Ten-cent men registered. Bunk-men threw down a nickel and two cents and became guests at large. Guests who registered were handed a chunk of wood too large to enter an ordinary pocket; attached to the wood was the key of the wardrobe. A small discount was made on a week’s lodging paid in advance, but few took advantage of it, for nobody ever expected to stay a week; some had been there for years, but they paid each night as they entered, for they 456 expected each night to be their last. Old customers looked into each other’s faces at evening with a glance which meant: “Hello! back again?”
I saw a woman there once. She came to look for a son, and sat by the door, scanning the faces as they passed her. Over a hundred men lingered around the sitting-room that night. At least a score of them repassed her, just to get a glimpse of her face, in which, though it was that of a stranger, many of them retraced their steps back over life’s jagged roadway. They asked the clerk questions that needed no answer, just to get near for a moment. They tiptoed across the floor; they spoke in whispers; and they indignantly hustled several half-drunken lodgers out of the room. Her anxious face set them all thinking; it created an atmosphere in which those men of life’s undertow grew tender and kind.
I tabulated, by the aid of the clerk, the ages, nationalities, and occupations of one hundred of them. Fifty were German, twenty Irish, sixteen native Americans; the rest were from the ends of the earth. Each of them gave an occupation; there were barbers, tinkers, teamsters, tailors, waiters, laborers, longshoremen, painters, paper-hangers, and scissors-grinders. One man put “banker” opposite his name. This led to an extra inquiry.
“Of course,” he said, “I am for the time being down and out; but banking is my business.”
Their trades were of the past—their vitality had oozed out, their grip on life was relaxed; if it ever tightened again, the first result of it would be another grade of surroundings.
In order to find out how they got a living, I followed some of these men through the maelstrom of city life. I found some distributing circulars. Others sold pencils, matches, laces. They lounged around saloons, sticking their dirty fists into the free-lunch dishes. They played lame, sick, halt, blind; they panhandled on the streets and alleys—especially the alleys, where they fared best. A dozen or more attended the ferries, waiting for a chance to carry baggage. They were unfit for hard work—they would not die.
Twelve cents a day kept most of them. When they didn’t manage seven cents for a bunk, they “carried the banner”—walked the streets or stood in a “dead-house” saloon, where there are no seats and where a man must stand. Many of them, when worsted completely, would “hit the bread-line,” after midnight, not so much for the bread as for a place to stand where they would be immune from the policeman’s club.
Despite some plain lessons to the contrary, I believed most of them to be victims of laziness; but in a single year twelve of them dropped on the floor dead: to these I gave the benefit of the doubt.
“The Hardest Work Is No Work at All”
One Sunday night I told a hundred men in the Bismarck that the reason they had no work was, that they were loafers and didn’t want work. This was in accordance with my theory—the prevailing theory—that poverty is the child of sin, that lack of work is the fruit of shiftlessness. I offered to change clothes with any man in the house, and to go out in the world and show him how to get a job. The challenge was accepted instantly—by an Irishman.