The Workers: An Experiment in Reality. The West

by Walter A. Wyckoff

The hands had been working by gas-light for nearly an hour when the time came for quitting the day’s labor. There was no rush now in leaving the factory. We crowded out through the gate, but under no high pressure, and the moving mass disintegrated and disappeared as magically as it had formed in the early morning. Beside the entrance idle men were again waiting, but their number was very few in contrast with the morning crowds, and their apparent purpose was a personal interview with the superintendent.

Mrs. Schulz’s boarders had soon reassembled, this time in her kitchen. Everything was in readiness for us. A row of tin basins stood in a long sink which extended under the rear windows nearly the length of the room; buckets of hot water were convenient, and at the pump at one end of the sink we could temper the water in the basins to our liking. Finally, there were cakes of soap cut from large bars, and the usual coarse towels hanging from rollers on the walls. With sleeves rolled up and our shirts wide open at the neck, we took our turns at the basins. It was interesting to watch the faces of the mechanics emerge from the washing in frequent changes of water to their natural flesh-color, in which the features could be clearly distinguished.

The few minutes during which we had to wait before the call to supper were spent in the front room, which was the sitting-room for the boarders and answered to the lobby in the logging-camp. Two windows looked out upon the street and commanded a farther view of the factory yard and buildings. The room was heated by a cylindrical iron stove, standing near the inner wall upon a disc of zinc, that served to protect a well-worn carpet with which the floor was covered. From a square wooden table in the centre a large oil-lamp flooded the room with light and brought out in startling vividness the pink rose-buds which in monotonous identity of design streaked the walls in long diagonal lines, broken only by an occasional chromo or a picture cut from an illustrated print. There was an abundant supply of wooden chairs, on which the men were seated, for the most part about the stove, and there was one large arm-chair on rockers, where sat Mr. Schulz with the next to the youngest child in his arms, an infant of between two and three. A girl of perhaps seven years, and a boy of nearly five, were playing together on the floor, and there was yet another child, for while we were washing in the kitchen I had heard the fretful cry of a baby from a dark chamber opening from that room.

Two of the men were intent upon the girl who lay in her father’s lap. They were rivals for her favor, and both were trying to coax her away. When she at last put out her arms to one of them, he tossed her toward the ceiling with a shout of glee at his triumph over the other man.

After supper we all regathered in the sitting-room. None of the men, so far as I could see, went out for the evening. Some of them read the newspapers of the day, and four had presently started a game of “High, Low, Jack,” at the table, with the result that most of the others were soon gathered about the players in excited interest, watching the varying fortunes of the game and giving vent to their feelings in boisterous outbursts.

I sat beside the fire talking to Mr. Schulz. There was inexpressible satisfaction in the feeling of raison d’être which one had in being a worker with a steady job once more and a decent place in which to live. A boarding-house is not a synonym for home, and yet it may stir the domestic instincts deeply in the contrasts which it offers with the homeless life of the streets. The unquestioning hospitality with which I had been accepted as a guest was in keeping with the best of my experience so far. There was no suggestion of my paying anything in advance, though I had no security to offer beyond the fact that I was regularly employed in the factory and my promise to pay promptly out of the first instalment of my wages.

Mrs. Schulz had offered me board and lodging at four dollars a week, or at four dollars and a quarter if I wished a room to myself. It was the last bargain with which I closed when I was shown the only vacant room. It opened from the passage near the head of the landing and was perhaps seven feet by six. A single bed filled most of its area, and the rest was crowded with a chair and a small stand which supported an oil-lamp under a mirror on the wall. Some nails driven into the door and along the wall beside it, served the purpose of a closet. Light and air entered by a window which opened only a foot or two from a side-wall of the next building.

Cheerless as the room was and far from clean, it yet had about it all the essentials of privacy, and at a little past eight o’clock I went to bed with almost the sense of luxury after a fortnight’s experience of station-houses and cheap lodgings.

At six in the morning we were called by Mrs. Schulz, who had already been up for an hour or more preparing our breakfast, with the help of a hired girl. The men turned out sleepy and half-dressed into the kitchen to wash themselves, and then we sat down to a breakfast of “mush,” meat and potatoes, coffee and bread. The factory-bell was ringing by the time that we had finished, and there was a rush to get within the gate before the last taps marked the advent of seven o’clock.

The routine of factory work does not lend itself to varied narrative, and yet Barry’s work and mine was far from the monotony of much of the labor which we saw about us. There was a growing supply of tongues in the paint-shop, sufficient to keep us busy for several days, and while the work of loading and carting and stacking them was not hard in itself, ten hours of it daily was enough to send a man very hungry to his meals and thoroughly tired to his bed.