When we reached the building, in the upper floor of which in a large hall are held the weekly meetings of the Central Labor Union, numbers of workingmen in their Sunday clothes were passing in and out of the neighboring saloons or loafing about the doors. The intersecting streets were strewn with small handbills, which we found covering the wide staircase leading to the hall and scattered over the seats and floor of the room itself. They were printed notices instructing the members to boycott the beer of certain breweries which were accused of employing non-union men, and also the products of this and that manufacturer, against whom similar charges were made.
We were a little early, but we chanced upon a Socialistic acquaintance of mine, who took us in with him and seated us well to the front. As the members entered I had a chance to point out to Mr. Ford those among them who had been pointed out to me as the officers of their various unions. He was deeply interested from the first, and much impressed apparently by the size of the gathering and the enormous numbers of organized workers which were represented there.
The stage of “new business” was barely reached that afternoon when matters were well beyond the control of the president. Motions and amendments and questions of privilege and points of order were fast driving him mad, when in despair he called upon a fellow-member to take charge of the meeting and become its temporary chairman. By this time there was a good deal of confusion; men in many parts of the hall were clamoring for the floor, and trying to drown one another’s voices. But there was immediate recognition of a change of generalship. The man who had taken the chair was a member of a union of musicians, a person of excellent address and well-appearing, and, as it proved eventually, a masterly parliamentarian. To reduce to quiet an assembly so excited was beyond his power, but he did unravel the skein of its tangled business, and through all the uproar and confusion he kept his temper perfectly, and secured some actual disposition of the affairs in hand.
The intricacies of intermingling interests there represented were beyond measure bewildering. The Cigarmakers’ Union had a grievance, which its representatives insisted upon presenting and having righted at once. But the Waiters’ Union claimed an antecedent right to the presentation of a question with reference to admitting certain men to their organization. And the Bricklayers’ Union demanded an immediate investigation of the account of expenditure for a certain recent Union picnic, charging directly, meanwhile, a flagrant misappropriation of funds.
Passions were running high. The lie direct was passed repeatedly, and men were all but shaking fists in one another’s faces. The shouting rose sometimes to such a pitch that the chairman’s voice could not be heard. But the passion was that of strong vitality. The Union, to its members, was an intensely living thing, and its issues, touching them so closely, most naturally roused comparatively untutored men to strong emotion.
I watched Mr. Ford with curious interest. Instead of showing any impatience or disgust at the show of temper and the loud disorder, he sat through the long session deeply, intently absorbed. Every question for debate, and every phase of discussion, and all the progress of the business, and the varying claims of the many organizations, and the widely differing personalities of the members, each won his vital interest, and, with amazing discrimination, he seemed to follow them with intelligent understanding. And when there came a report of progress in a strike among certain workers in shoe factories, and a statement of the causes of the strike and the measures which were being taken to carry it to a successful issue, I could see that he was more than ever roused.
“That’s the most interesting meeting I ever was to,” he said to me, as we walked down the street together. “I ain’t never realized before how mixed up things can be when there’s so many working people, and the men that hire them are mostly all organized in big companies. Why, the working people ain’t got nothing else they can do but organize too, to get their just rights. They have a pretty hot time in their meetings, if that’s a sample, but I guess they’ll know what they’re about. I guess I’ll join.”
In a very few days I must leave Chicago. I own to a longing to go and launch out upon the great farming regions between the Lakes and the Rocky Mountains, which I hope to cover in my journey before the autumn is far spent. I have been watching the coming of the spring in the Exposition grounds and in the charming parks of the city and along its beautiful boulevards, and I feel its subtle drawings to the country, to a life once more of labor in the fields. But I am very far from being prepared to go. Some little of a phase of life which in all large centres of population accompanies the swift industrial changes of the present I have seen here in Chicago, where it differs but slightly from similar conditions in every congested labor market. And under the play of the modern gregarious instinct there surely are few centralized markets which are not congested. But of the real city as a great positive force and a world-wide commercial power, whose unfaltering energies have built a huge metropolis in a generation, and are fast crowning their labors with splendid achievements in education and in art, I have been able to see little, and I have given no impression whatever. This much I have seen on the grounds where I am now a workman: I have watched something of the slow emerging from a scene of utter chaos of a co-ordinated scheme of landscape-gardening and of architecture, which has long passed the experimental stage, and is unfolding to the world, by a miracle of creative and constructive genius, a real vision of beauty and power and grace, which certainly holds for the living generation of civilized men a promise of rich blessings.