did. Worked on those stoves where you are, for a while--stove-tender

helper, then stove-tender. Then I got this job.... Don't you chew?... I'll lose it too if I take many more days off for sickness. Last time I was 'sick'"--he grinned--"Bert Cahill and the bunch and I took three skirts in Bill's car to Monaca. Had six quarts of damn good whiskey. I was out a week. Ralph says, when I come back: 'Pretty damn sick, you!' But to hell with 'em! I'm not afraid of my job."

That little blower called Dippy, I found, knew the furnace game in all its phases with great practical thoroughness. I used to try to get chances of talking with him on questions of technique.

"What about those jobs in the cast-house?" I said one day, "the helper's jobs? Isn't it a good thing to know about those if you're learning the iron game?"

"You don't want to work there," he said quickly, "only Hunkies work on those jobs, they're too damn dirty and too damn hot for a 'white' man."

So I got thinking over the "Hunky" business, and several other conversations came into my mind. Dick Reber, senior melter on the open-hearth, had once said, "There are a few of these Hunkies that are all right, and damn few. If I had my way, I'd ship the whole lot back to where they came from."

Then I thought of the incident of my getting chosen from the pit for floor work on the furnaces. Several times Pete, who was a Russian, discriminated against me in favor of Russians. Until Dick came along and began discriminating in my favor against the Hunkies.

How many Hunkies have risen to foremen's jobs, I thought, in the two departments where I have worked? One in the open-hearth--a fellow who "stuck with the company" in the Homestead Strike--and none on the blast-furnaces except Adolph, the stove-gang boss.

My recollections were broken into by a call for violent action.

"Cooler," yelled McLanahan, his voice going up into a husky shriek.

That meant molten iron inside, melting the cone-shaped water-chamber around the blast pipe. If let alone, the cooling at that place would cease, and in a short time there would follow an escape of molten metal.

"Cooler!" yelled on a blast-furnace means "Hurry like hell."

I grabbed a wrench to take the nut off the "bridle"--the first step in taking out a sort of outside cooler, the tuyère.

"Bar," said the Serbian stove-tender very quietly, picking up a specially curved one, and McLanahan took the other end.

Somebody knocked out some keys with a sledge, and the blowpipe fell on the curved bar, making the holders of it grunt. They took it off fast, for the instant the thing loosens, a flame shoots through the hole and licks its edges.

Then the tuyère comes loose with a few strokes of a pull bar. All of these moves are fast; a tuyère goes bad every other day and men work fast like soldiers at a gun drill.

But coolers don't break a lead but once in three months or so; and the cone's heavier, the gang bigger, there's less efficiency and more holler and sweat.

When the pull bar gets into action it looks a little like a mediæval mob with a battering ram. A "pull bar" is a tool designed to translate the muscle of many men into pull, on a small gripping edge against which sledging is impossible. At one end a thick hook grips the edge of the cooler, at the other a weight is brought against a flange that runs around the bar. Everybody on the gang has a piece of a rope attaching to that weight.

The stove gang moving between stoves Thirteen and Fourteen were caught and brought into this for muscle, and a couple of passing millwrights drafted.

"Hold up the goddam end," from Steve, boss by common consent.

"A little beef this time!" from a blower. "What the hell's the matter, _sick_?"

We all swear between breaths, and take a grip higher on the rope--the weight cracks the flange again, and makes the bar shiver.

When the new cooler, which resembles more nearly a gigantic flower pot, without any bottom, than anything else, is in place, there's a cry of: "Big Dolly!"

That involves four or five men, lifting a kind of ramrod with a square hammer-end, from the rack, and lugging it to the cooler.

I get near the ramming end this time; Tony is near me on the other side. Together we hold the hammer against the cooler. As the end strikes, the jar goes back through the men's hands.

"Now top."

Arms raise the bar painfully, and hold it poised a little unsteadily, sway back, tense, and drive.

"Hold it, hold it on the cooler, goddam you."

Tony and I had let our arms shake a fraction, and the hammer fell glancing on the cooler's edge.

"Now!"

Seated this time. Arms relax and stretch.

When things are ready, Adolph makes the water connections.

"Hold de goddam shovel, what you t'ink, I burn up."

A cinder-snapper holds a shovel in front of the hole to keep the flame from his hands.

"All right, all right."

The job's done; the millwrights pick up their tools, and the stove gang moves off leisurely to their cleaning. I hear the superintendent talking with a blower near the sample box.

"They did that in pretty good time," he says.

I used to eat my lunch and kept my clothes in a little brick shanty near Number 4, sharing it with the Italians of the stove gang. Although by the bosses' arrangement it was a mixed gang, Italian and Slav, the mixture did not extend to shanty arrangements, and race lines prevailed. I felt that I should learn low Italian in a few weeks if I continued with this group; the flow of it against my ear drums was incessant and some of it had already forced an entrance. Besides I was learning a great deal about: how to live, what to wear on your head, on your feet, and next your skin; where to get it--good material to resist the blast-furnace, and cheap as well; wisdom in eating and drinking, and saving money, in resting, in working, in getting a job and keeping it.

There was a whole store of industrial _mores_. In some respects the ways of living of these workmen seemed as rooted and traditional as the manners of monarchs, and as wise. I won considerable merit, when I brought in a kersey cap that I got for seventy-five cents, and lost much when I reluctantly admitted the price of my brown suit.

Everyone on the gang performed the washing up after work with the greatest thoroughness and success. They devoted minute attention to the appearance of clothes worn home. Rips and holes got a neat patch at once, and shoes were tapped at the proper period--before holes appeared. I have seen only one or two men in the mill who were not clean in their going-home clothes.

I talked to John one day on the subject of neatness. He asked, "You have to clean up good in the army?"

I dilated on the necessity of policing when wearing khaki.

He said: "Man that no look neat, no good. I no like him, girls no look at him. Bah!"

I was almost always offered some food from the bursting dinner buckets of my friends: a tomato, some sausage, a green pepper, some lettuce and cucumbers. I accepted gladly for it was always superior to my restaurant provender.

Tony told me one day that Jimmy had come over "too late from old country, to learn speak English and be American." He was thirty-one years old. He was going back this Christmas. And Tony was going too, but just for a visit. They were going to Rome. We had talked it over a good many times, all Italy in fact, people, women, farms. Tony turned to me: "You come Italy with Jimmy and me this Christmas? We go see Rome."

I assented quickly, wishing I somehow could, and was extraordinarily proud of that invitation.

I must not forget the occasion of the green pepper. One noon I sat beside Jimmy during the lunch hour. The whole Italian wing were together, sitting on benches in the brick shanty. Jimmy reached among the loaves of bread in his bucket, and hauled out a green pepper as big as an orange. He offered it to me and I accepted.

Treating it like my old friends the stuffed peppers, I bit deep. The whole shanty watched eagerly for results. I hadn't reckoned its raw strength and instantly felt like a blast-furnace on all heat. Despite all efforts I couldn't keep my face in shape, or resist putting out the fire with the water jug. The pleasure I furnished the Roman mob was enormous.

After that I learned to eat green peppers rationally and agree with my friends that they are beneficial. Beyond their health qualities they have an economic justification. With their help you can make a meal of cheap dry bread. Plain and unbuttered it costs you but six cents a half loaf which is a full meal, and hot green peppers will compel you to stow it away in self-defense. As Tony phrases it:--

"Pepper, make you eat bread like hell!"

Tony thinks that Americans eat too much that is sweet; it makes them logy and sleepy. I think he is right. Joe claims that the people in America do not know how to make bread; the wheat he says is cut when it is too green. The gang, of course, bring Italian bread in their buckets. It is certain that the American lunch of a soggy sandwich and piece of pie leaves a man heavy for the afternoon. The average dinner bucket in the shanty contains: a loaf of bread, a piece of meat,--lamb, beef, chicken, or sausage,--three or four green peppers, a couple of tomatoes, a bunch of grapes, and some vegetable mixture like tomatoes chopped with cucumbers and lettuce.

One day the gang got absorbed in stunts, climbing a ladder with the hands, giving a complete twist to a hammer with grip the same, the usual turning trick of a broomstick held to the floor, etc. My contribution was squatting slowly on the right leg with the left stiff and parallel with the floor. John complained of a lame thigh for three days after, I am gratified to say.

With Tony I occasionally picked a wrestling quarrel; he has a terrific grip and one day very nearly squeezed the life out of me in a fit of playfulness. I called him "Orso" afterward for his squeezing attribute. Tony's make-up includes a sense of humor. One day when he had rolled about on the floor in front of Number 3, he said: "Ain't you 'shamed, Charlie, you young man, fight old man like me. You twenty-two, twenty-three, me thirty-seven!"

Tony could put me beyond this vale of tears with his left hand.

VIII

I TAKE A DAY OFF

I decided on a day off. John had lately taken one for the festival at New Naples, and had come in to work the next morning with the wine still at festivals in his head. Sitting atop the blast-furnaces the other day, looking at the blue rivers and the three hills, and speculating about men going down to the sea in ships--because of the fat river-boat we could see--had made me sicken of the smell of flue-dust. I decided to take a day off.

Sometimes the foreman, when you got back after cutting a turn, would say, "I don't believe you want this job; you like loafing better; I'll give it to Jimmy." But with a seven-day week, only the mean ones hollered. Men took an occasional holiday.

I ate breakfast with a very conscious leisure at George's, putting down scrambled eggs, at 8.00 o'clock, instead of the coffee and toast at 5.15 A.M.

"No work to-day," said George; "lotza mon', eh?"

"Wrong," said I.

"Mebbe you see best girl to-day."

"Guess again."

"Married?"

"No."

"Mr. Vincent's wife is sick," said George, changing the subject.

"Oh, I'm sorry."

"He no work to-day; come in here for breakfast, ten minutes before you."

Vincent was a young American, twenty-one or two, whose brother I had known in college. He had not gone himself, but took a straw boss's job in the pipe mill. He had married six months before, and his wife lived with him in two rooms in Bickford Lodge--the other hotel in Bouton. We went to the movies together sometimes, and often met for supper at the Greek's.

I looked for Vincent, and found him reading the "Saturday Evening Post" in the front room.

"Elizabeth is sick," he explained. "I'm sticking around to-day."

We fell to talking mill.

"What hours do you work now?" I asked.

"Six to six."

"You get up at five."

"Yes, about that."

"That's not true, Philip," came over the transom from the sick room. "I set the alarm at four-thirty, Phil sleeps till five-thirty, drinks one cup of coffee, leaves his eggs, and catches the twenty-of-six car."

"You now have the story," said Phil. "It's a stinking long day, isn't it?"

"Phil has it all figured out," Elizabeth shouted from the back room. "From six to nine, he pays his rent--"

"Yes, I've figured it that way," he said. "The money I earn between nine and one is enough to pay my day's board and my wife's; one to three is clothes and shoes; three to five, all other expenses; five to six I work for myself!"

"That's bully; I think I'll figure mine."

"But there aren't any evenings, are there," he went on, "or any Sundays?"

Suddenly he looked up at the chandelier. "See all the pipes in that," he said; "I find pipes and tubes everywhere, since I've worked in the mill. It's darn interesting to pick them out. The radiator in this room is made of pipe, see; the bed in the back room; notice those banisters outside. I see them everywhere I look. If I had a little money, I'd put it in a pipe mill. 'S money in that game, once you get the market; Coglin and I have it all doped out."

For fifteen minutes, Phil's enthusiasm for pipe-manufacture built the mills of the future.

Toward noon I went to George's. The pit craneman, Herb, was there, eating George's roast beef and boiled potato, and looking half asleep.

"I'll fire you," I said.

"I'm on nights this week," he returned, with a slow smile; "I couldn't sleep, so I thought I'd get up and eat some. Besides, I've got to go to the bank. You're with the blast-furnaces now, huh?"

"Yes."

"Like 'em?"

"Yes, I think I'll like blast-furnace work," I said, "if I get to be stove-tender or something. Good boss, Beck."

"They say so. Pete's as crabby as ever in our place. He fired one of the second-helpers last week, Eric--d'you know him? Used to come in drunk every day, worked for Jock on Eight."

"That's too bad," I said; "he gave everyone a good time. Let me tell you how I amuse the gang on the blast-furnace. You know the way they break ingots for a test on the open-hearth?"

"Yes."

"It's not like that with us. I gave everybody on Five a treat because I thought it was."

Herb looked interested.

"Of course, on the open-hearth you pick them up with a tongs, when they're red-hot, and cool them in water."

Herb nodded.

"So there are always halves of test-ingots on the floor, _cold_. On the blast-furnace the stove-tender pours the test and knocks it out of the mould. Iron breaks easier than steel, so he never bothers to cool the ingot, but breaks it red-hot. Last Wednesday I wander up from the stoves when the furnace is ready to tap. The blower kicks busted halves of a test-ingot out of the way, and somebody says, 'A little too much sulphur.' I'm ambitious to learn iron smelting, too, and think I'll study the fracture. I walk in front of the blower and pick up the test."

Herb grinned.

"It wasn't red-hot," I went on; "but it had blackened over--_just_. I dropped it, and snapped my hand three feet behind me. The blower, the stove-tender, the first, second, and third helpers, and the assistant superintendent, who were all gathered, enjoyed the thing all over the place for several minutes. It gave them a good time for the afternoon."

When I left Herb, I took a walk through the Greek and Slavic quarters, and stopped a while on Superintendent's Hill, to study the graded superiority of foremen and superintendents. There were excellent little houses here, though too young and new to express any other character than moderate prosperity. Perhaps it was an ungracious thing to demand more.

I walked on, past farms, and up and down considerable hills. I lay down on the ground, in high grass, under apple trees which were near a tumble-down stone wall. It was enormously satisfactory to lie in the high grass, under an apple tree, listening to the small August noises--for a swift hour and a half.

After supper, I wanted badly to take a look at furnace fires against a night sky, and stepped out alone to do it. Close to the railroad station I set foot on the hill, and climbed past a Greek hotel and staggering tenements to a ridge. From there I could look over multitudinous roofs to the flat spaces by the river, where the mills roared and shone.

I heard heavy things dropped here and there over acres of plate flooring; they melted into a roar. The even whirr of the power house increased it, and the shrieks of machinery gave it a streaky quality. There were staccato punctuations, of course, by the whistles, and when a distant "blaw" came to me, I thought how loudly it drove into the ears of the hot-blast man, turning his wheel by a stove. But it was mostly the summed-up roar that occupied your head--an insistent thing, that made you excited and weary at the same time. The mills had been running for ten years; they always had a night-shift in Bouton.

It is easy to get excited about a steel-mill sky at night. I like to look at them. There weren't many lights at the nail mill but just enough to show broken outlines of a sheet-iron village there. The rolling-mills gave some of the brightness of hot billets through the windows, and over the stacks of the open-hearth were sparks. By closing my eyes, I could see curdling flame in the belly of Number 7. The open-hearth fires showed themselves, a confused glow under a tin roof.

Some little light came on the mills out of the night itself, though thin clouds kept washing the face of the moon, and now and then a blast-furnace got into the moonlight and looked perfectly confused with its pipe labyrinth and its stoves.

From where I stood, I could see the Bessemer converter pouring a fluid rope of white light; I knew it for a stream the thickness of a hydrant. A rusty, glowing cloud rose over the converter, changing always, and turning that patch of sky into gold. The pattern of smoke the blower knows like a textbook, and follows the progress of his steel by the color of the cloud.

My mind swept over many memories as I looked at the yellow fire of the Bessemers. There was no order or arrangement in them. They were a stream, thick in some passages, shallow in others, with scraps of all sorts riding over the top. One scrap was the price the Wop cobbler charged for soling, and another, Dick's words when he damned me for forgetting a bag of coal. Then there were things that wrung me and made the palms of my hands wet, as if thoughts went over nerves and not brain.

I looked over at the eight stacks of the open-hearth, closed my eyes, and saw Seven tapping. The second-helper broke the mud stoppage with his "picker," and liquid steel belched. Pete held up two fingers. Stanley the Pole was third-helper with me. We shoveled in the two piles. I could feel heat in my nose and throat and sparks light on the blue handkerchief I had tied around my neck. We cooled off in a breeze between the two furnaces, and as we caught our breath, watched Herb swing the ladleful, over the moulds for pouring.

I lived through the dragged hours in the morning of a long turn. Between two and four is worst--I remembered "fixing the spout" with Nick at three--wheelbarrow loads of mud and dolomite--a pitched battle with sleep--

At intervals in my memories, I grew conscious of the steady roar the mills sent me from the river; then forgot it, quite.

Finished ladles of iron came into mind, and I tried to follow in the dark the path they would take along tracks to the Bessemer. Thick red ingots of steel, big as gravestones, I knew, were coming from "soaking pits" to rolls, and getting flattened into blooms and billets. I could see trainloads of even steel shapes moving out of the freight yard to become the steel framework of the world.

"It is perfectly certain that civilization is kept from slipping, by a battle," I said to myself, beginning a line of thought.

An express train shot into view in the black valley at my feet, and passed the Bouton station, with that quickly accelerating screech that motion gives. I thought of the steel in the locomotive, and thought it back quickly into sheets, bars, blooms, back then into the monumental ingots as they stood, fiery from the open-hearth pouring, against a night sky. Then the glow left, and went out of my thinking. Each ingot became a number of wheelbarrow loads of mud, pushed over a rough floor, Fred's judgment of the carbon content, and his watching through furnace peepholes. The ladlefuls ceased as steel, becoming thirty minutes' sledging through stoppage for four men, the weight of manganese in my shovel, and the clatter of the pieces that hit the rail, sparks on my neck burning through a blue handkerchief, and the cup of tea I had with Jock, cooked over hot slag at 4.00 A.M.

A battle certainly, to make an ingot--trench work in a quiet sector, perhaps, but a year-after-year affair. The multiform steel prop which civilization hung upon came to me for a moment--rails, skyscrapers, the locomotive just passed, machinery that was making the ornament and substance of the environment of men. It rested on muscle and the will to push through "long turns," I thought. It could slip so easily. A huge mistaken calculation: not enough coal or cars to carry it. Or what if the habitual movements of the muscles were broken, or the will fallen into distemper? Suppose men thought it not worth the candle, and stopped to look on?

Were we to get more of the kind of civilization we knew, conquer more ground, or have less of it? It depended on the battle. And that hung, I was sure, on the morale of the fighter. I wondered if it wasn't cracking badly--

But at this point I considered how late it was, and whether it was not time for bed, that I might not have bad morale myself, with a headache added to it, at 6.00 A.M.

The roar again--I began breaking it up once more into the fragments of grind and rattle that composed it. In imagination I jumped on the step of the charging-machine as it moved on its rails past Seven. It shook and jarred grumpily about its business, I thought.

Near Five I got off, and started to make front-wall. I remembered how I felt on a front-wall a few weeks ago. I had tried to throw my mind into the unsleeping numbness that protects a little against the load of monotony. Other men I had seen do it, drawing a curtain over nine tenths of their brain; not thinking, but only day-dreaming faintly behind the curtain, leaving enough attention to the fore for plunging the shovel into dolomite, and keeping the arms out of heat.

Other passages from open-hearth shifts came into my mind in violent contrast. Shorty, who was always clearly to be distinguished anywhere on the floor because he wore his khaki shirt outside his pants, quarreled with me one day, and showed his temper, as one shows temper in Italy. He stood by the drinking fountain back of Number 4, hair on end, chest bare, his eyes a little bloodshot, and his mouth sullen and drawn at the corners, as it always was. The argument was about a shovel. Shorty took out a long knife from his pocket and explained its use in argument.

I remembered how the mill stayed in your mind when you left it. In the hour or so in which you washed up, walked home, ate, and went to bed, it loomed as a black sheet-iron foreman, demanding that you get to bed and prepare for the noise and jar it had in store for you at 5.00 o'clock. That sense of imminence was a thing to bear, especially if you wondered whether sleep would come at all.

Then there were long strings of neutral days when you did not think well of life, or ill of it. And there were the occasional satisfactions. The keen pleasure of acquiring a knack, as when I learned to "get it across" in back-wall. And the pleasures of rough-house. Jock, the first-helper on Seven, had once told me in a burst of enthusiasm for furnace work that he "liked the game because there was so much hell-raisin' in it."

In the midst of listening to the roar, and thinking of shifts, good and bad, it occurred to me abruptly that men would make front-walls in front of hot furnaces for several hundred years, in all likelihood. I wondered. Perhaps Mr. Wells's army of inventors would alter that. For several hundred years, thousands of men had labored without imagination or hope in Egypt, and built the Pyramids. There were similarities. Civilization rested on the uninspired, unimaginative drudgery of nine tenths of mankind. "There have always been hewers of wood, and drawers of water," I heard some elderly person say at me, in a voice of finality.

I did not stop to reply to the implications of that sentence in my own mind, but thought more closely of the Pyramid-builders I had known in the pit.

Marco drew Croatian words for me with a piece of chalk on his shovel, and I put down English ones for him. He had attended night school after working twelve hours a day in Pittsburgh. But Marco was, perhaps, exceptionally gifted.

The jobs we did were pick-and-shovel jobs. But have you ever used a pick on hot slag? There is judgment and knack, and he is a fool who says that "anyone can do the job." Whenever the chance for special skill happened by, as in hooking the crane to a difficult piece of scrap, there was an abundance, and much rivalry to show it off. Could such substance of "knacks" ever grow into anything more for this "nine tenths of mankind?" I wonder.

How much of strength, of skill, of possible loyalty, does modern industry tap from the average Hunky?

I asked the question, but did not answer it--for modern industry. I answered it for the gang in the pit and the crew on the stoves of the blast-furnace.

Not half.

There were vast unused areas of men's minds and of their muscles, as well as of their powers of will, that were wholly unreached in the rough job adjustment of modern industry. I mean among the so-called groups of "lower intelligence." It was an interesting speculation whether any engineer would ever find a means of tapping this unused voltage.

I suddenly thought how inconceivable the stoppage of that roar would be. A silent valley, with all those ordered but gigantic forces stopped, would be almost terrible. But just such a silence was likely to happen. By a walk-out.

The great strike had been going a week, in other towns--tying up the steel production of the country. Meetings had followed, and riots, with an occasional bloody conflict with the "mud guard" of Pennsylvania.

Part of that untapped force! I said to myself--dynamos of power of all sorts. Would it bludgeon over a change in steel conditions, or flow back, waste voltage, into the ground?

The rumble in the valley again. Could I hear the shake of the charging-machine at this distance? The Bessemer glow had changed. The nail mill roar seemed to increase.

I went down the hill. When I reached Mrs. Farrell's and climbed into my back room, I set the alarm for 4.00 o'clock, putting the clock a foot and a half from the bed. It has a knob on top, and you can stop it by knocking down the knob with the palm of your hand. I went to sleep, to dream about the men who built the Pyramids.

IX

"NO CAN LIVE"

I went into the employment office one day, to fix up the papers of my transfer to the blast-furnace, and got into a talk with Burke, the employment manager, about personnel work.

"What do you think of the game?" I asked.

"It's great," he returned; "it's working with human material--that's what it is; there's nothing like it. But," he added, "if you have any ideas about unions keep them in the back of your head--that is, if you want a job in steel. They won't stand for that sort of thing."

He looked down on his desk, where there was a news-clipping of the demands of the American Federation of Labor's Strike Committee--the twelve demands. He pointed to it.

"We give them practically all of these here in Bouton," he said, "all but two or three."

"The eight-hour day?" I queried.

"Yes, we give them the eight-hour day. Overtime for everything over eight hours."

"Could I stop work to-day after eight hours' work on the furnace?" I asked. "Could anyone before six o'clock, and hold his job?"

"Oh, no," he returned.

"I should call that a twelve-hour day," I said.

The "safety man" came in, and interrupted. He was a stocky young man with the intelligent face of an engineer.

"That man might do something for the steel-worker," I thought.

The men on the furnaces were talking about the strike that day. One young American said: "Well, strike starts Monday. Damned if I won't go if the rest do."

There were no leaders about, and it was unlikely, perhaps, that any would appear. There seemed to be a current opinion that any organizers "get taken off the train before they get to Bouton."

The Old Home Week Carnival had been called off through the influence of the mill authorities. They were afraid of a strike committee coming from the next town, and having a parade to lead the men out.

A special train went through Bouton that day at about five o'clock. Everyone watched it from the furnaces, and speculated what it meant. It was a double-header and passed through at top speed.

"Troops going to quell strike riots," the Assistant Superintendent, Lonergan, suggested. "A lot of those fellers are overseas men of the National Guard. They're havin' trouble with 'em. I don't blame the boys a damn bit for not wantin' 'to preserve order in the steel towns,' as the papers call it," he concluded, with a grin.

Haverly, an American blower, came up. "Fight for democracy overseas and against it over here," he said.

It is difficult to say what the men here would have done if they had had leadership. They had none, since no organizers whatever appeared, and no speechmaking occurred in town. There was pretty good feeling toward the company itself, which is, I believe, one of the best. A deep-seated hatred, however, existed against the whole system of steel. There was anger and resentment that ran straight through, from the cinder-snapper to the high-paid blowers, melters, and, in some cases, to the superintendents.

I was quite amazed--because of what the newspapers were continually saying--at the absence of any sociological ideas whatever. I remember one day I met my first and only Socialist. He was a stove-tender of great skill and long experience; he told me how bad he thought war was, and how he couldn't understand why people didn't live in peace and be sociable with one another. But, though there were few doctrines, except in rare instances, there was a mighty stream of complaint against certain things such as the company-owned town, the twelve-hour day, the twenty-four-hour shift, the seven-day week, and certain remediable dangers. It pervaded all ranks.

There were certain days in my summer in the mills that burned among the others like a hot ingot of steel on the night-shift. One of them was the cleaning out of No. 15 stove early in my gang apprenticeship. Ordinarily, the duties of the stove gang were to move leisurely from stove to stove while they were alight, and remove cinder from the combustion chambers. It was pried up with a crowbar, and hoed out on to a wheelbarrow. But when a stove was cooled for thorough cleaning, we did our real work.

The gas was turned off in the combustion chamber on the night-shift, and the stove allowed to cool for several hours. We prepared to go inside her, the next morning, to cut away the hardened cinder. John, the Slav, went in first, with pick and shovel, and worked an hour. Then Tony turned to me.

"You go in with me, I show you," he said.

We put on wooden sandals, foot-shaped blocks an inch thick, with lacing straps, donned jackets that buttoned very tight in the neck, and pulled down the ear-flaps of our kersey caps. Over our eyes we wore close-fitting goggles. We looked like Dutch peasants dressed for motoring. The combustion chamber is a space eight or ten feet long by three or four wide. It was partly filled with cooling cinder, some of it yielding to the pick, some only to the bar and sledge. Someone shoved an electric light through the hot-blast valve, and the appearance of the place was like a mine gallery. The chamber was hot and gaseous, but it was quite possible to work inside over an hour. After Tony had loosened several shovelfuls, I could see that the pick failed against a great shelf of the stuff that glowed red along its base.

"Bar," he called.

The bar came in through the little round door in three or four minutes. He held it for me, and I sledged. It needed a little work like this to make you yearn for real air. The heat weakened you quickly. We worked about forty minutes, and then lay on our bellies and wriggled out. The means of entrance and egress is a small door, about fourteen inches in diameter, which means absorbing a good deal of cinder when you caterpillar through.

We finished the whole job in three hours, and then went to the other side of the stove and cleared out half a carload of flue-dust from the brick arches that compose the groundwork of that side of the stove. The dust lay a foot or two thick, and one man worked with a shovel in each archway. Here it was hardly hot at all, but merely thick with the red iron-dust. As you bent over inside the archways, knee-deep in the stuff, it would rise and settle on your arms and shoulders; you kept up a blowing with your nose to keep it out. Some of it was hard and soggy, and pleasanter shoveling. Five or six of us could work inside the stove at once, in the different archways, each with a teapot lamp near by, and a large, light shovel. Men at the entrances hoed the stuff out as we threw back.

But it was the next day's cleaning that I remember most strongly. The word went about that we were to "poke her out," to-morrow. That night the gang, and especially John, the Italian, instructed me very seriously to bring a selected list of clothing the next morning: a jacket, a cap with flaps for the ears, two pairs of gloves, and two bandanna handkerchiefs.

We went on top of Number 15, and started to dress for the job of poking her out. Over our faces we tied the handkerchiefs, leaving only our eyes exposed. Our necks and ears were covered with the winter caps, our hands with two pairs of gloves.

The stove, as I said, looked like a very tall boiler: half was a long brick-lined flue, where the gas burned; half, a mass of brick checkerwork for retaining the heat. Masses of flue-dust had clogged the holes in the checkerwork and reduced its power for holding heat. It was our job to poke out that dust.

John and Mike and I unscrewed the trap at the top very deliberately, and dropped a ladder down. There was a space left at the top of the checkerwork for cleaning purposes. We worked on top of that.

Jimmy, I think, went in first, taking a teapot lamp with him and a rod. In three minutes he was out again, and Mike down. I began to wonder what the devil they faced for three minutes in the chamber. Tony looked at me and said, "I teach you, now."

I tied the handkerchiefs around my face, sticking the end of one in my collar, and followed Tony.

My first sensation, as I stepped off the ladder to the checkerwork inside the stove, was relief. It was hot, but quite bearable. I picked my way slowly to Tony, and tried to study in the dull light his motions with the rod. The dust was too thick and the lamp guttered too violently for me to follow his hand. I bent over to watch the end of his rod, and recoiled. I felt as I had when the ladle got under me on the manganese platform--flame seemed to go in with breath. It was the hot blast that continued to rise from the checkerwork, and made it impossible to work beyond three minutes in the stove.

When I mounted the ladder, and moved out into the air, I thought, "I haven't learned much from Tony, except that he somehow cleaned the checkerwork, and it's best to keep the head high; no more bending."

Five minutes passed, and I was scheduled to take my turn alone. Every man poked three holes and came up. I was full of resolutions for glory and poked four, coming up rather elated. John looked at me sadly when I stepped off the ladder.

"What's the matter, Charlie? You only poke 'em half out." He simulated my motions with the rod. I hadn't qualified.

John, the Slav, was tying his handkerchief back of his ears.

"I show him; you come with me, Charlie, I show you all right."

I wasn't gleeful. The last time I had done a job with John, we had carried pipes, many more at a time than anyone else. John, I anticipated, would stay in the stove, poking away, till ordinary mortals lost their lungs.

He picked up a poking rod, after very carefully putting on his gloves, and went over to the ladder, descending slowly. I followed him with my teeth in my lips, feeling for the rungs of the ladder with my feet, and holding my poking rod in my right hand. When I stepped off at the bottom, I felt my fingers closing over the bent handle of the rod in a death grip. I determined on no half-way poking.

John set to work at once, and I after him, rattling my rod in the checkerwork with all my strength, and pushing her in up to the hilt. I did three holes, and John four. My lungs were like paper on fire, when John turned to go up. We climbed out of the hole, and took down the handkerchiefs. The gang looked at me, and then at John.

"He do all right," he cried rather loudly, "every time all right."

I felt extraordinarily elated, and much as if John had given me a diploma, with a cum laude inscribed in gold letters.

There was later a trip down inside with Jimmy. He shouted a great many things at me in Anglo-Italian, which caused me a good deal of anxiety but no understanding. I learned on coming up that he was trying to tell me not to approach the combustion chamber adjoining the checkerwork. That is a clear shaft to the bottom. I was given in some detail the story of the man who fell down a year ago, and was found with no life in him at the bottom.

"Kill him quick," said John the Italian; "take him out through hot-blast valve."

Two burns on my wrists were an embarrassing legacy of this affair, for they required an explanation whenever I took off my coat. My arms were too long and shot from my sleeves, when poking out, and got exposed to the gas and flame, which were still rising in the checkerwork.

This incident put me into good standing with John, the Slav, I am delighted to say. He was a stoical person, without much conversational warmth, but he approached me at the foot of the furnace steps in the late afternoon; "Some people, no show new man; I show him, I Slovene, no Italian, been in this country eighteen year." That was about all, but enough for a basis of friendship.

I sat on my bed and sewed up a rip in my trousers, eleven inches long. It was lucky I had salvaged that khaki "housewife" from the army. My gray flannel shirt lay on the bed. There were little holes, you could pass matches through, all over it, with brown edges that sparks had made.

Would that sleeve last?

I made it last.

Then there were the pants.

That second-hand paint-spattered pair of mine had lasted five days. The next, a sort of overally kind, had stood it a month, the last week in entire disgrace; these mohair ones I got at the Company store were going yet. But the seat needed emergency attention.

After sewing-time, I got up and stared out of the window at Mrs. Farrell's four stalks of corn. They were doing well. I looked across at the back road, along which a junk-dealer's wagon jangled. The mud cliff was the horizon of the prospect. I watched a little stream going down it among roots, which I had watched a good many times before, and finally picked up my army field-shoes, and took them out to a Greek cobbler for resoling.

I shall remember for all time the "blowing in" of Number 9, which means its first lighting up. A blast-furnace, once lit, remains burning till the end of its existence. I got inside her, and was delighted to satisfy a deep-seated curiosity: we crawled in the cinder notch. The hearth of the furnace lay six or eight feet below the brick flooring, and the effect of standing inside, with the fourteen round blowpipe holes admitting a little sunlight, was like being in a round ship's cabin, with fourteen portholes, except that the hollow furnace shot up to dark distances that the light didn't penetrate.

We built a scaffolding six or eight feet above the hearth to hold firewood, and filled in beneath with shavings and kindling. Then we took in cords upon cords of six-foot sticks and set them on end on top; there were two or three layers of these, and on top of them, according to the orthodox rule, were dumped quantities of coke, dumped down from the top, of course, by skips; and above that, light charges of ore. Below the scaffold, we spent half a day arranging kindling, with shavings placed at each blowpipe hole. When the wood was arranged,--a three-days' job,--the crane brought us some barrels of petrol, and we poured about half a one in each blowpipe hole. The cinder notch was likewise thoroughly provided with soaked shavings. That was to be the torch.

Men assembled as at a house-raising. Nobody worked from 11.00 to 12.00 on the day of blowing in Number 9. From all parts of the blast-furnace they came, and arranged themselves about the cinder notch, and on the girders above. The men and their bosses came. There was the labor foreman, and the foreman of all the carpenters, of all the window-glass fixers, all the blowers, the electricians, the master mechanic. Then came the superintendent of the open-hearth and Bessemer, Mr. Towers, and Mr. Brown his boss; and, finally, Mr. Erkeimer, the G. M., with an unknown Mr. Clark from Pittsburgh.

We waited from 11.00 to 12.00 for Mr. Clark to come and drop a spark into the shavings. When he arrived the crowd parted quickly for him, and, with Mr. Erkeimer and Mr. Swenson, he stood talking and smiling for some minutes more at the notch. Mr. Clark was a tall slender person, with glasses and an aspect of unfamiliarity with a blast-furnace environment. No one knew, or ever found out, who he was. Mr. Swenson showed him, very carefully, how to ignite the shavings with a teapot lamp. Twice the photographer, who had come early, got focused for the awful moment, and twice Mr. Clark deferred lighting the shavings and went on talking with Mr. Swenson. Finally, he bent over and lit them. Mr. Swenson rapidly turned to the gang behind him.

"Three cheers for Mr. Clark!" he cried, raising his hand. When it is recalled that none of us knew the man we cheered, it wasn't a bad noise. The furnace smoked lustily in a few minutes, and several helpers rushed around it to thrust red-hot tapping bars in the blow-holes. They ignited at once the petroleum and shavings packed around them.

Immediately after the cheers, Mr. Swenson's bright-looking office-boy hurried through the gang with a box of cigars, another immemorial custom in operation. The more aggressive got cigars, then disappeared. It was a little odd during the afternoon to see a sweat-drenched cinder-snapper at his work with a long black cigar between his teeth. When they were burned out, the department settled back to normal production.

Many years might pass before such another occasion in that place. During that period there would be no slackening of the melting fires, or of the work of the helpers who kept them alive.

I stood on the platform waiting for the 10.05 train, and turned for a look at the landscape of brick and iron. I remembered a Hunky who had worked in the tube-mill for eighteen years and at length decided to go back to the old country. On the day he left, he went out the usual gate at the tempered after-work pace, walked the gravel path to the railroad embankment, and stopped for a moment to look back at the mill. He stood like a stone-pile on the embankment for a quarter of an hour, looking at the cluster of steel buildings and stacks. He had spent a life in them, making pipe, and I haven't a doubt this was the first time it came to him in perspective. From my own brief memories, I could guess at those fifteen minutes: pain, struggle, monotony, rough-house, laughter, endurance, but principally toil without imagination.

I thought quickly over my summer in the mills, and it looked rather pleasurable in retrospect. Things do. There's a verse on that sentiment in Lucretius, I think. I thought of sizzling nights; of bosses, friendly and unfriendly; of hot back-walls, and a good first-helper; of fighting twenty-four-hour turns; of interesting days as hot-blast man; of dreaded five-o'clock risings, and quiet satisfying suppers; of what men thought, and didn't think-- And again, of how much the life was incident to a flinty-hearted universe and how much to the stupidity of men. I knew there were scores of matters arranging themselves in well-ordered data and conclusion in my head. I had a cool sense that, when they came out of the thinking, they would not be counsels of perfection, or denunciations, but would have substance, be able to weather theorists, both the hard-boiled and the sentimental, being compounded of good ingredients--tools, and iron ore, and the experience of workmen.

Is there any one thing though that stands out? I heard the train whistle a warning of its arrival. Perhaps, if a very complicated matter like the steel-life can be compounded in a phrase, it had been done by the third-helper on Six. On the day we had thrown manganese into a boiling ladle, in a temperature of 130°, he had turned to me slowly and summed it all up.

"To hell with the money," he said; "no can live!"

EPILOGUE

A FURNACE-WORKER TALKS OVER THE TWELVE-HOUR DAY

EPILOGUE

I have tried to put down the record of the whole of my life, as I lived it, and the whole of my environment, as I saw and felt it, among the steel-workers in 1919. To me the book is the story of certain obscure personalities, and the record of certain crude and vital experiences we passed through together. I think it may be read as a story of men and things.

Many people, however, have asked me the questions: What were the conditions in steel and what is your opinion of them? What do you think of the twelve-hour day? or, How bad was the heat? and the like. And, What do you suggest? Since no man who has worked in an American steel mill, whatever his sympathies or his indifference, can fail to have opinions on these points, I have decided to set down mine, for what they are worth, as simply and informally as I can.

There is a proper apology, I think, that can be made for the presumption of conclusions based upon an individual experience. An intimate and detailed record of processes and methods and the physical and mental environment of the workers in any basic industry is rare enough, I believe, except when it is heightened or foreshortened for a political purpose. No industrial reform can rest upon a single narrative of personal experience; but such a narrative, if genuine, can supply its portion of data, and possibly point where scientific research or public action can follow.

Let me state my bias in the matter as well as I can. I was by no means indifferent to economic and social values when I began my job; in fact, I confess to being interested keenly in most of them. But I never sought information as an "investigator." Most of my energy of mind and body was spent upon doing the job in hand; and what impressions I received came unsought in the course of a day's work. I began my job with an almost equal interest in the process of steel-making, the administration of business, and the problem of industrial relations.

Some apology I owe to the several hundred steel-workers with whom I worked, and the many thousands in other mills, since most of them know from a far longer and deeper experience the conditions and policies of which I speak. My sole reason for raising my own voice in the presence of this multitude of authorities is that the Hunkies, who constitute the major part, are unable either to find an audience or to be understood if they find one. Again, they are like Pete, who, when I asked him what were the duties of a third-helper, which I have described to the length of several pages in this book, replied: "He has a hell of a lot to do." And as to the American workers and bosses, most of them lack the opportunity of any speaking that will be heard beyond their own furnaces; and, again, they are too close to their environment to see what is in it. They are natives, while I am more nearly a foreigner, and can see their steel country with something of the freshness and perspective that a foreigner brings.

I want to add that the management of the mill where I worked was a body of men exceedingly efficient and fair-minded, it appeared to me; and any remarks upon the twelve-hour day, or other conditions, are critical of an arrangement typical of American steel-management as a whole, and not of individuals or a locality.

The twelve-hour day makes the life of the steel-worker different in a far-reaching manner from the life of the majority of his fellow workers.

It makes the industry different in its fundamental organization and temper from an eight-hour or a ten-hour industry.

It transforms the community where men live whose day is twelve hours long.

"What is it really like? How much of the time do you actually work? Are you 'all in' when you wash up in the morning after the shift, and go home?"

To tell it exactly, if I can: You go into the mill, a little before six, and get into your mill clothes. There may be the call for a front-wall while you're buttoning your shirt. You pick up a shovel and run into a spell of fairly hot work for three quarters of an hour. On another day you may loaf for fifteen minutes before anything starts. After front-wall, you take a drink from the water fountain behind your furnace, and wash your arms, which have got burned a little, and your face, in a trough of water. A "clean-up" job follows in front of the furnace, which means shoveling slag--still hot--down the slag-hole for ten minutes, and loading cold pieces of scrap, which have fallen on the floor, into a box. Pieces weigh twenty, forty, one hundred pounds; anything over, you hook up with a chain and let the overhead crane move it. This for a half-hour.

Suddenly someone says, "Back-wall!" Lasts say thirty or forty minutes. It's hot--temperature, 150° or 160° when you throw your shovelful in--and lively work for back and legs. Everybody douses his face and hands with water to cool off, and sits down for twenty minutes. Making back-wall has affinities with stoking, only it's hotter while it lasts. The day is made up of jobs like these--shoveling manganese at tap-time, "making bottom," bringing up mud and dolomite in wheelbarrows for fixing the spout, hauling fallen bricks out of the furnace.

They vary in arduousness: all would be marked "heavy work" in a job specification. They are all "hard-handed" jobs, and some of them done in high heat. Between, run intervals from a few minutes to two or three hours. From some of the jobs it is imperative to catch your breath for a spell. Sledging a hard spout, making a hot back-wall, knocks a gang out temporarily--for fifteen or twenty minutes; no man could do those things steadily without interruption. It is like the crew resting on their oars after a sprint. Again, some of the spells between are just leisure; the furnace doesn't need attention, that's all; you're on guard, waiting for action. Furnace work has similarities with cooking; any cook tends his stove part of the time by watching to see that nothing burns up.

I have had two or three hours' sleep on a "good" night-shift; two or three "easy" days will follow one another. Then there will come steady labor for nearly the whole fourteen hours, for a week.

So, briefly, you don't work every minute of those twelve hours. Besides the delays that arise out of the necessities of furnace work, men automatically scale down their pace when they know there are twelve or fourteen hours ahead of them: seven or eight hours of actual swinging of sledge or shovel. But some of the extra time is utterly necessary for immediate recuperation after a heavy job or a hot one. And none of the spells, it should be noticed, are "your own time." You're under strain for twelve hours. Nerves and will are the Company's the whole shift--whether the muscles in your hands and feet move or are still. And the existence of the long day makes possible unrelieved labor, hard and hot, the whole turn of fourteen hours, if there is need for it.

Inseparable from the twelve-hour day in the open-hearth where I worked were the twenty-four-hour shift, and the seven-day week.

What does it mean to make steel twenty-four hours a day? to your muscles, to your thoughts, to the production of steel? Sunday morning, at 7.00, you begin work. There is an hour off at 5.00 P.M. Front-wall, fix spout, tap, back-wall, front-wall, fix spout, tap, back-wall--the second half is something of a game between time and fatigue. For a hot back-wall, or sledging out a bad tap-hole, may as easily come upon you at 5.00 or 6.00 of the second morning as at noon of the first day.

I've worked "long turns" that I didn't mind overmuch, and others that ground my soul. If you are young and fit, you can work a steady twenty-four hours at a hot and heavy job and "get away." But in my judgment even the strongest of the Czechoslovaks, Serbs, and Croats who work the American steel-furnaces cannot keep it up, twice a month, year after year, without substantial physical injury. "A man got to watch himself, this job, tear himself down," the second-helper on Seven told me. He had worked at it six years, and was feeling the effects in nerves and weight. Let me make an exception: one Hunky, a helper on Number 4, was famed for having "a back like a mule." He could, I am sure, work seven twenty-four-hour shifts _a week_ with comfort. But for all other men, with the exception of Joe, the long turn is an unreasonable overtaxing of human strength. Lastly, the effort of will, the "nerve" that the thing calls for in the last hours before that second morning, is too heavy a demand, for any wages whatever. The third-helper on Number 8 took, I think, a reasonable attitude when he said: "To hell with the money, no can live!"

The "long turn" leaves a man thoroughly tired, "shot," for several shifts following. As I said in the first part of this book, it is hardly before Friday that the gang makes up sleep and comes into the mill in normal temper. Here is the condition. You have ten hours for recuperation after twenty-four hours' work. Washing up in a hurry, getting breakfast, and walking home gets you in bed by 8.00. Eight hours' sleep is the best you can get. At 4.00 o'clock you must dress, eat, and walk to the mill. Men who live an hour or more from the mill, as some do, must, of course, subtract that time as well from sleep. After the ten hours off, you return to the mill at 5.00, to begin another fourteen-hours' steel-making. That night is unquestionably the worst of the two-weeks' cycle. The nervous excitement that helps any man through the twenty-four turn has gone--quite. The seven or eight hours of day sleep seem to have taken that away without substituting rest; and what you have on your hands is an overfatigued body, refusing to be goaded further. My observation was that, on this Monday after, men made mistakes; there were arguments, bad temper, and fights, and a much higher frequency of collision with the foreman. Efficiency, quality, discipline dropped.

The other accompaniment of the twelve-hour shift, the averaging of seven working-days per week, has, I am convinced, an equally bad physiological effect upon the healthiest of men. As I have said earlier, "the twenty-four hours off," which comes once a fortnight on alternate weeks to the twenty-four-hour shift, is a curiously contracted holiday. It comes at the conclusion of fourteen hours' work on the night-shift, and is immediately followed by ten hours' work on the day-shift. As far as I could observe, men went on a long debauch for twenty-four hours, or, if the week had been particularly heavy, slept the entire twenty-four. In the first instance they deprived themselves of any sleep, and went to work Monday in an extraordinarily jaded condition. In the second, they forfeited their only holiday for two weeks.

Another feature that impresses you when you actually work under the system is that the sleep you get is troubled, at best. You are compelled to go to bed one week by day, and the next by night. By about Friday, I found my body getting itself adjusted to day sleep; but the change, of course, was due again Monday. And yet, by comparing my sleeping hours with those of my fellow workers, I found my day rest was averaging better than theirs. Many of them, I found, went to bed at 9.00 in the morning and got up about 2.00. They complained of being unable to sleep properly by day. The body will adjust itself to continued day sleeping, I know; but apparently not to the weekly shifts, from day sleep to night sleep, customary in steel.

The "long turn" of twenty-four hours and the "seven-day week" I have never heard defended, either in the mill by any foreman or workman, or outside by any member of the management, or even in a public statement. If, by an arrangement of extra workers, it were possible to eliminate these features and still keep the twelve-hour work-day for six days a week, there would, I think, be a certain number of men ready enough to work under that arrangement. I met one man, for example, who said: "Good job, work all time, no spend, good job save." There are a few foreign workers whose plan is to work steadily for ten or fifteen years, and then carry the money back to the old country. These men are willing to spend the maximum time within mill walls, since they have no intention of marrying, settling down, and becoming Americans. But their numbers are small, and the desirability of their type is questionable. It is unwise, at any rate, to build the labor policy of a great industry in their interest.

On those first night-shifts I wondered if my feelings on the arrangement of hours were not solely those of a sensitive novice. I'd "get used to it," perhaps. But I found that first-helpers, melters, foremen, "old timers," and "Company men" were for the most part against the long day. They were all looking forward, with varying degrees of hope, to the time when the daily toll of hours would be reduced.

The twelve-hour day gives a special character to the industry itself as well as to the men. I remember noticing the difference in pace, in tempo, from that of a machine shop or a cotton mill. Men learn to cultivate deliberate movement, with a view to the fourteen-hour stretch they have before them. When I began work with a pickaxe on some hot slag, on my first night, I was reproached at once: "Tak' it eas', lotza time before seven o'clock." And the foremen fell in with the men. They winked at sleeping, for they did it themselves.

Another kind of inefficiency that flowed quite naturally from excessive hours was "absenteeism," and a high "turnover" of labor. Men kept at the job as long as they could stick it, and then relaxed into a two or three weeks' drunk. Or they quit the Company and moved to another mill, for the sake of change and a break in the drudgery. I remember an Austrian with whom I worked in the "pit," who said he was going to get drunk in Pittsburgh, go to the movies, and move to Johnstown the following Monday. He had been on the job three weeks. New faces appeared on the gangs constantly, and dropped out as quickly. I achieved my promotion from common labor in the pit to the floor of the furnace by supplying on a twenty-four-hour shift, when absentees are apt to be numerous, and it is hard fully to man the furnaces. The company kept a large number of extra men on its pay roll because of the number of absentees, and the turnover percentage ran high.

It is impossible to live under this loose régime--with high turnover, and the work-pace necessarily keyed low because of the excessive burden of hours spent under the roof of the mill--and not wonder if there isn't an engineering problem in it. The impression was of a vast wastage of man-hours. The question suggested itself: "Is it in the long run, good business--an efficient thing?" An exhaustive investigation by engineers and economists could surely be made to answer this question.

People ask: "Is there any mechanical or metallurgical reason for the twelve-hour day?" The answer is: No. There are several plants of independent steel companies that run on a three-shift, eight-hour basis; and the steel mills in England, France, Germany, and Italy operate with three eight-hour shifts. The long day is not a metallurgical _necessity_, therefore. The metallurgical _explanation_ of the twelve-hour day, however, is this. The process of making iron or steel is necessarily a continuous one, because the heat of the furnaces must be conserved by keeping up the fires twenty-four hours a day. So the division into either two shifts of twelve hours or three shifts of eight becomes imperative. Other industries might reduce their hours gradually from twelve to ten, and then to nine. With steel the full jump from twelve to eight must be made. Without doubt, this metallurgical factor accounts in some measure for the conservatism of the steel companies in making the change.

It is none of my business, in summing up a personal experience, to review the story of steel mills which have undertaken a three-shift plan of operation, of eight hours each, in place of the two shifts of twelve. But the study has been made by engineers and economists, who have collected figures as to the cost of operation on an eight-hour basis as contrasted with a twelve. The increased cost in product which such a change would entail is between three and five per cent.[3]

The community of workers takes on a special character, where men live whose day is twelve hours long. "We haven't any Sundays," the men said; and "There isn't time enough at home." This is the most far-reaching effect of "hours" in steel, I think, and easily transcends the others.

"What do you do when you leave the mill?" people ask. "On my night-week," I answer, "I wash up, go home, eat, and go to bed." Anything that happens in your home or city that week is blotted out, as if it occurred upon a distant continent; for every hour of the twenty-four is accountable, in sleep, work, or food, for seven days; unless a man prefers, as he often does, to cheat his sleep-time and have his shoes tapped, or take a drink with a friend.

The day-week is decidedly better. You work only ten hours, from seven to five. Those evenings men spend with their families, or at the movies, or going to bed early to rest up for the "long turn." It is not, however, as if it were a "ten-hour industry." Some of the wear and tear of the seven fourteen-hour shifts of the night-week protracts itself into the day-week, and you hear men saying: "This ten-hour day seems to tire me more than the fourteen; funny thing." However the week may be divided up, it is impossible to keep the human body from recording the fact that it averages seven twelve-hour days, or eighty-four hours of work, in the week.

For the men who did a straight twelve hours, "six to six," for seven days, the sense of "no time off" was very strong. I worked these hours for a time on the blast-furnace, and remember that the complaint was, not so much that there wasn't some bit of an evening before you, but that there was no _untired_ time when you were good for anything--work or play. When you had sat about for perhaps an hour after supper, you recovered enough to crave recreation. A movie was the very peak to which you could stir yourself. There were men who went further. I knew a young Croat in Pittsburgh who attended night-school after a twelve-hour day. But he is the only one of all the steel-workers I met who attempted such heroism. And he had to stop after a few weeks.

Now it should be mentioned that some of the social life that most workers find outside the mill gets squeezed somehow into it. In the spells between front-walls we used to talk everything, from scandal about the foreman to the presidential election. The daily news, labor troubles, the late war, the second-helper's queer ways passed back and forth when you washed up, or ate out of your bucket, or paused between stunts. Then there was kidding, comradely boxing, and such playfulness as hitching the crane-hooks to a man's belt. One first-helper remarked: "I like the game because there's so much hell-raisin' in it."

But this is hardly a substitute for a man's time to himself, for seeing his wife, knowing his own children, and participating in the life of larger groups. Soldiers have a faculty for taking so good-humoredly the worst rigors of a campaign, that some people have made the mistake of turning their admirable adaptability into a justification for war.

The twelve-hour day, I believe, tends to discourage a man from marrying and settling into a regular home life. Men complained that they didn't see their wives, or get to know their children, since the schedule of hours shrunk matters at home to food, sleep, and the necessities. "My wife is always after me to leave this game," Jock used to say, the first-helper on Seven. Mathematically, it figures something like this: twelve hours of work, an hour going to and from the mill, an hour for eating, eight hours of sleep--which leaves two hours for all the rest, shaving, mowing the lawn, and the "civilizing influence of children."

I have no brief to offer for the eight-hour day as a general panacea for evils in industry. I merely bear witness to the fact that the twelve-hour day, as I observed it, tended either to destroy, or to make unreasonably difficult, that normal recreation and participation in the doings of the family group, the church, or the community, which we ordinarily suppose is reasonable and part of the American inheritance.

Steel has often been described by its old timers as a "he-man's game." That has even figured as an argument against any innovation that might lighten the load of the workers in it, and against any change in the twelve-hour day itself. The industry has certainly a rough-and-tumble quality and a dangerous streak in it, that will always call for men with some toughness of fibre. But I question whether the quality of the men it attracts, and the type it moulds within its own ranks, will ever be improved by the twelve-hour day. The excessive hours, I know, operate as a check against many younger men, who would otherwise enter the industry. The inherent fascination of making steel is, I think, very great. It was for me. But the appeal is the mechanical achievement of the industry, its size, power, and importance, even its dangers. The twelve-hour day, on the other hand, tends to place a premium on time-serving and drudgery, in lieu of the more masculine qualities of adventure and initiative.

FOOTNOTE:

[3] The Three Shift System in Steel--Horace B. Drury: an address to the Taylor Society and certain sections of the Am. Soc. Mech. Engineers and of the Am. Inst. Electr. Engineers, Dec. 3, 1920.