At 6:50, on my arrival, I was received by Mr. and Mrs. Robinson and their son, who are managers in the firm of Heinz Pickles, 57 varieties! Emil Fuchs, who is doing a Heinz memorial, told them I was coming. They had a car and drove me to the William Penn Hotel. I refused their invitation to dinner as I felt rather tired. After dinner some reporters came to see me in my room. Oh, I am so weary of the same questions about Lenin and Trotzky! I wish I dared tell them what I really think.
February 15, 1921.
Mrs. Robinson fetched me at ten A.M. and took me first for a drive in the town and then to the Heinz factory. The town is built at the junction of two rivers, so it can only spread up and not out. The sun was struggling to break through the mist of grime caused by the factory smokes. Mrs. Robinson apologized for the lack of beauty of the town. She was wrong, it was terribly beautiful. Everything looked like a Whistler picture, but of course there is no color, no nature, and one longs for these things after a time.
When we drove to the Heinz factory we went in first to the Administration Building; the hall of which is lined with marble, has marble columns, a fountain in the middle, marble busts on pedestals all around, and a frieze by an English artist, representing the various Heinz processes. Mr. Robinson came and appointed a guide to show us all over. It is the first factory I have ever seen that was interesting. It really is wonderful to see the flat piece of tin go into the machine, become round and soldered, move along to have its bottom put on, and without stopping, go careering along overhead and down to the next floor to be mechanically filled with baked beans, and have its lid put on. From the moment the flat piece of tin gets into the machine to the moment when it is sealed up full is four and a quarter minutes. The tin manufacturing room was delightful, little bright, glistening, shining tins, ran, rolled and leapt, as it seemed, overhead and all round, dancing fairy-like to the music and hum of the machinery. The space over one’s head was full of them, impelled in different directions at different speeds on different levels, on little iron ways. The process itself interested me, but when I had grasped the process, I just stood in the middle of the hall and gave way to the impression of the whole, and it had the effect of making me laugh outright, it was so ridiculously joyous.
Mr. Robinson’s son, who is foreman in one of the departments, led me to a window and pointed out a little one-storied house in which Trotzky had lived and had a newspaper plant. Trotzky must have been a long time over here to have inhabited all the houses that claim him!
It was now twenty of one o’clock A.M. I have just returned from a marvelous evening at the Chalfont Steel Pipe works. I dined with Miss Chalfont. She had asked me whether I’d like a big party or not. I said I’d like to go to see the works, so she arranged that no one should dress for dinner and we went, a party of seven, first to the “residence” where the welfare workers live—a very nice house indeed—(there were three reproductions of Gainsborough and Reynold’s pictures of the “Beautiful Mrs. Sheridan”). Then to the cinema which is for the workers, and then to see the mill.
I have come away with a feeling of bewilderment ... the noise, the power, the heat, men who did not seem to count worked machinery that seemed human.
It was terrible when a lever opened the furnace door and a giant red hot tube like a gun barrel was gently but firmly impelled along by iron fingers and pushed into the fire mouth upon which a door closed. It was relentless—like the hand of Destiny. When the cylinder came out at the other end and passed through a fountain of cold water, the cold on the heat produced explosive noises like great guns in a battle and we had to dodge the shower of sparks.
Strange looking men were the workers, mostly Slovaks, and Italians. The Chalfonts are rather proud of the good feeling that exists between them and their workers. I saw no faces of disaffection, but I minded being looked upon by them as a curious idler—did they but know ...!
February 16, 1921. Pittsburgh.