The Workers: An Experiment in Reality. The East

by Walter A. Wyckoff

By dint of strenuous industry and careful imitation of the methods of the other men, I managed to keep pace with them. I saw from the first that the work would be hard; and in point of severity it proved all that I expected, and more. To ply a pick and urge a shovel for five continuous hours calls for endurance. Down sweeps your pick with a mighty stroke upon what appears yielding, presentable earth, only to come into contact with a rock concealed just below the surface, a contact which sends a violent jar through all your frame, causing vibrations which end in the sensation of an electric shock at your finger-tips. A few repetitions of this experience are distinctly disheartening in effect. Besides, the sun has cleared the fog, and is shining full upon us through the still air. The trench is well below the surface, now, and we work with the sun beating on our aching backs, and our heads buried in the ditch, where we breathed the hot air heavy with the smell of fresh soil, and the sweat drips from our faces upon the damp clay.

By nine o'clock what strength and courage I have left seem oozing from every pore. The demoralization is complete, and I know that only "the shame of open shame" holds me to my work. I dig mechanically on through another sluggish hour of torment; and then I come to, and find myself breathing deeply, with long regular breaths, in the miracle of "second wind," with fresh energy flowing like a stream of new life through my body.

Through all the working hours of the day the foreman sat upon a pile of tools silently watching us at the job. Now and then he politely urged that the ditch be kept not less than two feet wide, and nothing could have been further from his manner and speech than any approach to abusing the men. It was his evident purpose to treat us well, but the act of his oversight, under the conditions of our employment, involved a practical wasting of his day, and cast upon us the suspicion of dishonesty.

On the next morning, which was Saturday, the foreman sent me down the ditch, where the pipe was already laid, and ordered me, with two other men, to fill in the earth. Like a line of earthworks lay the "stubborn glebe" above the trench. The work of shovelling it back into place seemed easy at first, and was easy, as compared with the digging; but the wet, cohesive clay that lined the ditch's brink yielded only to the pressure of a compulsion very persistently applied. We quit on that evening at five o'clock, with a full day's pay for nine hours' work.

The foreman met me on Monday morning with an order for yet another change. At the barn I should find "Hunt," he said, and I was to report to him as his "help." Hunt proved to be a good-looking, taciturn teamster, who had just hitched his horses to his "truck," and he told me to get aboard. The "truck" was a heavy four-wheeled vehicle without a box, but with, instead, a stout platform suspended from the axle-trees, and resting but a few inches from the ground. Standing upon this we drove all day from point to point about the grounds, attending to manifold needs.

We had first to cart the milk-cans from the dairy to the kitchen. This errand took us to the rear of the Asylum buildings, where the entries open upon a series of quadrangular courts. Then from entry to entry we drove, gathering up great bags of soiled clothes, which lay in heaps about the doors, and we carted these to the laundry. Then back to the kitchen we went, and took on a load of huge cans filled with swill, and transferred them to a large pig-sty at the edge of the wood, below the meadow, and there emptied their contents into hogsheads, from which, at stated hours, the swill is baled out to the loud-squealing herd within. Again we made the round of the entries, this time to gather up the waste barrels which stood full of ashes, and the results of the morning's sweeping; and having emptied these, we replaced them for a fresh supply. Then we drove to the garden, and carted from that quarter to the kitchen several loads of vegetables.

The afternoon was consumed in supplying the demand for ice. Embedded in a mass of hay in the ice-house, the ice must first be uncovered, and the cakes, frozen together, must be pried apart with a crowbar and then dragged over the melting surface to the door, and finally loaded upon the truck.

We first carted it to the barn-yard, where we washed it by playing water over it with a hose, and then to the kitchen wing, where we chopped it into smaller pieces and threw these into openings which communicated with the large refrigerators inside. Again and again was this process repeated, until an adequate supply had been furnished, and then there remained before six o'clock time enough to cart to the pigs their evening meal from the kitchen.

With slight changes in detail, this remained the order of our work through the few days of my stay. I held the job long enough to find myself ensconced at the Asylum, and then I told the foreman that I wished to go. He looked at me in some surprise, and began to argue the point. "You'd better stay by your job," he said. "It is not the best work, but we'll find better for you before long." I thanked him heartily, and told him I was interested to learn that, but that I felt obliged to go. He shook hands with me, and cordially wished me luck, and told me to apply to him for work if I happened again in those parts, and added that I could get my wages by calling at the office on the next afternoon, which was the regular pay-day.

A free day was highly useful now, for my clothes and boots were seriously in need of repair. The pack contained the means of much mending, and by dinner-time my coat and trousers were patched, and my stockings were stoutly darned. But the boots were beyond me. Already they had cost me dear, for a dollar, the earnings of four days as a porter, had gone for a pair of new soles, and now another outlay, enormous in its relation to my means, was an imperative necessity.