enjoyed it 
 the most yet. My job was to pick holes in the coal walls 
 or slate roof for him to locate the insulator-pins for carry- 
 ing the wire into a new part of the mine. We were nearer 
 the real miners or " loaders." Every once in a while we'd 
 hear out of the darkness somewhere a gruff warning of 
 "Fire!" We'd duck quickly around a corner and wait 
 until a great boom shook the earth and the ah- most uncom- 
 fortably, with possibly some slate dropping about us from 
 the roof. Shortly afterward we'd hear the loader shovel- 
 ling into his car the coal his explosion had brought down, 
 as we sniffed the smoke on its way out through the entry. 
 
 Then, too, the driver and his mule would pass oftener, 
 bringing empty cars to the loaders and taking filled ones 
 up to the "parting" or side-track, where he'd couple them 
 into the "trips" for the motor-man to haul out to "the 
 bottom." 
 
 The driver in that "face" or passage is young and 
 friendly, but how he does swear and shout and beseech and 
 whistle and pound at his long-eared ' ' Mutt ! ' ' How ' ' Mutt' ' 
 can go as fast as he does, running without any safety-lamp 
 on his head into the darkness, placing with certainty his 
 feet between the ties and among the pieces of fallen slate, 
 and keeping his head safe from the roof, now high, now low, 
 I swear I don't know ! Horses, they tell me, can't do it. 
 
 After these few days of it, I'd say I could stand and 
 enjoy for eight hours a day anybody's job in the mines 
 except the mule's. If I were in his position I'm hanged if
 
 86 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 I wouldn't do as he often tries to do kick the lining out 
 of anybody that comes too near his heels. 
 
 But I must say also after only a few days of it that 
 the trouble with coal-mining is that the eight hours under- 
 ground with your buddy, your little light, and your pick 
 are only a part of it all; you've got to spend the other six- 
 teen in a mining town, or, as it's often called, a mining-camp. 
 
 But more about that later. 
 
 Now for bed and as much of sleep as possible under the 
 circumstances before the call at five- thirty. 
 
 Bitumenburg, 
 Thursday, May first. 
 
 To-day brought more the feel of a real miner than any 
 time yet, and my back and shoulders aren't sure they're 
 happy about it, though the rest of me is. At least five of 
 those cars of slate that the boys down at "the bottom" 
 pushed onto the cage were the product of mine own hand 
 and shovel and back and shoulders. 
 
 When they sent me down to the job they cautioned me 
 to use water every once in a while so as not to take the 
 temper out of my shovel. I didn't understand them at 
 first. Finally I saw the joke and answered that I'd try to 
 be careful, but that where I'd worked before I had always 
 insisted on having a special water-cooled shovel. To-night 
 as I came up I suggested to the boys that the pumps be 
 given an extra turn so as to take up the wetness caused by 
 my sweat. Slate plus shovel certainly equals sweat. Still it 
 was a good day down there mostly by myself and my shovel 
 and my friendly little lamp with occasional words with 
 the driver or the Polish loader working in the same heading. 
 
 But about those sixteen hours above ground as mentioned : 
 
 On my advance trip down here last week my eyes and 
 nose noticed too many things to make my prospective coal- 
 mining altogether a delight to think about. The little old
 
 " STEEL STILL SLOW MINERS WANTED" 87 
 
 Irish landlady, too, had a good deal to say about my having 
 three or five roommates. But, after all, that number 
 seemed to go pretty well with the kitchen and the back 
 yard, and I might as well take the whole dose. But I con- 
 fess I was stumped when I arrived and found that the three 
 beds were all double. Also when I was introduced to my 
 bedfellow, Jack, who proceeded to tell me that he had 
 just returned without any baggage from a week's spree, 
 and would I go with him to find a little whiskey to help 
 top off and stop off with. 
 
 The county is supposed to be dry, but we made the 
 round of three or four kitchens where we stepped over the 
 babies and the chickens, and were assured each tune in a 
 different accent: "No got no got nodding." Later I con- 
 siderately managed to get separated from him and finally 
 went back and turned in to waken at one to find him 
 almost too much under the influence to explain: "They 
 didn't (hie) know you 'fraid of you. Had plenty when 
 (hie) went back by self ! . . . G' night." 
 
 His constant snores or chokings were terrible to hear and 
 hard to quiet without ferocious jabs and pokes. At three 
 the two other boarders came in from their night shift. So 
 it was a pretty bad night surpassed, I guess, only by the 
 night on the cattle-boat, when the hay we had in our sleep- 
 ing-sacks proved to house some husky, cattle-fed graybacks. 
 
 The next day I asked Granny, the landlady, if I couldn't 
 sleep by myself in the idle third bed. 
 
 "Well, Oi should say not! What do you think Oi am 
 that Oi could afford to give ivry boarder a bed and beddin' 
 to hisself ! Sure, Jack snores, he has tonsils ! He's had 
 'em since 'e was a bye. . . . And you're no better'n him 
 either, sor." 
 
 Last night the third bed was filled by two boys who came 
 in from the rain after stumbling through the lightless and 
 watery cinder roads in the absence of sidewalks.
 
 88 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 "Oh, say, this is the first bed in three nights! But, 
 believe me, we've sure been hittin' the high spots. Wow, 
 that feels good ! . . . But say, it's got to be an all-fired good 
 job to hold me in this dark place. . . . Say, what'll we do 
 without no baggage? Oh, I guess we can double-shift this 
 underwear and it wouldn't kick none if we do make it 
 work night turn. And when we get a little stake we can 
 buy a lot o' truck. Goo' night, all." 
 
 At least their tonsils seemed all right, thanks be. Jack's 
 are not quite so bad now that he is living a very simple 
 life, having spent his last dime in the speak-easies and 
 already owing too many fellow-citizens to permit any 
 further "touches" or expenditures of any kind till next 
 pay-day a long, long two weeks. 
 
 So you see, it's a relief to pile out of my blankets and 
 leave my, or rather our, sheet yes, our one sheet and get 
 off to the wholesome dirt and darkness and interest of the 
 underground, "inside." The misery is to come back with 
 aching shoulders and blackened hands and face and back 
 and chest to find nothing but a basin on the filthy back 
 porch. I think I'll make a practice of shaking hands with 
 every bathtub I meet the rest of my days ! 
 
 This afternoon, after my eight hours with shovel and 
 slate, I came home black as night and sweaty and tired 
 through the rain and mud. Somehow the little stream down 
 in the bebottled back yard never seemed to be so full of 
 unsightly and unsavory things. Certainly the back porch 
 never had such a collection of unmentionable litter upon it, 
 nor were the babies and children ever in such disreputable 
 condition. On Granny's urging I sat me down wearily 
 with only a little washing of my hands and tried to be in- 
 terested hi the food. Most of the boarders were devouring 
 then* ham and potatoes from off the red tablecloth, spread, 
 of course, in the little kitchen. (The front room is only 
 for the state occasions, like weddings and funerals.) Over
 
 "STEEL STILL SLOW MINERS WANTED" 89 
 
 there in the corner, next week's washing was piled high 
 with the dirty towels hanging on the door. Back of me on 
 the lounge were thrown the half-dried clothes in process. 
 In arm's reach on the chair, by the stove, sat the dirty baby, 
 whimpering, with nothing on but a solitary, soiled woolen 
 garment, it's mother shouting to it: "Now you just wait 
 there till I finish this job and I'll attend to you !" Hardly 
 a yard from the table she was doing the week's washing, 
 scrubbing and splashing strenuously over the wooden tub. 
 Next to her by the door was my bedfellow, Jack, driven 
 inside by the rain, stripped to his waist and standing over 
 the basin with many snortings and splashings, getting the 
 coal dust from off his hairy chest and husky back. In be- 
 tween, underneath and around were twelve-year Margaret, 
 little Ethel with her wan cheeks and eyes and clubbed foot, 
 and Granny all in a steamy mess and muddle of serving 
 and washing and sweeping and crying and scolding. 
 
 And in it all I tried to eat and I guess because of that 
 equation of slate and shovel succeeded. 
 
 I wonder who coined that phrase: "It's a great life if 
 you don't weaken." It's a life-saver. 
 
 After supper my courage wasn't strong enough to follow 
 Jack's example, but I did manage to get most of the dirt 
 off into the little basin and thence out from the porch onto 
 the ground, whence it runs under the porch of the tenants 
 of the other half of the house. Some of it, I must say, 
 apparently stayed on my face in spite of all my efforts, 
 judging from the looks of the towel our towel or as you 
 might say, the "club towel." And it takes something more 
 than a little pale grime to be noticeable on that club towel 
 after it has been used a few days by the "members" ! 
 
 My roommates speak as though the Saturday-night bath 
 can be engineered with satisfaction and also efficiency. 
 But it almost seems selfish for them to insist upon having 
 it, because it means moving the whole family out of the
 
 90 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 room which serves not only for kitchen, pantry, and dining- 
 room, but also for laundry, sitting-room, parlor, and nursery. 
 Ordinarily the children and grown-ups of the family go to 
 bed an hour or so later than I do, so that on any but Saturday 
 night the bath would mean less sleep for the day's work. 
 
 Talk about the simple life in a faucetless home. It seems 
 to me highly complex. 
 
 Thanks to the daylight-saving, I've done my eight hours, 
 suppered, washed, and got into my clean clothes, and still 
 it's not yet six o'clock. It has cleared off and the children 
 are out on the road dragging home over the rough cinder 
 ruts their little wagons full of coal, picked up at the com- 
 pany dumps while others carry water from the wells. And 
 as they work they follow the example of their elders; little 
 tots of eight and ten curse at each other shockingly. Across 
 the street a foreigner is shouting at yard's length in a con- 
 versation with his wife, who finally ends it and rushes into 
 the house with screams of "Aw, you go to h - !" Under 
 the bridge other dirty little tikes play in the stream in the 
 midst of the sea of litter of rusty this and irons and rags 
 and papers and baskets so that nowhere is the gravel 
 bottom to be seen. 
 
 From down-stairs for the tenth or fifteenth time since 
 supper the baby screams the sudden scream of pain from a 
 tumble or a slap, followed by the scream of exasperation 
 from shrill-voiced and overworked mother. And now the 
 wagon of coal has caused trouble: "You hit me again, you 
 !" yells one of the youngsters of nine at another. 
 "You just hit me again, - - you!" Up the road 
 
 loll with obvious unconcern two young miners who turn in 
 toward the kitchen of the neighbor woman. Her nine-year 
 old daughter will help her hand out the beer or whiskey, 
 while one of the babies sleeps peacefully hi its crib and a 
 chicken or two seek tidbits under the stove or table.
 
 "STEEL STILL SLOW MINERS WANTED" 91 
 
 And beyond the back yards across the road and up above 
 the stream, more yelling children and barking dogs and 
 muddy, cackling geese show up against the splendid green 
 of the hillside as it rises majestically up and up to meet 
 the glorious blue and white of sky and cloud of a wondrous 
 curfew-time. Yes, there's the bell from the little church 
 now! 
 
 "How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of 
 Him !" But somehow He seems far away from His 
 children here. 
 
 They tell me that many, many coal-camps are much worse. 
 
 "Why, I remember," said one chap last night, "and it 
 wasn't long ago either when the mud was knee-deep right 
 here in these streets. These cinders make it fine now." 
 
 But it's time to go up to the ball. It's being given for 
 the benefit of the new Polish church. I'm assured that all 
 the beauty and the chivalry of the town is to be gathered 
 there. 
 
 Bitumenburg, 
 Friday, 
 May 2. 
 
 The most interesting day in the mines to date! I've 
 been a real miner that is a "loader" and sent up to the 
 tipple car after car of coal, loosened by the powder of mine 
 own tamping and exploding, brought down to the floor 
 with mine own pick, and loaded into the car with mine own 
 shovel and sweating shoulders. A few weeks of such work 
 and I could be a capable loader, for it was a day not only 
 of work but of instruction. 
 
 I was delighted, after I adjusted my lamp and reported 
 for duty, to be assigned to an experienced miner who was 
 able to speak my own language almost; for his Scotch was 
 so very burry that I often had trouble understanding him. 
 But I did get enough to make it a most profitable and en- 
 joyable day, well worth its cost in sweat and muscle.
 
 92 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 "Mac" was sure enough born for a mine; in fact his 
 shortness makes him a perfect fit for our five-foot seam of 
 coal. In spite of his fifty-three years he's a hard worker 
 and a real shovel-wrestler. 
 
 "Yes, sir, me first minin' was done when Ah was ten 
 years old and Ah've been at it ever since every day Ah 
 wasn't sick or enjoyin' meself. Mony's the time I mind 
 me and me fawther starrtin' off a-walkin' to the mine in 
 Scawtland at three in the mornin' and a-gettin' back at 
 six me mother a-washin' me face, oonlacin' me shoes and 
 a-puttin' of me to bed without me knowin' the dufference 
 till 'twas three again and time to get oop an' awf." 
 
 I think I should have liked to meet that father who gave 
 him his training for his life's work. 
 
 "He alms told us laads 'Keep her awf her feet,'" he 
 would puff as he picked away at the bottom while warily 
 watching the great overhanging cliff of coal near and above 
 our heads, till finally, perhaps with the help of a touch of 
 iron bar, a ton or two would fall and break obligingly for 
 our shovels at our feet. 
 
 "And another thing I've allus minded me of ' Remember, 
 laads,' me fawther'd say, 'civility is a better protection to 
 the head than a steel helmet." 1 
 
 A born teacher is Mac. "Now coom over here so ye 
 can change your hands. There, ye've got it joost right. 
 'Use your bean wherever it can save your back,' is a motto 
 o' mine and one that's saved me mony pains." 
 
 And always his words were followed with the chance to 
 do the thing which is good teaching. So after he had 
 started in the exactly right direction, I worked the long 
 auger-drill to make the slender six-foot hole for the powder, 
 tamped hi the watered slack upon it, then lighted the 
 "squib," and finally and only with great self-control- 
 walked instead of ran away while it burned toward the 
 charge. From the next "room" or working-chamber I
 
 "STEEL STILL SLOW MINERS WANTED" 93 
 
 watched the explosion through the " break- through," and 
 felt as if I were on the Western front as the flame shot out 
 and the earth and air heaved viciously, and slate and coal 
 rattled down. Tons and tons of it were pushed out toward 
 our car, some lumps requiring the pick before they could be 
 lifted. In a few fast minutes we'd have it full to over- 
 flowing and would go back to our box to sit down for a 
 bit of a chat, till the boy and his mule would carry it off 
 to the "parting" and we could push hi an empty for another 
 loading. 
 
 Apparently my recent researches into the fine art of shov- 
 elling have not been in vain, judging from his compliments. 
 But coal is a delight to negotiate, compared with the heavy 
 dolomite, or iron ore, or manganese, of an open-hearth. 
 It's more dusty, but that's a small matter. 
 
 I judge that it's the uncertainty of the driver's coming 
 that makes a loader work almost feverishly till the car is 
 filled when he proceeds to loaf. I'm told that after a 
 few years of such training a miner finds it hard on his self- 
 respect to have to adopt the slow, even, twelve-hour gait 
 he finds in the ordinary mill. I noticed, too, that the load- 
 er's training of hustle-loaf made even the wire-man and 
 others follow the same plan (for most of them have been 
 loaders at some time) with the result that I'm sure the day- 
 workers throughout the mine, even though miles away from 
 any foreman, give a better day's stint of muscle and ser- 
 vice than the labor gangs I've been hi where the foreman's 
 eye, and, more to the point, his voice, were constantly hi 
 evidence. 
 
 The amount of pride he took in his possession of all the 
 mysteries of mining was splendid. "At first, of coorse, 
 Ah'd roon if Ah saw the gas-fire a-coomin' oot from the 
 face. But later Ah cu'd gauge to a few feet how far 'twud 
 coom and sit still on me box comfortable and cool-like." 
 
 His skill represented, to be sure, forty-three years in the
 
 94 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 dark hallways of the school of pick and shovel, located in 
 various States here and back in "Scawtland." There the 
 mines were mostly 1,500 to 2,000 feet down, and generally 
 " gassy." "Wy, there, uf a mon'd coom to worrk with 
 even one match in hees pocket, he'd get sixty days in jail 
 forr't!" 
 
 Of schooling he had practically none at any time. 
 
 "Wull, it do seem to me that all this here oonrest is like 
 to coom from the illiments for, dootless, these be oon- 
 settled by the warr and all that there connonadin'." 
 
 But, personally, I'd like to see the man who could lessen 
 the huge respect which I brought away with me for the 
 contribution he has made to the doing of the world's work 
 and the meeting of the world's needs with the untiring en- 
 ergy of his hands and shoulders and the interest and en- 
 thusiasm of his heart and head. Indeed all work and life 
 may be a school if always you carry in your memory the 
 wisdom of a wise "fawther!" 
 
 "Uf a mon can tell ye soomthin', laads, don't be impoo- 
 dent thank him." 
 
 "Ah dunno," he answered, when I asked why he had 
 never gone into any other work. "Ah dunno" and then 
 a moment later "but Ah've never liked a boss too close 
 around me, y' oonderstand ? " 
 
 That seems to be the general testimony. There is no 
 boss near by to take away the pleasure of working as much 
 or as little as you like, or to steal the joy of using your own 
 skill and "know-how" for getting your results. Further- 
 more, these results, with the help of the watchful "check- 
 weigh-man" paid by the union to sit alongside the com- 
 pany's man and note all weights, can be depended on to 
 represent a certain definite amount in dollars and cents. 
 If the number of cars sent up looks like a good day's in- 
 come, or if it's "a morning after the night before," you can 
 take your dinner-pail and walk out without bothering to
 
 ''STEEL STILL SLOW MINERS WANTED" 95 
 
 wait for any whistles. To-day, for instance, the Welshman 
 in the next room left at two while his grandson continued. 
 I guess he deserves to leave when he wants to. He started 
 in a big mine over there when he was ten, and has mined 
 ever since. He's now seventy ! A fair-spoken, even- 
 tempered man he seems. 
 
 Too often, I fear, many hours are lost by waiting for 
 a careless, irresponsible, mule-abusing driver to bring the 
 cars, or for the machine-runners to sober up after pay-day 
 and come back to undercut the "face" with a gash of about 
 six inches at the level of the floor so that the explosion can 
 find the coal "off its feet," and therefore ready to loosen 
 with the shock and tumble to the floor. 
 
 "Dese d - fool cutters when they have money, dey 
 do no work. No money? den work. Dey no cut coal 
 to-day me no can work. No coal? no money me," 
 was the way my Polish loader of yesterday, with his rising 
 inflections, told his tale of woe as he found himself com- 
 pelled to go home at noon. 
 
 To-day Mac and I worked more than an hour and so 
 lost the benefit of several tons of coal jacking and pushing 
 and lifting a heavily loaded car which our driver let go off 
 the tracks into a watery hole a short distance from the face. 
 
 "In many's the mine Ah been in he'd be given his time 
 for thot," wailed Mac again and again. "Besides, Ah've 
 asked often and often for iron hi place o' these here wooden 
 rails." 
 
 If "the final test of knowledge is to prevent," as some 
 Frenchman has said, then it certainly seems that manage- 
 ment very often fails to meet that test by foreseeing and 
 preventing the little accidents and losses of time and strength 
 which finally make the worker accustomed to below-par 
 production, and, therefore, below-par earnings for the com- 
 pany and himself. 
 
 "Ah, 'tis often and often this happens, Buddy," he
 
 96 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 would say to soothe my own regret at losing my chance to 
 help make a good showing for the day. As it was, we got 
 only eleven cars instead of the thirteen we could have gotten 
 if we had been given better millwright or track-layer ser- 
 vice and instead of the fifteen or more if I'd come in as 
 early as he. 
 
 Well, at any rate, I'm a better man for my day's closer 
 acquaintance with the rough but shiny face of a seam of 
 coal, and the rough but true and wholesome heart of my 
 Scotchie Mac. I'm much obliged to have met them both. 
 
 Oh, yes, about the ball. 
 
 From the row of hard-working matrons sitting with the 
 children on the chairs, the boys with the pompadours and 
 the girls with the tight skirts and the brown, muscular arms, 
 to the foreigners with the great mustaches, the whole town 
 was there and evidently hugely enjoying it. The ener- 
 getic and attractive young wives of some of the younger 
 bosses did a big business at the counter covered with cakes, 
 pop, and ice-cream cones. The imported music was greatly 
 appreciated. If I had danced my first choice would have 
 been a slight little blonde, who seemed the belle in pop- 
 ularity. Perhaps it was just as well I didn't, for I'm told 
 since that 
 
 "Well, yes, Miss is a little wayward and she has 
 
 a child. . . . But she's well thought of." 
 
 I've no doubt that it's hard for a community to be par- 
 ticular about morals when the absence of lights, water and 
 sewage systems, recreation places, playgrounds, sidewalks 
 and lawns, bathtubs, and other such-like wholesome things 
 of life make it difficult to be particular about much of any- 
 thing else. 
 
 It seems to me certain, too, that the short eight-hour 
 day down in the headings makes every one of these lacks 
 more dangerous, and the moral results more questionable.
 
 "STEEL STILL SLOW MINERS WANTED" 97 
 
 After eight hours' sleep there is still another eight for the 
 enjoyment of life wholesome life if the aids and facilities 
 are there, unwholesome if they're not. If the work were 
 twelve hours it would be a matter of piling into bed per- 
 haps after a whiskey-beer or two to make sure of a sound 
 slumber to get ready for the next turn. Long hours 
 bring their own moral complications, too, but it's a question 
 which to choose for raising a family: a town of the twelve- 
 hour shift with good sanitation and recreation, or one with 
 the eight-hour shift and nothing but four-room houses with 
 no plumbing and without the other civic advantages which 
 seem to go with it. 
 
 I wonder what job to-morrow will bring. I could hardly 
 be a motor-man, or even his " snapper" or coupler-boy, 
 without more experience. The " trapper's" job is too easy 
 just to open the door or throw the " latch" at certain 
 junction places. Of course I couldn't be a "fire-boss," 
 because he has to pass a State examination before he can 
 make his daily examinations of every passage and "room." 
 I'll be just as happy not to drive a mule they're too danger- 
 ous. My friend Otto was all doubled up and had to leave 
 to-day because of an awful kick from his hard-working but 
 highly contentious "Mutt." 
 
 Well, here's hoping 'twill be as interesting as to-day 
 and that "Jack's tonsils" will let me have a fairly decent 
 sleep in the meantime. 
 
 Bitumenburg, 
 Saturday, 
 May 3. 
 
 Another hard but interesting day as "track-layer's 
 helper." 
 
 Was "buddy" to Domenico, an Italian born in France. 
 In spite of his seven years in this country he speaks Italian 
 and French, but only a little English. He is young enough 
 and bright enough to make a good deal of himself if he could
 
 98 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 somehow contrive to add English to his tool-box. But he 
 knows little if anything outside the mines and mining 
 towns, and the chances of his making the break for English 
 are poor. Anyway, he's a good, industrious worker, seems 
 to know his job, and, in line with mine habits, works hard 
 for a good period and then relaxes a few minutes with his 
 dinner-pail on his lap ("no eat no can work," as he puts 
 it), and does a day's turn that is mighty creditable, all the 
 more so considering that the foreman is far away. 
 
 Our job was to remove the tracks from old and abandoned 
 rooms, relaying them in others a day of pulling or pound- 
 ing spikes, " picking" out little trenches for the ties carried 
 out from the abandoned rooms, carrying long rails from 
 one place to another, and so on. Nothing too easy on arms 
 and backs nor yet too hard. 
 
 Came closer to the danger of coal-mining than any tune 
 yet. In one or two of the oldest rooms a lot of roof had 
 already fallen in, and many of the timbers, though still 
 standing, were badly bent or broken. On one the cross- 
 piece at the top was bent down at each end by the weight 
 of the hill above it, and as I worked I could see fresh cracks 
 appear hi the middle of it ! I kept as close to the good posts 
 as possible when pulling out the spikes or ties, and was 
 very quick to respond to my buddy's "Listen !" when occa- 
 sionally he would stop, as all miners seem to do, to see if 
 the slate is giving its warning crackle. As we sat lunching 
 in one passage and there came a great, dull boom, he 
 said: "Dere! Rock he fall where we work little time 
 ago." 
 
 On the whole, safety seems to have a lot of everybody's 
 thought, from the fire-boss, who must daily or rather, 
 nightly chalk the date on every room before the cutters 
 or loaders dare start work, down to the most foreign worker 
 and the most Godless mule-pounder. 
 
 "Stop!" said Mac, as we walked out yesterday and
 
 " STEEL STILL SLOW MINERS WANTED" 99 
 
 heard a dull, distant thud. " Always keep your ears cocked 
 in a mine!" 
 
 Sure enough, fifty yards farther on, we found a few hun- 
 dred pounds of slate had dropped ahead of us onto the 
 track where we walked. 
 
 Thursday a Polish loader helped me out of a dangerous 
 situation where I thought I had to stand and shovel right 
 under a very bad piece of roof. 
 
 "No! No!" he said when he looked at it. "He fall 
 down you keel. Put dees here." And he shoved my 
 car under the bad place. "Now come down keel d 
 fool car!" 
 
 Later he took his bar and brought down several tons of 
 the bad place right into the car a very good piece of 
 head work. 
 
 Those who load "rooster" coal have to go into worked- 
 out rooms, saw out the farthermost supporting timbers so 
 as to bring down the five feet of slate roof with the three- 
 foot vein of good "rooster" above it, sawing and retreating 
 till the whole room has fallen in. Apparently they do it 
 with great skill, trained listening, and observation and 
 moderate safety. It doesn't look good to me. 
 
 To my surprise, the old style safety-lamp is carried by 
 the fire-boss to detect gas. Gas gets in through the wire 
 meshes above the flame and ignites with a little pop, the 
 wire preventing outside explosion by absorbing the heat. 
 Before the lamp was invented I understand "fire devils" 
 ignited with a torch the gas when found in small quanti- 
 ties, and then lay down on the floor, covered all hi wool, 
 which singes but does not burn, till the gas it always 
 floats and burns higher than the air was thus consumed ! 
 Where the gas was too great to be burned, a grindstone 
 and steel were used for striking sparks enough to give the 
 miner light. These are not hot enough to ignite the gas. 
 In gaseous mines certain powders are used for exploding,
 
 100 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 which go off so quickly that they do not ignite the gas 
 taking one five-thousandth of the time, says an expert, of 
 the flash of ordinary black powder such as Mac and I 
 watched yesterday which, by the way, was followed by 
 the flash of the gas released by the coal and ignited by the 
 explosion or by the burning paper of our charge. 
 
 The State inspector's men visit every mine regularly, and 
 their suggestions are posted publicly, but nobody yet seems 
 to have done anything to lessen the very real danger factor 
 carried around hi the hind hoofs of almost every mule. 
 Almost every miner can tell of this or that sad experience 
 with those hoofs; they are genuinely feared. After talking 
 with the boss driver the other night it almost looked to me 
 as though there ought to be something like "The Psycho- 
 logical Bureau of Mule-Handling Research." 
 
 "Well, I've learned," he said very seriously, "that if a 
 stubborn mule fights back, you can beat him into sub- 
 mission if your arms don't give out on you. But if he 
 won't fight back and just takes his punishment, he's got 
 you licked before you start." 
 
 "That boss can do things with a mule in a minute nobody 
 else could do in a year," testified one of his admirers. 
 
 Or perhaps something could be done with biology. 
 Everybody says a mule's more dangerous than slate be- 
 cause the slate's rattle gives warning. It's my idea that 
 some Luther Burbank might so use serums from a rattle- 
 snake that Mr. Mule would rattle before he'd kick! 
 
 I remember being told by a lecturer that in Ohio a re- 
 turned soldier, taken back onto his old mine job, caused a 
 strike because he didn't get his same old mule back. It 
 sounded unreasonable in fact it was told to prove the 
 worker's unreasonableness. The miners here think it 
 sensible. 
 
 "Why, mebbe he'd trained that one and knew all about 
 him, and didn't know none of the other mules in the mine
 
 "STEEL STILL SLOW MINERS WANTED" 101 
 
 even then it's dangerous work. He was only one of these 
 here safety-first cranks." 
 
 One of many stories about the highly developed mule 
 brain and mule self-respect is that once a driver was so 
 mad that he planned to murder the beast. So he purposely 
 left an empty car at the bottom of a grade in a black pas- 
 sageway, and then drove him down on the run with several 
 heavy cars unbraked behind him. Mr. Long-Ears merely 
 vaulted nicely into the empty car. 
 
 This afternoon at three because of Saturday six of us 
 got into an empty car down at the parting to save the 
 mile walk to the "bottom." I felt sorry for the poor beast. 
 After a day's abuse from his driver, he had to gallop almost 
 the whole way with the din of Bedlam behind him calls 
 and shouts to him in six languages and frightful curses in 
 one (American curses seem always to get the most action 
 and are certainly most generally used), whistlings, bangings 
 of powder-cans on his flanks, hammerings of six dinner- 
 pails in the car. And he had to keep his feet and head as 
 he raced, while we ate the dirt thrown up by his hoofs be- 
 tween yells and swears. 
 
 "Why only seven car to-day, Joe?" said one of our six 
 to another as we came to the "bottom." 
 
 "If I take all d - fool coal to-day, no can work next 
 week," replied Joe with a twinkle. 
 
 Last night I had a talk with one of those in authority, 
 a fine type of man. 
 
 "Five years ago," he said, "you could have got a room in 
 any one of a score of homes. Now they'd rather have all 
 four rooms than the money you'd pay and the discomfort 
 of living in the other three. It's a good sign. . . . 
 
 "The young women are changing fastest of all. If one 
 of 'em marries a bright young fellow we're sure to have 
 them ask for a better house. If we can't give it, or if they 
 already are in the best of our two or three types of houses,
 
 102 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 we soon lose them. She wants to 'get on' move into 
 better surroundings, you know, 'be somebody' and he's 
 her chance. One reason we have a hard time keeping 
 things shipshape in the mine is our trouble in getting or 
 keeping men of any big skill they can do better elsewhere. 
 Just now we've got good company houses standing idle, 
 with laborers hi worse houses beggin' us for 'em. But if 
 we fill 'em up with those men, then we won't have any 
 chance at all of gettin' here the skilled men we're after. 
 
 "Of course you understand we can't sell houses here; hi 
 ten years more or so we'll have the seam all worked out, 
 and then there won't be any town or camp any more here 
 at all. Besides, rent is so low that selling would be hard 
 and the unions haven't permitted raises. 
 
 "We wish we could have better houses at least a few 
 to begin with with more than four rooms, a cellar to keep 
 things in, and a shanty for a cow with free pasturage on 
 the hills. Also a wash-shanty at each pit where the men 
 could leave their work clothes to dry while they take a 
 shower, put on good clothes before they walk home through 
 the rain or snow though they do say in some places where 
 they have these, some of the men are awful slow in usin' 
 'em." ("Them that's slow in usin' 'em in our part of the 
 country we duck till they learn better," said one of my 
 five roommates later.) 
 
 He confirms the statement that there is a tradition among 
 miners that it is dangerous to wash their backs. Some men 
 are said to have alligator-like collections of years of sweat 
 and coal-dust between their shoulders. But, personally, 
 as long as they live hi towns entirely guiltless of bathtub 
 or faucet, I don't see how they could do otherwise than get 
 as much off as they can reach and save their self-respect 
 by inventing the tradition to excuse the rest. 
 
 "The unions are talkin' about demanding a five-day 
 week. We'd be tickled to get them to work an average of 
 five days. Most of 'em work about three now."
 
 " STEEL STILL SLOW MINERS WANTED" 103 
 
 He said he had once tried to break away from mining 
 and was in the labor gang of a big steel-plant. But after 
 his years of the miner's fast-work-short-loaf, he couldn't 
 stand the footlessness of "Nothing to do most of the time, 
 yet orders against sitting down. Thirteen men were assigned 
 to move a tank. Two of us handled it easily. It was too 
 bad to kill time that way, so it was 'back to the mines' 
 for me and for life, I guess." 
 
 "Granny" and I have not been on good terms since I 
 objected to Jack and his "tonsils" as bedfellows. Besides 
 all the things described there are too many that cannot be 
 mentioned. So I'm packing up and leaving in a few 
 minutes. Sorry, because I do like it "inside." 
 
 Later : 
 
 One of my roommates is hardly a Bolshevik but he is 
 unhappy. An American he is, one who has followed the 
 mines in many fields, and for many years, and is still a 
 wanderer: 
 
 "This State is the worst of all. They don't do nothin' for 
 a laborin' man except get all the work they can outa him. 
 . . . Where the work's less steady than 'tis here, of course 
 the miners can't pay for your faucets and sidewalks and 
 such like. But they needn't make such a fuss about us! 
 Durin' the war I saw with my own eyes a shovel of slate 
 put into the cars for every shovel of coal for the govern- 
 ment, mind you. 'Twas by the owner's orders, too ! And 
 then if we rested a day they called us slackers. Huh !" 
 
 Steelville, again, 
 Sunday, May fourth. 
 
 I beg Providence's pardon for assuming so calmly that I 
 had closed the chapter on "Life in a Coal Camp" when I 
 wrote the "Later" on yesterday's notes. All the time 
 Fate was waiting for me around the corner or at least
 
 104 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 down-stairs ! I certainly never was so surprised in my life 
 as by what she handed me with the help of one of her 
 handmaidens. 
 
 When I arrived down in the kitchen with my baggage I 
 found Jack taking his bath, so I called through the door 
 into the parlor to Granny to ask if she had the dollar I 
 figured was coming to me. 
 
 When she answered "No" very nastily I thought I would 
 dispose of the matter in the normal mine-camp manner. 
 In view of her week of meanness and mine of discomfort, 
 and considering the profane habits of the town generally, 
 it seemed the proper thing to let the matter drop and then 
 grant my permission for all of them to go where the tem- 
 perature is reported as unvarying though less comfortable 
 than hi the mine. According to everything I'd seen and 
 heard in the camp and in our little "club," she would coun- 
 ter with a stronger line of directions for me, and the incident 
 would then be considered closed with everybody justified 
 and satisfied. That seemed to me the mine-town formula. 
 
 But there's a catch somewhere in that formula judging 
 from what happened. 
 
 Daughter, the mother of the children, shouted something 
 to Jack, who jumped quickly into his trousers but refused 
 to open the door for me till daughter got out the front door 
 and around onto the back porch. As I started out, suit- 
 case in one hand, sweater and dinner-pail in the other, she 
 rushed at me screaming: 
 
 "You'll tell my mother to go to h , will you? I'll 
 
 learn ye! - - ye!" 
 
 Before I had any idea of it all, she drew off and delivered 
 a magnificent blow that drew blood on my cheek-bone ! 
 
 Unfortunately, one of the things I'd never learned at col- 
 lege was what to do when a lady assaults you. So I was 
 greatly puzzled, but did manage to push her off. When 
 she returned like a wild-cat, I used an uppercut of my
 
 '< STEEL STILL SLOW MINERS WANTED" 105 
 
 dinner-bucket to keep her at safe distance. Then I grabbed 
 the suitcase she tried to pick up and, fearful of missing 
 my taxi-bus, started backward through the yard. By this 
 time the neighbors had all gathered on all the back porches. 
 With a large lump of coal in her hand she pursued. Luckily 
 bottles were everywhere, and one of them I picked up long 
 enough to counsel caution with her coal while she continued 
 to scream at the top of her voice, as face to face we backed 
 off across the lot. 
 
 "You tell her that again! You tell her that again and 
 I'll show ye, you - !" 
 
 Finally she stopped and put all her strength into the 
 most compound and most foul assortment of names con- 
 ceivable and the war was ended. The neighbors in the 
 bleachers were evidently disappointed to see no further 
 action or casualties, but I was glad to get my waiting bus 
 and to bid the place a long good-by. 
 
 I'm not at all sure I conducted myself with proper vigor, 
 though I hardly know what I could have done without 
 hitting back. I certainly am sorry to have hurt the old 
 lady's or her temperamental daughter's feelings. Still, I 
 guess that for a chap whose pet idea is that what makes 
 the wheels of all of us go 'round is the desire for a satisfy- 
 ing sense of our own individual worthwhileness, and that 
 the cause of practically all friction between people, and 
 especially between people of different groups and statuses, 
 where it is so easy to misunderstand " formulas," is to be 
 found in offended or obstructed self-respect, injured pride, 
 and hurt feelings I say I guess that for such a chap the 
 demonstration was worth its cost in blood and gore. And 
 to think it happened just after I had been advised by 
 Mac that " Civility is a better protection to the head than 
 a steel helmet" !
 
 CHAPTER V 
 A SECOND COAL TOWN 
 
 RETURNING to "base" in Steelville, the search for work 
 in steel was renewed. Again nothing but disappointment. 
 " We're laying 'em off instead of takin' 'em on," or "I'd be 
 glad to take ye into him, y' understand, but the boss jist 
 told me he don't need no more men and not to bother him. 
 . . . Next week? Well, if I was you I'd try. . . . Use 
 the phone to save the fare? Well, I dunno; you'd better 
 come yerself." 
 
 By chance 1 happened to drop in on a federal coal expert 
 with an assortment of questions run onto by my pick and 
 shovel. He expressed the belief that I should try life in a 
 coal town widely noted for its attention to the needs of the 
 miners and their families. 
 
 Coaldale, 
 
 Sunday, May eleventh. 
 
 As the mine is working only four days a week, I was told 
 to report Tuesday morning and referred for board and 
 room to this place, where I am writing on the kitchen table. 
 I must say it is a lot better than "Bitumenburg." Another 
 miner and I have a large room, and luxury! sleep in 
 separate beds. The landlady is a terror for work and also, 
 thank heaven, for something like cleanliness. 
 
 "We've been wantin' a better house and askin' and askin' 
 the company fer it fer years. This gives us the room we 
 want, but we couldn't have it without takin' boarders. . . . 
 We've just got in I've been sick and my husband he's 
 been sick. You never saw such a place as them foreigners 
 
 106
 
 A SECOND COAL TOWN 107 
 
 that was here left it ! ... Such a stack of beer kegs and 
 whiskey bottles and filth ! it almost makes me sick now to 
 think of it, and the way we've worked to clean it up with 
 chloride and all." 
 
 There's a library and a parlor with a $150 talking- 
 machine, as usual and a dining-room. All very nice ex- 
 cept for an occasional odor in memory of the former occu- 
 pants. 
 
 The lady of the house looked positively young and pretty 
 this morning with a special Sunday "do" on her hair. So 
 you can see she's an exceptional woman, for: 
 
 " Yes, we got these four boys and we've adopted the little 
 girl till she's twenty-one. The boys are all we got left out 
 of fifteen children! The other eleven we lost one way or 
 'nother and they was mignty nice children, too. . . . And 
 now the doctor tells me my husband can't live though he 
 don't know it hisself. . . . Cancer." 
 
 The husband makes himself handy around the house 
 while, with plenty of optimism, he gets stronger from his 
 recent appendicitis operation. Altogether they enjoy a lot 
 of happiness, one boy of seventeen " trapping" at certain 
 switches and doors in the mine at three dollars, and the 
 other of nineteen or so working in the company store, the 
 proud owner of a flivver to say nothing of a pompadour, 
 a handsome face, and ambition. 
 
 Even the conversation here is a course in mine practice. 
 
 "I ain't been sick a day in my life till now," says hus- 
 band. "And fer the last few years I been workin' every 
 day and double turn every second Sunday. Ye see, I got 
 ter keep after them pumps maybe whin I get ter one, it's 
 kickin' like, ye understand, and by the time I gits it fixed 
 I got ter walk fast to git ter the others. 
 
 "A few years back one o' the boys reported the mine 
 where I wuz then was beginnin' ter 'squeeze.' The super 
 comes and 'e gits a hundred men to go down and fix tun-
 
 108 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 bers to stop it. But instead o' startin' in near the shaft 
 at the bottom, y' understand and a-workin' back, 'e takes 
 'em to the fur end of the mine. And the ' squeeze ' it keeps 
 a-gettin' worse and finally it falls in and kills 'em all. My 
 God, it was awful in the town that night." 
 
 "Yis-sor, I wuz over at B shortly after the explosion 
 there and volunteered to go down in the dinky bucket 
 they'd rigged up. My God Almighty! I seen sights I 
 never seen before. There on the bottom was fifteen or so 
 men lying natural-like in their clothes. And when you'd 
 go over and touch their clothing phew ! It would all fall 
 to pieces and blow up and fly away ! And there 'ud be the 
 body all burnt to a black crisp ! I give ye my word 'twas 
 the awfullest o' sights ever I see." 
 
 Between his twenty and the boarder's sixteen years of 
 mining I guess I've heard the complete, ghastly details of 
 almost every mine disaster in the State. But if they don't 
 mind it, neither do I, for I'll have only a short time of it. 
 Besides, these electric safety-lamps and the strict prohibi- 
 tion against taking matches into the mine, together with 
 the State's constantly closer supervision, make the work 
 safer each year. Also, I learn with pleasure that there 
 are no mules in this mine. 
 
 A Sunday in a small town in this State is a desert of 
 do-nothingness. Those hardy defendants of a certain de- 
 nomination who are said to represent the minority which 
 controls the State because of their manifest respectability, 
 seem to get dreadfully "het up" about the possibility of a 
 modern Sunday with movies. In the meantime they close 
 their eyes to the all-day sessions in the licensed clubs of the 
 Owls, the Bears, Eagles, etc., and in the boarding-houses 
 of the foreigners, also to the crap games and drinking feasts 
 on the hills near the towns. It certainly appears from the 
 view-point of the car-window that many citizens are also 
 little troubled by the hundreds of thousands of people who
 
 A SECOND COAL TOWN 109 
 
 live in manifestly shameful conditions, or by the tens of 
 thousands who work thirteen and a half or fourteen turns 
 of ten and twelve hours every fourteen days in the steel- 
 plants. 
 
 The Slavic boarders under the same roof with us it's 
 a big double house don't seem to feel badly about Sunday, 
 judging from the noise through the nailed-up door. There 
 will probably be another one added in the morning to the 
 pile of kegs already in our common back yard. 
 
 Last week I happened to be waited on by "Gertie" 
 again. She has left the first restaurant, mainly because 
 they wouldn't give her the same tables constantly, so that 
 her friends could always have her service and so give her 
 the tips of friends, not of strangers. She says it makes a 
 difference of a dollar a day. She is much distressed. Hus- 
 band comes home from France this week. She's sure she 
 doesn't love him, though I urged her to give him a chance 
 before she does anything final. "He may have changed 
 just as much as you have." 
 
 But her "Sweet Potato" gave her a sleepless night. He 
 confesses to having a wife and two children ! As soon as 
 he can get the children and a separation he wants to marry 
 her and she him. But the thought of his silence on this 
 detail and of all the delay it means is the biggest shock of 
 her life to date. 
 
 Naturally I asked her if he knew that she was also married. 
 She gave a quick gasp: 
 
 "My Gawd, no!" 
 
 Coaldale, 
 May 14. 
 
 I certainly am glad to have proceeded at least this much 
 farther with my education as a coal-miner. 
 
 This mine is about five times as big as the other; it covers 
 over 3,000 acres and is worked by over 400 men every day. 
 It is also nearly 200 feet lower down as I realized more in
 
 110 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 my stomach than anywhere else yesterday morning when 
 the engineer shot the cage down the shaft at terrific speed. 
 
 It was like coming into a great union depot to get out on 
 the bottom. The place was brilliantly lighted, thoroughly 
 bricked and whitewashed, and covered with a perfect net- 
 work of tracks and passageways, surrounded with little 
 office and supply rooms or shanties, all filled with miners 
 and motor-men and bosses. I climbed into one of the little 
 coal cars with five or six others, and, sure enough, it soon 
 started off with about fifteen other cars all filled with work- 
 ers. So we went by tram to our locations ! Two or three 
 other such trains, or "man trips," left after we did, for other 
 sections. 
 
 Something over a mile down the lighted butt or main 
 passageway, we got out at the car-like shanty office of the 
 boss of that section. Here I was assigned to "Steve," a 
 good-natured-looking Croat, and told to go and put up a 
 "swing-door." I hadn't the ghost of an idea what such a 
 door might be, but the boss seemed to think he'd insult 
 anybody who was assigned as I was to "timbering" by tell- 
 ing him about it. So I let it go at that. The trouble was 
 that my "Steve" didn't know much more about it than I 
 did, and perpetrated an immense amount of profanity in 
 trying to solve the problem. But we remembered all we 
 could of the directions, and contrived to make enough 
 progress by the tune some kind of a worker or boss would 
 come along and give us instructions for the next move. It 
 seems that a swing-door is so hung that when opened by 
 workers or the motor-trams it always swings back exactly 
 across the passage in such a way as to stay there and stop 
 the air current without fastening. We finally got it to be- 
 have fairly well by making the bottom hook or hanger 
 longer than the top one, though the strong current would 
 persist in pushing it somewhat past the proper spot. 
 
 I did a lot of hammering and sawing and lifting and
 
 A SECOND COAL TOWN 111 
 
 talking (in the "no got" and "no can" style of English) 
 with Steve, who had been hi this same mine about thirteen 
 years. It is plain to see that it is a well-run mine. In 
 place of the mules the motor goes up to the entries, and then 
 the "snapper" carries in a cable and attaches it to the 
 loaded car so that the motor-man can snake it out by the 
 power of his "crab" or winder. They then skite off to the 
 next place, leaving empties for the loaders or diggers to 
 push in up to the face of the coal in the rooms where they 
 are working. The pair work fast and certainly look more 
 reliable than the mule-drivers perhaps because getting 
 action continuously out of a mule in a mine is, I am sure, 
 a bigger strain on moral and physical fibre than most men 
 can stand and still be dependable workers. 
 
 Of course we took the "man- trip" when the day's job 
 was done back to the bottom. Then we got into a long 
 line of miners standing hi a narrow passageway and grad- 
 ually moved up until our turn came to be counted in the 
 ten to be sent up by the "eager" after the required niter- 
 change of signals with the engineer above. 
 
 To-day I was assigned to an Italian carpenter or "brat- 
 ticer," who has been here over eighteen years. We had to 
 shoulder our tools and walk well over a mile to fix a door 
 that was letting too much air leak through it, and then 
 we walked on to cut away slate and coal preparatory to 
 erecting a new frame and door at another point. My body 
 tells me it was a mighty busy day for most of my muscles 
 and I guess I never before got such a complexion of coal 
 dust and sweat. The wonder is the way these day-workers, 
 away off by themselves, keep at the job all day with enor- 
 mously less loafing than we used to contrive to do in the 
 steel-mills with the foreman's eye right on us. They must 
 get the habit from their experience as loaders and diggers 
 when they are working strictly for themselves. And then, 
 too, there's a lot more satisfaction in doing a job your own
 
 112 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 way for later inspection than to have a foreman swear at 
 you every time you make a false move. 
 
 Living quite comfortably. Every room and house has 
 electric lights unmetred, so that they run day and night 
 and water running at a faucet in the kitchen or just out- 
 side. (For all this the company charges only eight dollars 
 for a four-room house, and all the workers seem to think it 
 very reasonable.) Our "club" towel here is a very special 
 affair. 
 
 "Now you kids," the landlady declared to-day, "if I 
 catch you usin' that there roller-towel, there'll be trouble 
 'round here ! That there towel's for the boarders, and don't 
 forget it!" 
 
 Seeing that two Mikes are the only other boarders, that 
 makes it a highly exclusive arrangement compared to 
 some I've known recently. 
 
 After work the young "trapper" son and I go down 
 cellar with the wash-tub and the hot teakettle and contrive 
 to get fairly clean. That's better than doing it hi the 
 kitchen while everybody's eating supper. But I feel like 
 telling that citizen who has any sort of a bathtub in his 
 home. If so, he ought not to complain of anything. 
 
 Coaldale, 
 May 15. 
 
 Now that I'm assistant bratticer, or door-fixer and car- 
 penter, I can't ride in the "man-trip" any more, because 
 I have to help inspect every door we meet and fix it on the 
 spot if it's letting too much air through. That's the reason 
 for tired legs, and also a sore head and neck following a 
 ferocious bump received from taking off my cap with its 
 lamp, and so failing to see a projecting beam. 
 
 This matter of doors and air seems to be mighty important 
 in a mine. To-day at the noon-hour my chief showed me 
 where both gas and water were coming out through the coal
 
 A SECOND COAL TOWN 113 
 
 at the face of the seam as the digger worked at it. Pipes 
 are laid for the pump to carry away the water. The prob- 
 lem of the gas is up to us bratticers, working, of course, 
 under the fire-boss and others. By means of the doors in 
 the main passages the air is made to go 'round through the 
 smaller passageways or entries, and then to pass into the 
 various rooms, one after another, by means of the "break- 
 throughs," or openings, which connect them close to the 
 face. In some places thick canvas has to be stretched like 
 a veritable stockade in such a way that it conducts the air 
 right up to the face, where it gathers up the gas and hurries 
 it away. 
 
 "Gas at the face don't do no harm provided it don't stay 
 there." 
 
 Now if these doors that are supposed to stop the air and 
 make it go another way let a lot of it pass, it's just like a 
 short circuit of electricity there's just that much less to 
 go where it should. And that's a serious business with a 
 certain mine and its famous explosion not many miles away. 
 
 To-day along came an inspector and held up his little 
 anemometer in one hand and his watch in another: 
 
 "That's all right 135 revolutions tunes 60. That's 
 8,100 cubic feet of air a-goin' through here every minute. . . . 
 Did you ever know that there are more pounds of air 
 a-comin' into a mine every day than there is pounds of 
 coal a-goin' out of it? Well, it's true. A cubic foot of 
 coal, you understand, weighs about 70 tunes as much as a 
 cubic foot of air. Now the fans drive into the mine 200,000 
 cubic feet of air every blessed minute of the twenty-four 
 hours every day in the year figure it out for yourself. . . . 
 Did you ever stop to think, too, that in winter the air it- 
 self carries out more tons of water than all the motors do 
 of coal? You see, the mine is warmer than the outdoors, 
 so that it heats the air as it comes in, and that makes the 
 air pick up water and carry it out. And by the same
 
 114 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 token it brings it in during the summer, when the cooler 
 air in the mine makes it stick on the mine roof in the drops 
 you see." 
 
 Up in the main butts the air current is so strong that the 
 big doors cannot be opened by the " trappers" to let the 
 motors or the men pass unless they are made in a "V" 
 shape, which requires only a half swing against the pressure. 
 
 As we worked all day to fix a regular and an emergency 
 door, we felt that we were probably making life safer for 
 all our other fellow-workers. Nearly everybody hi the 
 mines seem to have this idea of hang together or hang sepa- 
 rately or rather, play safe together or be blown up to- 
 gether. No digger here is allowed to endanger himself 
 or his companions by the firing of his explosive. A "shot- 
 firer" makes the rounds of each section, inspects the drilled 
 hole, sees to its proper cleaning and charging, and then with 
 his battery sets it off in safety with a powder which goes off 
 with too much speed to ignite any possible gas. 
 
 Then, too, the daily output of coal depends on every- 
 body's team-work. The loader must wait until the machine- 
 cutters have undercut the face, and the shot-firer has made 
 the coal cliff tumble to the floor. Then he must depend on 
 the motor-man and his snapper to get the cars to him with- 
 out his having to wait and loaf. Or if he's a "pick-man" 
 he must have the help of the timber-man to make the place 
 safe up to the last minute. It seems that a pick-mar is 
 one who gets his coal by taking out the "ribs" and "pillars" 
 of coal which separate the different rooms and where the 
 weight of the roof, after the rooms have been worked out, 
 is such that the machine-cutter and explosives cannot be 
 used; the coal would just sag down right onto the machine 
 and the powder might bring the whole thing down ! Even 
 after the pick-men have worked wherever possible, it is the 
 exceptional mine, I'm told, that does not find it cheaper to 
 leave forty per cent of the coal still there rather than try
 
 A SECOND COAL TOWN 115 
 
 to get it out, after meeting all the safety and other regula- 
 tions. 
 
 Perhaps this combined life-and-limb and dollars-and- 
 cents necessity of team-work is accountable for the very 
 good baseball game I saw to-night after supper. The other 
 team came from the city, but was cleaned up by the mine 
 boys hi their handsome suits to the very high-class tune of 
 two to one. The mine band also did some artistic work 
 between innings. Such things do a lot of good where the 
 work is only eight hours, and so leaves a lot of daylight 
 between four and nine o'clock. If I can judge from the 
 line of conversation of the boys, they are also big factors 
 hi improving the town's morals. Of course, good living 
 conditions share with athletics in the credit for this. Also 
 the reported disapproval of the higher-ups as shown by the 
 occasional discharge of underofficials who become careless 
 of their personal standing and influence. 
 
 I've been waiting to be invited to join the union so far 
 in vain. It costs about eighty cents a month, besides a 
 ten-dollar initiation fee, all subtracted from your pay by 
 the company. 
 
 T hear there was union discussion last night about striking 
 because some of the socialistically inclined Russians were 
 discharged, but the Americans prevailed. The workers 
 seem to be, for the most part, very happy, their most serious 
 trouble being that the slump in the steel business permits 
 working the mines only three or four days a week. 
 
 " Where you work before you come here?" they all ask, 
 whether down "inside" or above ground. "Ah ! . . . Work 
 
 steady dere ? . . . Seex day ? My G ! For why you 
 
 queet dere coom here work tree, four day week, huh? 
 Five day all right, fine; tree day no can live." 
 
 I have to do some quick thinking to explain so unreason- 
 able an action. Apparently the bane of the mines is this 
 irregularity of operation. That seems to be due mainly
 
 116 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 to the generally accepted impossibility of storing the coal 
 at mine mouth with, therefore, the necessity of stopping 
 work the minute that either orders or cars run out. With 
 comparatively few of the large customers doing much stor- 
 age they say that, roughly, one-third of all coal goes to 
 the railroads, another third to the public utilities and the 
 biggest industries, while of the final third only about a 
 fourth goes to the domestic or household users ! the result 
 is a markedly seasonal demand which piles up in such shape 
 as to make a peak demand on the railways for cars which 
 they cannot meet with, accordingly, an idle mine resulting. 
 
 Many of the men seem to earn well over ten dollars a 
 day, and a number load enough to get over twelve dollars, 
 day after day, when they do work. 
 
 I asked a girl at the company store why all don't live 
 better when they can earn such money. Both her parents 
 are Russians, and she speaks several Slavic tongues a 
 bright, well-Americanized young lady. 
 
 "Why, you see, all those Slavic people Russians, Poles, 
 Croats, etc. they all expect to go back to the old country 
 some day, buy a nice little farm and take it easy. They 
 don't really like this country unless they came here young, 
 but they can make good money here. So they won't pay 
 rent for a good house, and they make all the children go to 
 work early while they put the money in the bank for that 
 little farm. That's what I hear 'ein all talking about all 
 the tune. . . . Oh, those Russians that were arrested here 
 yesterday as Bolshevists? Why, they'd go back peacefully 
 to Russia and help their friends, only they believe that the 
 government here will keep all their money, and it's their 
 money they want to take over to help the cause. See?" 
 
 I understand passports are not being given to anybody 
 to go back to Russia. I guess she's right about the older 
 Slavic people. But when I asked a young chap I know 
 if he was going back, I got very quickly his energetic "No!
 
 A SECOND COAL TOWN 117 
 
 For why?" One Russian was pointed out as having on 
 deposit in the local savings-bank an account of $18,000 ! 
 
 It certainly looks like an enormous job to straighten out all 
 the kinks in a population like this. . . . "No, you can't get 
 any of these older people from Europe to learn English 
 only the young will do it." Misunderstandings and dis- 
 trust are easy enough, goodness knows, even among well- 
 understanding friends. To my surprise to-day a man who 
 has been in this one mine over fifteen years said: 
 
 "Too many robbers in dees country. . . . Alia time 
 steal. Man work to-day where alia time 'squeeze' break 
 up floor or roof he stay alive all right and come outside, 
 and den some robber with gun take away all monee he 
 get. ... In olda time coal weigh good; so gooda man 
 maka da gooda monee. Now coal no weigha good. . . . 
 Check- weighman ? Yes, he paid by a da union, but pocket 
 always open for company and he forget hees buddies. 
 Only one good check-weighman in hundred." 
 
 It certainly is too bad that a company which does so 
 many fine big things should be thought especially by an 
 old employee thus guilty of dishonesty. But I guess 
 such distrust is general in industry and generally because 
 there isn't enough effort to establish mutual respect and 
 confidence by each finding out what the other fellow's got 
 in his head and heart. 
 
 Seeing the Russians go off with the federal officers yes- 
 terday reminds me of that Bolshevist Socialist meeting I 
 attended in Steel ville, celebrating "Debs Day." The 
 woman who had presided at the Canton meeting where 
 Debs made the speech for which he was imprisoned, was 
 cheered when she said "People look now for peace not to 
 Paris but to Moscow!" and "If the peace commissioners 
 don't hurry, the Bolshevists won't give 'em their passports 
 to come back here." Another said, "Just think, if Debs 
 were free he'd talk to-day at one meeting. Now that our
 
 118 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 enemies have been good enough to put him in jail, his ideas 
 and ideals are being proclaimed to-day at 5,000 meetings 
 like this." It was a bigger and livelier meeting than the 
 first attended, but seemed to me unlikely to make much 
 trouble. 
 
 Coaldale, 
 May 16. 
 
 Maybe some day I'll want to be a miner again, but if I 
 do I'll have to break a vow I made several tunes to-day 
 that if the Lord would get me out alive I wouldn't bother 
 him again to look after me any more in a coal-mine ! 
 
 Was assigned to a stalwart, black-mustached timber- 
 man, named John. First we fixed up a temporary canvas 
 stop where a brick wall is being built, so as to save the 
 need of sending any more air through a portion of the 
 mine which has now been worked out. Then we went into 
 an entry where three pick-men were taking out the ribs 
 and pillars and where the floor was squeezing up so en- 
 thusiastically for a get-together party with the roof that 
 there was hardly an unbroken timber in the place. 
 
 Our job was merely to take down the broken ones and 
 put up good ones! As I stood under a particularly nasty 
 piece of roof I cast my eye down past two or three broken 
 upright posts till finally I saw a pair of good ones and 
 made a mental note to make a break to their protection 
 if anything started to fall. Then to my huge dismay I 
 saw that the reason that the uprights were good was that 
 the cross-bar holding the roof was itself split and U-shaped. 
 
 Of course I tried to reason with myself that my buddy 
 wasn't worrying and he'd been doing this work for ten 
 years. But I didn't make a great hit with myself, I will 
 say. And was partly right, too. For, at one time 
 I protested to John that some top-coal was loose. A 
 stroke or two of the pick failed to loosen it, but on my 
 further protest, a third blow brought down about five tons
 
 A SECOND COAL TOWN 119 
 
 of it! I thought still more should be got down before I 
 worked under it, but he assured me laughingly of its com- 
 plete safety. For an hour or so I worked under it, and 
 picked up what had fallen hi order to clear the track for the 
 few cars still to be loaded. Then we ate our dinners out 
 of our buckets outside in the entry where the weight was 
 less and the timbers sounder. Then we came back to the 
 spot where I had been working, ready to go at it again. 
 Two more tons had fallen ! 
 
 As we dug and picked and pounded the new uprights 
 and cross-bars into place, John, of course, told about vari- 
 ous disasters and serious accidents, including the time the 
 top-coal fell on him and broke his leg. Still I suppose one 
 broken leg in eighteen years of mining (all in one mine !) 
 is, on the whole, rather reassuring. Certainly the roof 
 seemed to trouble him mighty little beyond an occasional 
 thump to test its soundness, or a sharp stop to listen when 
 slate fell, say, on the other side of the entry, where he was 
 strenuously hammering a post into position. I take it he 
 never heard the town minister tell what he told me last 
 night : 
 
 "One tune I had to give up going to an important na- 
 tional assembly of my denomination because word came 
 that one of my best friends had been entombed in a big 
 mine disaster. I was greatly shocked and immediately 
 wrote the funeral sermon, but no telegram came setting the 
 hour of the funeral. That was two years ago. They have 
 been working on that disaster ever since. Last week I 
 preached that sermon the man's body had only just been 
 recovered!" 
 
 (Incidentally, the minister said he knew little about the 
 thoughts or the feelings of the town's miners outside the 
 few foremen in his church. Furthermore, he doubted 
 greatly if even the priest of the local Slavic churches 
 did.)
 
 120 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 My timberman is certainly a hard worker and a con- 
 scientious one. We kept hard at it all day except for the 
 regular short morning rest and bite out of our dinner- 
 buckets at about nine. At twelve he queried: 
 
 "Buddie, wat you tink? If work now no catch dinner 
 and put up posts, den dees 'Bolshevik' here (jovial for 
 Russian) he no lose time and get one more car coal to-day. 
 Wat say?" 
 
 So we delayed our dinner an hour and thus helped the 
 digger's production by changing the cross-bar (and block- 
 ing the track) during the hour when the motorman would 
 be eating his lunch, and so would not come along and have 
 to leave the digger's full car to wait for the next trip. A 
 first-class example of mine team-work. 
 
 Nature evidently takes a hand in this mine team-work, 
 too. Before we finished our timbers, the pick-men in the 
 entry had pretty well finished their ribs and pillars, and so 
 began taking up their tracks. To-morrow they will delib- 
 erately saw the timbers supporting their roof, and with their 
 amazing skill contrive to back out safely at just the last 
 safe moment while the roof falls in. It seems that this 
 will serve to lessen the weight of the roof on the place 
 where we worked to-day, and so make it safer for the Rus- 
 sian to go ahead and get out the coal still available in his 
 "rib." You can relieve roof pressure, so they say, by 
 either putting up stronger supports hi the room itself, or 
 by "making a fall" in a near-by room or entry. 
 
 During the afternoon the section boss, a very reliable and 
 intelligent man, came along, saw that everything was going 
 properly, and with friendly words continued his rounds of 
 the eighty-five or so men in his part of the mine. I hope 
 he appreciates what a good man he has in my buddy. 
 Anyway, I was warm in praising him whenever his very 
 marked pride in his work led him to pause for breath in 
 between strenuous blows and inquire:
 
 A SECOND COAL TOWN 121 
 
 "Dere, Buddee, wat you tink? Me good timber-man? 
 Mebbee yes, mebbee no? Wat say?" 
 
 I didn't do a quarter of the work he did, but my shoulders 
 found it one of the hardest days in the mine and that in 
 spite of the fact that, joy of joys, I had a " shower-bath" 
 in the cellar to-night. I'm sure that lessens by at least a 
 third a worker's fatigue after a day of hard, sweaty, dirty 
 work. 
 
 John, like others of his kind, has handled almost every 
 job in the mines. He reported a short period "outside," 
 but showed not the slightest interest in any other field. 
 
 "Work one year steel car company drive rivet no like. 
 Too much noise. Old man dere no got ears no more no 
 can hear." 
 
 To-night an American just ahead of me in the line, wait- 
 ing to be "caged" up, testified: "Yep, thirty-seven years 
 of it mostly right here. Pumping now mostly walking 
 from one pump to the other. Get pretty tired. Nope, 
 never tried nothin' else. Well, I don't know, guess 
 'twas because I was afeard of the weather." 
 
 And to-night at supper a new boarder confessed: "No, 
 I cudn't do nothin' else but mine that is, and be happy. 
 I tried it once in a railroad yard. They was too many 
 different kinds o' weather out there, so I come back." 
 
 Another boarder, Mike, is a former union organizer 
 also a former gambler. "I was gettin' too sure o' myself 
 too bold. I had to quit it, as a sort of safety-first proposi- 
 tion like, you know." 
 
 He tells many tales of disputes he's taken part in. As 
 to the union's stand or lack of it in regard to living con- 
 ditions: 
 
 "Well, I'll say we got enough to handle, with pay and 
 hours and ventilation. And of course, you understand, in 
 every big union there's lots o' fractions." 
 
 I get the impression that the union meetings are mostly
 
 122 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 run by the most aggressive, and that all the decisions come 
 before the company officers as demands rather than requests 
 or suggestions, whether in line with the signed agreement 
 or not. The attractive pay and easy duties of the check- 
 weighman evidently make trouble. I'm told he is changed 
 often by the vote of the men, whose distrust is aroused by 
 some one who feels that his cars are not being weighed 
 fairly, and who is himself, quite likely then to be elected to 
 the job only to be displaced in his turn by some other 
 doubter of his honesty. 
 
 I'm positively sorry to be going away to-morrow, but 
 I'm after steel rather than mine experience, and I hope it 
 will now be possible to get a mill job. But I certainly have 
 got a valuable side-light on the problem of the factory fore- 
 man. I recall how we used to agree hi the sheet-mill that 
 the foreman did not want to answer our questions for fear 
 he'd lose his monopoly of the "know-how" and how on the 
 open-hearth we usually learned things only by being cursed 
 in everybody's presence when we made mistakes. No 
 wonder these men here feel independent and self-respecting. 
 Especially when the tonnage men can take their dinner- 
 bucket and go " outside" and home at any hour they feel 
 like it. Then, too, if they get tired loading, with its puff- 
 hard-fill-car-take-easy method, they can easily get a chance 
 to become skilled men at wiring or track-laying, timbering, 
 etc. Still more important, once a year anybody can go to 
 the county-seat and take an examination to become a fire- 
 boss, and then a pit-boss, and so rise almost indefinitely. 
 In other words, the State, as it were, furnishes hi coal that 
 pull-less promotion system which is felt by many workers 
 to be so missing in many plants. 
 
 "I mind me o' Jo Smith," said mine host the other night; 
 "'e couldn't even read when 'e was thirty. An' then 'e 
 married a school-teacher, y' understand. And damned if 
 she didn't up an' learn 'im to read. An' the first thing ye
 
 A SECOND COAL TOWN 123 
 
 know, 'ere 'e was a fire-boss. And then later, 'e gets ter be 
 a pit-boss and superintender. An' then one day they 
 makes 'im manager an' president!" 
 
 At this the ex-union organizer and gambler exploded: 
 "Don't it beat the dickens the way some fellows has all the 
 luck!" 
 
 Altogether, it looks as though the independence of the 
 worker, a proper day of eight hours with good pay, either 
 according to your own efforts or to an agreed, liberal day- 
 rate, with "alia time good air and no cold no hot," justi- 
 fies the country's miners in thinking highly of their work, 
 their service, and therefore themselves as useful and self- 
 respecting persons altogether different from anything I 
 would ever have supposed a few months ago. 
 
 It seems to me certain that the company is getting its 
 money back on all these expenditures for better living con- 
 ditions. And the workers seem to me a higher class, less 
 given to booze and unreliability and irregularity, and so 
 able to secure better production per man also fewer acci- 
 dent claims altogether a happier and more stable working 
 force than under other circumstances. And that's the real 
 test of any welfare or better-relation activities. 
 
 I wonder what's to be the next job. 
 
 Steelville again, 
 May 19. 
 
 The mine superintendent reported that I had proved his 
 informal and voluntary secret service to be hi prime work- 
 ing order; nearly a dozen foremen had 'phoned to suggest 
 a close eye on me as a " fellow with a dark beard and a 
 keen eye who certainly looks like a Bolshevik." Another 
 citizen had reported me as taking notes at a ball game I 
 was signing a picture-postal. Another stated that she had 
 seen me through an open window drawing maps in my bed- 
 room, and, as I had been heard to speak a few words in 
 German, I was undoubtedly a spy for the Huns !
 
 124 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 At three o'clock in the morning of my last night in the 
 town, my roommates, just getting in from their night shift, 
 had said they knew I was a detective. Things looked close 
 for a few moments, but I was able to reassure them of my 
 interest in coal-mining and not in individuals until with 
 their fatigue they dropped off to sleep. At breakfast the 
 landlady expressed the same suspicions but also seemed 
 easily reassured. 
 
 That person, by the way, made a large hole in the earn- 
 ings of a week. The wages of four days as "timber-man" 
 were twenty dollars, minus some slight deductions for the 
 electric safety-lamp (five cents per day), etc. With ten dol- 
 lars out for board and room, it did not make one very en- 
 thusiastic about building a fortune. 
 
 At any rate, my second week of coal has shown that bad 
 living conditions are not a necessity unless the coal-seam 
 of the town or camp is extremely short-lived; also, I think, 
 that money spent by the company in better surroundings 
 brings good returns in better and more productive workers, 
 as mentioned before. It also appears to me unquestion- 
 able that the miner's work carries him much closer to a 
 genuine self-respect than does the steel-mill laborer's job. 
 With this start the increase of it by any and all means 
 would seem to bring good results in many ways. It also 
 seems certain that hi the limited opportunities of the camps 
 the most outstanding way to indicate your standing is not 
 to earn and spend as we do, but just not to earn, seeing that 
 there is so little to do with the money. 
 
 That must be the reason why the operators claim that 
 even when they have the orders and the needed cars, the 
 difficulty is to get the miners to stay "inside" for a good 
 day's and a good week's work. Where a man can show by 
 his house or his flivver or by other of his possessions that he 
 is "getting on," a very definite value is given to earning 
 the wherewithal. But in a community where no house
 
 A SECOND COAL TOWN 125 
 
 can be bought because the town may not be there a few 
 years later and where the roads may be too bad for a 
 flivver, then the only other way of indicating the status of 
 a self-respecting man who is "as good as the next one" 
 would seem to be by that "conspicuous leisure" which is 
 obtained, not in the ordinary way of working, earning, and 
 then buying, but by not working by walking out of the 
 mine at two o'clock while some other chap is so much a 
 dub of a worker that, in order to make a living, he has to 
 stay hi till the day is ended at four ! 
 
 Work has been such that I've seen little of this, but it is 
 hard to read any statement from the operators without 
 running onto it. 
 
 At the mine the most serious moment of the day was at 
 five o'clock. Then everybody began to listen and I would- 
 n't be surprised if many prayed. Finally the whistle would 
 boom and re-echo from the sides of the valley : One two 
 three! With that, the tension was over and everybody 
 smiled. "Work to-morrow! Thank God!" But when it 
 went only one two ! you saw men taking it pretty hard 
 running their hands through their hair and saying: "My 
 God ! How can live ! What can do ? No work to-morrow ! ' ' 
 
 And nobody seemed to know why. 
 
 "It's somethin' about steel!" said my landlord when I 
 asked him for the cause of the two-blast days. He had 
 been with the company all the ten years it has been owned 
 by a steel company which must, of course, lower its coal- 
 and-coke production the minute steel begins to slow up 
 when war contracts are called off and peace-time buyers 
 hesitate in hopes of lower prices. 
 
 On the subject of the Bolshevists, by the way, I was in- 
 terested to get the testimony of some federal-service men 
 recently, like this: 
 
 "There are about 25,000 I. W. W.'s hi the whole coun- 
 try. Their recent convention in Chicago brought only 54
 
 126 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 delegates. It is likely they will shortly attempt to revive 
 their propaganda for sabotage, stopped during the war. 
 Personally, we believe the average employer is hysterical 
 in his fear of what the radicals may do though we tell 
 all of them we see that the mailed-fist and machine-gun 
 method is the worst possible way to stop it. Especially hi 
 this district there should be more effort to get better con- 
 tacts with their men. . . . 
 
 "Such Russians as we arrested up there hi your coal 
 town the other day are not strictly Bolshevists. They are 
 members of the 'Union of Russian Workmen,' which charges 
 modest dues for teaching them to read and then makes 
 philosophical anarchists and terrorists out of them. It 
 has about 15,000 members and was organized hi this coun- 
 try by the man who is now one of Trotsky's men his chief 
 of police in a big Russian city. These men are easily sub- 
 ject to deportation under federal law. 
 
 'Debs is a member of the Workmen's International In- 
 dustrial Union, which may be called the left wing of the 
 I. W. W. and the right whig of the Socialists or vice 
 versa. All of these are radical split-offs from the organized- 
 labor movement. Some radicals, like Foster of the Amal- 
 gamated Association of Iron, Steel and Tin Plate Workers, 
 are hoping to stay in conservative labor ranks, and by 
 'boring from within' convert it to radicalism or wreck it 
 in the attempt. Employers definitely help such insidious 
 plans when then* 'labor policy' only means the hiring of 
 secret-service men who proceed to beat up and drive out 
 of town any agitators or other men who begin to show 
 signs of a leadership that might later become troublesome. 
 Such a 'labor policy' is entirely too common in the rougher 
 industries. It may easily bring about the blowing-up of 
 some of the plants of the worst employers and so start 
 serious trouble." 
 
 The street-car strike here does not seem to be taken very
 
 A SECOND COAL TOWN 127 
 
 seriously. The paper this morning said many of the men 
 were glad to get back to running the cars after the house- 
 cleaning to which their wives had put them. To-night a 
 waitress after telling of her " going out to work at the age 
 of eleven" (on account of nine children and a sick father) 
 recounted how a woman at her table a few days before had 
 exclaimed: 
 
 "Well, I hope they strike. My man's a motonnan, and 
 I need him at home to beat some carpets." 
 
 A chat to-day with a Bohemian minister (Presbyterian) 
 who has been in this country eight years brought out: 
 
 "Yes, I think many, many Slavic people will go back as 
 soon as they can. Not many hardly any Bohemians 
 and not many of the Slavs who are on farms. But of the 
 Poles, Ruthenians and Ukrainians they all are very na- 
 tionalistic many will go back; nearly one-fourth of the 
 600,000 Ruthenians, for instance. Whether they stay or 
 not, that will depend on what they find. Personally, I 
 think they expect to find too much, and I know many of 
 their people want to come here. I think the country will 
 suffer if they do not let them come if they pass this anti- 
 immigration bill in Congress. . . . Yes, we try to Ameri- 
 canize, but we never say that word foreign people do not 
 like it. And when we see some of our own children often 
 they are cleaner than American children looked down upon 
 as 'Hunkies,' I wish Americans would take some Americani- 
 zation themselves. Yes, it is hard work, especially when 
 Bohemians so generally go from Catholicism, not to Protes- 
 tanism but to atheism." 
 
 Well, I'll agree with him to the point of feeling posi- 
 tively sorry not to see more of my rough and husky, but 
 honest and friendly and likeable, Slavic buddies here in the 
 mines, and they certainly are hard workers a lot of us 
 would certainly shiver if these chaps weren't in our midst ! 
 
 "Rosvameshpo Polski?" (Do you speak Polish?) is all
 
 128 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 I know besides a few numerals, but even that seems to sur- 
 prise them and make them more friendly. 
 
 And now to look around for another job. "No work" 
 at the steel-mills gave me a chance to learn something of 
 the reason for the spirit of freemasonry so noticeable among 
 railway workers. 
 
 Steelville, 
 Decoration Day. 
 
 To-day I feel as though a worker ought to ask, "Where 
 am I going to live?" before expressing a preference for an 
 eight-hour-day job. Of course, the hourly rate is more 
 important because it practically tells him where he may 
 live. But just now I feel almost as though I'd prefer longer 
 hours at the same money because the longer day in the 
 plant would mean a shorter day in the less pleasant sur- 
 roundings of the boarding-house. 
 
 I don't imagine many workers would figure it out just 
 that way, for I'm simply suffering from the accumulated 
 dirtiness and misery of several days and nights here in the 
 slums. At any rate, I can now appreciate better than be- 
 fore the view-point of a man who walks past an eight-hour 
 job and takes a ten and twelve hour one that doesn't pay 
 any very great amount more. He figures on two things: 
 he can buy somewhat better living accommodations and 
 then he won't have to stay in them so long. 
 
 All this quite surely has something to do with the diffi- 
 culty of getting the work done, and done well, there in the 
 railroad roundhouse where I now have the title of "ma- 
 chinist's helper." With all the rules enforcing strictly the 
 eight-hour day, my forty-five cents an hour as a helper 
 brings three dollars and sixty cents. Figure this with the 
 cost of existing and the excessive grease and grime of help- 
 ing to fix engines, and it gives a reason for my Polish ma- 
 chinist's apparently frequent lack of a helper, and his 
 anxiety to treat me well my first day. At the same tune he 
 wasn't at all happy in his own work, though he gets fifty- 
 seven cents and can work up to sixty-eight.
 
 A SECOND COAL TOWN 129 
 
 "Thees one debil of job alia time dirt, sweat, grease. 
 But to-day we take eesy so mebbe you come back to- 
 morrow," he explained as soon as I was turned over to him 
 by the foreman. A moment later he apologized for having 
 to ask me to crawl along with him down into the pit be- 
 neath one of the monster engines: 
 
 "Watch yourself mebbe no get-'em grease. Last week 
 new buddy he get-'em grease and straight he queet. No- 
 body like-'em dees work. Good man he no stay." 
 
 After we had got out the heavy eccentric rods and car- 
 ried them to the blacksmith shop we "took a blow" and he 
 showed me the store-rooms, machine-shop, etc. 
 
 "Dees place you come for get-'em tool. Me want you 
 like job stay be my buddy." 
 
 Others called to me not to worry when I showed signs of 
 wanting to keep busy when he left me for a time; as near 
 as I can make out, the general motto is, "Don't kill your- 
 self!" 
 
 After several days of it, it looks as though the trouble is 
 that the wages for the eight hours are generally found too 
 small to hold a man unless he can take it as easy as the 
 work will at all permit. When, day before yesterday, I was 
 changed to a different job, my new buddy, a young Ameri- 
 can, took a great deal of time to assure me that "There's 
 nothing to it, Charlie. It's a cinch most o' the tune 
 waitin' around for your signal when they want you. It's 
 dead easy you'll like it fine!" 
 
 I was quite proud to learn that my signal would be the 
 one long blast, which I had supposed was for some very 
 important chap. So I took great pride in hopping off to 
 report hi answer to its summons much to his disgust. 
 When later I came in from strenuously scrubbing the head- 
 lights on top of the big hot engines, the boys exclaimed, 
 "Say, you ain't supposed to sweat on that job!" 
 
 This listless attitude is usual for unskilled labor, but not
 
 130 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 for skilled and semi-skilled men. Another factor is un- 
 doubtedly that the union, which took advantage of govern- 
 ment and the war-time ban on opposition to unions to grow 
 strong, is apparently now discounting somewhat the com- 
 pany's control of its men. Still another factor is the ab- 
 sence of the "swing-shift." 
 
 Instead of the men's working one week or one month on 
 the first shift or trick from seven to three, daylight, changing 
 the following week to the evening shift, and then to the 
 night shift, as is common, for instance, in the hot-mills of 
 steel-rolling plants, here a man's length of service gives 
 him his choice to have and to hold the whole year round. 
 The day shift is, of course, the most popular. Next, 
 strangely enough, is the third or night " trick." The worst 
 of the three, and the one where every new man must per- 
 force begin, is the second three to eleven P. M. This 
 order of choice makes one more proof of the fundamental 
 I keep running up against that everybody wants to be a 
 near-normal human being hi addition to being a worker. 
 
 "Why, I can't call on my girl without gettin' a lay-off to 
 do it and that costs me a day's wages before we start! 
 Sunday ? why, you've got to get a lay-off for Sundays and 
 holidays just like any other day, and you'd better not get 
 too blooming many of 'em, either. 
 
 "Union? I don't know nothin' about what they do. 
 We second-trick fellows can't never go to the meetings 
 no, nor to the movies, nor anything else. 
 
 "Of course, we have our mornings and we can eat dinner 
 with the wife and mebbe the kids, and we can garden 
 but what's the use? Why, say, I've got a fine suit at home 
 bought it over five years ago. Swell ! But do you sup- 
 pose I can wear it out and get a new one? I should say 
 
 not ! No chance as long as I'm stuck on this second 
 
 trick!" 
 
 Then, too, there's the union regulation which, as reported
 
 A SECOND COAL TOWN 131 
 
 to me, says that no helper can be advanced to machinist 
 unless he started as helper before he was twenty-Jive. 
 
 "You twenty-five? Come here? you fit for nothing 
 except for kill," explained my Emil that first day. 
 
 Of course such a rule closes the door for many, and so, 
 theoretically, makes the chances greater for the others. 
 But with forty-five cents and eight hours for the start, and 
 the final limit of sixty-eight cents on the second shift until 
 years and deaths bring the third or the first well, that's 
 surely another reason for the round-house's lack of interested 
 workers. 
 
 At the pace taken the work is not exhausting, and would 
 be much less so if only the hammer, sledge, or wrench did 
 not have to be handled in such outlandish positions. The 
 locomotive apparently still is where the automobile was a 
 dozen and more years ago, when that joke started about 
 the insane motorist tinkering with the slats of his asylum- 
 bed a story which was shortly killed by making the motor 
 get-at-able from the top. Even after standing in a four- 
 foot pit you're likely to wear scabs on your head for some 
 tune and to avoid the grease is apparently impossible 
 even for the most experienced. 
 
 Still, I can hardly imagine any man who was once a boy 
 who wouldn't be glad to crawl under and over and into the 
 giant engines. They look power. They feel power as you 
 pound their steel "innards." They breathe power as they 
 pant. They spell power, even when the dinkey, or "goose," 
 as it's called, pushes them about after their fire-box is cold. 
 You feel yourself absorbing strength just as does the groom 
 of the giant and you wish yourself in the engineer's seat 
 with your hand on the throttle, driving the monster, whose 
 nose is plunging on forty-five or fifty feet in front of your 
 controlling fingers. 
 
 So I have enjoyed the work in spite of all the bumps and 
 the grime and the injunctions to "Take it easy !" And, as
 
 132 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 I started out to say at the beginning, I'd be tickled if I 
 could stay there in "the house" or "the yard" more and 
 here in my room less. 
 
 At three dollars and sixty cents a day a fellow's got to 
 watch corners. By staying near-by I could cut out the 
 street-car. No room is to be had, even here in this neigh- 
 borhood, for much if any less than three dollars a week. 
 The cheapest board I've met is a twenty-one meal-ticket 
 for six dollars and fifty cents. Bing! there goes almost 
 one dollar and fifty cents out of that three dollars and sixty 
 cents! You can't work without canvas gloves at twenty- 
 five cents per, and if you don't disgrace your buddies 
 you've got to pay for a lot of washing. With all that, you're 
 only alive and physically able to work provided you have 
 better luck than I did when I took my present quarters. 
 For every day here I feel too tired to work hard. 
 
 The front rooms I saw were too noisy. This one is at 
 the rear. Its drawback is that the other roomers have to 
 pass through it to the bathroom. 
 
 "But Oi hev only wan or two others besides yorself, sor, 
 and Oi'm certain, sor, ye'll not mind it at all, at all," the 
 landlady of about sixty-five assured me. I inspected the 
 bathroom and felt that an ex-roomer who happened to be 
 on hand was probably right in saying the old lady was 
 clean and honest. But I guess I'm a poor inspector: I 
 failed to notice that the bathroom has no ventilation what- 
 ever except through what is now my room! My window 
 looks out on a little court about ten by twenty feet, formed 
 by alley-houses, whose back steps are covered with colored 
 people and bulwarked by garbage-cans. Just around the 
 court's corner is a stable with about fifty horses and numer- 
 ous colored hostlers, whose noisy labors continue far into 
 the night. The wind seems often to set from that direc- 
 tion for carrying both noise and odor. Ditto for the black- 
 smith-shop just beyond.
 
 Courtesy of the New York Central Railroad 
 
 A FREIGHT ENGINE LIFTED BY A CRANE 
 
 Part of the dignity and satisfaction of the worker's life comes from his 
 familiar association with and control of great power
 
 A SECOND COAL TOWN 133 
 
 Carpets seem to be often beaten in my court and very 
 dirty ones, too. But even then, if the wind is blowing the 
 dust down the alley, I dislike to be awakened by the land- 
 lady coming in to close my window and so shut off both the 
 dirt and the outside air from my room my bath-bedroom ! 
 
 I must say the colored people seem to be happy I find 
 myself chuckling occasionally even now in the midst of 
 my Decoration Day case of "slum slumps," in unison with 
 one neighbor of a very infectious laugh. 
 
 "No, sor," says my housekeeper, u they don't use as bad 
 language as lots o' them as thinks theirselves their betters. 
 Oi must say as they've had raisin' good raisin' ! 
 
 "That piano-player? Well, sor, now thot's from a house 
 thot's not so good. Ye'll be after understandin' me, sop- 
 it's not a nice place. But still, they run it respectable-like, 
 and Oi must say some o' thim colored women Oi see come 
 out o' there do look like real ladies, if Oi do say it." 
 
 Well, is it any wonder with no movies to go to because 
 it's morning, no offices nor stores nor public baths nor 
 libraries to look into because it's a holiday, no bed made 
 because some of the roomers aren't up yet after their night 
 shift, and nothing to do but go around in the neighboring 
 alleys and see thousands of negroes and Slavic folk hi shirt- 
 sleeves or night-gowns and kimonos crowded on their side- 
 walks or court-porches and steps, with glimpses of front 
 rooms chuck-full of beds and cribs and dinner-tables and 
 stoves and pink-and-red-tinselled shrines and chromos, is 
 it any wonder that I find it hard to think to-day of those 
 who fell at Gettysburg or Cantigny ! These people are the 
 soldiers of our modern industry. They aren't under the 
 sod, but many of them are maimed in their fight in the 
 trenches of production, and many of them are a lot like 
 the discouraged colored boy I heard telling his friend in 
 the employment-office hallway last winter when jobs were 
 scarcer than now:
 
 134 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 "Well, Ah don't calls it livin'; Ah'in just existin'; and 
 with one o' my feet down to'rds the cold clay and the rough- 
 box and me likely to slip if Ah doan' mind my step mighty 
 sharp like." 
 
 Of course I suppose it's right to assume that my Slavic 
 and colored friends are not as bothered by bathroom-stable 
 smells as I am, but they must wake up just as often as I 
 do when people pass through their room or when the 
 whole family is in with them. And then, too, I'm sure they 
 are driven more surely than I though perhaps less con- 
 sciously to the companionship of the saloon or the place 
 of the player-piano (though on this score of music, I must 
 say that a great number of the crowded tumble-downs I 
 saw this morning had victrolas and player-pianos going 
 gayly). In fact, I'll warrant the whole outfit of them will 
 feel quite as little like doing a good day's work in the mill 
 or the round-house as I will when I register this afternoon 
 at three. 
 
 Just who's to blame for such a dreadful district I don't 
 know. But with these few days added to the coal-camp, 
 I'm surer than ever that the employer has an interest in 
 the living conditions of his workers that is a long way from 
 philanthropic. Of course, as long as even such places rep- 
 resent home, with all its associations and intimacies, they 
 and the changing of them will have to be handled with the 
 kid gloves of diplomacy. 
 
 Emil assures me that most of his friends are going back 
 "to auld country just so soon as they can, so can live on 
 farm in nice place." If that's true, the resultant labor 
 shortage will present to industry a large bill in the form 
 of higher wages. It is to be hoped that some of this in- 
 come is to be used for better houses provided this city can 
 see the wisdom of burning up such as these around me and 
 get others built. 
 
 Ugh ! I guess I'll go out and take a walk and try to find
 
 A SECOND COAL TOWN 135 
 
 a clean restaurant for dinner so as to get into better shape 
 for the work on those handsome steel engine chaps. 
 
 Later. I hate to think of the low-down the vile con- 
 versation I had to overhear last night between the old 
 landlady and one of the roomers, or the goings on I had to 
 witness in a neighboring apartment, but it was only in line 
 with all the other things to be seen and heard on all sides 
 in this locality. 
 
 Hotel de Bath-Bed-Room, 
 June 1st. 
 
 There is, somehow, a thrill about working with engines 
 especially the live ones that go out from your hand and 
 get groomed into shape to run down to the station for 
 their job of hauling the politician to the governor's office at 
 
 B , or the worried husband to his sick wife or baby up 
 
 at "The Junction" all the actors in "this pleasing, anxious 
 being" called life. 
 
 Last night I caught this thrill from the inspector, who 
 was extremely proud of his responsibility. With him I 
 helped test every one of the more important and accessible 
 nuts and bolts and pins and bearings that spell speed and 
 safety to the engineer and all his protege's: 
 
 "You see, if I fall down on my job, there's the devil to 
 pay and maybe scores of lives lost (tap, tap on the piston- 
 pin). If they pull into A - even fifteen minutes late be- 
 cause this here works loose (tap, tap on the dowel-pin on 
 the eccentric or the valve-stem) it gets right back to me, 
 you understand. Now this here is the power for Train 
 
 No. , which is one of the fastest and best on the line. 
 
 And the engineer ! Well, I'll say he's some particular guy. 
 In an hour you'll see him out here goin' over all this just as 
 if you and me was dead. . . . And you've got to know the 
 name of every blamed bolt and screw or how can you tell 
 the boss what's wrong? . . . Whew! Say, look here!
 
 136 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 That spring's got all them leaves busted. Wow! We'll 
 have to report that, and if the boss don't 'shop' her for re- 
 pairs they won't have anything on me, anyway." 
 
 His pride was refreshing. It was a sight, though, to see 
 how it offended my Emil, who as a machinist had taken 
 these very engines apart and put 'em together again, and 
 so felt he did not need to be urged so strenuously to "Keep 
 your eyes open there, Shorty! This is serious business." 
 All during the shift they growled alternately into my ear, 
 each about the other, each defending his own knowledge 
 and its value and sufficiency to the occasion. 
 
 Occasionally we had to stop and do some fixing before 
 we could report "0. K." As we worked, the "hard-grease" 
 man was filling the cups on the main rod or the side bar, 
 which together carry the motion from piston-head to drive- 
 wheel. Or perhaps the "air men" were seeing to the 
 brakes, while still others were making sure that water and 
 steam and fire were in good condition. 
 
 Then would come along the tracks a well-dressed man in 
 a pressed suit and a new straw hat, carrying a suit-case, 
 looking like well, like a member of the town school board. 
 
 "Where's 7978?" 
 
 "Right there, sir, second ahead." 
 
 He was the engineer. Up he'd mount and pretty soon 
 be down hi his newly washed and ironed overalls and 
 jumper, cap with goggles, handkerchief over his white 
 collar, and oil-can in hand, going over it all again as though 
 we had never been born ! 
 
 He's the king of the round-house the prince of the 
 yard. When he takes the throttle to move out in his turn, 
 and whistles three blasts for the switch to take him to his 
 train hi the big station, everything is supposed to be in 
 readiness for him, even down to the tools and the drinking- 
 water in the iron cupboard. And when he comes back to 
 the yard from his run, he turns his engine over to the
 
 A SECOND COAL TOWN 137 
 
 "hostler," who sees to driving it to all the places where it 
 dumps its ashes, gets its water, and receives the other at- 
 tentions required for the next trip. 
 
 From his look the engineer seems to deserve the dignity 
 he enjoys. Usually, so they tell me, he has had to be fire- 
 man for ten or more years before his chance came. So 
 he's no casual worker; he's an expert in a place where lack 
 of experience may mean death for him and many others. 
 By his union with the others of his group throughout the 
 country he has secured recognition of his importance. 
 From the information to be picked up in the yards and the 
 "house," his earnings are much below the figures generally 
 understood. That eight-hour restriction practically means 
 work only every other day a run and return usually 
 constitute a double turn one day and so require a loaf the 
 next day. For this he gets from thirty-five to fifty dollars 
 a week. This can hardly be felt too liberal, considering the 
 responsibility, the skill, the dirt, and the danger also those 
 long years of hard shovelling as a fireman at pay little above 
 labor rates. 
 
 "First, ye're on the 'extra' list as a fireman, y' under- 
 stand? And it may be a long tune before ye get a reg'lar 
 run. Then after a few years, when ye think ye're going to 
 cop out a boost, along comes some guy you never heard of, 
 mebbe from some other division entirely, and gets it be- 
 cause he got hi mebbe two days ahead of ye, eight years 
 ago ! And so ye wait another year or two," said one who 
 had finally given up his place in order to become a machinist. 
 
 It seems to me highly proper that the engineer's job has 
 come to have the dignity it has whether by his own efforts 
 or otherwise. It puts a bigger, abler, and more dependable 
 man in charge of us travellers. Without that, all the tap- 
 tappings of my friend the inspector, and the attentions of 
 all the others in the house and the yard would be pretty 
 fruitless, as well as all the precautions taken after the
 
 138 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 huge, panting "X-4" is coupled up to the Pullmans hi the 
 station. 
 
 I wonder, by the way, if most of us realize that while 
 we're getting on board, the station "air man" is getting up 
 into the engine to "set the air." Then he walks the length 
 of the train to see that every brake is set as it should be. 
 From the rear platform he signals his 0. K., whereat the 
 engineer releases the brakes. Then he walks forward to 
 see that every wheel is free finally reporting hi familiar 
 manner but with military care, "She's 0. K., Jim. Go to 
 it !" Thereupon Jim is likely to say to the conductor just 
 outside with a watch in his hand which has been compared 
 with the engineer's, "You may fire when ready, there, 
 I'm 'all set." 1 At this the conductor steps on a trip which 
 passes up to the despatcher's office the signal, " Ready "- 
 and watches for the light which means "Go." On the in- 
 stant of its appearing he calls or signals to the engineer, 
 who opens the throttle while brakemen and porters grasp 
 steps and doors and the safe and comfortable conquering 
 of space begins ! 
 
 Since returning to ordinary pursuits, opportunity has been 
 taken to travel hi the cab and see what happens after the 
 engineer says, with his two short blasts, "We're off!" 
 
 The first surprise was the fireman. Viewed from down 
 on the ground, his responsibilities look simple if not exactly 
 easy so much coal into the fire-box for so many miles at 
 such and such a speed. He doesn't seem to view it that 
 way. 
 
 "See the driver over there? Well, of course, he thinks 
 he's the whole party around here. In a way he is, but, 
 believe me, he wouldn't get very far from the station if I 
 wasn't here to get him a nice fire goin' !" In such wise the 
 knight of the shovel and the poker whispered into my ear 
 a large part of the way when he was not busy which wasn't 
 very much.
 
 A SECOND COAL TOWN 139 
 
 "Wait till I get her goin' good and then you can try her 
 out a bit if you like. . . . Now we got an easy stretch. 
 Here y'are. Now lemme look." Business of holding his 
 shovel so as to see the spots hi the bed of coal showing 
 black through the blaze black because burnt out. "Yes, 
 give her three on each side and two hi the middle-forward. 
 Twist your shovel with your wrist as you let go. One foot 
 like this on the apron here from the tender, the other in 
 the cab, and your back against the partition so you don't 
 fall out. Leave your body loose-like, so you can get a good 
 swing. There, now! Watch till you get a 'black stack' 
 dark smoke. 
 
 "Now that's too bad! That steam-gauge sure 'nough 
 is walkin' back on you ! Here, lemme have it. If the coal 
 gets too thin in places we'll go in late, sure as shootin'. . . . 
 Ah, there she comes up again. We're all right ! . . . Yes, 
 you see an engine's all-fired temperamental you have to 
 study her she always wants coal when she wants it and 
 where exact. I've always said you can easy fool a fellow 
 human, but, believe me, you've got to go some to fool a 
 fire!" 
 
 In between tunes it was something doing every instant. 
 In the towns the blower had to be turned on for the forced 
 draft or the fire-door opened and then readjusted when 
 the engine was supplying all the draft needed. Or the pick 
 had to be taken to break up the lumps pressing against the 
 gate that barred the coal's coming onto the apron for the 
 shovel. 
 
 At nearly all tunes both engineer and fireman had to 
 keep alert to "pick up" the signals. On the day trip, the 
 fireman would call across the cab "Fair block!" and the 
 engineer, with a wave of his canvas-gauntletted hand, would 
 repeat it. By night the call would be, perhaps, "Green 
 high!" and on we'd go. When it was "Yellow low!" the 
 throttle would move back a bit, for the yellow's meaning is
 
 140 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 that "the next block is one you must not run past. At 
 this moment it is set against you. Get your train under 
 good control." Wonderful eyes for lights and color they 
 both seemed to have ! 
 
 "It's a bad go when the fog makes the lights practically 
 invisible," says the engineer when you sit over behind him 
 on his narrower seat. "One day I remember running slow 
 and looking up for the signal through a thick paste of a 
 fog and ran past a brakeman trying to stop me down there 
 from the ground. Killed three of the boys in the caboose 
 I smashed into. 
 
 "On one run from Jersey City to Washington the en- 
 gineer and the fireman have to pick up in four hours and 
 forty minutes 279 miles a total of 648 signals and they 
 get laid off if they miss a one ! . . . No, you mustn't take 
 it too easy when the fog's bad, or the despatcher's likely to 
 say when you get in late, 'Why, what's eatin' at you? 
 There wasn't no fog hi here ! ' They seem to have mighty 
 little fog in the despatcher's office. 
 
 "Strike! Not us engineers! What could we do if we 
 was beaten? The roadmen and the switchmen that's 
 different. They've been wanting and deserving a raise 
 this long time. Whether they win or lose they can get their 
 kind of job at ordinary unskilled labor anywhere." 
 
 All this care helps the engineer to realize his responsibility, 
 and that responsibility, when reinforced by exceptional 
 wages and hours and conditions, spells dignity of work, 
 which in turns spells dignity of worker and therefore con- 
 sideration and safety for the public he serves. 
 
 Things industrial would certainly be a lot better if more 
 workers could have more of a chance to feel this dignity of 
 the job the way the engineer and the coal-miner do. But 
 from what I've seen so far, there's a big crowd of foremen 
 who have the idea that whatever dignity there may be in
 
 A SECOND COAL TOWN 141 
 
 the job belongs to them and they'll be hanged before 
 they'll let anybody else have any of it if call-downs and 
 curses and proddings can keep them out of it. I'm sure 
 that a different kind of foreman and more careful study of 
 the different jobs, together with a friendly teaching of these 
 revised jobs, would make a big change, because I'm sure 
 most of the workers are surprisingly anxious to feel their 
 job important and respectable. For instance, only last 
 night I suffered from a machinist's anxiety on this score: 
 
 "I'm ten years here and nobody ever saw my face dirty" 
 (looking at me very pointedly), "and I work as hard as 
 anybody hi the 'house.' But a machinist don't have to 
 look like a coal-heaver, and shouldn't and wouldn't, if he 
 never wipes his face with his glove, just as I seen you do 
 a minute ago. Use your handkerchief." 
 
 Of course among unskilled workers handkerchiefs are 
 not good form, though I've had to use them occasionally 
 covertly for fear my lack of skill in doing without them 
 as, for instance, in blowing my nose would give me away. 
 
 Dignity is generally assumed to be given a job by tonnage 
 or piece rates of pay. A machinist last night seemed to 
 think otherwise: 
 
 "Yes, there's plenty of loafing now that we're all on day 
 rates. But there was twice as much when we were on 
 piece rates only that loafing didn't cost the company any- 
 thing; we just waited around to get a chance at some job; 
 only on special rush tunes were all of us busy. But the 
 company didn't save very much at that, either. Because 
 when we did get a job, 'course we tried pretty hard to make 
 it a big one. We'd maybe see that several other things 
 ought to be done to the engine besides the things called for 
 on the card and the foreman or the 'super,' he didn't 
 take the time to check up too carefully; and besides it was 
 a matter of opinion. So a thirty-cent job might be made 
 into a two-dollar proposition and besides helping the ma-
 
 142 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 chinists that would make a better showing of work done 
 for everybody all up the line, from the foreman to the 
 'super' himself. And another thing now here's this 
 throttle valve, it's the most important thing in an en- 
 gine. The piece rate used to be $1.80, so of course 
 everybody would hustle to finish it in not more than 
 three hours. So he could keep himself a sixty-cent man, 
 see? And then everybody else on day rates would have to 
 work two or three more hours to put it hi and make it do 
 even for a short time. Now to-night I've spent six hours 
 on it. Look how careful I've been ! I'm proud of it. It 
 won't take fifteen minutes for the other fellow to get it in 
 operation, and it will last a lot longer than any three-hour 
 job. . . . Yes, I'm loafing just now. Over there on my 
 bench is another job like the one I just finished, and I'm 
 sure it's for me, all right. But, believe me, if I should get 
 busy on it, the foreman 'ud come along pretty soon and 
 say, ' Hey there ! Who'n the devil's givin' out the work in 
 this place, you or me?' So I'll let it lie, wouldn't you? 
 Got a cigarette? Thanks. Drop along again." 
 
 Another machinist near him, by the way and a hand- 
 some, clean-overalled and clean-faced fellow he is has taken 
 various fly-outs into other lines of work, Pullman conductor- 
 ing, for instance. 
 
 "It ain't so bad except that you can't ever plan on any- 
 thing. You never know where you're going to be. Per- 
 haps even four minutes before your train starts and you 
 have all your tickets in, you're changed to take somebody 
 else's run. And then when you get there you may be sent 
 two or three other places before you get back home. I'd 
 rather be here at my lathe and know that the chances are 
 good for being home to-night and here to-morrow." 
 
 In the steel-mills it was surprising to find the number of 
 different jobs even the youngest workers seemed to have 
 had. Here, as in coal-mining, it's surprising to find the
 
 A SECOND COAL TOWN 143 
 
 number who have been around the place six, eight, ten, 
 twenty, and more years. The rule of seniority is probably 
 a big factor and, of course those working on the first and 
 third, or more desirable, shifts probably average still longer. 
 One of the helpers has just been a blacksmith and a vic- 
 tim of this motor age: 
 
 "Well, ye see, all me materials wuz goin' higher, me labor 
 wuz costin' me more'n more 'n all the tune hosses wuz 
 gettin' scarcer'n scarcer. So I sold out in August. But 
 this work is too dirty. I can't see it not yet, anyways." 
 
 Perhaps he hasn't yet learned to use his handkerchief 
 any better than I have so that when he does he'll be very 
 contented. If the French philosopher is right "By the 
 work you know the workman" he'll also be happier when 
 he gets to be machinist instead of helper. Still there are 
 obstacles there. One is that he became a helper in his 
 forty-fifth instead of his twenty-fifth year, and the union 
 rule says he can't become a machinist. 
 
 But it's time to get ready to go to work which, by the 
 way, means, because of the scarcity of roundhouse lockers, 
 a rather depressing walk of several blocks in greasy work- 
 clothes past the corner loafers, who nudge each other as I 
 goby. 
 
 Hotel de Bath-Bed-Room, 
 Monday, June 2d. 
 
 An expert has said that steel and iron are recovering. 
 So I have asked for my "time" and am just about to start 
 off in hopes of a job somewhere in the land of ingots, billets, 
 and bars. 
 
 At the present moment my strongest idea or maybe 
 it's more of a, feeling, and a sore one at that is that, judging 
 from some of my experiences, a man is supposed to be grate- 
 ful if he's given a job and then, after performing this service 
 with the sweat of his brow and his back he's supposed 
 to be equally grateful for being given the money due him !
 
 144 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 At one time not many weeks ago the company where I 
 was working owed me about seventy-five dollars for three 
 weeks' work, while the one I had left owed me about the 
 same amount. Of course, this is mainly because the pay 
 at pay-day is the money earned, not in the period ending 
 hi the pay-day but in the two weeks preceding that. In 
 some cases the pay-day follows the pay-period by a shorter 
 interval, as ten days or, in some cases, one week. 
 
 To-day, when I went back to the roundhouse to get my 
 money, I was asked very curtly if I didn't know the rule. 
 Of course I didn't, because nobody had told me a single 
 rule of any kind except the informal one called to me as a 
 beginner by most of my new acquaintances "Take it 
 easy. Don't kill yourself !" 
 
 "Well, you oughta know we require ten days' notice," 
 the clerk or paymaster, whoever he was, said. 
 
 "But I don't want to stay any longer." 
 
 "Well, you'll have to come here in person Friday." 
 
 "But I want to be hi another part of the State Friday, 
 and I've already lost to-day's work hi order to come here 
 for it this morning." 
 
 "Well, we can send it to you, but that has to go through 
 
 the P office, and it'll take a long tune. Maybe we can 
 
 fix it Friday if you'll send somebody, properly authorized." 
 
 So I have to ask somebody else to take tune off to get the 
 money due me. 
 
 I know, of course, the impossibility of giving a worker 
 his full money up to any minute he chooses to throw down 
 his tools. I know too how such action may easily per- 
 suade too frequent sudden quits when money becomes 
 tight hi the worker's affairs with a rehiring, probably, of 
 the same worker a day or so later. It is doubtless a neces- 
 sary rule, but it should certainly be explained to the worker. 
 And it should not be made the excuse for a surliness which 
 all but makes the worker think that his employer is going
 
 A SECOND COAL TOWN 145 
 
 to give him his money at some convenient day only because 
 he hates to see people starving 'round the place! That 
 idea occurs, I'm sure, a lot of times, because the paymaster 
 so often seems to feel that he serves his employer best when 
 he makes his lead-pencil sharpest and saves time by deliver- 
 ing ultimatums instead of explanations through that nasty 
 little hole in the glass window ultimatums which blot out 
 many earlier pleasant impressions the worker may have 
 been about to carry with him. The effect of a lot of 
 nice welfare^ near-luxuries can be cancelled in an instant 
 by one growly paymaster; for he hands out the necessity 
 of life. 
 
 It was in the same office of this unsympathetic refuser 
 of my money that the railway company first expressed the 
 assumption that of course the money was all I or anybody 
 else was working for anyhow. After having been properly 
 examined the day before and accepted into the benefit so- 
 ciety and he was an exceptionally courteous doctor, who 
 explained the different benefits and examined me mainly 
 for lungs and hernia I had reported early at the office of 
 this paymaster chap. I waited considerably after the be- 
 ginning of my shift and finally asked very diffidently of the 
 clerks in general if somebody was going to put me to work. 
 A young lady shifted her gum and interrupted her conver- 
 sation with the young man whose desk was quite noticeably 
 within hand's reach, long enough to counsel: 
 
 "You should worry you're gettin' paid for this all 
 right." 
 
 Perhaps it is this higher-up tightness on money, and this 
 same higher-up idea that money is all the worker wants, 
 that help to that "Don't kill yourself!" propaganda. 
 
 In that connection, too, a lessening of responsibility and 
 therefore of interest, all up and down the line, has certainly 
 come from government operation. That's too big a ques- 
 tion to discuss here, but all the higher-ups are undoubtedly
 
 146 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 feeling that the many decisions made for them in Washing- 
 ton have lessened their responsibility, with a "We should 
 worry" policy becoming easily the thing everywhere. 
 
 Whatever the cause, it's a certainty that the morale of 
 the crowd is low. Of course a lot of the specific and acute 
 unhappinesses a fellow runs across among the men go back 
 to no big underlying cause, though every one of these leaves 
 its little sore spot. Each sore spot, when added to by an- 
 other and another, becomes in turn a centre of serious in- 
 fection. It is doubtless impossible to prevent these entirely, 
 but it does look as though just that has got to be the con- 
 stant aim and effort of everybody up and down the line all 
 the time. For instance: 
 
 "That's just the way I get it in the neck around this 
 place all the time!" said a boy who had asked to have a 
 chance at another's job when that chap was off on Decora- 
 tion Day, and was told it had been given to another ap- 
 plicant. "These guys think just because I'm regular and 
 not gettin' off every other day that I'm in love with this 
 job o' mine. So they hand me any kind of a raw deal and 
 think I'll stand for it. Believe me, if this happens again, 
 I'm going to blow (leave) ! And right from now on I'm 
 going to take it easier, so they'll do a little more worryin' 
 about holdin' me like they do some of these other stiffs 
 around here!" 
 
 And this from an engineer: 
 
 ''Why, sure, I'm wet wet all over. And you'd be wet 
 too if you'd fallen into a pit full of water like I did a minute 
 ago lookin' for my engine. . . . Sure, there was no light ! 
 Could I drive an engine if I was blind ? . . . But what do 
 they care? They don't have to walk around the yard, so 
 they should worry. . . . Oh, I'll get dried off someway, but 
 take my word, somebody'll hear about this, all right !" 
 
 One way the boss "hears from it" without knowing 
 he's hearing from it is in that "Don't kill yourself" or
 
 A SECOND COAL TOWN 147 
 
 "What's the difference? To h with it." If the boss 
 
 doesn't care enough to prevent these mishaps to the worker, 
 the worker can't curse the foreman without getting fired; 
 his only come-back is, therefore, to be careless about the 
 job. For, after all, the boss depends for his stand-in on his 
 record of the work accomplished for the company, as every 
 worker jolly well knows. 
 
 "Watch yourself. Here comes the boss!" is at any 
 moment likely to throw a group of temporary loafers into 
 various stages of apparent strenuousness. Or a beginner 
 is likely to be exhorted: 
 
 "Hey there! For the love o' Mike, don't sit down to 
 rest there ! Get down under that engine or behind the 
 fence, or I'll get in bad when the boss comes along and 
 asks why I ain't keepin' you busy." 
 
 But I guess neither boss nor worker is to blame entirely 
 and each is getting about what he deserves. They just 
 haven't got together to work out the mighty difficult prob- 
 lem of making things run smoothly and happily and effi- 
 ciently. Anyway, everybody I've come onto here is a good 
 fellow fair-minded and decent yes, I'd say unusually 
 clean-minded, too. Nobody is for upsetting things gener- 
 ally. About the only growl I heard come from a group of 
 men, outside the usual H. C. L. and the deprivations of the 
 second shift, was good-natured wonderings when the union 
 officers were going to get down to business during their ses- 
 sions in Washington and make a report on a number of 
 points under serious discussion. 
 
 After I told my "gang leader" I wanted to quit, the news 
 spread and pretty soon some of my buddies were asking 
 me embarrassing questions. 
 
 "Why you queet ? . . ." "Where do you go from here ? " 
 etc. 
 
 I tried to dodge my Emil's bold "How much you make 
 when insurance salesman before war knocked you out?"
 
 148 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 No use, he kept after me. I had to think fast. If I 
 gave too small a figure he'd say I didn't talk (in spite of all 
 my efforts at bad grammar) like a man that earned so 
 little. Still I mustn't give too big a sum. 
 
 "Well," I said, "one year I remember makin' a little 
 over $2,000!" 
 
 It was all off. The sum was too large. The attitude of 
 Emil and the others changed immediately. "Oh!" said' 
 he, "putty soon you get beeg job. Den you send for me 
 for good machinist." 
 
 When later we drank a glass together I tried to re-estab- 
 lish myself as his helper, but to one who gets fifty-seven 
 cents for each of eight hours, and has to work seven days a 
 week to get thirty-two dollars and he only works every 
 other Sunday or so the earner of even an occasional $2,000 
 is out of his class. Still, it's pretty sure he would have 
 known I was a liar if I had named, say, $1,200. 
 
 Somehow my quitting always seems to be taken as a 
 sign usually the first sign that something's phoney about 
 me as an honest-to-goodness working man. That's odd, 
 because in many places other men are quitting or at least 
 just dropping out of sight. Maybe they just don't come 
 back and so avoid those questions about the future which 
 seem to lead to others about the past. But nothing at all 
 troublesome has happened so far, and the main thing 
 is that while I've been on the job everybody has been 
 friendly and frank, and treated me as the buddy I've tried 
 to be. 
 
 I'm sorry to be leaving the railroad work without helping 
 to push one of those big engines. But the boys tell me not 
 to feel too bad about it. "Say, on a good hot day goin' up 
 a hill, I'll tell the world a fellow's got to sweat some to 
 keep her coaled up ! And you have to watch you don't 
 get thrown out goin' round a curve, too." 
 
 Well, so long to the roundhouse and here goes for the
 
 A SECOND COAL TOWN 149 
 
 open-hearth or the hot-mill less grease but a lot more 
 sweat ! But grease or no grease, I think I love every eccen- 
 tric-rod and every dowel-pin of those handsome, big, digni- 
 fied giants of steel and steam.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE CIRCLE OF THE HIRING-GATES 
 
 IT seemed desirable to know conditions over a broad field, 
 even though that meant fairly frequent changes and more 
 railway travel than the usual unskilled laborer would feel 
 free to buy or willing to steal. In some cases it was evident 
 that a newcomer was distrusted as an unstable floater. In 
 others it seemed to be desirable to keep any kind of a 
 worker around against the later possibility of needing him 
 badly. 
 
 Irontown, 
 Wednesday, June 4. 
 
 It doesn't seem to be any joke this trying to get a job 
 in a steel-mill. Evidently it's going to take several more 
 weeks for the business to come back enough to please the 
 workers who were laid off shortly after the armistice. 
 
 At one time yesterday the employment manager or one 
 of his clerks was courteous enough, but helpless. 
 
 "You see, we've got thousands that have been laid off 
 for weeks. We're trying to take them back as fast as we 
 can. Some of those on the benches out there now we're 
 putting on again to-night. You might stick around for a 
 while and maybe we can place you." 
 
 The white-coated doctor also made it look like a nice 
 place to work, though the plant itself is far from pleasant 
 in appearance. But, as often before, the policeman spoiled 
 the impression. If he didn't have a whip in his hand or hi 
 his voice, he certainly did in his manner. He was letting 
 a group of workers, mostly foreign-born, into the waiting- 
 room, and when I asked if they were "takin' men on," he 
 
 150
 
 THE CIRCLE OF THE HIRING-GATES 151 
 
 simply motioned me to get in line. As they all had paper 
 slips I thought I was getting into the wrong pew, but there 
 was nothing to do except to follow his growls of injunction 
 to the bunch: 
 
 "Fill up them benches there!" 
 
 "Everybody keep in his turn!" 
 
 I felt still more out of place when a clerk read certain 
 names and numbers, but finally went in when my turn 
 came while the policeman sat and watched the crowd as 
 if they were so many western steers. 
 
 In the streets the talk from such as firemen and truck- 
 drivers, bar-tenders and mill- workers, ran: 
 
 "Sure, they shut down that is, almost. The men was 
 gettin' organized strong. Just about the time they begin 
 to think of talkin' turkey to the company, along comes the 
 company and puts the whole plant on less'n half-time. 
 
 "Why, we've got well over half of all the men in the 
 plant in the union, and we're ready to go out any time our 
 higher-ups will let us, and, believe me, we'll show the 
 managers some thin'." 
 
 "Da low men dey wan' a beeg pay. Dey joina da 
 union. Da beega pay fellers dey no like, and da beega 
 company men dey no like. I tink no go." 
 
 At another big establishment several hours down the 
 line it was the same story: "We're trying to take our old 
 men back as fast as the return of business will let us and 
 there are 2,000 of 'em off. But you might stick around. 
 You never can tell." 
 
 There was no policeman to spoil the picture, but the only 
 worker I talked with was far from happy. 
 
 "This? I'll tell you straight. This is a scab-hole! 
 We're gettin' the worst of it for fair workin' us only eight 
 hours at thirty-six cents ! And they ain't yet come through 
 with the back pay the arbitration committee awarded us. 
 They owe me over $170 on it this minute. But I'll prob-
 
 152 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 ably never see it. ... Naw, they won't join no union; 
 they're all after every other feller's job." 
 
 At another gate some scores of miles away the employ- 
 ment manager was sympathetic but, for the same reason 
 as the others, helpless. They are keeping their men busy, 
 but fear the necessity of partial close-down any minute; 
 are being hard put to it to find places for returning soldiers. 
 
 While I told my story of unsuccessful selling and urged 
 my qualifications, a group of hot-mill men came out, stop- 
 ping from work on account of the day's terrific heat. He 
 called after one of them with much meaning in his voice: 
 
 "Well, all right. But when you want to get some money 
 on that swell auto you bought last week, let me know ! 
 
 "Yes," he went on (I'll have to expurgate the expletives 
 and the tobacco-juice), "we've reduced a lot of men to 
 eight hours without increasing the rate of thirty-six cents 
 and it's pretty hard on them with the cost of living where 
 it is. 
 
 "Shop committee representing the men? Great success. 
 Nearly seventy-five per cent of all foreigners and of every- 
 body voted, and they surprised us by electing the very best 
 men in the place we couldn't have done better ourselves. 
 And they're ironing out grievances in good shape. . . . 
 
 "You're right; steel's a great game and has got a big 
 future ahead of it. But all the same, if I was you, I'd hike 
 back into selling. Nobody gets any chance to work up 
 around here from the bottom where you are. A lot of times 
 I've made notes on likely fellows I've seen come hi. But 
 by the time I'd got around to it again to give 'em a lift, 
 they were gone. It's no use. The machine's too big in a 
 place like this to work out any fine points like that. You 
 take my advice and try your old line again." 
 
 And he was supposed to be the champion of the human 
 interests in a plant employing not more than 1,300 men ! 
 
 I thanked him for his good-will and for the courtesy of
 
 THE CIRCLE OF THE HIRING-GATES 153 
 
 his telling me his own personal misfortunes, and walked 
 slowly away with my head down. The question in my 
 mind was this: "I wonder is there any connection between 
 his alibi for any promotion or transfer system and his evi- 
 dent desire to curry favor with the men by using the vilest 
 lot of profanity and obscenity I've heard in a long time? 
 Is he trying to make his personal popularity as a 'good 
 fellow' hide his inability to get a square deal for the chaps 
 he should be looking out for?" 
 
 After slinking off with a disappointed and hopeless hang 
 of my shoulders as long as he could see me, I turned the 
 corner and ran to catch the train for one of the country's 
 big steel centres a few hours away. 
 
 " Here's the situation," one of the employment clerks 
 there put it and a very able looking, kindly chap he was, 
 too. "To help win the war we jumped from well over 
 10,000 to over 30,000 men, with ninety-eight per cent war 
 work. Now we're below ten and no telling what's going to 
 happen. There are 2,000 of our men off who are supposed 
 to be paying us interest on mortgages we fixed up for 'em 
 ourselves. Naturally, we want to put 'em to work again, 
 but it can't be done unless we have orders. To-morrow 
 morning you'll see 500 men outside here, and we'll take on 
 as many as we possibly can. . . . Yes, at thirty-six cents 
 if they are common labor. But what can we do? The 
 company is losing money on this kind of operation as it is. 
 ... In a few weeks it may be worse or better. If you 
 drop back this way, you'll find me right here." 
 
 Questions around the town brought out that rents were 
 very high in their opinion (six rooms thirty dollars, three or 
 four rooms twenty) ; that many, many houses were vacant, 
 some of the men getting work in other kinds of plants under 
 the same management while others with mortgaged houses 
 had to stick around in hopes of a job some morning; that 
 the foreigners were hard to make stick in the unions, es-
 
 154 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 pecially if they had ever been "stung" by an unhappy 
 union experience; that certain Slavic peoples were the 
 worst " booze-fighters," and that "there'll be a lot more 
 drinkin' after July 1 everybody'll make it hisself." 
 
 Iron town, 
 June 5th. 
 
 It's not important because I'm not trying to find out 
 how I feel under these various conditions. But still, I find 
 it amazing to notice how depressed I get after even a few 
 hours of such job-askings with the drooping chin and 
 shoulders, averted eyes, lowered voice, and bad grammar 
 of the jobless man and such job-refusals as to-day's. In 
 between comes, of course, the very unpleasant knowledge 
 that people who pass me on the street turn to stare at my 
 old clothes and run-down appearance. After a day of such 
 walkings, askings, and turn-downs, it seems to take all the 
 will power I can muster to keep from feeling as down-at- 
 the-heel, hopeless, and generally useless and worthless as I 
 look. All the memories of years of interesting work, help- 
 ful friends and hopeful aspirations, seem somehow to grow 
 just as leary of me in my old clothes and hangdog ah* as 
 are the passers-by. 
 
 Equally surprising, too, is the way all these come back 
 and sort of shake me by the hand to make up again the 
 moment I get signed up for the job. So I'm sure I'll feel 
 better when I can happen to run somewhere into a steel 
 job in the next week or so of search. 
 
 Meanwhile I find myself enjoying the men in the smoking- 
 car, many of whom seem glad to tell the story of their lives 
 in terms of jobs: 
 
 "Well, my line'd be called 'special messenger.' F'r in- 
 stance, I'm sent by the express company to-night to see 
 that a carload of berries don't get side-tracked anywhere. 
 I'll probably find another man at the big station here, and
 
 S'S
 
 THE CIRCLE OF THE HIRING-GATES 155 
 
 he'll see it into N , and I'll go back home on the next 
 
 train. Once I helped through from Texas to New York 
 a train-load of spinach ! The express charge sure was a 
 lulu over $11,000! A delay anywhere in transit would 
 have ruined the whole biz. . . . Before I got into this 
 line? Oh, I sold subscriptions to an illustrated weekly on 
 the instalment plan to factory and mine workers. For- 
 eigners ? I should say the foreigners did buy it ! You see 
 they wanted the pictures even if they couldn't always read 
 the explanations or their kids read 'em for 'em. I'll say 
 I helped some to Americanize these fellows with those 
 weekly pictures." 
 
 But I've nearly forgotten to mention that before leaving 
 S - I talked with one of the chief organizers of the iron 
 and steel workers, by the name of Foster. He seems to 
 think he has his own troubles in spreading his local organ- 
 izers around enough to keep the different local unions 
 satisfied. 
 
 "They call me a radical, but I'm only anxious to get 
 somewhere; while all the old fellows say: 'Oh, yes, we've 
 tried to get the big plants too many times already ! ' Why, 
 if we could only get the heads of these other twenty-four 
 internationals anxious genuinely interested we'd have the 
 whole industry in a month !" 
 
 He gave me the impression of not being altogether sure 
 that he could interest them, and he was evidently surprised 
 to find so many workers joining the union in plants which 
 are reported happy and contented, adding: "Of course, 
 where the men have right wages, hours, working conditions, 
 treatment, and all that, and are happy, we ain't got a chance 
 with 'em." 
 
 He's a very quiet fellow of the intellectual type, partly 
 red-haired, mainly bald not much magnetism, and, I 
 judge, a poor speaker. His chief, Fitzpatrick, is big, mag- 
 netic, diplomatic, a wonderful speaker, and a splendid pre-
 
 156 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 sider. How far the two will go in the direction of their 
 reputed earlier syndicalist connections is a question, but 
 together they certainly look like heady, hustling, professional 
 organizers. Tighe, the president of the Amalgamated Asso- 
 ciation of Iron, Steel and Tin-plate Workers impresses one 
 as conservative, reliable, able, and well-balanced. I judge 
 he's not particularly friendly with the other two or with 
 the whirlwind campaign for members which has, as it were, 
 been forced on his organization through them. 
 
 "Foster grew up in Chicago hi a catch-as-catch-can sort 
 of way that made him an ' anti ' and would sure make any- 
 body the same," said a man who should know. "After all 
 sorts of unions had tried to organize the stock-yards work- 
 ers, always separately and always unsuccessfully, he came 
 along with the proposal of a sort of federated whirlwind 
 campaign idea. When the combined drive was organized 
 under the leadership of representatives of all the unions that 
 could find members in the yards, such as steamfitters, elec- 
 tricians, etc., he was made secretary. It worked. While 
 the packers do not deal with the unions, nevertheless a 
 great many advantages have been secured. At the St. 
 Paul convention of the American Federation of Labor it 
 was voted to use the same plan under the committee for 
 organizing iron and steel workers, with representation of 
 the twenty-four unions involved, and with, naturally, 
 Foster as secretary."
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 WITH THE BUILDERS OF SHIPS 
 
 "Shipyardia," 
 Monday, June 9th. 
 
 A man and a citizen again! A do-er and a be-er a 
 be-er because a do-er. I've got a job. I'm to be a builder 
 of boats for those that "go down to the sea in ships." 
 
 It seemed too good to be true this morning when the 
 policeman condescended to nod as I asked him, in the em- 
 ployment office, if they were taking men on. A little later 
 a straw-hatted young blood took my alias and "Cleveland, 
 0." for an address, told me there was no job for any "semi- 
 skilled," put me down as a helper, got my signature to ac- 
 cept the company's arrangements for accident compensa- 
 tion, and passed me out to the doctor. He soon had on 
 my chest his rubber gloves which protected him from the 
 touch of hundreds of skins but did not prevent passing all 
 those touches on to me. I think I'll go into quick con- 
 sumption if I have to take any more jobs and cough for all 
 the doctors as hard as he made me cough for him while he 
 examined for rupture. When he finished he said I must 
 have strained myself lately. I think I know when it hap- 
 pened under one of those engines. But he may be a crank 
 on such matters, from the way I heard him making other 
 poor fellows cough their heads off while I was dressing. 
 "Cough, I said! Don't you know how to cough?" he ex- 
 ploded as one chap, evidently much confused, made a sort 
 of dying gladiator gasp or intake instead of a cough. 
 
 The company's boarding-house makes a very good im- 
 pression. The beds look clean; with not more than two 
 
 157
 
 158 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 or three (all single) in each room. The shower-baths ap- 
 pear fine; the food for one meal at least has been quite fair. 
 Apparently the bed and board are well worth the charge 
 of ten dollars per week. 
 
 "Be here at seven- thirty to-morrow morning" is good 
 music for jobless ears. 
 
 Tuesday, June 10. 
 
 Have hardly done a stroke of work to-day, though I feel 
 just as tired as if the work had been hard and justified its 
 four dollars and thirty-two cents for eight hours. 
 
 It was a wonderful sight to see thousands of men pour out 
 of the trains from the city and flow into the gates and 
 through the time-clock runways, there to disappear in the 
 direction of the steel hulls which loomed up about the tall 
 scaffolds on the ways. After the policeman let us in we 
 were marched off to a room under one of the ten great 
 ways or hull platforms. There we were exhorted: 
 
 "Now, men, if any of you are anyways a-scary of scaf- 
 folds, now's the tune to say so. It wastes a lot of time to 
 assign a man to a job and then have him take one look 
 down to the ground and come back and want us to start 
 him all over again. . . . Well, then you're all game, are 
 you? All right, you foremen, take your pick." 
 
 I went off with one foreman and with two or three other 
 beginners, mounted the incline that took us to the noisy 
 and busy-looking deck of a steel monster. As one chap 
 came up, the foreman said, "Go with him. He ain't got 
 nothin' for you to do, but that's all right." Before I got 
 off, another and a more aggressive reamer came along and 
 took me with him. But I got only as far as a hole and a 
 ladder leading down below when he motioned me to wait for 
 him the noise of pounding and riveting made words almost 
 impossible. 
 
 When I began to look around I decided that many others 
 must have been advised to wait as I was. Although the
 
 WITH THE BUILDERS OF SHIPS 159 
 
 noise made it seem as if every man and boy in the crowd 
 covering the deck must be killing himself with overwork, 
 the eye testified that there were many idle hands. Two or 
 three hours later this was not so noticeable. 
 
 After I had sat there for close to an hour wearing an " I'm- 
 willing- to- work-and-only-waiting-for-my-boss" expression, he 
 returned and motioned me down the ladder. And there I've 
 stayed all day since, in practically solitary confinement 
 because the noise is so fearful that all conversation is out 
 of the question. Such din as a pneumatic hammer and a 
 few ship-builders can make in a small room almost com- 
 pletely enclosed in steel ! Luckily I found some cotton to 
 put in my ears, but even then it was deafening. And when 
 somebody up on deck would hit one of the steel flooring 
 sheets above us with a sledge, I'd jump with the sheer pain 
 of it! Meanwhile the boss had next to nothing to do; he 
 would sit for an hour like a bump on a log, then jump up 
 and ream out a few rivet-holes, then perhaps go up on deck 
 wearing for camouflage the air of a man who's on an errand 
 and be gone for another hour. When I would finally go 
 up to get a little farther from the din, he'd find me and 
 again motion me down below where I could do my loafing 
 less observed. Perhaps then he'd have me hand him some- 
 thing followed by an hour of nothing but observing how 
 the passer-boys picked up the red-hot rivets as they came 
 flying down from the heater-boy above on deck, and put 
 them into the proper hole, where, in an instant, the riveter 
 pushed them through and commenced hammering the hot 
 metal at first quietly as the rivet gave way and filled the 
 hole, then noisily as it cooled and the hammer came onto 
 the resounding steel of the plate forming the ship's side. 
 
 It seems the riveter inside, the holder-on, who opposes 
 the riveter with his hammer-gun on the scaffold outside, 
 and the heater-boy on deck divide $5.50 among them 
 (not evenly) for every one hundred rivets, and how they
 
 160 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 do work if the driver in my compartment is any sample ! 
 It's a pleasure to watch his energy and his muscles and 
 his skill in the handling of his heavy hand-tool. The 
 electric welder with his shield-glass before his eye is an 
 absorbed worker, too, though you can't look directly at the 
 beautiful light he makes. But you soon get tired of watch- 
 ing workers do exactly the same thing time and again, as 
 well as enjoying the strings of light where the sun shines 
 through the rivet holes or the shooting-stars of the hot 
 rivets. Strangely enough, in the midst of the worst noises 
 my ears ever had to stand, my greatest desire was to go to 
 sleep. This I didn't give in to, so that when my reamer 
 walked over in my direction I could rise with an interested 
 expression and then sit down when he winked and passed 
 on to sit on some softer plank behind me. 
 
 It wasn't so bad in the afternoon, but most of the morn- 
 ing there would be an average of, say, three men loafing in 
 our little steel-bound club-house to every five or six work- 
 ing. A big boss could be spotted by his shoes and legs on 
 the ladder, and an alibi appearance of activity arranged 
 before his eyes descended. On deck such soldiering would 
 easily be spotted. Personally I was at my buddy's elbow 
 whenever he was on the job, but counting all the tunes I 
 handed him a hammer or something, I think a liberal esti- 
 mate of my day's exertion in muscle would be five minutes. 
 But my ear-drums! they have had the busiest little day 
 of their lives, bar none. They have evidently kicked up 
 trouble about it, for my head feels as if a sympathetic 
 strike were on. 
 
 This noon, when the workers swarmed down from the 
 ways to eat their lunch hi every conceivable spot, a capable- 
 looking man of the American carpenter type told me how 
 things were going with him: 
 
 "Yes, I remember I was here five days before I found 
 anybody who really needed anybody to help him. I guess
 
 WITH THE BUILDERS OF SHIPS 161 
 
 those fellows want a helper so he can hand 'em dignity 
 mostly." 
 
 He was full of a more recent experience: 
 
 "Last week I got strapped for money. So I asked about 
 gettin' some of the money due me. Well, I signed this and 
 that, and went here and there and all over the yard accord- 
 ing to everybody's directions. When I got my money I'd 
 been firm' myself all this time it seems that was the only 
 way I could get it. So there was nothin' for me to do but 
 to take my money and coat and my dinner and go home 
 to loaf the rest of the day. Then Monday that's yesterday 
 I had to come down to that place they call the 'Service 
 Buildin" (huh !) and ask for a job and be rehired. And so 
 here I am again on a brand-new job to-day 'a if I'd had 
 never been here before. So you see I had to pay two days' 
 wages, or a total of nearly nine dollars, to get what was owin' 
 to me and all I wanted was a small loan just a part of 
 it, say fifteen dollars. Ain't that a devil of a note, now?" 
 
 To-night, when I came down to the ground from my steel 
 cell and the deck, I had no time-card to punch. The time- 
 clerks were greatly disgusted. 
 
 "Why didn't you go to the Service Building and get one 
 when you were told? . . . Why, of course you were told. 
 You must have been. That's the system. You've lost 
 your day now." 
 
 Finally it was arranged that I should get proper credit 
 at the office to-morrow. 
 
 It was about all I could do to walk home to-night at four. 
 But that shower-bath helped a lot. I'll hope to-morrow 
 will make it possible to say I've got work as well as a job. 
 I'm all in to-night for some reason I mostly suspicion those 
 ears. 
 
 Thursday, June 12. 
 
 It's a shame to do it after only two days of work, but un- 
 less I feel a lot better in the next hour or so I guess I'll have
 
 162 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 to quit instead of loafing around the next two days as 
 the doctor told me to do last night. 
 
 Yesterday, thank Heaven, there was less noise to stand 
 because of being assigned to an outside reamer. We stayed 
 up on a scaffold nearly forty feet above the ground, and 
 easily made sure to keep enough well-reamed holes ahead 
 of the riveter working inside the hull and our holder-on 
 there on the scaffold with us, something over forty feet 
 from the ground. 
 
 During the whole day the reamer had to be helped to 
 hold his machine for as much as an hour and a half, on a 
 liberal estimate. All the rest of the day I sat on the scaf- 
 fold with my back in a comfortable position, or climbed 
 into the shell where the sides had not been put on, and where 
 I could stretch out without being seen from below and still 
 be in call of my buddy. A good deal of the tune he was 
 there beside me. At other times it was interesting to watch 
 the men, with the help of the great tall church steeple of a 
 crane, pushing and crow-barring and sledging the long 
 girders into place for making the keel at the bow. 
 
 The reamer does seem to have an easy time of it. Why 
 he has to be assigned wholly to one gang alone, I don't 
 know, unless it is that sometimes the riveting gang might 
 need him badly for a lot of holes and let out a mighty 
 holler if they couldn't get him. Which they surely would 
 not hesitate to do, because every rivet means money to 
 them. It makes you almost weary to see 'em sweat. Be- 
 fore noon yesterday our gang hammered 417 rivets into place. 
 
 "Just think o' that!" said a foreman as he saw it. 
 "Them guys divvy up between 'em about twenty- three 
 dollars for that half day's work!" 
 
 Both the holder-on and my reamer were Lithuanians who 
 were beginning to look very much like young American 
 "sports," but in spite of their years here could speak ex- 
 tremely little English.
 
 WITH THE BUILDERS OF SHIPS 163 
 
 Along about three, eyes and head were aching enough to 
 permit a good chance to see what the company dispensary 
 would do to make me feel like standing up to my arduous 
 duties the next day. I rather expected to observe the same 
 methods as in an earlier plant where the doctor took my word 
 for it that I felt "cold-y and sore-throat-y " and without 
 taking any steps to confirm my home-made diagnosis, 
 gave me a horse-size dose of epsom and Jamaica ginger. 
 I had in mind, too, the army doctor who was reported to 
 have given eighty glasses of salts to the soldier boys who 
 marched past him after their temperature had been dis- 
 covered and reported by a lieutenant, and, in the flu epi- 
 demic, administered the dose to them all out of the one glass ! 
 
 But I could not have been given more consideration. 
 An assistant took my temperature carefully, counted my 
 pulse, and looked at my tongue. The only hardship I 
 suffered was to see another doctor pull off, in what I thought 
 was a heartless manner, the nail of a fellow-worker, assur- 
 ing him meanwhile in a jocular fashion: "Why, my boy, I 
 wouldn't hurt you for the world." 
 
 "With a temperature of 102 you aren't safe, and your 
 buddies aren't safe with you on that scaffold," the doctor 
 said when he got his assistant's report. "Take these pills 
 and loaf around for a couple of days. Remember, you can't 
 get back on the job until you get my 0. K." 
 
 This morning I can appreciate better than ever the tre- 
 mendous importance for evil and good of the close connec- 
 tion between our physiological health and well-being and our 
 psychological attitudes and feelings toward those around 
 us. By the time I got up to my room yesterday I felt 
 positively sorry that somebody, had not spoken to me hi 
 a way that would have permitted me to unload all the 
 vitriol that my aches and pains and fatigues had by this 
 time piled up inside me. I've no question but that many 
 workers who are either sick or doing hard work for very
 
 164 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 long hours day after day and month after month in order 
 to get more money, are more or less permanently in my 
 mood and therefore over ready to listen while the agi- 
 tator who usually has himself been through that same 
 thing directs all his vitriol against the industrial system. 
 
 Lying on my bed all last evening gave good opportunity 
 for a chat with my Polish roommate. Ever since he struck 
 this country, nearly ten years ago, he has been a heater on a 
 hot-mill, and a wonderful pair of arms and shoulders it has 
 given him. In fact he's as clean-cut a bundle of 175 pounds 
 of young manhood as any one could wish to see and he 
 gets my complete respect as he puts out the light and kneels 
 down in his B. V. D.'s by his bed for what must be a long 
 statement of his wishes to his particular saint. Life seems 
 to leave him a good deal to ask for, too: 
 
 "Nine year I work hot-mill, alia time same place. Work 
 stop dere. Stay two mont's wait alia time no job. One 
 mont' I try New York every day look for steel job. No 
 good. Wife she seeck last winter flu. Doctor he say she 
 no can live. Hospital she cost forty dollars week. Baby 
 come baby die wife she no die. . . . Now must work 
 here one mont' before catch money for first two week. To- 
 day I got one dollar. . . . What do all dees mont' I no 
 can tell." 
 
 And he can work here only three days a week, at that ! 
 
 Thursday afternoon, 
 June 12. 
 
 I think I've already mentioned the impression a fellow 
 gets that lots of paymasters seem to hate to give up money 
 after the worker has fulfilled his part of the bargain. 
 
 This morning I told the doctor that I had decided to 
 quit. After making two trips to the service department I 
 got my check-slip back with his instructions to get my 
 " termination notice" from the foreman for my money.
 
 WITH THE BUILDERS OF SHIPS 165 
 
 That gentleman did not believe my story about a letter 
 from my wife wanting me to come home: 
 
 "If I was to tell my boss I had such a letter and couldn't 
 produce it, he'd call me a liar, too." An extremely diplo- 
 matic way, I'd say, of calling me a liar which I was. 
 
 I objected that I had done everything the company 
 asked me, that it was my money and this a free country, 
 etc., but to no purpose. 
 
 The time-office clerks had treated me nicely the day be- 
 fore so I went hi and repeated it all. After the clerk had 
 said for the fourth time, "Nothing doing. You gotta wait 
 till pay-day. That's the rule," I started away, permitting 
 myself to remark, "Some system!" 
 
 It was delivered in good enough mood; any worker would 
 have said it, especially since there was no effort whatever 
 to show that the rule had any reason behind it. But the 
 clerk took offense: 
 
 "If you don't like the system you know d well what 
 
 you can do!" he shouted. 
 
 I smiled to myself and moved to the door. But as I did 
 so I could see every clerk in the room raise his eyes and 
 gaze toward me and silently give me the ha-ha of his scorn 
 and contempt. By the time I had passed them all and got 
 outside the door, these silent derisions from better-dressed 
 people than myself, sitting in the seats of might and man- 
 agement, had served to make me feel about two feet high 
 and therefore extremely hurt and mad. I wanted to go 
 back and land something on the jaw of my assailant for 
 he was a psychological assailant. But I reflected that all 
 my authority the whole machine of management was 
 on his side. So as I walked back for a final statement at 
 the Service Building all my anger directed itself toward, 
 not the time-clerk, but the whole establishment of which 
 he was a part. 
 
 Of course, any one can say, "Now be logical. That chap
 
 166 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 is only a small cog in the whole machine. The manager 
 would be sorry if he knew that he butted in," etc., etc. 
 But when a fellow's self-respect is smarting the way mine 
 was just then, logic doesn't get a ghost of a show, and from 
 that moment to this I've had no use for the company from 
 top to bottom and the doctor's heartless pulling off the 
 worker's nail looks now more representative to me than his 
 considerate taking of my temperature. Why should that 
 whipper-snapper of a pompadoured tune-clerk "bawl me 
 out" ? These paymaster offices certainly do roil my blood ! 
 I'm sorry I'm learning to swear it's very hard work to 
 keep from it right here. And the point is that I want to 
 curse the company as much as I want to curse that clerk 
 who uses the back of his head only to hold his hat on, but 
 who, of course, is bold enough to take refuge in that mock 
 bravery with which all the foremen and others who know 
 authority is on their side bolster themselves "Well, if you 
 don't like it you know what you can do." 
 
 "The petty tyranny of little minds in brief authority!" 
 My, but that makes me mad and I know from many 
 mouths that it makes numberless other workers no less so. 
 
 But to try to calm down and go on. At the Service Build- 
 ing the boy ultimatumed: 
 
 "You'll have to send hi your badge-check and we'll send 
 you the money if you can't stick around until pay-day." 
 
 "Well, here it is I'll leave it now," I said. 
 
 "No, that won't do; you must send it by mail like that 
 pile of them over there." 
 
 Yesterday it would never have occurred to me, but now 
 that I've met that time-clerk, I'm wondering if the com- 
 pany wants that check entrusted to the post-office in the 
 hope that it may stand a chance to go astray. 
 
 If that thought occurs to me, it's pretty sure to occur 
 with more force to thousands of my recent buddies and so 
 increase distrust.
 
 WITH THE BUILDERS OF SHIPS 167 
 
 I had hoped to get in a word about the process of ship- 
 building how the ore comes to the docks of a near-by 
 company, is passed from blast-furnace to Bessemer and 
 open-hearth and rolling-mill until it lies as a great steel 
 sheet cut to size and, still warm, ready to have holes punched 
 in it according to the pattern; how this sheet is then swung 
 overhead by the church steeple until it lies hi the right 
 place, say, on the deck; how men sledge-hammer "drift- 
 pins" in the holes of one sheet until they come near to fit- 
 ting those of the adjoining one, ready for the bolter-ups, 
 who proceed with their bolts further to hold the sheets in 
 place together as though with steel basting- threads; how 
 the reamers drill out the unevennesses of the corresponding 
 holes so that the riveters can get the large rivets through, 
 etc., etc. But, thanks to that important pompadoured per- 
 sonification of unpleasantness, I've no stomach just now 
 for such matters. 
 
 I guess I can be decent enough to say that the company 
 houses at twenty-two dollars per month, with free water, 
 seem very attractive with their six rooms and bath. 
 
 " That's because they was built before the war," said a 
 contractor. "These we're finishing now are no better 
 hardly and will have to fetch thirty dollars. Nobody but 
 rollers and men like that'll be able to live in 'em." 
 
 Perhaps I ought also to add that the ship workers look 
 to me like a rougher and also a younger set of men than 
 I've seen elsewhere possibly because it is a new and per- 
 haps short-lived industry. Many seem to be of the float- 
 ing type. Whether that is the cause of a pretty careless 
 management or the result, I don't know. I wish somebody 
 would tell me whether it's all hang-over from the days of 
 the "cost-plus" contract. That would explain why I am 
 to be paid, as I hope, some sweet day, something like eight 
 dollars for about ninety-five minutes of what might be called 
 work. But I'm not going to feel bad about it; the wear
 
 168 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 and tear on my ears on the job and on my disposition in 
 
 the pay-office makes the money seem perfectly well earned. 
 
 I'm only sorry not to have learned more about ship-building. 
 My grip is packed and I leave for pastures fresh and, 
 
 doubtless, pay-clerks ditto. 
 
 Atlantic City, 
 Sunday, June 15. 
 
 One of the most noticeable of all the high spots of this 
 annual convention of the American Federation of Labor is 
 the skill with which the body does its business. Mr. 
 Gompers, I would hazard, can hardly be excelled anywhere 
 in America as a presiding officer. He never lets the meet- 
 ing get away from him for a moment, and at the right 
 point seems to bring in the suggestion which clears matters. 
 He is certainly fair in fact he is said to follow the policy 
 of allowing the trouble makers so much parliamentary 
 rope that they generally succeed in strangling themselves. 
 For a man of his years he has a remarkably resonant voice. 
 To be sure, he has had lots of practice, having presided at 
 thirty-eight out of thirty-nine of the Federation's yearly 
 conventions ! 
 
 The delegates as a body appear to me almost as remark- 
 able as he. Their voices are much better suited to transact 
 business of this kind than would be those of, say, such a 
 group of representative business men as could be called 
 together by any national commercial organization. (I recall 
 one chairman at one such national convention not long ago, 
 whose voice and bearing made him a laughing-stock.) 
 And as for rules of order, this crowd has the whole country 
 beaten badly. Still better, most of them seem to talk pretty 
 good sense about their various organization problems. 
 Some of them are master statesmen on even such subjects 
 as the League of Nations. Naturally enough they feel very 
 strongly about the various issues because these touch very 
 closely their bread and butter; or if not that, then their
 
 WITH THE BUILDERS OF SHIPS 169 
 
 standing and self-respect as leaders. So they have that 
 high pitch of emotion and earnestness which are essential 
 to real eloquence. Some of them are said to take lessons 
 in public speaking, but others who have been attending 
 these conventions for years because of their position at the 
 head of one or other of the internationals, appear to get 
 enough practice to make them past masters in the influ- 
 encing of the crowd. 
 
 As a body, too, I must say that the delegates are a su- 
 perior-looking lot of men and women. Naturally they rep- 
 resent a great amount of sifting about 600 out of a total 
 membership claimed to be over 3,000,000. Of course, a 
 very large proportion of these millions seldom go to the 
 local halls to debate or to vote, and as a result many of the 
 leaders have stayed in influence year after year, even though 
 the rank and file may have passed to other opinions. 
 
 The executive committee appears to have large powers 
 and is apparently made up of the very strongest men in the 
 whole group of leaders in all the various unions. It is al- 
 ways made plain, though, that this body has no powers 
 whatever to control the actions or the policies of any of the 
 111 national and international unions composing it, unless 
 these specifically give such power to the central body, as in 
 the case of the arbitration of a dispute between two or more 
 member organizations, each of which, for instance, claims 
 jurisdiction over some new group of workers. I imagine this 
 point is missed by the many who think that Mr. Gompers 
 and his associates at the top should be expected always to 
 compel the action of the 111. On the contrary, each of these 
 has an autonomy which extends much further than, for 
 instance, that of the 48 State governments. Furthermore, 
 any attempt to override this self-government of the 111 
 constituents might easily mean the withdrawal of the of- 
 fended group, and with it the cutting off of the per capita 
 membership fee without which the Federation cannot do
 
 170 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 business. To that extent, therefore, each of the 111 has 
 the larger body in its power. 
 
 It certainly looks as though this executive committee had 
 a lot of knotty problems assigned to it for both study and 
 final decision later by the votes of the delegates. But, so 
 far, the decisions as brought in by them and by the com- 
 mittee on resolutions appear to get the 0. K. of the conven- 
 tion amazingly. Whenever they are questioned, a mem- 
 ber gets up like John P. Frye of the moulders, Mathew 
 Woll of the engravers, or William Green of the coal-miners. 
 After he has stated the different steps that led to the de- 
 cision, there seems to be nothing further to be said, and the 
 vote goes through in support of them and their recom- 
 mendation. 
 
 Over at one table in front have been gathered the radicals 
 from the West, especially the Pacific coast, with red-haired 
 " Jimmy Resolution Duncan," of Seattle, in charge. They 
 have tried all during the two weeks to put through this or 
 that radical resolution to change Labor Day to May 1; 
 to allow a referendum whenever five per cent of the members 
 of the union desire; to place the hiring and firing of their 
 foremen in the hands of the workers; to recognize Bolshevik 
 Russia, etc., etc. Regularly all the votes go against them, 
 and regularly they get up to charge that the powers that be 
 are standpatters, reactionaries, and conservatives who have 
 outlived their usefulness. Most of the social-service work- 
 ers and such guests at the convention agree with them, but 
 I can't help thinking that these critics read into the minds 
 of the millions of workers who have at least theoretically 
 elected these delegates, a lot of desires and demands which, 
 personally, I have not yet been able to find there. For the 
 most part, that is, it seems to me, these workers have got 
 only as far as these leaders have themselves got namely, 
 to the point of wanting to put their feet the feet of their 
 representatives under the same table with the plant heads
 
 WITH THE BUILDERS OF SHIPS 171 
 
 and then negotiate, or, as they say, bargain, for better 
 wages and hours and working conditions. After that at 
 some distant time, maybe, they may want more, but why 
 bother about that now? Just now and for a long time 
 to come they are all more interested hi getting a vested 
 interest in the job than in the plant or management, general 
 misunderstanding to the contrary notwithstanding. 
 
 11 As a matter of fact," Foster, the organizer for iron and 
 steel workers, is reported to have said, "even after we get 
 'em into the union we have to do a lot of educatin' to get 
 'em to caring even about such things as the eight-hour 
 day." 
 
 Secretary of Labor Wilson gave a good plea for conser- 
 vatism, evidently intended to back up Gompers. " Let's 
 hold what we have before we fight for more." 
 
 "If our red friends were to win their way in this conven- 
 tion," said John Frye, "wouldn't some of our employer 
 friends who'd like to see us all shot at sunrise, be sighing 
 for the good old days of conservative Sam and the rest of 
 us, though ! We're for evolution, not revolution." 
 
 "Why, if regular Wall-Streeters were down here," said 
 one of the highly educated "innocent bystanders," "they 
 wouldn't do a bit different from these standpat leaders!" 
 
 But I find it hard to believe that "Sam" doesn't know 
 very well where he came from and where he and his beloved 
 "labor movement" are getting to. All of them certainly 
 make no bones of saying in the presence of the "fraternal 
 delegates" from England and Canada that this "move- 
 ment" of theirs has done immensely more for the worker 
 here than has the "movement" in any other country, bar 
 none. 
 
 One big underlying divergence of opinion is as to the 
 craft union or the industrial union. Of course no attention 
 could be paid to the radical resolution "that the A. F. of L. 
 be reorganized away from the craft and onto the industrial
 
 172 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 basis." That would mean disbandment and play directly 
 into the hands of the I. W. W. or the "One Big Union." 
 At the same time, the present craft basis seems to make 
 the jurisdictional disputes unavoidable (as when the steam- 
 shovel men become the electric-crane men following the 
 electrification of their jobs), and these do take up a lot of 
 the convention's time. Then, too, how can an employer 
 deal with "the union" when that may mean dealing with 
 twenty or more different and more or less quarrelsome and 
 jealous unions? Progress toward the industrial union is, 
 however, being made by the success of such as the "miners," 
 which includes everybody working in the mine, and by the 
 formation of "departments" in the A. F. of L. in which 
 all the related fields try a little harder to work together. 
 For instance, the four big printing-trades unions are now 
 arranging to have then* contracts with the employers all 
 begin on the same day, and in partnership with the employer 
 associations to hire an expert to find the cost of living as 
 the basis of the yearly and industry-wide wage adjustments. 
 
 Inasmuch as this organization of all the workers into one 
 body, without respect to craft or function, is the basis of the 
 French Syndicalism and the American I. W. W., it is pro- 
 moted mainly by the radicals. The present plan of the 
 more intelligent of these, however, is said to be to try to 
 take the A. F. of L. as it stands and change it gradually 
 by "boring from within." This is said to be the purpose 
 of Foster with what truth no one seems to know. He 
 and the chairman of the committee report here that after 
 ten months of then* joint campaign to organize iron and 
 steel workers, they have secured 100,000 members! And 
 now rumors have it that the heads of the iron and steel 
 workers unions are fearful that the success of the plan will 
 put these former and perhaps present syndicalists into 
 control of their conservative unions. 
 
 Altogether it might look as though a steel company
 
 WITH THE BUILDERS OF SHIPS 173 
 
 might well consider dealing with any union that would 
 follow the conservative leadership of such as head the 
 moulders, the miners, the printers, and others; going, as it 
 were, to their defense against their highly active and highly 
 radical enemies. But, unfortunately, the group of steel 
 manufacturers who are already dealing with the Amal- 
 gamated Iron, Steel, and Tin Plate workers are at this very 
 moment finding it most difficult, up at the Marlboro- 
 Blenheim, to come to any satisfactory agreement for the 
 year ensuing. In fact, they have been on the point of 
 breaking off negotiations entirely, following what they 
 claim to be attempts on the part of some of the union's 
 officials in some of the local communities to break earlier 
 agreements as made on a national basis, and otherwise to 
 demand changes seriously hurtful to these manufacturers. 
 I am told, also, that the Amalgamated's president acknowl- 
 edges the difficulty he has in getting all his local chapters 
 to see the importance of a line of conduct such as will make 
 more and more employers want the union's advantages 
 and that for that reason he regrets the sudden methods of 
 the special campaign which will give him a still larger body 
 of members whose conduct will be all the harder to control. 
 
 So until the employers who deal with a union are able 
 to give recommendations following their actual experience, 
 there seems nothing to do but await with courage the com- 
 ing of the campaign's forces, meanwhile remembering the 
 words of Foster: 
 
 "Sure, where the men are getting good wages, right hours, 
 good conditions, and are generally happy, we organizers 
 can't do nothin' with 'em." 
 
 It is also worth remembering those other words from him 
 and some believe him a real expert on mass psychology: 
 
 "In steel and iron where men work together in big bunches, 
 we can get everybody to strike even though we have only 
 ten per cent the most important and leading ten per cent
 
 174 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 with us; but we want 'em all and we won't do nothing 
 till we get at least thirty per cent." 
 
 If you ask Foster what he'll do when he gets his thirty 
 per cent all ready to strike what he'll ask for, he says: 
 
 "That's not my business. I'm only an organizer. I've 
 got no programme or demands except that I want the 
 twenty-four co-operating unions to give more organizers 
 to work under me and then we'll soon be ready to turn 
 things over to the boys who have got the demands ready." 
 
 Well, the convention assuredly makes it look like a real 
 " movement" much too real and too complex for an ob- 
 server to expect to know very deeply or widely about it 
 without much more study and experience than has been 
 vouchsafed to me. On the other hand, it certainly is too 
 real and too large and too serious-minded and capable 
 to permit most of us to go on assuming that it is unsafe 
 and un-American to speak or know anything about it. It 
 seems to me certain that it would help some toward indus- 
 trial equilibrium if a larger number of employers would 
 drop into the public very public sessions of the con- 
 vention next year. There seems to be no secret sessions 
 unless it may be those of the executive committee, which 
 I doubt. Furthermore, it would seem highly proper for no 
 employer to take as representing the union's attitude the 
 unreasonable dictum of a local business agent without giv- 
 ing the national heads a chance to pass on it. Most of 
 these certainly give the impression of sincerity as well as 
 reasonableness and ability.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 FOR a few days following the convention life was a sort 
 of chameleon affair with a day of job-seeking in old 
 clothes followed by a day of white-collared attendance at 
 a conference or two conferences where it was desirable 
 though extremely difficult to keep silence when matters 
 were discussed which touched closely on the field of my cur- 
 rent experiences. 
 
 One of the old-clothes days was spent in an Eastern city 
 where all the steel-plants seemed exceptionally well organ- 
 ized for giving the applicant exceptionally good treatment 
 and consideration. Altogether, the courtesies shown were 
 such as could only make the seeker after a job keenly sym- 
 pathetic with the employment manager, who seemed himself 
 in all cases extremely sorry that, on account of "dull times 
 in steel," he could not hire more men. In one case the 
 clerk came out onto the street and showed me the way to 
 another plant, with the hope, evidently sincere, that better 
 luckinight be with me there. 
 
 Since then it has been very interesting and gratifying to 
 learn that that particular city enjoys the reputation for a 
 minimum of labor trouble. 
 
 Finally, but the diary tells of it sufficiently: 
 
 Tankton, 
 July 4, -. 
 
 All things considered, the hardest and worst job to date, 
 and the closest shave yet, also, from being fired from it. 
 Also the closest to being laid out by the combination of 
 
 175
 
 176 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 job, sun, and foreman and to being brained by the last- 
 named. So I'm thankful for being alive and still on deck, 
 though by a narrow margin. 
 
 "We don't take on no helpers," the employment clerk 
 assured me at the gate of a great oil refinery. "Everybody 
 starts in the labor gang and works up. Come around to- 
 morrow and we'll probably take you on." 
 
 The next morning they were asking every applicant 
 about his citizenship: 
 
 "You say thirty-five years hi this country and no papers ! 
 You should be ashamed. There's no job for you." 
 
 Then to the next: "Them papers is all right. Will you 
 take labor job? . . . Well, I guess you don't want to 
 work or you'd speak up. How about you, Mike?" 
 
 Finally six of us were started off under the lead of a chap 
 who had worked there before, and who said he had once 
 had a fight with the boss for whom we were now headed. 
 Before we had gone far he had to coax along four of the 
 party, who seemed to have no taste for this particular boss 
 or department. Another hundred yards and both he and 
 the four dropped out and started back another way, leaving 
 a stranger who had joined the party and myself to continue 
 two finishers out of seven starters. 
 
 He had worked hi the plant thirty-one years before at 
 the age of eleven ! He had many remarks about the old 
 days when "Right there we used to raise Cain with the 
 apples in a big orchard, and now see that big building. 
 Don't it beat the devil? 
 
 "Sixteen years I sold vegetables but you had to give 
 too much credit, and it busted me. Nowadays it takes 
 too much money $400 to look at a horse and wagon!" 
 
 We had hardly given our names and got our numbers, 
 lockers, and aprons of coarse sacking, before we were sent 
 with others to report to the "pitch house." There the 
 trouble began, at least for me. The gang's job was to fill
 
 IN AN OIL REFINERY 177 
 
 barrels with pitch, pass them by two men who nailed the 
 hoops in place, and then roll them into position hi the 
 storage yard. Hour after hour hi the hottest sun of this 
 summer my job was to roll every barrel hundreds of them, 
 each weighing about 500 pounds over the rough gravel; 
 then, worst of all, to "bung it up" turn it and twist it 
 and tug it into its place, always with its freshly inserted 
 bung up to prevent leaking. The job is no snap for a be- 
 ginner and his bare hands there is a lot of knack hi it which 
 no one can get the first day. When my temples began to 
 drum hard and my mouth to fill full of cotton so that I felt 
 a few minutes in the shade might barely save me from sun- 
 stroke, I asked my Polish foreman about changing places 
 with one of those hi the shade at easier jobs. In a surly 
 voice I was refused any change and any rest the barrels 
 would pile up and stop the line even as I spoke. Just as I 
 was about to say "Thank God" from the bottom of my soul 
 for the arrival of four o'clock I heard the boss say "Over- 
 tune to-night, boys!" as if he were handing out candy! 
 Luckily the sun grew a little cooler, and finally, too, he gave 
 another worker to help, and both of us were kept busy. 
 
 At five I learned that all overtime work is optional, so 
 I knocked off and stumbled, almost too exhausted to walk, 
 up to the very handsome shower-baths and wash-basins. 
 A shower certainly would be splendid after such a day. 1 
 found that the soda furnished in place of soap hurt my 
 hands where the skin had been torn off by the sharp barrel- 
 ends, and would not remove the tar sufficiently to let me 
 either take my shower or wash my face. After a long time 
 with the burning soda I went down and called to my boss, 
 "Where's some naphtha?" and showed him my tar-covered 
 hands. 
 
 "Aw, you don't get no naphtha here you'll have to go 
 home that way," he shouted, and then jeered at me. "Say, 
 how did you get that way, you poor fish !"
 
 178 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 It was too much for my sore-tried muscles and frazzled 
 nerves. After cursing him and regretting that my inex- 
 perience made it less effective than I wished I asked him 
 in anger: " Where's your boss so I can report you to him?" 
 
 As I went back, covered by his jeers and curses, a fellow- 
 worker of Slavish birth took pity and directed me to a pail 
 of naphtha in the shanty the boss's shanty! 
 
 I have seldom been so done up in my life as that evening 
 and, because of that and poor sleep that night, took a 
 bad lot of feeling with me into the plant the next morning. 
 Most of the tune I was paired off in rolling some heavy 
 barrels up a steep incline into the freight cars with an igno- 
 rant Italian who knew not even the commonest words in 
 English after ten years here ! After some hours of it my 
 weary nerves let go and I lost my temper when his igno- 
 rance made the barrel go wrong before the eyes of the gang 
 and the boss. 
 
 "I can't work with that man !" I cried out. "He knows 
 nothing. I try to use my head to make it go straight and 
 he spoils it all!" 
 
 "Hain't I told you," roared the boss, "that you ain't 
 supposed to use your head around here ! Muscle's all we 
 want. Put your muscle into it!" (This after his yester- 
 day's efforts to teach me to "bung-up" by using my head.) 
 
 All day it got more and more on my nerves to have him 
 continually order us about as though we were slaves. 
 "Hey, there, you !" and since he knew none of our names 
 because we were all new to him, we had all of us to look up 
 "Yank that big skid over there! Come on, come on, 
 let's go ! " Or if any one made a move to do something with- 
 out being told, "Hey, what you up to, huh? Well, you 
 wait till I tell you to," followed a half-hour later by, "Say, 
 won't none of you fellows make a single motion right with- 
 out me bein' here to tell you?" 
 
 Finally as his wrath turned on me once more for some-
 
 IN AN OIL REFINERY 179 
 
 thing, I fairly saw red. If a weapon had been handy I 
 think I would have used it, even at the cost of a lifetime's 
 regret. As it was, I turned on him with the strongest curses 
 I have ever dared even to think, much less to utter, in all 
 my life. I was desperate, tried beyond endurance by his 
 slave-driving combined with a sore throat, the hard work, 
 and the scorching heat, added on to the preceding day's 
 fatigue and bad treatment. I expected to be knocked 
 down. To my utter amazement, and also that of the gang, 
 he said nothing. 
 
 I felt better for being a rebel for the rest of the turn, 
 but he was preparing his come-back. At four he said: 
 
 "You and I don't seem to get on together. I can't fire 
 you, but this note will let me lose you, and you can mebbe 
 get a chance in another department." 
 
 Saturday the department superintendent heard my story 
 most considerately, expressed regret for the dirtiness and 
 hardness of the work and for such bad bossing, said he would 
 help me get into another department, as he "could see I 
 looked more intelligent than most of 'em," and he "believed 
 in helping even the newcomer to get on." So I'm to report 
 to-morrow to a cool and clean-looking place where heavy, 
 filled barrels are all over the place. But I can hustle them 
 all right if I'm not insulted as a dog every fifteen minutes 
 and made to feel that I'm keeping a perfectly good mule 
 out of a job. 
 
 The foreman certainly is the holder of the worker's life 
 and future, and he certainly is in most of the places I've 
 been far from being what he should be in any world that 
 has been made anything like safe for democracy. Here's 
 hoping for a decent one to-morrow. 
 
 Tankton, 
 JulyS. 
 
 Life is worth living again ! I've got a decent foreman 
 and so a bearable job.
 
 180 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 When I found him yesterday a little before seven, he 
 gave me a careful ''up and down" and decided I'd do for 
 weighing the empty barrels, which our crowd fixes up ready 
 to be filled and shipped. 
 
 "You see these scales are marked for regular weights 
 and also for kilos." (He pronounced it "kylos.") Now 
 see if you can read that in pounds. . . . That's right. 
 Now in kylos? . . . You've got it and I'll tell you which 
 weights is to be stencilled onto the barrels as they come. 
 Now take that brush and see if you can work the stencil. . . . 
 
 My G , . . . no ! That won't do. . . . Here Jim, give 
 
 me that knife to rub it out ! Now again and lighter, for 
 the love o' Mike ! There, that's 0. K. Now we're ready. 
 Hey there, you fellows, let them barrels come and don't 
 be slow about it!" 
 
 There was no time just then to see what it was all about, 
 but there certainly was, on the instant, a din of hammering 
 and banging and rolling that soon put a barrel onto my 
 scales with another one waiting before my awkwardness 
 succeeded in getting the right "regular weights" painted 
 on it. And so it kept going nearly all day, with mighty 
 little let-up except for a couple of hours when we were all 
 taken over to another building where we took fresh-made 
 and unpainted barrels down from their stacks in the big 
 warehouse, twirled them onto the runways by which they 
 finally got down onto a big barge that took them out to a 
 ship for later use at some other plant. 
 
 I've come to have a lot of respect for the humble barrel. 
 It's really a wonderful thing. That bulge hi its centre 
 makes it possible for an expert to do 'most anything with 
 it some of the boys were almost magicians with 'em. Of 
 course, the biggest thing is that, when filled, the barrel can 
 by this bulge be set upright or turned hi this or that direc- 
 tion with an ease that is impossible with a bulgeless drum. 
 I guess drums would sure enough have killed me or made 
 me kill that foreman last week.
 
 IN AN OIL REFINERY 181 
 
 By " rubbering" when the barrels run a little slow, I 
 could see that the fresh-coopered ones came over from the 
 warehouse, passed through a paint vat, were placed on a 
 runway that landed them before the chap who ran the 
 machine to make their bung-holes of the exactly right size, 
 then were flipped from one man to another until their ends 
 were stencilled with the company name, brand, destination, 
 etc., and "Tare. . . ." 
 
 I'll never forget that "Tare. . . ." That was where I 
 had to mark my weights after a line of boys had nailed the 
 hoops right and my buddy had shoved the completed barrel 
 toward me. As quick as I could steady it, read the flicker- 
 ing hand on the dial and stencil the right number, I gave it 
 a turn to roll down an incline to the filling room, where the 
 full weight and number of gallons were put on by some 
 other chap. By others it was rolled into the shipping-room 
 or else onto the boat for New York or Antwerp, Copen- 
 hagen, Buenos Aires, or some such place. 
 
 The gang boss is a young Irishman, who seems friendly, 
 besides being active and knowing his job. He gets the 
 work out of all of us successfully and without ruffling us 
 much perhaps because he doesn't ruffle us much. 
 
 One boy did say: "Yes, he's better'n most, but at that 
 he yells too much." 
 
 The yelling seems to be because he doesn't take the 
 trouble to learn our names. So he has to yell in order to 
 attract everybody's attention, and then point to the man 
 he wants. When he's right near and yells loudly, the chances 
 are he's yelling at somebody farther away, but if he yells 
 loudly and suddenly) it may very well be yourself that's in 
 very bad and you look up in a good deal of fear and trem- 
 bling. As a matter of fact, I guess everybody looks up 
 every time he yells so as to be on the safe side, which comes 
 pretty close to stopping the whole process in order to help 
 him single out his men.
 
 182 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 So far nobody has asked me my name or used it if he 
 had it. That seems a big mistake. It took me a year 
 once to change my New York hotel because the clerks 
 at the old place had power over me they knew my name 
 and used it to the limit; and the clerks at the new place 
 didn't. I don't know any place where this ancient power 
 of the name can be used to more purpose than in a gang of 
 workers. The men seem to know all of this in a sort of 
 reverse-English way. Several of them have spoken of their 
 gang bosses: 
 
 "Yes, he's one of the best in the place he don't yell 
 hardly at all" or the reverse. 
 
 For a long time all the boys around and the boss, too, 
 let me know they thought I was pretty slow in marking my 
 barrels and pushing 'em along. 
 
 Once I asked one of the youngsters nailing the hoops on 
 to do it. He did show speed ! But I noticed that he never 
 looked at the scales! 
 
 "Oh, sure, but that takes too much time when you want 
 to mark 'em fast !" 
 
 Another of my would-be instructors put it: 
 
 "When-a da boss come yell at you, always make out 
 like-a you was deef. . . . Neva mind about da scales 
 mark 'em on as dey come on a da stencil except when-a da 
 boss he come by. Now you follow me I make-a you learn 
 fine." 
 
 Still another who had had experience was willing to be 
 an instructor without charge: "Watch your scales and be 
 damned quick about gettin' the right weight on when you 
 can see the boss out of the corner of your eye. Otherwise, for- 
 get the scales and take it easy." 
 
 I've had almost no instruction on any of my jobs from 
 the bosses they've been too busy or else they or their 
 bosses didn't think it was worth the time. But, Jimmy ! 
 I've had a lot of it from my buddies ! Only most of that
 
 IN AN OIL REFINERY 183 
 
 has been to help me get by with as little personal effort and 
 discomfort as possible. I'm inclined to think if they had 
 been given a little more attention for interesting them in the 
 job, they wouldn't be such down-hill teachers of the fellow 
 like me. It looks like the sex-hygiene question it isn't a 
 matter of instruction or no instruction, but of good instruc- 
 tion or bad. 
 
 Along that line here's what a sixteen-year-old told me 
 yesterday at lunch-time: 
 
 "I didn't get in the first tune. I lied about my age, and 
 they was onto me. But the second time I got by. Before 
 I came the second time I was a few weeks at the shipyard. 
 But J - ! they was too many ambulances there ! A wire 
 rope was always droppin' on somebody and breakin' their 
 head or somethin'. Why, they hired about 200 men every 
 mornin' because 200 would be quittin' after hearin' the 
 ambulances for a half day. I had a friend who saw an 
 accident hi his first five minutes and he walked down the 
 scaffold and out immediately. Yes, I got a good boss now. 
 Sure, he swears like h - at you, but only when his boss 
 is around and he winks at you while he does it. ... Sure 
 I do a lot o' soldierin'. I'd say I can loaf most of the eight 
 hours in one way or 'nuther. . . . Nope, I quit school a 
 year ago. . . . My mother she's dead." 
 
 My buddies on last week's job report feeling about that 
 murder-provoking foreman just as I did. Last night 
 brought me onto one of them a fine upstanding Irishman, 
 with as strong a face as I've seen in a long time. We had 
 a regular reunion. 
 
 "Oh that . Thank God, I've been transferred 
 from him, too. You didn't know that I had cursed him to 
 his face a few days before, and so had all the rest of us 
 just as you did ! . . . Sure, he took it. If he'd made a 
 move I'd 'a' smacked his - - mug. ... Of course, he was 
 rubbin' it in to us new guys he gave all the easy jobs to
 
 184 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 his pets. But then he handles everybody like slaves. Why, 
 a week ago he works us and works us, tryin' an' pryin' to 
 push an old rusty car down the platform. We pushed and 
 we swore and we just sweat blood makin' that fool car 
 move twenty feet fer an hour. And then when we was 
 about done fer, and we figgered he'd give us a bit of a 
 spell, what did he do but say, ' Hey there, you slobs ! Give 
 us a little action now ! Shake 'em up and we'll make up 
 for all that lost time!' Now can you beat the like o' that? 
 Why, for two cents we'd 'a' mobbed him." 
 
 Which reminds me that last week I remarked to that 
 same boss hi a half-joking kind of way how "the com- 
 pany'd make a million if they put concrete here instead of 
 gravel, because they have to pay more for the harder work 
 it makes pushin' these barrels on it." 
 
 "Say, young feller, you're hi the wrong pew here," he 
 answered. "They want bright boys like you over to the 
 head office; you're too good for this. . . . But as long as 
 you're here, just grab that barrel and rustle it over the 
 gravel and into that car and be - quick about it, 
 too." 
 
 If ever I run across a foreman who asks me if my doing 
 of the actual job gives me any hunches that would save 
 other men's labor, or the company money, and then nods 
 his head and thanks me for my suggestion well, the shock 
 will probably be fatal. 
 
 Tankton, 
 Tuesday, July 9th. 
 
 To-day has certainly been an example of the figure Mr. 
 Strawboss cuts hi all this matter of the job and every day 
 makes it look surer that for the wage- worker the job, hi 
 turn, cuts the biggest figure of anything in life for the 
 wage-worker and, I guess, also, for every one of the rest of 
 us, for that matter. (In England and on the continent the 
 job perhaps counts less because a larger proportion of all
 
 IN AN OIL REFINERY 185 
 
 kinds of people expect to earn their living in one way, and 
 then live their real life in another.) 
 
 We were all on hand before seven, ready to begin chasing 
 "them barrels" across the scales and down-stairs as usual, 
 when the gang boss announced: 
 
 "Nuthin' doin' to-day around here, boys! All hands 
 come along with me." 
 
 All but one stuck even when the employment manager 
 asked, after we had been lined up before him in his shanty: 
 
 "Now, if any of you fellows want anything better than a 
 labor job, say so now and quit, because 'labor's' all I got 
 to-day." 
 
 So we started off over to a great field where big tanks 
 were being erected. When our particular six got to the 
 job, there was a general explosion: 
 
 "Me stand there in that mud all day and shovel with 
 them 'wops' ! I'll tell the world I won't ! Not me !" 
 
 "Say, look at that guy in the mud there to his knees! 
 Wow, not for mine ! Come on, I'm goin' home !" 
 
 "How you gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've 
 seen Paree, " yelled another derisively, and we all headed 
 back to the shanty to get our lunches and quit. 
 
 But a well-built and likable young returned soldier boy, 
 without any hat and with light, curly hair and a friendly 
 smile, saved the job for us by starting another current: 
 
 "I don't need money any worse'n that chap, but I did 
 jobs worse'n than that hi the army so I don't see why I 
 shouldn't here. Where's a pair of them boots?" 
 
 Another, a very wiry, good-looking, and generally up- 
 standing Pole, confessed "No like but gotta catch monee." 
 
 Up to that point it had looked as though I would be 
 treated with contempt if I stayed, but with these I was, 
 with decency, able to throw hi my lot. The soldier had 
 saved our "faces" for all of us. While we three got into 
 our hip-boots, the other three, with much profanity, took
 
 186 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 off their working-clothes and pulled out of newspaper 
 packages their street pants and shirts (some of them almost 
 as torn and soiled as those they took off), and soon struck 
 off for a day's loaf. It was hard for the others of us to feel 
 sure of our self-respect in taking a job so distasteful to our 
 buddies until they and their taunts were well out of sight 
 and sound. As a matter of fact we felt, I'm sure, a good 
 deal degraded as we stomped down to the mud-hole in our 
 huge boots, our long shovels in hand. 
 
 "If the company's got eyes, Buddy," argued the soldier- 
 boy, "they'll mark it up against them fellows for side- 
 steppin' this work and give us a long mark for tacklin' it. 
 Say, mebbe they're doin' it to test us!" 
 
 I wish I could believe he was right, but I doubt it. 
 
 When we settled down to the work we found it not bad 
 and there's where the foreman comes in, as I started out 
 to say. He was a black-haired, red-faced Italian who 
 spoke seldom but kept his eyes open. He put us three in 
 a line where the Pole was down lowest in the mire oozing 
 up at the side of the great tank which had slid into the 
 marsh. From the Pole's shovel I caught the segment of 
 clayey mud on mine and, using my thigh for a fulcrum, 
 hoisted the heavy stuff to the soldier, who hoisted it hi 
 turn from his boards up to the pile where two overtalkative 
 and slow-moving Italians wheel-barrowed it away. And 
 Mr. Foreman or Gang Boss let us have all the time we 
 wanted. In fact, the soldier and I were given an easy pace 
 by the Pole, who certainly showed no awe of the boss. 
 Only one thing we could not do: we could lean on our 
 shovels to our hearts' content and gaze off at the sky-line 
 or toward an occasional aeroplane, but we must not sit down. 
 This rule seems to be general among bosses, and many 
 workers will not give him a chance to find 'em at it. When- 
 ever possible I have tested it and usually found it drew a 
 call-down. Here it brought a gob of mud from the boss,
 
 IN AN OIL REFINERY 187 
 
 followed by a firm but decent call-down, and, finally, on 
 the second offense, a threat of firing. 
 
 Where men are being paid for purely muscular energy, 
 the wisdom of this prohibition is certainly to be questioned. 
 Surely an occasional " spell" or sit-down could be permitted 
 in a way that would secure a bigger day's work for the 
 company than the usual day of unbroken, but extremely 
 low-speed effort especially if tried with a higher type of 
 gang boss than seems common. There is mighty little 
 reason to be afraid of trying this miner's system of hard- 
 work-and-hard-loaf instead of the common half-work-and- 
 half-loaf because it may smack of the new-fangled "scien- 
 tific management." The idea is a very old one in this 
 country. Away back hi 1650 it seems that heavy canoe 
 loads of furs were brought down the Great Lakes from 
 Mackinac Island and such trading forts by crews who pad- 
 dled hard for a certain distance, and then, on the call of 
 "Pipes! Pipes!" rested and smoked for a few delicious 
 moments and so made long runs with the minimum of 
 fatigue. Without doubt, that plan came as the result, not 
 of theory, but of experience. 
 
 Even when this boss was near we three new ones took 
 our time, and it's a certainty that all of the thirty or so 
 other shovellers did. When we could not see him from the 
 corner of our eyes, we all let down a notch or two in our 
 "delivery" and increased the frequency of our arm-on- 
 shovel-handle loafing. Many times as I loafed I noticed 
 that every single shovel was similarly poised and motion- 
 less. 
 
 But even at that, we did a good day's work as such things 
 go, and moved a lot of mud and the point is, we did it 
 without friction, without being yelled at, and with the feel- 
 ing that we were being given good attention; as for instance, 
 by the ice-water boy when it grew warm. But I think the 
 boss's easy, quiet way was responsible for the general good
 
 188 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 cheer and for my surprise, too, at this moment, to find 
 myself a chap whose self-respect is less hurt by the mud 
 than by many foremen's curses, and whose shoulders and 
 arms are not sore, in spite of handling all the ooze and stuff 
 the husky Pole passed up to me. 
 
 Perhaps I ought to add that some of the good cheer of 
 the gang was at my expense. Evidently a full beard sug- 
 gests to this bunch of buddies more a goat than a human; 
 all morning and occasionally after dinner "baa-baa" kept 
 going from one side to the other of the acre-big marsh. 
 WTien not otherwise employed, I waved my hand to show 
 the lack of any hard feelings, and to my near-by shovellers, 
 mostly Italians, made an alibi for the cause of the fuss: 
 
 "You see, me father's English, but me mother she was 
 French, and the French are great for beards. Yes, I parlez- 
 vous and si-parla a little." 
 
 So far the beard has at least made everybody think I'm 
 either foreign or queer and in either case has given suffi- 
 cient reason for my being in the labor gang. And no 
 American-born who is not thought queer or overthirsty 
 will be seen there day after day or week after week without 
 having his purpose suspected and his ability to get answers 
 to his questions thereby ended. So the beard has helped. 
 
 The day's restings and walkings from the plant to the 
 field gave many chances at conversation: 
 
 The Soldier: 
 
 "After two years of savin' the country, it's tough to come 
 down to this. . . . I'd try to get back my old job before 
 the war but I ain't so strong as I was then. . . . Naw, the 
 army life weakened me. We got plenty o' sleep and the 
 work wasn't bad. But the eats, I'll say they was fierce 
 I dont' want any more army life in mine. . . . Prohibition ? 
 'Course there ain't no kick yet. A fellow can still get 
 beer, and, if he knows the barkeep, the other stuff, too. 
 Nobody wants the hard stuff in hot weather, but just you
 
 IN AN OIL REFINERY 189 
 
 wait till the cold nights come, and then if they can't get it 
 there'll be some holler!" 
 
 Thomas, the colored man (heavy set, mustache, sensible 
 face, good voice) : 
 
 " Yessir, in lots o' companies we'd 'a' been laid off to-day 
 and otha men hired for this job. " (He went off with another 
 group to a second job on which only half stayed.) " Durin' 
 the war was the great tune heah a man got lots o' over- 
 time; sometimes a fella could work two shifts if he wanted 
 to, and many's the time Ah got double time for Sundays. 
 The war was shuah a great time foh money if a fella could 
 stand the wo'ak. . . . No, Ah don't like this Saturday- 
 afternoon-off idea. Ah wants work and mah family 
 shuah wants it foh me." 
 
 "Slim," also colored (a good barrel-rustler, with his long 
 arms and willing disposition): 
 
 "Color line? Why they ain't no color-line around heah. 
 Dey treats a black man fine the best place Ah evah worked. 
 If any boss calls you 'niggah' you reports him, and if it's 
 true, out he goes. Ah been hyah a year now with good 
 wages and steady work all but six weeks when the labor 
 strike was on at the Junction, and dey couldn't handle no 
 moah freight from us." 
 
 Later he and I walked to the street-car past the line of 
 sisters of charity and begging men displaying their withered 
 or missing arms or legs as the workers from one depart- 
 ment folded their two weeks' pay into their pockets. 
 
 "It's sumpin' fierce!" exclaimed Slim. "Every pay-day 
 dey's all hyah wantin' some o' youah good money. Befoh 
 yo' gets outa hyah somebody shuah to say every pay-day: 
 'What's youah numba?' 'What foh yo' wants ma numba,' 
 yo' asks 'em, 'n dey say: 'Well, the boss's or the super's 
 motha done died and we wants fifty cents from everybody.' 
 And he gettin twice and moah as much's yo' gettin' ! And 
 cou'se yo' gotta give it, too. S'fierce ! . . .
 
 190 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 "No Ah ain't takin' no cah to-day but Ah reckons Ah 
 will to-morrow when we gets paid. Ah done run shoaht 
 dis time 'cause de kids done woah out two pairs o' shoes 
 befoh Ah'd expected 'em to mah pay check foh two weeks 
 runs about fohty-seven dollahs after takin' out five dollahs 
 foh a Liberty Bond. Dat's pretty good for a regular eight- 
 hour job. But, no sir, a fellah doan't want to give many 
 fifty cents to nobody outa that leastways not when he 
 has to buy shoes 'n everything for his family dese days. . . . 
 S'fierce, this beggin'." 
 
 I would have walked the mile over to the car line with 
 him except that he joined some friends. The car service 
 is so bad that most of the thousands of workers walk very 
 long distances, and therefore have that much less energy 
 for their labor jobs, besides having to add, most of them, 
 I'd say, close to two hours for coming and going on to the 
 eight hours required for making their living. 
 
 With the help from the shower-bath here at the "Y" 
 (fifty cents a day I just had to take it that day after the 
 other boss and the heat nearly killed me) I'm feeling sur- 
 prisingly fit, but bed looks pretty good all the same. And 
 though he was a very good foreman as foremen go, and 
 made a decent job out of his mud-hole, still I hope we'll 
 have orders enough to keep us busy with some more of 
 those barrels to-morrow. 
 
 Tankton, 
 July 10. 
 
 Every day makes plainer the wisdom of studying the 
 gang boss and keeping an eye out for him with the zeal so 
 many of my companions have shown and have constantly 
 urged on me as a beginner. After all, he's the man that 
 counts. Right or wrong, it's his say-so that makes the 
 day into heaven or hell and the future rosy or rank. If he 
 hasn't eyes to see a certain line of performance which you 
 figure good, you might as well let it go; it will get you no-
 
 IN AN OIL REFINERY 191 
 
 where. If some other line of action seems to make a hit 
 with him, go to it, and go to it strong. 
 
 To-day my soldier-buddy of yesterday's mud-hole had 
 the job of ushering up the barrels to the scales we were 
 all tickled, when we got busy at seven, to learn that the 
 day meant barrels instead of boots and shovels. He was 
 inexperienced and he had to do a lot of running back and 
 forth, stooping the while he pushed and rolled his charges. 
 All morning he kept going so did I, of course, but with 
 less wear and tear. By noon his " tongue was hanging out," 
 and we agreed that the slow shovelling of the day before 
 was less exhausting. He had spoken several times to the 
 boss asking for another man to push the barrels part way 
 to him but had got no satisfaction. His neck ached, he 
 said, "bad enough to kill a horse." He seemed to me a 
 hard worker, and a willing one; as I saw it, he was a little 
 too conscientious in giving a lot of small pushes instead of 
 a few big ones. 
 
 At the noon-hour the boss and I fell into conversation, 
 and I kept my promise to speak a word for my hard-pressed 
 Jerry. I was amazed at the reply: 
 
 "That fellow ! Why he's a loafer, that's all he is. He's 
 lyin' down on his job, and if he don't do better I'll have to 
 let him go I told him so, too ! " 
 
 When I argued that all he needed was a little more 
 "know-how" and would be worth a little instruction that 
 he was taking it too seriously and running and stooping too 
 much, I got nowhere, or rather, I quickly found I stood a 
 big chance of getting in bad myself. So in amazement I 
 saw I could do nothing, and let the matter drop. Which 
 one of us is right, I don't know. But I do know that his 
 opinion is the only one that counts. 
 
 It seems plain, too, that in many, many cases the best 
 will in the world is not enough or at least is not quick 
 enough to overcome a man's inexperience in time to pre-
 
 192 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 vent the boss's marking him down as a shirker. And when 
 once that mark has been made it is too often so hard to get 
 it rubbed out that the worker finds that he might just as 
 well live up that is, down to it. I'm sure, too, that lots 
 of workers start in by really caring, by having the want-to 
 spirit. But the effectiveness of this is, of course, largely 
 lessened by the lack of skill in the job, by the lack of the 
 know-how. By the tune this lack has been ended under 
 the ordinary boss's training (or lack of it), the man has 
 the know-how but has lost the want-to, and the situation, 
 on the whole, considering the best interests of both the com- 
 pany and the man, is worse than it was at first. At any 
 rate, whenever I've been the victim of an experienced but 
 careless automobile mechanic, I've always decided that my 
 own inexperience, tempered by my desire for results, would 
 have done the engine less harm than the expert's know-how 
 tainted by his lack of interest. 
 
 I "mind me," also, of the days back there on the open- 
 hearth. By the time I got so I was pretty handy with the 
 shovel and could make the dolomite stick on that fiery and 
 shimmering white cliff of the furnace's back wall, I had 
 been cursed so much hi the presence of my friends that I 
 was too ashamed and mad to use my skill effectively. After 
 a few days this would, I presume, have worn off if my 
 month had not then been up. But I wager that many 
 workers quit at just exactly that point to the saving of 
 their own "face" and self-respect but to the company's 
 loss. 
 
 "Naw, I ain't married," another boss said a few days 
 ago. " I can't see nothin' in that. And some of the women 
 are such fools. . . . W'y last fall I was visitin' a sick friend 
 who had to have the room so dark you couldn't see nothin' 
 at least he couldn't and what does the nurse do but 
 come and sit on my lap and I never seen her before ! 
 When my line of talk stopped sudden-like she fair took my
 
 IN AN OIL REFINERY 193 
 
 breath away my sick friend he asks what was the matter, 
 and I pushed her off as decent as I could and started on 
 again with what I was sayin'. They make me sick ! Give 
 me a good boxin' bout or a cock-fight. I used to belong to 
 a club that had swell affairs of that sort. Sometimes they 
 began at one o'clock in the mornin'. That's the life ! No 
 women and no booze for mine !" 
 
 Some of his unrepeatable stories seem to support my 
 growing belief that the absence of the finer social delicacies 
 of conversation and conventionality among the uneducated 
 means the levelling of a wall which serves to protect the 
 morals of the more polite part of modern society to a degree 
 we are not likely to appreciate unless we know both groups 
 well. Still others of his tales give good support to another 
 of my observations along this line of human relationships 
 namely, that one result of long hours and the fatigue and 
 overwork of manual laborers is a lessened interest in the 
 moral relationships within the bounds of wholesome matri- 
 mony and a proportionately heightened interest in the more 
 challenging and exciting conquests outside. Almost every 
 day seems to bring confirmation of the belief that, es- 
 pecially among the workers who find in their work compara- 
 tively small chance for the moral satisfaction of "getting 
 on" and "counting" of self-respect there is vastly more 
 psychology in their morals or, rather, their immorals, than 
 has been heretofore appreciated. If that is true, the im- 
 provement of working hours and conditions could be ex- 
 pected to bring an improvement or at least a chance for 
 an improvement of the workers' morals. But more of 
 that later especially if I get any more confirmations like 
 to-day. 
 
 Education is, apparently, understood by all the workers 
 to have a lot to do with the quality of the job and the op- 
 portunities for "getting on." 
 
 "Aw, I didn't care nothin' about it. I wanted to get
 
 194 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 doin' somethin' to earnin' money ! I got through the 
 eighth grade," say nearly all of the barrel-hammering lads. 
 Very few of them claim they had to stop, and none expresses 
 any regret. 
 
 It looks as though somebody's doing a poor job of per- 
 suading these youngsters to any desire for any large amount 
 of education. And still, as I say, they seem to feel, unlike 
 my cold-roll buddy there in the sheet-mill, that there should 
 be a connection between a good education and a good job. 
 This afternoon in a moment's pause I was telling one lad 
 that I stuck through high school. He shot back at me, quick 
 as a flash, with great scorn: 
 
 "And then you're here workin' in a factory!" 
 
 The local " Y" advertises throughout the plant its classes 
 in a variety of practical studies. I'm inclined to think their 
 enrollment is likely to depend on the number of times the 
 boys are able to observe the foreman promoting those who 
 take them. Otherwise such effort is sure to look like fancy 
 stuff. 
 
 The " Y" also sends the song leader and the accompanist 
 who plays on the little transportable organ noon-hours one 
 day a week in each of the various departments. That gets 
 good results. Last Monday the bosses and the boys sang 
 well, besides making every late-comer take off his hat and 
 join in on the familiar tunes. Later, all the boys kept sing- 
 ing at their barrels far into the afternoon. My buddy 
 propped up the printed words on the little barrel where he 
 sometimes sat, and in between rollings of barrels he would 
 turn 'round, lean down, and, beating the tune with his 
 hand, sing the words from the sheet. It certainly made us 
 all better workers. 
 
 Tankton, 
 July 11. 
 
 Barrels, barrels, and more barrels, thousands of barrels 
 chasing each other over my scales and past my stencil and
 
 IN AN OIL REFINERY 195 
 
 brush so it has gone all day, except for the time taken to 
 go over to the doctor's for examination. 
 
 He surely does give the genuine article. He has a right 
 to, for that matter, considering that the company gives 
 substantial life and health insurance and other advantages, 
 based on length of service, without asking any contribu- 
 tion from the men. After a long wait (at fifty-three cents 
 per hour) my turn came to join two others in his office, where 
 we were told to strip. After we took our turns in giving 
 our pedigree and genealogy, the doctor gave us each the 
 most thorough and careful examination imaginable. When 
 he was through, my card read " Class A-l, fit for any kind 
 of work." 
 
 "Yes," said one of the two young clerks, "quite a num- 
 ber just turn and walk out when we tell 'em to strip and, 
 of course, that's the last we or the company sees of 'em. 
 But mostly they make no kick. Once in a while we make 
 somebody go and be operated on for instance, for rupture 
 itoefore we'll take him on, but he sees the point and is stronger 
 for it. 
 
 "Lots of times, too, the boys are in trouble, and we try 
 to get 'em to quit the quacks and follow good advice. Only 
 yesterday we tried to do that with a young ex-soldier, and 
 all he did was to get mad and walk out and off the job. 
 Too bad; we wanted to help him." 
 
 My memory recalled the very rough journeyman roll- 
 turner back there in the sheet-mill last winter. I had been 
 afraid he would spot me up to the moment when he turned 
 to me at the boarding-house table and said: 
 
 "No, siree, I wouldn't stay there if I had to have a doctor 
 lookin' me over. That's all right, y' understand, for these 
 here hunkies and for'ners but it ain't nothin' for self- 
 respectin' workin' men like you and me." 
 
 The number of such "conscientious objectors" or of 
 overmodest ones could probably be made still smaller if
 
 196 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 only one worker was allowed in the room at a time, with 
 one instead of two clerks. It could not have been pleasant 
 for the big colored boy to hear his particular disease named 
 for the clerk's record in the hearing of us all. It would 
 help, also, if the booklet explaining the insurance were not 
 handed a man after he's been examined, with the words: 
 
 "It's somethin' like that, I think. Anyway, you can 
 read all about it in this booklet I haven't read it yet myself" 
 
 But speaking of barrels, barrels "Hey there! Push 
 along them barrels!" Before and after the examination I 
 stood all day before the scales like a painter in his studio, 
 black brush hi one hand and brass number-stencil for a pal- 
 ette hi the other. It certainly is monotonous. But I can't 
 make out that that makes it particularly disagreeable in a 
 way, rather the opposite. I find I can get the right weights 
 painted on quickly and still think of many things or, what 
 is more to the point, think, if I try hard enough, of one 
 particular line or train of thought and arrive somewhere 
 with it, too. I'm not sure that my fellow-workers occupy 
 then* minds that way, but if they don't it is partly because 
 they don't mind the monotony and partly because they're 
 given comparatively little that's worth thinking about. 
 I'm inclined to think that the boys would give more last- 
 ing attention to worth-while stuff put in their minds, say, 
 by company movies or by near-technical problems than 
 I would, because there would be fewer other competing in- 
 terests. Those songs last Monday, for instance, kept going 
 on the boys' lips nearly all the afternoon. Perhaps, too, 
 a plant paper or magazine could definitely plan to stimulate 
 some of the men's thinkings while at work, by occasionally 
 publishing them. Few would complain at all about the 
 monotony, I'm sure, if all were encouraged to give a sympa- 
 thetic foreman suggestions for improving the process, and 
 then were made to feel that this would be tied up with an 
 active, well-planned system of recognitions for promotions
 
 IN AN OIL REFINERY 197 
 
 and transfers. It is monotonous work plus lack of oppor- 
 tunity for personal recognition that makes a bad combina- 
 tion, so far as I can judge. 
 
 This is the kind of thing the workers' committee should 
 tackle after it has got some of the easy things out of the 
 way and long before it gets around to meeting only once 
 in several months, as a member tells me it does here. 
 
 To all those workers here who know anything about this 
 committee plan, the big thing seems to be the protection 
 it gives a man against the unfair boss: 
 
 "If he says 'get outa here,' you just go to your delegate 
 and he lays the case before the committee." 
 
 This testimony supports my observations that the steadi- 
 ness and the security of the job are second only to wages. 
 In that case much of the advantage of the committee must 
 be offset by the company's frequent mention of a long list 
 of causes for which men may be discharged without notice 
 and without appeal. 
 
 Nothing but the non-enforcement of this list would give 
 any one the slightest security or permanency, with com- 
 mittee or without. As a matter of fact, these rules are not 
 enforced, and the foremen are able apparently only to send 
 men back to the hiring office for transfer, as in my case. 
 Current rumor says, too, that the company plans to pay 
 well above the prevailing rates of wage. 
 
 On the whole the company would pretty surely be chosen 
 by any worker who spent, say, a week in the town sizing up 
 the various employers by talking with the workers in the 
 saloons and elsewhere and such conversations are sur- 
 prisingly numerous. Whether it is conscious of it or not, 
 every corporation has a pretty definite character given it 
 in the small talk of the working community. The surprising 
 thing is how generally this character agrees with the one 
 given the same company by those having big commercial 
 dealings with it. Time after time I find a poor employer
 
 198 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 has the reputation of an inefficient or a slippery business man, 
 and vice versa. 
 
 This evening we got our pay and it covered time up to 
 three days previous. As we came out past the mute ap- 
 peals of the sisters and the mutilated begging workers and 
 children, there seemed a surprising amount of generosity. 
 
 Except for the absence of whiskey the corner saloon seems 
 still very busy. It is certainly the worker's club. I 
 imagine the same group gets together more or less at the 
 same time. But, hi any case, the foot on the brass rail is 
 sufficient introduction to any other member with whom 
 you are free to introduce any subject you please, especially 
 if the liquid stuff is "on you." I notice, though, that the 
 club dues are continuous, unless the barkeep is too busy, 
 or asleep at the switch. This evening, for instance, when a 
 group got so busy talking that they were slow in getting 
 their repeat orders in, Mr. Barkeep would gather up the 
 glasses at what he thought proper intervals to represent 
 due rental for the space they were occupying on the brass 
 railing, and, with the emphasis of a switch of his towel 
 across the wet bar: 
 
 " Which is it, gents, large or small, light or dark?" 
 
 And they knew they had to give the right answer or break 
 up their party. 
 
 Birch beer is on draught and is very good. Maybe it 
 will help make the whole scheme possible after the ban on 
 the other drinks is enforced. On the whole, it is to be hoped 
 so. The news is that one reason for the growth of the 
 I. W. W. on the Pacific coast is that that organization has 
 been live enough to fit up clubs which, in the absence of the 
 saloon, attract the lumberjack when he comes to town 
 attract and finally enlist him. 
 
 Perhaps the I. W. W. keeps going because its programme 
 supplies some of the excitement formerly supplied by old 
 John Barleycorn. Most of the bone-dry votes at the
 
 IN AN OIL REFINERY 199 
 
 A. F. of L. Convention in Atlantic City came from the red- 
 headed Western delegates. As one chap put it, the day 
 before the Fourth: 
 
 "How the devil are you goin' to celebrate without any 
 booze?" 
 
 He was the same one who lifted his hat whenever a breeze 
 came during those broiling afternoons with: "I'll be hanged 
 if that ain't almost as good as a schooner o' suds." 
 
 It looks as if more thought should be given to arranging 
 for the new saloonless conditions perhaps not so much with 
 patent substitutes of an entirely new sort as with the ex- 
 tension of some of the others, such as the soft-drink em- 
 porium, the neighborhood athletics with daylight saving 
 the movie, the club, the school, etc. 
 
 A few days ago, by the way, a half-drunken sailor and I 
 got together by means of the bar's free masonry. He was 
 still proud of his strong right arm and his general huskiness 
 as an able-bodied seaman, but: 
 
 'No, never go back to old home hi Norway. . . . My 
 mother yes, to her I could talk and she understand. To 
 brothers and sisters no, to them I could not talk . . . no, 
 not even in fine suit of clothes. . . . You see in all twelf 
 year since in all that time never do I say one word with 
 good, decent woman. Something gone" putting his hand 
 to his heart "something gone here." 
 
 Well, I wonder how I'll be handled when I try to get the 
 money due me on those three last days so that I can wan- 
 der on to pastures new. That seems to be a pretty good 
 test of an employer. 
 
 Tankton, 
 
 July 13th, 1919. 
 
 A plum to the pay-master's department ! It met the 
 test very well, and the money was shortly in my hands, 
 just as if they thought I had earned it. 
 
 Chanced last night onto the red-haired, small-faced but
 
 200 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 husky-armed Pat who worked in the gang at the " Pitch- 
 house." Says he: 
 
 "Yes, O'im still with that boss because a friend o' mine 
 tells me he'll soon have a good place with him. But Oi 
 will say this if me woife hadn't died an left me wid a kid 
 to look after, Oi'd be hanged if Oi wouldn't take the chance 
 o' twenty years in the pen for brainin' that slave-driver. 
 Why, that man ain't human, he ain't an' he don't deserve 
 to live alongside o' humans not he." 
 
 So before leaving to-day I told the super's man in rough 
 language that I seriously believed, both from personal 
 experience and from general testimony, that this boss 
 would hi all probability some day be killed by some worker, 
 driven, as I was, to desperation. His answer was amazing 
 that that was outside his field! He said I would have to 
 see his chief which I didn't have time to do. Why should 
 I give two hours to saving the man's life ! I suppose I'll 
 never know if my prophecy comes true. If it does, it may 
 give pleasurable occupation to the plant policemen. A 
 good many of them look as though they'd be happiest 
 when most strenuous in the use of their clubs. No wonder 
 that the rawhiding foreman sticks on the job if any official 
 side-steps hearing about him that way. 
 
 But, on the whole, the place would be considered pretty 
 much as a man, who looked like a fairly successful skilled 
 worker, put it last night down on the beach after his in- 
 telligent dog served to open conversation: 
 
 11 A job there is 0. K. If you make good they're pretty 
 likely to notice you and push you along. I had a chance to 
 go there fifteen years ago. Sorry now I didn't take it. 
 My friends who did have good places now. Furthermore, 
 everybody there's got a job six days a week if he wants it 
 and no fear the company's goin' to blow up before pay- 
 day. . . . Now at that company over there," pointing to 
 a near-by shipyard, "I wouldn't take a place a friend of-
 
 IN AN OIL REFINERY 201 
 
 fered me. 'Your main job,' he says to me, 'is to dodge the 
 boss.' Then he tells me just how to look out for him, and 
 just what others I was to walk away from and keep out of 
 sight of. That's no business for an honest man. I couldn't 
 see it besides, I guess it isn't goin' to last long now." 
 
 From that we passed on to dogs and the way they be- 
 have according to their feelings, just like people: "Well, 
 after he bit the baby I had to get rid o' the pup, and I tried 
 to do it without bein' unkind to him, you understand. 
 But when he come back to the house again one day, I just 
 told him plain that he was yellow, and that I never wanted 
 to see him again. Well, that dog just turned and walked 
 away, and after that when he'd be runnin' by and I'd speak 
 to him, he'd kinda stop and give me a stony look, you know, 
 and go on again as though he'd never seen me or heard o' 
 me." 
 
 It is a constant surprise how the wearing of worker 
 clothes or, maybe, it is the thinking of worker thoughts or 
 the feeling of worker interests seems to make it easy to 
 enter into such conversations conversations which go with 
 surprising quickness to the heart of matters. Beginning 
 with the dog or the job, it seems very shortly to come 
 around to the son just back from war, the daughter just 
 married, or the sickly wife, and then on to the disappoint- 
 ments or the triumphs of the past and the dreams of the 
 future. And that "heart of matters," wherever found, 
 always seems very human and very normal once its diffi- 
 culties are understood and very wholesome. 
 
 I wonder what interesting group of humans my lot will 
 be lined up with next. 
 
 Shoptown, 
 July 16. 
 
 The fine red-tiled buildings and the handsome fence 
 made me expect good treatment as I started through the 
 artistic iron gate of the huge steel-plant. As often before,
 
 202 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 under the same circumstances, the plant policeman broke 
 up the picture ! He started to close the big gate in my face, 
 and to save his breath waved me back. In order to make 
 him pay me the compliment of something besides signs I 
 stood my ground till he finally shouted: 
 
 "Over there ! Over there ! Can't you see? Over there, 
 to the door!" 
 
 When I went in and with proper humility asked about a 
 job, he sent me across to a little brick shanty where another 
 but younger, fatter, and more agreeable policeman sat 
 sweating and meditating in his uncoil ared shirt-sleeves, 
 while his capacious tummy tried to overflow the boundaries 
 of his khaki trousers. 
 
 "We've nothing I know of," he said when he had heard 
 my story, "except the labor gang and there's no use 
 you're takin' that because you won't stay in it it's nothing 
 but 'niggers' and the lowest foreigners. 
 
 "You say you're married and kids? Well, now, the 
 head of the forge department was lookin' for a boy, but 
 mebbe you'd do." 
 
 He called him up, gave me a good "rep" over the phone 
 and asked him to send over a boy for me. Before he ar- 
 rived I observed how like a jail the small room was, where 
 applicants were supposed to wait, separated from the police- 
 man by a cell-like, iron-mesh door. 
 
 Though I tried my best, the foreman could not be per- 
 suaded to let me substitute a high-school education for 
 actual experience in figuring temperatures, etc. 
 
 On the way back and out it was thrilling to see the huge 
 steel forgings of various weights up to sixty and more tons 
 being heated in the furnaces built especially for them, or 
 being forged into huge, compact, hexagonal shapes at the 
 colossal hydraulic presses while the men up in the cranes 
 skilfully engineered them back and forth across the mam- 
 moth anvils.
 
 IN AN OIL REFINERY 203 
 
 At a near-by machine-shop a policeman interrupted his 
 jollying of the girls passing out it was five o'clock suffi- 
 ciently to answer, " Nothing till to-morrow at eight. Yes, 
 we're taking men on all right." 
 
 Inside, one of the clerks stopped to hear my question 
 and then carefully and coolly looked me over from top to 
 toe before vouchsafing: 
 
 "Can't say whether there'll be a job or not, but you be 
 sure to be here at nine o'clock. . . . No, I can't say, but 
 you be here and we'll see." 
 
 In the corner saloon the bartender referred my question 
 to a customer who was a boss in the steel company. 
 
 "Well, if you're skilled, the machine-shop's the best, 
 otherwise the steel-plant. But you've got to turn up at 
 both places hi the morning nothin' doin' at this time o' 
 day. You be there in that room by the gate, at seven to- 
 morrow, and we bosses'll come down and look over the 
 bunch and take on any one we need. That policeman you 
 saw he can't do no hirin' not he. . . . Yep, they're 
 about 2,000 men workin' now. The startin' rate for labor's 
 thirty-eight or forty cents. But the hirin's all up to us 
 bosses, don't forget that." 
 
 Such arrangements for so large a company in these days 
 seems to justify the bad reputation which this same com- 
 pany's main plant had among the working population back 
 
 at S , and which its national officials seem to have 
 
 among steel manufacturers. 
 
 Such arrangements or lack of them of course, favor 
 the doing of the day's hiring at one specific hour. Where, 
 as seems sometimes to happen, this hour is the same for 
 most of the plants in the locality, the seeker for a job must 
 try hard to guess which one offers the best chance for him, 
 because after he waits at one gate for that hour he has lost 
 his chance for the entire day at all gates. So far, I have 
 found it practically impossible to learn from any one at
 
 204 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 any gate any idea as to the probable comparative chances 
 of successful results from the wait. All urge, "No, I can't 
 say but don't fail to be on hand." 
 
 It is a certainty that the men who day after day guess 
 without success the proper gate and so continue jobless, come 
 closer to being Bolshevists than any others not yet signed 
 up on the society's rolls. It looks to me as though the em- 
 ployer who nowadays opposes any kind of State or inter- 
 state employment bureau, and insists that the ideal situa- 
 tion is the one by which he can find fifty men outside his 
 gate every morning for every five or ten jobs, is asking the 
 country to let him play with matches where the tinder is 
 dryest. 
 
 "Comrades, listen! Thousands of men are now out of 
 work. Now quick, before they get jobs, is the time for us 
 to get their attention for our gospel. Fill out the cards 
 with their names and we'll do the rest" was the appeal 
 of the secretary of the Bolshevist-Socialist group there in 
 Steelville last spring. 
 
 I'll wager that secretary had himself waited at many 
 gates and knew what he was talking about.
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 IN THE IRON-MINES 
 
 JUST when should iron be called steel or semi-steel? 
 This question seems to have bothered the experts a good 
 deal. Certainly the workers themselves in the plants use 
 the words almost interchangeably, as has perhaps been 
 noticed in earlier pages. 
 
 But, in any event, the time spent in working with ore 
 and "pig" and "metal" in the open-hearth or "soft iron" 
 in the sheet-mills creates a curiosity to see the district in 
 which the whole process starts with the removal of the ore 
 from the ground. A temporary return to white collars 
 soft permitted a glimpse of one's family and a slight vaca- 
 tion during the trip up the Great Lakes. Down the great 
 highway these afford, travels each year the huge flood of 
 something like 60,000,000 tons of the yellow "dirt" needed 
 for the strengthening and the building up of our industrial 
 and commercial structure. 
 
 At the head of the lakes it was easy again to don the 
 unshaved countenance of the man that needs a job, and 
 again to ask and observe and especially to listen. 
 
 The Iron Ranges of Minnesota, 
 July 25th, 1919. 
 
 It is easy to believe that the Minnesota iron-ore develop- 
 ment, unlike, for instance, Texas oil, profited few farmers. 
 The reason is that the deposits were found soon after the 
 timber had been exploited and before any number of set- 
 tlers had arrived. The trip up here from Duluth is mainly 
 through cut-over and burned-over wild country, apparently 
 
 205
 
 206 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 filled just now with blueberries and blueberry pickers until 
 you strike the iron country. Then the landscape is full of 
 great, deep gashes where the hundreds of train-loads of ore 
 have been taken out and started down the lakes to the 
 blast furnaces of Chicago, Gary, Cleveland, Youngstown, 
 Pittsburgh, Buffalo, etc. 
 
 Here are the results of the days of job-seeking: 
 
 Company nearly three miles walk from town. 
 Great difficulty in finding the mine captain, who was dimly 
 visible at the bottom of a very deep "open-pit." There the 
 ore was being loaded by a huge and very busy steam-shovel 
 into a car which moved a short distance to dump it through 
 its track into the hoist-cars, which then brought it up and 
 dumped it into railway-cars for Duluth. A worker volun- 
 teered that the lease would run out in a few months, so the 
 mine could offer a man only a poor job because a short one. 
 Occasionally sharp whistle-blasts from the shovel in a near- 
 by pit gave warning, and the workers walked to little round 
 steel shelters just before a series of enormous explosions 
 threw up smoke and rocks and shook the whole country- 
 side. 
 
 The mine captain, when finally found, shook his head: 
 
 "No, can't take on a single man of any sort got too many 
 now and will have to lay off some soon." 
 
 - Iron Co. The employment manager was very will- 
 ing to talk: 
 
 "All I can give you is track-laying. Ten hours with time 
 and a half for over eight hours makes it $4.85 a day. You 
 keep laying the track wherever necessary for the shovel 
 to go to dig out the stuff for loading into the cars. We try 
 to make everybody begin there and then keep pushing 'em 
 up to pit-men who help with the shovel, firemen, and, finally, 
 shovel-men. . . . No, shovel-men are day-men, not ton- 
 nage; they earn about twelve dollars. And we try to keep 
 everybody busy the year around some go down in our
 
 IN THE IRON-MINES 207 
 
 underground mines in other parts of the range and keep 
 building up the ' stock-pile ' to be shipped in summer. . . . 
 Yes, more Finns here than anything else. Some of 'em are 
 splendid workers; some of 'em are impossible; they won't 
 learn English or anything and are all for the I. W. W. stuff. 
 The Poles are good husky workers. The Italians are good, 
 too. During the war they started a strike, but we showed 
 'em they were helping the Germans and they called it off. 
 Lots of the Italians and Austrians are going back to see 
 what's happened. . . . Well, I have to bawl 'em all out 
 pretty often that's about all they understand, you know." 
 
 The company seems to be trying hard to further satis- 
 factory relations with its men. Like all the other mines I 
 saw, they furnish a wash-house with hot shower-baths and 
 very good lockers. Then they offer a class for any group 
 of applicants in any subject, employ a visiting nurse, pro- 
 mote baseball, aid an employees' club which is a sort of 
 "Y" without the religious element. A poster spoke of 
 representation on a small co-operative committee to handle 
 complaints against foremen and such matters, but it did not 
 speak of elections by the men, and was not mentioned by 
 the employment manager or by any of the workers. The 
 company houses at the edge of town seem well cared for, 
 with certainly low rents from eight to fifteen dollars. 
 
 This town or village is always hi plenteous funds, owing 
 to the tax laid on the assessed value of the precious ore. 
 The streets are paved with wood-block and lined with thick 
 clusters of electric lights. The fire department is the last 
 word of rubber-tired motors. The school buildings are fine 
 and, what's more, start even their grade teachers at one 
 hundred dollars per month ! They have night classes, ad- 
 visers in vocational guidance, visiting nurses, baby clinics, 
 and almost everything else imaginable. The national or 
 State Y. W. C. A. supports an Americanization worker who 
 covers the chief towns. The town library is well housed,
 
 208 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 always open and hospitable has story hours for the chil- 
 dren and all such "modern appliances." And instead of 
 waiting for people to come to it, it goes to them by estab- 
 lishing branches at two convenient points on the main 
 street, besides others on the outskirts. One of these is 
 meant particularly for the workers, and kept always un- 
 locked day and night provided with spittoons, toilet facili- 
 ties, etc. Its librarian had been a machinst and millwright 
 whose life, like that of so many workers, had been changed 
 by sickness hi his case, tuberculosis. 
 
 "Anybody can die of it, you know, but most anybody 
 can live, too, if he'll fight like I fought." 
 
 He was very proud of his always keeping peace among 
 his rough-handed readers and living up to the dignity and 
 other requirements of his job: 
 
 "As high as 150 of 'em in here at one tune, sir, and never 
 no trouble. ... I'll stand most any abuse from 'em in- 
 side here, 'cause this is my job I'm paid to stand for it. 
 But I had a fellow in here the other day who stepped out 
 on the street and called me names from there! Straight 
 off, I had him arrested !" 
 
 A small but tight-skinned and muscular fellow fell into 
 the conversation, and after the librarian turned out the lights 
 we continued to talk. In the dark his little eyes gleamed 
 to remind me of a rat's, and he kept hitching up his coat 
 to make it settle better, and rubbed his nose with the back 
 of his fingers as though he might be a "coke" fiend, though 
 his talk gave no hint of it. He proved to be a lumber-jack, 
 apparently in funds and taking a little loaf in town after 
 several weeks of casual labor in Duluth. His talk showed 
 him surprisingly thoughtful and reasonable. If he found 
 himself in a lumber camp where the food was rotten, bed- 
 bugs prolific, ventilation bad, a bath impossible, the boss 
 mean, and the cook distilling alcohol, he would probably 
 follow the I. W. W. organizer without much compunction.
 
 IN THE IRON-MINES 209 
 
 He did not report any one camp as showing all of these in- 
 citements, but told of various partial combinations of the 
 list. 
 
 "Wages are bein' cut now from the 'fifty-five dollars and 
 found' a month a lumberman gets, with five dollars or 
 ten dollars more for sawin' and drivin', but products seems 
 to be goin' higher. Some of the camps, I will say, are get- 
 tin' a lot better and that's a good thing, too. In some the 
 eats are wonderful." 
 
 He thinks he is too old to learn millwrighting or any similar 
 trade now, though he is not yet out of his thirties. 
 
 "No, I've never had no chance at that sort o' thing not 
 where I could earn anything like enough while I was learn- 
 in', you understand." 
 
 Iron Range Country, 
 July 26th. 
 
 A busy day. 
 
 One captain I found underground after going down the 
 side of the cut and walking in through the passage to "the 
 bottom," 160 feet below top surface. ... He could offer 
 no work, but he very considerately let me go along through 
 the different passages. The miners working "at the face" 
 had carbide lamps there is no gas in these mines and cer- 
 tainly needed their rubber boots. The timbering required 
 of them looked very difficult for the thirteen-foot vein. 
 The shovelling is, of course, a lot heavier than in soft coal. 
 An average of nine dollars for an eight-hour day seems to 
 be considered very good. 
 
 The captain is a young man of foreign parents light- 
 haired and friendly eyed who has made good use of ambi- 
 tion, application, and correspondence schools. 
 
 "We think we move men along faster than in the other 
 companies, but we don't push any but American-born onto 
 the shovels or other machines. We contrive to give very 
 steady work to everybody. And even when we find a man
 
 210 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 getting a great big stake out of some location we've given 
 him we never, never cut our rate to him as too many com- 
 panies do. Oftentimes we have to raise the rate where the 
 goin's bad. When there was a big strike up here two years 
 ago our men stuck by us. ... We don't believe in loud- 
 talking bosses if they don't get a man to work by leading 
 hun into it we fire the man or the boss. . . . Yes, there's 
 some danger here even after the State makes all its inspec- 
 tions. In one mine in the district a mass of rock came down 
 when lightning 'pre-exploded' a score or more of tons of 
 powder that had been planted and ready. If all of the 
 thirty charges had gone off instead of ten, it would have 
 killed fifty instead of eighteen men. I don't see how it 
 could have been prevented." 
 
 "The captain? oh, he's square and everybody likes 
 him. You gotta give him a fair day's work, but he's decent 
 about it," said a well- trimmed young chap who kept the 
 wash-house. 
 
 "I'm as old as he is, but I guess I'll never be a mine cap- 
 tain. . . . Well, for one thing I like booze too much. . . . 
 Get it? Sure you can get it. Why, a man I know here 
 made $15,000 hi one year of blind-piggin'. He has a swell 
 auto now. His wife had to spend the whole day takin' 
 the stuff down to the store hi the baby-buggy. At the end 
 of the year he was caught and had to pay a fine. 'Twas 
 fifty dollars! . . . But I live with my aunt here and I 
 wouldn't bring it here, so a friend and I go over to other 
 'dry' towns and get enough for a good time. That's why 
 I don't save. A fellow can save if he wants to in one of 
 them lumber camps, but most of 'em move on as soon as 
 they get a 'Michigan stake' of forty dollars or so. Some 
 do nothin' but stay for two or three meals without workin' 
 and then go on to the next camp. But timber's no job 
 too many lice, too rough. . . . Unions? Well, I'm sore 
 on 'em. When I was makin' eight and nine dollars hi a lum-
 
 IN THE IRON-MINES 211 
 
 her mill up there, they come along and proposed boostin' 
 some of the unskilled men and kids in a way that sure was 
 foolish. And it didn't get anybody anywheres, either, then, 
 though they may try it again later. . . . Here? it's a 
 good place here five dollars per for my job eight hours. 
 Lots o' fellows a' been here a long time and they all swear 
 by it. If you don't believe they live well and dress well, 
 take a look in their dinner-pails this noon or go and see 
 the white shirts in the lockers over there." 
 
 On the way back to town a Slovenian worker on crutches, 
 unshaved, sick and sad looking, told of his accident in the 
 mine, and seemed very hopeless about getting much com- 
 pensation money from the State fund: 
 
 "Twelf' or fifteen dollar week not much not for family 
 man." 
 
 He had been a year or more with nearly every company 
 and was equally unenthusiastic about them all. 
 
 At R , a few miles distant, a fireman's tournament 
 
 was under way with the supposedly dry saloons openly 
 selling whiskey, with chuck-a-luck and other gambling 
 games going on everywhere. 
 
 The superintendent of the biggest mine there seemed very 
 intelligent and wholesome : besides, sympathetic toward my 
 condition. 
 
 "We've got nothing here for you. Sorry. . . . No, 
 we have no rules requiring a man to start in any certain 
 work. We try to place them according to our needs and 
 
 push them as they deserve. Company, I understand, 
 
 has classes on mining, but nobody can be a captain there 
 unless he's an engineer. . . . Yes, some foreigners are as 
 ambitious as you'd want. We won't let anybody be a fore- 
 man unless he has his papers; we find those in his gang 
 who have theirs feel superior to him. . . . Well, I claim 
 no nationality is either good or bad. They're mixed and 
 you've got to treat 'em as individuals and treat 'em square.
 
 212 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 I don't see any signs of trouble here now at least not 
 among our 350 men." 
 
 As might be expected from such a man, the "stock pile" 
 showed a good supply of ore from the continuous under- 
 ground and inside work of the preceding winter. With 
 good luck it would be shipped down the lakes before navi- 
 gation closed, when the men could be kept steadily on the 
 job again replenishing it, and the whole place showed very 
 good care and attention. 
 
 At another big mine near by the swarthy, heavy-set mine 
 captain pulled his long mustache with the fingers of reminis- 
 cence and said he had mined almost everywhere and would- 
 n't return to soft coal "if they gave me the whole country." 
 
 "Oh, sure, you can take care o' yourself all right where 
 the gas is, but how do you know but what some fool down 
 the entry is goin' to send you all to kingdom-come with his 
 ignorance or carelessness? That's what I allus used to 
 keep thinkin'." 
 
 "I'd have to start you hi with a gang timberin'," he said 
 finally. "That's $5.25 for eight hours and pretty hard 
 work, too. The fellows that mine are mostly foreign and 
 prefer buddies of their own nationality though they do 
 work best under an American boss. But if I was you I'd 
 start in the open pits; there it's nothin' but practically 
 railroadin'." 
 
 Though he used ore instead of coal terms for instance, 
 "back" instead of "roof" he had many memories of his 
 coal days, especially of some mules he had known. 
 
 "I mind me o' one driver who could 'sic' his mule onto 
 anybody and you had to climb outa there quick, too. . . . 
 Aw, they're a bad lot them mules and I'm glad we 
 have nothin' but electricity up here. I know one boy had 
 trained his animal but never trusted him an instant durin' 
 two years, till one day for some reason he got careless 
 and picked up a whip by the beast's heels. That is, he
 
 IN THE IRON-MINES 213 
 
 tried to. He got it right in the stomach died in an 
 hour." 
 
 He is sure his company are the best employers on the 
 range. 
 
 A young Swedish boiler-maker waited along with me for 
 the train back to town. He has recently set up for himself 
 and is evidently not making it very well is consequently 
 rather sore on things. 
 
 "I can't bring on my family from Montana because there 
 
 are no houses anywhere except at L . At M they're 
 
 paying eighteen dollars a month for one room and living in 
 tents. But at that I may jump the whole blamed country. 
 . . . Oh, yes, I used to work for that outfit, but never 
 again! Why, they're reg'lar slave-drivers. Every second 
 man in the place is a foreman or some kind of a boss. And 
 even at that they can't give an ordinary worker much at- 
 tention. One winter I went every day out of workin' in 
 steam heat 'way above a hundred degrees out into the cold 
 away below zero with my wet underwear a-stickin' to 
 me. After a few weeks o' that, all I felt like doin' an hour 
 after goin' to work was to sit down. So I quit. . . . Over- 
 time ! I should say they do give a man overtime. Why, 
 I tell you, I used to get checks there of more than $200 
 more'n $100 a week ! But say ! I was so busy and so 
 tired that I didn't care a whoop about walkin' across the 
 street to cash it! Just all in done out. That's no life 
 at all. No, sirree, never again will I work for them ! The 
 - people I think are the best of all square and ready to 
 do the right thing. But to get on most anywhere, you've 
 got to have a drag or else marry the boss's daughter. . . . 
 Boiler-makin's good work you can average $8.50 a day. 
 Of course you're too deef to hear anything at dinner, though 
 it wears off soon after you stop the day's work. But it'll 
 make you deef for life all right enough if you keep at it." 
 
 He got off at X , after he had told me about that
 
 214 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 town's wonderful schools, amusement building with a curl- 
 ing floor, and the great ski- jump incline just outside. 
 
 Before turning in I found my lumber-jack at the reading- 
 room again. He is a surprisingly sane chap on many lines, 
 considering that he has had no chances to see much normal 
 life. "You see, they's no chance to meet decent girls when 
 you must spend most o' your time hi a lumber camp." 
 
 As we talked a boy joined us who had had his leg badly 
 
 hurt at the Company. He seemed to feel that it was 
 
 his own fault that he had not got a better settlement on 
 it, and appeared enthusiastic about the company and the 
 chance it gave for advancement. 
 
 Here comes a band at bedtime and past ! It's leading 
 
 the baseball team which defeated B at a game begun 
 
 at six-forty-five this evening. Daylight saving is a great 
 affair, especially here in the north. Last night, about eight, 
 a big crowd of us enjoyed a first-class game on the school 
 grounds between fathers and sons. 
 
 It seems to be a great place for the youngsters and not 
 very bad for anybody else, so far as I can see. 
 
 P. S. The evening paper tells that the school census 
 shows fathers of 29 nationalities, with 175 more of them 
 born Finns than Americans ! Family life appears to be 
 equally exciting for them all an advertisement that "My 
 wife has left my bed and board, so I will not be responsible 
 for any bills" is signed by Husam Afghan ! 
 
 Iron Ranges, Minn., 
 July 27. 
 
 At one open-pit mine hi L this morning the red-haired 
 
 superintendent was shy on work, but obligingly long on 
 information. It seems fairly easy for a wanter of work to 
 talk with the boss, because the office is usually out hi the 
 country where a stranger seems interesting even if he looks 
 as tough as I do.
 
 IN THE IRON-MINES 215 
 
 He is sure the Finns who make trouble are the latest 
 over; the best ones are those who came some thirty years 
 ago or so, at the time of a temperance movement in Finland, 
 and brought their temperance societies with them a fine 
 lot of workers. If he is right, it means that most of the 
 agitation in the iron country has been caused by the vic- 
 tims of autocratic Russia's programme of ruthless treatment 
 of the Finns contrary to its sacred promises. When these 
 came over they brought that idea of government along with 
 them. According to that, it looks as though all govern- 
 ments, like all employers, are in the same boat with the 
 sins of one visited on all the others. Apparently, the labor 
 problem must be viewed as not merely a national but an in- 
 ternational problem. 
 
 According to him, the town's schools and other advan- 
 tages are taken as a matter of course by all the foreign-born, 
 with none of them interested nowadays in doing a good day's 
 work. 
 
 "I started out tryin' to treat 'em fine and make 'em my 
 friends, but after they'd thrown me down a few times when 
 I asked 'em to work overtime, I cut it out. Now I try to 
 be square, but show 'em there's to be no foolin' and they 
 do pretty well for me. At least they're anxious to do over- 
 time work." 
 
 He is more for rough treatment of his men than any other 
 superintendent or captain met on the range, and, it is signifi- 
 cant and important to add, more fearful of trouble. I'll 
 wager quite a lot he's lonesome and unhappy and therefore 
 unduly pessimistic about things and, especially, people. 
 
 The town's other mine is shut down all the officials out 
 of town. Some children assured me that their fathers and 
 most of the others who regularly worked there were now 
 busy in near-by mines. They also are enthusiastic about 
 their schools and their teachers. 
 
 A lean, unshaven, but shrewd-looking young merchant
 
 216 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 fell easily to mentioning with pride both the buildings he 
 had earned and also a twelve-thousand-dollar loss he had 
 been able to weather in an unlucky mine venture out West. 
 He thinks the workers are all pretty contented, with the 
 town's prosperity good for at least fifty years more, be- 
 cause, so far, the mining companies are working only those 
 properties on which they hold short leases, holding for later 
 development their own properties. He was evidently 
 bothered to place me. In a lull in the conversation I 
 opined: "It's a great life if you don't weaken and the devil 
 if you do." 
 
 He took it for an opening, and came back: 
 "You've got a weakness, then, eh? . . . Booze, mebbe ?" 
 A mine superintendent or captain at K , a few miles 
 farther on, is of a rough but substantial type, who had left 
 railroading in a dull period, started firing on a steam-shovel, 
 and worked from one position to another till his present 
 success. 
 
 As of all the others, my inquiries about his way of han- 
 dling his men and some that work up are the ones who be- 
 lieve most hi the "rough stuff" were made in an off- 
 hand way after we had discussed the various jobs he might 
 have for me. Here is the best stuff I've run into yet: 
 
 "I make it a rule never to send a man where I'm unwill- 
 ing to go myself or take any chances I'm leary of takin'. 
 I've had only one man killed and that was his fault alto- 
 gether. ... I don't believe in talkin' rough with the men. 
 When things are going fine I don't mind usin' considerable 
 profanity. But when there's trouble and it's tune for the 
 men to do their best, then you never hear me swearin' or 
 jawin'. Well, I guess, it's because I know I never do my 
 best for anybody that tries to push me that way. 
 
 "If a man won't work without somebody swearin' at 
 him, I take him to one side never with others around 
 and say it's 'more work, Joe,' or get out.' If he stays he
 
 IN THE IRON-MINES 217 
 
 knows for one thing I'll never cut a rate on him. . . . Yes, 
 our company gives a super his head if they don't trust 
 
 him they don't keep him. The people don't do that. 
 
 They have all sorts of bosses and officials, and everybody 
 passes the buck to everybody else till it gets down to the 
 head office. And by that time it's too late and nothin's 
 done. What is it they call it yes, 'absentee management/ 
 Bad stuff. . . . Give me my minin' underground it's 
 more interesting always some new information or some- 
 thing to figure out. Well, you come around Monday and 
 maybe I can find a foreigner who'll take you on below 
 ground for his buddy. So long." 
 
 A large part of Hibbing, the "richest village in the world," 
 is being moved to Alice in order to permit stripping off the 
 top dirt and getting at the rich deposits beneath. Even 
 without this enlargement the town's pit is a world-beater ! 
 As you look across it, you think you have gauged its size 
 correctly until the locating of a distant whistle makes you 
 focus your eyes on a train hitherto invisible halfway up 
 the farther wall more than a mile and a half away ! With 
 its numerous shovels busily puffing and loading the red or 
 yellow ore into the cars, and a score of engines laboring to 
 pull these up the grade to the assembling train, it makes a 
 good picture of industry's far-flung frontiers. 
 
 These steam-shovels are wonderful! For concentration 
 on their job, commend me to them as they bite into the 
 side of the hill with their enormous maw, while the steam- 
 puffings grow slower and slower as though all but foiled and 
 exhausted, and the platform and "spar" quake with the 
 threat of defeat only to come through it triumphantly 
 with the shovel full to overflowing and the exhaust singing 
 joyously ! Then, before you know it, the shovel has been 
 raised and for the barest fraction of a second poised over 
 the waiting car, the rope has been pulled to let the tons of 
 ore fall through, and immediately the great mouth has been
 
 218 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 swung down and at it again for another bite, its bottom 
 swinging as it goes like some giant licking his chops in 
 worker-like satisfaction. 
 Why doesn't somebody write the "Song of the Shovel"? 
 
 "Oh, I am the shovel, the Great Steam Shovel, earth opens 
 
 at my command 
 And pours her treasure in fullest measure into man's open 
 
 hand!" 
 
 Something like that it should go. 
 
 Before leaving town for Duluth I asked a husky but leg- 
 less and half-fingered beggar if he was the same chap I had 
 noticed in two other mine towns where they were celebrating. 
 A moment later I sat down on my suit-case by his side so 
 as to leave him and his open cap free for the passers-by and 
 their dimes and nickels. 
 
 His red, weathered face lighted up surprisingly, and he 
 showed a very friendly but quick pair of eyes, and a ready, 
 conciliating tongue. All of these, I suppose, are important 
 in giving him his chance to earn his daily income over an 
 amazing part of the country's geography: 
 
 "Oh, yes, I try to be around at all such things as fire- 
 men's tournaments. But that was no good there yesterday. 
 Motor equipment that's drivin' the hook-and-ladder run- 
 ners off the boards. . . . Sure, that keeps me movin'. 
 To-day week I'll be at R in Wisconsin, a week later at 
 
 , Iowa, and two weeks later at K , North Dakota. 
 
 . . . Oh, them's all circus days there. Ye see, I follow 
 
 X 's circus forty or fifty days every year a fine bunch 
 
 of boys they are, too. When it gets me out to Montana 
 I'll beat it to a fine list of towns in Georgia and Florida. . . . 
 Yes, the police in all them places know me and I just report 
 at headquarters and say I'll be around for a coupla days, 
 and they tell me they're glad to see me again and wish me
 
 IN THE IRON-MINES 219 
 
 luck. (Thank you, ma'am, thank you, very kindly.) . . . 
 Nope, nothin' doin' in any of the big eastern cities they 
 don't give me no show at all. . . . Well, it's about fifteen 
 years I been doin' it. First, I just took the atlas and laid 
 out a circular trip, and when I'd covered it once I knew the 
 best places and then made 'em onct a year. 
 
 "These foreigners up here and the colored people down 
 South they're the ones that keep me goin'. If two Ameri- 
 can women come by and one edges my way, the other pulls 
 her elbow and says, 'Why, he's makin' more than you or 
 me or our husbands' and they pass by. But the foreigners 
 they seem to think, 'Why, money or no money, I wouldn't 
 be that way for a million,' and when one edges over they 
 all dig down. (Thank you kindly, lady.) There, see ! She's 
 the wife, I'd say, of a Lithusian (Lithuanian). . . . And if 
 they ain't nothing to give they'll say 'Good mornin" or 
 'How's poor John?' or something and that makes me feel 
 good and that I ain't the dirt under their feet. Say, if I'd 
 'a' kept a diary I c'ud write a book I'll bet I could sell for 
 a dollar and a hah" if I could sell it for a cent." 
 
 On the way down a painter told of having given up the 
 very unsteady line of contract work, "with help so expen- 
 sive and all," for a steady job with the railroad at about 
 five dollars a day. He seemed to think very highly of the 
 personal advantage of an occasional pass down to Wash- 
 ington or other such place, even though he had to forego 
 his earnings for the time. 
 
 On the whole, the iron country seems to present a very 
 definite problem of Americanization, which is getting pretty 
 definite attention of the right sort. It looks, too, as though 
 the least trouble is to be expected by those employers who 
 most emphasize decent wages, with the rate never cut, 
 steady, year-round work and square human treatment by 
 the foreman on the job. 
 
 Though I've taken no job, I rather think I have a better
 
 220 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 idea of the Range's thought about worker and " super" 
 than if I had settled down to a dinner-pail hi one place. 
 "Leastways" it appears to be a good way of getting both 
 groups to talking, this asking for a job and looking as 
 though you needed it. 
 
 Northwesterly, 
 July 29. 
 
 Yesterday afternoon two of us waited for nearly an hour 
 to see the employment manager of a big plant. A cigarette 
 got the other waiter to talking. He was a young and well- 
 tanned Norwegian, muscular but spare, with good teeth 
 and a clean-moulded face that did not go well with his 
 rough clothes. 
 
 "You see, I work here before it's one of best companies 
 to work for. I hope get my old yob back." 
 
 "My first boss here he made me trouble. You see I 
 know nothing about steel-yard when I take yob. The first 
 night my boss see me know nothing and he say nothing. 
 But the second night, because I do not understand, he call 
 me name. I tell him, 'You first man to call me that, and 
 you'll be last,' and I pick up bar iron and he run and I run. 
 But he get away and stay away long time. When he 
 come back he laugh and say: 'You all right, Buddy, and I 
 won't call you that no more.' 
 
 "And then one night he come to me and say, 'I drunk 
 to-night.' I say, 'I can't help it,' and pretty soon he go off 
 and sleep. I had to tell the mixer-boss where he was, so 
 they two get mad and in the morning outside the gate they 
 two fighted and he got two black eyes besides gettin' 
 fired. 
 
 "I remember one boss in powder-mill in Wisconsin. He 
 fired us all out from eating in warm room so he could eat 
 there himself alone. All right till winter come and we all 
 eat out in the rain and cold. And then one day the boys 
 all take out their knives they make me come along and
 
 IN THE IRON-MINES 221 
 
 they tell him: 'We kill you quick if we cannot eat in here.' 
 He how was scared ! He said 'all right' quick. 
 
 " But one boss I had he was fine. Fine, good man he was. 
 We all like him and on account we like him, you know, we 
 all work for him harder we work for him like devil. My, 
 he was good, fine man ! 
 
 "You know for another boss here, I sleep free mont's; 
 every night I go off and sleep. The boss he tell me to. He 
 think more work come soon and he want me 'stick around 
 but keep outa sight' !" 
 
 Finally the employment manager came in carrying his 
 rough-looking red head far back of his feet in some way, 
 but smiling. 
 
 "Nothin' to-day, boys, come around to-morrow at eight 
 o'clock," he said. "The merchant mill's full" to the 
 Norwegian, who cursed the company roundly as we went 
 out to the car. But there some of his old pals seemed to 
 give assurance of getting him in, and he was happier when 
 he waved me good-by. 
 
 As usual, I tried to get a line on the probabilities of get- 
 ting work if we came at eight, but as usual could not. 
 
 The employment man was, however, decent enough to 
 express regret this morning when he finally showed up 
 after eight-thirty. 
 
 "I come up here from Bayonne because my brother he 
 
 write from S ," said a Slavish man who waited with 
 
 me. "I live here in company house long time. Rent very 
 cheap your fuel from company cheap, too. . . . Classes ? 
 Well, I leave Poland seven years old fourth grade only. 
 Study? Yes, like to, but how can with twelve hours 
 work and little garden besides?" 
 
 "Foreman? Some good, some bad. I do best for one 
 who is gentleman and treats like gentleman. How men 
 work for him, that depends on his character." 
 
 I take off my hat for his quiet thoughtfulness also for
 
 222 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 his not feeling unfriendly to the company though very sorry 
 that within two months after being laid off last spring he 
 had been asked to vacate his company house, and had 
 hard work to find either a job or a house in a near-by 
 city. 
 
 "The men on the long turns on the open-hearth, etc., 
 call it a dog's life, but plan to stand it for a while and then 
 beat it with the stake they can save," a substantial-looking 
 worker put it. " Lately a first helper let a heat go through 
 the bottom. He was fired. The one on the other turn 
 came and saw and ran away quit. Both are old before 
 their time tired all the time. I'd bet money that over- 
 work caused the disaster the ( Aw-to-h with-it' spirit. 
 
 The minister here complained of the long hours and seven- 
 day week to the 'super/ and his chairman of trustees was 
 told to tell him to mind his own business. The solitary 
 Protestant church has a hard time because nobody owns 
 either his home or his job, and so hates to put very much 
 money to help build a church he may never have a chance 
 to enjoy. Just lately one of the deacons, long a leading 
 resident, got his quit notice; he has no idea for what reason. 
 The plant super once broke a nasty strike at another plant. 
 He is pretty much boss of the town tells the school head 
 what he'll stand for in education and what he won't. The 
 man he put in as secretary of the Men's Club is every so 
 often found drunk on the job. On the 'floor' there's one 
 gang-boss who is much respected. The men say : ' When he 
 calls us down we know we deserve it. He tells what he 
 wants done, ordinarily, and that's enough we do it." : 
 
 The town is certainly beautifully laid out and maintained. 
 It would look, too, as if the H. C. L. were well tamed by a 
 company apparently anxious to make the place as attrac- 
 tive as it can be made with the long work-day and without 
 personal home ownership.
 
 IN THE IRON-MINES 223 
 
 Northwesterly, July 30. 
 
 At the local employment office they referred me to a 
 shipyard whose ad for "50 reamers, 50 bolters, 10 black- 
 smiths, helpers. Steady work" I had seen. Back of other 
 counters in the government agency are representatives of 
 various lumber-camps, iron-mines, saw-mills, etc., out hi 
 the country. They certainly paint a great picture: "New 
 camp, good chuck, steady job, fine treatment $4.85 a 
 day," etc. 
 
 On the same street a number of the private hiring agents 
 stand at their doors and buttonhole the passing job- 
 seekers. 
 
 One of them caught a tartar. As I came by a drunken 
 Slav came reeling out showing his bleeding knuckles. 
 
 "The devil he get me in. He tell me I no know the place 
 
 he tell about, and call me Bohunk. He nothing but a 
 
 Finn heemself, and I hit heem hard." 
 
 Later this same agent, with the red mark still showing 
 across his forehead, drew me into his dark lair and almost 
 pushed his blanks and tickets into my pockets while selling 
 out his own client: 
 
 "Thees a fine job laying track near , Mich. Good 
 
 camp, good chuck, an' everything, $4.20 a day. Take train 
 at free o'clock to-day I need joost one more. Free ticket 
 for ten dollars wort' of travel. Good pay. Eef you don't 
 like, you work one, two day and go on, and you that mooch 
 nearer Ohio." 
 
 And he would get another fee for supplying another 
 worker ! 
 
 Past these doors, looking at this notice or that, flock the 
 human wreckage of the lumber-camps and the railway 
 gangs. 
 
 One of the agents who had been in the government's em- 
 ployment service and thought he knew several reasons for 
 its recent demise knew most of them.
 
 224 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 "That chap there in the blue mackinaw, he's been around 
 here for fifteen years. Maybe he'll have fifteen jobs during 
 the summer out and in, in and out, all the tune. He 
 wants booze and he wants a change. As long as he can get 
 free transportation, what's the odds? Of course not many 
 are giving that now except the railroads. 
 
 "But it ain't what it used to be. Why, I've seen men come 
 in here with a big wad of, say, $2,000, and blow it all in- 
 just throw it around. Many men just made a living by 
 bumming off them they'd just as soon give you a "V" as 
 a nickel if they had it. One fellow stole his pal's roll of 
 $150. He hid it while the police searched him, and then 
 went and spent it on his pal, the owner, and himself. He 
 told me his pal wasn't spendin' it fast enough !" 
 
 "In the old days we used to throw 'em onto the trains 
 and then throw 'em off on the snow. When they so- 
 bered up and got a stake again, back they'd be with us 
 again." 
 
 "Well, the drunker ye be," said one philosopher I hob- 
 nobbed with, "the less ye'll be a-mindin' of the flies and the 
 bugs in the camp; and by the time ye're sober ye're used 
 to it, see? Or if ye ain't ye can quit and come back here 
 and go som'ers else. . . . But take my advice, stick by 
 yer boats and leave luniber-camps alone. I'm tellin' ye 
 'tis a dog's life." 
 
 Some of his pals wandered up and the discussion went 
 on to the comparative merits of such substitutes as hair- 
 tonic, wood-alcohol, etc. 
 
 The boss, who is often in cahoots with these private 
 employment agencies and shares their fees for hirings, and 
 then fires to permit others to be hired, is partly responsible 
 for breaking down the morale of these former workers. 
 These are the ones, too, who Professor Carlton Parker be- 
 lieved were the result of their homeless, voteless, and women- 
 less life often trying to find in the I. W. W.'s beliefs the
 
 IN THE IRON-MINES 225 
 
 opportunity to express evilly the instincts their abnormal 
 life forbade them to express wholesomely. 
 
 It was one of these unshaven, low-voiced chaps that I 
 ran into one night in Cleveland some years ago. He was 
 the secretary of an international hoboes union. I insulted 
 him by letting him see that to me a hobo, a tramp, and a 
 bum were all the same. He was excited as he fired back 
 at me: 
 
 "Say, you don't suppose I'd be a tramp, do you? But 
 do you know that this country couldn't exist without us 
 'boes! The Northwest's gotta have us guys -work at 
 lumber in the winter and then Oklahoma's gotta have us 
 work in wheat in summer, and we gotta make quick con- 
 nections, too, or the crop spoils. So we gotta take the 
 train and we don't believe in spendin' money on fares. But 
 a tramp ! Huh ! He just walks from job to job because 
 he don't care whether he ever gets there or not and nobody 
 else does, neither. A bum well, he's no good whatever. 
 He just bums a drink or a sandwich off people from day to 
 day, 'thout doin' nothin' worth while for it. A tramp is 
 miles above a bum." 
 
 So I'll wager that more of my new friends of this after- 
 noon are still hanging on somehow to their self-respect than 
 anybody in earth or heaven would ever suspect. Two 
 boys to-day said they left their last camp because they 
 had to walk four miles to get a postage-stamp. They 
 seemed to think it a perfectly good reason, too. They were 
 certainly young enough to have many sweethearts. 
 
 In spite of the tragedy the wreckage of the afternoon 
 pushes in on an observer's soul; I'm just waiting for the 
 chap who tries to tell me that human nature is funda- 
 mentally a sad mess and can never be relied on to get us 
 anywhere, even under the best of circumstances! For I 
 am surer than ever that they are right who claim that a 
 "man may be down but never out." And I'll wager, too,
 
 226 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 that this inborn and never-dying desire to get as far as pos- 
 sible from the zero of personal uselessness and insignificance 
 is deeper down in us than even Professor Parker's instincts 
 of workmanship, possession or acquisition, parenthood, curi- 
 osity, and all the ten or a dozen other she names. These 
 seem to me merely the most common and best-recognized 
 the most tangible and acknowledged ways in which a 
 man can show himself a do-er and a be-er, and therefore 
 entitled to the respect of himself and other do-ers and 
 be-ers. And from listening to a lot of these men in the 
 last few months I'm more certain than ever that a consid- 
 erable part of their vices, especially their drinking, is be- 
 cause at those tunes they hear such assurances of their un- 
 diminished, individual manliness and value as they would 
 so gladly, gladly hear when sober and decent and on the 
 job, but sad, sad, to relate cannot. 
 
 I wonder if the hearing of it is so indispensable to being 
 a man and keeping going that it is better for a man to hear 
 it then than not at all. I wonder. 
 
 Northwesterly, 
 July 31. 
 
 In luck again! On the job! To-morrow at eight it's 
 ship-building again. And instead of being a reamer's 
 helper, I am to be the reamer himself at fifty-eight cents 
 per for an eight-hour day. 
 
 In the employment office a young chap of twenty-three 
 spoke enthusiastically of his doings and responsibilities, es- 
 pecially his earnings, on twenty submarines under a ship- 
 fitting contractor at . Since then: 
 
 "When I left there last fall I had over $400. Now well, 
 I've seen the country all right, but I'm sure busted. Down 
 South I had a good job, too good money and overtime 
 almost every night till ten o'clock. I'd 'a' done that regular 
 but they only put on one street-car and a few trucks, and 
 by the time you got into town and to bed you was tired,
 
 IN THE IRON-MINES 227 
 
 and it was midnight. To get up again at six to be out to 
 the plant by eight was too hard. So I blew, and I been 
 about every place y' ever heard of since." 
 
 Later this evening he was at those private employment 
 agencies looking at the mining jobs, because "They didn't 
 have my kind of work for me there at the yard." I sure 
 hope he won't become one of those homeless wrecks. 
 
 The doctor hi a clean-looking hospital wrote down all 
 the "noes" of my family health history much faster than 
 I could say them myself ! In short order he put on my card 
 the usual "Class A," which hi turn got me my "All right. 
 Be at the gate at seven-fifty to-morrow" from the kindly, 
 likable, and jolly employment clerk. (I wish there were 
 more like him.) 
 
 It seems like old times to be setting the alarm-clock 
 again though eight o'clock seems a luxurious hour for the 
 start on the job. 
 
 Northwesterly, 
 August 1. 
 
 Few managers seem to realize how a worker figures and 
 begrudges the minutes or hours he uses to go and come. 
 Besides frequently causing the "passing up" of the distant 
 job, it looks as though all those minutes like all the drops 
 of sweat figure sooner or later in the worker's bill against 
 his employer, and so in the cost of production, and, finally, 
 of living, for everybody to pay. 
 
 When, after a fifteen-minutes' ride down-town, I got on 
 the shipyards' car, I found it crowded, with many sitting 
 on the floor. Quite a number were sleeping. It was an- 
 other forty-five minutes before we got off for a few minutes' 
 walk to the gate. Strangely enough, the train was no faster 
 when I took it to come in this evening, "because the con- 
 ductor can't take up the tickets any faster," my seat-mate 
 said. So all together I put in eight hours at work and two 
 more getting on the job and off of it.
 
 228 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 At the plant it took a full hour and a half or more to an- 
 swer to my alias, join the reamers at the proper gate-house, 
 get badges and tool-checks, follow the leader into the yard, 
 find the reamer-foreman in one of the hulls or shells, get 
 the proper machine and air-hose, etc., etc. A stocky, black- 
 browed, and bristly Italian, with a piggy expression written 
 all over him in spite of his brown trousers and shirt and 
 lavender suspenders, was my buddy. He said he had been 
 making fifty a week in an eastern yard, but had to leave to 
 avoid trouble. He bluffed better than I but did not know 
 very much more about a reamer. We went very hard at 
 reaming out the holes for the rivets in some pretty nasty 
 places on the keel, that was barely laid, got almost no atten- 
 tion from the foreman, and broke several drills. When the 
 noon whistle blew I was greatly surprised. He whispered: 
 "We no work so - - hard this afternoon." 
 
 But after we had moved up with a long, slow line to a 
 hearty and well-cooked dinner for thirty-five cents in the 
 company restaurant, and had a cigarette, we went at it 
 harder than ever. It was actually an Alphonse and Gaston 
 affair. He would take the machine out of my hands ahead 
 of his turn except that I insisted that it was my series of 
 holes to ream. And all this time our foreman was seldom 
 if ever in sight. 
 
 The flat reaming-machines are very hard to hold even 
 when quiet, but they buck like a bronco when the air is 
 turned on. Some attention could surely produce a design 
 enormously easier to handle. The drill kept coming out 
 and held us up badly we would have raised Cain about 
 it if we had been working piece-work. I notice again that 
 fatigue grows fastest when you work hard and accomplish 
 little. So that the foreman could save us some fatigue 
 and the company much money by making sure that we get 
 good tools. My tuition fees for learning how to handle the 
 beast are in the shape of several welts across the arm where
 
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 IN THE IRON-MINES 229 
 
 the machine's long handle caught it once almost to the 
 point of breaking the bone. But there is a feeling of pleasure 
 in controlling such unmistakable power and making it do 
 your will except, as I say, when imperfect tools lessen the 
 effectiveness of your effort. Bad tools that get no attention 
 cause a lessening of the worker's respect for the manage- 
 ment, which in turn gives a big push downward to the whole 
 morale. 
 
 Well, I've done a good day's work and enjoyed it. I have 
 no grouch on any boss because all of them I could see had 
 a good look in their eye with, possibly, one exception. 
 
 A machinist very kindly gave me the advantage of his 
 commutation ticket on the train in, and mentioned his pleas- 
 ure in the company. Of work in steel he thought little: 
 
 " No good. Too long hours. It takes a lotta guts to ask 
 human bein's to work twelve and fourteen hours reg'lar." 
 
 He gets eighty cents an hour for eight hours and thinks 
 highly of it. 
 
 As I think now how soon I must go to bed to rest my 
 arms and back in time to get up at six, spend the hour on 
 the way and have enough pep to stand my turn in taming 
 that bucking reamer, it looks as though an eight-hour- 
 inside-the-gates day is none too short. 
 
 Northwesterly, 
 August 2. 
 
 There's a lot of satisfaction in a good tired feeling honestly 
 and constructively earned and it's mine to-night. 
 
 That old reaming-machine has been on its noisy, jumpy, 
 put-putty go almost every minute of the eight hours with 
 the Italian Luigi and me Alphonse-and-Gaston-ing to make 
 sure we didn't loaf on each other, and he did his full share, 
 even though one of the foremen whispered me to " Watch 
 out for him he's layin' down on you." 
 
 The work was about as yesterday, except that we didn't 
 break so many drills and kept 'em in the machine better,
 
 230 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 and in general felt the satisfaction of seeing our efforts count. 
 Perhaps, too, we were helped by the demonstration of the 
 usefulness of our work given us by the launching of one of 
 the big hulls. It was inspiring to stand with the crowd of 
 workers and their wives, children, and sweethearts and 
 watch and listen to the team-work as the gang of maulers 
 alternately attacked the supports on the water side or rested 
 as though under an orchestra conductor till finally the 
 boat slid off into the water and the big wave wet all the 
 careless bystanders. (They tell of a riveter who wondered 
 if the minister would be careful with the bottle when he 
 christened his baby ! It is also said that the champagne's 
 preciousness is what fits it to serve on such an occasion as 
 this christening which continues the form and the spirit 
 of the ancient blood-sacrifice.) Who officiated at the 
 bottle-breaking and why the cranes and engines didn't 
 make more fuss, I don't know, but I'm sure more noise 
 would have helped make it more impressive. (A deaf writer 
 claims that our feelings are more easily stirred through our 
 ears than our eyes. Of course everybody knows that every 
 parade without a band is a frost.) 
 
 The first day on the job you keep everlastingly on your 
 toes in a way which tires the spirit; you wonder what's 
 going to happen to you, how the boss is going to handle you, 
 what kind of a company you've broken into, etc. You re- 
 member what happens then good or bad longer than 
 the happenings of any other day, except, perhaps, the day 
 you get promoted. The second day you enjoy more if 
 you were handled right the first day partly because you 
 aren't on your spirit's toes so much, and partly because you 
 feel acquainted with your buddies. To-day when Luigi 
 was taking his turn I cultivated several interesting chaps. 
 
 "I guess you're new at laborin', ain'tcha?" I said to one 
 bright-eyed man with the face of a minister, who didn't 
 know what rate he was getting with his welding-torch.
 
 IN THE IRON-MINES 231 
 
 "Well," he said, "my brother's got me in here, and he's 
 taking care of such things. He knows better than I, too, 
 why I joined the union last night. . . . But anyway, it's 
 better than farming at least when you have as bad luck 
 as I did." 
 
 A near-by Swedish-American seemed happy to be earn- 
 ing sometimes as high as fifty-five dollars a week at bolting- 
 up, while keeping his living expenses for his family of three 
 down to fifteen dollars rent included. He wants now to 
 buy a house, having sold his recently. He, too, had not 
 succeeded at farming. His memories of several years in 
 lumber-camps seem mostly of hunger. 
 
 A calker of the huskiest and sturdiest variety boasted to 
 some friends this noon: 
 
 "I've earned as high as $27 here, and my average for a 
 year has been $12 a day piece rate, of course. And in the 
 year I added $3,000 to what I had. . . . Naw, I ain't 
 goin' to 'buy no store, mebbe?' I'm goin' to work a few 
 more years and then quit. No more work for mine then." 
 
 "This place is no good!" A rivet-heater up on the 
 crowded deck of the newly launched hull started in on me 
 though I'd never seen him before. "Too all-fired many 
 crews. You'll do 300 by noon and then not get 75 after, 
 because another crew's comin' your way. An' every second 
 man you meet is a foreman he has. to boss and he has to 
 'get his.' No wonder they say fifty men leave every day. 
 One week's enough for me. Why, they ain't hardly any- 
 body here now that was here a year ago, when I left. I'll 
 hold out till Saturday, and then it's back to - - for mine." 
 
 Everybody else seems to be happy and to believe in the 
 company. On our keel especially everybody seems to 
 smile. Even though the noise permitted no exchange of 
 ideas unless you wanted to yell hard sentiments went 
 from one to the other; and these were valuable for the com- 
 pany, too. One gray-haired ship-fitter shouted something
 
 232 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 at me; I couldn't catch it, but I noticed I smiled for an hour 
 because I did catch the good-will and good humor of his 
 mood. 
 
 When I took back my hose and turned in my badge and 
 tool-checks to quit, I was asked no questions. My address 
 was taken very politely and the forwarding of my pay 
 promised. (Haven't yet got that money from the railway 
 roundhouse because it was refused my messenger, and I've 
 not been able to follow directions to call for it.) 
 
 On the car back to town my seat-mate was full of his 
 day's ending: 
 
 "My God! My buddy's just been killed in the last 
 hour. The rivet-tosser come runnin' up yellin' 'He's 
 dead hi there! He's dead!' . . . And there he was just 
 inside the deck-house o' that boat launched to-day with 
 his hands on his chest clutchin' the little electric-light wire 
 that had electrocuted him. . . . No, the pulmotor couldn't 
 help him, the doctor said." 
 
 The lad had been a stranger till assigned to him that 
 afternoon, so he soon got to talking of other things: 
 
 "Yes, he's a good foreman and I'll say he's been square 
 to me suggestin' one boost after another till now I'm 
 drivin' 'em in (riveting) for my eighty cents an hour or, if 
 I get piece-work, my little fifteen dollars per. . . . Oh, 
 I'll say that hammer makes me deaf as a bat every once in 
 a while. And when I'm workin' inside and somebody up 
 above on deck hits his drift-pin or the sheet a wallop- 
 Say! Ain't it awful!" 
 
 Macheenia, 
 August 20. 
 
 After twenty-four hours here the prospect looks bad for 
 any work in steel. 
 
 Yesterday morning the papers bore large notices that the 
 Blank Company wanted "Drill-Press hands, etc.," and
 
 IN THE IRON-MINES 233 
 
 could offer as inducements "Good wages, ideal factory, no 
 labor trouble." 
 
 Inquiry of a group of men near the gates indicated, how- 
 ever, that the company had assumed too much in promising 
 the last-named advantage. The tool-room men had struck 
 and were reporting good progress in calling out other 
 groups, one by one. "Why, it's a cinch; they can't run 
 without us, and when the boys in the assembly department 
 come out to-night, the big fellows will see that they're up 
 against it." The pickets are taking their work seriously 
 and seem to have good organization. The chief station is 
 in front of a saloon where many lounge to absorb the latest 
 news and, one or two of them, more beer than is good for 
 them. 
 
 No one seems to have any definite idea of the cause of 
 the trouble. "Ask the committee; they're to make the 
 demands," the rank and file make alibi. But the com- 
 mittee members appear to know little more about it than 
 their companions. "Our wages should be higher, because 
 living is higher," but how much higher does not seem to 
 have been given much thought by any of them. Working 
 conditions and the foremen the group reports as satisfac- 
 tory. Altogether, it appears only a matter of the wounded 
 feelings of the leaders. 
 
 "You see, we was elected by all the men in the tool-room, 
 union and non-union, to represent 'em to the superintendent. 
 We was given power to straighten out all the tangles. 
 Well, we been wranglin' and wranglin' for two weeks, and 
 now the management refuses to recognize us now or for 
 the future. So we called the boys out." 
 
 The boys have evidently stood by and obeyed the call 
 loyally. It is hard not to believe that some company 
 official has either not suspected the seriousness of the atti- 
 tude of his chief workers or else has lost his temper in a
 
 234 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 way that has turned them all hard against him. At any 
 rate, it is certainly hard for an outsider to see any more 
 valid reason for the difficulty than mishandling or bungling 
 somewhere. 
 
 It's plain, though, that, as in the case of most strikes, 
 the original factors of the matter are being fast forgotten 
 in the present acute stage. As the time dragged on through 
 an afternoon which most of them would have found fairly 
 short inside the plant, the tone and manner in which the 
 company was mentioned grew less and less respectful and 
 decent more and more bitter. Motor-men and conductors 
 dropped off from the cars and joined their remarks to the 
 others regarding the unspeakable selfishness and unlimited 
 greed of all capitalists and employers as causing all the evils 
 of these costly times. The unsoundness of the reasoning, 
 and the wide inaccuracy of the facts passed out in explana- 
 tion of matters economic and industrial, made a sad com- 
 mentary on our educational and publicity arrangements. 
 It should be added, however, that outside the street-car 
 men, most of the talking was done by one who, in recount- 
 ing his different attempts to earn a living, was very frank 
 to say that this and that plan had gone awry because " Well, 
 I guess I like my beer too much." Not that he was any- 
 thing but jaunty about it. "Hell, it's as easy as pie to 
 earn a living if not there in the plant, then in some other 
 way where those hogs can't boss us." 
 
 "I hain't no great kick at anything I've been there ten 
 years and I'm not a member of the union," whispered one 
 of the most thoughtful. "They do say that some of the 
 boys in other shops are getting more than we are and I 
 know I don't want to hog anything off of anybody. But 
 the boys on the committee are a good bunch, and I'm for 
 givin' them a chance to show what they can do." 
 
 The chances are that in a few days even he will be keep- 
 ing up with the crowd by joining in with the unthinking
 
 IN THE IRON-MINES 235 
 
 and bitter mud-slinging of the rest especially when the 
 gallant optimism of the leaders comes to meet the stern 
 test of the silence of the management. Without the slight- 
 est doubt, too, such a man as he will never be worth to the 
 company as much as he was before. Whatever the out- 
 come of the effort, his attitude toward his employers will 
 never again be as friendly as it has been during his ten 
 years to date. Sometimes I imagine as when troubles are 
 of long standing and as much in the way as a sore thumb 
 a good scrap may clear the air, but this one seems needless. 
 
 Doubtless it is hard for the management to imagine 
 properly in advance the blitheness with which such a group 
 expects to bring the company to its knees. 
 
 "No, we ain't heard nothin' from 'em yet," one of the 
 leaders assured a questioning follower who had evidently 
 found his uneventful picketing a long, long turn. "But 
 to-morrow that's Friday I expect a lot more o' the boys 
 out from the other departments, and I give 'em till Saturday. 
 Yessir, before Saturday noon the big fellows'll be sendin' 
 for us that's at the latest, y' understand." 
 
 That was yesterday. This morning the crowd at the 
 gates or, rather, across the street from them was larger, 
 but from inside came the sound of a busy factory. I got per- 
 mission from them to go into the employment office to ask 
 about work in a department not yet on strike, promising 
 "the boys" to come out on strike with them if the rest de- 
 cided to come. The employment clerk said: "We don't 
 know ourselves what it's all about. Guess they'll be back 
 before long. If you'll turn up Monday we'll have some- 
 thing for you." 
 
 When I reported to the group, it appeared too much like 
 trying to crab or "scab" their game, so I guess I won't 
 try it. I'm sorry. It looked like a good shop, though the 
 noise in the office is fearful. 
 
 The State employment bureau seems not to have the
 
 236 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 co-operation of some of the larger steel companies, so I had 
 to ask the corner policeman to help start off for their gates. 
 
 "We're still hand-loadin' our furnace and it's all we can 
 do to get the foreigners to stay on it even the drunken ones 
 and I don't blame 'em at that. I'll say it's mighty hard, 
 dirty work. Come around when we get our new machinery 
 in," was the surprising way hi which the superintendent of 
 a blast-furnace turned me down. 
 
 The last man of the day's searchings I have just come 
 from and my temperature is still near the boiling-point. 
 
 It was a pleasure to observe that the big steel-plant looked 
 clean, with grass in evidence, safety appeals in all places, 
 dinkies busy, and stacks smoking enough to indicate that 
 business was keeping as many, say, as 2,000 men busy. 
 
 The face of the man with his feet on the desk in the 
 gate-shanty had all the marks of the plant policeman, 
 though he wore no uniform. It was small but florid and 
 stern, pierced by two small, steel-blue eyes, and topped by 
 a heavy shock of steel-gray hair. I asked about the 
 "chances for a man's gettin' on here to-day, huh?" 
 
 "Nothin' doin'," he vouchsafed without looking up from 
 his paper hi a steel-gray voice if ever I heard one. 
 
 "Well, what about Monday? Any chance, sir?" 
 
 "Can't say" sound of steel-gray filings and business of 
 reading the paper. 
 
 "Well, is the plant runnin' pretty full?" This in the 
 effort to see if he was just absorbed hi the news item and a 
 human being again when he finished. 
 
 "Guess so" still in the midst of it, and still less human 
 than a nice, warm, orange-red, steel ingot. 
 
 There was nothing to do but turn away I was almost 
 afraid of being arrested, or at least "bawled out," if I stood 
 and looked at him while trying to think what to say next, 
 in an effort to convey the impression that a job was of some 
 interest to me. Then from a safe distance I called back:
 
 IN THE IRON-MINES 237 
 
 "Got an employment department here?" 
 
 '"S all there is," he spat out of the corner of his mouth 
 like an overchewed tobacco quid. 
 
 How can such a man if he is a man and not one of the 
 charging machines brought down from the " floor" and re- 
 versed into a discharging machine how can such a man fail 
 to realize the enormous seriousness of a job to the man who 
 asks for it? How can any company which believes in 
 "safety first" for its men be so careless of the safety of it- 
 self and the industrial regime? For such a creature makes 
 a real man want to enroll with the upsetters of the system 
 which puts him there with his feet on the table. 
 
 Perhaps my radiator is a little too hot to favor proper 
 working at this moment of my cerebral cylinders, but I will 
 hazard again that this type of plant guard, together with 
 the ordinary type of secret-service man too often employed 
 by many companies, is easily accountable for a reduction 
 by at least fifteen per cent in the good-will and friendly re- 
 lations which might normally be expected from the various 
 arrangements for better relations made common in the 
 various plants during the past few years. 
 
 I don't think I like this town, so I guess I'll move into 
 what the steel men call the Calumet District. 
 
 P. S. On the tram a brakie seemed to think that only 
 by a strike could people be made to realize how "this coun- 
 try can't get along without us railroad guys. Why, where 
 
 in h 'ud they be, huh?" Which makes an ordinary 
 
 patron wonder whether some of these strikes aren't more to 
 obtain from a thoughtless and unappreciative public a 
 larger personal or group recognition and appreciation of 
 services rendered than to get more wages, or even more 
 union authority and prestige.
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 AMONG THE INGOTS AND BILLETS AGAIN 
 
 Calumetta, 
 August 25. 
 
 From the Northwestern ranges it is, of course, easy to fol- 
 low the great ore barges to the points where coal and ore find 
 it convenient to meet. Within the last few years the district 
 at the lower end of Lake Michigan has developed with 
 amazing speed into a steel centre of huge proportions. 
 It offered new and interesting territory for study. 
 
 Was all ready for the day's work this morning shortly 
 after five. But after walking over a plant which should be 
 famous for its magnificent distances, I was told to report at 
 five-thirty for my old friend the twelve-hour shift. A real 
 working man probably wouldn't bother to take more than 
 an hour or so of sleep in advance preparation for anything, 
 so I'll follow suit and hope that my new straw-boss will be 
 as anxious to find an hour or two of slumber for himself 
 on the job to-night as my previous bosses on the long 
 shifts have been. 
 
 At the employment office Saturday they asked a question 
 or two, gave me a card marked " Labor or better," and in- 
 structions to "Be around Monday morning between six 
 and seven." Evidently they are unwilling to sign a man 
 up till he is ready to go right onto the job. This morning 
 the basement room was filled and overflowing with a few 
 of us white and many black Americans, many Mexicans hi 
 overalls and sombreros, and others who had shown their 
 slips to the policeman yes, he was about as officious as 
 usual and been given their places in the procession up to 
 the window. It moved very slowly and at its end brought 
 many disappointments. 
 
 238
 
 AMONG THE INGOTS AND BILLETS AGAIN 239 
 
 "How old are you?" the employing clerk would shout. 
 "How old? . . . Well, you'll have to get a birth-certificate 
 before you can get a job here." 
 
 Or, 
 
 "Sign here. Can't write? Well, how do you spell it? 
 Slow, now! P-r-z-1-m. . . . That right? All right, go 
 with that man to the north gate." 
 
 In between our semi-occasional moves the policeman 
 would take the holders of certain slips evidently former 
 employees up to the window ahead of the line, to the ac- 
 companiment of many subdued growls. 
 
 Finally my companion and I got to the window; he to be 
 told, "No, that church birth-certificate won't do get a 
 
 real one from the court"; and I to be directed to the 
 
 gate with my pass. 
 
 When my department head was finally found after long 
 trudgings and many inquiries, he was non-committal as to 
 the kind of work, but very definite in his orders that I be 
 on hand a good half -hour before the whistle starts the night- 
 shift. 
 
 Walking past a group of loaders, with my package of 
 overalls under my arm, one of them called out, "No got 
 job?" and grunted his approval when I answered: "To- 
 night." 
 
 And to-night it is. I'll be happy to be part of the gor- 
 geous spectacle of flame and shadow, white clouds and black 
 roofs and stacks, which the roaring Bessemer converters 
 blow upon the sky to be enjoyed in the park where I loafed 
 last night. And while my eyes enjoyed the picture for its 
 dazzling wealth of blaze and smoke and steam, a couple of 
 bench companions interpreted it in the terms that inter- 
 ested them those of flesh and blood: 
 
 "Yes," said an American of apparently good education, 
 "it's us clerks who are not getting what we should out of 
 all that there. Why, just a few days ago one of the boys
 
 240 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 said to the office manager: 'Well, I'm quitting the stool for 
 good; I've figured it out that instead of my $150 here I'll 
 make $200 outside there on the coke-ovens.' And he's 
 right at that." 
 
 "Me been with " (a near-by company) "eight years- 
 one same job since come dees country. Get 43 ^ cents 
 hour, and now have eight-hour sheeft with ten hours pay. 
 Pay $40 mont' board and room: alia time stew for eat 
 alia time stew no good. . . . Sure we all join union 
 must get more money or go back to ten twelve hours." 
 
 He seemed a fine type of the Polish worker strong, 
 well-shaven, intelligent-looking. His family of five is still 
 in Poland "on a farm good buildings everything yes, 
 all right now. During war me get good money but no can 
 send not'ing. Just now send me 'em $2,000." 
 
 Yes, I'll be glad to be part of the picture but gladder to 
 get closer to the other men who have been part of it for 
 years. A lot of them, probably, have never thought of it as 
 a picture at all but, at that, I guess their view of it as bread 
 and butter for themselves and their wives and youngsters 
 here or "back in old countree" comes closer to the heart 
 of the matter than the "Ah's" and "Oh's" of us sight- 
 seers there on the park bench. 
 
 Here goes for a short snooze and then into the greasy bro- 
 gans, wool socks, and all the plant fixin's. 
 
 Calumetta, 
 August 26. 
 
 Like the first twenty years at golf, it's the first half of 
 the twelve-hour shift that's the hardest. It looked last 
 night as though midnight had forgot to come. When I 
 guessed it was eleven, my fellow "hooker" laughed and 
 showed me it was nine ! After supper in the plant restau- 
 rant when the whistle finally blew, I lost a good hour of sleep 
 by searching for my boss and buddies: I found them at 
 last in a dark shanty fast asleep and joined them without
 
 AMONG THE INGOTS AND BILLETS AGAIN 241 
 
 further delay ! When, an hour later, we started to work again 
 it seemed bearable to think of sticking at it till the end. 
 
 The work itself is not very bad hooking the chains 
 around the piles of billets so the crane-man can lift them 
 off the iron trucks which bring them from the blooming 
 mill, or else guide them into the pickling-vat, etc. When 
 the billets they weigh from a few hundred pounds up to 
 several tons are red hot it is warm business, and prospects 
 are good for my getting a fine collection of burns unless I 
 can learn that all steel is not cold that looks it. At all 
 times the work is dangerous, especially while fastening the 
 chains to the tongs which lift out the separate billets to be 
 drilled for testing all the steel at this "dock" is said to be 
 special, for tools, etc. A finger in the wrong place or a 
 glove caught suddenly seems to mean nothing to the ten- 
 ton crane, as many of my friends appear unfortunately 
 able to testify. 
 
 Our boss, Tom, seems a friendly sort, just lately pro- 
 moted to his new responsibilities but evidently not afraid 
 of them, seeing how regularly he goes to sleep in their pres- 
 ence. But he is jolly with us and does seem anxious to get 
 through with all the stuff that has to be handled before 
 daybreak. And the men there are four of us under him 
 seem to like him. So the outlook is not bad. The crane- 
 man under him seems to know the job better than he, but 
 "is too temperamental for big responsibilities," according 
 to a friendly clerk: 
 
 "Mike's been here on the billet-dock over ten years, and 
 he'd be a boss if he'd let booze alone and wouldn't be 
 quite so fast and furious with his crane. Yes, he sure is a 
 terrier with those tongs when he's not on the crane!" 
 
 Everybody has a good word, too, for the assistant head 
 of our department, Louis. He got a young Pole to give 
 me a share of his locker, and told me to go into the office 
 to eat my dinner and generally to take liberties not given,
 
 242 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 as he puts it, "to any but white men," and to hope for an 
 early raise from the gang. The Pole proceeded to loan me 
 a dirty shirt so I could save my clean one. In general, 
 everybody gave me a friendly go. So I'll do my best to 
 get close to them and the job and the twelve-hour shift 
 and hope not to lose an hour's sleep again by not knowing 
 the ropes. 
 
 Calumetta, 
 August 27. 
 
 The possibility of the great steel strike is on everybody's 
 mind. Apparently every word about it in the newspapers 
 is diligently read for rehashing during the night with 
 many comments. 
 
 "Aw, them guys think we've worked their old twelve 
 and fourteen hours so long that we'll stand for anything," 
 says the Polish crane-boy. "We'll show 'em pretty soon !" 
 
 "But I don't believe we go out," confides a young Polish 
 "hookei " working along with me. "They ask for seventy- 
 five cents hour no company give dat, and not many work- 
 in' mans believes dey give it. I tink dey no go out no 
 difference if dey do vote ninety-eight per cent strike." 
 
 "Why shouldn't the company give us the eight-hour day 
 without makin' anybody strike for it?" says the heater, 
 happening by from the soaking-pits. "I'd be glad to let 
 it cost me three or four dollars a day." (A door-boy work- 
 ing on the same hot floor with him, says the man works 
 eleven hours days, and thirteen hours nights, every other 
 week, and earns about $400 a month, wages and tonnage.) 
 
 "What we earn is all right but it's these fellows that take 
 it away from us ! the grocers, the meat-man, and all," 
 complains an old oiler. "Why, you never get no change 
 from a dollar bill any more. Stone of the engineers 's a 
 big man, and he's right let's try to cut the cost o' livin' 
 first." 
 
 "Well, count me in, uncle, for a six-day week like a civi-
 
 AMONG THE INGOTS AND BILLETS AGAIN 243 
 
 lized man," says an engineer of thirty years' service. "This 
 work fourteen hours nights every day in the long-shift 
 week is plain hell, and we oughta stop it and we woulda 
 long ago, if the bosses hadn't seen some profit for themselves 
 to keep us from it." 
 
 "Well, mebbe me see my girl every day when eight-hour 
 comes," smiled another Polish hooker who had earlier con- 
 fided how he maintained friendly relations with his Polish- 
 American fiancee by spending nearly every other day with 
 her, catching up his sleep on the odd days. 
 
 It looks to me as though three main factors are at work 
 for such discontent. First, the war has made everybody 
 want to live a more normal life than the long shifts permit. 
 Secondly, the state of chronic fatigue caused by these long 
 shifts enormously complicates the relations between the 
 worker and all his superiors and all his world, in fact, in- 
 clines him to be fretful, distrustful, almost malicious. 
 Anybody who doesn't believe it, should "try it on his own 
 Victrola!" And third, the present constant public dinning 
 of the H. C. L. even though in the effort to reduce it 
 makes every one feel poor. 
 
 Let no one cast the first stone; it is enough to try the 
 souls of the sanest men. In the days when I tried to inter- 
 est the rich in philanthropic gifts it was always evident that 
 every one is as rich as he feels; his actual bank-book figures 
 have little to do with it. Russell Sage is reported to have 
 told the street panhandler who asked him for a dime: 
 "Why, man, I have a million dollars in the bank not earn- 
 ing a cent come around some other day when I'm not so 
 worried!" Even if the constantly ascending costs were to 
 be brought low by the punishment of any profiteers, that 
 makes it all the more certain that somebody's profits have 
 grown abnormally while your wages have either stood still 
 or shrunk, or at least grown only normally. In any case it 
 all makes you feel poor. And when added to by chronic
 
 244 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 fatigue, that makes you feel sore, ready to call for an ac- 
 counting of all your troubles. 
 
 The psychologist James talked about men becoming great 
 because instead of stopping when they're tired they keep 
 pushing into the energetic freshness which, he claimed, 
 lies just beyond these layers of weariness. He called these 
 layers "fatigue dams." My experience of the last few 
 months makes me think he is right in the case of the man 
 who has a chance to "catch up" and start even again at 
 occasional intervals or is kept up by the feeling of large 
 achievement. But where the foreman takes for himself 
 most of the feeling of achievement, and where it is the same 
 round for weeks and months of "Yes, sir, eleven hours days 
 and thirteen hours nights steady, with only two days off in 
 two years not exceptin' Sundays and holidays," as some 
 of my buddies have boasted then I'm sure it's a "Fatigue 
 Damn." 
 
 I've had more of these hi their acute form in working 
 hours under plant roofs than ever in my life before. They 
 were nasty and they gummed up the works for the day's 
 sane thinking about everything, especially about my em- 
 ployers and lots of well-meaning employers are undoubt- 
 edly having their motives misunderstood by those daily 
 temporary fatigue dams. (I remember, for instance, the 
 white, pinched face of young Giovanni near the tired end 
 of that first night in the open-hearth labor gang as he 
 stood on the hot bricks of the down-take and told the boss 
 
 he could "go to h ; I'm through" and many others 
 
 hi the same mood.) 
 
 But the big trouble comes when these little acute emer- 
 gency or temporary dams become chronic ! They certainly 
 do wall off tired men into different compartments from rested 
 ones! Just now there seems at least a fair chance that 
 dynamite may be put to work in the country before they 
 are blown up and away.
 
 AMONG THE INGOTS AND BILLETS AGAIN 245 
 
 These feelings are not lessened by the talk of other com- 
 panies in the neighborhood in which the long shifts have 
 been abolished, with, usually, nine, ten, or eleven hours' 
 pay given for eight hours' work and with also, I believe, 
 a saving to the company, at least where leaders instead of 
 drivers are put in as gang bosses and foremen. 
 
 But possibly I'm suffering myself at this moment from 
 too long and too busy nights. We were kept very busy 
 nearly all the shift. This morning I dragged the long way 
 to the employment office to ask if the labor job they men- 
 tioned at the blast-furnace was still open; it sounded dirty 
 but interesting. When the policeman planted himself in 
 front of me and asked very curtly what I wanted, I found 
 the night's work had made me very touchy. It seemed to 
 me it was not his business to say, "Aw, you can't get no 
 transfer," when the employment clerk in charge of such 
 matters was only six feet away. It was only the sight of 
 his billy that kept me from busting a dam or two while I 
 walked around him. 
 
 In line with the clerk's direction, I walked a block or 
 two to find the blast-furnace head. " He'll be here hi a 
 minute," his assistant said. After a half-hour another said: 
 " He'll be here in an hour and a half." 
 
 I dragged myself home very late and very weary and 
 to bed. Now, after a poor day's sleep, I must start early 
 for the blast-furnace again tired to begin with. I'll try 
 to work through and over it and trust for a dam and not a 
 damn in the morning. 
 
 So I'll say Good Night and go to work ! 
 
 Calumetta, 
 August 28. 
 
 Another night on the chain gang. 
 
 All the bosses at the blast-furnace were enjoying the 
 shower-bath, with which each department office is equipped 
 for general use, and I waited some time for my man. He
 
 246 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 evidently has trouble getting labor for his extremely dirty 
 and disagreeable work, and seemed about to take me on 
 when I unfortunately mentioned my very short period on 
 the " billet-dock." 
 
 "Aw," he said then, "you come round in a week. I 
 sure hate these hurry-up transfers." 
 
 He is probably right. Of course I could quit the "hook- 
 ers gang" and then take a chance at "hirin' on" in the 
 blast-furnace at the employment office; but that's risky; 
 I guess I'll do well to get better acquainted with my present 
 billets and chains and buddies. 
 
 "Let she blow!" snorted my young Pole as the starting 
 whistle blew before we had got our work clothes out of our 
 common locker. " Dat what she for ! Let she blow." 
 
 Yes, we do take it easy getting under way. Mike, the 
 strenuous crane man, reports for his day one of the best 
 sleeps hi weeks; Stephen none at all. Tom, the gang boss, 
 got in only a few hours, but he has looked over the orders 
 for the night and joyously announces that, "We'll be able 
 to go over the line for fair all right" the interpretation 
 whereof is that we'll be able to "hit the hay" or "pound 
 our ears" for at least an hour before morning without 
 slighting any billets. 
 
 We did, but the steel we handled was red-hot and made it 
 a fairly strenuous night. Of course, in between train- 
 loads there was time for tobacco and a bit of gossip about 
 the strike. In one such breathing spell I saw the crane 
 man motion big Joe as he lowered the huge hoist-block 
 with its enormous hook. I supposed that meant to take 
 off or put on chains as usual, but was ordered back by the 
 crane's staccato bell. All was plain when Joe took out a 
 cigarette, placed it on the block so that the crane man could 
 raise it and "rack it in" along his travelling bridge to where 
 he could reach the precious smoke and enjoy himself. 
 
 The Poles seem silent to us but they certainly enjoy
 
 AMONG THE INGOTS AND BILLETS AGAIN 247 
 
 conversation with each other in loud voices which kill 
 sleep for any one trying to go "over the line" on one of the 
 locker-room benches. All an ordinary person can get is 
 the constant interlarding of typical American profanity and 
 obscenity which seems to be indulged in as a sort of badge 
 or "first papers" of Americanism. 
 
 My sleepy admonitions to "Aw, hire a hall !" got no con- 
 sideration whatever. "Poland and the League of Nations," 
 said my buddy when I asked him what the talk was about. 
 (Six months ago I would have sworn it was a riot or a row 
 instead of a talk !) 
 
 Finding sleep impossible in the presence of the League 
 I went over to my old friends, the open-hearth furnaces 
 and the chaps at work beneath the "floor," and came back 
 wondering whether some of these Americans who ask, 
 "Why do these 'wops' come over here, anyway?" would 
 be willing to do for any money the work these foreign-born 
 workers do without a murmur at forty-three cents an hour. 
 
 Without at least a half-day's practice I could not have 
 stayed, for any money, ten minutes in the checker-chamber 
 from which a crowd of husky foreigners were taking out the 
 checker-brick. A thermometer would without doubt have 
 registered there, as it did at another plant mentioned some 
 time ago, a heat at which the scientists will prove that life 
 cannot be sustained ! Yet there they are a half -hour in 
 and a half-hour out, theoretically, though I doubt if it 
 works out as long as that practically helping to quiet the 
 demand for open-hearth steel. 
 
 If, as reported, over 100,000 foreign-born workers have 
 left the country in the past three months, and if this pace 
 continues, the answer must be the invention of machinery 
 for these jobs. Certainly such machinery would require 
 no greater ingenuity than much already under successful 
 and indispensable, also, and much to the point, cost-re- 
 ducing operation.
 
 248 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 When it comes to sweat and muscle and brawn and heat 
 and dirt and gas, and nearly every unpleasant thing that 
 can be thought of in connection with back-breaking work, 
 it certainly seems up to these chaps to do it these and 
 negroes. Not one of us need withhold our acknowledg- 
 ment that the great structure of American industry and 
 that means American commerce, American prosperity, 
 American life is built finally on the husky biceps and the 
 hairy, sweaty chests of these fellows these fathers and hus- 
 bands and brothers. And of many of them even their chil- 
 dren and wives and sisters do not appear to sense their 
 service any better than do the rest of us; some of them 
 seem to me, with their endless hours and absence of lay- 
 offs, to be making of themselves in actuality, genuine living 
 sacrifices for their families. 
 
 A labor agitator would agree with all this and then 
 proceed to draw two false deductions from it: first, that 
 labor gives all the value there is brains and capital nothing; 
 second, that the higher-ups and the capitalists are wit- 
 tingly and consciously to blame, are cruel exploiters of those 
 beneath them. 
 
 Neither logic nor, in my opinion, experience is on the 
 agitator's side. But the trouble is that logic isn't on the 
 job with these men: it lies down before those fatigue dams 
 and goes to bed after the first eight, nine, or ten hours of 
 hard work, and the feelings which then take control of the 
 mind of the tired worker find sweet music in his words. 
 
 Just now I can't complain personally of the hard toil. 
 But even at that the twelve-hour day or night leaves 
 almost no time for those ordinary relationships of father, 
 brother, sweetheart, or friends which make life worth living. 
 Add to the twelve the usual average of an hour and a half 
 to go and come an average of two hours would be faker 
 in the city and you have left only three of the sixteen wak- 
 ing hours in which to dress and undress, eat three meals,
 
 AMONG THE INGOTS AND BILLETS AGAIN 249 
 
 look at a paper, get acquainted with your youngsters, or 
 retain your stand-in with your "lady-friend." 
 
 Of course logic can pointedly ask: "Why eight hours? 
 why not seven or five?" And managers and experts can 
 discuss it for days. Of course it does vary according to the 
 kind of work. They are right hi saying that there are two 
 sides to the question hi logic. But the workers don't 
 come to their conclusions by logic at the end of his first 
 or his fiftieth week of the twelve-hour shift the manager 
 would probably agree with his men that it just "felt" too 
 long, and would then observe that most of their mutual 
 friends were on eight hours, which would be enough to make 
 it look better than nine or ten. 
 
 In some such informal way of feeling rather than think- 
 ing it looks as though pressure is likely to grow for making 
 the eight or nine hour day for the labor gang (possibly 
 longer where men live near the plant) economic profitable 
 for the company and the man. As a matter of fact, I'm 
 growing more sure that the twelve-hour day is tremendously 
 wasteful, and so a part of our little old companion, H. C. L. 
 
 It is probably true that the unskilled man who works with 
 his bare hands cannot really produce enough to make a 
 decent living in eight hours also that the labor gang is 
 already the most expensive part of the whole productive 
 process. In which case, there are two good reasons for the 
 invention of more machinery to handle those subhuman 
 jobs besides lessening the bugaboo of possible labor short- 
 age at a later date. 
 
 The conversation of the workers every place makes it 
 plain as day that every deprivation of normal life and its 
 normal relationships, as well as every drop of sweat and 
 ounce of muscle has to be paid for. Long hours, smoke, 
 dirt, grease, heat, loads, "no spell," all these things, as well 
 as "bad boss," go to make one job pay more than another 
 if it is to find workers. Hour after hour of in-between talk
 
 250 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 goes on about these details and the charge that has to be 
 made for them on the boss and the company. And the 
 consumer pays the bill for it whether it is genuinely essen- 
 tial to the process or merely overlooked by an ignorant 
 gang boss, an overworked and undermanned millwright 
 department, or an overlogical and undersympathetic su- 
 perintendent. 
 
 "Two tune tree time four tune I ask for electric 
 heater in my crane," says Lorenzo. "Alia time 'All right, 
 some day.' Never she come. Seex time I ask for lights so 
 I see acid tank for put billets in: never no - - light she 
 come. Dees h - of job." 
 
 "Yes," says the brakie of the dinky engine which hauls 
 the trucks piled with billets from the blooming-mill to us, 
 or takes the hot ingots from the cinder pit and the open- 
 hearth to the soaking pits. "Get $6.95, but all tune run, 
 run never no rest ten hours day and fourteen nights. 
 No good." 
 
 "Had good job in M ," says Walter, a Polish fellow- 
 hooker, "but cars no good dere leave too far to walk in 
 winter. . . . Too cold and den I got no people dere. 
 Here my cousins." 
 
 All sounds perfectly human, doesn't it? 
 
 Here, too, as everywhere before, I get the idea that all 
 this would be different if there was more feeling that hard 
 work would in the end bring the longed-for better job. 
 But everywhere here, as usual, is the conviction that the 
 only real way to get ahead is to marry the boss's daughter. 
 To my surprise a young college-bred chap who has an 
 important job as a semi-technical clerk voiced this con- 
 viction, and worse was able to support his point. 
 
 "The department super? he's the cousin of the general 
 super. His assistant? married his sister" and so on 
 down the line for nearly everybody in sight, or out of it, 
 in the whole place.
 
 AMONG THE INGOTS AND BILLETS AGAIN 251 
 
 "Why, we've got men over us," said the engineer; 
 " they 're blamed good men, I'll say, too. But fellows they 
 used to boss are now over 'em, and they in the same job 
 as seventeen years ago; they hadn't no pull, you see. An' 
 I gotta friend he's a ' sailor 'that's a general engine and 
 machine fixer. He goes to war; he comes back, y' under- 
 stand, to get his job. The boss's nephey's got it. 'Thout 
 no experience a-tall, y' might say. 'Course he quit, wouldn't 
 you?" 
 
 But I've slept from seven-thirty till two-thirty seven 
 hours. It's four-thirty now time to start for supper and 
 work. I could stand it not to get into my dirty clothes 
 but here goes. 
 
 So long till what always looks and feels like day after 
 to-morrow, but isn't. 
 
 Same Place, 
 August 29. 
 
 Of course the night shift gives little chance to see the 
 social life of the district. The saloons seem generally de- 
 serted at least in the afternoons. The Greek candy and 
 soda places look busy, but not with working men. Beer is 
 still available, also whiskey to those in the know, I'm told, 
 though at very high prices. The movies seem sufficiently 
 lurid and prosperous. 
 
 In general, the houses and flats are not particularly bad 
 partly perhaps because many of the women of the district 
 help out by such jobs as "putting the tights on the sausages" 
 at a local packing-house. As usual, the homes nearest the 
 plant are the worst, filled apparently, every room of them 
 and out onto the street, with the least successful of the 
 foreign-born and negroes, their women, and, especially, their 
 children. In between are numerous dirty eating-rooms and 
 saloons with brand-new "Soft Drinks" signs. As the young 
 man passes some of these latter, the panel at the back of the 
 show-window opens stealthily and discloses the beckoning 
 finger of the painted barmaid.
 
 252 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 The English language mostly broken is fairly common 
 on the street. In the early morning and evening hours the 
 cars are crowded with hard-working men going to or coming 
 from work with their dinner-pails. At our plant compara- 
 tively few seem to patronize the very good and inexpensive 
 company restaurant. In their hands are a surprisingly 
 large number of newspapers of all languages, including 
 mostly the lurid and well-known American sheet which 
 gives the least news and the most bitter and unfair criticism 
 of every group except the workers. From the photographers' 
 exhibits it is plain that marrying and giving in marriage is 
 a frequent and highly festive occasion, with confirmation 
 competing with it for first place among life's high spots. 
 
 The search for a room discovered some crowded, dark, 
 grimy apartments, with dingy bathrooms of antiquated and 
 neglected plumbing and linoleum. "We mostly gets four 
 dollars for it, sir." My choice at three has been clean, 
 comfortable, and well-ventilated cared for by a matronly 
 grandmother of good German type, who was proud of hav- 
 ing all clerks, and needed strong urging to take in such a 
 rough-looking steel worker as she evidently thought me. 
 
 To-day, particularly, the numerousness of the district's 
 cripples has got on my nerves. While we were getting our 
 work duds on last night I noticed big Lorenzo using his 
 knife to cut off a finger from a new pair of the white canvas 
 gloves which are almost as necessary as clothes. When I 
 protested, he answered "No good no use!" and held up 
 his hand to show that finger missing. During the night as 
 we fixed the chains around the heavy hot truck loads, or 
 put the tongs on the big billets, watchful to extricate our 
 thumbs and fingers, my buddy carried on the tale of all the 
 accidents he had witnessed: 
 
 "Dese two fingers here dat cost him. See? Anodder 
 fellow, da whole billet it break loose and fall on him nine 
 mont' in hospital 'fore he get well. . . . Me ? Me no get 
 hurt me know how work t'irteen years and never no
 
 AMONG THE INGOTS AND BILLETS AGAIN 253 
 
 accident. Green man green man lak you he get hurt 
 unless watch mighty sharp!" 
 
 In the restaurant, after Tom, the boss, had told how he 
 broke his leg a one-footed boy served himself and handled 
 his crutch dexterously. On the way home I passed the one- 
 armed crossing watchman, bought a paper of the half- 
 handed newsman, and then joined a crowd in the street 
 to gaze on a mass of thick red blood left on the pavement 
 just after the home-hurrying victim of the motor-cycle col- 
 lision had been put in the ambulance and hurried off to the 
 company hospital. 
 
 On the car I was not too tired to return the smile of 
 an early-rising baby on its father's shoulder smiled till I 
 glanced at its chubby hand and discovered to my horror 
 that all the fingers had been cut off ! 
 
 Here are my thanks to be through with this job and still 
 intact, though I expect to locate in one or two more mills 
 before I go back to assume the white (collared) man's bur- 
 den. I'm only sorry that I can't stop for a go at the blast- 
 furnace or the Bessemer. But I will say that it doesn't 
 take many twelve-hour nights of uninteresting hand labor 
 to seem like a mighty long time. 
 
 It would seem longer were it not for the flaming panoramas 
 and the monster noises always on hand. To be close to all 
 the mammoth power they spell gives somehow a subtle 
 pleasure as though it were somehow in process of becoming 
 part of your own personal equipment. As you stand on the 
 rim of the pickling-tank waiting to guide the crane-load of 
 billets into the acid for taking off the scale, you suddenly 
 feel warmth at your back, and turn to marvel at the won- 
 drous orange-colored ingots following the dinky through the 
 yard as silently as if they were the iridescent oil- jars of 
 Ali Baba. Then over in the open-hearth the building's out- 
 lines are in an instant thrown out black against the sky by 
 the dazzling silver whiteness of the tapping as if the devil
 
 254 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 himself had suddenly switched on the lights of Hell's Gen- 
 eral High Headquarters. A moment later the crane bell 
 in the near-by building sounds its urgent warning, and the 
 soaking-pit opens to throw out a lemon-yellow glow on the 
 great room's black steel rafters. Then the crane's huge and 
 sinister mutilated hand of finger and thumb reaches down 
 into the fiery abyss under the guidance of the unseen man 
 above and then relentlessly soars up and over with its 
 dripping yellow ingot to the receiving tables of the bloom- 
 ing-mill. Too-ot ! goes the whistle of the bar roller from his 
 bridge and, looking like some dumb helpless beast, the ingot 
 is rushed onto the roll tables, clankity-clank, up to and 
 through the huge, sputtering rolls that shower hot fiery 
 scale everywhere, only to be stopped suddenly with a 
 colossal bang ! After an instant's pause of silence the rolls 
 are reversed, the yellow beast, now turning red, is pushed 
 back through and, clankity-clank again, stopped, bang! 
 till it is become lean and thin and comparatively cold, 
 ready to be cut and hustled again into other furnaces for 
 later heating and further rolling into the finished beams 
 for the new sky-scraper. Too-ot ! goes the whistle again, 
 and on the instant the soaking-pit crane-man has deposited 
 his dripping burden and another Ingot Beast is on his 
 way to the slaughter of the tirelessly grumbling and cease- 
 lessly sputtering rolls : for these are tonnage-men, and every 
 instant means money. Marvellous, too, are the deeds and 
 doings of the crane-men who reach into the furnaces to 
 clasp one of these elongated blooms, lift it off of the tables, 
 and then by a sort of swing-your-partner movement, which 
 is too complex to try to describe, contrive to place it in 
 other furnaces, and then put the reheated steel back again 
 onto the " tables" which carry it to the smaller rolls. 
 These give it its final form and leave it to cool until it is 
 put into the cars for shipment and use. 
 
 It's a shame that the movies can't make these wondrous
 
 AMONG THE INGOTS AND BILLETS AGAIN 255 
 
 sounds and don't make these wondrous sights the experi- 
 ence of every one who enjoys the modern life, the weight of 
 which is borne by the fabricated contents of those gorgeous, 
 orange-colored Ali Baba jars! 
 
 When we parted after the morning's wash-up I brought 
 out my overalls under the pretense of necessary laundering 
 saying good-by calls out too many questions, and trying 
 to get my money on the spot is too hard on time and dis- 
 position. 
 
 On the whole, it looks as though, like most of the others, 
 the company is trying to better its relations with its men, 
 but does not seem to realize how far they must go in the 
 way of organization to bridge the gulf after they have taken 
 the first step of genuinely wishing to be fair and square. 
 Classes there are in various studies, but no worker I met 
 knows of them. Of the character of the men at the top 
 no one I saw had anything but the haziest ideas, though for 
 the most part all agreed that they were, of course, here as 
 elsewhere, "out for the dollar." 
 
 My last inquiry was of a young and handsome, black- 
 pompadoured crane-man from another "dock." Born here, 
 he had had two years public school in addition to a Polish 
 parochial school which gave instruction mostly in English 
 and partly in Polish. 
 
 "No, my father's not goin' back all of us are here. But 
 at that he's sorry he came over; he left a good business over 
 there for some fool reason. He's raised twelve of us kids 
 and he's husky as you'd want. He has drunk a beer-glass 
 full of whiskey every night for thirty years 'course about 
 half of it is the melted lard he puts in it. But he's like 
 the rest of these foreign-born slaves around here worked 
 his head off and still only a 'chipper,' which, as you know, 
 is all-fired hard work. Me, I'm just married. . . . What ! 
 Twelve kids to go round and kiss the foreman for jobs? 
 No, not for me !"
 
 256 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 One thing is certain, the second generation he represents 
 will never be seen very often or very long in the heat of the 
 checker-chambers. So if that work is to be done by humans 
 and not by machines, it will require a constant stream of 
 " them ignorant foreigners." 
 
 I'm off for other steel towns in this same district. 
 
 Calumetropolis, 
 
 Wednesday Afternoon, Sept. 3. 
 
 It appears that every steel-worker comes into this dis- 
 trict sooner or later certainly the crowds are large enough 
 at the different plant gates. And that's the nearest I've 
 got yet to a job that and a pair of legs well wearied by 
 walking from one gate to the other. 
 
 The system sure does rub it in that the time of a jobless 
 man is of no value to himself or anybody else. 
 
 "All the hirin's done at the other gate," one policeman 
 advised gruffly enough, as though he had something else 
 of real importance on his mind. 
 
 "No hirin' done here except at five o'clock," was the 
 word of his colleague at the other gate, more polite but no 
 less definite and final. 
 
 "What do you want?" came in an insulting tone of 
 voice from a tough-looking foreign-born worker as I stepped 
 into the employment office at five o'clock after a half-day's 
 loaf. It was a bold attempt to pose as a skilled or semi- 
 skilled man entitled to walk inside, away from the un- 
 skilled crowd outside. But it didn't work. I was ordered 
 out into the crowd of fifty or so negroes, Slavs, Greeks, 
 Spaniards, Persians, and others standing around for the 
 "hirin' at five." 
 
 It was fully six before a blue-coated but unimpressive 
 Greek said in a good try at friendliness: "Back this way, 
 fellows ! Everybody back here." 
 
 So we all backed and huddled up against the fence and,
 
 AMONG THE INGOTS AND BILLETS AGAIN 257 
 
 like a herd of cattle, turned our heads in the one direction 
 that of the hirer whose coming the order was supposed 
 to herald. 
 
 After another long wait he came, leisurely enough, pre- 
 sumably in order to indicate that he was not unduly anxious 
 to buy what we had to sell. 
 
 "Anybody here want to go on as labor in Open-hearth 
 No. 2?" he asked as he looked at his white slips and moved 
 through the crowd. 
 
 To my surprise only one or two volunteered, and they 
 only after repeated invitations. 
 
 Ditto with the call for laborers in rail-mill, dock, coke- 
 plant, and blast-furnace. When I volunteered for this 
 last he considerately told me to wait and he'd hope to have 
 something better soon. 
 
 "Sure, all these guys has had a crack at all them bum 
 jobs or else their friends has told 'em," explained a tanned 
 and toughened young son of Greek parents when I asked 
 what the matter was. "And them as has gone on here just 
 now you'll see 'em here to-morrow night tryin' for some- 
 thin' else. Who wants to work in open-hearth or checker- 
 chambers this weather, huh? And they're all too dirty, 
 anyway and too hard. Look at them hands them's 
 from eleven and a half hours solid on them jobs no chance 
 to sit down and hi the coke-plant no chance to wash-up- 
 like them guys there." 
 
 Sure enough, there came by a dozen men as black and 
 dirty as miners and much harder to clean ! going off their 
 twelve-hour turn. 
 
 "In rail-mill," added a hardy Pole, "alia time lift-'em 
 up rail, push-'em up rail, pile-'em up rail. . . . Too heavy, 
 no good." 
 
 Later he added that he had worked in another depart- 
 ment three years without a break till nine days ago, when 
 his boss "He no like me and tell me 'get the h - out,'
 
 258 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 but superintendent he tell me 'stay.' But every day no 
 can see him for get-'em back job." 
 
 A big chap with gold teeth and smooth-shaven, rosy 
 cheeks, who appeared to hold himself above the common 
 herd of us, proved to be a soaking-pit heater. He admitted 
 most proudly earning an average of fifteen dollars per day 
 by combination of time and tonnage. 
 
 "Well, I think it's comin' to me now been at it fourteen 
 years, since the days when I used to have to be carried home 
 done up by the heat. In the last five years I've run six 
 autos ragged. . . . Sure I'm independent. That's why 
 
 I'm here. The boss at Steel Company tried to tell 
 
 me somethin' about heatin', and I says, 'If you know this 
 job so well,' I says, 'it's yours, you've got it,' I says, 'and 
 you keep it.' Gee, you should-a seen the look on his 
 face ! But I don't need to stay any place I don't want to." 
 
 Of course we got around to the danger of a nation-wide 
 strike. 
 
 "Well, I know somethin' about strikes I'm blacklisted 
 
 now at X Steel Company, and I've been out in three 
 
 big ones. And I'll bet any man the gang won't last two 
 months. These darned foreigners won't stick they cave 
 in. Most of 'em simply can't live three weeks 'thout get- 
 tin' a piece of money somehow. No, sir, they're fightin' 
 too much money for what they got in their jeans." 
 
 All this while the crowd was milling around the moving 
 employment man like cattle around the man with the corn- 
 basket. 
 
 "Anybody want to learn chipping? Good jobs to start 
 chipping! . . . Where'd you work last, son? . . . And 
 before that? All right go and stand over there." 
 
 As he passed my rosy-cheeked friend, he whispered: 
 "I'm keeping you in mind, but nothing yet." 
 
 By seven-thirty the purchaser of labor had gone inside 
 and stayed so long that the crowd had to assume that the
 
 AMONG THE INGOTS AND BILLETS AGAIN 259 
 
 market-house was closed until six o'clock in the morning, 
 and so drifted away. Joining our cursings with the more 
 violent ones of the crowd, a young Greek and I walked 
 over to town and forgot our troubles in a movie. (He is 
 planning to go back home as soon as he can find the money 
 and accept his uncle's offer, earlier turned down, to educate 
 him for medicine.) 
 
 Figuring on the usual delay, I joined him and a group of 
 about eighty laborers a half-hour after the hiring hour of 
 six this morning. It was seven when the Greek policeman 
 shoved us back again against the fence and a clerk came out 
 to look us over. His nose was very large and very disdain- 
 fully tilted, and gave him a very high-brow expression, 
 but from his mouth there issued constantly a copious 
 stream of very low-brow tobacco-juice intended, doubt- 
 less, to alibi his nose and prove to us he was a regular 
 fellow. 
 
 Again only a few accepted the invitation to "go on" to 
 the jobs offered many of them waiting for the better ones 
 they expected, according to experience, to be given out 
 later from the sheaf of white slips. 
 
 "Not a thing in that line," he said to me when I asked 
 for "mill-wrightin', furnace, or machine-helpin'." 
 
 "Nothing yet," he whispered to a young Jewish boy of 
 dapper clothes and appearance with whom I shortly got 
 chummy. 
 
 He had been laid off his crane in a Pittsburgh mill and had 
 waited at this gate twice daily for a month, living with his 
 married sister meanwhile. He was getting discouraged 
 and therefore sore. As we went away together to another 
 mill after we had stood around the hiring-clerk for an hour 
 and a quarter besides the half-hour before that worthy 
 appeared the curse he let fly at the whole institution was 
 terrible to hear. In support of it, he argued: 
 
 "Does it look reasonable? A great big mill like that
 
 260 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 workin' thousands of men and never no crane-man taken 
 on in a month ! And they won't let me in to see a foreman 
 or anybody ! Aw, I tell you nothin' does a fellow any good 
 but pull. You gotta have a drag or they treat you like 
 cattle." 
 
 For most of our two-mile walk till we hailed an obliging 
 ice-cream truck driver he took great pleasure in enter- 
 taining me with stories of his skill hi getting the work out 
 of a crane by the right working of the levers to "bridge" 
 (move the crane's beams the length of the building), "hoist" 
 (up and down from the floor), and "trolley" or "rack" 
 (from one side to the other) all at the same tune "and 
 never no smash-ups or call-downs from the boss." 
 
 He seems to possess the makings of a good worker. But 
 it is easy to see that with another month of this his morale 
 will be so broken that he will become a hopeless good-for- 
 nothing, whether on the job or off. But anybody with any 
 self-respect or any skill there at the gate he and the others 
 call it the "bull-pen" will sympathize with the evolution 
 of his thinkings and his feelings there on the hiring-line each 
 evening and morning which made him sum up the purposes 
 and plans of his immediate future with: 
 
 "But I'm almighty sure o' one thing you won't catch 
 me workin' myself to death when I do get in." 
 
 When we arrived finally at our destination, the pay-clerk 
 told us to ask the watchman whether he had anything for 
 us. That gentleman was very democratic, but the best he 
 could do was to break the news to us gently that: 
 
 "All the hirin's at four. Be here at four." 
 
 We trudged another half-mile to another plant, feeling 
 sure that its newness would mean work for us. The watch- 
 man was affable though dignified, but referred us to a very 
 rough-looking employment manager, who in turn said there 
 was nothing for a crane-man, but might be something on 
 the hot-mills if I would "Be here at four."
 
 AMONG THE INGOTS AND BILLETS AGAIN 261 
 
 So there you are and here I am still outside the gates. 
 However, it looks good for a job this afternoon on the 
 evening shift. I'll have to catch a little sleep and take my 
 working clothes along so as to be ready for a night's work. 
 Perhaps I should take my dinner, too, but I guess I'll 
 gamble on some kind of a plant restaurant. 
 Here's hoping ! 
 
 Calumetropolis, 
 Sept. 3, 8 P. M. 
 
 It certainly does get on a fellow's nerves this constant 
 disregard of the jobless job-seeker's time ! 
 
 As instructed, I made sure this afternoon to be on hand 
 at four all ready for that possible hot-mill job, and stood 
 properly lined up with a couple of negroes who were getting 
 their time-cards made out for going to work. But the 
 clerk told me that he had nothing to do with the hiring, and 
 the man who did was down-town. 
 
 To him and the watchman I reiterated: "But he told 
 me to be here at four !" 
 
 The watchman asked some questions intended to indi- 
 cate his belief that I was a liar. He also refused permission 
 to go into the plant to see the hot-mill foreman. I never 
 wanted to swear more. I did calm down, however, and 
 gave myself the satisfaction of expressing to him, quite 
 politely, my conviction that plant policemen in general 
 and I acted as if I didn't think he was one, his blue coat 
 being off cancel off about twenty per cent of the value of 
 all the company spends in restaurants or other forms for 
 securing the good-will of their employees. In less ruffled 
 mood I'll cut it down to fifteen, but no lower, as previously 
 stated. It is foolish for the management to point with 
 pride to their positive efforts to get good-will and then 
 never take a look at some of the things which are constantly 
 negativing them. 
 
 To wear off the raspy edge of my disappointment, I walked
 
 262 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 over to the - - plant. There the employment manager 
 appeared quite human. He could give me nothing of a 
 skilled sort, but would be glad to let me start in the yard, 
 at from forty-two to sixty cents, according to what turned 
 up. I agreed to come if my next try failed on the hot-mills. 
 On the way to town I dropped into the company hotel for 
 unmarried men. It's a wonder handsome, clean, with 
 tiled floors, shower-baths, all for about ten dollars a week, 
 room and meals. 
 
 So now it's "Be here between seven and eight in the 
 morning" as usual. It's well I was born a grand hoper. 
 But it makes a fellow feel that everything else worth while 
 vanishes as hope vanishes when you see there at the gates 
 some of those discouraged chaps who feel themselves grad- 
 ually settling down a rung or two in the scale of respecta- 
 bility from skilled or semiskilled to unskilled labor. The 
 odd thing is to notice how easy it is to absorb all their moods 
 myself. It takes an effort not to feel as sore at the com- 
 pany and the world as they do, even though it does not 
 mean to me, as it threatens constantly to mean to them, 
 the month-long difference between bed and no bed, food 
 and no food, decency and indecency, now that my tour is 
 almost ended. 
 
 Anyway, I'll try to sleep and dream of the white-collar 
 world where my time used to be considered valuable and 
 hope for the best in the morning. 
 
 In the way of jollier things, by the way and I need to 
 think of them I am reminded of my unsuccessful hunt for 
 a steel job in a Massachusetts city last spring. After I had 
 been at five gates without result, I bought a paper and looked 
 at the Help Wanted column. Sure enough there it was 
 in big letters, too "Must Have Experienced Steel 
 
 By that time I was getting out my paper and lead-pencil 
 to take down the address, glowing with pleasure meanwhile 
 at my brilliancy in thus discovering the well-hidden oppor-
 
 AMONG THE INGOTS AND BILLETS AGAIN 263 
 
 tunity. Then I read the small print and woke up. It 
 read: "Must Have Experienced Steel stitchers on high-grade 
 corsets." 
 
 Calumetropolis. 
 
 Sept. 4. 
 
 Right thumb and fingers almost strike at the thought of 
 grasping even a pen after the work they have been doing 
 for seven hours to-day. But still they share in the general 
 delight at having found a job besides having played so 
 well their part in the "virile and moving drama" of the 
 day it might be entitled "Forty Buckets o' Sweat." It 
 certainly was "moving"; because that's the job it's called 
 the "drag-out" by the men, and "pair-heater's helper" 
 by the management and it takes something "virile," all 
 right, to stand up to it. 
 
 It all came from my lucky mention there at the gate this 
 morning of one of the company's other plants where I 
 worked on the cold rolls last winter in Episode II. A half- 
 hour later I was being examined by the doctor. It seems 
 ungrateful to mention it, for I was mighty glad to get, 
 finally, on the hot-mills. But it is worth noticing that 
 fifteen minutes after he told me I'd evidently picked up a 
 near-rupture on some job, I was doing the heaviest job of 
 lifting encountered to date. (That is, after all, pretty typical 
 too much of this betterment idea seems not to have got 
 out of the service building and right into the job where 
 and only where it can save the worker's sweat and skin 
 and blood. That's where he wants it.) 
 
 It seems that the "drag-out's" job is first to put the pairs 
 of cold steel in the form of "sheet-bar" onto the "peel" 
 or heavy iron flat bar or paddle with which the pair-heater 
 pushes them back into the hottest parts of his furnace. 
 During the whole of the morning it was given as law and 
 gospel that these bars had to be picked up and carried 
 over to the peel four at a time. After the heater had told
 
 264 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 me that each of them weighed thirty-five pounds they're 
 about thirty inches long, six wide, and one thick I knew 
 why it was that my back sort of squeaked every tune I 
 had to lift four of them practically off the floor it was not 
 so bad when they could be taken off the top of the pile. 
 The new and younger chap who was supposed to help me 
 threw his gloves down after a few of those liftings and trips 
 over to the peel and walked off the job. The other boy 
 put in his place had to stop every few minutes and massage 
 his arm out of the cramps until we prevailed upon the 
 heater to let us make it hi two trips of two bars each. Later 
 in the day we worked up to three again, and with a few 
 days of practice I suppose four would be 0. K. 
 
 After " charging" in this way one of the furnace compart- 
 ments, we would start taking out of the other the pairs 
 heated hot enough to be rolled. This means taking hold 
 of the hottest pairs with our tongs after edging them off 
 the pile, dropping them onto the floor, squeezing the tongs 
 tight together for a fresh hold again between thumb and 
 hand, and then walking off the forty or fifty feet to the 
 "roughing rolls," where the "rougher" helps lift them onto 
 the mill for pushing through to the "catcher" on the other 
 side, the two of them pushing them through and lifting 
 them back over the heavy rolls until they are thin enough 
 to be swung deftly over to the finishing rolls near by other 
 hot pairs being led up to him meanwhile. Most of the bars 
 worked on the turn were on their way to automobiles, 
 though others go into machinery, onto roofs, into tanks, etc. 
 Before you work out the properly polite way to sidle up to 
 a red-hot furnace mouth for the capture of the pairs, you 
 are likely to use your fingers a number of times to see 
 if your eyebrows are still with you. Luckily, running- 
 water permitted frequent wettings of face and neck and 
 wrists. 
 
 But at that a chap gets a lot of satisfaction out of feeling
 
 AMONG THE INGOTS AND BILLETS AGAIN 265 
 
 that he's doing the work of a regular "he" fellow. Mighty 
 few sounds in my life have given me more satisfaction than 
 the sizzle of the water in the bosh or trough as I put into it 
 my first pair of red-hot tongs. The big worry is to wonder 
 whether you can do it until four o'clock without letting 
 anybody see the color of your tongue. One way I saved 
 myself was to tell myself regularly, as I started out with my 
 pair properly tonged: "Now don't get fussed. This sweat 
 won't hurt you. Keep going but take it easy like you was 
 walking down Fifth Avenue." (I find I'm beginning to 
 think in bad grammar !) 
 
 But what helped most was the kindly advice of the heater 
 and the boss roller to "Don't get excited and you'll learn it 
 all right. Watch out for the tricks of it and so save your 
 strength. It's sleight more than strength that does it." 
 
 Then's the time the new man comes to know the innate 
 character of his superiors and associates, whether it's good 
 or bad. And that of my crowd is undoubtedly good. 
 
 The heater said it was one of the hardest of turns because 
 it was all what he calls "single iron," and so did not call 
 for the special heating and handling by the rollers of "double 
 iron," which gives us pair-heaters a breathing-spell. There 
 simply was no let-up all day of charge and drag out, charge 
 and drag out. But I stood it so well that for to-morrow 
 I've dated up for an encore and a long turn besides. 
 
 During the morning one of the bosses asked if my experi- 
 ence in the other plant would make me consider an assistant 
 foremanship in the cold rolls. Of course, now that I'm so 
 near through my adventure, I have to take every such 
 chance. So, after finishing the eight-hour "go" on the hot 
 mills at four to-morrow, I start at five-thirty on the twelve- 
 hour night turn with my old friends the cold rolls and the 
 dignity of an assistant foreman. 
 
 From here it looks like submerging down into a sea of the 
 pink, quivering heat and the yellow-red sheet-bar of the
 
 266 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 furnaces and of sweat coming up for air on top of a pile 
 of steel sheets somewhere in the middle of next week ! 
 
 Calumetropolis, 
 
 Sunday afternoon, Sept. 7. 
 
 It certainly is the dickens to crawl out from under the 
 strain and sweat of two days of hot work crowded into one, 
 and then find you've got no money to get anything to eat. 
 The only compensation is that for a while you're too sleepy 
 and tired to care about eating. But at that I can't think 
 with much pleasure of that almost foodless trail from 
 Friday midnight to this morning. Still it has helped me 
 to get the feel of the man in hard lines though it has also 
 given my belief in human nature a severe jolt. 
 
 But let me lead into the desert of hunger as I came into 
 it. Luckily the eight hours on the furnace brought mostly 
 " double" and " light" bar with decent breathing-spells 
 after we finished charging. One of the day's best pointers 
 came from a strong and energetic colored man who has 
 worked up to the position of rougher. 
 
 "If yo've been workin' on tune yoh got to get a entire 
 new idea now that yoh's heah on tonnage. Heah yoh's 
 got to remembah that the moh wo'k yoh does, the moh 
 money yoh gets. Yoh's wo'kin' now foh yohself just keep 
 a-thinkin' o' that all the time. And futhamoh, yoh can't 
 make good money heah unless everbody else has exactly 
 thet same idea. If one fellow on the crew begins to go slow, 
 everybody that sees him slows up 'thout thinkin', they 
 all slows up. If they sees yoh goin' strong, that helps them 
 to go stronger and everbody makes moh money. It takes 
 time for yoh fellows from the labor gang wheah yoh's been 
 wo'kin' foh the company to get that." 
 
 He's a wise chap. Such good teaching must have come 
 from experience. 
 
 I did my best. All the same I was glad it wasn't yesterday
 
 AMONG THE INGOTS AND BILLETS AGAIN 267 
 
 the heater himself said : "They come near havin' my hide 
 hung up here on the furnace wall yesterday with all that 
 single iron." Also I thanked all the stars for the eight-hour 
 turn. 
 
 "I've been around steel and furnaces for nearly twenty 
 years," said the roller, "and I tell you I've worked mighty 
 little on the twelve-hour turn, and, furthermore, I wouldn't 
 have anything to do with it if you gave me the mill." 
 
 He gets an average of, say, twenty-eight dollars every 
 turn he works. He has to have experience, know-how, lead- 
 ership, and responsibility. The rolls are sensitive; a draft 
 of wind on them may spoil a five-hundred-dollar investment. 
 He's a good leader, too and a good leader is worth his 
 hire. It's a delight to see the spirit and skill and team- 
 work with which the crew do their work rapidly, yet keep 
 out of each other's way, every man knowing just at what 
 instant he must swing in with his tongs and carry on the 
 process, while the other chap, thus freed, turns and takes 
 the hot sheet from the one farther down the line. 
 
 "Why a fellow who works day after day on the twelve- 
 hour shift feels like going home every morning before break- 
 fast and slapping his grandmother ! It's bad enough after 
 eight here on the furnaces," the heater added. 
 
 I'm for a good stiff gait at work that takes a man to 
 stand up to it, for a proper period, and then be through. 
 Furthermore, I'm sure that most workers would rather have 
 it that way than to take a slow, namby-pamby gait for 
 a long period. 
 
 "The best turn we ever had on that gauge !" he said as 
 we washed up at four, while the next crew took off their 
 coats and put on their sweat-caps. 
 
 From five-thirty on after a trip into town for supper 
 most of the job was to watch the cold-roll foreman and so 
 learn how to polish the rolls so the day men can start in 
 without delay. It was misery to have to keep awake after
 
 268 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 the day's exertions with the tongs and the bar until the 
 boss said at three that that would be all for the night, and 
 let it be seen that sleep in some corner was hi order. A 
 word to the wise and weary ! 
 
 It was a pleasure to meet the men in the department 
 and to see how much better some of the details of cold- 
 rolling were handled than in the other plant especially 
 to learn that here the management has been wise enough to 
 call the helper the "second catcher," and so to let him share 
 on the tonnage rolled. Apparently most of my inner un- 
 happiness back there would have been avoided if I had 
 only been cold-roll helper here. 
 
 At midnight and at breakfast-time I was too tired to want 
 much at the restaurant, but did make the error of spending 
 for a meal-book my last two dollars, being perfectly con- 
 fident of the arrival of the check wired for to take the place 
 of that owed me, but not waited for, at the last plant. 
 
 The shower-bath in the dirty boarding-house was a 
 godsend. No money had been wired, but very hopefully 
 I got up at noon and spent seventeen of my last twenty-five 
 cents on a malted milk. With only eight cents in my pocket 
 my stomach began to inquire how about having to do a 
 twenty-four-hour shift of loafing with nothing in it to work 
 on. It seemed a good chance to test the idea I've always 
 had that a man of education and a bank-account could 
 always cash at least a small check on his face. So I looked 
 up a minister, asked him to keep the secret, told him what 
 I was up to, and offered documentary proof of my state- 
 ments. 
 
 My optimism got the surprise of its life ! He stated his 
 complete belief in the truth of my statements, refused to 
 feel it necessary to look at the documents and then added : 
 
 "But every time I have done that I have been deceived, 
 so that I have promised my wife never to do it again." 
 
 A banker whom he called up seemed to think it completely
 
 AMONG THE INGOTS AND BILLETS AGAIN 269 
 
 inconceivable that he should be expected to cash a check 
 for, say, five dollars not as a bank officer but as a human 
 being, and similarly refused to look at my documents. 
 
 I was sore to have my pet idea busted. My nerve 
 wavered at asking my landlady for credit, and a full ex- 
 planation would be embarrassing. The thing was getting 
 serious I was becoming very hungry. 
 
 At the telegraph office where I had become a regular 
 hourly caller a young lady obligingly accepted my offer to 
 sell her three penny stamps for two cents. So with these 
 two added to my other eight I paid a nickel to ride out to 
 the plant restaurant to use my meal-ticket. Again the 
 policeman squashed my little idea, as might have been 
 expected : 
 
 "Nothin' doin' here Saturday nights, young fellow." 
 
 For me it was "nothin' doin'" but to walk back to town 
 with my fingers playing with my last nickel my mind re- 
 volving around the same article, having apparently moved 
 down from under my hatband to under my belt. I hoped 
 somebody might try to hold me up. I was going to offer 
 to go fifty-fifty with him if he'd cash me a small check. 
 
 Well, "I'll say" that hunger and fatigue sure do make a 
 bad pair. At that, they were for me not so terrible, of course, 
 as for the man who has no idea when it's going to end. 
 Hunger I knew on the cattle-boat, but hardly hunger and 
 fatigue. The best investment of my whole career to date, 
 bar none, was a big apple which the clerk handed me over 
 for my final, ultimate nickel. I Fletcherized for the last of 
 the two miles or so into town, sent another wire for money, 
 and in general disgust went to bed empty of food though 
 still hopeful and certainly very sympathetic with the hun- 
 gry and tired everywhere. 
 
 In the morning I succeeded in standing off my nice, quiet, 
 and sweet-mannered landlady for a breakfast by mention-
 
 270 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 ing a letter "I expect today." (She's all right but she con- 
 fines her efforts to the kitchen, and husband is only a dis- 
 tant relative of that lady whose claim to fame is that she 
 "chases dirt.") 
 
 Of course one of the serious sides to the foodless week- 
 end was that I can't draw a check on my alias, and might 
 get into trouble if I told my real name to the landlord. 
 This living a double life with two names is not as simple 
 as it's cracked up to be. 
 
 The boarders have taken me in very well and certainly 
 do not tone down their remarks about the heads of the 
 town's plants for the ears of any one. The net deduction 
 is that "If they had to try it a few times they'd see that 
 these long hours are hell, all right." There seems some 
 difference of opinion as to whether the workers can stand a 
 long strike, though the majority seem to think that the 
 present uncertainty as to strike or no strike is worse than 
 the actuality could ever be. It is evident that the whole 
 town senses the seriousness of the situation. 
 
 "Why," says the landlord, "even when the railway strike 
 was coming off I lost thirty roomers. No, we don't like 
 strikes not after just finishing paying for some new re- 
 pairs." 
 
 I judge from what I hear in the stores that the town people 
 agree that the long day is the chief thing which makes the 
 men willing to join the union. The hot-mill men seem to 
 have little interest in the whole matter in view of their 
 short turn and good tonnage pay, even though the sliding 
 scale on which their pay is based has forced a cut in pay fol- 
 lowing the temporarily lessened price of sheets. 
 
 It's pleasant to think that there is no "bar" to drag or 
 rolls to polish until to-morrow night. 
 
 Later. Have just chanced onto two workers with inter- 
 esting results:
 
 AMONG THE INGOTS AND BILLETS AGAIN 271 
 
 "Me? I work no more in steel-plant so no can strike," 
 one of them testified. He is evidently a man of Slavic 
 birth. "Why? Well, like thees. Fife year ago I work 
 een - plant een roll gang. One day I haf w'at you 
 call fit. For few minute no can do nothing. Boss he see 
 me do nothing. He swear. I say: 'Just minute, please, sir. 
 Dees fit God send me I no blame. Een one minute I all 
 right again.' But he go on swear and call me name. Den 
 I grab bench and say 'my mother no dog/ and he afraid 
 and say ' You fired ! ' And ever since when I ask for work 
 dere my name black and no can catch job." 
 
 "You bet I'm going out with the boys!" said one of the 
 most skilled-looking Americans I have seen. "No, I've 
 nothing to gain myself I'm on eight hours and tonnage 
 and make good money. But those guys workin' the long 
 turns will need all the help they can get. For myself I 
 don't expect to gain anything and may lose my job." 
 
 "Well, there's one thing I've got against the company. 
 'Twas nine years ago that several of us boys went and told 
 the super of our department we wished he could cut out 
 the eighteen-hour turns every other Sunday. Seein' we 
 was on tonnage we was sure we could do just as much- 
 yes, and more without it: it made us that near dead the 
 rest of the week. None of your ultimatums, you under- 
 stand. Just a request a gentleman's request. What does 
 he do but rear up and bang the table and swear he's runnin' 
 this plant, and by the Almighty he'll run it as he sees fit 
 and all that. Well, when he comes it that way you know 
 how 'tis of course we had to rear up too and call the boys 
 out. We stayed out several months and it was bad goin', 
 I tell you. And later I got on where the hours was right 
 and worked up to a good job again. But well, I'm willin' 
 to get into this scrap just to show that I'm for some of the 
 boys even though they's foreigners that's still on them 
 turns and under such bosses."
 
 272 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 Calumetropolis, 
 September 8. 
 
 Guess I'll have to take back what I said somewhere in 
 these pages about living conditions not bothering much if a 
 fellow's good and tired. Just now it looks as though they 
 have a way of crawling into a fellow's attention at just the 
 times when he can least stand to think about them. Just 
 as a youngster of five cries over annoyances in the evening 
 which wouldn't bother him in the morning, so a dirty board- 
 ing-house seems, somehow, doubly dirty when you come 
 home weary in the dawn from a long, hard, twelve-hour 
 night turn and try to blot it all out as you crawl in between 
 your sheet your one sheet and your blanket. It seems, 
 too, to take the pleasure out of life to wake up after only 
 a few hours' sleep and in the broad daylight observe that you 
 are not the only living thing in your bed and then to con- 
 sider that you'd probably observe an even larger numerous- 
 ness of your bedfellows if it weren't for the unfair advan- 
 tage of camouflage protection afforded them by the color 
 of the blanket and the absence of that second sheet. (Ac- 
 cording to report, cooties are common in good society in 
 this mill-town in which are so many itinerant workers.) 
 
 As following from much the same cause, probably, the 
 moral conditions are too bad to describe. Improvement 
 can, however, be reported for at least the strictly local situa- 
 tion meaning right here in the boarding-house, in fact on 
 my own floor and hallway because orders to vacate have 
 been given to-day a little tardily to the two recently 
 arrived young women roomers. 
 
 Whiskey is still available in the back room of any of the 
 saloons where you are known, but at prices which, as one 
 of my heater friends put it, " makes a good bun too blamed 
 much of a luxury." 
 
 The other night, by the way, when this heater had vis- 
 ited more back rooms than was good for him, I had to
 
 AMONG THE INGOTS AND BILLETS AGAIN 273 
 
 keep whispering to him that everybody knew that he was 
 one of the best heaters in the country, and that it wasn't 
 necessary for him to shout so loudly that: "Yes, sir, I just 
 told him that if he could get a better heater than I was he 
 could go and do it and be hanged. Why, buddy, that old 
 fool of a melter knows that I know more in a minute 'bout 
 makin' steel special steel, y' understand than he does in 
 a week. That's the reason he won't promote me," etc., etc. 
 Apparently the attractiveness of whiskey is that it offers 
 one way of fulfilling the wishes of sobriety a false fulfil- 
 ment of those hopes which remain so difficult of fulfilment 
 under actual conditions. In that case the man who drinks 
 is at least continuing to dream of and hope for those fulfil- 
 ments and so to possess, still, something of a mainspring 
 or motive for his upbuilding, provided its escapement can 
 be better controlled and directed. 
 
 The mayor is said to be doing his best to make it a good 
 town: schools, libraries, "Y," street drinking-fountains, 
 pavements, and many such things all point in the right 
 direction. As nearly as I can judge, a good deal of the 
 smoke from the mills blows off into the open country, but 
 some part of it must make a lot of work for the town's 
 housewives. Most of these, however, seem to be young 
 and strong though, from what I can see here on my own 
 floor and windows and in many of the houses on the street, 
 I fear that after a certain amount of fighting with the dirt, 
 an armistice is arranged in which the dirt is granted con- 
 siderable liberty and the housewives proportionate peace 
 and leisure. 
 
 On the job last night my boss broke me in quite properly 
 by letting me do the greater part of the roll-polishing. It 
 is a very dirty job and the "cold rolls" they get hot even 
 though the metal goes through them cold cause an enor- 
 mous amount of sweating in such a mugginess as last night's. 
 In between times I tried to work out my idea to make the
 
 274 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 work a little easier, especially for the new second catcher. 
 After I had brought him a board on which he could take a 
 seat in his "spell," the old roller who was pushing the sheets 
 to him very fast asked me if I couldn't find a cushion. All 
 the same, the young fellow was so done up when the whistle 
 blew that I doubt if he thinks the money worth the effort, 
 even with the help of my board. Besides, he was not as 
 lucky as I was in having in his roller a boss who pulled out 
 his watch at three-thirty, and with as much definiteness as 
 if he had heard the whistle blow, say: 
 
 "Good Lord! if we do any more, the day gang won't 
 have anything to do! To the devil with it; let's hit the 
 hay!" 
 
 On the whole well, I can think with a fair degree of 
 equanimity of making to-night the last of my nights on the 
 job, having been at it off and on since January 30, and fear- 
 ing further absence will make it too hard to get back and 
 think and talk in ordinary language. 
 
 This morning, by the way, when I was very tired and had 
 to listen, for some reason or other, to an especially out- 
 rageous lot of blasphemy and filth, I made a note of this: 
 It would have been impossible to give any one the feeling 
 of my conversational and other surroundings without bring- 
 ing in a good deal of profanity, and at least some of what 
 might be called vulgarity. But if any one thinks I have 
 come within a mile of giving an idea of the real thing, he 
 has another think coming or, as I suppose I should say, his 
 belief is largely erroneous. What I have tried to pass over 
 should be taken and multiplied by, say, 100 or, to make 
 allowance for the presumption that all the dirt of my present 
 surroundings has crawled in under my skin and into my 
 system and allowed to stay there by the lack of sleep which 
 seems always connected with night-work, I'll call it 50 in- 
 stead of 100. This revolting filth of speech is the most dis- 
 appointing thing I have found in my travels. But I am
 
 AMONG THE INGOTS AND BILLETS AGAIN 275 
 
 still sure it is connected with long hours and with the diffi- 
 culty a worker has in expressing in his work his individ- 
 uality and in feeling himself progressing that together with 
 the necessity of his showing himself as good as the next 
 man in whatever lines of competition may be set up hi his 
 group. 
 
 Same Place, 
 The Day After. 
 
 Packed and ready for the train to Cleveland glad to be 
 able to report my last night on the job as being the stiff est 
 of all; there's been nothing of the "petering out" idea! 
 
 Sure enough that second catcher failed to turn up last 
 night he was reported "done up." The first catcher was 
 on hand and going strong until twelve I would not have 
 had the courage to urge him to save himself because he has 
 been on the cold rolls longer than I. But at twelve he, too, 
 was all in from the stiff pace his roller set him, and a cold. 
 By that tune I was well tired, too, from a full six and a half 
 hours of pushing the polishing-stones onto the hot rolls 
 the night was fearfully muggy and hot. The regular three- 
 thirty knock-off for sleep was looking good to me at twelve- 
 thirty when I came back from the restaurant. To my great 
 surprise I was told that the catcher had gone home and I 
 was to take his place. Bluffing experience in that particular 
 way of doing it, and without any helper, I had to catch and 
 pile part of the time in very high piles about ten tons of 
 stiff, heavy sheets as they came through the rolls as fast as 
 the roller could push them. It tested me to the limit. 
 When at six the whistle finally blew for the end of the turn 
 for the night and for my long labor shift begun last Jan- 
 uary! I took off my dripping shirt and wrung, I'd say, 
 close to a small wine-glass of sweat out of it to say nothing 
 of all that had dropped from my face onto the rolls and the 
 sheets.
 
 276 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 As often before, I noticed how fatigue is partly muscular 
 and partly mental how thirty seconds of the sheets going 
 wrong and piling up and making a fellow feel himself a 
 "dub" and getting him in bad with his buddy is much 
 more tiring than thirty minutes of steady-going, rhythmic 
 catch-lift-an d- throw. 
 
 "Worry wearies worse than work " every foreman should 
 say it fast and often. "Worry wearies worse than work." 
 
 It must be said also that it didn't make the work go any 
 easier to think, as I stood and dripped sweat and gritted 
 my teeth to keep going at the roller's speed, all that last 
 hour and a half, that my immediate superior officer was 
 snoozing in his office with the lights out ! And I didn't love 
 the company any harder, either, for having no locker for 
 good clothes and no shower-bath to prevent my having to 
 go with all my sweat-drenched clothes out into the rain and 
 darkness of the drizzly dawn. 
 
 However, this company has my respect for the relations 
 it has established with its men both here and at the other 
 plant. I doubt greatly if it has much trouble in the ap- 
 proaching strike unless the union members from other plants 
 make it impossible for the men here to go to work. Further- 
 more, I got my money without a great deal of difficulty this 
 afternoon after giving notice at twelve o'clock. Of the 
 three of us who were asked why we were leaving, one said 
 he wanted to get away and into another line of work before 
 the strike caught him. There's one unhappy boarding- 
 house keeper already ! 
 
 Have imported all possible fresh clothes from the haber- 
 dashery and the tailors, piled them on to white paper on 
 the floor, and worked the shower-bath to the limit. I hope 
 hard to leave all my little friends behind. Nevertheless, it 
 will probably be necessary to park my baggage in the ga- 
 rage before reporting to my family. Hardly what could be
 
 AMONG THE INGOTS AND BILLETS AGAIN 277 
 
 called a triumphal return ! But for all that a happy one 
 with arms and shoulders stronger and huskier, head saner, 
 and heart, I hope, wholesomer than before. 
 
 Later. Stepping off the sleeper this morning, the news- 
 paper bore the headlines clear across its top: 
 
 "Steel Strike Set for September 22."
 
 PART II 
 FINDINGS
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 SOME OUTSTANDING IMPRESSIONS 
 
 June, 1920. 
 
 AND now, what of it ? What does it all mean ? 
 
 Certainly the most outstanding impression of all is that 
 I found my companions in the labor gangs so completely 
 human and so surprisingly normal. It makes me smile at 
 myself now as I recall the air of mystery and " different- 
 ness" with which my mind had surrounded all these work- 
 ers back there in the days before I started out to join them. 
 I feel like apologizing to them now for all my wonderings 
 as to whether I could meet the test of their suspicion or 
 the strain of their possible misunderstanding and probable 
 ill will. My only excuse is that these same wonderings 
 were quite manifestly in the minds of practically all my 
 white-collared friends before I set off. If, perhaps, they 
 were also in the minds of my readers as well, I shall cer- 
 tainly hope that the foregoing pages press this point home 
 namely, that my hard-working associates my "bud- 
 dies," as I now think of them are enormously more like 
 all the other members of our national House of Industry 
 and Life than they are tmlike them. 
 
 In every room of that house, also, all seem to find life 
 just about the same nip-and-tuck problem of hopes and 
 fears, satisfactions and disappointments, pleasures and an- 
 noyances; in general, pretty much the same mixture prop- 
 erly described as "this pleasing, anxious being." Wherever 
 found, too, these humans seem just about equally ready 
 and anxious to tell about these hopes and fears, these satis- 
 factions and disappointments, to any one who will present 
 an ear which is manifestly and sincerely sympathetic. 
 
 281
 
 282 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 As I look over the experiences and testimonies reported, 
 I find myself wishing that I could add some of the conver- 
 sations held with workers and others during the months 
 following my return to well-dressed ways. For these, of 
 course, have contributed to the final impressions without 
 being given to the reader. Perhaps, however, the reader 
 himself has recently heard such testimony as that of the 
 elevator girl and her greeting to me: 
 
 "Where you been all this time? . . . Yes, this uniform 
 ain't so bad, but, all the same, it's why I'm goin' to quit 
 to-morrow. . . . Well, you see, I'm on what they call the 
 'split shift' a few hours on, then a few hours off, and back 
 again. That makes me change into or out of these clothes 
 four times a day. I can't see it." 
 
 Next to this fundamental humanness of all of us, wher- 
 ever we are, the outstanding impression, as I try to marshal 
 the various experiences in single file past the reviewing- 
 stand of memory, is certainly this: the most important fac- 
 tor of all in the life of the wage- worker is the job the daily 
 job. For him the day commences with the breathing of 
 the prayer, "Give us this day our daily job." That is the 
 only way in which the daily bread may be spelled with sat- 
 isfaction and contentment hi a civilization organized for 
 the mass production required for meeting a fast-moving 
 world's mass needs. 
 
 It almost makes me shiver with the cold of those Febru- 
 ary mornings before the great factory gates when I think 
 of the heart-sick dejection, the demoralizing loss of stand- 
 ing as a man, and the paralyzing fear of the bread line which 
 fill the mind and soul of the man who, after days of seeking, 
 has no job and knows not where to find one. This impres- 
 sion has been greatly strengthened by many recent conver- 
 sations, both with laborers and executives. Some of these 
 latter say that they still recall more vividly than anything 
 else the hours and days and weeks back there twenty or
 
 SOME OUTSTANDING IMPRESSIONS 283 
 
 thirty years ago in the foundry or machine shop, spent in 
 the fear that a lay-off might be required by the company's 
 business or that discharging somebody might appear to the 
 foreman as the best way for him to ease his mind from some 
 of his vexations. All that I have seen or heard or felt com- 
 bines to make me believe that it is impossible to see the 
 world as the worker sees it without looking at it through 
 the eyes of the man to whom the need of the daily bread- 
 together with the need of the daily hope means the need 
 of the daily job. 
 
 We are quite likely, also, to miss the real point when we 
 assume so blithely that an overplus of men in New York 
 can easily be remedied by the reported overplus of jobs in, 
 say, Chicago. Unless the finding of work and the allot- 
 ment of men to it throughout the country is far better 
 organized than at present, the job in Chicago does precious 
 little good to the jobless man in New York especially if he 
 is unskilled. For, in the nature of the case, the worker who 
 must earn his living by his naked as well as untrained 
 hands is not likely to possess a financial margin sufficient 
 to bridge the distance. The paying or the advancing of 
 his fare has its difficulties and involves considerable risk, 
 especially for the man of family. The saving of fare by the 
 use of the "side-door Pullman" or by " riding the rods" 
 means the endangering of both his body and his morale by 
 exposing these to the degenerating irregularity of the hobo, 
 or, as he calls himself, "the migratory worker." 
 
 One look at the world through the eyes given by this 
 daily need of work, also, makes it immensely easier to 
 understand the worker's attitude toward the restriction of 
 output "stringing out the job." Whether we like it or 
 not, even a short experience will convince any one that the 
 workman has considerable right to fear, as a practical, day- 
 by-day proposition, that by working too hard or too well 
 he may work himself out of his job that by producing too
 
 284 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 much he may produce himself out of that indispensable 
 daily bread. Especially to the man hired by the day, the 
 whistle for the end of the turn may announce not so much 
 the beginning of his hours of rest as the foreman's "Here 
 y'are, Jo! This'll get your 'time.' Won't need you to- 
 morrow. Work's all done" and the beginning of that 
 hopeless circuit of the gates in search of further opportunity 
 to earn his "time." The thought of even a few weeks of 
 that is often reason enough to make the worker feel highly 
 doubtful about the introduction of machinery very hesi- 
 tant to accept the calm assurance of the economists that he 
 need have no fear because the whole thing is bound to work 
 out in the long run through the increased production and 
 the resultant cheapening of goods. Naturally enough, with 
 his family on his mind, he fears this "long run" may be 
 so long that his self-respect may be destroyed, even though 
 starvation be avoided, before the slack is taken up. Still 
 further, there seems to be general admission from both 
 workers and executives that unexpectedly large production 
 under an attractive piece-rate has often brought about the 
 rate's reduction. If that is true, it is not strange if the 
 worker often feels it his duty to himself and his friends not 
 to gamble too much upon the permanency of the arrange- 
 ment. 
 
 The understanding of this fundamental importance of the 
 daily job helps also to an understanding of the labor-union. 
 In addition to its more public appearances, on behalf of 
 better wages and hours, the union is likely to be quietly 
 busy helping to find work for its members and then to pro- 
 tect them against unjust firing, to much the same effect as 
 was mentioned so often in support of the representative 
 committee there hi the oil refinery. It is impossible to 
 help wondering if the unions would have grown to anything 
 like their present size if all the managers who find them 
 so serious a problem had felt more keenly how seriously
 
 SOME OUTSTANDING IMPRESSIONS 285 
 
 this problem of the daily job touches the life and soul of 
 the worker. In any event it is beyond the slightest doubt 
 that nothing like proper happiness and therefore proper 
 effectiveness is by any means to be expected in the indus- 
 trial world until more thinking and more organization have 
 been devoted to the increase of security for the country's 
 working hands and heads in this regard along lines to be 
 suggested in later pages. 
 
 The recent months of plenteous jobs are, I am sure, not 
 at all sufficient to affect the value of this fundamental 
 necessity of the job as a keystone to the whole arch of the 
 problem of industrial relations. The result of such months 
 is merely to make the restless situation worse by urging the 
 worker to make good use of the occasion to get acquainted 
 with the advantages and disadvantages of as many different 
 employers as possible during what he is certain will be only 
 a temporary period because an abnormal one. When- 
 next week or next month things begin to get back to what 
 he is convinced is their normal tightness, he will know 
 what plant furnishes, all things considered, the best com- 
 bination of the securities and opportunities he hopes for. 
 If a worker has saved a little ahead, such an " inspection 
 tour" may be as good an investment as spending it in 
 loafing or on some of the ordinary luxuries especially if 
 in the meantime he finds about as much security at the 
 last place as he had originally ! 
 
 It will surely appear natural enough that the next im- 
 pression which marches in on my memory is that of tired- 
 ness and the connection of this tiredness with its unheavenly 
 twin, temper. Together these two certainly make a vicious 
 circle which deserves the thought of all those desiring either 
 a better industry or a better and safer America. Tired- 
 ness seems to cause earlier temper with hardly greater regu- 
 larity than temper, with its inner friction, causes earlier 
 tiredness. Happiness, either in the plant or the home,
 
 286 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 appears to be unthinkable in connection with regular work- 
 shifts longer than ten hours at the most. Apparently, too, 
 this happiness together with good citizenship is impossi- 
 ble with the long factory turns without much reference to 
 the question of the nature of the work. One of the most 
 violent denunciations of the twelve-hour shift came from a 
 plant policeman: 
 
 "Why, you guys that work on the floor up there hi the 
 open-hearth can go home and go to bed and keep yourselves 
 in good shape. But when we chaps have sat here all day 
 at the gate, we've got to take an hour's exercise or two 
 before turnin' hi or we begin to get fat and slumpy. This 
 twelve hours is the devil all right." 
 
 The bulk of our iron and steel should no longer be made 
 and rolled into the heavier forms on the twelve-hour day 
 and the seven-day week. For the labor gang and for the 
 furnace men it seems beyond question that management 
 must plan somehow to find enough things for a man to do 
 hi eight, or at most ten hours, to justify the payment of a 
 satisfactory wage and, at the same time, not too much work 
 for the preservation of the worker's physical stamina. 
 There can be no question in my mind but that the long 
 turns are uneconomic and wasteful from the view-point of 
 plain dollars and cents. I shrink with proper shame when 
 I recall the gait we workers took in the moving of those 
 bricks from the furnaces or the " checkers" a gait that 
 required careful observation to determine whether we were 
 moving or not. I remember, however, that even that gait 
 sufficed to bring all the weariness that could be borne either 
 by me, the greenhorn, or by my friends, the old-tuners. 
 Certainly all of us grew, almost daily, less and less worthy 
 of the wages we were paid. Certainly, too, few if any fore- 
 men prove able to stand the strain to the point of such 
 loyalty to the company as suffices to keep them awake 
 night after night. With the long turns added to the seven-
 
 SOME OUTSTANDING IMPRESSIONS 287 
 
 day week, it just is not humanly possible. Whether fore- 
 man or worker, such men are paid for energies which they 
 simply are not able to deliver. 
 
 If it is true, as a member of the War Labor Board reports, 
 that 98 per cent of the disputes they were asked to solve 
 simmered down finally to some petty dispute between a 
 foreman and a man, then I am willing to wager that the 
 majority of this 98 per cent would be found to have occurred 
 when both foreman and worker were just plain tired. Such 
 ill humor, the doctors are assuring us, is the one unfailing 
 sign and symptom of such tiredness. Many foremen, I am 
 sure, are regularly working too long hours: in many cases 
 their responsibilities call for longer turns from them than 
 from the men under them. Indeed, in some cases it would 
 appear that the whole organization, from the president 
 down to <the humblest shoveller, is pushing itself too hard 
 in order to meet some emergency which is allowed to stretch 
 itself over the weeks and months until every one under the 
 plant roof is "on edge" and the stage is set for trouble. 
 
 Whether tiredness and temper T. & T. are caused by 
 bad conditions of working or of living, I am convinced 
 that they constitute an explosive which is almost as destruc- 
 tive as the "T. N. T." of warfare in its effects on the firing 
 line of our daily lives and along the larger front of our 
 national safety and development. "A man swears to keep 
 from crying; a woman cries to keep from swearing," is a 
 saying recently heard that substantiates the "philosophy 
 of profanity" originally set down in explanation of the 
 "detonations" encountered there on my first long-hour job. 
 The connection of these "twins" with the sleep-inducing 
 virtues of the "whiskey-beer" of the same town has been 
 made, I think, sufficiently plain. 
 
 There can be no doubt, also, that "T. and T." constitutes 
 a serious menace to the whole country in the way it per- 
 suades its possessor to listen sympathetically to the words
 
 288 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 of the agitator. Any one who has carried these twins for 
 days sitting upon his own body and soul wants to counsel 
 every good citizen to beware of the daily head-lines which 
 blame all industrial difficulties upon the I. W. W., sower of 
 dissension. It would get us all much farther along if we 
 only would inquire whether tiredness does not supply one 
 reason why these presumably happy and contented persons 
 listen as much as they do to those agitators. It is nearer 
 the whole truth to believe that the agitator earns, or at least 
 works for, the salt of his daily bread by rubbing it into the 
 raw spots and sore spots which our public opinion and our 
 industrial intelligence allow to exist. Of such raw spots and 
 sore spots one great and continuous cause is contributed 
 by these twins. It is largely a needless and a preventable 
 cause because it represents such low-speed work and such 
 high-speed deterioration. Democracy is not safe in any 
 country where there are hundreds of thousands of tired 
 chronically tired men or, for that matter, women. For 
 that reason, if no other, those workers who want to "make a 
 stake" quickly either for themselves here or their families, 
 or that farm "back in old countree," and so ask for the long 
 turns, should be refused. 
 
 The problem of the agitator and his hearing goes over, 
 of course, into the field of ignorance and its opposite in edu- 
 cation. Even tired minds would not give the credence they 
 give to the agitator's false statements "For every dollar 
 you earn your employer earns ten," or "You earn your wages 
 in two hours of work, what you earn in the other ten or 
 twelve makes his profit" if education, inside the plant or 
 out, put into those minds what it should. The point is 
 that the installing of proper facts and information are quite 
 impossible when those minds are chronically tired. In- 
 deed, almost all the constructive educational and social 
 agencies set up by a public which wants to be helpful are 
 sure to fail of their mission if they finally impinge upon
 
 SOME OUTSTANDING IMPRESSIONS 289 
 
 persons who would be happy to profit from them if only 
 they were not too tired to care. "Want of interest is worse 
 than want of knowledge" if only because without it knowl- 
 edge is impossible. 
 
 Thus the third impression, which marches out like those 
 silent timbers which came forward from the black corri- 
 dors of the mine, is closely connected with the second: 
 the worker's ignorance the unskilled, the semiskilled, and, 
 yes, the skilled worker's ignorance of the plans and pur- 
 poses, the aims and ideals the character of his employer, 
 the company. 
 
 This ignorance is not strange. The work of obtaining a 
 mutual understanding between the industrial manager and 
 the great mass of workers who have rushed in during the 
 last few years from all over the known world for taking up 
 their tools in our vast scheme of modern production, is 
 colossal ! It takes one's breath away to contemplate it ! 
 This is especially true of steel, in which America has sud- 
 denly forged to the front as the producer of more steel than 
 all the rest of the world combined. This work, too, is one 
 whose accomplishment must necessitate tune tune with the 
 help of patience, and, most of all, of sympathy. Mean- 
 while, it must be understood that the great means for that 
 mutual knowledge which must be added to by mutual sym- 
 pathy to make mutual understanding, will grow immensely 
 faster by demonstration than by exhortation. The seeing of 
 the thing done the thing which actually happens this 
 constitutes the great primer by which the minds of prac- 
 tically all of us learn the greatest lessons. Statements, ar- 
 guments, logical exposition, whether by ink or breath: 
 these for virtually all of us are mere foot-notes on the page 
 of practical instruction and learning. One or two, possibly 
 three or four, demonstrations seen unmistakably in the 
 doing of our work and taken into the inner sanctum of our 
 experiences these give us our fixed ideas and attitudes, and
 
 290 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 so supply the real roots of our education. Perhaps it is 
 well that it is so, otherwise we might believe the false teach- 
 ers and preachers instead of casting them out when the dem- 
 onstration given by their lives and works fails to support 
 their words. At any rate, the worker is not to be blamed if 
 he considers his driving foreman or that grouchy gate police- 
 man or that mean-minded paymaster or his pompous clerk 
 quite as fully and as properly a representative of the com- 
 pany's real purposes as the solicitous employment manager 
 or the friendly nurse or if he sets the manifest waste of ma- 
 terials off against the company's narrow figuring of its wage 
 rates. For that reason it must be granted that much of 
 the distrust of great corporations is not based so much upon 
 ignorance as, in too many cases, upon bad demonstration. 
 Nor can the better understanding be obtained merely by 
 the addition of truer demonstrations unless the good-will is 
 really there to be demonstrated. The solution requires a 
 sincere purpose within the soul of both parties in the rela- 
 tionship and then the conviction that every single contact 
 between the two is sure to be understood as a revelation 
 of that purpose. Especially in the case of the great con- 
 cerns which now maintain these relationships under the 
 supervision of absentee management, a successful outcome 
 requires an amount of attention which is nothing less than 
 tremendous. Where the executive in immediate and close- 
 hand charge feels that his sensibilities in the particular un- 
 derstanding of a delicate situation and matters of human 
 relationships are never anything but delicate are prac- 
 tically bound to be rendered worthless after passing through 
 a thousand miles of postal communication, there is set up 
 a hopelessness and a mechanicalness which is sure, in time, 
 to dull those sensibilities. Sooner or later, such dulled and 
 injured sensibilities, on one side or the other, are pretty likely 
 to mean the severed relations which, as recent history proves, 
 are but the vestibule to war.
 
 SOME OUTSTANDING IMPRESSIONS 291 
 
 For all these reasons it is extremely superficial of us to 
 think that we can solve the problem of happy industrial re- 
 lations or happy American citizenship for the foreign-born 
 worker merely by juggling with the phrase of "Americaniza- 
 tion." The word itself should be dispensed with because 
 it assumes so blithely that what we have already can profit 
 from nothing they can bring and that whatever they bring 
 can be made suitable if they will only let us teach them 
 English and show them the street to the court-house! 
 No Americanism is worth our effort to obtain unless it is 
 an Americanism of good-will good-will built upon under- 
 standing. And this good-will and understanding of America 
 must be gained, after all, in exactly the same way as the 
 understanding of the company and its purposes by de- 
 monstration. It is for us, therefore, to look more to the 
 demonstrations of a likable or unlikable Americanism which 
 are given every time a foreman commands, a judge in- 
 structs, a salesman sells, or a newspaper reports, assumes, 
 or exhorts. It is idle to suppose that the teacher of Eng- 
 lish is going to make his printed pages offset all the force 
 of the demonstrations of all the other contacts which the 
 worker makes from day to day with all of us. It is folly 
 also for us to assume that all our teachings must wait upon 
 his learning of his English. There are many, many things 
 which should be gotten over, through his own language, 
 to the worker whose years may now be too advanced or 
 whose working hours are much too long to permit the learn- 
 ing of our tongue in time to be of service to us. In the 
 making of these contacts, also, and especially if we have 
 in mind his joining an English class, we should try to reach 
 the worker not so much through his friends and compatriots 
 at the plant, but through the larger group of his friends in 
 his particular settlement or colony. If we cannot by all 
 our demonstrations in all our contacts with that colony and 
 its leader succeed in " selling America" so as to have their
 
 292 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 combined good-will in the learning of our ways, then per 
 haps we should take a look at our ways ! 
 
 Of the seven months' experiences, these appear to me the 
 outstanding impressions. Beneath them, and tying them 
 together into the whole great organization of modern life 
 and work, are some deeper factors which should be looked 
 at before we talk about the way out. 
 
 . . . Meanwhile neither our classes nor our contacts will 
 be found to " demonstrate" an Americanism which the for- 
 eign-born worker is likely to find attractive unless we 
 can first of all come to a deeper realization of that funda- 
 mental humanness which makes him enormously more like 
 us in all the larger reaches of his thoughts and feelings 
 than unlike us.
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 SOME DEEPER FACTORS 
 
 IN order to make it easier to think about the industrial 
 worker, it has long been the fashion of the philosophers to 
 describe him as the " economic man" interested in play- 
 ing his part hi the process of production or distribution, 
 more or less exclusively for the purpose of thereby earning 
 his daily bread, and, with good luck favoring, his daily 
 jam and cake. "All he wants is hi the pay envelope," so 
 more practical and experienced observers are apt to voice 
 the same effort to find an all-inclusive rule of modern hu- 
 man action. Such a man, it goes without saying, will have 
 only an incidental interest hi the nature, the hours, or 
 other conditions of his work, or the character of his fore- 
 man, or his company, so long as he takes out of the plant 
 enough money wherewith to buy hi the remaining hours of 
 his day the satisfaction of his real desires as a person among 
 other persons. 
 
 This explanation of the mainspring of men's doings is 
 highly popular. To my great surprise I found it used quite 
 as much by the worker for the explanation of his employer's 
 behavior and especially his misbehavior, as by the em- 
 ployer for the understanding of the worker's comings and 
 shortcomings. But something must surely be wrong with 
 a mainspring whose effectiveness is so readily accepted hi 
 the case of the " other fellow" and so strenuously denied 
 hi our own. At the very least an enormous amount of proof 
 ought to be required in order to substantiate on any uni- 
 versal basis a theory which no one can be found willing to 
 admit for himself or for any one else except the person 
 he does not intimately know. 
 
 293
 
 294 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 Of course the dilemma may be partly avoided by making 
 the all but universal assumption that putting men into the 
 group called Labor or Management or Capital changes 
 them even down to the bottom of their souls where their life's 
 motors are set upon the piers of their foundation desires. 
 This is the way often taken to get around the need of com- 
 ing to the understanding of the other person's actions by 
 taking the time to understand him. Of such study the re- 
 sult is pretty sure to be the same as that which impressed 
 itself after my months at the south pole of the industrial 
 world that humans vary little at the bottom of their hearts 
 though they may vary much in the tops of their heads; 
 that of all of us the mainsprings are just about the same, 
 though different circumstances require different modes and 
 methods of their escapement. 
 
 For some months I carried about the conviction of the 
 enormous importance of the job to the wage- worker, as 
 though it made him a very different and rather peculiar 
 kind of chap till I awoke to the realization that in this in- 
 dustrial era of ours the job is almost equally important 
 to everybody else. After all, there are exceedingly few of 
 us in this country whose first concern is not our job. For al- 
 most all of us the most important part of our income, by 
 far, comes from the carrying of some current responsibility, 
 with serious trouble camping down very close to us the 
 moment something goes wrong with that source. Even the 
 industrial captain builds up his capital quite largely to take 
 care of himself and his family in the days when sickness or 
 other disability puts an end to his yearly salary as the busy 
 director of this enterprise or that. The chief dollars-and- 
 cents difference between his job and that of the workers 
 in his factory is that he is more likely to be hired and 
 paid by the month or the year instead of by the hour, 
 day, or week and to have certain securities against unwar- 
 ranted discharge. Upon him as upon the worker hangs
 
 SOME DEEPER FACTORS 295 
 
 always heavily the fear of lessened income as the result of 
 sickness or death of joblessness. His abilities and his 
 savings lessen the fear, of course, but do not by any means 
 eliminate it. 
 
 Most of the difference, then, consists, not in his being hi 
 the group of management, but in the size of his margin of 
 security and safety a margin given him by his closer con- 
 nection with those who give the job or take it away and 
 by the larger savings and assurances which his larger educa- 
 tion and earnings permit. In the work of the Cleveland 
 Welfare Federation we spent large sums trying to get the 
 people of the city to understand that the community's 
 poor were not a fixed group or class habitually acting from 
 abnormal and peculiar motives and therefore habitually 
 and permanently hi need of help. It is this difference, 
 not of human material but of educational economic margin, 
 which permits some to save themselves while others, en- 
 countering the same obstacle of sickness or unemployment, 
 are brought down to the need of temporary help, just as 
 a friend of mine reported: "I'm getting old. Ten years 
 ago I could stumble and still keep going for fifteen feet at 
 least. Now a stumble means a fall without doubt and 
 without delay." 
 
 The difference is in the margins of assurance, opportunity 
 and living in general, allowed by the daily or weekly wage 
 instead of the monthly or yearly salary it is this that gives 
 the reason of the labor gang's intenser and more necessitous 
 attitude toward the job, rather than any or all supposition 
 that the gang is made up of humans possessing different in- 
 terests and therefore wanting satisfactions entirely different 
 from the rest of us. 
 
 During the long hours of shovelling bricks, lifting the steel 
 sheets off the cold rolls, or stencilling the " Regular weights, 
 there now ! " onto the barrel-heads, it was often a problem to 
 know what to do with one's mind. On some such turns
 
 296 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 I would definitely try to make the time go faster by picking 
 out some particular field of recollection and endeavoring, 
 hour after hour, to "lick the chops of memory" by recalling 
 every impression possible, for instance, on one shift from 
 my travels in Italy, on another turn Egypt or South 
 America. At other times I would find myself swinging my 
 body in rhythm with the movements of the job while al- 
 most chanting to myself: "I wonder if anybody could ever 
 find any connection between this town's evident immorali- 
 ties and some of the plant's evident dissatisfactions?" 
 "Is there any connection between the way people earn 
 their livings and the way they live their lives? and if so, 
 do bad morals cause bad jobs or bad jobs cause bad morals, 
 or both?" As becomes a father, my fondest hope is that 
 the following offspring of my long-turn ponderings may 
 prove a more helpful interpreter of our modern industrial 
 life and all its human units than that offspring of the phi- 
 losophers which ought to be known as the "economic 
 alibi." 
 
 Suppose we start at what might be called our "jumping- 
 on" place there in the shining land of Get-up-in-the-morning, 
 and draw a line through the sixteen waking hours of our 
 day to the "jumping-off" place there in the shadowy land 
 of Go-to-bed-at-night. Such line we may quite properly 
 call our "western front" at least it represents all the 
 opportunity we have for the putting forward of all our life's 
 campaigns, whatever and wherever they may be. Now, 
 from all that I have seen or heard all kinds of human beings 
 do and say, it is safe to assert that every normal person pos- 
 sesses at the bottom of his heart the desire to find some- 
 where along this front the satisfaction that comes with the 
 consciousness of "breaking through." It is impossible to 
 conceive of any one who would pass along this front day 
 after day, and year after year, without getting anywhere 
 some feeling that he is making progress counting as some-
 
 SOME DEEPER FACTORS 297 
 
 thing more than a cipher in the sum total of humanity 
 and be therewith content. Such a person is pretty certain 
 to be proved an imbecile or a fool or else he will be found 
 among the unknown derelicts at the morgue. 
 
 Now, in these recent days of unrest and commotion, 
 when fear gives birth to misunderstanding, and misunder- 
 standing increases the brood of fear, it is easy for all of us 
 to believe that the man who is too far off up the line, or 
 down for us to see and know him, will not be satisfied unless 
 his " break-through" brings him into the manager's or the 
 autocrat's or the plutocrat's chair of absolute power for the 
 domination of the rest of us. Yet acquaintance with both 
 groups is sure to convince all as it does me that the member 
 of the labor gang is no more truly represented as the father 
 of such an extreme desire than is the capitalist though such 
 acquaintance does show that each is willing to believe the 
 other not only capable of such a desire, but happy in it. 
 It is immensely truer to the actuality to believe that every 
 normal person, quite apart from his particular membership 
 in this group or that in the industrial process, is moved 
 to do what he does by the universal itch to feel that some- 
 where on his life's front he is justifying his existence among 
 other persons by "getting on," doing a little better than 
 merely holding on, while those about him pass along. In 
 this feeling all of us find quite as much pleasure in beating 
 our own previous record as in going ahead of others. The 
 main thing is the sense of motion and progress. When 
 the "high spots" of the "boss roller" or the "first helper" are 
 put alongside of the successful banker's or manufacturer's 
 it is odd to observe that they all fit into practically the same 
 formula each is a high spot because it serves to measure 
 their progress from the point where they started. It is this 
 satisfaction in the distance travelled rather than in the 
 point arrived at, that permits millions of us to have our sep- 
 arate, individual satisfactions without wanting to crowd
 
 298 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 each other out of the pleasure of the same, or competing, 
 ultimate destination. Thus: 
 
 "Well, yes, things have gone pretty well with me," says 
 the nationally known philanthropist, the boss roller, or the 
 first helper, as he reaches expansively for his Havana, his 
 pipe, or his quid, according to station and fancy. "I'll 
 never forget the day and, yes, the hour, for I happened to 
 notice as I went in that it was - - o'clock when the boss 
 sent for me from out of the labor gang" (or the office force, 
 or other position without especial distinction), "and asked 
 me if I didn't want to take a try at - " (fill in name of 
 next position up the line). "Then I recall that it was 
 just - - years ago this next month that my new boss 
 proposed," etc., etc. (fill in all the steps which indicate 
 distance travelled from the point of starting). 
 
 Altogether, it is very fortunate that the great majority 
 of us take much more satisfaction in passing the "flivvers" 
 of our past, or the truck loads of our slow-moving associates, 
 than we take dissatisfaction in the thought of the limousines 
 still ahead of us and still unpassed on the road of life and 
 progress. All things considered, we could hardly hope for 
 progress from anything less selfish or for self-preservation 
 from anything less progressive. 
 
 Now I am convinced that the daily wage-worker wants, 
 to an even greater extent than the rest of us, to find his high 
 spots and locate his break-through in the sector of his job. 
 For one thing, the narrowness of the margin between the 
 daily job and the daily bread means that what he does in 
 the hours under the plant roof determine more narrowly 
 what he may do elsewhere, than does the nature of our work 
 for the rest of us; and that is saying a great deal, for in a 
 world built on jobs, all of us must adapt ourselves first to 
 the conditions which we must meet for the earning of our 
 living, and then, with what we have left of time and at- 
 titudes and interests, set about the living of our lives. If
 
 SOME DEEPER FACTORS 299 
 
 the worker is still on the long-hour day, all this can be 
 figured out in minutes to make plain the immense necessity 
 of getting the utmost of personal satisfactions out of his 
 working time. 
 
 That means that the worker lives and moves and has his 
 being there on the job. There is where the tire of his life's 
 wheel meets the smooth or jagged roadway of actuality. But 
 still more important than that, he finds there in the precise 
 nature of his job, skilled or unskilled, ^important or unimpor- 
 tant, and in the relationships it provides, the most impor- 
 tant means of establishing his status and standing as a man 
 and a citizen and the status and standing of his wife and 
 children. Thus the oil-can or the wrench spells progress 
 upward from the shovel, quite beyond the two-cents-hourly 
 income. Thus, too, the promotion out of the gang to the 
 humblest foremanship is certain to mean not only more 
 money for a wider margin of enjoyments and securities, 
 but also, and much more important, the envious congratula- 
 tions of the gang, the familiar acceptance as a comrade at 
 the hands of others heretofore far above him, and, finally, 
 those gossipy noddings of heads at the club or the lodge 
 which are the incense burned before the altars of progress 
 and success. It is only the great distance of most of us 
 from such events that permits us to miss the hugeness of 
 these steps as they appear from the view-point of the labor 
 gang. It is this hugeness that causes many workers to lose 
 their heads certainly, at least, the natural size of their 
 heads the moment they find themselves thus elevated 
 and so perhaps inclined to drive their former " buddies" 
 with less consideration than that shown by those who never 
 were in the gang. 
 
 Now in view of all this, the most fundamental criticism 
 I know how to make, in regard to the present industrial 
 situation, is this: that in^the minds of so many members 
 of the labor gang, and also of higher groups of workers,
 
 300 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 there is so wide-spread and so deep-set a conviction that 
 for them there is no chance to break through on their industrial 
 sector! 
 
 It must be evident to those who have read this diary that 
 while the matter is two-sided, nevertheless, considerably 
 more justification than could be wished is, as a matter of 
 fact, given that conviction. The trouble the most mani- 
 fest trouble at least is in that " first line of defense" which 
 is maintained there at the contact points on the line by in- 
 dustrial management hi the person of the boss or foreman, 
 the plant guard or policeman, and the plant paymaster and 
 his clerks. If the break-through is to be engineered on the 
 sector of the job, it must inevitably be hi the presence, 
 and with the permission and recognition, of one or more of 
 these representatives of and of parts of the management. 
 Through these the workers must get those daily demonstra- 
 tions of the plans and purposes of all the other "lines." 
 There would seem to be no way by which management can 
 avoid the responsibility for whatever impression the workers 
 gain of its performance and intentions as the result of those 
 demonstrations nor any effective denial that that impres- 
 sion as a whole is considerably less satisfactory than could 
 be desired. 
 
 Whether justified or not, this conviction that on this 
 sector no satisfying feeling of gain or progress is to be made 
 in proportion to effort required that "pull" and the marry- 
 ing of the boss's daughter must be counted on for getting 
 forward produces the same result in the factory as it would 
 on the fields of France and Flanders. When Foch or Haig 
 became convinced rightly or wrongly that successful 
 pressure could not be hoped for, strategy and the neces- 
 sity to keep moving required, of course, the transfer of the 
 effort to another sector. So to-day, when the worker be- 
 comes, in any way, convinced as the result of a few deadly 
 demonstrations, that employers as a group are unwilling or
 
 SOME DEEPER FACTORS 301 
 
 unable to reward initiative, loyalty, and skill, he changes 
 his tactics. Leaving behind just enough energy and skill 
 to keep "the enemy" from "breaking through" and dis- 
 charging him and he's a wonderful judge of the precise 
 amount needed for this purpose he withdraws the reserves 
 of his interests and enthusiasms for more effective and 
 worth-while application elsewhere. 
 
 Like all the rest of us, the worker, it is worth repeating, 
 carries into the other sectors of his living the equipment he 
 is able to take out of his job. So here again he suffers from 
 the narrowness of his margins. If he is untrained he must 
 daily put a larger proportion of his entire physical equip- 
 ment in his case, his entire capital into his daily givings 
 for the benefit of the needed daily gettings of the family's 
 food than do the most of us. Unskilled, skilled, or semi- 
 skilled, if he makes iron or steel the chances are that he 
 must put in an average of twelve of those sixteen waking 
 hours with, in most cases, an additional hour and a half 
 or two to go and come. 
 
 The result is not favorable to such a worker's finding in, 
 say, the sector of his home the sought-for satisfactions of 
 forward movement and distinction. That is certainly evi- 
 dent from the most casual reading of the foregoing pages. 
 
 Over into the sector of his relationships as a citizen, simi- 
 larly, many a worker can take only a depleted physique 
 and an unsatisfied hope. Some, however, do "stand the 
 gaff" of even the hardest work and, perhaps with the help 
 of a sense of humor or a determined will, endeavor here to 
 find the distinction of leading those around them. I am 
 quite sure that these are often the men whose manifest 
 ability to influence others comes to the attention of the all 
 too common plant detective or "under-cover man" with 
 the result that they may be reported as potentially danger- 
 ous workers. In too many instances such a report is likely 
 to lead to the "planting" of, say, a bottle of wh'iskey in
 
 302 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 the man's clothes, with the later discovery of it by the 
 secret planter, who in horror at such outrageous breaking 
 of the plant rules, lands the offender on the street, jobless 
 and sore, ready to believe that his manhood requires his 
 personal direction of a continuous war against the indus- 
 trial and economic arrangements which permit such injus- 
 tice. I have reason to believe that such men are not happy 
 in their capacity as leaders of the war that they would be 
 enormously happier if they could find there in the plant 
 and on the job the opportunity to enjoy the sense of con- 
 structive leadership which, of course, remains unattain- 
 able until the hurt that honor feels has been assuaged. It 
 is strange that so many managers who themselves get great 
 pleasure from their membership in some committee of the 
 local Chamber of Commerce find it so difficult to under- 
 stand the wish of some of the workers to enjoy similar dis- 
 tinction in their world under the plant roof. 
 
 Into the final sector of their miscellaneous relations as a 
 person come great numbers of workers who realize their 
 position at the base of modern industry, yet who have 
 found nowhere else in home or club or lodge any milestone 
 of distance travelled from the starting point of personal 
 insignificance. Here is their final chance. Of such men 
 their profanity, I am persuaded, is intended to convince 
 their hearers that they themselves remain unconvinced of 
 the inferiority which their present job may indicate in 
 much the same way that a child assures you of his "I don't 
 care! I don't care!" when his toys are taken from him. 
 In addition, he can hope for a certain distinction among his 
 pals by giving the requisite attention to the luridness and 
 daring of his blasphemies. Of such men, too, their boast- 
 ings of their "fifteen, sixteen w'iskee-beer" are also calcu- 
 lated to impress themselves and their friends with the re- 
 markable carrying or staying powers of then* physical 
 manliness. For many, further, the certainty with which
 
 SOME DEEPER FACTORS 303 
 
 drunken ears are able to hear the assurance of their owner's 
 achievements, past, present, or future, makes it worth while 
 to indulge in the cup which congratulates as well as inebri- 
 ates congratulates because it inebriates. The old machin- 
 ist who used the bartender's dispensations to "get the feel- 
 in' of my old position back like, you know," and the melter 
 in the Western steel town for whom the "hard stuff" almost 
 instantly recalled the days when he was discharged because 
 "the boss he knowed I knowed more 'n a minute about 
 steel than he did in a month," as well as the hobo who used 
 his whiskey as protection against the bugs and flies all 
 these and others support, sorely, this proposition that the 
 worker's bottommost desire is to find the chief basis of his 
 belief in himself there in his work, and that, failing this, he 
 endeavors in all the other parts of his living to make the 
 necessary adjustments. 
 
 Yes, I am convinced that there is a connection between 
 the town's jobs and the town's morals or immorals. 
 Through the hours of the morning on the new job or in the 
 evening after supper at the boarding-house, we would feel 
 each other out and do our best to impress each other with 
 our "high spots" just as do two bond salesmen at the club 
 or two society leaders over their tea-cups. This job and 
 that, and its importance, this promotion and the other, 
 especially this occasion or that when the worker showed 
 that he understood his job better than did his foreman 
 these are men's "talking points" as they try to "sell" 
 themselves to each other; these are the things they hold 
 onto all their lives. The sad thing is that with so many 
 workers the stock of these high moments runs out so quickly 
 with the resultant drawing on the reserves of this or that 
 drinking bout or this or that conquest of the other sex. In 
 the wealth of detail in the features of that conquest it is all 
 too easy to see that here at least the narrator feels that he 
 has proved that if fortune had only gone differently he
 
 304 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 might have shown himself an outstanding salesman, or if 
 fate had only handed him a dress suit instead of a pipe- 
 wrench, the world might have been the better for a real 
 statesman! Instead of believing that vice is the over- 
 whelming of the spirit's forces by the body's, we would 
 come much nearer to the heart of the matter if we dis- 
 cerned in vice the energies of both body and soul combined 
 in an assault upon all the forces that oppose men's having 
 life and having it more abundantly. The harm of it is that 
 the assault secures the hoped-for sense of victory the in- 
 dispensable sense of victory only because it is made at 
 the weakest spot in the line and so proves fleeting, false, 
 and degrading. 
 
 So that first line of defense does more than lessen men's 
 interest to break through on the job. It increases by the 
 same amount the pressure to find on some weaker sector 
 the gam that will justify a proper self-respect. When all 
 the fields have one after the other been entered and ex- 
 plored, there must somewhere be found experiences and 
 satisfactions which will make the whole enough like the 
 normal and average life of the normal average human to 
 be properly called "wholesome" else a man may not call 
 himself a person. It is the fault of all of us to a greater or 
 less extent if this craving for wholesomeness requires many 
 men to vibrate back and forth across the line of the normal 
 as from a restrictive job to a short but furious high spot 
 of a vacation in order to feel that these extremes average 
 into a fairly passable holding of the line. 
 
 This "wholesomeistic person" is interested in the pay 
 envelope, but most of all he wants it to help him find in his 
 work the justification for feeling himself a man because of 
 what he does a man because a workman, a workman that 
 need not be ashamed. Much wrong we do him when we 
 assume that nothing will satisfy him except the manage- 
 ment and ownership of the entire enterprise. That assump-
 
 SOME DEEPER FACTORS 305 
 
 tion binds our hands because it blinds our eyes to the high 
 desirability of changing his whole life as well as his attitudes 
 and convictions by changing the possibilities for his normal 
 satisfactions on his job. That change requires not only 
 the improving of the foreman and the others he sees as the 
 company, but also the lessening of the fear of joblessness, 
 the ill humor of fatigue and the ignorance of the deeper 
 motives of his associates in the whole industrial proceeding. 
 
 The harm that all these do is done because they so vitally 
 affect men's feelings. Built, all of them, upon the bottom 
 wish to consider ourselves self-contained, self-controlled, 
 and worthy personal units in the world, it is our feelings 
 that lead us all to the release of all our energies. Our think- 
 ings give us our facts and the logical connections between 
 them. Our feelings enable us to set a value on those facts 
 and connections. All the yeast in the world gives bread 
 no value until the feelings of hungry humans speak and 
 the arms of hungry humans reach. Short experience will 
 convince any one that it is impossible to overstate the 
 influence on these infinitely delicate scales within us of a 
 few days or weeks of joblessness, a few months of fatigue, 
 or a few years of the conviction that the company doesn't 
 care and that doing the job "don't get you nowheres." 
 
 So long as human beliefs and attitudes are so slightly the 
 result of thinkings and so largely the result of feelings of 
 hope and fear, fatigue, disappointment, pride, so long will 
 it be worth while to see the cause of any man's abnormal 
 beliefs and attitudes in whatever abnormal conditions may 
 surround his job. And here it must be noted that the 
 normal conditions of a decade ago may become abnormal 
 to-day, because they have remained while others changed 
 as when, for instance, other industries shorten their day 
 and leave one or two to continue with the long turns. 
 
 "You take the best-trained and mildest-mannered lion 
 imaginable the result of a life-time's careful handling
 
 306 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 and in five minutes of bad treatment which rubs him all 
 the wrong way, you can drive him back into a wild beast 
 and, perhaps, keep him there for life !" 
 
 In these words an expert trainer puts well another ex- 
 tremely important difference between feelings and think- 
 ings. Ask a man how long he has possessed such and such 
 an idea and you can make a rough judgment as to the 
 probable difficulty of disproving it. But, by its intensity, 
 the emotion of an instant may prove more effective than 
 others which have been possessed for years. Thus a few 
 months or even years of plentiful jobs do not by any means 
 cross off those feelings of despair which burn themselves in 
 on the soul during a few months or weeks of unemploy- 
 ment as in 1913-14, and to a less extent in 1919. Thus, 
 also, many employers and many union members find it 
 quite impossible to-day to discuss each other without a 
 heat which badly warps the straightness of their thinking, 
 perhaps as the result of attitudes forged in the heat of 
 intense emotions years and years ago. 
 
 "Well, you see, he was the leader of the union durin' 
 the strike. A fair-minded man he was and a decent strike 
 it was, at the start. But finally the company orders every 
 family out of all its houses in eighteen hours everybody's 
 gotta be out, y'understand. Well, his wife, two days 
 later, had a baby when they was campin' out an' died. 
 He's been what ye might call a company-fighter ever since." 
 This was the report of a famous radical given me there in 
 the second mine town. 
 
 "No, I've never believed in the fairness of the worker or 
 the unions since the time they went out on us after we had 
 treated them the best we knew how for years," was the 
 way an employer told of his own hurt. "And they all 
 acknowledged that they had no complaint!" 
 
 "Well, what can we do?" said the workers in very much 
 the same situation in another city. "If we don't go out
 
 SOME DEEPER FACTORS 307 
 
 the boys where they haven't got the advantages we've got 
 can't win. If we lose our jobs we can still keep our friends 
 and live in the town here, but if we refuse to help our bud- 
 dies make their fight, then we can't go on living here that 
 is, 'thout bein' called yellow. What's the answer?" 
 
 Each is trying to solve his problem in the way that allows 
 him to feel himself true to what he decides is his highest 
 loyalties. Yet each fails to see the conditions under which 
 the other's choice must be made. And each is certain that 
 the other's action is made plain by that "economic" for- 
 mula of the philosophers. 
 
 All of which means that in the world of human energies 
 the " relativity of motion" holds as true as any Einstein 
 may demonstrate for the world of natural forces. If all of 
 us stood still, then all of us could stand contentedly and 
 "save our face" in standing. It is when war makes the 
 unskilled worker into a munitions producer and puts him 
 up the line out of his place that those who have not moved 
 forward feel that they have in actuality been moved back, 
 and are therefore unhappy. By the same token the profi- 
 teer is felt to have moved backward all those who would 
 otherwise be perfectly content to feel that they had shared 
 with others the universal set-backs of war times and condi- 
 tions. In the same way, too, men feel it proper to desire 
 more progress in the way of better jobs after returning from 
 the fields where so much blood was shed that all men might 
 travel farther into life and more abundant life. 
 
 As long as all these feelings for forward movement nor- 
 mally express themselves first of all in the form of pressure 
 there on the earn-a-living sector, it behooves us to guard 
 and protect them from every influence that disturbs them, 
 unless those influences are found to be absolutely insepara- 
 ble from the industrial process. 
 
 Such disturbance as is to-day caused by the fear of job- 
 lessness, fatigue, and ignorance constitutes, I am certain, a
 
 308 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 very serious, costly, and needless brake upon both the self- 
 respect and the effectiveness of our workers and fellow- 
 citizens hi our basic industries added to by the further 
 commotion caused by the war's upsetting of old standings 
 and statuses. Before this latter can be ended it will be 
 necessary for all to feel that something like the old relative 
 positions and opportunities for the same relative motions 
 forward have been re-established, with the bottommost 
 moved up so as to meet the more particular measurements 
 and requirements of a more democratic world. The process 
 is trying. The very disturbance and commotion puts 
 people throughout the country into the same touchy mood 
 that followed my sleepless bed and crowded kitchen in 
 the first mine town, because all these things reach and 
 roil feelings even though they may not affect thinkings. 
 Thereby the gap is widened. If, then, the precise formula 
 needed to bridge the gap comes not instantly to the lips, 
 feelings are sure to be hurt, relations become strained or 
 broken if, indeed, the war is not on the instant declared. 
 
 But as long as men will fight oftener to save then- face 
 than to feed their stomach progress is assured as long, at 
 least, as the public and the determiners of the conditions of 
 industry understand the vastness of the forces which men 
 carry in their souls and the delicacy of then* control, and 
 then arrange properly for the release of those forces. 
 
 A word or two about such arrangements and we shall be 
 done.
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 THE WAY OUT AND MANAGEMENT 
 
 IP my opinions thus far are in general sound, it is evi- 
 dent that those who determine the conditions under which 
 a man earns his living determine thereby pretty much the 
 conditions under which he lives his life. This would seem 
 to be supported by the fact that the whole circle of present- 
 day political and social as well as economic varieties of 
 unrest unconsciously seek correction by attacks not on the 
 social or political but on the industrial sector. By the 
 strategy of the most practical and pressing necessity thus, 
 as well as by the logic of our line of thought, the challenge 
 of the whole range of our modern life comes to be deposited 
 on the doorstep not so much of the owners of industry as 
 of its managers. 
 
 I am sure that most of the thinking and feeling which is 
 going on at the top of the great industrial organizations is 
 good enough to deserve better expression on that first line 
 of contact. Nothing is more certain than that this better 
 expression will be worth all the effort or money it may cost 
 to secure it. The average foreman's failure at least in 
 the fields I visited to obtain the worker's desire to co-op- 
 erate would be a matter for smiling if it were not so serious 
 a drain upon the whole industrial process. The number is 
 surely large of those workers who must smile in their sleeves 
 when they think how easy it is to let a foreman suppose 
 that they are giving all they have when as a matter of fact 
 they have merely calculated to a nicety the amount required 
 to save them from immediate joblessness. Such an artistic 
 appearance of labor without its actuality is sure to be the 
 
 309
 
 310 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 result, whether the worker dislikes the boss or distrusts the 
 company. In either case the company is sure to pay the 
 bills though, of course, they are passed on to the con- 
 sumer in the cost of production. Nothing is surer than 
 that the company's and the public's bill for this failure of 
 the foreman is colossal. 
 
 The foreman who fails to get the good-will and respect 
 of his workers is pretty likely, also, to fail to make good 
 use of the slender energies they do release. But it will 
 always be difficult to get either persuasive or intelligent 
 foremen for the handling of men on the long turns: tired 
 workers require too much heat in their driver's mouth to 
 favor much light in his mind. When the shorter hours are 
 put in force, management will make a most costly error if 
 it does not exchange this driver for a leader with the ability 
 to use for the best good of the company the energies he can 
 interest his men to release. Besides huge inefficiency, mur- 
 der itself is likely to occur if the old type of foreman tries 
 to continue his old tactics with men no longer too weary to 
 hope for the satisfactions of self-respecting work and accom- 
 plishment. 
 
 The need of lessening the foreman's right to discharge a 
 man at will without, perhaps, withdrawing it completely, 
 hardly needs statement. Larger security on the job is the 
 first requirement for safeguarding the worker's self-respect. 
 The better expression of company interests by plant police- 
 man and paymaster's office also needs no argument. 
 
 But it must not be assumed by any means that the cause 
 of the faulty expression lies wholly hi these officials and 
 then* shortcomings. Just as the worker learns or thinks 
 he learns about the company by this or that demonstra- 
 tion staged by the foreman, the guard, or the paymaster's 
 clerk, so the foreman must guess the kind of manner and 
 message he must pass on down the line only by the demon- 
 stration of it he sees in the actions of the men just above
 
 THE WAY OUT AND MANAGEMENT 311 
 
 him. Without doubt the worker's wholesale and hard- 
 working explanation "Aw, he's afraid he'll lose his job!" 
 is all too often the true diagnosis of the foreman's con- 
 duct. He cannot be expected to "put himself in the work- 
 er's place" unless he can be sure that he doesn't lose his 
 own place by so doing! And quite possibly the fault is 
 not so much in the factory manager or superintendent 
 above him as in the general manager above him or the 
 vice-president or president or chairman of the board above 
 him ! The labor gang, I am persuaded, is far from being 
 the only place where men sigh to be given a greater chance 
 to "turn themselves loose" without being rapped by a 
 superior on the knuckles of their initiative. That better 
 expression on the first line of contact, therefore, cannot be 
 expected to favor larger satisfactions in the job until more 
 "chiefs" assign responsibilities to all their associates as did 
 one I have much in mind: 
 
 "And finally this: Don't bother to tell me how you pro- 
 pose to get the results we have agreed upon. That's your 
 job, not mine. But, in case your delivery of these results is 
 interfered with by obstacles which you cannot move but I 
 can, then have in mind that I try to earn my salary by 
 sitting here with the door open waiting for you." 
 
 If such words serve to send an executive out of the door 
 with his head high and his heart resolved to give its ut- 
 most, there is small reason why their spirit cannot be ex- 
 tended clear down the line. At any rate, only when that 
 is done will industry know something of the efficiency of 
 the willing bird which flies farther than the thrown stone. 
 Meanwhile, this plan and that for solving the labor problem 
 is discussed for weeks and months while the foreman con- 
 tinues to judge that he had better make his own job a little 
 surer by passing in, as his own, the valuable suggestion of 
 one of his gang, and then the "super" judges that he had 
 better make a little surer of his place by passing it on to
 
 312 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 his superior as his ! And no one can question the wisdom 
 of their judgment until he knows how deeply or how super- 
 ficially the president and the board of directors have 
 thought about this matter of getting men to do their best. 
 
 It will be recalled that the finest shower-baths I met were 
 in the refinery for the use of the men under the control of 
 the only person I have ever had the least desire to murder ! 
 To the same effect is the general understanding that a com- 
 pany known recently to have inaugurated profit-sharing 
 continues to employ foremen who make the workers pay 
 them for their jobs ! 
 
 These words are not meant to discourage the initiation of 
 plans and devices for the bettering of conditions and rela- 
 tions. The point is, that these must not be expected to 
 lessen by one jot the necessity for fab-ness and squareness 
 in all the relationships of the entire establishment nor, 
 similarly, the necessity for improvements which save sweat 
 and strain directly on the job where the work is done as in 
 the case of the heavy sheet-bar there by the pair heater's 
 furnace. Instead of hoping to build a relationship of friend- 
 iness by means of the service or employment department's 
 restaurants, clubs, badges, etc., the purpose must rather 
 be to help the entire organization to carry up and down, 
 without obstruction, all the impulses which may be con- 
 tributed by any at the top or at the bottom which are 
 calculated to increase the effectiveness of any for the 
 benefit of the whole. In these days of the multiple-unit 
 enterprise, management is failing to offer to all kinds of 
 workers, at top and bottom and in between, the assurances 
 of a break-through that will be proportional to effort be- 
 cause it is failing to give proper thought to the develop- 
 ment of those spiritual forces of its persons which are, after 
 all, its final resources; and to the effective projection of 
 these into every nook and cranny of the organization.
 
 THE WAY OUT AND MANAGEMENT 313 
 
 That can hardly be accomplished, though it will be helped, 
 by a few classes for foremen. That can also not be accom- 
 plished by foremen or workers or executives who are sup- 
 posed to be kept at their best by the fear of dismissal, in- 
 stead of by the hope of increased opportunity and security. 
 
 A discouraging feature to-day is the number of executives 
 who depend entirely for their knowledge as to whether the 
 projection of their interests and ideals actually reaches to 
 the labor gang, upon the highly prejudiced testimony of the 
 foreman or the highly unreliable report of the " inside man," 
 who makes his living by deception and who stands to lose 
 his job the moment he fails to disclose a certain amount of 
 trouble and unrest around him. 
 
 The result is that the worker's ignorance as to the real 
 heart and purposes of his employer is equalled only by the 
 employer's ignorance of the real wants of his workers. If 
 it were not so, more employers would have confidence to 
 ask the workers themselves to tell them what is on their 
 minds and then see that nothing happened to them for 
 telling. One reason why this is not done more generally 
 in industry is that the manager is inclined to miss this 
 point of the importance of feelings and so to rely upon his 
 thinkings. Especially if he was once a worker, he is likely 
 to think that his reasoning powers, by which he believes 
 he has built up his business, will tell him what the worker 
 wants even better than the worker himself can do it. The 
 result is fairly certain to bring later disappointment to him 
 and soreness to the men. He should hang on his walls 
 the "Eleventh Commandment," "Thou Shalt Not Take 
 Thy Neighbor for Granted. 7 ' 
 
 Another reason for delaying so long the asking of the 
 worker for his opinion in matters, not perhaps of finance or 
 sales, but of the job and its conditions, is fear fear that 
 the worker will take advantage of the occasion merely to
 
 314 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 put more into that pay envelope. But except under con- 
 ditions which appear to him to justify a sense of injustice 
 or distrust, the most his self-respect will permit him to 
 ask for is whatever represents at one and the same time 
 the best interests of the company and of himself. Where, 
 therefore, this spirit of reasonableness is not hi evidence, 
 management will do well to seek, and seek diligently and 
 deeply, for the abnormal conditions or relationships which 
 are sure to be at the bottom of such abnormal and unreason- 
 able feelings. 
 
 In this collective dealing whatever may be its particular 
 form the worker, if he is young, wants a larger opportunity 
 to show what he can do with the assurance that it will get 
 him some kind of proportionate recognition. If he is old, he 
 wants a larger security for the holding of his job and his place 
 in the line of job importances and standings. In both con- 
 nections he has something to give in return for these gains. 
 He knows the exact amount of energy he puts into the job 
 and how much he might put into it also how much more he 
 could make what he puts hi count, if somebody would make 
 it worth his while. In one company now finding that it can 
 pay better wages and still make steel more cheaply on the 
 short day than on the old long turns, the men have helped 
 largely to this end by contributing of their store of this 
 knowledge of the job. As a result this job or position on 
 the furnaces or rolls has been eliminated and that one 
 has been combined with another for the saving of a man. 
 Another thing the worker can give is his understand ing of 
 some of the difficulties of management and his resultant 
 increased respect for management's inability to work out 
 all matters to everybody's instant satisfaction. Of such 
 understanding in these days of restless labor, freight tie-ups, 
 and tight money, management needs all it can get from any 
 one but most from the worker.
 
 THE WAY OUT AND MANAGEMENT 315 
 
 It might be claimed that the worker, as a matter of fact, 
 ought to want more than this for which he feels willing and 
 able to give return. But with a larger chance to enjoy the 
 satisfactions of a steadier, better job, with less stealing of 
 these satisfactions by the foreman, he will be found to grow 
 hi ability and capacity to the same proportionate degree 
 that the rest of us grow under the same stimulus namely, 
 the necessity of "making good" by successfully meeting, 
 one after another, the responsibilities of our jobs. To an- 
 ticipate without fear the gradual development of a partner- 
 ship based upon the development of abilities and capacities 
 requires nothing but mutual confidence in the fairness of 
 each side. Such fairness any one is certain to find easy of 
 expectation who has taken the trouble to add to his belief 
 in the fundamental wish of the average manager to play 
 fair the further belief of the worker to base his own self- 
 respect upon the same honest foundation. Each group must 
 have a certain amount of consideration in understanding 
 that the other is sure to be having its own troubles in mould- 
 ing the actions of all its members into that consistency of 
 performance which is required to establish the kind of 
 character that begets confidence. The shortcomings of 
 this kind that exist in the past of both groups complicates 
 enormously, it goes without saying, the possession of either 
 this expectation or consideration unless they can be can- 
 celled off against each other. 
 
 All of which means that there can be no easy way out of 
 the industrial problem. The reason is that that problem is 
 a problem of relations between persons all of whom are 
 daily forming and reforming their attitudes and hopes and 
 beliefs and wants and faiths and fears on the basis of 
 what they see or think they see, what they think, and es- 
 pecially what and then doing their best or their worst 
 accordingly they feel. For which reason it is difficult
 
 316 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 enough to work out satisfactorily the relations between two 
 perfectly friendly and perfectly expectant and considerate 
 individuals. Naturally enough it is sure to be enormously 
 more difficult to work them out between great groups all 
 of whom are bound, more or less, by their group loyalties, 
 their economic necessities, and their economic and physiolog- 
 ical margins to say nothing of the further difficulties of 
 comparatively sudden gatherings together, strange con- 
 fusions of tongues, and feelings that require that interpreta- 
 tion which often serves only as a ''compound fracture of 
 speech followed by mortification." In such circumstances, 
 it behooves each group to look with such forgiving eyes 
 upon the inconsistencies of the other's behavior as it would 
 wish to have the other look upon its own. Both must face 
 the demand for better collective morals before they can ex- 
 pect success as either corporations or as unions. 
 
 These necessities and restrictions mean, for one thing, 
 that there cannot possibly be enough promotions to go 
 around, even when management equips itself to recognize 
 ability wherever it discloses itself. But not all workers 
 want promotion. An immensely greater number do want 
 to have a better idea of what the job is for. Huge num- 
 bers work year after year making parts of machinery with- 
 out ever seeing the completed whole of which they have the 
 right to feel themselves the co-producers and co-creators. 
 Greater knowledge of its service to others makes my job 
 better because more important. And the possession of a 
 better job to-day than yesterday entitles me to think of 
 myself as a better man. Luckily industry is awakening to 
 the importance of this, as in a factory where movies are used 
 to explain why a motor works to the workers who day 
 after day make the motor's parts. Along such lines there 
 are almost endless opportunities for increasing the work- 
 er's understandings and abilities without requiring the larger
 
 THE WAY OUT AND MANAGEMENT 317 
 
 imagination called for in the more theoretical classes unre- 
 lated to the job. 
 
 Better jobs and steadier jobs, less tiring jobs, jobs whose 
 human service is better understood, jobs with a better 
 chance to enjoy the satisfactions of their doing without 
 these being lessened by a grasping foreman representing an 
 unknown employer: this is what the worker wants more 
 than he wants to sit in the chair of the manager or clip the 
 coupons of the owner. 
 
 The challenge should not be too much for the American 
 executive. Certainly he will find a greater satisfaction and 
 perform a greater service in the meeting of it than ever he 
 has known before. A few decades ago the mass needs of 
 the world called for the mass production of the great 
 corporation. The need was met by the executive who was 
 trained in the assembling and marshalling of the dollar in 
 armies large enough to supply the power of massed finance. 
 After him came the leader who possessed the ability to de- 
 velop and direct men's desires and demands in a way to 
 furnish the organized mass sales required for the mass pro- 
 duction made possible by the massed dollars. He in turn 
 has been followed by the expert scientifically trained to 
 secure the refinements in mass production which massed 
 demand and competition made possible and necessary. 
 This executive still has some distance to go before we can 
 talk legitimately about that science of industry which 
 stands for the organized knowledge of the natural forces it 
 employs. To-day the interests of the owners of the dollars 
 which created the plant, and the originators and possessors 
 of the desires and needs which keep the plant going, have 
 the right to ask that the present-day executive give deeper 
 thought toward developing that art of industry which will 
 stand for the organized emotion of its human factors 
 and forces organized and applied in ways which will at
 
 318 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 one and the same time meet most effectively the needs of 
 both the makers and the users of goods, both the performers 
 and the receivers of services. 
 
 But if the manager is to meet this challenge of bringing 
 about a better America by means of better jobs, he has the 
 right to ask the co-operation of his customers in ways which, 
 finally, are worth mentioning.
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 THE WAY OUT AND THE PUBLIC 
 
 RECENT events throughout Christendom are calculated to 
 make plain the interest of the public in this problem of 
 the relations between those investors of brawn, brains, and 
 bullion who comprise industry. To this interest the public 
 is not hesitating to give voice in the form of its demand 
 that ways be found whereby these relations can be com- 
 posed with less general inconvenience and annoyance. This 
 demand is not likely to be satisfactorily fulfilled until the 
 makers of it see that it involves certain serious responsibili- 
 ties. 
 
 One of the most outstanding of these appears to me to 
 be the organization of machinery for getting the worker and 
 the job together. Both industry and the public have to 
 pay too high a price in the shape of the wasted opportunity 
 of the unmanned job and of the injured morale of the job- 
 less man to allow the getting of the two together to remain 
 in the hands of the employer who likes to have forty men at 
 his gate for every five jobs, the union which may similarly 
 wish to juggle the market, or the job agent who puts money 
 in his pocket every time one of his patrons is hired and, 
 by the same token, fired. Nor can this function be per- 
 formed well by a government department which, in the 
 nature of the case, is compelled to favor the worker more 
 than the work itself or the employer. This is practically 
 the situation of the Department of Labor according to the 
 terms of its establishment. 
 
 There should be no reason why that department and the 
 Department of Commerce could not jointly be authorized 
 
 319
 
 320 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 to set in motion an interstate employment bureau which 
 would facilitate the transfer of men from one part of the 
 country to the other without the over-emphasis of one 
 group's interests or the over-centralization of authority 
 which hobbled the recent federal bureau. 
 
 Beyond doubt such a joint bureau should ask and receive 
 the support of manufacturers, workers, and public in mak- 
 ing at once a study of all the obstacles hi the way of the max- 
 imum regularity of operation of all industries. In such reg- 
 ularity the wish of the owner meets the wish of the manager 
 and the worker : all want steady work, whether for their dol- 
 lars, machinery, and plant, their directing abilities, or the 
 energies of their hand and arm and head. Without doubt, 
 too, such a study would not get far without seeing that the 
 public has a chance to play a large hand hi aiding this 
 desired regularity, or in insisting that men shall not work 
 themselves out of their jobs. It is well known that extremes 
 of style tend to overwork men and women part of the year, 
 and then to out-of-work them a larger part. Seasonal buy- 
 ing of such things as coal naturally puts upon both produc- 
 tion and distribution the same strains of rush-hour peak 
 loads with the consequent depressions that daily env 
 barrass the transportation systems of cities. This strain 
 seems to grow rather than diminish as the users of, for in- 
 stance, railroad or manufacturing supplies tend to come 
 together into larger and larger aggregations of buying power. 
 Such aggregations present, however, the means for securing 
 the hoped-for improvement with greater ease, when once 
 the solution of the problem is seriously approached. Such 
 aggregations and government could also co-operate to make 
 the hobo no longer necessary by fitting seasonal jobs together 
 in ways to avoid the need of migration. 
 
 Whether unemployment insurance as operated in other 
 countries is to be considered or not, there is no question 
 but that such a study of the obstacles is desirable in itself
 
 THE WAY OUT AND THE PUBLIC 321 
 
 from every point of view before the public can think in- 
 telligently of getting at both of these corner-stones of the 
 whole industrial problem the getting together of the man 
 and the job, and the keeping of them together as long as 
 is efficiently possible. If government cannot represent 
 the public interest in this way, it is to be hoped that some 
 group of enlightened employers may set about it in an un- 
 prejudiced and scientific manner, with, if possible, the co- 
 operation of their workers. 
 
 The most important result of such studies and the or- 
 ganization that would follow them for increasing the regu- 
 larity and the security of the job would be this: it would 
 force the foreman and the whole managerial organization 
 to abandon the all too general practice of capitalizing the fear 
 of joblessness, and to organize for getting a much greater 
 co-operation from the workingmen by means of a constant 
 appeal to their faith in the surety of reward. Until some 
 such fundamental change as this is made there can be but 
 futile talk about the moral or progressive values of good 
 character in connection with the relations between industry's 
 persons either as individuals or as groups. Without this 
 change, furthermore, industry will remain far behind educa- 
 tion, religion, and salesmanship, all of which have in our 
 day substituted for their old appeal to fear of punishment 
 or penalty the appeal to hope, and faith in a proportionate 
 reward. 
 
 It is a question whether any plan such as that of the 
 second industrial conference will serve to inform public 
 opinion as well as one organized to give to all the facts of 
 industry a continuous and unprejudiced study and inter- 
 pretation without waiting until the situation is acute and 
 those hi the middle have come to share the prejudices and 
 biases of one side or the other. But many plans will doubt- 
 less be found worth trying and will be certain to contribute 
 some bit of guidance to the better step. The main thing is
 
 322 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 for the public to realize that all its protestations of the 
 paramountcy of its interest in the matter will not avail to 
 secure serious influence for its opinions unless these opinions 
 are free from the bias of feelings and are based upon real 
 understanding an understanding as far removed as possible, 
 for instance, from the almost total ignorance with which the 
 public continues to treat the strikes of the steel workers, the 
 soft-coal miners, and, perhaps to a less extent, the railway 
 men. In short, the public's right to an effective view-point 
 in this matter will require it to think less about the relations 
 between capital and labor and to know immensely more 
 about capital and about labor. 
 
 Such an informed understanding would start at once to 
 break down the present tendency to roll together the inter- 
 ests of about 400,000 manufacturers and of about 30,000,000 
 workers into the charming but highly deceptive simplicity 
 of "capital and labor." Those thousands of manufactur- 
 ers are making tens of thousands of different kinds of things, 
 meeting tens of thousands of different kinds of problems 
 as put up to them by millions of different buyers of their 
 goods and services. Still vaster is the extent of the prob- 
 lems of the wishings and wantings and standards and be- 
 liefs and prejudices and necessities and luxuries of all those 
 thirty millions! Most of our misunderstandings come 
 from taking too much for granted missing the perspec- 
 tives which make the nearer view so simple. Looked at 
 from a distance, the differences between the foreman and 
 the member of his gang, between the millwright or the 
 rigger and the laborer, seem slight. "Out of work!" we 
 are apt to say. "How can that be when I can't get men 
 to mow my lawn?" The truth is that the public cannot 
 do a better and more valuable thing for itself and the coun- 
 try than to exercise all its power to make sure that the 
 millwright may never find it necessary to ask for the chance 
 to mow that lawn ! For him to do so would deal a cruel
 
 THE WAY OUT AND THE PUBLIC 323 
 
 blow against that self-respect upon which the public must 
 depend to keep him at his bench every working-day, an 
 upright, forward-looking, and sincere worker and citizen. 
 For days after he takes the job of a common laborer he 
 will not be able to hold his head among the friends with 
 whom, after years of work and ambition, he now has the 
 standing that goes to the possessor of skill with tools. As 
 a matter of fact, there is a wider breach between the skilled 
 and the unskilled laborer than between " labor" and 
 "capital." 
 
 It is the thread of self-respect and standings and statuses 
 running through all these differences that ties the world of 
 modern society together. It is impossible to overstate 
 either the delicacy of this thread or its crucial importance 
 to the whole great organization of present-day working and 
 living and enjoying. 
 
 We give to the dollar altogether too great an importance 
 when we consider it the cause either of men's industry or 
 their intrigue, their virtues or their vices. The dollar is 
 merely an especially convenient and simple means for facili- 
 tating the measurement of a man's distance from the cipher 
 of insignificance among his fellows. If it does not serve 
 that end it is not sought beyond the narrow limits required 
 for the daily bread as in the mine town, where " conspicu- 
 ous leisure" proves more valuable to this end and so causes 
 loafing hi exactly the same way that the standing which the 
 dollar can buy for the mine owner or operator in the big 
 city, with its fine houses and limousines, brings him down 
 diligently on time every day to his desk. Beyond a certain 
 point, dependent upon the standings and statuses which 
 the dollar can buy in the community, the increase of wages 
 is thus quite as likely to lessen as to increase effort. 
 
 Those who are sure that the dollar causes the harms of 
 modern life will be disappointed to see those harms con- 
 tinue if ever private profit is done away with. Without
 
 324 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 bothering first to get the money as now, men will still go 
 on trying to make their particular jobs and the importance, 
 skill, and usefulness of them in comparison with other jobs 
 represent the particular degree by which they as citizens 
 are moving forward from their earlier and less trained and 
 less important selves, or at least holding their own in com- 
 parison with others. As long as human needs must be 
 met by the doing of jobs, these jobs will be the real criterion 
 of character and worth, of applied serviceableness the real 
 means of indicating a man's importance to others and of 
 understanding their importance to him. And as long as 
 they are such, men will do deeds as base to get the chance 
 to indicate their standing through them as they do now in 
 order to obtain the additional and easily calculated mani- 
 festation of importance made possible by money. German 
 military and civil life was not appreciably better than ours 
 when the guests sat down at table according to the degree 
 of nearness to the Kaiser denoted by the job given by their 
 government. 
 
 So it seems to me that there is no need to try a new sys- 
 tem of society. I find myself less a socialist than ever; 
 the whole thing seems too vast and yet too delicate to put 
 into the hands of a committee. What we need to do and 
 at once is to apply more insight to the working of the 
 system already in existence this long while. Any system 
 will tie itself together only with the strength and certainty 
 of the cord with which it can tie men's givings to their get- 
 tings, their wan tings to their havings, their presents to their 
 futures. In any system the investor of money, of mana- 
 gerial mind, or of effective muscle will get out of the whole 
 process of industry what he wants for his givings only with 
 the silent understanding and co-operation of all of us. As 
 workers used to call my attention to this or that "demon- 
 stration" they were noticing as to what "gets a fellow 
 somewhures" and what does not, I found myself wondering
 
 THE WAY OUT AND THE PUBLIC 325 
 
 whether amongst any of us there could be any such thing 
 as character or virtue except as we could believe that the 
 fulfilment of certain conditions of performance would with- 
 out fail bring at some later date the enjoyment of the 
 reward and whether we could hold our faith indefinitely 
 in the face of demonstrations to the contrary. I doubt it. 
 The main difference is that education puts some in better 
 position to see over a larger field or around more corners 
 than others and therefore more able to find the demon- 
 strations that support their faith. But it is the great pub- 
 lic of all of us that determines what is the strength of the 
 cord that ties the " to-be" to the "is" and makes the 
 right reward follow upon right performance. If we in our 
 capacity as railway employers allow it to come about that 
 the tenders of switches and maintainers of track gain less 
 recognition in the pay envelope or otherwise than men 
 who work with the pick and the shovel elsewhere, then we 
 must not complain if men desert the switches. 
 
 If we in our capacity as bestowers of good-will and recog- 
 nitions kowtow to the possessor of millions more than to 
 the discoverer of new forces in the molecule, then we must 
 not complain if men go in for the millions rather than the 
 molecules. If always "the wheel that squeaks the loudest 
 gets the most grease," then we must expect maximum 
 squeaking. If we permit it to come about that the will to 
 do brings no better recognition and no closer connection 
 with the well-to-do than does the lack of it, then well- 
 doing will begin to be a stranger to well-being. And when 
 these are no strangers then the wish for the satisfactions 
 of self-respect will begin to exert its pressure elsewhere than 
 on the job. If, furthermore, that line which is known to tie 
 right moral results to the right moral actions of individuals 
 is observed not to operate for the performance of groups, 
 then corporations and unions will alike seek to avoid the 
 responsibilities of moral character. And while the church
 
 326 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 may continue to urge upon us all as individuals the require- 
 ments of the moral law, we shall find it constantly easier 
 and easier to evade them as more and more our actions 
 become fused in the activities of the multiple-unit groups 
 which are sure increasingly to operate as the great forces 
 and factors of our modern life. 
 
 Which means that a country is pretty sure to get as good 
 government as it deserves and as good an industry no 
 better and no worse because men will see no point in 
 their exerting more political or industrial effort than they 
 have noticed from experience is worth while. 
 
 When men are helped to find in their jobs the satisfac- 
 tions that make many of us wish there were more hours 
 in the day for the doing of our work, then and only then 
 will men stop exerting pressure to lessen the time spent 
 hi their earn-a-living sector and to increase the money and 
 the hours which they can take out of it with which to bring 
 up the average of their lives as a whole. 
 
 Disappointment is sure to continue, also, if this public 
 of all of us with one hand educates ourselves to new and 
 larger abilities and, with the other, fails to provide the 
 better jobs without which these abilities will only serve to 
 bring us disappointment and unhappiness. Such failure is 
 likely to have serious consequences when the children of 
 the present foreign-born workers come to the plant in 
 larger numbers after the manner of the young crane-man 
 of the billet dock. Common labor with its untrained 
 hands and usually the untrained direction of these hands 
 is pretty surely the most expensive part of the pro- 
 ductive process to-day. In addition it furnishes the most 
 unreliable and unstable part of our industrial structure 
 because its very lack of training makes it fairly ready to 
 get off of one job and onto the next, so long as its require- 
 ments are equally simple. Especially at this tune of labor 
 shortage all of us should ask, for our own security, that
 
 THE WAY OUT AND THE PUBLIC 327 
 
 industry invent more labor-saving machinery, especially in 
 its hottest and roughest jobs, before it lets this shortage 
 prevent it from discontinuing the long turns or before it 
 feels itself built upon a secure foundation in men's feeling 
 toward the possessors of skill. 
 
 The schools, the churches, the libraries all the organiza- 
 tions for the bettering of American life will not suffice to 
 serve or save the life of a country unless that country's 
 industry furnishes from its top to its bottom jobs which 
 permit all of us to put into practicable and serviceable form 
 the inspirations and ideals of our best living. That does 
 not mean at all that jobs must be made easy or clean and 
 comfortable or even interesting the worker does not want 
 to loaf, and he can see fine points in a dull or monotonous 
 job with an eye that should shame us. It does mean that 
 he wants to feel sure that, when he does give all he has to 
 give, he and his value in it all will not fail to get something 
 like the satisfactions in his heart and the recognitions for 
 himself and his family to which he feels that service entitles 
 him. Like all the rest of us, he follows the line not so 
 much of the least resistance as that of the maximum recog- 
 nitions per unit of effort. 
 
 If we take millions of people, with all the interests of their 
 heads and the desires of their hearts, and assume to dispose 
 of them under the five letters of "labor," then the lines be- 
 gin dangerously to stretch which bind the future and the 
 present together in the way which alone makes possible 
 whatsoever things are true and of good repute. Such a 
 strain upon the lines the war has brought as men saw 
 others getting unfair shares of money and other recognitions, 
 while the high cost of living was met better by those who 
 fought for larger wages than by those who, like the teachers, 
 trusted us to see to their reward. One result of that strain 
 is that men are seen to be working less hard and generally 
 acting less reasonably which in turn gives the employer
 
 328 WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND 
 
 a grievance. The strain upon those lines and they have 
 only the tenuous strength of faith becomes highly danger- 
 ous when, at so critical a tune, men begin to argue for doing 
 away with further attempt at understanding each other 
 and having instead resort to machine guns. That only 
 plays into the hand of the Bolshevist agitators who see their 
 work of disruption thus begun for them in support of 
 their doctrine that there can never be any reconciliation 
 between the seller and the buyer of human energies. Hun- 
 dreds of thousands of honest workers have in the last year 
 lost for a time at least their faith in us of America, be- 
 cause in our ignorance of them we have found it attractive 
 to try to save ourselves by blaming the general unrest 
 wholly upon them. 
 
 The sweat and tears and, yes, the blood of the long 
 days and longer nights among the "boys" of the open- 
 hearth floor, the black "rooms" "inside" or the greasy pits 
 of the "house" or the "yard" will not have been in vain if 
 they may somehow serve to lessen the number of those 
 who with the best of intentions are withholding that 
 understanding and recognition which is indispensable to 
 the whole scheme of organized life and progress a rec- 
 ognition that must be built on some such "close-up" 
 knowledge of men's hearts as these pages have tried to 
 give, and on the sympathy without which knowledge seems 
 somehow to fail to carry on. 
 
 Ten thousand men, so it is said, must join their forces 
 together for the putting of the daily loaf upon our daily 
 table. But every single one of those forces is released not 
 so much by the force of the others as by virtue of each one's 
 faith in the others faith that his co-operation will be re- 
 warded by theirs. This will always be so as long as hu- 
 mans are human with hearts as well as heads. Before we 
 lay the blame upon those others or talk about trying some 
 other plan, all of us, whether we happen to think of our-
 
 THE WAY OUT AND THE PUBLIC 329 
 
 selves as in the group of persons called Capital or Manage- 
 ment or Labor or the Public, should arrange to put into this 
 present scheme a larger measure of the two elements which 
 are likely to prove sovereign for these trying times a cool 
 head and a warm heart.
 
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