It was to Martyn and his interest that I owed still other views. He took me one day to a boardinghouse in which lived twenty-four people, all in two rooms, and yet, to my astonishment and confusion, it was not so bad as that other court, so great apparently is the value of intimate human contact. Few of the very poor day laborers, as Martyn explained to me, who were young and unmarried, cared how they lived so long as they lived cheaply and could save a little. This particular boardinghouse in Homestead was in a court such as I have described, and consisted of two rooms, one above the other, each measuring perhaps 12 × 20. In the kitchen at the time was the wife of the boarding boss cooking dinner. Along one side of the room was an oilcloth-covered table with a plank bench on each side; above it was a rack holding a long row of white cups, and a shelf with tin knives and forks. Near the up-to-date range, the only real piece of furniture in the room, hung the buckets in which all mill men carried their noon or midnight meals. A crowd of men were lounging cheerfully about, talking, smoking and enjoying life, one of them playing a concertina. They were making the most of a brief spell before their meal and departure for work. In the room above, as the landlord cheerfully showed us, were double iron bedsteads set close together and on them comfortables neatly laid.
In these two rooms lived, besides the boarding boss and his wife, both stalwart Bulgarians, and their two babies, twenty men. They were those Who handled steel billets and bars, unloaded and loaded trains, worked in cinder pits, filled steel buckets with stock, and what not. They all worked twelve hours a day, and their reward was this and what they could save over and above it out of nine-sixty per week. Martyn said a good thing about them at the time: “I don’t know how it is. I know these people are exploited and misused. The mill-owners pay them the lowest wages, the landlords exploit these boardinghouse keepers as well as their boarders, and the community which they make by their work don’t give a damn for them, and yet they are happy, and I’ll be hanged if they don’t make me happy. It must be that just work is happiness,” and I agreed with him. Plenty of work, something to do, the ability to avoid the ennui of idleness and useless, pensive, futile thought!
There was another side that I thought was a part of all this, and that was the “vice” situation. There were so many girls who walked the streets here, and back of the Dispatch and postoffice buildings, as well as in the streets ranged along the Monongahela below Smithfield (Water, First and Second), were many houses of disrepute, as large and flourishing an area as I had seen in any city. As I learned from the political and police man, the police here as elsewhere “protected” vice, or in other words preyed upon it.
CHAPTER LXII
In the meantime I was going about my general work, and an easy task it proved. My city editor, cool, speculative, diplomatic soul, soon instructed me as to the value of news and its limitations here. “We don’t touch on labor conditions except through our labor man,” he told me, “and he knows what to say. There’s nothing to be said about the rich or religious in a derogatory sense: they’re all right in so far as we know. We don’t touch on scandals in high life. The big steel men here just about own the place, so we can’t. Some papers out West and down in New York go in for sensationalism, but we don’t. I’d rather have some simple little feature any time, a story about some old fellow with eccentric habits, than any of these scandals or tragedies. Of course we do cover them when we have to, but we have to be mighty careful what we say.”
So much for a free press in Pittsburgh, A.D. 1893!
And I found that the city itself, possibly by reason of the recent defeat administered to organized labor and the soft pedal of the newspapers, presented a most quiescent and somnolent aspect. There was little local news. Suicides, occasional drownings, a wedding or death in high society, a brawl in a saloon, the enlargement of a steel plant, the visit of a celebrity or the remarks of some local pastor, provided the pabulum on which the local readers were fed. Sometimes an outside event, such as the organization by General Coxey, of Canton, Ohio, of his “hobo” army, at that time moving toward Washington to petition congress against the doings of the trusts; or the dictatorial and impossible doings of Grover Cleveland, opposition President to the dominant party of the State; or the manner in which the moribund Democratic party of this region was attempting to steal an office or share in the spoils—these and the grand comments of gentlemen in high financial positions here and elsewhere as to the outlook for prosperity in the nation or the steel mills or the coal fields, occupied the best places in the newspapers. For a great metropolis as daring, forceful, economically and socially restless as this, it seemed unbelievable that it could be so quiescent or say so little about the colossal ambitions animating the men at the top. But when it came to labor or the unions, their restlessness or unholy anarchistic demands, or the trashy views of a third-rate preacher complaining of looseness in dress or morals, or an actor voicing his views on art, or a politician commenting on some unimportant phase of our life, it was a very different matter. These papers were then free enough to say their say.
I recall that Thomas B. Reed, then Speaker of the House, once passed through the city and stopped off to visit some friendly steel magnate. I was sent to interview him and obtain his views as to “General” Coxey’s army, a band of poor mistaken theorists who imagined that by marching to Washington and protesting to Congress they could compel a trust-dictated American Senate and House to take cognizance of their woes. This able statesman—and he was no fool, being at the time in the councils and favor of the money power and looked upon as the probable Republican Presidential nominee—pretended to me to believe that a vast national menace lay in such a movement and protest.
“Why, it’s the same as revolution!” he ranted, washing his face in his suite at the Monongahela, his suspenders swaying loosely about his fat thighs. “It’s an unheard-of proceeding. For a hundred years the American people have had a fixed and constitutional and democratic method of procedure. They have their county and State and national conventions, and their power of instructing delegates to the same. They can write any plank they wish into any party platform, and compel its enforcement by their votes. Now comes along a man who finds something that doesn’t just suit his views, and instead of waiting and appealing to the regular party councils, he organizes an army and proceeds to march on Washington.”