Steel Part 20

I felt extraordinarily elated, and much as if John had given me a diploma, with a c.u.m 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 embarra.s.sing 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 pa.s.s 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 quant.i.ties of c.o.ke, 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 a.s.sembled as at a house-raising. n.o.body 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-gla.s.s 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 gla.s.ses 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 l.u.s.tily 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 pa.s.s 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 cl.u.s.ter 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 princ.i.p.ally 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 h.e.l.l 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 pa.s.sed 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 mult.i.tude of authorities is that the Hunkies, who const.i.tute 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 h.e.l.l 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 b.u.t.toning 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 sc.r.a.p, 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.