Through the mill: The life of a mill-boy

by Frederic Kenyon Brown

The personnel of this room was always changing; but its prevailing character remained the same: a dull-eyed, drunken set of men, a loafing, vicious set of young fellows who worked a week and loafed three.

I chose to work in that place because it was my first opportunity for an advance from doffing to “joiner.” A “joiner” is one who shares with another the operation of a pair of mules—a semi-spinner. The pay is divided, and the work is portioned off between the two. I had been working toward this position for six years and a half, and now it had come, even in that miserable room, I was eager to see how I should manage.

But, oh, the mockery and vanity of all efforts, even my wild ones, to master one of those machines! The lurching, halting, snapping things could not be mastered. Threads snapped faster than I could fasten them. One tie and two breaks, two ties and three breaks, along the row of glistening spindles, until there were so many broken threads that I had to stop the mule to catch up. And every stop meant the stoppage of wages, and the longer a thread stayed broken, the less I was earning; and on top of that, the bosses swore at us for stopping at all. I should have stopped work then and there—it would have been the sensible thing to do—but I was no loafer, and I was trying to make good in this new work—the end of a long desire. The other “joiners” and spinners did not try to keep at it. They gave up the work as soon as they discovered how useless it was to try to make a decent wage from the worn-out machines. Only myself and a few poor men who were there because they could not get any better place stayed on and fought the one-sided fight. Every time the machinery broke—and breaks were constant—the machinist grumbled, and took his own time in coming with his wrenches.

The physical and mental reaction of all this upon me was most woeful. My muscles grew numb under the excessive pressure on them, so much so that I often stood still when the threads were snapping about me and looked on them as if I had never seen a broken thread before. Or I would suddenly stop in my wild dashes this way and that in the mending of threads and look dazedly about, feel a stifling half-sob coming to my throat, and my lips would tremble under the misery and hopelessness of it all. My only consolation, and very poor, too, lay in the clock. At six o’clock it would all end for a few hours at least, and I could get out of it all. But when you watch the clock under those circumstances, an hour becomes two, and one day two days. So the labor was, after all, a wild frenzy, a race and a stab and a sob for ten and a half hours! I can never think of it as anything more.

Some of my work-fellows in that room were sent to jail for assault, petty thieving, and drunkenness. I used to think about them, in the jail, doing light work under healthy conditions, even though they were paying penalties for lawlessness, but I, who had done no crime, had to have ten hours and a half of that despairing contest with a machine. How much better to be sewing overalls or making brooms in a jail! I had to stay in the house at night in order to be thoroughly rested for the next day’s work. I had no liberty.

And, added to all this, there was the constant depressive contact with unsympathetic and foul-mouthed desecrators of ambition. Those who knew me in that room were aware that I was trying to avoid every degenerative and impure act. Some of them passed word around also that I was attending such and such a church! They came to the end of the mule, when the boss chanced not to be around, and, in a huddled group, stood at my elbows, where I had work to do, and put on their dirty lips the foulest vocabulary that ever stained foul air.

Then one day there came a flash which clearly lighted up everything. “Why are you going through this wild, unequal labor in this dull room day by day! Why? Do you absolutely have to do it? Are others keeping at it, as you? Why, why, why?” each one bigger than its fellow, made me meet every fact squarely. “To what end all this?”

My labor was helping to buy beer at home! I was giving up all my wage to my aunt, and getting back a little spending money. I had fifteen cents in the bank at the time. I did not have to overstrain myself as I was doing. I had the privilege of giving up my work at any moment I chose. I was no slave to such conditions. No man could drive me to such tasks. Giving up the work only meant a scolding from my aunt and a little going about among other mills to find another, and perhaps better, position. This was a new thought to me—that I could leave my work when I wanted; that I might be given work too hard for me.

Previously I had worked on the supposition that whatever was given me ought to be done at all costs; that the mill was the measure of a man, and not man the measure of the mill. I had always looked upon my work as a test of my moral capacity; that any refusal to work, even when it was harder than I could bear, was a denial of my moral rights. But now the worm of conscience was boring through me. Why should I, at twenty years of age, not be entitled to what I earned, to spend on my education, instead of its being spent on my aunt’s appetite for intoxicants?

Then, too, why should I have to work with people who had no moral or mental sympathy with me? Was five dollars and seventy-five cents, my pay for the first week in that gloomy room, worth it? Assuredly not.