But the men who most fascinated me were the “roughers” who, once the puddler had done his work and thrown his lump of red-hot iron out upon an open hearth, and another man had taken it and thrown it to a “rougher,” fed it into a second machine which rolled or beat it into a more easily handled and workable form. The exact details of the process escape me now, but I remember the picture they presented in those hot, fire-lighted, noisy and sputtering rooms. Agility and even youth were at a premium, and a false step possibly meant death. I remember watching two men in the mill below Mt. Washington, one who pulled out billet after billet from furnace after furnace and threw them along the steel floor to the “rougher,” and the latter, who, dressed only in trousers and a sleeveless flannel shirt, the sweat pouring from his body and his muscles standing out in knots, took these same and, with the skill and agility of a tight-rope performer, tossed them into the machine. He was constantly leaping about thrusting the red billets which came almost in a stream into or between the first pair of rolls for which they were intended. And yet before he could turn back there was always another on the floor behind him. The rolls into which he fed these billets were built in a train, side by side in line, and as they went through one pair they had to be seized by a “catcher” and shoved back through the next. Back and forth, back and forth they went at an ever increasing speed, until the catcher at the next to the last pair of rolls, seizing the end of the rod as it came through, still red-hot, described with it a fiery circle bending it back again to enter the last roll, from which it passed into water. It was wonderful.
And yet these men were not looked upon as anything extraordinary. While the places in which they worked were metal infernos and their toil of the most intense and exacting character, they were not allowed to organize to better their condition. The recent great victory of the steel magnates had settled that. In that very city and elsewhere, these magnates were rolling in wealth. Their profits were tumbling in so fast that they scarcely knew what to do with them. Vast libraries and universities were being built with their gifts. Immense mansions were crowded with art and historic furniture. Their children were being sent to special schools to be taught how to be ladies and gentlemen in a democracy which they contemned; and on the other hand, these sweating men were being denied an additional five or ten cents an hour and the right to organize. If they protested or attempted to drive out imported strike-breakers they were fired and State or Federal troops were called in to protect the mills. They could not organize then, and they are not organized now.
My friend Martyn, who was intensely sympathetic toward them, was still more sympathetic toward the men who were not so skillful, mere day laborers who received from one dollar to one-sixty-five at a time when two a day was too little to support any one. He grew melodramatic as he told me where these men lived and how they lived, and finally took me in order that I might see for myself. Afterward, in the course of my reportorial work, I came upon some of these neighborhoods and individuals, and since they are all a part of the great fortune-building era, and illustrate how democracy works in America, and how some great fortunes were built, I propose to put down here a few pictures of things that I saw. Wages varied from one to one-sixty-five a day for the commonest laborer, three and even four a day for the skilled worker. Rents, or what the cheaper workers, who constituted by far the greater number, were able to pay, varied from two-fifteen per week, or eight-sixty per month, to four-seventy-two per week, or twenty per month.
And the type of places they could secure for this! I recall visiting a two-room tenement in a court, the character of which first opened my eyes to the type of home these workers endured. This court consisted of four sides with an open space in the center. Three of these sides were smoke-grimed wooden houses three stories in height; the fourth was an ancient and odorous wooden stable, where the horses of a contractor were kept. In the center of this court stood a circular wooden building or lavatory with ten triangular compartments, each opening into one vault or cesspool. Near this was one hydrant, the only water-supply for all these homes or rooms. These two conveniences served twenty families, Polish, Hungarian, Slavonic, Jewish, Negro, of from three to five people each, living in the sixty-three rooms which made up the three grimy sides above mentioned. There were twenty-seven children in these rooms, for whom this court was their only playground. For twenty housewives this was the only place where they could string their wash-lines. For twenty tired, sweaty, unwashed husbands this was, aside from the saloon, the only near and neighborly recreation and companionship center. Here of a sweltering summer night, after playing cards and drinking beer, they would frequently stretch themselves to sleep.
But this was not all. As waste pipes were wanting in the houses, heavy tubs of water had to be carried in and out, and this in a smoky town where a double amount of washing and cleaning was necessary. When the weather permitted, the heavy washes were done in the yard. Then the pavement of this populous court, covered with tubs, wringers, clothes baskets and pools of soapy water, made a poor playground for children. In addition to this, these lavatories must be used, and in consequence a situation was created which may be better imagined than explained. Many of the front windows of these apartments looked down on this center, which was only a few yards from the kitchen windows, creating a neat, sanitary and uplifting condition. While usually only two families used one of these compartments, in some other courts three or four families were compelled to use one, giving rise to indifference and a sense of irresponsibility for their condition. While all the streets had sewers and by borough ordinance these outside vaults must be connected with them, still most of them were flushed only by waste water, which flowed directly into them from the yard faucet. When conditions became unbearable the vaults were washed out with a hose attached to the hydrant, but in winter, when there was danger of freezing, this was not always possible. There was not one indoor closet in any of these courts.
But to return to the apartment in question. The kitchen was steaming with vapor from a big washtub set on a chair in the middle of the room. The mother, who had carried the water in, was trying to wash and at the same time keep the older of her two babies from tumbling into the tub of scalding water that was standing on the floor. On one side of the room was a huge puffy bed, with one feather tick to sleep on and another for covering. Near the window was a sewing-machine, in a corner a melodeon, and of course there was the inevitable cookstove, upon which was simmering a pot of soup. To the left, in the second room, were one boarder and the man of the house asleep. Two boarders, so I learned, were at work, but at night would be home to sleep in the bed now occupied by one boarder and the man of the house. The little family and their boarders, taken to help out on the rent, worked and lived so in order that Mr. Carnegie might give the world one or two extra libraries with his name plastered on the front, and Mr. Frick a mansion on Fifth Avenue.
It was to Martyn and his interest that I owed still other views. He took me one day to a boardinghouse in which lived twenty-four people, all in two rooms, and yet, to my astonishment and confusion, it was not so bad as that other court, so great apparently is the value of intimate human contact. Few of the very poor day laborers, as Martyn explained to me, who were young and unmarried, cared how they lived so long as they lived cheaply and could save a little. This particular boardinghouse in Homestead was in a court such as I have described, and consisted of two rooms, one above the other, each measuring perhaps 12 × 20. In the kitchen at the time was the wife of the boarding boss cooking dinner. Along one side of the room was an oilcloth-covered table with a plank bench on each side; above it was a rack holding a long row of white cups, and a shelf with tin knives and forks. Near the up-to-date range, the only real piece of furniture in the room, hung the buckets in which all mill men carried their noon or midnight meals. A crowd of men were lounging cheerfully about, talking, smoking and enjoying life, one of them playing a concertina. They were making the most of a brief spell before their meal and departure for work. In the room above, as the landlord cheerfully showed us, were double iron bedsteads set close together and on them comfortables neatly laid.
In these two rooms lived, besides the boarding boss and his wife, both stalwart Bulgarians, and their two babies, twenty men. They were those Who handled steel billets and bars, unloaded and loaded trains, worked in cinder pits, filled steel buckets with stock, and what not. They all worked twelve hours a day, and their reward was this and what they could save over and above it out of nine-sixty per week. Martyn said a good thing about them at the time: “I don’t know how it is. I know these people are exploited and misused. The mill-owners pay them the lowest wages, the landlords exploit these boardinghouse keepers as well as their boarders, and the community which they make by their work don’t give a damn for them, and yet they are happy, and I’ll be hanged if they don’t make me happy. It must be that just work is happiness,” and I agreed with him. Plenty of work, something to do, the ability to avoid the ennui of idleness and useless, pensive, futile thought!
There was another side that I thought was a part of all this, and that was the “vice” situation. There were so many girls who walked the streets here, and back of the Dispatch and postoffice buildings, as well as in the streets ranged along the Monongahela below Smithfield (Water, First and Second), were many houses of disrepute, as large and flourishing an area as I had seen in any city. As I learned from the political and police man, the police here as elsewhere “protected” vice, or in other words preyed upon it.
CHAPTER LXII
In the meantime I was going about my general work, and an easy task it proved. My city editor, cool, speculative, diplomatic soul, soon instructed me as to the value of news and its limitations here. “We don’t touch on labor conditions except through our labor man,” he told me, “and he knows what to say. There’s nothing to be said about the rich or religious in a derogatory sense: they’re all right in so far as we know. We don’t touch on scandals in high life. The big steel men here just about own the place, so we can’t. Some papers out West and down in New York go in for sensationalism, but we don’t. I’d rather have some simple little feature any time, a story about some old fellow with eccentric habits, than any of these scandals or tragedies. Of course we do cover them when we have to, but we have to be mighty careful what we say.”
So much for a free press in Pittsburgh, A.D. 1893!
And I found that the city itself, possibly by reason of the recent defeat administered to organized labor and the soft pedal of the newspapers, presented a most quiescent and somnolent aspect. There was little local news. Suicides, occasional drownings, a wedding or death in high society, a brawl in a saloon, the enlargement of a steel plant, the visit of a celebrity or the remarks of some local pastor, provided the pabulum on which the local readers were fed. Sometimes an outside event, such as the organization by General Coxey, of Canton, Ohio, of his “hobo” army, at that time moving toward Washington to petition congress against the doings of the trusts; or the dictatorial and impossible doings of Grover Cleveland, opposition President to the dominant party of the State; or the manner in which the moribund Democratic party of this region was attempting to steal an office or share in the spoils—these and the grand comments of gentlemen in high financial positions here and elsewhere as to the outlook for prosperity in the nation or the steel mills or the coal fields, occupied the best places in the newspapers. For a great metropolis as daring, forceful, economically and socially restless as this, it seemed unbelievable that it could be so quiescent or say so little about the colossal ambitions animating the men at the top. But when it came to labor or the unions, their restlessness or unholy anarchistic demands, or the trashy views of a third-rate preacher complaining of looseness in dress or morals, or an actor voicing his views on art, or a politician commenting on some unimportant phase of our life, it was a very different matter. These papers were then free enough to say their say.
I recall that Thomas B. Reed, then Speaker of the House, once passed through the city and stopped off to visit some friendly steel magnate. I was sent to interview him and obtain his views as to “General” Coxey’s army, a band of poor mistaken theorists who imagined that by marching to Washington and protesting to Congress they could compel a trust-dictated American Senate and House to take cognizance of their woes. This able statesman—and he was no fool, being at the time in the councils and favor of the money power and looked upon as the probable Republican Presidential nominee—pretended to me to believe that a vast national menace lay in such a movement and protest.
“Why, it’s the same as revolution!” he ranted, washing his face in his suite at the Monongahela, his suspenders swaying loosely about his fat thighs. “It’s an unheard-of proceeding. For a hundred years the American people have had a fixed and constitutional and democratic method of procedure. They have their county and State and national conventions, and their power of instructing delegates to the same. They can write any plank they wish into any party platform, and compel its enforcement by their votes. Now comes along a man who finds something that doesn’t just suit his views, and instead of waiting and appealing to the regular party councils, he organizes an army and proceeds to march on Washington.”
“But he has been able to muster only three or four hundred men all told,” I suggested mildly. “He doesn’t seem to be attracting many followers.”
“The number of his followers isn’t the point,” he insisted. “If one man can gather an army of five hundred, another can gather an army of ten or five hundred thousand. That means revolution.”
“Yes,” I ventured. “But what about the thing of which they are complaining?”
“It doesn’t matter what their grievance is,” he said somewhat testily. “This is a government of law and prescribed political procedure. Our people must abide by that.”
I was ready to agree, only I was thinking of the easy manner in which delegates and elected representatives everywhere were ignoring the interests if not the mandates of the body politic at large and listening to the advice and needs of financiers and trust-builders. Already the air was full of complaints against monopoly. Trusts and combinations of every kind were being organized, and the people were being taxed accordingly. All property, however come by, was sacred in America. The least protest of the mass anywhere was revolutionary, or at least the upwellings of worthless and never-to-be-countenanced malcontents. I could not believe this. I firmly believed then, as I do now, that the chains wherewith a rapidly developing financial oligarchy or autocracy meant to bind a liberty-deluded mass were then and there being forged. I felt then, as I do now, that the people of that day should have been more alive to their interests, that they should have compelled, at Washington or elsewhere, by peaceable political means if possible, by dire and threatening uprisings if necessary, a more careful concern for their interests than any congressman or senator or governor or President, at that time or since, was giving them. As I talked to this noble chairman of the House my heart was full of these sentiments, only I did not deem it of any avail to argue with him. I was a mere cub reporter and he was the Speaker of the House of Representatives, but I had a keen contempt for the enthusiasm he manifested for law. When it came to what the money barons wished, the manufacturers and trust organizers hiding behind a huge and extortionate tariff wall, he was one of their chief guards and political and congressional advocates. If you doubt it look up his record.
