Chapter 10

The second week I got closer to the girls. Or, more truthfully put, they got closer to me. At the other factories I had asked most of the questions and answered fewer. Here I could hardly get a question in edgewise for the flood which was let loose on me. I explained in each factory that I lived with a widow who brought me from California to look after her children. I did some work for her evenings and Saturday afternoon and Sunday, to pay for my room and board. Not only was I asked every conceivable question about myself, but at the dress factory I had to answer uncountable questions about the lady I lived with--her "gentlemen friends," her clothes, her expenses. It was like pulling teeth for me to get any information out of the girls.

In such a matter as reading, for example. Every girl I asked was fond of reading. What kind of books? Good books. Yes, but the names. I got _We Two_ out of Sarah, and Jean was reading Ibsen's _Doll's House_. It was a swell book, a play. After hours one night she told me the story. Together with Ada's concern over my grammar it can be seen that I left the dress factory in intellectual advance over the condition in which I entered.

The girls I had the opportunity of asking were not such "movie" enthusiasts, on the whole. Only now and then they went to "a show." Less frequently they spoke of going to the Jewish Theater. No one was particularly excited over dancing--in fact, Sarah, who looked the blond type of the dance-every-night variety, thought dancing "disgusting." Shows weren't her style. She liked reading. Whenever I got the chance I asked a girl what she did evenings. The answer usually was, "Oh, nothing much." One Friday I asked a group of girls at lunch if they weren't glad the next day was Saturday and the afternoon off. Four of them weren't glad at all, because they had to go home and clean house Saturday afternoons, and do other household chores. "Gee! don't you hate workin' round the house?"

I wonder how much of the women-in-industry movement is traceable to just that.

The first day I was at the dress factory a very dirty but pleasant-faced little Jewish girl said to me, "Ever try workin' at home? Ain't it just awful?" She had made thirty-two dollars a week beading at her last place--didn't know what she'd get here.

I had hoped to hear murmurings and discussions about the conditions of the garment trades and the unions--not a word the whole time. Papers were full of a strike to be called the next week throughout the city, affecting thousands of waist and dress makers. It might as well have been in London. Not an echo of interest in it reached our factory. I asked Sarah if she had ever worked in a union shop. "Sure." "Any different from this?" "Different? You bet it's different. Boss wouldn't dare treat you the way you get treated here." But as usual I was yelled for and got no chance ever to pin Sarah to details.

A group of girls in the dressing room exploded one night, "Gee! they sure treat you like dogs here! No soap, no towels--nothing." The hours were good--8.30 to 12.15; 1 to 5.15. One Saturday Ada and the boss asked the beaders to work in the afternoon. Not one stayed. Too many had heard the tales of girls working overtime and not being paid anything extra.

* * * * *

Wednesday I went back after my last week's pay. When the cashier caught sight of me she was full of interest. "I was writing you a letter this very day. The boss wants you back awful badly. He's out just now for lunch. Can't you wait?"

Just then the boss stepped from the elevator. "_Ach_, here you are! Now, dearie, if it's just a matter of a few dollars or so--"

I was leaving town. Much discussion. No, I couldn't stay on. Well, if I insisted--yes, he'd get my pay envelope. My, oh, my, they missed me! Why so foolish as to leave New York? Now, as for my wages, they could easily be fixed to suit.... All right, all right, he'd get my last pay envelope.

And there was my pay envelope with just twelve dollars again. "What about my overtime?"

Overtime? Who said anything about overtime? He did himself. He'd promised me if I worked every night that week late I'd get paid for it. Every single night I had stayed, and where was my pay for it?

He shook his finger at my time card.

Show him one hour of overtime on that card!

I showed him where every night the time clock registered overtime.

Yes, but not once was it a full hour. And didn't I know overtime never counted unless it was at least a full hour?

No, he had never explained anything about that. I'd worked each night until everything was done and I'd been told I could go.

Well, of course he didn't want to rob me. I really had nothing coming to me. Each night I'd stayed on till about 6. But they would figure it out and see what they could pay me. They figured. I waited. At length majestically he handed out fifty-six cents.

* * * * *

The fat, older brother in the firm rode down in the elevator with me--he who used to move silently around the factory about four times a day, squinting out of his beady eyes, such light as shown there bespeaking 100 per-cent possession. He held his fat thumbs in the palms of his fat hands and benignly he was wont to survey his realm. Mine! Mine! Mine! his every inch of being said. Nor could his proportion of joy have been greater if he had six floors of his own to survey, instead of one little claptrap back room. It did make him so happy. He wore a kindly and never-changing expression, and he never spoke.

Going down in the elevator, he edged over to my corner. He pinched my arm, he pinched my cheeks. _Ach_, but he'd miss me bad. Nice girl, I was.

Evidently he, too, had evolved a moral equivalent for a living wage. Little kindly personal attentions were his share for anything not adequately covered by twelve dollars and fifty-six cents.

V

_No. 536 Tickets Pillow Cases_

Ah, one should write of the bleachery _via_ the medium of poetry! If the thought of the brassworks comes in one breath and the bleachery in the next, the poetry must needs be set to music--the Song of the Bleachery. What satisfaction there must be to an employer who grows rich--or makes his income, whatever it may be--from a business where so much light-heartedness is worked into the product! Let those who prefer to sob over woman labor behind factory prison bars visit our bleachery. Better still, let them work there. Here at least is one spot where they can dry their tears. If the day ever dawns when the conditions in that bleachery can be referred to as typical of American industrial life, exist the agitator, the walking delegate, the closed and open shop fight.

I can hear a bleachery operator grunting, "My Gawd! what's the woman ravin' over? Is it _our_ bleachery she's goin' on about?" Most of the workers in the bleachery know no other industrial experience. In that community, so it seems, a child is born, attends school up to the minimum required, or a bit beyond, and then goes to work in the bleachery--though a few do find their way instead to the overall factory, and still fewer to the shirtwaist factory. No other openings exist at the Falls.

There is more or less talk nowadays about Industrial Democracy. Some of us believe that the application of the democratic principle to industry is the most promising solution to industrial unrest and inefficiency. The only people who have written about the idea or discussed it, so far, have been either theorizers or propagandists from among the intellectuals, or enthused appliers of the principle, more or less high up in the business end of the thing. What does Industrial Democracy mean to the rank and file working under it? Is it one of those splendid programs which look epoch-making in spirit, but never permeates to those very people whom it is especially designed to affect?

It was to find out what the workers themselves thought of Industrial Democracy that I boarded a boat and journeyed seventy miles up the Hudson to work in the bleachery, where, to the pride of those responsible, functions the Partnership Plan.

What do the workers think of working under a scheme of Industrial Democracy?

What do the citizens of the United States think of living under a scheme of Political Democracy?

The average citizen does not think one way or the other about it three hundred and sixty-five days in the year. Even voting days the rank and file of us do not ponder overlong on democracy _versus_ autocracy. Indeed, if it could be done silently, in the dead of night, and the newspapers would promise not to say a word about it, perhaps we might change to a benevolent autocracy, and if we could silence all orators, as well as the press, what proportion of the population would be vitally concerned in the transition? Sooner or later, of course, alterations in the way of doing this and that would come about, the spirit of the nation would change. But through it all--autocracy, if it were benevolent, or democracy--there would be little conscious concern on the part of the great majority. Always provided the press and orators would keep quiet.

From my own experience, the same could be said of Industrial Democracy. Autocracy, democracy, the rank and file of the workers, especially the women workers, understand not, ponder not.

"Say," chuckled Mamie, "I could 'a' died laughin' once. A fella came through here askin' everybody what we thought of the Partnership Plan. My Gawd! when he got to me I jus' told him I didn't understand the first thing about it. What ud he do but get out a little book and write what I said down. Never again! Anybody asks me now what I think of the Partnership Plan, and I keep my mouth shut, you bet."

Once an enthused visitor picked on me to ask what I thought of working under the Partnership Plan. After he moved on the girls got the giggles. "Say, these folks that come around here forever asking what we think about the Partnership Plan! Say, what any of us knows about that could be put in a nutshell."

And gray-haired Ella Jane, smartest of all, ten years folding pillow cases, said: "I don't know anything about that Partnership Plan. All I know is that we get our share of the profits and our bonuses, and I can't imagine a nicer place to work. They do make you work for what you get, though. But it's all white and aboveboard and you know nobody's trying to put something over on you."

But the general spirit of the place? Could that be traced to anything else but the special industrial scheme of things? One fact at least is certain--the employing end is spared many a detail of management; the shift in responsibility is educating many a worker to the problems of capital. And production is going up.

* * * * *

Have you ever tried to find a spare bed in a town where there seems to be not a spare bed to be had? I left my belongings in an ice cream store and followed every clue, with a helpful hint from the one policeman, or the drug store man, or a fat, soiled grandmother who turned me down because they were already sleeping on top of one another in her house. In between I dropped on a grassy hillside and watched Our Bleachery baseball team play a Sunday afternoon game with the Colored Giants. We won.

And then I took up the hunt again, finally being guided by the Lord to the abode of the sisters Weston--two old maids, combined age one hundred and forty-nine years, who took boarders. Only there were no more to take. The Falls was becoming civilized. Improvements were being installed in most of the houses. Boarders, which meant mainly school-teachers, preferred a house with Improvements. The abode of the sisters Weston had none. It was half a company house, with a pump in the kitchen which drew up brown water of a distressing odor.

The sisters Weston had worked in the overall factory in their earlier years, hours 7 to 6, wages five dollars a week, paid every five to six weeks. Later they tried dressmaking; later still, boarders. I belonged to the last stage of all--they no longer took boarders, they took a boarder. Mr. Welsh from the electrical department in the bleachery, whose wife was in Pennsylvania on a visit to her folks, being sickly and run down, as seemed the wont of wives at the Falls, took his meals at our boarding house, when he was awake for them. Every other week Mr. Welsh worked night shift.

My belongings were installed in the room assigned me, and the younger of the sisters Weston, seventy-three, sat stiffly but kindly in a chair. "Now about the room rent...?" she faltered. Goodness! yes! My relief at finding a place to sleep in after eleven turn-downs was so great that I had completely neglected such a little matter as what the room might cost me.

"What do you charge?" I asked.

"What do you feel you can pay? We want you should have some money left each week after your board's paid. What do you make at the bleachery?"

My conscience fidgeted within me a bit at that. "I'd rather you charged me just what you think the room and board are worth to you, not what you think I can pay."

"Well, we used to get eight dollars a week for room and board. It's worth that."

It is cheaper to live than die in the Falls at that rate. Three hot meals a day I got: breakfast, coffee, toast, two eggs, mush, later fruit; dinner, often soup, always meat, potatoes, vegetables, coffee, and a dessert; supper, what wasn't finished at dinner, and tea. Always there was plenty of everything. Sometimes too much, if it were home-canned goods which had stood too many years on the shelves, due to lack of boarders to eat the same. But the sisters Weston meant the best.

"How d'ya like the punkin pie?" the older, Miss Belle, would ask.

The pumpkin pie had seemed to taste a trifle strange, but we laid it to the fact that it was some time since we had eaten pumpkin pie. "It tastes all right."

"Now, there! Glad to hear you say it. Canned that punkin ourselves. Put it up several years ago. Thought it smelled and looked a bit spoiled, but I says, guess I'll cook it up; mebbe the heat 'n' all'll turn it all right again. There's more in the kitchen!"

But it suddenly seemed as if I must get to work earlier that noon than I had expected. "Can't ya even finish your pie? I declare I'm scared that pie won't keep long."

Mr. Welsh got sick after the first couple of meals, but bore on bravely, nor did the matter of turned string beans consciously worry Mr. Welsh. The sisters themselves were always dying; their faithful morning reports of the details of what they had been through the night before left nothing to the imagination. "Guess I oughtn't ta 'a' et four hot cakes for supper when I was so sick yesterday afternoon. I sure was thinking I'd die in the night.... 'Liza, pass them baked beans; we gotta git them et up."

* * * * *

At six o'clock in the morning the bleachery whistle blows three times loud enough to shake the shingles on the roofs of the one-hundred-year-old houses and the leaves on the more than one-hundred-year-old trees about the Falls. Those women who have their breakfasts to get and houses to straighten up before they leave for work--and there are a number--must needs be about before then. Seven o'clock sees folks on all roads leading to the bleachery gate. At 7.10 the last whistle blows; at 7.15 the power is turned on, wheels revolve, work begins.

It must be realized that factory work, or any other kind of work, in a small town is a different matter from work in a large city, if for no other reason than the transportation problem. Say work in New York City begins at 7.45. That means for many, if not most, of the workers, an ordeal of half an hour's journey in the Subways or "L," shoving, pushing, jamming, running to catch the shuttle; shoving, pushing, jamming, running for the East Side Subway; shoving, pushing, jamming, scurrying along hard pavements to the factory door; and at the end of a day of eight or nine hours' work, all that to be done over again to get home.

Instead, at the Falls, it meant a five minutes' leisurely--unless one overslept--walk under old shade trees, through the glen along a path lined with jack-in-the-pulpits, wild violets, moss--the same five minutes' walk home at noon to a hot lunch, plenty of time in which to eat it, a bit of visiting on the way back to the factory, and a leisurely five minutes' walk home in the late afternoon. No one has measured yet what crowded transportation takes out of a body in the cities.

New York factories are used to new girls--they appear almost daily in such jobs as I have worked in. At the Falls a strange person in town is excitement enough, a strange girl at the bleachery practically an unheard-of thing. New girls appear now and then to take the places of those who get married or the old women who must some time or other die. But not strange girls. Everyone in the bleachery grew up with everyone else; as Ella Jane said, you know their mothers and their grandmothers, too.

It so happened that a cataclysmic event had visited the Falls the week before my appearance. A family had moved away, thereby detaching a worker from the bleachery--the girl who ticketed pillow cases. The Sunday I appeared in town, incidentally, seven babies were born. That event--or those events--plus me, minus the family who moved away and an old man who had died the week before, made the population of the Falls 4,202. Roughly, half that number either worked at the bleachery or depended on those who worked there. Who or what the other half were, outside the little group of Main Street tradespeople, remained a mystery. Of course, there were the ministers of the gospel and their families--in the same generous overdose--apportioned to most small towns. The actual number working in the bleachery was about six hundred and twenty men and women.

Odd, the different lights in which you can see a small town. The chances are that, instead of being a worker, I might have spent the week end visiting some of the "_élite_" of the Falls. In that case we should have motored sooner or later by the bleachery gate and past numerous company houses. My host, with a wave of the hand, would have dispatched the matter by remarking, "The town's main industry. The poor devils live in these houses you see."

Instead, one day I found myself wandering along the street of the well-to-do homes. What in the world...? Who all ever lived way up here? Whatever business had they in our Falls? Did they have anyone to talk to, anything to do? I laid the matter before Mamie O'Brien.

"Any rich folk living around here?"

"Guess so. Some swell estates round about--never see the people much."

"Are they stuck up?"

"Dunno--na. Saw one of 'em at the military funeral last week. She wasn't dressed up a bit swell--just wore a plaid skirt. Didn't look like anybody at all."

In other words, we were the town. It was the bleachery folk you saw on the streets, in the shops, at the post office, at the movies. The bleachery folk, or their kind, I saw at the three church services I attended. If anyone had dared sympathize with us--called us "poor devils"!

* * * * *

The first morning at the bleachery the foreman led me to the narrow space in the middle of three large heavy tables placed "U" shape, said, "Here's a girl to ticket," and left me. The foreman knew who I was. Employment conditions at the bleachery were such that it was necessary to make sure of a job by arranging matters ahead of time with the manager. Also, on a previous occasion I had visited the bleachery, made more or less of an investigation, and sat in on a Board of Operatives' meeting. Therefore, I left off my earrings, bought no Black Jack, did not feel constrained to say, "It ain't," though saw no reason why I too should not indulge in "My Gawd!" if I felt like it. I find it one of the most contagious expressions in the language. The girls did not seem to know who I was or what I was. Not until the second day did the girl who stood next to me ask my name--a formality gone through within the first five minutes in any New York job. I answered Cornelia Parker. She got it Miss Parks, and formally introduced me around the table--"Margaret, meet Miss Parks--Miss White, Miss Parks." Also all very different from New York. About the only questions asked by any girl were, "You're from New York?" and, "Where did you work before you came here?" Some wondered if I wasn't lonesome without my folks. I didn't have any folks. There was none of the expressed curiosity of the New York worker as to my past, present, and future. Not until the last few days did I feel forced to volunteer now and then enough information so that they would get my name and me more or less clear in their minds and never feel, after their heart-warming cordiality, that I had tried "to put anything over on them." Whether I was Miss Parks or Mrs. Parker, it made no difference to them. It did to me, for I felt here at last I could keep up the contacts I had made; and instead of walking off suddenly, leaving good friends behind without a word, I could honestly say I was off to the next job, promise everyone I'd write often and come again to the Falls, and have everyone promise to write me and never come to New York without letting me know. I can lie awake nights and imagine what fun it is going to be getting back to the Falls some day and waiting by the bridge down at the bleachery for the girls to come out at noon, seeing them all again. Maybe Mrs. Halley will call out her, "Hi! look 'ose 'ere!"

* * * * *

At our bleachery, be it known, no goods were manufactured. We took piece goods in the rough, mostly white, bleached, starched, and finished it, and rolled or folded the finished stuff for market. In Department 10, where most of the girls worked, the west end of the big third floor, three grades of white goods were made into sheets and pillow cases, ticketed, bundled, and boxed for shipping. Along the entire end of the room next the windows stood the operating machines, with rows of girls facing one another, all hemming sheets or making pillow cases. There were some ten girls who stood at five heavy tables, rapidly shaking out the hemmed sheets, inspecting them for blemishes of any kind, folding them for the mangle, hundreds and hundreds a day. At other tables workers took the ironed sheets, ticketed them, tied them in bundles, wrapped and labeled and stacked the bundles, whereupon they sooner or later were wheeled off to one side and boxed. Four girls worked at the big mangle. Besides the mangle, one girl spent her day hand-ironing such wrinkles as appeared now and then after the mangle had done its work.

So much for sheets. There were three girls (the term "girl" is used loosely, since numerous females in our department will never see fifty again) who slipped pillow cases over standing frames which poked out the corners. After they were mangled they were inspected and folded, ticketed, bundled, and wrapped at our three U-shaped tables. Also there, one or two girls spent part time slipping pieces of dark-blue paper under the hemstitched part of the pillow cases and sheets, so that the ultimate consumer might get the full glory of her purchase.