The Workers: An Experiment in Reality. The West

by Walter A. Wyckoff

We were up at five one clear, cold morning near the middle of December, in order to try our luck at the gates of a factory which lies four miles or more from the heart of the city. It was no great hardship to set off without a breakfast, for we had supped heartily on the night before, and had gladly spent our remaining cash for beds in preference to sleeping in the station-house.

Out of a cloudless sky blew a strong, dry, northwest wind across the snowless prairies, and it cut sharply, at right angles, through the long diagonal street which we followed to the far southwest. We did not loiter, for it took our fastest gait to keep us warm. The buildings shielded us in part, but around the corners the wind caught us with its unchecked force, and enveloped us often in clouds of driven dust which rose from the surface of the frozen streets. There was exhilaration in the walk; when we reached the centre of the viaduct which carries Blue Island Avenue across the various lines of railway which enter the city between Fifteenth and Sixteenth Streets, we were in the full, unimpeded gale, and looking back we could see across the dark city the first slender shafts of light dimming the eastern stars.

It was still dark when we reached the factory gates, for the better part of an hour remained before the sun would be well up, and it was almost half an hour before the beginning of the day’s work. We were not the first to be on hand. Already there were groups of men who stood before the fast-closed gate, or stamped slowly up and down on the sleepers of the railway which enters the factory yard, or gathered for shelter behind the walls of neighboring buildings. The number of these men was growing fast. I thought at first that many of them were employees waiting for the morning opening of the factory. But when the heavy gate moved down its groove in answer to the keeper’s push, disclosing the open area of the factory yard and the long platforms flanking the warehouses, this company of waiting men, grown now to eighty or a hundred strong, stood against the high board fence and along the edges of a great stream of workingmen, which began to pour with increasing volume through the narrow way. A bell sounded from the factory tower, and you could hear the first slow movements of the piston-rods, and the answering stir among the fly-wheels as they warmed to swifter motion, and the straps and pulleys tuning up to the canticle of the working-day.

WAITING FOR A JOB OUTSIDE THE FACTORY GATES.

The sudden on-rush of factory-hands was almost a miracle. Men seemed to rise as by magic from the soil. They streamed from neighboring tenements, and along the wooden sidewalks, and from out the horse-cars which came down the streets loaded to the couplers. They had grown to the number of an army, and in rough, uneven, changing ranks they walked briskly, five, six, nine men abreast, while the bell tapped off nervously the swift approach of seven o’clock. Two men seated in a buggy drove their horse slowly into the thick of the crowd, which deflected at the gate to let them pass, and then closed in behind with increased momentum. The superintendent of the factory stepped down from the buggy and climbed the staircase to his office.

The converging lines of workmen made denser the mass that pressed quickly through the gate. There was little speech among them, and the noise they made was the shuffling, broken step of an unorganized crowd. But there was not wanting the inspiration of a moving throng of men. Some of them were old and much bent with pain and labor, and there were boys in the crowd who could be but little beyond their first decade of life, but the great body of the hands were young men between the ages of twenty and thirty-five. One could trace upon these faces all the stages of life’s handicraft, in distorting human countenances into grotesque variations from all normal types of beauty, and bringing out upon them, in infinite variety, individual expressions of aggressive power and the strength which comes of long endurance. Ah, the hideous ugliness of the race to which we belong, and yet the more than beauty of it in the strong lines it bears of honest work faithfully done and of pain and sorrow bravely borne!

With the last sharp ringing of the bell there was a sudden rush of the living stream of workers, and then it abruptly ceased, and we, the unemployed, stood at both sides along the high board fence, like so much useless foam tossed off by the swift current which had poured through the narrow gate. The keeper began a monotonous march up and down the opening before his sentry-box. He was a muscular, blue-eyed Irishman of fifty-five or sixty, and he was in no wise ignorant of his business. There was nothing to indicate that he was aware of the presence of the crowd of expectant men, until some of us pressed too near to the gate in our anxiety to catch sight of a foreman in search of extra hands, and then he ordered us back with a violence which showed that we were one of the pests of his existence.

From some unseen quarter of the factory yard a closely covered wagon suddenly appeared. The paymaster presently descended from the superintendent’s office, and entering the wagon, he was driven to the gate, where a halt was made while two loaded revolvers were handed to him by the porter, in full view of the idle men, and then he was driven rapidly up the avenue toward the city.

It was the usual heterogeneous crowd that lingered there about the gate. Most of them were Irishmen, I think, and there were certainly Italians and Scandinavians and some Welshmen, and even a few Polish Jews, while Clark and I, so far as I could judge, were the only native born. Not all of them could have been in the homeless plight in which we were, and there was scarcely a case of insufficient clothing among them, while many seemed to be habitual workmen who knew the decencies of home and of some home comfort. But there were not wanting men who, like us, were evidently upon the streets, and not only in dress, but in face, they suggested those who, if not already of that class, are swiftly approximating to professional tramps.