The Workers: An Experiment in Reality. The West

by Walter A. Wyckoff

Our place is by no means a sinecure. The roads are constantly falling into unrepair and a deal of hard work is necessary to keep them in order. Pick and shovel work, that most heart-breaking of manual toil so far as my experience goes, is mostly in demand, for the old trenches must be kept open and new ones dug, and sometimes the sides of long sections of the road must be buried under a layer of earth to prevent the bare planks from warping in the sun. After six hours of such labor there remain two in the early evening in which we go over every foot of roadway on the grounds and make whatever immediate repairs are necessary. At seven o’clock, Harry reports to the fire department, and then we are free.

It is not altogether easy to account for Harry as a common laborer. A well-set-up, muscular American of about fifty, with a singularly intelligent, shrewd face and the merriest of blue eyes, he might be, from his appearance, a well-to-do contractor. Only once with me has he touched upon the general subject of his past, and then he intimated that formerly he was well off, but that in his business relations he had always passed as a “good fellow.” “And that means, you know,” he said, turning upon me with a significant look, “that means a ‘damn fool!’”

Among the workmen on the grounds whom I have come to know, none has interested me more as a type than an American carpenter with whom I sometimes spend an evening. The man is lonely and uncomfortable in his new surroundings. The novel conditions which here beset him as a workingman are quite as disturbing to him as the unfamiliar setting of his daily life. He clings tenaciously to his individuality, and the new order of things which confronts him here lightly makes strange havoc of all that.

We had not been talking many minutes on the embankment, where one day after dinner we first met, when the man’s case shone clear as day. He is a master-carpenter from a village home in Ohio, and the certainty of steady work for many months at four dollars a day was tempting enough to induce him to leave his family behind and come here. He had arrived a few days before and had found instant employment.

Seeing the man, a tall, fine-looking, self-respecting American mechanic, and hearing him speak, and learning even this little of his history, you had direct vision of his past. You could almost see a comfortable, wooden cottage, of his own building, with a garden-plot about it and flower-beds in front, standing on a well-shaded village street. He owns the cottage and the plot of land, and his children were born there, and he is an officer in the village church, and has been justice of the peace, and more than once has served as “school trustee.” Social inequality, as applying to himself, is a new idea, and it gives him a hitherto unexperienced sense of self-consciousness. In his native village his family meet the families of all his neighbors on the same footing, except that they recognize in the minister, and the doctor, and the village lawyer, and the schoolmaster, a distinction which attaches to special education. His children study and play at school with the children of all his neighbors, and mingle freely with them at church and in their other social relations.

But here is something new and strange. He is no longer a man with a name to distinguish him, but has become a “hand,” having a number which he wears conspicuous on his jacket. He goes to his work as an integer in an army of ten thousand numerals. Home has changed to a barrack, where he, a number, sleeps in a numbered bunk, and eats, never twice at the same place, as one of half a thousand men. His comfort and convenience are never consulted, and his views have no smallest bearing upon the course of things. The superintendent of the building upon which he works, whose energy and skill he admires hugely, shifts him about with scores of other men, with as little regard to him as an individual as though he were a piece of timber. Once he spoke to his superintendent about some detail of the work and found him a most appreciative listener. Then he ventured, in conversation, upon a subject of general interest, only to find that by some mysterious change he was speaking to a stone wall.

And now there confronts him what he regards as another sacrifice of individuality, which he is urged to make, and which gives him no little concern. He had scarcely known of the existence of Trades Unions, and now he is thronged with appeals to join one.

No discrimination is made by the management as between union and non-union men in employing workers on the Exposition; but many of the union men here are making the most of the present opportunity for the propaganda of their principles, and for bringing the desirable non-union men within their organization. My carpenter friend, whom I shall call Mr. Ford, comes in for a large share of attention, and is, as I have intimated, not a little perplexed by the situation.

Two or three times he has asked me to go with him in the evening to meetings which are held near the Fair Grounds, and which are addressed by delegates from the Central Labor Union. These we have not found very enlightening. There has been a good deal of beer-drinking and much aimless speech, which has grown heated at times in the stress of hostile discussion; and now and then a plain, matter-of-fact workingman has given us an admirable talk on the history of Trades-Unionism and its beneficent results, and the imperative need of organization among workers as the only means of safe-guarding their interests and of meeting, on any approach to equal terms, the peculiar economic relations which exist between labor and organized capital.

Mr. Ford, much bewildered, has listened to all this, and we have talked it over together on the way back to our lodgings, and sometimes late into the night. I have tried to explain to him, as well as I understand it, the idea of organization, and the necessity of organization which has grown out of the great industrial change since the middle of the last century. But Mr. Ford, for all practical purposes, belongs to the pre-revolutionary period; the industrial change has little affected him. He served his apprenticeship, and was then a journeyman and then a master-carpenter in due course. In his experience, work has always had its basis in a personal relation, as, for example, between himself as a contractor and the man whose job he undertook and to whom he looked for payment. A like personal relation has always existed between himself and the men whom he has employed.