Rebel Voices
Page 18
THE PRIEST
By RALPH CHAPLIN
The night we came from out the drifting snow,
The winds were bitter and the streets were drear;
Who mocked us when we had no place to go?
We gaunt eyed men had watched the blizzard grow—
The ghastliest and wildest of the year—
The night we came from out the drifting snow.
But how could God’s anointed ever know
How driving Hunger hovers ever near!
Who mocked us when we had no place to go?
We knew your piety for empty show,
But still your pillared church was warm with cheer
The night we came from out the blinding snow.
Some day an earth uprooting storm may blow
Your mighty temples full of screaming fear!
Who mocked us when we had no place to go?
Then you’ll remember how you scoffed at woes
And met a plea for shelter with a sneer!
The night we came from out the drifting snow
Who mocked us when we had no place to go?
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Charles Ashleigh came to the United States from England as a youth in 1910 and returned there in the early 1920’s after a decade spent as an I.W.W. member, organizer, writer, and “class war prisoner.” His semi-autobiographical novel, The Rambling Kid (London, 1930) describes some of his teen-age experiences bumming around the country as a hobo and a Wobbly. After a prison term in Leavenworth, Ashleigh was deported as an enemy alien to England. His poems have appeared in The Masses, The Liberator, Century Magazine, and the Little Review, and several were included in Genevieve Taggard’s anthology, Maydays (New York, 1925). Mr. Ashleigh left the I.W.W. for the Communist Party and describes himself, currently, as “a worker in the cause of British-Soviet friendship” (letter to J. L. K., March 24, 1964). He is a contributor to the British Daily Worker.
THE FLOATER
By CHARLES ASHLEIGH
“For East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.” So sang a poet, referring to the great and almost unbridgeable gulf which divides the western peoples from those of the Orient. Judging from the mass of confusion and misconception apparent in the references made by a number of our eastern would-be sympathizers of a certain type, the migratory worker of the Pacific states is as little understood by the easterner as is the inscrutable Oriental-by the son of the Occident. This was very vividly suggested to me recently by a friend of mine—a western hobo agitator, strong of body and clear of mind, who has contributed much to the development of class consciousness among the floaters of the coast. “That crowd back East thinks we western stiffs are all bums because we beat the trains,” said he. “They haven’t the savvy to distinguish the difference between the Bowery bum and the casual laborer of the West. Hence all this stuff about the ‘bummery,’ etc.” This gave me furiously to think; and with much force was brought home to me the wide difference existing between the living and working conditions of the proletariat of the East and that of the West, and particularly of the Pacific coast.
In the East the first and most obvious feature which strikes the western observer is the permanence of industry. It is true that there are periodical crises which necessitate the laying off of hands, but the industries are territorially stationary. There are huge and complex aggregations of machinery, necessitating numerous minutely distinct functions for the processes of production, which are performed by whole populations of industrial wage earners who reside for their whole lifetime, or at any rate for periods extending into years, in the same district. In the steel industry, in the textile industry, and others of like magnitude, it is nothing out of the ordinary for several generations of workers to have lived always in the same spot and to have worked always at the same process—allowing for changes implied by the improvement of machinery—and to have sold their labor-power to the same boss.
In the eastern industries women and children are employed. It is common for a whole family to be working in the same mill, plant or factory. This makes for family life; a debased and deteriorated family life, it is true, lacking in all the pleasant and restful features usually associated with that term, but, nevertheless, marriage, the procreation of children and some amount of stability are assured by the conditions of industry. On the other hand, the nerve-and-body-racking, monotonous nature of the work, the close and unhealthy atmosphere, and, sometimes, chemical poisoning or other vocational diseases, and the speeding-up system, all make for loss of nervous and physical vitality and the creation of bodily weaklings.
As we journey westward we mark a change. We leave the zone of great Industry and enter country in which capitalism is still, to some extent, in the preparatory stage. We come to the source of one of the great natural resources—lumber—and to that portion of the country where the railroads are still busily extending their complex network and where agriculture on a large scale is a leading factor in economic life.
All of these three principal occupations of the unskilled worker of the Pacific coast—lumber, construction work and agriculture—are periodical in their nature. A mighty wave of fertility sweeps up through the various states into British Columbia, drawing in its wake the legions of harvest workers. In California and Oregon, the ripening of fruits brings an army of labor to the scene. The construction of railroads, aqueducts and other signs of an onward-marching capitalism, employs temporarily thousands of laborers, teamsters and the like. The same is true of the lumber industry, which is also conditioned by natural processes.
The result of this is the existence on the coast of an immense army of unskilled or semi-skilled workers, of no fixed abode, who are forever engaged in an eternal chase for the elusive job; whose work takes them away from the towns to the hills or plains or forests, for varying periods. Forever over the great western country are they traveling, seeking this or that center of temporary activity, that they may dispose of their labor-power.
The Pacific coast is the country of the bindle or blanket-stiff. On the construction jobs the workers sleep in tents. In the lumber camps they are housed in bunkhouses, rude frame structures with tiers of bunks, something similar to the forecastle of a wind-jammer on a large scale. In these bunk-houses the men wash and dry their clothes, smoke and play cards, and generally divert themselves within the small limits of their time and location. The atmosphere is anything but fresh, and vermin are usually abundant, the wooden material of the bunks rendering it easy for the nimble and voracious creatures to secrete themselves. In many camps the men are engaged in a perpetual warfare against lice. The sleeping quarters for agricultural workers consist of barns, sheds or probably the open field. Bedding is rarely provided in lumber camps and never in construction camps and on harvest work. Therefore, the worker is compelled to follow literally the advice of the founder of Christianity and “take up his bed and walk.” The inevitable burden of the migratory worker is a roll of blankets, slung by a cord around his shoulders. Many hotels in the coast towns, knowing the vermin-infested state of the camps, refuse to allow blankets to be brought into the premises, and they are therefore stacked up in the cheap saloons during the stay in town of their owner.
Employment agencies play an important and predatory role in the life of the floater. A large agency will take complete control of the recruiting of labor for some big job, shipping numbers of men out each day to the scene of action from their branches in various towns. Fees ranging from one to three dollars are charged the applicant for unskilled positions. It is a well-known fact, although, by reason of the underground support of the powers that be, hard to prove in specific cases, that there is often collusion between the agencies and the petty bosses by which a constant stream of men are kept coming and going, to the mutual enrichment of the agent—or “shark,” as we prefer to term him—and the “straw boss.” Nothing is easier for a foreman than to discharge quantities of men on trumped-up charges after a brief period of work and thus p
rovide more fees for his agent friends in town.
A prominent feature of every coast town of any size is the “slave market,” or “stiff town,” composed of a varying number of streets or blocks, according to the size of the town and its strategic position as a recruiting center for labor. As you walk down the street, you notice that the loungers are all “stiffs.” Sun-tanned, brawny men, most of them in early manhood or in the prime of life, dressed in blue overalls or khaki pants and blue cotton shirts, in the lumber country in mackinaws and high, spiked-soled boots, are standing in knots around the doors of the employment sharks, watching the requirements chalked up on the blackboards displayed outside. In some of the larger agencies the office will seat a couple of hundred men, who wait patiently for the employe who appears at intervals and shouts out the news of some particular job for which men are needed. Then comes a rush! The slave market is in full swing! Numbers of disconsolate ones may also be observed who have not the price of a job and who are waiting in the hope of obtaining that much-desired thing—a free shipment. There may be a dozen such offices in two or three blocks. This is also the quarter of cheap restaurants, where a meal—of adulterated, worthless food—may be bought for ten or fifteen cents. Fifteen or twenty-cent lodging houses are also plentiful, most of them crawling with vermin, and there is an abundance of barrel houses, where the slave gets an opportunity of drowning his miseries in oblivion by “blowing in” his “stake” on rot-gut whiskey or chemical beer. Above all this wave the flaunting banners of the military, marine and naval recruiting offices, offering a desperate refuge for the jobless, homeless, starving worker; vultures hovering over the swamp of poverty, ready to sweep down upon some despairing victim, probably some confiding lad lured to this country by booster-fed visions of the “Golden West.” The ostensible recruiting officers are the gaily uniformed, upright-standing men standing invitingly outside their offices; the real recruiting officers are the vampires of hunger and unemployment.
The wholesale firing of men by foremen, the arduous nature of the work, and the temporary nature of the employment, keep the worker constantly in motion. He does not usually have enough to pay his fare, if he is to exist at all in the town whilst waiting for the next job. Therefore, the only alternative is to beat the trains. This is also the only method of following the harvests over the wide stretches of country, where to pay a fare would be impossible usually and ruinous always. Hoboing is, therefore, the universal method of traveling among the migratory workers of the Pacific coast.
The railroad tracks are alive, at certain periods of the year, with men tramping the ties, under the burning sun, with heavy bundles of blankets upon their backs. The worker cannot usually travel as fast as the professional “tramp,” who beats the fast passengers. His unwieldy pack makes it difficult for him to negotiate anything but a freight, although some of them achieve wonders of agility in the “making” of a “blind” or even the “rods,” when hampered by their bedding. On the outskirts of practically every town may be seen the “jungles,” or camp, where the meal, purchased—or, if needs be, begged—in the town, is cooked. A supply of cooking utensils is nearly always to be found in the “jungles.” Primitive utensils, it is true, formed with much ingenuity out of preserve, oil or lard cans. Besides the large stew can, there is always the “boiling up” can, in which shirts and underclothes are sterilized—an inevitable feature of the incessant campaign against the plague of body lice.
The meal over, if it be winter, a huge fire is built up and, with the approach of dusk, blankets are spread, and these soldiers of western industry, out of whose sinews and brain the enormous wealth of the West is distilled, settle down for a night of fitful slumber, broken by the cold, the necessity of attending to the fire, and the arrival of newcomers. In the morning the long walk down the track is resumed or a train is boarded with caution and concealment. There are constant wrangles with the brakemen, who frequently demand a money contribution in return for the permission to ride, with the alternative of jumping off (oh, Solidarity, thy name is null among the railroaders of the West!), and the unceasing, gnawing fear of arrest for vagrancy or of a beating up by the railroad police in the yards of the town of destination. It would be hard to estimate the number of workers who in one year are sentenced to varying terms of imprisonment, usually accompanied by hard labor, for the crime of trespassing on the property of the railroad companies. Yet no other method of traveling is possible for them. The risk of imprisonment, or of rough physical handling by the yard police is an integral part of their lives. Can we wonder that among them is fast growing a spirit of passionate rebellion? To make strong men, who work out in the open air and who preserve a certain spirit of rude independence, slink for fear of the armed bullies of the city or railroad police, and to be stigmatized as bums and ne’er-do-wells by canting, ignorant magistrates, is a certain method of fostering and stimulating that revolt which is already smoldering in the consciousness of the workers of the Pacific states.
And, for all this labor and suffering, what reward? The average wage of the worker in the lumber camps is $2.75 or $3 per day of ten hours. From this, five dollars weekly is deducted for board, often of the rottenest kind. A hospital fee of one dollar per month is also compulsorily charged by the company for medical attention of a very indifferent nature and for a hospital which, in many cases, is non-existent. The truck system flourishes in camps of all kinds, the distance from the nearest town obliging the worker to purchase from the camp store, where he is charged exorbitant rates for his goods.
It must be remembered also that this work is by no means permanent, and that the savings of one job must be applied to tide the worker over until the next. Construction workers receive an average of $2.25 per day, from which 75 cents is daily deducted for board, or $5.25 per week. Here the hospital graft also prevails. If a worker remain only two days in a camp, the dollar is extorted. The work is from sun-up to sun-down. Somewhat larger wages are paid for agricultural work during the harvest rush, but the work is at breakneck speed and for extremely long hours, and lasts only for a short term.
The effects of the life lived by the slaves of the domain ruled by the Southern Pacific railroad and the lumber trust are, in many ways, disastrous. The striking feature of the Pacific country is that it is a man’s country. Conditions render it impossible for the worker to marry. Long terms in isolated camps produce the same phenomena of sex perversion as exist in the army, navy and the monastery. The worker is doomed to celibacy with all its physical and moral damaging results. The brothel in the town, between jobs, is the only resort.
Yet the arduous physical toil in the open air does not have the same deteriorating effect as does the mechanical, confined work of the eastern slave. The constant matching of wits and the daring needed for the long trips across country have developed a species of rough self-reliance in the wandering proletarian of the West. In health and in physical courage he is undoubtedly the superior of his eastern brother. The phenomenal spread of the propaganda of the I.W.W. among the migratory workers indicates that this great mass, so long inarticulate, are at last beginning to realize their economic oppression and to voice their needs. The size of the local membership is an uncertain gauge in that territory of ever-moving fluid labor. Certain is it that around nearly every “jungle” fire and during the evening hours on many a job in the great westland, the I.W.W. red songbook is in evidence, and the rude rebel chants are lustily sung and discontent expressed more and more definitely and impatiently.
The free speech fights of San Diego, Fresno, Aberdeen and Spokane, the occasional strike outbursts in the lumber country, the great railroad construction strike in British Columbia and the recent tragedy of Wheatland are all indications that the “blanket stiff” is awakening. It was indeed an unpleasant surprise to the masters of the bread in the booster-ridden West when the much-despised tramp worker actually began to assert himself. The proud aristocrats of labor had also long stood aloof from them, considering them worthless of o
rganizing efforts. And, then, suddenly, lo and behold, the scorned floater evolved his own movement, far more revolutionary and scientific than his skilled brother had ever dreamed of! From the lumber camps, from the construction camps, from the harvest fields, water tanks, jails and hobo campfires came the cry, ever more insistent, of the creator of western wealth. And, marvel of marvels, summit of sublime audacity, the cry of the flouted wanderer was not merely for better grub, shorter hours and simple improvements, but, including these things and going beyond them, he demanded, simply and uncompromisingly, the whole earth—the Product of his Toil!
More power to you, western brother! Go to it! And may you continue the good work and agitate and organize until you have builded up for yourself a mighty force that shall bring you your reward, the ownership of industries, and transform the vaunted, slave-driving mockery of the “Golden West” into a workers’ land that shall really deserve the name.
Industrial Worker, July 23, 1910.
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This poem, signed J.H.B. the Rambler, appeared in the Industrial Worker (November 1916).
THE MIGRATORY I.W.W.
By J. H. B. THE RAMBLER
He’s one of the fellows that doesn’t fit in,
You have met him without a doubt,
He’s lost to his friends, his kith and his kin,