CHAPTER IX
The World of Seasonal Labor and the Casual Workers
“Why is it that those who produce food are hungry, and that those who make clothes are ragged? Why, moreover, is it that those who build palaces are homeless, and that those who do the nation’s work are forced to choose between beggary, crime, or suicide in a nation that has fertile soil enough to feed and clothe the world; material enough to build homes to house all peoples, an enormous productive capacity through labor-saving machinery of forty thousand million man-power; and where there are only sixty-five million souls to feed, clothe, and shelter?”
The foregoing questions were put into the platform and issued by the Industrial Army of 1894 which was known as Coxey’s army. That year was one of great depression all over the United States. The causes for the depression were discussed very widely at the time. It was the year following the great World’s Fair in Chicago and hundreds of thousands of men were out of employment. There was suffering and deprivation in all the cities of the United States. Charitable institutions were taxed to their limit by the new responsibilities put upon them. The idea of having all the unemployed form themselves into a great army of peace, and march to Washington for the purpose of presenting to the President and Congress a petition for the right to labor, developed in the mind of a man named Coxey who lived at Masillon, Ohio. He gathered together the first army numbering several thousand men. These men were organized into companies, and officers were appointed after the fashion of the regular military customs.
Similar armies mobilized in other parts of the country. One at Los Angeles, another at San Francisco, one in Boston, and one in the Northwest, started towards Washington at one time. There were about 10,000 men on the march. They were ridiculed, persecuted, and feared. When the army that started from San Francisco reached Sacramento, it encamped outside the city. On Sunday night this curious army marched down into the center of the town, halted before the first church it came to, then the men filed in and in an orderly fashion filled up every pew. The remainder of the army marched on to the next church and did the same thing. This was repeated until every church in the city was filled to its capacity. This was the first and probably the last time in the history of that city when church pews were at a premium on Sunday night.
The men of this army were harmless for the most part. A great many of them were worthless fellows, but the vast majority were honest workingmen who had been thrown out of employment, and owing to the circumstances of the times were unable to find anything to do, and, consequently, were in despair. Their plan was to go quietly across the country and when they arrived in Washington simply to fold their arms and ask the government what it was going to do for them. Only a few of the men of Coxey’s army reached Washington and the spectacular scheme failed. It, however, emphasized the need of the time and showed up the extreme danger in the situation.
The Unemployed. The unemployed man presents a real problem to society. Carlyle said, “A man willing to work, and unable to find work is, perhaps, the saddest sight that fortune’s inequality exhibits under the sun.” Many well-to-do people living in comfortable circumstances, with position and income assured, assert that if a man wants work he can always find it, and that the only men unemployed are the shiftless and the lazy. Right now the war has absorbed all the surplus labor, and a condition exists different from any that we have previously known in the history of America. Immigration has been cut off and the demands for new enterprises have called for hundreds of thousands of new workers, so that at the present time there is no reason why any man should be out of work. In fact, so serious has the need for men become that the latest interpretation put upon the draft law amounts practically to a conscription of labor for all men of draft age.
The Banana Boat. A whistle sounded on the Mississippi river just below New Orleans early one afternoon last summer. It was a dismal, rainy day, and as the long screech died away the sound seemed almost prophetic of some coming disaster. Soon a huge steamship painted drab-gray, with a red diamond upon its smoke-stack, nosed its way from out of the mist and crowded in close to the pier. Scarcely were the ropes fast when there began to appear on the dock men black and white, ragged, unkempt fellows who had hurried from the near-by saloons, poolrooms, and other lounging places. This boat was just in from Central America loaded down with bananas. Two enormous unloaders were set up alongside of the vessel. The machinery of these started and an endless belt, which traveled to the bottom of the hold and out again, came up loaded with bunches of bananas. The fruit was brought down and thrown upon a table. Here two men, standing one on either side of the traveling belt, would take hold of a bunch of bananas and place it upon the shoulders of a third man, who in turn carried it off to the waiting freight-car. Fifty men went to work almost immediately; twenty an hour later in the afternoon; and at nine o’clock that night, under the glare of the electric lights, ninety-two men were busily engaged in carrying the fruit and storing it in the freight-cars.
All night long the men worked at a feverish pace. They were organized so that they formed an endless chain. The first two continuously placed the fruit upon the third man’s shoulder, and he in turn stepped along as fast as those ahead of him would allow. When he was relieved of his bunch of bananas at the car door by two men on the inside who stowed the fruit away, he would take his place in the line of men returning for more fruit. Round after round this group of men passed, until in less than seventeen hours of constant work every banana was taken off the boat. When we realize that this boat carried nearly ten thousand tons, we get some idea of the activity of the workers.