SOME PITTSBURGH STEEL WORKERS[7]

[5]The Protestant denominations in the city are conducting mission work among the Slavs and Italians. Several missionaries, colporteurs and Bible readers are employed. There are among the Slovaks, Lithuanians, Magyars and Italians, adherents of various Protestant churches.

[6]The Roman Catholic Church has not the influence over the Bohemians and Italians that it has over the above mentioned people. The Bohemians are many of them free thinkers. The Italians are deeply religious but for the most part lukewarm in their attitude toward the church, and their edifices do not compare with those of the Poles.

GREEK ORTHODOX CHURCH.

A GREEK ORTHODOX PRIEST.

If we measure the efficiency of the Roman Catholic Church among the Slavs and Lithuanians in Pittsburgh by money spent on buildings and maintenance, it cannot be equalled either by American Catholicism or Protestantism. The people give freely of their hard earnings to erect costly church edifices and support the priesthood. The Slavs and Lithuanians have been on the South Side of Pittsburgh only for the last twenty years, but to-day they possess church property valued at three-quarters of a million dollars, and most of it is paid for. They also give toward the erection of parochial schools and maintain them.

The priests have great power over the lives of their people. Some of them are charged with accumulating riches, but taken as a whole, I view them as a body of men loyal to their vows and honoring the profession wherein they serve. With the great numbers constantly coming from Europe, it is surprising how carefully they keep in touch with the newcomers. Slav and Lithuanian priests whose parishes are constantly changing take a census each year. They know the affairs of their people. They know their housing conditions, their hardships in mine and mill; are familiar with the wrongs they suffer. In trouble the priests are their counselors; they sympathize with them in their struggles; they institute and manage insurance societies against sickness and accident. Some of the priests found and control building and loan associations. They at all times stimulate their people to rise to the level of other people around them. The priests are busy men. A parish of two thousand or three thousand means endless activities. With the influx of Slavs and Lithuanians into the country, and the necessity of organizing parishes where many of them settle, the difficulty has been to secure properly qualified priests to take charge of the work. Hence, many of the Slav and Lithuanian clergy are overworked and no assistance can be furnished them. Their influence lies first with the adults who come from the fatherland. The children are not as amenable to the discipline of the church; neither do they give their earnings as freely to its support. The growing problem of the church is to meet the religious needs of people of Slavic blood raised in a new country.

This sketch,—brief though it is,—of the foreign-speaking peoples of Pittsburgh shows clearly how dependent the industries are upon a supply of able bodied men from Europe. The enterprising from agricultural communities freely bring their strength to the expansion of American industries, and never was there an army more docile and willing than these newcomers. They believe in mutual protection and organize and conduct various societies for this purpose. They find their pleasure in many crude ways. They are loyal to their church, and the many churches owned by them represent offerings made by men who literally earn their bread by the sweat of their brow. Many of them save money and the number of those who own their homes is annually increasing.

There are imperative needs of this element of the city's population which must be met if the cause of civilization is to be served. The fatal and non-fatal injuries of the mills fall heavily upon these peoples. Each week a tale of wrong and suffering, agony and death, is sent across the water, which seriously reflects upon the industrial life of America. The value placed on human life here will not bear comparison with that of older countries whose civilization we say is lower than ours. The great need of the hour is a current and detailed record of the serious accidents of the district, that the public may know exactly at what cost of life and limb industry is carried on, and may exhaust every means for lessening the sacrifice.

A SLAVIC LABORER.

We saw that the housing conditions of many of these peoples are a disgrace to civilization. The insufficiency of houses, the greed of landlords, the exigencies of some foreigners and the penury of others, bring about this condition. There should be stricter regulation of immigrant boarding houses. Men who coin money in shacks and those foreign born who are too greedy to pay for decent quarters, should feel the firm hand of the law. Crowding, dirt and filth are not American and should not be tolerated in any American city.

But negative work is not enough; positive and aggressive work must be done if the foreign-speaking are to rise to the measure of their opportunity. Every nationality has its aesthetic side, and Pittsburgh has done nothing to bring this to the fore. Other cities have fostered the national dance, have encouraged works of art, and have induced the foreigner to show the artistic side of his nature. Cannot this be done in Pittsburgh? Give these people a chance to bring out their needle-work, to show their artistic skill, to sing their national songs, and to dance their native dances, and the life of the city will be richer and stronger.

Then why should the people who gave Lafayette a welcome that has become historical, and who championed the cause of Kossuth, not go forth in sympathy to these people of Slav and Iberic extraction? They are left in ignorance of our language, our laws, our government, and our history. This rich inheritance we cherish, and we believe it is more excellent than any of which the older countries of Europe can boast. If this be so, is it not our privilege and duty to train these peoples of southeastern Europe in the principles of democracy? Thousands of these peoples yearn for a knowledge of our language and an insight into that form of government that has made America great among the nations of the earth, and we should be willing to go half way and meet the need.

The public school can take up this work with greater zeal; the social agencies of all sorts can stretch the cords of their tents and take in the men who are anxious to learn.

Drawn by Joseph Stella.PITTSBURGH TYPES.IN THE LIGHT OF A FIVE-TON INGOT.

Drawn by Joseph Stella.

PITTSBURGH TYPES.

IN THE LIGHT OF A FIVE-TON INGOT.

JOHN ANDREWS FITCH

FELLOW, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN

It is estimated that between 70,000 and 80,000 men are employed in the manufacture of steel in Allegheny county. Their homes are clustered about the mills along the rivers, they are clinging to the bluffs of the South Side, and they are scattered over Greater Pittsburgh, from Woods Run to the East End. Up the Monongahela valley are the mill-towns,—Homestead of Pinkerton fame, Braddock with its record-breaking mills and furnaces, Duquesne where the unit of weight is a hundred tons, and McKeesport, home of the "biggest tube works on earth." Here are countrymen of Kossuth and Kosciusko, still seeking the blessings of liberty, but through a different channel,—high wages and steady employment. Here are English, German and Scandinavian workmen, full of faith in the new world democracy; and here are Americans,—great-grandsons of Washington's troopers, and sons of men who fought at Gettysburg.

[7]This is a description of leading types of steel workers. A discussion of the labor problem in the steel industry is reserved for a later number.

Fully sixty-five per cent of these men are unskilled, but the remaining thirty-five per cent, the skilled and semi-skilled, are the men who give character to the industry. This is the class from which foremen and superintendents and even the steel presidents have been recruited, and it is the class that furnishes the brains of the working force. It is of them that I write. To know these men you must see them at work; you must stand beside the open-hearth helper as he taps fifty tons of molten steel from his furnace, you must feel the heat of the Bessemer converters as you watch the vessel-men and the steel pourer, and above the crash and roar of the blooming mills you must talk with rollers and hookers, while five-and ten-ton steel ingots plunge madly back and forth between the rolls. You must see the men working in hoop mills and guide mills, where the heat is intense and the worklaborious; you must see them amid ladles of molten steel, among piles of red hot bars, or bending over the straightening presses at the rail mills.

But to know them best you should see them at home. There the muscular feats of the heater's helper and the rough orders of the furnace boss are alike forgotten, and you find a kindly, open-hearted, human sort of men. You grow into an understanding of them as they tell of hopes and plans or mistakes and failures, and understanding becomes sympathy as it comes home to you how close some half-spoken disappointment presses in upon them. It was in this way that for nine or ten months I lived among the steel workers, and came to number some of them as friends.

The skilled workers are generally of Anglo-Saxon, German or Keltic origin, the largest proportion being American born. They are not educated, so far as school and university training are concerned, but they are post graduates in the school of experience.

The visitor in a steel mill sees only faces reddened by the glare of fire and hot steel, muscles standing out in knots and bands on bare arms, clothing frayed with usage and begrimed by machinery. The men do not differ materially from other workmen, and the visitor passes on and forgets them. The world is full of men in greasy overalls. But a workman is not merely a workman, any more than a business man is merely a business man. He is also a man, whether he works in a mill or sits at a desk. So I shall introduce some of these men and let them talk to you, as they talked to me. Bear in mind that the things they talk about could be taken up from another point of view. In the following interviews I am making no interpretation of the workers from the employer's standpoint. These are the issues of life as seen by the men themselves.

Courtesy Carnegie Steel Co.POURING MOLTEN IRON, JUST TAPPED FROM BLAST FURNACE, INTO BESSEMER CONVERTER.

Courtesy Carnegie Steel Co.

POURING MOLTEN IRON, JUST TAPPED FROM BLAST FURNACE, INTO BESSEMER CONVERTER.

Jack Griswold is a Scotch-Irish furnace boss who came to America and got a laborer's position at a Pittsburgh blast furnace, when the common labor force was largely Irish. Those were the days before the advent of the "furriners." I sat in Griswold's sitting room in his four-room cottage one evening and he told me about the men who work at the furnaces, and about the "long turn."

"Mighty few men have stood what I have, I can tell you. I've been twenty years at the furnaces and been workin' a twelve-hour day all that time, seven days in the week. We go to work at seven in the mornin' and we get through at night at six. We work that way for two weeks and then we work the long turn and change to the night shift. The long turn is when we go on at seven Sunday mornin' and work through the whole twenty-four hours up to Monday mornin'. That puts us onto the night turn for the next two weeks, and the other crew onto the day. The next time they get the long turn and we get twenty-four hours off, but it don't do us much good. I get home at about half past seven Sunday mornin' and go to bed as soon as I've had breakfast. I get up about noon so as to get a bit o' Sunday to enjoy, but I'm tired and sleepy all the afternoon. Now, if we had eight hours it would be different. I'd start to work, say, at six and I'd be done at two and I'd come home, and after dinner me and the missus could go to the park if we wanted to, or I could take the childer to the country where there ain't any saloons. That's the danger,—the childer runnin' on the streets and me with no time to take them any place else. That's what's driven the Irish out of the industry. It ain't the Hunkies,—they couldn't do it,—but the Irish don't have to work this way. There was fifty of them here with me sixteen years ago and now where are they? I meet 'em sometimes around the city, ridin' in carriages and all of them wearin' white shirts, and here I am with these Hunkies. They don't seem like men to me hardly. They can't talk United States. You tell them something and they just look and say 'Me no fustay,me no fustay.' That's all you can get out of 'em. And I'm here with them all the time, twelve hours a day and every day and I'm all alone,—not a mother's son of 'em that I can talk to. Everybody says I'm a fool to stay here,—I dunno, mebbe I am. It don't make so much difference though. I'm gettin' along, but I don't want the kids ever to work this way. I'm goin' to educate them so they won't have to work twelve hours."

There is a considerable difference between a blast furnace foreman and a Bessemer steel pourer. The furnace man gets rather low wages, while the steel pourer is well paid and works eight hours a day for six days in the week. It was Jerry Flinn who told me how he had worked up from his first job as laborer, to a position as steel pourer. I met him just as he got home from the mill one day, and I asked how he managed to work only an eight-hour shift when other men had to work twelve. He told me that attempts have been made to introduce a twelve-hour day in the converting department but without success. Two Pittsburgh mills have tried it and both went back to eight hours because the heat is so great as to make it impossible for the men to work that long.

"It must be hard," said Flinn, "for the twelve-hour men to have to work alongside of us eight-hour men. During the twelve hours of their day they work with all three crews of the eight-hour men. One crew gets through and goes home soon after the twelve-hour men come out, the next crew works its eight hours and goes home, and the third crew comes out before those twelve-hour fellows can quit. The eight-hour men get a lot more pleasure out of life than the twelve-hour men do. We can go to entertainments and social affairs as we couldn't if we had to get up next morning and go to work at six o'clock."

Flinn is fifty-two years old, and tells you his strength is not up to what it was, say fifteen years ago. The men who went to work with him as young men are nearly all dead, and to-day he is one of the oldest men in his mill. He speaks lightly of the danger of accidents, andsays that he has encountered only the minor ones. Once when they were changing stoppers, the crane dropped the old one just as it swung clear of the edge of the ladle. It fell on him, burning him and breaking his leg. At another time he failed to lower the stopper in time, and the stream of molten steel struck the edge of a mold as the train was shifted; it splashed onto the platform, burning his legs so severely that, for six weeks afterwards, he was unable to turn over in bed. It is a common thing for metal to fly that way; the sparks strike his face, they lodge in his nose or his ears, and once he nearly lost the sight of an eye. He refers to these things as trifles.

What I said of the half concealed disappointments which are real and tragic in the life of a steel worker, would have been clear to you had you heard the story of Robert Smith, as he told it himself. As a boy he went to work in the coal mines of eastern Pennsylvania and did not get into the mills until he was about thirty years old. Then he came to Pittsburgh, took a laborer's position, and began to work up slowly year after year until he occupied a place of some importance, though not in the first class of skilled men. After he had been there a few years, there was a labor difficulty in this mill and he left and went to another plant where he took a position similar to his last one. As a new man he could not advance as rapidly as he might have done in the old mill, and before he could get into the best of standing, he was thrown out of work by further labor troubles. He secured a position in another mill where he remained for two years till forced out by a strike to seek work in a fourth mill. Here he remained for ten years in a subordinate position. At the end of that time, he was promoted and became for the first time in his life, the first man in the crew. Then, in some way, he incurred the dislike of the superintendent, and the man on the opposite shift worked against him because he wanted Smith's job for a friend.

So, after working for three years in a position for which, as he said, he had served a ten years' apprenticeship, Smith again lost his place and was obliged to apply for work in still another mill. He had been a leader in the union, and it was a feeling almost religious in its devotion that bound him to it. To get into this new mill he had to agree to give up his union card. To-day he says that he is a strong union man at heart, but his connection with it is over. Now, at nearly sixty years of age, he is working in a semi-skilled position, although fitted to take his place among the men of the best skill and to handle a crew.

Smith is a man of more than ordinary intelligence. He is a man of religious inclinations and a church member. He regrets the twelve-hour day now chiefly on the ground that it keeps the young men away from church. If he had not become a church-member when he had an eight-hour day, he doesn't see how he ever could have become interested in religious matters. He lives in a comfortable home which he owns and where he spends most of his time when not in the mill. After supper he sits down to read for a short time before going to bed, but he told me with considerable regret that he was unable to do any systematic reading. A few years ago he read several of Shakespeare's plays, but he had to force himself to do it, he gets sleepy so soon after supper. Since that time he has not attempted anything more serious than the daily paper.

Of course, the question of organized labor suggests a number of other considerations. The old union attitude towards employers is not of consequence now in Pittsburgh, for most of the steel mills of the district have been non-union for ten or fifteen years. This fact, however, makes it all the more worth while to consider the present attitude of the men as individuals.

Jim Barr is a man thirty-five years old who came from England when he was a small boy. It has been only during the last ten years or so that Barr has worked in a steel mill, but he has lived in the steel district longer than that. He occupies a skilled position in one of the mills where he works every day but Sundays from seven in the morning until six in the evening, and on alternate Sundays he has the long turn of twenty-four hours. This Sunday work, he told me, came in after the union had been driven out, and the twelve-hour day is more general now than it was under unionism.

Drawn by Joseph Stella.PITTSBURGH TYPES.OF THE OLD TIME IRISH IMMIGRATION.

Drawn by Joseph Stella.

PITTSBURGH TYPES.

OF THE OLD TIME IRISH IMMIGRATION.

"Tell me, how can a man get any pleasure out of life working that way?" Barr asked me almost with a challenge. We were sitting before the grate in his comfortable and tastefully furnished parlor. There were pictures on the wall, a carpet on the floor, and the piano in the corner spoke of other things than endless drudgery. He seemed to interpret my swift glance about the room, for he went on, "I've got as good a home here as a man could want. It's comfortable and I enjoy my family. But I only have these things to think about, not to enjoy. I'm at work most of the day, and I'm so tired at night that I just go to bed as soon as I've eaten supper. I have ideas of what a home ought to be, all right, but the way things are now I just eat and sleep here."

Barr works in a position where he encounters considerable heat, and he says that alone is very exhausting even when a man does not do hard physical labor. There is great danger, too, in the sweat that keeps a man's clothing wet all of the time. If he gets into a draught he is likely to contract a cold or pneumonia. Working under such conditions shortens a man's life, to Barr's mind, and although he is but thirty-five years old he tells you he feels a decline in his strength. The men find that it costs more to live, too, when working in the mills, for they need the best of food and the warmest clothing in order to keep going. The little chance for recreation leads them to the saloons as the natural place for relaxation. They go there much oftener, in his opinion, than they would if they had more time for social enjoyment; and of course there is a good deal of money spent there that is needed for other things. He says that men frequently spend twenty dollars in a single night after payday. But the thing on which Barr seems to have the strongest convictions is the plan of the United States Steel Corporation of issuing stock to employes.

"The men have been fooled by this proposition," he declared, "and they really believe that the corporation wants to do big things for them in offering such liberal dividends. But let me tell you something that maybe you haven't noticed. The first stock issued in 1903 was followed by a slashing cut in wages in 1904, and it amounted to a lot more than the extra dividends. It's only a scheme to fool the men. They take away in wages more than what they give in dividends and they will do that every time, so that the corporation is always ahead of the game. But that isn't the only thing; it ties the employes down to the corporation. They've got to stay in its employ at least five years from the time of getting the stock in order to enjoy all of the benefits, and even then they won't get the extra dividends unless they have shown what the corporation calls a 'proper interest' in its affairs. It's a fine scheme for keeping out unionism and keeping the men from protesting against bad conditions."

Now, just by way of contrast, listen to the story of George Hudson, who occupies a position similar to that of Barr, and has been in mill work about the same length of time. After having tried another line and found it unsatisfactory, Hudson came to the mills at about thirty years of age. He did what American young men dislike very much to do,—he took a common laborer's position along with the "Hunkies." Being a man of perseverance and some education, he worked up very rapidly until he now occupies a skilled position.

"The Steel Corporation is a fine one to work for," said Hudson to me with enthusiasm. "It gives every man a chance for promotion, and listens to every workman who has a plan for improvement. All the intelligent men are satisfied. If you can find any dissatisfied men, you will find that they are men who would be discontented anywhere you put them. Take the way they loan money to men who want to build homes. A good many men have their own cottages now just because the company helped them. The company has a savings department too, and it pays five per cent on all deposits, and that ismore than the savings banks pay. Then, on the other hand, it charges only five per cent interest on the money that is loaned, and that is a lower rate than you can get anywhere else. The company owns houses which it rents to employes at thirty per cent or more below what other people charge. I pay twenty-five dollars rent, and I've got a friend in a company house which is better than mine, and he only pays eighteen." Hudson is ambitious and he was very proud that his department during recent months had succeeded in beating all previous records known.

To turn to the second question raised by Smith in our talk before his fire,—if number of organizations is any criterion the churches in the mill towns must be strong. I found a considerable number of loyal church members among the steel workers. Those of them who have to work on Sunday chafe under the necessity that drives them to such a disregarding of the Sabbath.

Especially does this bear heavily on the wife who must attend church alone, while her husband is in the mill or at the furnaces. A Scotch Presbyterian mother at a home where I called one afternoon just as the man was preparing to go to the mill for the night, spoke regretfully of having left Scotland. They might not have been able to live so well there, but "Oh, man, we could have brought up the children in the fear o' God and in a land where men reverence the Sabbath." There are men like Smith, too, who fear the effect of twelve-hour work on the lives of the boys.

In spite of this religious sentiment that exists among the workers there is, on the other hand, a good deal of feeling that the churches do not understand the needs of the workingmen. Frank Robinson, for instance, believes that the churches are not interested in some problems that are to him very real.

"There are a good many churches in this borough," he said to me one day, "and they are supported generally by the women. The preachers don't have any influence in securing better conditions for the men,—they don't try to have. They never visit the mills, and they don't know anything about the conditions the men have to face. They think the men ought to go to church after working twelve hours Saturday night. The preachers could accomplish a lot if they would try to use their influence in the right direction; let them quit temperance reform until they get better conditions for the men. It's no time to preach to a man when he's hungry; feed him first, then preach to him. The same thing with a workingman; get a decent working day with decent conditions, then ask him to stop drinking. Let the preachers go into the mills and see the men at work in the heat, and outside the mills let them notice the men with crushed hands or broken arms or with a leg missing. If they would stop their preaching long enough to look around a little they could do something for us, if they wanted to try."

There seems to be some reason for such a feeling. I talked with ministers in some of the mill towns who knew very little of the problems of the workingmen or of the conditions under which they work. Some of them said that they had never been inside the mills, and, of course, such men cannot be entirely sympathetic. Of a different sort was another minister whom I met who had been a mill-man himself. He had gone into mill work as a boy and had worked up through a common laborer's position to a skilled job before he left the mill to go to college. I have met few men with more understanding and sympathy for the working-men's problems.

Unionism is not entirely dead in the mill towns; at least the spirit of it is to be found among the men, though the form is absent. Some of them expect to see an organization in the mills again. Others have given up hope of gaining shorter hours or higher wages through collective bargaining, and are looking for government interference and a legal eight-hour day. There is considerable variety of opinion as to how this is to be brought about. Pittsburgh steel workers are traditionally republican in politics; Speaker Cannon himself does not fear "tinkering" with the tariff more than they. The majority of them have been hoping that their representatives would get time after a while to consider and pass the labor legislation that the workingmen desire. However, there has been much loss of faith in the last few years.

A good many men in the mills are socialists at heart, and though they still vote the republican ticket, they would vote with the socialists if that party were to manifest strength enough to give it a chance at carrying an election. A considerable number of others have gone the whole way and are active working socialists. One of these is Ed. Jones, a skilled steel worker. He was left an orphan, came to Pittsburgh from New York as a boy of eighteen years, and worked for a short time as a laborer in one of the mills. After trying his hand at several unskilled trades he went back to a small mill in New York, where his wages were $1.25 a day. He was determined to work up in the industry, and after a year or so as a laborer he found himself in a semi-skilled position with wages correspondingly better. A year or two later he returned to Pittsburgh and became a full fledged skilled man at $5 a day. Since then, in spite of reverses, he has worked up slowly until now he holds one of the most important positions in his mill. Jones has never been a union man. He says he does not believe in unions because they accomplish things only in prosperous times, and go to pieces in a panic. "It is no use for them to try to regulate wages, anyhow," he says, "for labor is a commodity and its price is regulated by supply and demand. The only way out for the laboring men is to get together in a labor party,"—and this to him means the socialist party.

"We must go back to the condition when workmen owned their own tools," declares Jones. "We must own the instruments of production. Labor is now the helpless victim of capital, and capital must be overthrown. The workman is given enough to buy food and clothes for himself, and no more if the capitalist can help himself. They keep these workmen employed twelve hours a day at some work, while if every man in thecountry would work two hours a day, all the labor that would be necessary to support the population of the country could be performed. Now all of this excess, these ten hours over the necessary amount, goes to the employer in profits, and many people throughout the country are living in idleness because other people are working overtime for them." Jones is in comfortable circumstances himself; he owns his house and he owns some United States Steel stock, but he says he is one out of thirty-eight men in his whole plant who could have done as well.

One of the near-socialists who hopes for both unionism and for governmental relief, gave me a statement of his belief one Sunday afternoon as I sat in a comfortable chair in his little parlor. "I think there will be a labor organization in the mills again," he said. "It may not come in our day, but it is bound to come; the men will be driven to it. There would be a union now but for the foolishness of the men. They begin to talk as soon as a movement is started, and of course the news reaches the ears of the bosses before the organization is really on its feet. Then the men, who are not in a position to resist, are threatened with discharge. That has happened in this very mill. It may be that political action will be necessary before a union will be possible. There are two things that we've got to have: an eight-hour day and restriction of immigration. I think that we will have to get together in a labor party. I'm not a socialist, myself, though quite a good many of the mill men are, and there are a good many things about socialism that I like, all right. I would vote with them if I thought they were going to win and there are others who feel the same way. I used to vote the republican ticket, but I'm tired of it. They haven't done much for the workingmen when you consider the length of time they've been in power. I'm disgusted with the whole thing and I haven't voted at all for several years."

Several of the men had said to me: "Go to see Joe Reed; he can tell you more about the mills than anyone else." Soone day I climbed the hill to his home, and found him. I had been led to expect a good deal and was not disappointed, though he was just recovering from an illness and was unable to talk as much as I had hoped. Reed is just the man that one would pick as a leader,—six feet tall, broad shouldered, with strong intellectual features,—and he was in truth a leader of the Amalgamated Association years ago, before the steel mills became non-union. He took a prominent part in a strike that was of considerable importance in the steel district. He is a skilled man and if he had cast his lot with the company in the dispute, it is quite likely that he would have best served his own interests. But he stayed by the men and when the strike was lost, Reed left the steel district. He might have had his former position again, but he was too proud to ask for it, and lived away from Pittsburgh until the bitterness engendered by the struggle had begun to die out. After several years he came back and got a job again in a Pittsburgh steel mill. It is a non-union mill and of course Reed is a non-union man.

Reed told me some of his experiences and how during the strike he had received letters of encouragement from all over the country, from men prominent in many walks of life. I asked him what he had done with them. He shook his head. "I burned them," he said, "when I came back to the mills. I have nothing in my possession now which would suggest in any way that I ever had connection with the union. When I came back here, I knew I was coming to a non-union mill and I took a job in good faith as a non-union man. That is a chapter in the history of my life that is ended. The whole matter of unionism is a thing of the past and as an employe in this mill, I have no part in it." This fine sense of honor in conforming to the new regime is not so unusual among this class as one might expect.

So these are the steel workers. I have not chosen extreme cases; on the contrary, it has been my aim to select men who are typical of a class,—the serious, clear-headed men, rather than the irresponsibles,—and with one exception, each case is fairly representative of a large group. The exception is the man whom I called Hudson. Not over three men out of the hundred and more with whom I talked at length indicated like sentiments, and he is the only one who gave them such full expression. It should be understood that these are the skilled men,—it is only among the skilled that opinion is so intelligently put forth.

The number of positions requiring skill is not large, relatively speaking, and competition for them is keen. The consequence is that the skilled workers are a picked body of men. Through a course of natural selection the unfit have been eliminated and the survivors are exceptionally capable and alert of mind, their wits sharpened by meeting and solving difficulties. Such a disciplinary process has developed men like John Jarrett, consul at Birmingham during Harrison's administration; Miles Humphreys, for two terms chief of the Pennsylvania Bureau of Industrial Statistics, one-time nominee of the Republican party for mayor of Pittsburgh, and now chief of the fire department of the Smoky City; M. M. Garland, collector of customs for Pittsburgh, under both McKinley and Roosevelt; A. R. Hunt, general superintendent at Homestead; and Taylor Alderdice, vice-president of the National Tube Company.

In telling about their fellows who are numbered to-day among the rank and file, I have tried to introduce the leading types,—the twelve-hour man with the eight-hour man, the embittered man and the contented man, the man who is at outs with the church, the union man and the socialist. There are many others who talk and think like Flinn and Smith and Robinson, and I could furnish examples of much more radical thought and speech. These are typical cases representing different degrees of skill and different shades of opinion. It is highly significant that there are such men as these in the Pittsburgh mills. In a discussion of the labor problem in the steel industry, it must be borne in mind that these men are more than workers; they are thinkers, too, and must be reckoned with.

Drawn by Joseph Stella.PITTSBURGH TYPES.BRITISH BORN.

Drawn by Joseph Stella.

PITTSBURGH TYPES.

BRITISH BORN.

CRYSTAL EASTMAN

MEMBER STAFF PITTSBURGH SURVEY

To study industrial accidents from the "home" side has been my business for a year. To acquaint myself daily with households doubly disabled by sickness and loss of income, to see strong men, just learning to face life maimed, to visit home after home, where sudden death has visited,—a dreadful business, you might say. Yet it has left with me impressions of personality, character, and spirit, which make the year's work a precious experience.

The first thing brought home to me was that working people do not have "the luxury of grief." The daily tyranny of hard work in their lives, leaves little time for pondering the unanswerable "Why?" of sorrow.

For instance, Mrs. Dennison, the widow of a brakeman who was killed on the Pennsylvania Railroad, spent no quiet days of solitary mourning. She was left with six children, the oldest eleven. All the money she had was $500 from the Railroad Relief Association,[8]to which her husband had belonged, $450 which the men on her husband's division raised, and $30 which his own crew gave. The company gave her $20 toward the funeral.

[8]The company pays the running expenses of this association.

With some of this money she rented and stocked up a little candy and notion store, using the three rooms in the back to live in. Here she tended store, and cooked, and sewed, and ironed, for herself and the six. She would have done her own washing too, she told me, but she couldn't leave the store long enough to hang her clothes up in the yard. She made a reasonable success of the enterprise, enough to pay for rent and food, until the hard times came. After that she steadily lost money. So now she has put in her application for a chance to clean cars for the railroad at $1.21 a day. For this privilege she must wait her turn among the other widows; and when she gets it she must leave her children in one another's care from six in the morning till six at night. They are now two, four, six, eight, ten, and twelve, respectively. Mrs. Dennison will not have time to sit down and grieve over the death of her husband for many years to come.

One mother, whose thin face haunts me, has been able to endure her tragedy only through this necessity of work. She had a daughter, just seventeen, who was employed in the dressmaking department of one of the big stores in Pittsburgh. This girl, Ella, was eager and gay, with a heart full of kindness. She was everybody's favorite in the workroom; at home she meant laughter and good will for them all. To her mother, Ella was joy and gladness,—life itself. One morning this little dressmaker, after leaving her wraps on the eleventh floor, found that she was a few moments late. She ran for the elevator to go to her workroom above. The elevator was just starting up, with the door half closed. Ella tried to make it, slipped, and fell down the shaft.

This tragedy demoralized the working force of the store for two days. In the hunted, suffering eyes of the mother one reads that she cannot forget, night or day. She feels that Ella's employers were generous in giving her $500, but it would make no difference "if they gave her the whole store." In the back of her mind are always two visions alternating,—the merry girl who sat eating her breakfast at a corner of the kitchen table that morning, laughing and teasing her mother, and then, as she ran out to take the car, looked back to smile and say goodbye,—this is one. The other,—that unthinkable fall down eleven stories and the crash at the bottom of the shaft. I felt that nothing but the daily insistence of work,—cooking and washing for her husband and two grown sons, and caring for the two younger children,—had saved this mother's reason.

Another striking instance of the pressure of work in poor people's lives was in the family of Harry Nelson. They lived on the South Side, near the Jones and Laughlin Steel Works, where the father and two grown sons and Harry, who was nineteen, were employed. Two younger boys were in school. One Sunday night, on the way home after his twelve hours' work, Harry said to his father that he'd "give a lot" not to go back to the mill that night. (There was another twelve hours' work to come before he could sleep, for this was Harry's "double shift.") He didn't tell his mother he was tired, because he knew she would beg him not to go back to work. Harry was ambitious; he was an electrician's helper, getting fifteen dollars a week, and he did not want to lose his job. At 7:30 he was back in the mill, and at 8:00 he was up on an electric crane, making some repairs. When he was through he started along the narrow run-way of the crane to a place where he could climb down. The air was full of steam; some say that he was blinded by this; others, that he must have been a little dizzy. At any rate, to steady himself, he reached for an electric wire that was strung along there. He happened to touch a part that was not insulated, got a slight shock, and fell thirty-five feet to the floor of the mill.

After Harry was killed, the two older boys left the mill and looked for work in another city. But the father had no choice; he was too old to find new work. His fifteen a week was all the more indispensable now because Harry had given all his money to his mother, and the two older boys had paid generously for board. In three days the father was back in his old place at the cold saw, within sight of the place where Harry fell.

Thus work may be a cruelty as well as a blessing. But in any case it leaves the workers little time to dwell upon their misfortunes. When they do speak of them, it is almost always in a "matter-of-course" way. This is not, I think, because they lack feeling, but because they are so used to trouble that the thought of it has ceased to rouse them.

That poor people are used to trouble is a commonplace. I mean by "trouble," the less subtle disappointments of life, those which come with disease, injury and premature death. Of all these rougher blows of fortune, the poor family gets more than an even share. This stands to reason, if experience has not already convinced one of it. To the ordinary causes of sickness,—unsanitary dwellings, overcrowding, undue exposure, overwork, lack of necessary vacation, work under poisonous conditions,—to all these poor people are much more constantly exposed than others. To injury and death caused by accident they are also more exposed. Poor people's children play in dangerous places, on the street, near railroad tracks. The poor man's dwelling is not often fire-proof. Poor people do most of the hazardous work in the world, and the accidents connected with work form the majority of all accidents.

Moreover, the poor family is, in a material way, less able to meet these disasters when they come, than the well-to-do family. This is in some degree due to ignorance, for ignorance, whether as cause or result, almost always goes with poverty. In a very large degree, however, it is due to poverty itself. It is because they have no reserve fund to fall back on in emergencies. Suppose a young steel worker with a family gets a long, sharp chip of steel in his eye. He cannot go to the best specialist, to the man who knows all that anybody knows about saving eyes. Through ignorance or lack of interest on the part of the doctor who treats him, he loses his eye. Thus an injury which might mean but a few weeks of fearful anxiety to a well-to-do man, may result in lasting misery to a poor man. In the same way, too, what might often be in a well-to-do family a short struggle with disease, crowned with success, is more likely to be in a poor family an unrelieved tragedy.

Thus are the poor, by reason of their very poverty, not only more open to attack from these bodily foes, but also, and again by reason of their poverty, less equipped to fight and conquer them. "St. George killed the dragon; St. George wore the finest armor of his day and his sword was tested steel."

With these workers whom I met,—poor people, not as the charity visitor knows them, but poor, as the rank and file of wage earners are poor,—misfortune is almost part of the regular course of things. They are used to hard knocks, if not yet in their own lives, then in the lives of their relatives, friends, and neighbors. Consequently, there is often in their attitude toward trouble a certain matter-of-fact calmness, which looks like indifference. Thus, I have had a mother tell me about her sixteen-year-old son's losing two fingers in the mill. She couldn't remember exactly how or when it happened; she thought he had lost only a week's work; and she had no comment upon it but that it might have been worse. An old steel worker whom I questioned about his injuries answered, "I never got hurt any to speak of." After persistent inquiry, however, he recalled that he had once fractured his skull, that a few years later he had lost half of a finger, and that only three years ago he was laid up for nine weeks with a crushed foot. Troubles like these are the common lot; they are not treasured up and remembered against fate.

Often I have found in young women a surprisingly "middle-aged" way of looking at trouble. I remember, for instance, Mrs. Coleman, whose husband was a freight conductor. They had been married nine years, and had made out pretty well up to the last two years, although the wife, as she somewhat proudly explained, had had three children, two miscarriages, and an operation, during this time. On Christmas night, 1903, Coleman had his arm crushed in a railroad accident. He was disabled for three months, and went back to work with a partially crippled arm. Three weeks later, as he was numbering cars, an iron bar rolled off the load and broke his nose. This laid him up again for five weeks, and left his face permanently disfigured. He has been troubled ever since with nose-bleeding, so that he has to lay off every little while, and the doctor says he must have an operation before he can be cured. Since this second injury, a fourth childhas come. When I saw her, Mrs. Coleman was just recovering from a bad attack of grip, which had increased their expenses. To help along in this hard luck time they took two railroad men to lodge and board in their three room flat; one of these men had been killed on the road the week before I called. Here are troubles enough, and yet this young woman had no special complaint against fortune.

"Yes," she said, as she rose to open the door for me, the last baby dangling over one arm,—"we've had a bad time these last two years, and now with him only working two or three days a week, I guess it'll be worse. But then,"—with a smile, "what can you do about it?"

On the same day I talked with a much older woman. She was too worn out to smile at her troubles, but she had the same "everyday" attitude toward them. Ten months ago they had been doing well. Her husband was earning ten dollars a week at odd jobs; two sons, twenty and seventeen, were getting fifteen dollars a week each as lead buffers in a coffin works; she and her daughter kept house and did a little sewing; and they all lived happily together. Then one day her husband was brought home with a smashed foot and a leg broken in two places, as a result of a bad fall. He had been on a ladder, painting, when the cornice gave way and he jumped to save himself. For five months they kept him at the hospital free of charge, and for four months more he went back on crutches for treatment. Finally they told him to come back for an operation, but on the day after the operation they sent him away again with a bill of three dollars for the time he had been there. His wife had to help him home, and he was in bed when I called. The doctor had said it would be better for him to stay at the hospital, but the superintendent decided that they could not treat him in the ward for nothing any longer. The wife laughed a little grimly when she told me this.

"Why," she said, "I can't pay a dollar and a half a day to that hospital. Ever since he got hurt I've been cleaning offices. All I can make is six dollars aweek and I have to pay car fares out of that."

"Well," I said, "how about your sons? They are making good wages."

"Oh, they were," she answered, "but Harry, the oldest one, has been home for five months. He's got gastritis, and the doctor says it's from lead poisoning. You know he's a lead buffer on coffins. He don't seem to get much better."

"And the other boy," I said, "does he go right on doing the same work?"

"Yes, Charlie,—I don't know what we'd do if he lost his job. He's been on half time now for three months, and that means only $7.50 a week."

To add to the general desolation in this home, the flood had been in and covered the lower floor, leaving everything smeared with a dry, muddy paste. In the midst of it all sat this tired woman of fifty, who had just come home from her five early morning hours of office scrubbing; and she was less concerned with the bitterness of her struggle with life than she was with the immediate problem of how to get her maimed old man up to the hospital every other day for treatment.

This unquestioning acceptance of misfortune does not often amount to either a commendable cheerfulness or a deplorable apathy. Occasionally, however, it approaches heroism. I think the most courageous person I met during the year was Mrs. Herman Baum, a German woman of forty-five or thereabouts, who, after nine years of disappointment and defeat, still meets the days as they come with an unbroken spirit. She came to America as a girl of nineteen and went out to service. At twenty-three she married. Her "man" turned out ugly; he drank and was always mean to her. His parents, who thought he had married beneath him, took a dislike to her and joined him in making her unhappy. They lived along in this way for fifteen years, during which time she bore him seven children. One day, in his work as a moulder, he received a slight injury, from which blood poisoning set in. After this his mind was affected; he became silent, morose, and uglier than ever, giving his wife hardly a moment, day or night, when she was not in fear of him. After a year or so during which he grew steadily worse, he shot himself one night, leaving her with the seven children, another one coming, and no resources except a heavily mortgaged house and $800 insurance. She had no relatives; her father had been run over by a train, soon after coming to America, and her only brother had been drowned in river work a few years before.

It was in August, 1906, that Mrs. Baum's husband killed himself. In September a baby was born, only to die before winter. The two older children got work and brought in ten dollars a week between them, while Mrs. Baum took in washing and made two or three dollars a week. Thus things went pretty well until June, 1907, when the second boy, Harry, the jolly one, who "kept all their spirits up with his jokes," was all but killed in an elevator accident at the box factory where he worked. When, after four months at the hospital, he came home with a permanent lameness, and strict orders never again to do heavy work, he turned to selling papers, and is now making about $1.40 a week. After half their small income was cut off by this accident, Mrs. Baum tried to run a grocery store in the front part of her house, but she lost money at it and was forced to give it up. When I saw her, she was hanging somebody's washing up in the yard. She took me into her spotless kitchen and told me this story, not eagerly, as if pouring out her troubles, but only after many questions, rather reluctantly, and with sometimes an apologetic smile. Here, I thought, is a heroine of modern realistic tragedy; the dramatist would have her lost in bitter retrospect. But she was not; she sat there smiling a bit ruefully, and wondered whether she must put aside her sturdy German pride next week, and go to the Poor Board for help.

Some people, especially the Irish, even get amusement out of the number and variety of their troubles. This is true of the Learys, whose six years of married life have been crowded with disasters. To begin with, Andy, the husband, who is a brakeman, has had nine accidents on the road in five years, so many that his wife could not distinguish in her memory the one of a year ago which I had come to inquire about. Twice he has been near death. Once the priest performed the last offices, but Andy pulled through after all. Besides all these injuries, none of them less severe than a broken bone, he accidentally shot himself one day and nearly died from that. "And look at him now!" said Mrs. Leary. (Andy is a handsome Irishman, and the picture of health.) In addition to all this, they have lost two children by diphtheria. Mrs. Leary's outlook on life seems to be a mingling of humor and superstition. She told me, with incongruous awesomeness in her Irish brogue, how she had heard the "death whistle" outside the door three times on the night that her little boy died. And one night, when Andy had to stay at home to take care of her, the brakeman sent in his place was killed. She thinks this is a "sign," and has no doubt of Andy's ultimate fate.

"Oh yis," said she, "the docthers say ye can't kill Andy,—but I know betther. He'll be a-comin' home dead soon. Ivery time I hear a knock at the dhoor, I thinks to mesilf, 'There now,—it's thim, comin' to tell me Andy's kil't.' Andy, he jokes about it. Ony this marnin' afther I'd been givin' him his breakfast, he starts to go to work out the back dhoor, an' I says, 'Andy, why don't you niver go out the front dhoor?' 'Oh, Leary;' says he,—(that's what he calls me—Leary) 'Leary,' says he, 'the back dhoor's good enough for me. I'll be a-comin' by the front dhoor soon enough, an' I won't be walkin'."

With so many misfortunes the Learys have not been able to save anything. Four times Andy tried to join the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen, but each time after his papers were made out and he had paid down his dollar, and the day had come to join, he couldn't get together the necessary nine dollars for the first payment. With all this, there is an unfailing humor and philosophy in the Leary household which is irresistible.

Among railroad men generally there is a certain laughing, soldier spirit. It is part of the faith; no true "railroader" is without it. Perhaps this spirit leans torecklessness with some of the younger ones, but I believe it is just as essential to the running of a railroad as is the executive skill of the Hills and Harrimans. This spirit stands by the men in danger and makes them meet death bravely. It stands often a harder test; you will not break the spirit of a railroader by cutting off his arm or giving him a wooden leg. Out of fifteen railroad men I visited, who had received permanent injuries, all but four have gone back to the road. Two of the four are totally unable to do work of any kind. Another has gone home for a few weeks until he can "get used to his wooden leg," when he will be ready for any job the road will give him. The other, a twenty-year-old boy who lost his right arm at the shoulder, has learned to write with his left hand and is studying telegraphy as hard as he can, in order to stick by the railroad.

Of the eleven who are back on the road, nine were able to go into the same work and pay, but two had to take lower jobs on account of partial disability. This meant in each case five or six dollars a week less, but neither man complained; he took it as part of the day's work. What the railroader dreads is having to quit the road altogether. A watchman's job will be accepted with a good deal of cheer. Notice the spirit of the one-legged watchman at your crossing, who is very likely a man dropped from an active, exciting occupation at eighty dollars a month to flagging a crossing for forty. He is still in the game. But try to retire a railroader on a pension while he is able to work, and you will break his heart.

To a large extent, the railroaders' wives reflect this spirit. They are quite resigned to the risks and dangers of the "mister's" trade. But with the mothers, especially those whose husbands have followed more quiet callings, it is different. They lead an anxious life.

In every dangerous occupation there is not this sustaining common courage to help a man endure gaily a lifelong deprivation. A certain degree of independence and fraternity in a group is necessary to bring it about. Many go forthfrom the steel mills maimed for life, who have no such spirit to uphold them. I remember one night in Homestead seeing a boy on crutches, with one leg gone. He was about nineteen, with blue eyes and a shock of yellow hair falling down low on his forehead. In his face was that desperate look of defiance which comes with a recent deformity. He was trying with all his young will to be indifferent to the stares of the crowd, while in every nerve he felt them. All this and a weary hopelessness were written in his sullen child-face.

I have shown how grief is crowded out of the lives of working people, and how their frequent experience of trouble gives them an ordinary manner in speaking of it. These things largely account for the opinion held by many, that working people do not feel their sorrows as keenly as others do.

Furthermore, I found among working people almost no pretence of feeling where none exists. This too, might give rise to such an opinion. Where the death of a husband has meant merely a loss of income, with the attending problems of struggle and adjustment, there is no effort to have it appear otherwise. Where it has aroused only a feeling of bitterness toward the employer, this is not concealed either. But where the death of the bread-winner, has meant not merely an economic problem, not merely a legal battle, but heartache and emptiness,—that is written, real and unmistakable, in the faces of those left. And in the case of sons, where there may be no question of income, it is often possible to tell in the first glance at the mother whether this boy who was killed was "one of her children," or the child of her heart. There is an outspoken genuineness about these people which allows them neither to make a show of grief where there is none, nor to hide real suffering, even from a stranger.

Mrs. Leary took the accidents of "Andy" lightly. If he should happen to be killed some day her heart would not be broken. She spoke of the death of her baby three months before without feeling, mentioning the doctor's bills. But when I asked her to tell me about her oldest boy who died two years ago of diphtheria, I could see at once that I was on different ground. Her eyes filled with tears, and there was grief and longing in her voice as she talked about him. You see he was only five, but they understood each other. When she was unhappy he knew it. He would climb up in her lap, she said, and put his arms around her neck and say, "Don't cry, Mommy; I love you."

Mrs. Burns, a pretty Irish widow, whose husband was crushed while coupling cars, is obviously well satisfied with the $4,000 insurance he left. She takes boarders and is carefully saving the insurance money for her little girl's education. Her affections are set on this child. She has a tender memory of her Tom as he started off to work whistling that last morning, but she makes no pretence to mourn for him. She frankly admits that her marriage was not successful enough to make her risk it again.

Thus it is with Mrs. Andrews, a woman whose husband was killed in the mill. I found her smiling and contented a year later. Her man had been good and faithful while he lived, but after he died, her brother came to live with her and help her raise her two boys. He earned just as much, and she was perfectly satisfied with the situation.

On the other hand, I knew of a six months' bride who shot herself three weeks after her husband was killed. And a young German woman, whose father had been run over by a dinky engine in the mill, said to me in a choking voice, "Oh, when it comes to tellin' how he died, it breaks my heart." I have seen mothers and fathers in middle life who had become broken and old in a year after the death of a son, and a few women whom I visited eighteen months after such a tragedy, were literally unable to speak of it.

There was one wild-eyed little Scotch woman, Mrs. MacGregor, who refused to talk with me at all. I learned from a neighbor that she had twice been insane. Some years ago, when they had lived near the railroad, a little three-year-old girl of hers, who was playing before the house, ran in front of a train. The mother reached the child just in time to touch her dress as the engine tore her away. The mother lost her reason and was sent to an asylum. After six or eight months she recovered and came home. Then, one morning two years later, she got word to come at once to the hospital, that her son was dying. He was a lineman at Edgar Thompson, and had left home to go to work as usual two hours before. In some way,—no one ever knew how,—he had fallen from a ladder and broken his skull. After this second blow the mother was again insane.

Then there was an old father, Macdougal, who had had three sons. One died of smallpox, and one was killed in a steel mill. The third was a railroad engineer. On the night of March 13, 1907, he was taking a heavy freight across a bridge at Deer Creek, Harmarsville. The creek was high and the pier gave way; the engine and first cars went crashing into the water below, carrying three men to death. The bodies of the fireman and conductor were recovered next day, but young Macdougal, the engineer, was never found. They say the old man's hair turned white in twenty-four hours, and that he can still be found on fair days walking along the banks of the creek, looking for his son. But for the most part mothers and fathers do not lose their hold on things. Their lives go on as before. You can know perhaps only from a weary sadness in the mother's eyes that the light of their lives has gone out.

Death does not always mean sorrow, and these working people, it seems to me, feel no pressure of convention upon them to appear sorrowful when they are not. But where affection is strong and love is deep, tragedies are as real with them as with any people I have known.

Wherever love is found there is the chance of grief; there is potential tragedy. And it is in poor families, I think, that one finds the most close and lasting affection.

So often, in looking up a fatal accident case, I would come upon an intimate and devoted family group. The case of Will Gordon, for instance,—there was aholiday drama I shall not soon forget. The Gordon family was a large one. Father and mother were living, and three working sons lived at home, besides four younger children. Then there were two married daughters, who lived near by and kept in close touch with the family. Will, the oldest son, although he was twenty-eight, was the greatest "home boy" of them all. He still handed every pay envelope over to his mother, unopened, as he had done when a child. His working life had been varied. First he tried the railroad, but he was slight, and the work was too much for him. Then for a while he did river work with one of his younger brothers who was on a government job. But in this he soon developed a chronic cough, and his mother was afraid of consumption. So finally he got a job with the Pressed Steel Car Company, as a pipe fitter's helper. Here the work was lighter and seemed to agree with him. Every two weeks he brought home twenty-five dollars and handed it over to his mother. Meanwhile his father, who was fifty, had taken a job at the Oil Refinery, firing boilers at night.

The boys considered this a dangerous job for the old man, and almost every night one of them would go with him. Will felt most strongly about it and was always begging his father to give it up. On Christmas evening, 1906, the son's arguments prevailed and his father promised to give up the job. This made them all especially happy on the next day, when the two married daughters came home with their families to celebrate Christmas. During the day they planned that the whole family should gather at the oldest daughter's house for New Year's. All the boys were to have a holiday except Will, and he promised to get off at noon, if he could, to eat the New Year's dinner with them. The day came, the family was gathered and the dinner was ready. With much joking and laughter and good-humored impatience, they were waiting for Will. In the midst of it came a boy with a scared face to say that Will had been killed at the works. He had been sent to repair a leak in a pipe. The steam was left on; the pipe burst; and he and Wilson, the pipe fitter,were scalded to death. The father put on his coat and hurried down to the mill to keep them from sending his boy's body to the morgue.

This family affection shows its true nature in times of trouble. Barring what seemed to me an unusual number of deserting husbands, I was impressed with the faithfulness of these people to one another in struggle and distress. There was Mrs. Frederick, for instance, a Swiss woman whose husband was killed in a runaway, while driving for a wholesale liquor dealer. Just a week before the accident they had bought a small house with a $600 mortgage on it, and Mr. Frederick said to his wife, as they were looking over the deed: "Now we can begin to get along, and lift up our heads, and stop worrying."

Since her husband's death, even with the $1,000 insurance, it has been hard to keep things going and continue payments on the house. There are four children and only one is old enough to work. Just in this troublous time, too, the family burdens have increased. Mrs. Frederick's mother has come from Switzerland, old, feeble and without income; and her step-daughter, who had been away from home and independent for years, after lying in a hospital six weeks with a fever, has now come home, weak and helpless, to stay until she is able to work. Mrs. Frederick does not for a moment question the rightfulness of these burdens. The old grandmother and the convalescent daughter help her around the house; she takes in washing; the boy's wages are good. On the whole she is cheerful. The last thing she said to me, as she stood in the open door, was, "Oh, we'll get on somehow. We'll all work together, and if we have to, we'll starve together."

Another pathetic and almost humorous instance of family loyalty is the case of a man named Benson. I was hunting for the wife of a brakeman, who had been killed in the same wreck with the engineer Macdougal of whom I have spoken. I was told that I could learn about her at this Benson's house. I went there and found it a tumble-down, three-room shanty with a small shed for a kitchen, crowded in between brick tenements. There was no carpet on the floor and only a bare table and two kitchen chairs in the living room. The man's wife was unspeakably slovenly and, I think, half-witted.

When Benson came in, however, I could see that he was different. He was only twenty-six. His father had been a river-man, and he himself was born in a "shanty-boat." Owing to his mother's early carelessness he had lost one eye. When he grew up, he left the river and became a teamster, and in good times he made a living. At the time I saw him, however, he had had only one or two days' work a week for four months. The hard times, and the wife, I am sure,—not any natural shiftlessness in the man,—accounted for the desolation of his home. There was something fine in Benson's face, a certain modest look of steadfastness and pride,—the pride of the "family protector." This protector-ship extended even to the remote connections by marriage of the miserable creature who was his wife, for I found that the brakeman's widow, whom he had taken in and cared for after her husband's death, was his wife's sister-in-law. Further questioning revealed that this widow had an old mother who had also been dependent on the earnings of the brakeman.

"And what has become of the mother?" I asked.

"Oh," he said, "she lives here, too. She makes her home with me."

There he sat, this one-eyed teamster, in his barren, rented, three-room castle, and told me in a simple, serious way, as though it were to be expected in good families, that his wife's sister-in-law's mother "made her home with him."

It is not uncommon to find a loyalty like this in relations where one would least expect it. I have quite lost faith in the unkind stepmother of fairy-tale tradition. It is a step-daughter whom Mrs. Frederick, the Swiss woman, is caring for in the midst of her struggle. Three or four times I found a woman utterly uncomforted after the loss of a stepson. There was Conley, for instance, a car inspector who was killed in a wreck. A stepmother had brought him up since he was ten years old, loving him as few mothers love their own sons. And he gave her back a real devotion. When his friends would ask him why he didn't have some fun with his money instead of giving it all to his folks, he used to say,

"Well, fellows, home ain't a boarding house."

It is not unusual to find young men giving up their own prospects, to take up the burden of the family at the sudden death of the father. But the most memorable instance I remember of self-sacrifice on the part of a son was that of James Brennan, a switchman, who was killed on the Baltimore and Ohio in November, 1906. He, too, was only stepson and stepbrother to the family he fathered. Thomas Brennan, an Englishman, had married in the seventies and come to America, where his wife bore him two sons and then died. Soon after, he went back to England and married a sister of his first wife and brought her here to take care of his children. He soon proved worthless as a provider. He lived off and on with his family, but contributed less and less to their support, and finally left them entirely. The second wife was not strong, and after the birth of her last child, became an invalid. The burden of the family thus fell upon the shoulders of the two boys, her nephews and stepsons. They went to work at eleven and twelve. Arthur, the younger, was drowned at eighteen, leaving James, the older son, as the only support.

This young man never deserted his post. During the later years his burden increased. His stepsister made a runaway marriage at eighteen and in two years was deserted by her husband and came home with a child. A feeble old grandmother of eighty-eight came over from England to be taken care of. His stepmother became crippled with rheumatism and lay in bed for two years. In June of the year he was killed, he sent her away to a sanatorium to get well. She had been there for five months, had gained twelve pounds and was doing well when the telegram came to tell her of hisdeath. She came home to face the struggle of life without him,—an aged mother on her hands, a boy of ten, and an in-consequent daughter with a baby,—and she herself an invalid, suffering constantly. One would say that the mere problem of existence would be all absorbing for that woman. Yet, when I found her a year later, it was the emptiness of her life without this son rather than the loss of his income that was her tragedy.

There are all kinds of people everywhere. This is the only final conclusion. It is not easy therefore, to describe the spirit in which the working people meet trouble. They meet it in all the ways there are. But most of those I met, had an "everyday" attitude toward misfortune. This seems to support the opinion many hold, that poor people do not feel their tragedies deeply. But I think it is to be explained rather by the fact that they are too busy to entertain grief, that trouble is too common among them to arouse exclamation, and that they make no show of feeling where there is none. That they know the deepest sorrow, is obvious to one who has seen the loyalties and lasting affections which make up so much of their lives. I found usual in families, a generous affection which could rise to self-sacrifice and devotion in time of trial; and sometimes between two members of a family, a rare love, exclusive and complete, so that the death of one left the other in an empty world.

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