The Lunch Hour in an Interborough ShopThe Lunch Hour in an Interborough ShopToList
The Lunch Hour in an Interborough ShopToList
The next time I addressed a big shop meeting I gave the musician all the minutes save three. Several hundreds of men stood around me—disorganized, poorly paid men.
"Men," I said, "there is in this city a thing called the Civic Federation. Its leaders are directly the owners of this shop. In it are also leaders of labour, Mitchell and Gompers. There are several bishops of various beliefs. Now the Civic Federation tells us—tells the world—that it believes in labour unions. What I want to suggest is this: A dozen of you get together; write a note to your masters and ask them if that belief applies toyou?"
Of course I knew it didn't apply to them, but I got very tired merely telling the slaves to be good, and ended my service there in that way. A spy at once informed the superintendent, and I was told—the Y.M.C.A. was told—that I could never enter their shops again. The man who succeeded me as a speaker at that shop, the following week, went much further; he positively advised them to organize, for hardly in the United States could one find greater need of organization.
The last piece of work in New Haven was a master stroke. It was an inoculation. Jack London was in the East and I persuaded him to pay the comrades in New Haven a visit and make a speech. The theatres were all engaged, so were the halls.
The new Y.M.C.A. hall could not be rented—for London. There was only one hope left—Yale. I knew a student who was a Socialist. We outlined a plan. London was a literary man; Yale had probably heard of him. The Yale Union was canvassed. It was a Freshman debating society. Certainly; they had read London's books—"The Call of the Wild," "The Sea Wolf," etc.
"Well now, boys, here's your chance. Jack London can be had for a lecture."
The Union had no money and Woolsey Hall cost fifty dollars. "That's easy," I suggested, though I didn't have fifty cents at the time. That seemed fine. "Of course," I said, as I remembered the empty Socialist treasury, "we'll have to charge an admission fee of ten cents." That, too, was allright. In case of frost or failure I promised to make good so that the Union would have no responsibility. I meekly suggested that as compensation for "risk involved" I would take the surplus—if there was any.
"They say Jack London is Socialistically inclined, Doctor," said the youthful president of the Yale Union.
"Yes, he is, rather," I answered.
"Well," he added, "I suppose we will have to take our chances." The chances seemed small then; they loomed up larger later.
He hoped President Hadley would not interfere with him.
"Will you introduce him, Doctor?"
"Certainly."
"What's his topic?"
"He calls it 'The Coming Crisis.'"
"Social, I suppose, eh?"
"Yes, it's a suggested remedy for a lot of our troubles."
The Socialist student had a few rounds with Lee McClung, the Yale treasurer. "Mac" didn't know Irvine from a gate-post but took Billy Phelps's word for it that London was a literary man and let it go at that—let the hall go, I mean.
"Yale," said the brilliant Phelps, "is a university, and not a monastery; besides, Jack London is one of the most distinguished men in America."
When it was decided we could have the hall theadvertising began. Streets, shops and factories were bombarded with printed announcements. Next morning—the morning after securing the hall—Yale official and unofficial awoke to find tacked to every tree on the campus the inscription, "Jack London at Woolsey Hall."
Max Dellfant painted a flaming poster that gripped men by the eyes. In it London appeared in a red sweater and in the background the lurid glare of a great conflagration. Yale and New Haven had never been so thoroughly informed on such short notice. The information was in red letters.
The first thing done was to run down the officers of the Yale Union. They had previously run each other down. The boys were thoroughly scared, explanations were in order all around.
The wiseacres of Yale got busy and the new Yale took a hand also. Professor Charles Foster Kent—the Henry Drummond of Yale—and Professor William Lyon Phelps counselled a square deal and fair play.
The Yale Union had a stormy meeting. A real sensation was on their hands; there was possible censure and probable glory and every man in the Union went after his share.
It was indignantly moved and carried that the president of the Union introduce the speaker.
"Irvine is a Socialist," the mover said, "and would spoil the show before it began."
Alexander Irvine and Jack London, 1906Alexander Irvine and Jack London, 1906ToList
Alexander Irvine and Jack London, 1906ToList
They next discussed the topic. One boy suggested that London be asked to cut out all mention of Socialism. That was tabooed because no one knew that he would mention it anyway.
The day of the lecture I got this note from the Socialist student: "Yale Union and many of the faculty are sweating under the collar for fear Londonmightsay something Socialistic. The Union realizes that it would be absolutely useless to ask him to smooth over his lecture and cut out anything which sounds radical. Also they have decided that it would be a shock to the university and the public to haveyouappear upon the platform in any way, shape or manner. They are going to ask you to cancel your engagement to introduce London. In this I think they are unwise, but as they are determined it must be so. I advise you to agree to whatever arrangement they suggest. This done, they will 'take the chances' that London will express Socialistic ideas. Now I fear there will be the devil to pay for the lecture—the university is going to be surprised, the faculty shocked beyond measure and the Yale Union severely criticized!"
This is how the president of the Union expressed the situation in a note to me on the day of the lecture. "At a meeting of the executive committee of the Yale Union it was voted that the president of the Union introduce the speaker of the evening as it would tend to identify the Union more conspicuouslyand also to give it prominence before the student body. For this reason—wholly beyond my power and opposed to my opinion—I shall be forced to forego our little plan which I thought by far the best," etc., etc.
Some small portion of prosperity having come our way I was able to dine a small group with Jack London as the chief guest. Professor Charles Foster Kent of Yale, and Charles W. De Forrest, a business man, were among the guests.
It was a Socialist innings at Woolsey Hall that night. The big crowd gave the Yale Union an idea—this time it was a financial idea—twenty-eight hundred people paid admission—the officers swept down on the box office; but there was a Socialist inside playing capitalist. Socialists are not familiar enough with the game to play it successfully, but in this instance we played in strict accordance with the rules. We furnished the capital, took the risks and bagged the pot! We conceded nine points out of ten—the tenth was a financial one. The audience represented every phase of life in the city. Over a hundred of the faculty and ten times as many students. Citizens of all classes were there.
The Harvard Students had played horse with London a few weeks before this and we—the Socialists—were prepared for any sort of demonstration.
"The spectacle of an avowed Socialist," said theNew HavenRegister, "one of the most conspicious in the country, standing upon the platform of Woolsey Hall and boldly advocating the doctrines of revolution was a sight for gods and men."
Jack London talked for over two hours to that packed hall and received a most unusual attention. After the lecture he was taken to a students' dormitory where he answered questions till midnight. Then he was escorted by a smaller group to Mory's for supper and at one o'clock we held a reception at the big house which was known as "the Socialist Parsonage."
For over twenty years I have been a contributor to newspapers and religious periodicals, but not until I met Jack London did it ever occur to me that I could earn a living by my pen. London made me promise to write. My first story I mailed to California for his criticism and suggestion, but before it returned I had entered the field.
Appleton's Magazinepublished my first serious attempt at fiction. It was a short story entitled, "Two Social Pariahs."
The cry of peonage was in the air and I arranged withAppleton's Magazinefor a series of articles on the subject. Dressed as a labourer I went to the muscle market of New York and got hired. To do this I had to assume a foreign accent and look as slovenly as possible. With a picturesque contingent of Hungarians, Finns, Swedes and Greeks, I was drafted for the iron mines of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company. The mines are near Bessemer, Ala. At every turn of the road south we were herded and handled like cattle.
It was a big, black porter who led us into the car at Portsmouth, Va. I was the leader of the contingent, and the porter addressed us for the most part by signs, and when he spoke at all he called me "Johnny." When inside, he arranged us in our seats, putting his hands on some of our shoulders to press us down into them. I did not realize that Iwas in a Southern state until I saw a big yellow card in this car marked "Coloured." Then I knew instantly that we were in a Jim Crow car. A coloured woman sat next to the window in my seat and by her look and little toss of the head and a quick nervous movement she seemed to say, "What are you doing here?"
When the train pulled out of the depot, I stepped up to the porter and said:
"Haven't you a law in Virginia on the separation of the races."
The big black fellow grinned.
"Dere sho' is, boss—but you ain't no races. You is jest Dagoes, ain't you?"
At Atlanta we changed cars and were again driven into the Jim Crow car. This time I made a more intelligent attempt to solve my race problem. The conductor, faultlessly dressed in broadcloth and covered with gold lace, strode into our car with the air of an admiral of the fleet. He went straight through the car, collecting the block ticket for our gang from the boss, and as he returned I stepped into the aisle in front of him, blocking his passage.
"Pardon me, sir," I said, "isn't there a law in Georgia on the separation of the races?"
Without a word, he removed the glasses from his nose, stared at me for a moment, then turned sharply, walked to the end of the car, removed the card which read "Coloured" and reversed it. It then read"White." Then he came back through the car slowly, staring at me as he passed but without uttering a word.
Our particular destination was "Muckers Camp" at Readers. A group of three buildings on the brow of a hill—the hill where the blacks live. The first of these buildings is a kitchen and dining room, the second is a big dormitory and the third is a wash-house. This was our new home. The dormitory was originally intended for a series of small rooms but the work was arrested before completion. The uprights marking the divisions of the rooms were still standing—bare and uncovered. The floor of the big dormitory was littered with rubbish—miners' cast-off clothing, shoes, broken lamps, and in a corner there was a junk-heap of broken bedsteads, slats, army blankets and sodden mattresses. We were told to make ourselves "at home." There was room enough and plenty of bedding. All we had to do was to fish for what we needed and put it in order. Everything was red—red with ore that men carried out of the mines on their bodies.
The junk heap in the corner played an important part in the movements of my gang. The thought of having to sleep in the sodden stuff chilled me to the bones, but I kept silent. Whatever the previous condition of the men had been, they felt as I did as they pulled their bedding out piece by piece. Theyhad gone to spend the winter in the mines of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company; they knew the work, conditions and pay; they had refused to be bribed on the way down, but as they tugged at the junk, a change came over them! They swore in half a dozen languages—they gritted their teeth and vowed that they wouldn't be treated like pigs.
In a Mucker's Camp in AlabamaIn a Mucker's Camp in AlabamaToList
In a Mucker's Camp in AlabamaToList
Irvine and Three Other MuckersIrvine and Three Other Muckers as They Left Greenwich Street for the SouthToList
Irvine and Three Other Muckers as They Left Greenwich Street for the SouthToList
We went to the wash-house and the outlook was less encouraging. There was a long, narrow trough in the centre. It was half full of red ore. The floor was wet and covered with ore, rags, old papers and other rubbish. There were compartments intended for shower-baths, but there again the work had been arrested and was incomplete. We washed, made our beds, ate dinner and proceeded to the company store to be fitted out.
Each man was furnished with a number. By that number he was to be known while in the company's employ. Each man showed his number and drew what he needed—overalls, lamps, and heavy boots. There was nothing niggardly in the credit. The deeper the debt the tighter the grip on the debtor. The goods cost just one hundred per cent. more than anywhere else. The company paid wages once a month. If a labourer borrowed of his own within that time, he paid ten per cent. on the loan.
As we came back from the store, the miners were just leaving the mines and it was interesting to see them gaze into our faces and address us in Russian,Hungarian, Swedish and various other languages. It was one of the excitements of camp life—to inspect and classify the newcomers.
One of the men had a wheezy accordion and he relieved the monotony of the evening with some German airs. The big shed was unlighted, save as each man was his own lamp-post. Each made his own bed by the light of the lamp on his cap. As he undressed, the cap was the last article to be set aside and the extinguishing of the smoky, flickering blaze the last act of the night.
As the first streak of the gray dawn came in through the bare windows, four of our gang dressed and deliberately marched out of the camp—never to return.
The first number in the programme of a "mucker's" toilet is to adjust his cap with his lamp in it, trimmed and burning. The second is to light his pipe; then he dresses.
It was half-past five and still dark, when those nude, shaggy men with heads ablaze with smoky, flickering lamps, began to move around. They looked grotesque—unearthly—denizens of some underground pit. They were good-humoured and full of boisterous laughter.
A breakfast of pork, beans, potatoes, bread and coffee—plenty of each—and we went off with dinner pails over the hill to the valley, where five tall, smoking chimneys marked the entrances to as many mines.
Each mine has a complete outfit of men and machinery, and a certain number of chambers or pockets in which, with blast and hammer and hand, the red hills are made to disgorge their treasures of iron ore.
Three of us perched ourselves on the rear end of the "skip"—a big iron-ore disgorger—and began the half-mile descent. It was a 45 per cent. grade, and the skip, at the end of a powerful wire cable, went down by jerks. One of my companions was Franz, the Hungarian, the other was a German. The big square mouth of the mine became smaller and smaller as we bumped into the bowels of the earth. In a few minutes it looked like a small window-pane, and then disappeared altogether and we were left in the darkness.
Each mine is like a little town. It has a main street and side alleys—"pockets," they are called. There are "live" and "dead" pockets—the dead are the worked out.
At the first of the live pockets the skip was stopped by some invisible hand and we clambered over the side to a platform where a foreman met and conducted us to the task of the day.
The mine was filled with red dust. We could see but a few feet ahead of us. The lamps on men's brows looked like fire-flies dancing in the red mist. There was a sound of rushing water and thechug, chugof the pumps. As we waded ankle-deep through a water alley, we heard the warning yellsof a foreman. A charge of dynamite was about to burst and the men were flying out of danger. We were whisked into a cleft for safety. Half a dozen old miners were squeezed in beside us. Our scarcely soiled caps told the story of our newness and the old hands watched us closely.
Boom! The hills shivered like the deck of a warship as she discharges a broadside. Franz shivered too. His eyes bulged and he stared, loose-jawed, at the men around us, who laughed at his fright.
The explosion was in our alley; it had torn up the car-tracks like strips of macaroni; it was the salute of dynamite to our soft, flabby muscles, to our white caps and new overalls; it was a stick of concentrated power throwing down the gauntlet to men in the raw.
We had a foreman who superintended our compartment, "a driller," who with a steam drill sat all day boring holes for dynamite, and we were the "muckers"—miner's helpers—who carried away with muscular power the effects of the explosion. Each alley had similar crews.
"Mule boy!" I roared with all my vocal power into what looked like an ugly rent in the rocks. A moment later, I saw a glimmer of light, then a mule shot up out of a hole and a black boy brought up the rear, clinging to the tail of "Emma," the mule, our sure-footed locomotive.
We were handed a huge sledge-hammer each and the work began. My hammer bounded off the rocks as if it were an air ball. It bounded for a dozen heavy strokes.
"Turn that rock over and look for the grain!" the foreman shouted in my ear. Then he took the hammer, turned the huge boulder over on its side, struck it twice or thrice and it flew into splinters.
We acquired the knack of things quickly, and instinctively struck the working pace. It was the limit of human strength and endurance. My jacket came off first, then my overalls, then my shirt, leaving trousers and undershirt only. The others followed suit. The sweat oozed out of every pore of my body. We smashed, filled and ran out the full cars. We worked silently, doggedly and at top speed. Several hundred men were doing likewise in other pockets; they were less bloody, perhaps, but the work was the same and they did it without knowing that it was brutally hard. There was a halt of fifteen minutes for dinner. Then we went at it again. Our best fell short of the demand. For every car of ore blasted, the foreman got fifty cents and for running out each car, we got twenty cents—a little over six cents each.
"—— —— your souls to h—l," the foreman shouted. "Why don't you get a move on you —— hey?"
We moved a little faster.
"You muckers ain't goin' t' get ten cars out t'day if ye don't mend yer licks!"
We "mended our licks."
He looked like a wild beast. Short of stature, but his arms were hardened and under the red skin the muscles were hard as whip-cords and taut as a drum. His eyebrows were heavy and bushy and over his strong chest grew shaggy masses of black hair. Our car slipped the track once and when he heard the smash he came thundering along, ripping out a string of oaths as he came. Putting his powerful body to the lever, he lifted the car almost alone. As he did so, his lamp came in contact with my hand. Unable to let go, I screamed to him to move. As he did so, he saw the seared flesh.
"Too bad! Too bad!" he said, as he dropped the truck. I gazed into his eyes.
"Look here!" I said, "if you will look as human as that again, you may burn the other hand!"
The human moles who empty these pockets of ore are inured. Life down there is normal to them. After a few years' work, the skin becomes calloused and tough. The hands become claws or talons—broken and disfigured. The muckers laughed at us. They saw we were concerned about trifles. Bloody sweat and hot oil held the red dust around us like a tight-fitting garment. Our scanty clothing was glued to our bodies. Our shoes were filled with water, but that was a luxury—it was cool.
What a hades of noise and dust! The continual noise and clatter of the pumps, the rattle of the drillers, the hissing of steam and the ear-splitting roar of the dynamite explosions are matters that one gets accustomed to in time. The frenzied desire to get cars filled and run out leaves little time for novel sensations—for that, brute forcealoneis needed.
At the end of the first day we had filled and run out ten cars. Our pay for that was sixty-six cents apiece. During the same time, Philo, the mule boy, made seventy-five cents and Emma—she had earned what would enable her to return to-morrow to repeat the work of to-day.
About five o'clock in the afternoon we were sandwiched into the big iron skip with a score of others—black and white. Eight hours had taken our newness away. We were as others in colour and condition. We looked into their faces and felt their hot breath. Then a signal was given and the panting, squirming mass was jerked to the surface.
As we passed over the hill to the camp I was in an ecstasy. The sense of relief under the open sky was intense. Others seemed to have it—for they joked and laughed boisterously over trifles as we went "home."
Seven of us together went to the big wash-house. It was rather crowded. I marvelled that nobody was using the shower-baths. I soaped myself,stood beneath the big iron water-pipe and waited, but there was no response. There was a loud laugh, then a miner asked:
"Air ye posin' for yer photo, mister?"
"No. What's the matter with the water?"
"Fits, Buttie—it's got fits!"
There was plenty of food, of a kind. The supper, at the close of the day was a brief function, but brutal as it was brief. It was something of a shock, the first night we were in camp, but at the close of my first day's work I found myself on a level with the grossest. The finer instincts were blunted or gone and I was in the clutch of a hunger like that of the jungle, where might and cunning rule. At a signal from the cook, we rushed in, crushed by main force into a seat, seized whatever was nearest and began. Scarcely a word was spoken—heads down, hands and jaws at top speed. The disgusting spectacle lasted but a few minutes, then up and out to smoke and talk.
Beside me sat a strong, powerfully built German boy, who joked about the age of the pork for supper.
"What you guff about?" the burly steward asked.
"Schmell, py gee—its tick mit bad schmell!"
"Vell, you shut your —— maut or I smash your —— head, see?"
The boy laughed, then the steward removed his plate and refused to give any more. Nobody took any notice. We were too busy and too brutallyselfish to interfere. The steward was the camp bully and the men were afraid of him. They must not even laugh at his provisions. We had pork for breakfast, we took pork chops to the mines for dinner, and the staple article—the standby—of every supper was pork. Pigs in Alabama are like turnips in Scotland—there are no property rights in them. They breed and litter in the tall dog-fennel; they root around the shanties and cover the landscape.
"Who owns these pigs?" I asked old Ransom Pope, a Negro.
"One an' anoder!" he said.
The gullies and the weeds were full of them and the steward found them easy and cheap feeding.
"You come yere for breakfast to-morrow an' I smash your dam head!" the steward said to the boy, as we left the dining room. There was no reply. Each man went his way. They were tired—too tired to think. Though a stranger to even the taste of liquor, I had an intense craving for it and it seemed as if I had used it all my life. An hour after supper, I lay down on my sodden pile and went to sleep.
I was awakened next morning by a Norwegian mucker who was organizing a strike over the incident of the tainted pork. Five minutes later, every man in the shed was around the stove in an impromptu indignation meeting. It was agreed that Max, theGerman boy, should go in first; if the steward put him out, we were all to leave with him and refuse to work. He was allowed to take breakfast but was refused a dinner pail. We dropped ours and marched to the office in a body. An investigation was made and it was discovered that the steward was feeding us on his neighbour's pork and charging it to the company. He was discharged and we went back to the camp to make merry for the rest of the forenoon. The fun, for most of them, consisted of an extra demand on their physical force—rough horse-play, leap-frog and wrestling. One man went to town for extra stimulants. Another, a big Swede, stripped nude, drained at a single draught a bottle of whiskey and lay down to sleep himself drunk and sober again before his next call to the pits. At the close of the day he lay there—a big, shaggy animal, wallowing.
The mines were shut down on Sunday and we had an opportunity to look around. Though a place of one thousand inhabitants, it has no post-office. There are ditches but no drains; wide, deep gullies, but no streets. The moon shines there in her season, but there are no street lamps. The hogs are somewhat tame and we fed them as we went along. There is a church but it's for black folks—it's essential to them. The whites fare not so well. If they want one, they travel for it. They do likewise for a school, for the little school beside thechurch is for coloured children. The only "modern convenience" was an ancient style of hydrant, around which the children were organizing fire companies and extinguishing imaginary fires.
After visiting the mule boy in Rat Hollow on Sunday, I returned to the camp. The men were lounging around the stove, smoking, and exchanging experiences. In one corner, a German sailor was playing his wheezy accordion, and in another, to a group of Slavs, a Russian soldier was singing a love song. It was my last day with the muckers. Many of my gang had already gone—the rest would follow. It wasn't a matter of wages or hours—it was a question of muck. Once in it, men lived, moved, and had their being in it, but even the most brutalized quailed at the junk pile in the corner of the shed.
The sun was setting behind the red hills. Save for a long, yellow streak just above the horizon, the sky was a mass of purple billows. The yellow changed to amber and later to a blood red. Then rays of sun-fire shot up and splashed the purple billows; the purple and gold later gave place to black clouds through which the stars came one by one, while the muckers were settling down for the night.
It seemed at first as if I would have to commit some crime to get admission to the stockade where the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company had theirlargest convict labour force. I was seedy-looking—my beard had grown and I was still in blue shirt and overalls. I approached the chaplain—told him my story and gained admission to his night school; and for three weeks moved in and out among the socially damned of that horrible stockade.
In that time I got the facts of the life there and I became so depressed by what I saw that I had to fight daily to keep off a sense of hate that pressed in upon me every time I went into that atmosphere.
Here were eight hundred men, seven hundred of them coloured. They had committed crimes against persons and property. The state of Alabama hired them out to the corporation at so much a head and the corporation proceeded, with state aid, to make their investment pay.
The men were underfed and overworked and in addition were exploited in the most shameful manner by officials from the top to the bottom.
For the slightest infraction of the rules they were flogged like galley slaves. Women were flogged as well as men. What the lash and the labour left undone tuberculosis finished. Unsanitary conditions, rotten sheds, sent many of them into eternity, where they were better off.
They were classified according to their ability to dig coal, not according to the crimes committed.
From the stockade I went to a lumber camp where some officials had been found guilty of peonage.
Irvine Punching Logs in the Gulf of Mexico, 1907Irvine Punching Logs in the Gulf of Mexico, 1907ToList
Irvine Punching Logs in the Gulf of Mexico, 1907ToList
I got a job as a teamster and took my place in the camp among the labourers as if I had spent my life at it.
In this way I got at the facts of how and why men had been decoyed from New York and imprisoned in the forests.
I was so much at home in my work and so disguised that no one ever for a moment suspected me. I obtained photographs of the bosses, the bloodhounds and the camp box cars in which the lumber Jacks lived.
Several times around a bonfire of pine knots I entertained the men of the camp with stories of travel, history and romance.
If I had been discovered, if the purpose of my presence had been known I would have been shot like a dog; for life is as cheap in a Southern lumber field as in any part of the world.
From the lumber camp I went to one of the big turpentine camps where conditions are as primitive and as inhuman as in the stockades.
My next and last job in the South was punching logs in Pensacola harbour for a dollar and six "bits" a day. There I got material for several stories of peons who had escaped from the woods.
While in Pensacola I made a visit, one Sunday morning, to the city jail and asked permission to address the prisoners. The jailer, of course, wanted to know what an unkempt labourer had to say to his charges.
In order to convince him I had to deliver an exegesis before the desk! The cells were iron cages with stone floors.
A young Englishman, who had just landed after a long sea voyage the night before, was the first man to whom I talked. He claimed to have been drugged and robbed in a saloon. The fact of his incarceration was a small thing to him; what made him swear was the condition of his cage. The excrements of probably half a dozen of his predecessors in the cell lay around him, nauseating and suffocating him. Fire shot from his eyes as he pointed to it. He was bitter, sarcastic, sneering, and with evident and abundant cause.
Whatever I had to say to the men and women in that dungeon that morning was driven from my mind and my lips.
The young man pushed all the resentment of his soul over into mine! I spent that Sunday in working out a plan by which I could help Pensacola to clean up this social ulcer.
There was a Tourist Club there and I offered to lecture for them. It was arranged for the following Sunday afternoon. I called on the mayor and he promised to preside. I interviewed several aldermen and they promised to attend. I lectured for forty minutes on my experiences as a labourer in the camps of the South, and for ten minutes at the close described what I had seen in the city jail.
It was a somewhat heroic method of treatment, and I did not remain long enough to see the effect, but I at least deprived them of the plea of ignorance.
I found in Florida two Government officials who had done splendid work in behalf of labour. I mean the labourers who were decoyed by false promises and brutally abused on their arrival in the camps. They were both modest men—men unlikely to enter politics for personal advancement. I cut my articles out of the magazine and sent them to President Roosevelt, calling his attention to the conditions and commending these men to his notice. The result was that they were both promoted to positions where their usefulness was increased and the cause of labour considerably helped.
A group of literary people with whom I was acquainted had rented No. 3 Fifth Avenue, and were operating a coöperative housekeeping scheme. I became part of the plan and it was there that I first met the Rector of the Church of the Ascension, the Rev. Percy Stickney Grant.
Naturally, we talked of the church and its work. I was so impressed with Mr. Grant's bigness that I volunteered to devote some of my spare time to the work of his parish. A few weeks later I got a letter from him inviting me to become a member of his staff. This was a surprise to me, but I made no immediate decision. I was earning a comfortable living and devoting my spare time to the Socialist propaganda. I wasfree—very free—and I saw danger ahead in church work.
I had several interviews with Mr. Grant and went over the situation. I wasn't a man with Socialistic tendencies; I was a Socialist—a member of the party.
The danger ahead looked smaller to Mr. Grant than it did to me. He had absolute confidence inthe broad-minded men of affairs around him. My Socialism was explained and understood. Just how to fit in was the next problem.
The mission of the church is at No. 10 Horatio Street. It was without a minister in charge. For a few Sunday evenings I conducted the service. The audience was composed of half a dozen parishoners and a dozen of my personal friends. Mr. Grant knew nothing of my ability in public address. I took his place one night in the church and that ended my career at the chapel. I had discarded an ecclesiastical title I possessed but never used; I became a lay reader in the Episcopal Church—the church of my youth—the church in which I was baptized and confirmed.
The conference and discussion following the service was an afterthought. The audiences steadily grew. It was and is the most cosmopolitan audience I ever saw. I wanted to get acquainted with the people and suggested a sort of reception in the chapel. The ladies of the church provided refreshments.
"Who is that man?" one of the ladies at the tea table asked one night.
"He is a Socialist agitator," I answered.
"Why don't you ask him to talk?"
The man was Sol Fieldman and I asked him to speak for five minutes. He did so and from that time the character of the after-meeting changed. The first few evenings after the change the speakingwas very informal: any one of note who happened to be in the meeting was asked to speak. Later, the invitation was enlarged and any one who desired to speak could do so. Then came a time limit. A workingman asked that the refreshments be cut out. The table took up valuable space and the time consumed in "serving" was "a pure waste," so he said. Then we arranged for a formal presentation of a topic and a discussion to follow it.
The Socialists were always in the majority. Every Socialist is a propagandist—not always an intelligent propagandist. Intelligent and leading Socialists are generally engaged Sunday evenings, so the majority of those who came to us were of the hard-working kind—limited, very limited, in the literary expression of the social soul flame that so passionately moves them.
Some of our church officers who took an active part in the first year's meetings were somewhat alarmed at the brusqueness of these men and women, and undertook to correct their manners.
The Rector understood. And with great patience and tact he heard all. The Church of the Ascension has in its membership some of the country's biggest leaders in industry; some of these men came to the meetings. What they saw and heard was different to what they expected. They fraternized with the men of toil. It was a fraternity utterly devoid of patronage. There were free exchanges of thought.The average labouring man is incapable of such conference, for no matter how many years a member of a labour union it is only when he becomes a Socialist that he becomes an intelligent advocate of anything.
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The Rector and I tried to avoid the notice of the newspapers and for about six months we succeeded. Then came the explosion of the bomb on Union Square and we were at once thrown into the limelight. I was on the Square that afternoon.
It was designed to be a mass meeting of the unemployed. The unemployed are not usually interested in any sort of propaganda; the more intelligent of the labour men are, and the Socialists are more so.
So the promoters of the mass meeting for the unemployed were Socialists. It was at this meeting that a police official declared to a man who had the temerity to question him that the policeman's club was mightier than the Constitution of the United States.
No permit was given and no mass meeting held, but the multitude was there and when the police began to disperse it the people who were neither Socialists nor unemployed resented being driven off the streets. I saw men clubbed and women deliberately ridden over by the mounted police. I kept moving: I wanted to be where it was most dangerous. I suffered for months with a bruised arm thatI got as I went with the crowd in front of the horses: it was a blow aimed at a man's head; I was clubbed on the back for not moving fast enough. At every turn, at every angle of the Square, the police were as brutal as any Cossack that ever wielded a knout.
Late on that afternoon the police opened the Square—that is, the people were permitted to cross it in all directions. My study was at No. 75 Fifth Avenue, and I was moving in that direction past the fountain when the explosion took place. I was hurled off my feet; that is, the shock to my nervous system was so great that I collapsed. My first flash of thought was of the battle-field!
Fifteen feet in front of me two men staggered. It seemed to me that one of them had been ripped in twain. He fell and the other fell on top of him. Instantly the policemen around me seemed crazed: as I staggered to my feet one of them struck me a terrific blow with his club. The blow landed between my shoulders, but glanced upward, striking me on the back of the head. I tumbled over, dazed, but the thought that his next blow would murder me seemed to give me superhuman strength and I ran. As I turned he attacked another man and I thought I was free. I was mistaken, however, for he gave chase and if I had not escaped into the crowd I would have fared badly at his hands.
My nerves were so badly shattered that on the way to my room I fell several times. The followingSunday night the Civic Federation packed our meeting with their speakers.
Mr. Gompers's representative in New York was the first man put up. He was furnished with quotations from alleged Socialist writers on the question of religion. Then a woman from Boston who had once been a Socialist, sent a note to me—I was presiding—asking for extended time. I was the only Socialist in the place who knew what was going on.
The newspapers had all been "tipped off," as theHeraldreporter told me later. The discussion waxed so warm that fifty people were on their feet at once, shouting for recognition.
Humour in such a situation is a tremendous relief. I managed to inject some into the discussion and it was like grease to a cartwheel. In a humorous way I turned the light on the Civic Federation and the audience laughed. Next day every newspaper in New York had an account of the meeting. From that time until the end of the first year of the meeting the papers reported not only what happened but much that never happened. Most of them were humorous in their treatment. The Marceline of the press gave us much space in its characteristic style.
The result was that we were forced to have policemen guard the door so that when the chapel was full the crowd unable to gain admittance could be dispersed. We admitted by ticket for some weeks, butthe plan didn't work well. Of course, many who came were moved solely by curiosity, but for two years the chapel has been filled at every meeting. On the wildest winter nights it looked sometimes as if the choir was to be my only audience, yet when the after-meeting opened, the place was as full as usual.
The Sunday evening service is designed to be of special helpfulness to working people; it is an extra service permitted by the canons of the church, and in this instance directed to helpful and constructive social criticism. The discourses have not been theological in any sense, but I have seen men and women converted, experiencing a change of heart in exactly the same manner as people are converted in revival meetings. The same energies of the soul were released and the same results obtained with this extra consideration, that the change was a new attitude toward society as well as a change of heart.
Men and women who had not been in church since they were children have found an atmosphere—a spiritual atmosphere—that has been a distinct help to them during the week. There have been unique examples of this that cannot be recorded or catalogued. If we were padding a year-book, bolstering a creed or attracting men merely to put our tag on them the meetings would have waned long ago, for the class of people who attend are quick to discover undercurrents or ulterior motives.
The spiritual atmosphere is created by acombination of forces. The picture of the Ascension by La Farge has contributed not a little to it—even to people to whom the circumstance was a myth. The architecture and music contributed much.
We held the after-meeting in the church one night—to accommodate hundreds of people who couldn't get into the chapel. The meeting was a failure. The most radically minded men told me that they couldn't talk in the church.
"Why?" I asked one man.
"—— if I know, but it took the fight out of me!"
It took the fight out of all. So we went back to the chapel. One man whom I have known for years as a Socialist agitator who fought the intellectuals in his party and was a materialist of the most radical kind made this statement at the last meeting of the first year:
"I appreciate the courage of Mr. Grant in opening this church to the people and opening its pulpit to a representative of the people. I am grateful for the fine fellowship, the freedom of discussion, the music, the beautiful architecture and the inspiration that comes from such contact, but these are the smallest of what has come to me during the past winter. I am the son of an orthodox Rabbi but I have been an atheist all my life. I have been over-bitter and destructive in my addresses. I have learned something here. I did not expect nor did I want to, but I have. I am now a believer in the immortality ofthe soul and I look forward to life instead of death. This has influenced my work, my life. Instead of a hundred words against human slavery to one for human freedom I speak a hundred for human freedom to one against human slavery. That may seem small to you. It's big to me—it's a new psychology."
A school teacher, a brilliant young Jewess, said: "The inspiration of that service in the church lasts all week with my scholars. I am worth twice as much as I was to the public schools."
A letter from a trained nurse says: "I am going away for the summer, but before I go I want you to know how much of a blessing your service has been to me, and to both physicians and nurses in this hospital, for we have all been at one time or another, and we have always talked over your topics with interest and profit."
During the first year we had a tremendous stimulus in the meetings from the active participation of four of the most prominent theosophists in the country—two of whom are members of the vestry. They sharpened the line between spiritual and material things. They brought to the notice of working-class Socialists the essential things of the soul. They made the meetings a melting-pot in which the finest, best and most permanent things were made to stand out distinctly. The world affords not a better field either for the testing or propagating of theirphilosophy, but they did not come the second year and we missed them very much.
There was a good deal of misunderstanding about the meetings, arising from garbled newspaper reports. The newspaper reporter has a bias for things off colour—buzzard-like, he sees only the carrion—at least he is trained to report only the carrion—this always against his will. So we were kept explaining to men and women of the church who had not been able to attend and see for themselves. There was not only misunderstanding but prejudice. I came in contact with it in quarters the most unlikely. The people of independent means in the Church of the Ascension have social ideals, those of the working class who are in the church have none—none whatever, and what prejudice I found came from those who had never contributed anything to the church but their presence, and to whom the church from their childhood had been an almshouse, a hospital, and a place of amusement.
These were the people, baptized and confirmed Christians, who spoke with bitterness and a sneer of the evening meetings because the majority of the attendants were Jews. The other phase of their prejudice was against Socialism—which they supposed to be a process of "dividing up." My chief encouragement came from the richest people in the church, the sneer came from the poorest.
The range of topics was as wide as the interests ofhuman life. The speakers were the leading men of New York and distinguished visitors from other lands. One of the earliest speakers was Mrs. Cobden Sanderson, the daughter of Richard Cobden and the intimate friend of William Morris. Capitalism was represented by Professor J.B. Clark, Dr. Thomas R. Slicer and Herman Robinson of the American Federation of Labour. There were many others, of course, but these were the best known. The Socialist leaders were W.J. Ghent, Rufus Weeks, Gaylord Wilshire and R.W. Bruére. Exponents of individualism were many, and most of them were brilliant. The most powerful address on behalf of labour was made by R. Fulton Cutting. There has been no attempt to bait an ecclesiastical hook to catch the masses. We have tried to make men think and to act on their best thought.
This venture in ecclesiology is not the democratization of a church. It is the leadership of a rector—Mr. Grant is an ecclesiastical statesman—he has a strong cabinet in his vestry. Men who, having made big ventures in the business world, are not averse to an occasional venture in matters not directly in their line. He has enough reaction among them to keep the balance level.
The Church of the Ascension is the real Cathedral of New York. What matters it about Canon, Chapter, Dean and Prebend? A cathedral is a church of the people—all the people!