The Workers: An Experiment in Reality. The West

by Walter A. Wyckoff

Columbian Anniversary Hotel—No. 1., Chicago, Ill.,

Wednesday, April 27, 1892.

From the time that I began work on the Exposition grounds, early in this month, it has grown increasingly difficult to hark back in imagination to the unemployed régime of the winter. The change is a revolution of condition. Hundreds of us live all together within this vast enclosure, and have rare occasion to go out except on Sundays, and then only if we choose. We get up in the morning to an eight-hour day of wholesome labor in the open air, and return in the late afternoon with healthy appetites to our temporary “hotel,” which is fragrant of clean, raw pine, and stands commandingly on the site of the future “court of honor” near the quiet waters of the lake. About four hundred of us are housed and fed in this one building; men of half a score of nationalities and of as many trades, ranging from expert carpenters and joiners and staff-moulders and steel-workers to the unskilled laborers who work in gangs, under the direction of the landscape-gardeners or, as in my case, on the temporary plank roads which are built for the heavy carting.

Guarded by sentries and high barriers from unsought contact with all beyond, great gangs of us, healthy, robust men, live and labor in a marvellous artificial world. No sight of misery disturbs us, nor of despairing poverty out in vain search for employment. Work is everywhere abundant and well paid and directed with highest skill. And here, amid delicate, web-like frames of steel which are being clothed upon with forms of exquisite beauty, and among broad, dreary wastes of arid dunes and marshy pools which are being transformed by our labor into gardens of flowers and velvet lawns joined by graceful bridges over wide lagoons, we work our eight hours a day in peaceful security and in absolute confidence of our pay.

Complete as the revolution is, it is yet in perfect keeping, in some strange way, with the general change wrought by the coming of the spring. This spring, in its effect upon the labor market in Chicago, was like the heralding of peace and plenty after war.

There was no longer any real difficulty in securing work. The employment bureaus offered it in abundance in the country, and there was some revival of demand even within the city limits. This by no means solved the problem of the unemployed, however. Many of the men were so weakened by the want and hardship of the winter that they were no longer in condition for effective labor. Some of the bosses who were in need of added hands were obliged to turn men off because of physical incapacity. One instance of this I shall not soon forget. It was when I overheard, early one morning, at a factory-gate, an interview between a would-be laborer and the boss. I knew the applicant for a Russian Jew who had at home an old mother and a wife and two young children to support. He had had intermittent employment throughout the winter in a sweater’s den, barely enough to keep them all alive, and, after the hardships of the cold season, he was again in desperate straits for work.

The boss had all but agreed to take him on for some sort of unskilled labor, when, struck evidently by the cadaverous look of the man, he told him to bare his arm. Up went the sleeve of his coat and of his ragged flannel shirt, exposing a naked arm with the muscles nearly gone, and the blue-white, transparent skin stretched over sinews and the outlines of the bones. Pitiful beyond words was his effort to give a semblance of strength to the biceps which rose faintly to the upward movement of the forearm. But the boss sent him off with an oath and a contemptuous laugh, and I watched the fellow as he turned down the street, facing the fact of his starving family with a despair at his heart which only mortal men can feel and no mortal tongue can speak.

Other men there were in large numbers who during the winter had swelled the ranks of the unemployed, but who now, in the reviving warmth and the growing demand for labor, drifted out upon the open country to their congenial life of vagrancy. There still remained, however, and apparently in full force, the shrewd gentry who stop pedestrians on the street with apologetic explanations of hard luck and with begging appeals for a small sum wherewith to satisfy immediate wants. Clark and I had soon come to know this as a recognized occupation among the men with whom we were thrown. A highly profitable trade it often proved, for a dollar a day is a gleaning not at all uncommon to these men, and the more skilful among them can average a dollar and a half. They are rather the sporting spirits among the professionally idle; gambling is their chief diversion, and their contempt for honest work is as genuine as that of a snob.

But within this chaotic maelstrom of the unemployed, which in every industrial centre seethes with infinite menace to social safety, is always a large element which is not easily classified. It was still to be found on the streets and in the lodging-houses of Chicago when the winter was gone, in seemingly undiminished numbers and in much its accustomed thriftlessness. The class has to be defined in negative terms. The men are not physically incapable of work, nor are they habitual tramps, nor yet the beggars of the pavements, and they lack utterly the grit for crime. If they have a distinctive, positive characteristic as a class, it is that they are victims of the gregarious instinct. By an attraction which is apparently irresistible to them, they are drawn to congested labor markets, and there they cling, preferring instinctively a life of want and squalor in fellowship with their kind to one of comparative plenty in the intolerable loneliness of the country.

There is a semblance of sincerity in their search for work, but they are cursed with the rudiments of imagination which makes cowards of them all, and their incapacity is a weakness of will rather than of brawn. Shrinkingly they walk the narrow ledge which in many planes of life separates from tramphood and crime, while lacking the wit for the latter and the courage for both lives, and looking ever for something to turn up instead of resolutely turning something up. Civilization is hard on such men, and their sufferings are none the less real because chiefly due to their incapacity for the struggle for existence. And not only their own misery must be reckoned with in any fair estimate of the case, but far more the misery of their women and children, for these men are proletarians in the literalest meaning of the word.