A domestic scene with several generations of a family room.THERE WAS NOTHING IN THE DOMESTIC SCENE WHICH MET US TO SUGGEST THE HOME OF A REVOLUTIONARY.
THERE WAS NOTHING IN THE DOMESTIC SCENE WHICH MET US TO SUGGEST THE HOME OF A REVOLUTIONARY.
THERE WAS NOTHING IN THE DOMESTIC SCENE WHICH MET US TO SUGGEST THE HOME OF A REVOLUTIONARY.
Soon we were seated at supper, and the family, accustomed, apparently, to the presence of a stranger brought home from the meeting, left my friend and me to our own discussion of Socialistic themes. I found this deeply interesting, for my host was finely representative of the views of the majority of the Socialists whom I saw at Waverley Hall. In the main he was a Social Democrat. His economic views were drawn, I found, entirely from Karl Marx. “Das Kapital” was his Bible, and he seemed to know it by heart. To question Marx’s theory of value or his treatment of labor in relation to production was blasphemy akin to casting doubt before a devout believer upon the plenary inspiration of the Scriptures.
He was a Socialist of serene temperament, with boundless faith in the silent processes of development. Propaganda was hysterical from his point of view.
“There could be no propaganda in behalf of Socialism,” he said to me, “one hundredth part so effective as the unchecked activity of men who imagine themselves the bulwarks of social order and the bitterest foes of Socialism. We have no quarrel with the increasing centralization of capital. The opposition to ‘trusts’ and the like comes mainly from thebourgeoisie, who feel themselves being forced out of independent business. We Socialists are already of the proletariat, and we see clearly that all trusts and syndicates are the inevitable forerunners of still greater centralization. The men who are employing their rare abilities in eliminating the useless wastes of competitive production, by unifying its administration and control, and so reducing greatly the cost of the finished article, and who are perfecting the machinery of transportation and distribution by like unity of administration, are doing far more in a year to bring about a co-operative organization of society than we could do, by preaching the theory of collectivism, in a hundred years.
“The collectivist order of society may be distant, but, at least, we have this comfort—that the day of the old individualist, anarchical order is past. We can never return to it. The centralization of capital has proved the inadequacy of all that, in the present stage of progress. We have no choice but to go on to further centralization, and the logical outcome must be eventually, not the monopoly of everything by a few, but the common ownership of all land and capital by all the people.”
It was in the middle of the next morning that I chanced to meet, in the thick of a sweat-shop region of the West Side, an old acquaintance of the Socialist meetings. “The Unionist” I shall call him, for he had much to do with organizing the workers in sweat-shops into labor-unions. A victim of the sweaters himself, earning his living at a sewing-machine in a densely crowded shop, he yet managed to get about among the other victims and further their organization. More than once he had taken me with him on his rounds, and I had grown familiar with the sight of rooms, in all the poorer sections of the city where the rent is relatively low, turned into factories on a small scale for the manufacture of ready-made garments.
And this idea of miniature factories is really the key to the situation. The industry of ready-made clothing is an enormous one, involving millions of dollars of invested capital, and competition among the merchants is very keen. The difference of a fraction of a cent in the cost of production, by the piece, of a given garment may mean the difference between profit and loss in the whole output. Cheapness of production is, therefore, of the first necessity.
Merchants of the greatest executive ability and highest efficiency are able to secure the maximum of cheap production through the legitimate factory system. Men of less business ability, in order to compete successfully, avoid the factory system of production and make use of the sweat-shops instead. The sweat-shop is, therefore, in a single word, an evasion, under the stress of competition, of the factory system of production.
About ten men, women, and children are crowded together in a room. Most appear to be sewing.AN EVASION OF THE FACTORY SYSTEM OF PRODUCTION.
AN EVASION OF THE FACTORY SYSTEM OF PRODUCTION.
AN EVASION OF THE FACTORY SYSTEM OF PRODUCTION.
There are few industries which could profit any longer by this system as opposed to that of the factory, but the manufacture of ready-made clothing is an exception; and, in it, the less fit to survive are sure to take advantage of the sweat-shops, until they have been driven out of the business altogether by those whose superior abilities enable them to undersell the product of the shops with the product of legitimate factories.
The manufacturer who makes use of the factory system at once subjects himself to certain regulations. His work-rooms must show a certain cubic area to every operative employed; certain sanitary provisions must be regarded; children under a certain age must not be set to work, and a prescribed number of hours must be accepted as the limit of the working day.
But the manufacture of ready-made clothing lends itself to an easy escape from all this. Instead of having his work done in a factory, subject to wholesome but costly restrictions, a merchant may give it out to the lowest bidders among the sweaters. These men take it to their homes, and secure there the services of their wives and children, and employ the families of their neighbors. Thousands of rooms are thus closely packed with workers who have underbid one another in the struggle for existence, until, in the cheapest quarters available, without regard to light and air, and decent sanitation, the work is hurried forward at feverish haste by human wretches whose utmost toil through excessive hours can often earn them little more than the means of bare subsistence.
The Unionist was leading me in a brisk walk through a labyrinth of city squalor. Over unswept wooden pavements we passed, along uncleaned, wooden streets, in whose broken surfaces lay heaps of decaying garbage. Wooden houses for the most part flanked the way, hideous, blackened shanties which leaned grotesquely on insecure foundations, with rickety flights of broken steps clinging to the buildings’ sides, where, on warmer days, the teeming population can be seen overflowing from work-rooms and sewing ceaselessly, even in their search for fresh air.
Opening directly upon the black rot of crumbling pavements were the steep descents to dark cellars which undermine these reeking hovels. From many of them, as we passed, came the hot breath of furnaces laden with the wholesome smell of baking bread. These were the underground bakeries of the region, and down their wooden steps, whose surfaces were buried under layers of hardened filth, were ranged the great round loaves of dark bread on which this population largely lives. While through the open doors, which admitted freely the floating germs from off the putrid streets, we caught glimpses of baking-tins full of soft muffins ready for the oven, and bakers in white dress who moved about in the gloomy, fetid air over floors strewn with ashes and the crumpled shells of eggs and crumbs of unbaked dough.
Mingling in the squalid crowds upon the streets were other figures peculiar to the scene. Women they were for the most part, with ragged, faded shawls tied round their heads and falling over their shoulders, and limp skirts, dangling about their legs and brushing the surface slime of the pavements. Some upon their shoulders, and others in Oriental fashion upon their heads, they bore large bundles of clothing which had been cut at the great dealers’ shops, and which they were taking now to be made up in the sweaters’ dens.
A cold winter scene. Two women carry large bundles under their arms with one coming down a set of stairs.RETURNING WORK FROM SWEAT SHOPS.
RETURNING WORK FROM SWEAT SHOPS.
RETURNING WORK FROM SWEAT SHOPS.
The Unionist was talking rapidly, almost vehemently, at my side, with the swift, nervous gesticulation of his race, for he was a young Polish Jew, of short, sturdy figure, with wiry black hair, and eyes which were like burnished coals. The scenes about us, which were far more interesting to me, concerned him not at all in contrast with the delight he felt in picturing the outcome of political change. Like so many of the Socialists whom I met, he was an admirable workman, and thoroughly practical in his views of life, and hugely energetic and efficient in the organization of his trades-union; but yet he was possessed, as most of them are, of a strange faculty of living intensely at times in dreams of a fulfilment of preconceptions of another social order. He was hard at it now, and was completely blind to the significant facts about us. With an amazing acquaintance with contemporaneous political history, he had been sketching for me what he regarded as a great economic revolution in America. The drift of what he said was simply that in this country, from colonial days to the present, the middle-class, who are the small owners of land and capital, have been the main support of the society in which we have lived, and that the chief strength of the middle-class has been the farmer.
In every movement in this country wherein the wage-earners have sought for separate political action in their own interests, they have invariably found the farming classes in opposition to them and supporters of conservatism. But there are marked indications of a change, he went on. The farming classes are no longer economically independent, in the sense of owning their land and capital, but are tenants of the capitalists who hold their mortgages. And, with this change in economic standing, they have begun to find that their interests lie, not in maintaining rights of private property, which have robbed them of their own, but in joining forces with all wage-earners to bring about a state of things wherein property shall be a monopoly of all.
And having touched once more in prophetic spirit the beatific vision of the Socialist, he waxed eloquent in high praise of it, and then turned to me with an impatient:
“Can’t you see it, Comrade Vikoff—can’t you see it?”
He sympathized with me as one of the countless seekers for employment in the city, and he had cultivated me because of my interest in the meetings. Really admirable in their sincerity were his patient efforts to convert me to Socialism; and when, at last, he gave me up, I am sure that it was from the conviction that he was dealing with a mind hopelessly Philistine, whose constant appeal to dry facts marked it as wholly incapable of appreciation of the charming theory of human perfectability.
We turned now and passed down a flight of wooden steps to the basement of a small, brick building. I knew that we were going into a sweater’s den, for I had visited many of them under the lead of the Unionist, and many of them on my own account in futile search for work.
There was nothing exceptional in this one beyond the fact that, more commonly than in the cellar, I had found the shops on the ground floor, and oftener still in the upper stories of tenements.
As we neared the door, there was the usual sound of the clattering rush of sewing-machines going at high speed—starting and stopping abruptly, at uneven intervals, and giving you the impression, in the meantime, of racing furiously with one another.
The opened door revealed the customary sight of a room perhaps twenty feet square, with daylight entering faintly through two unwashed windows, which looked out upon the level of the street. The dampness showed itself in dew-like beads along the walls and on the ceiling, which I could easily reach as I stood erect. In spite of its being winter, the dingy walls were dotted with black flies, which swarmed most about a cooking-stove, over which, stirring a steaming pot, stood a ragged, dishevelled woman, who looked as though she could never have known any but extreme old age. In the remaining floor-space were crowded a dozen machines or more, over which, in the thick, unventilated atmosphere, were the bending figures of the workers. Oil-lamps lit up the inner recesses of the room, and seemed to lend consistency to the heavy air. From an eye here and there, which caught his in a single movement, the Unionist received a look of recognition, but not a head was turned to see who had entered, and the whir of feverish work went on, unchecked for an instant by our coming.
While the Unionist was talking to the sweater, I walked between the close lines of machines over a floor covered with deep accumulations of dirt, and shreds of cloth, and broken threads, to where, in a corner, a group of girls were sewing. The oldest among them may have been twelve, and the youngest could have been a little over eight, and their wages averaged about seventy-five cents a week for hours that varied widely according to the stress of work.
Near the corner was a passage, and through it I could see into a small room which had no window, nor any opening but the door; there, in perpetual darkness lit up by one oil-lamp, was a man who, for twelve (and sometimes fifteen) hours a day, pressed the new-made clothing for a living.
It was ladies’ cloaks that the sewers were making; of course, they worked by the piece, and the best among them could earn a dollar in the day, and sometimes more by working over-time. They were very smart-looking garments, and their air of jaunty stylishness was a most incongruous intrusion upon their surroundings. When I asked the Unionist for whose trade they were being made, he seemed to think nothing of the fact that he mentioned, in answer, one of the foremost merchant-citizens of the town.
We were on the point of leaving, when a heavy foot-fall sounded on the wooden steps, and the door opened to the touch of an inspecting officer, whose glowing health and neat, warm uniform were as though a prosperous breeze were sweeping the stagnant room. The work, however, was as unaffected by his coming as it had been by ours. Not a sewer noticed him, and the stitching of machines went racing on with unabated swiftness. Only “the old man” watched nervously the movements of the officer, as he walked about the shop, making note of the bad air, and the filth upon the floors, and the group of little girls, and the dark, unventilated chamber beyond.
The Unionist had caught me by the arm.
“We’ll wait,” he said; and we stood together in the shadow of the open door.
Returning finally to the side of the old sweater, the officer handed him a printed form.
“You must make out this blank,” he said, “and have it ready for me when I call again.” And without another word he started for the stairs. But on the way some evidence of unsanitary condition more shocking than any met with yet—a heap of offal on the floor, or a fouler gust of poisoned air—checked him, and he turned, indignantly, to the nearest worker.
“Look here,” I could hear him say, “you’ve got to clean up here, and right away. The first thing you know you’ll start a fever that will sweep the city before we can stop it.”
The young Hebrew had stopped his work and turned half round in his chair until he faced the officer. There were deep lines in his haggard, beardless face, and his wolfish eyes were ablaze with the sense of sharp injustice.
“You tell us we’ve got to keep clean,” he answered, in broken English, lifting his voice to a shout above the clatter of machines. “What time have we to keep clean when it’s all we can do to get bread? Don’t talk to us about disease; it’sbreadwe’re after,bread!” And there sounded in the voice of the boy the cry of the hungry for food, which no man hears and can ever forget.
Many people in a room working at sewing machines. One man in the foreground is talking and appears angry.“DON’T TALK TO US ABOUT DISEASE; IT’SBREADWE’RE AFTER,BREAD!”
“DON’T TALK TO US ABOUT DISEASE; IT’SBREADWE’RE AFTER,BREAD!”
“DON’T TALK TO US ABOUT DISEASE; IT’SBREADWE’RE AFTER,BREAD!”
The officer passed, speechless, up the steps, and we followed into the clean, pure air, under the boundless blue of smiling skies.