He read it and looked at me uncertainly. Finally he got up, told me to wait a minute, and went through a nearby door. In a minute or two he returned and said: “Well, that’s all right. We can do as well as that, anyhow, if you want to stay at that rate.”
“All right,” I replied as nonchalantly as I could. “When do I start?”
“Come around tomorrow at twelve. I may not have anything for you, but I’ll carry you for a day or two until I have.”
I trotted down the nearby steps as fast as my feet would carry me, anxious to get out of his sight so that I might congratulate myself freely. I hurried to a telegraph office to reject my friend’s offer. To celebrate my cleverness and success I indulged in a good meal at one of the best restaurants. Here I sat, and to prepare myself for my work examined that day’s Dispatch, as well as the other papers, with a view to unraveling their method of treating a feature or a striking piece of news, also to discover what they considered a feature. By nine or ten I had solved that mystery as well as I could, and then to quiet my excited nerves I walked about the business section, finally crossing to Mt. Washington so as to view the lighted city at night from this great height. It was radiantly clear up there, and a young moon shining, and I had the pleasure of looking down upon as wonderful a night panorama as I have ever seen, a winking and fluttering field of diamonds that outrivaled the sky itself. As far as the eye could see were these lamps blinking and winking, and overhead was another glistering field of stars. Below was that enormous group of stacks with their red tongues waving in the wind. Far up the Monongahela, where lay Homestead and McKeesport and Braddock and Swissvale, other glows of red fire indicated where huge furnaces were blazing and boiling in the night. I thought of the nest of slums I had seen at Homestead, of those fine houses in the east end, and of Carnegie with his libraries, of Phipps with his glass conservatories. How to get up in the world and be somebody was my own thought now, and yet I knew that wealth was not for me. The best I should ever do was to think and dream, standing aloof as a spectator.
The next day I began work on the Dispatch and for six months was a part of it, beginning with ordinary news reporting, but gradually taking up the task of preparing original column features, first for the daily and later for the Sunday issue. Still later, not long before I left, I was by way of being an unpaid assistant to the dramatic editor, and a traveling correspondent.
What impressed me most was the peculiar character of the city and the newspaper world here, the more or less somnolent nature of its population (apart from the steel companies and their employees) and the genial and sociable character of the newspaper men. Never had I encountered more intelligent or helpful or companionable albeit cynical men than I found here. They knew the world, and their opportunities for studying public as well as private impulses and desires and contrasting them with public and private performances were so great as to make them puzzled if not always accurate judges of affairs and events. One can always talk to a newspaper man, I think, with the full confidence that one is talking to a man who is at least free of moralistic mush. Nearly everything in connection with those trashy romances of justice, truth, mercy, patriotism, public profession of all sorts, is already and forever gone if they have been in the business for any length of time. The religionist is seen by them for what he is: a swallower of romance or a masquerader looking to profit and preferment. Of the politician, they know or believe but one thing: that he is out for himself, a trickster artfully juggling with the moods and passions and ignorance of the public. Judges are men who have by some chance or other secured good positions and are careful to trim their sails according to the moods and passions of the strongest element in any community or nation in which they chance to be. The arts are in the main to be respected, when they are not frankly confessed to be enigmas.
In a very little while I came to be on friendly terms with the men of this and some other papers, men who, because of their intimate contact with local political and social conditions, were well fitted to enlighten me as to the exact economic and political conditions here. Two in particular, the political and labor men of this paper were most helpful. The former, a large, genial, commercial-drummer type, who might also have made an excellent theatrical manager or promoter, provided me with a clear insight into the general cleavage of local and State politics and personalities. I liked him very much. The other, the labor man, was a slow, silent, dark, square-shouldered and almost square-headed youth, who drifted in and out of the office irregularly. He it was who attended, when permitted by the working people themselves, all labor meetings in the city or elsewhere, as far east at times as the hard coal regions about Wilkes-Barre and Scranton. As he himself told me, he was the paper’s sole authority for such comments or assertions as it dared to make in connection with the mining of coal and the manufacture of steel. He was an intense sympathizer with labor, but not so much with organized as with unorganized workers. He believed that labor here had two years before lost a most important battle, one which would show in its contests with money in the future: which was true. He pretended to know that there was a vast movement on foot among the moneyed elements in America to cripple if not utterly destroy organized labor, and to that end he assured me once that all the great steel and coal and oil magnates were in a conspiracy to flood the country with cheap foreign labor, which they had lured or were luring here by all sorts of dishonest devices; once here, these immigrants were to be used to break the demand of better-paid and more intelligent labor. He pretended to know that in the coal and steel regions thousands had already been introduced and more were on their way, and that all such devices as showy churches and schools for defectives, etc., were used to keep ignorant and tame those already here.
“But you can’t say anything about it in Pittsburgh,” he said to me. “If I should talk I’d have to get out of here. The papers here won’t use a thing unfavorable to the magnates in any of these fields. I write all sorts of things, but they never get in.”
He read the Congressional Record daily, as well as various radical papers from different parts of the country, and was constantly calling my attention to statistics and incidents which proved that the workingman was being most unjustly put upon and undermined; but he never did it in any urgent or disturbed manner. Rather, he seemed to be profoundly convinced that the cause of the workers everywhere in America was hopeless. They hadn’t the subtlety and the force and the innate cruelty of those who ruled them. They were given to religious and educational illusions, the parochial school and church paper, which left them helpless. In the course of time, because I expressed interest in and sympathy for these people, he took me into various mill slums in and near the city to see how they lived.