A Day with a Tramp, and Other Days

by Walter A. Wyckoff

We speak in old-fashioned phrase of a city’s slums as though they were a local evil in the town, quite remote in connection with the rest of the corporate whole, while in truth we know, in our haunting, new-found knowledge of social solidarity, that they form a sore which denotes disease in every part of the body politic. The conviction grows upon us that it is often at the cost of much suffering to our kind that we have food to eat and raiment to put on, and the immunity from personal responsibility which once we felt in paying high prices for our wares is fast being undermined by increased acquaintance with the ramifications of the “sweating system.” Indeed, we seem to see that, from the very frame of things, if one enjoys, another suffers, and that the unwitting oppressors of the poor are often the poor themselves, while the destruction of the poor is their poverty. Men tell us that things were growing worse, and that hope lies that way, because it points to ultimate dissolution and a new order. I find it impossible to share this form of optimism, and I cannot see that things are really getting worse, but rather incomparably better as measured, for example, by the standard of the last century of industrial progress. And so far from seeing hope in a belief that matters are getting worse, I find it rather in the view that much that is worst in modern life is fast becoming intolerable in a society which grows increasingly conscious of vital interdependence and relationship. Meanwhile the concrete facts remain, and here is a glimpse of some of them as they appear in a partial record of fragments of two days’ experience in Chicago.

I was working as a hand-truckman in a factory far out on Blue Island Avenue. My wages were $1.50 a day, and I was paying for board and lodging, in a tenement across the way, $4.25 a week. As one result, I was saving money and would soon be able to leave the job and write up my notes, while widening my acquaintance with the town before looking for other work. Already I had a little knowledge of the city. For two weeks after entering it I had been among its unemployed and had suffered some and had seen the real suffering among others of my class, before I found occupation in a West-side factory.

It was during those two weeks that I came to know a widow, with whom this tale is first concerned. I met her early in December; it was now nearing the end of January, and we factory hands were marking with delight the lengthening of the days, for we were beginning to have a little daylight left when work was over. At last one afternoon the setting sun came pouring through the kitchen window while we were washing up for supper at Mrs. Schultz’s boarding-house. That was because it was Saturday, and we had quit at five o’clock, being given, as was the custom in the factory, a half hour on Saturday afternoons.

The usual week’s end excitement was running high among the men. Gibes and louder talk than common were rife, as black hands and faces came white from soap and successive basins of hot water. Some of the men were going in the evening to a “show,” others to a “fancy-dress ball,” and a few were saying nothing. We scattered widely after supper, leaving the house to the family, which must have been a welcome change to them, for generally, through the week, we all foregathered in the sitting-room at night and romped with the children and played cards until bed-time.

Mrs. Stone will serve as the widow’s name, and my first errand that evening took me to her home, which was in the basement of a building on Boston Avenue. We were both concerned in pressing a claim which she had upon her husband’s people, a highly just claim, I thought; for he had deserted her some time before his death, leaving her alone in the support of herself and their two children. Why she had ever come to the city, I could never make clearly out, beyond what had seemed to be to her a strong appeal to her reason that, if she must make her own living and the children’s, she could hope to do it better in town than in the country where she was born and bred. And the marvel was that she had succeeded in keeping them all alive. The city had, of course, furnished an awful disillusionment. The children proved an insuperable barrier to employment at domestic service, and, failing to find any other labor, she was rescued finally from starvation by getting a job from a “sweater.” She deserved success, for she was an heroic creature. To hear her describe the struggle, you would gather that hers had been the best of luck. She merely wanted a chance to work, so that they might live; and had she not found it, just when she thought, for lack of it, that they must starve?

From the sweater’s shop she would carry the goods two miles to her home, walking both ways, for she could not afford car-fare. Then all day and through much of the night she made the garments. They were boys’ waists, and the materials, ready cut, besides the necessary thread and buttons, were furnished her. There was left for her to do all the remaining work, down to sewing on the buttons and making the button-holes, and she was paid for the finished waists at the rate of thirty-five cents a dozen.

It was hard, she did admit, to feed and clothe her family and pay the rent on a wage-rate like that, and she was near to going under when another and a crowning stroke of fortune fell. In answer to a notice tacked on her door, two women, who worked in a neighboring book-bindery, applied for board, and each agreed to pay two dollars a week. The five then lived together in the basement-room, whose furniture consisted chiefly of dry-goods boxes, but the boarders took kindly to the home and the children, and things had gone comfortably ever since. Gradually the children, a boy of nine and a girl two years younger, were learning to help at some of the simpler forms of sewing and in the housework.

This, I beg to interpolate, was the small beginning of Mrs. Stone’s success. Haying shrewdness as well as energy, she soon discovered that keeping boarders was more profitable than making waists, and so she developed that side of her enterprise. When I saw her last, in the following May, she was mistress of a well-appointed mechanics’ boarding-house on Milwaukee Avenue, but her troubles had taken new form, for the contamination of the slums had begun to appear in her son, who was fast developing into an incorrigible, and she had sent for me in order to consult about a plan of placing him in a reformatory.

But to return to the February evening, on which I called to talk with Mrs. Stone about a claim upon her husband’s people: I found her at home. One ran little risk of failing to find Mrs. Stone at home, her engagements abroad being confined to trips to the sweater’s shop for materials. I heard the swift clatter of her sewing-machine as I walked down the steps from the filthy pavement to the door of the basement where she lived. The room had always to me an effect of being brilliantly lighted. It was due to the illumination of two large lamps which were kept faultlessly clean and were burning often in the day as well as night, and in part to the general cleanliness of the room, not to mention the cheerfulness which radiated from Mrs. Stone. She turned from her machine as I drew up an empty soap-box and sat down in front of her, and one would have thought, from the contagion of her manner, that she never knew any mood but one of hopeful courage. But she had no time to spare, and when our talk was ended, she turned again to work, while I went over to another corner and chatted with the children and the boarders.

I was waiting for my friend Kovnitz, whom I had asked to meet me there. Kovnitz was himself employed in the same trade as Mrs. Stone, although in quite another branch of it. He was a coatmaker, and had been brought up to work under the sweating system. Much of the value of his acquaintance, apart from my personal liking for him, lay for me in his thorough knowledge of the trade. He was a socialist, and a very ardent one; but his efforts for reform were directed mainly toward effecting organization among the workers of his kind, and with this I warmly sympathized. We were to go together in the evening to a gathering of the cloak-makers, and, when he appeared at Mrs. Stone’s, we lost no time in starting for the meeting-place on the South-side.