Horny Hands and Hampered Elbows: The Worker's Mind in Western Europe

Front matter

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Part I— With The Workers Ghaptbb Pacts

I. The Picture-Puzzle of Europe .... 3

II. With the Steelmen of Devastated France 20

III. "French Nights in a Barroom 1 ' .... 37

IV. Hate and Hope at Heroic Lens .... 57

V. Below Ground with the Miners— and

Above 68

VI. Other Victims of a New Kind of War . 90

VII. A Bird's-Eye View of Belgium .... 101

VIII. Krupp's and the Cannon Capital . . . 109

IX. The Workers in Germany's "Pittsburgh

District" 132

X. "Hail Columbia Ueber Alles!" .... 140

XI. "Mort Pour La France" — French Unknowns 146

XII. In "The Hot-Spot of Europe" .... 159

XIII. Politics and Potatoes in the Saar . . . 173

v vi CONTENTS

CaUFTBB PAdB

XIV. The "Hall of the Reformation" . • . 192

XV. Paris — and by Air to England .... 220

XVI. Readjustment in England 235

Part Ii— Conclusions

XVII. Horny Hands 249

XVIII. Hampered Elbows 260

XIX. The (Dis)united States of Europe? . . 272

ILLUSTRATIONS

"Outside" workers at a mine in St. Etienne in south-central France Frontispiece

Mr. Williams as he is, and in his "protective colorations' 1 . . 22

The landlord of the "Tout Va Bien" at Douai was kinder to his two pets than to his wife or little Suzanne 44

Little gleaners in the fields near Lens 66

"Certainly it is hard to imagine a city so demoralized in its actuality yet so devoted in its aspiration as Lens" .... 66

The insertion of timber supports with their "top pieces" at certain distances is definitely prescribed by mining law in all countries 76

Fellow-workers in the coal pit near Lens 86

Even the young girls in the district appear to form in early years the same "habitude" of hard, horny-handed work . . 86

Bessemer converter 96

"The thoroughly attractive cottages furnished the workers worn out in the Krupp service, each group in a colony by itself, married, unmarried, widows, widowers, etc." 118

Workers inspecting cheap suitings outside one of the scores of gates leading into the huge Krupp establishment .... 130

A group of war orphans at Elberf eld 130

At Elberf eld the Zoo and its denizens share the Sunday afternoon crowds with football 134

vii viii ILLUSTRATIONS

FACING PAOB

German coal-miners of the Saar leaving town for the shaft of a coal-mine several miles in the country 182

"The hot-spot of Europe" 182

The closeness between modern industrial and conservative agricultural France is typified in Le Creusot 218

In Europe generally, as in this suburb of Paris, everybody works, including the dog . . . . 218

Introduction

My "overalls" studies of the American common laborer in 1919, as described in "What's On the Worker's Mind," resulted in a profound conviction, first, of the vital importance to the worker of the possession of the job — of the getting and the gripping of the chance to work — and, further, of the vast importance to the worker's character and life of the job's physical, mental, and spiritual conditions.

The experiences of 1920 in Great Britain, as recounted in "Full Up and Fed Up," resulted in the belief that an understanding of these "Big Four Factors," and their part in shaping the careers of a nation's unskilled laborers, furnished a useful key for understanding not only that nation's industrial life, but also its social and political development as well.

That should not be strange. For without doubt it is true for all of us at all times that: —

We tend to live our way into our thinking infinitely more than we tend to think our way into our living.

If that is true, then it is bound to carry all the physical, mental, and spiritual conditions of our modern work into the very centre of our modern living and feeling to an extent far beyond anything we have heretofore been x INTRODUCTION

willing to admit. For in this industrial age it is undeniably true for the great majority of us that: —

The most compelling and the most inescapable forces for determining the conditions of our living — and hence of our thinking and feeling — are the conditions under which we work to earn our daily bread — the conditions of our job.

Epictetus described a huge factor for explaining nations as well as individuals — also spiritual, as well as moral or manual achievement, when he wrote:

"What do you think Hercules would have been if there had not been such a lion, and hydra, and stag, and boar, and certain unjust and bestial men whom Hercules used to drive away and clear out? . . . Why, then, he would not have been Hercules ! "

The summer of '21, herewith reported, represents partly the desire to observe any unusual by-products appearing in the social field as the result of differences in the working conditions of the French and German populations. Partly, also, it represents the bold hope that the worker's mind as affected by these conditions might furnish us some helpful hint regarding the near future of western Europe, and hence of the world, by revealing the mental and emotional forces now at work in its formation.

It should be remembered that in this approach my primary purpose is neither to prove any thesis nor to propose any particular remedy. So far as possible the aim is to make a camera of myself for recording as faithfully as feasible the feelings, attitudes, and view-points encountered, together with the individual setting of which they were a part.

INTRODUCTION xi

It will be noticed that the effort has been to get close to the life and work — and so to the mind — of the unskilled, common laborer in the basic industries of iron, steel, and coal. One reason for this is that the field of the skilled artisan is in every country too varied and diverse to cover in one, or even several lifetimes. The chief reason is that the conditions of a nation's unskilled labor represent the lowest common denominator for building up the rest of the nation's entire industrial and social equation.

Nothing is more certain than that the foundations of our modern House of Industry and life rest finally upon the brawn and the brain and the heart of our unskilled, common laborer.

If in these critical days we are to know whether these foundations of our industry and life in America or Europe are stable or unstable, we must somehow contrive to get a better understanding of the thoughts and feelings of the great mass of our humblest workers.

By our thesis the only way to secure such knowledge is to know the worker on his job.

The reader must judge the extent to which the experiences herewith related support my previous deductions, justify my underlying purposes, or fulfil my resultant hopes. In any case I appeal, on behalf of the men and women who will speak from out these pages, for the same sympathetic hearing which it has been my earnest effort — and my deep joy — to afford them when we were face to face.

PART I WITH THE WORKERS

Chapter I The Picture-puzzle Op Europe

Paris, France, July 20, 1921.

In the mornings it's not so bad. But by afternoon the summer's enterprise begins to look all but impossible. Then I get to feeling like a lad before a heaped-up mess of the red, white, and blue pieces of a jig-saw puzzle — faced by the necessity of somehow making a picture out of it before the whistle blows for my return.

But perhaps the blues of this particular afternoon come from getting into the heart of this jig-saw "mess of Europe" too suddenly. For my morning has been spent at a meeting of "the Sub-Committee on the Limitation of Armaments of the League of Nations" ( The honorable gentlemen of the committee appear to be in much the same picture-puzzle predicament. Still they did not seem particularly depressed at what certainly looked like a slow start at the solution of their colossal problem. A certain strangeness and stiffness of manner at the beginning, evidently the result of different language and manners, soon wore off and the gentlemen began lowering their voices from the grand-stand pitch of the first hour. A little later the representative of the French working men was smoking the cigarettes of the Italian general, or the Chilean or British statesman.

And to-morrow will furnish the satisfaction of starting the search for a job in the steel plants and mines up north. Yesterday, luckily, permitted a reconnoitring visit to what ought to be called the artisans' rather than the laborers' quarter over by the Vincennes Gate. At a crowded restaurant it was easy to see that the workers were highly skilled men. Some of them wear glasses which make them look almost like the studio artists of the Latin Quarter — especially when combined with their long studio-coats of light-colored denim. In fact, the small furniture factories or machine-shops which fill the neighborhood are called "ateliers," our word, exclusively, for studios. The restaurant itself, like most of them in the district, was on a broad and handsome boulevard. A few of the streets encountered are pretty bad as compared with the greater part of this amazingly cleanly and comfortable city. But even at that they are far and away better than miles and miles of such streets as are furnished by London, or, say, Chicago. Also they are enormously better than the streets and the homes found just beyond the fortifications and the city gates in St. Ouen and St. Denis. These quarters of the poorer and least skilled workers are filled with great factories, gas plants, chemical establishments and slaughter-houses — also with the worst smells encountered outside the chemical laboratory at college.

In this district it is easy to see that drinking is much worse — just about as much worse, in fact, as is the sanitation of the streets or the plumbing of the houses. The summer's first drunken man (outside the celebration of July 14) turned up at the restaurant. Except for him, the drinking of the lunch-time beer and wine appeared wholly without result. Outside the gates, many, many faces showed that too much alcohol was a fairly regular affair. After so close — so typically close — a tie-up of working, living, and thirsting conditions as the quarter furnishes, it is not surprising to re*d the many notices still left upon the bulletin-boards. These called upon the workers to rise up and put an end to the foolish and footless war and make the start at once into the era of international peace and brotherhood which was promised to follow the moment the "working classes" in all nations decided to take matters into their own hands.

It would be attractive to stay and dig deeper into the bad jobs which are pretty likely to furnish the cause of the unhappiness which expresses itself in these ways of "rum and revolution" — also to discover whether these jobs might not be so mastered by the French temperament as to make even coke-plant and slaughter-house laborers happy ! Remembering how every worker wants to believe in the importance of his job and so of himself, v exactly that is more nearly conceivable than we are apt to think. But such working conditions are likely to remain for some time very different from the clean, comfortable, and well-lighted though crowded, little machineshop I visited earlier in the day inside the walls.

This was run by a young captain who spent two years during the war in America inspecting French war-supplies. His twenty-five workers make various sorts and sizes of wooden tanks, some of them giving their entire days to making small useful and artistic wooden bottles. They do not look rushed but manage to get in about fifty hours — at two to three francs — a week and still have "la semaine Anglaise," that is, the Saturday half -holiday, said to be spreading among the city's offices and artistic establishments.

The captain thinks the high percentage of the population on French farms or in small French cities and towns is mainly responsible for the remarkable " equilibrium" of the ordinary industrial conditions and relations here. Just lately the increase of industrial unemployment has been, he thinks, a benefit to the country because it has helped to send back to the farms the overplus of workers called into the cities by the war. Similarly, their original departure for the city caused a needed increase of farm wages. As for unions, the captain reports his own and also his workers' indifference to the matter of their membership.

In that connection the clerk here at the little hotel used a typically neat French phrase for our very violent but expressive verb, "to fire."

"It is that there are too few to answer," she explained when I finally gave up the effort with the "apparatus," as the telephone is called. "You see, to save money — for our government owns the phones and it has no money — they have given many employees their 'thanks.' "

This morning the newspaper gives an extended comment by a former deputy on the heavy loss accompanying the telephone service — or lack of it. The system was taken over as far back as 1889 when it was making a lot of money for its private owners, and so looked like a proper subject for government operation — and profit. This past year it has managed to lose the astonishing sum of 220,000,000 francs ! In addition, the equipment is in such bad repair that the prospect is good for both higher rates and still smaller circulation. The chances are certainly far from favorable to any early spending of the 1,500,000,000 francs required for the system's renovation.

"In America/' concludes the article, "there is one phone for each 8 inhabitants; in Denmark one for each 17; in Sweden, each 27; in Switzerland, each 42; in Germany, 59; Great Britain and Ireland, 64; Belgium, 133. In France we have one phone — such as it is — for each 143 citizens!"

In spite of these "thanks/' there are considerably fewer unemployed workers here than the reported million and more in Great Britain and the two or three millions in America.

"France would be -the most prosperous country in the world if she could somehow get a signed statement that America and England would help her in case of unwarranted attack by Germany/' according to a local American correspondent. "As it is, her sleep is one long nightmare from the fear of Germany's attacking her again for the final 'third strike and out' — the ultimate death-stroke — before the rest of the world can come to her protection."

Industrial conditions here are undoubtedly much more affected by all these international matters than ours would be at home. The morning head-lines are usually so filled with them that you get the feeling that France, at least, just can't get completely down to work until her national fears are somehow lessened. Nevertheless, it is surprising to find so little talk about national sorrows and so much about national resuscitation and salvation.

This last is said to be the cause of the failure of the great general strike on the railways and elsewhere here a year ago last May. Many of the workers were interested to see what the radicals could do but not willing to pay any very great price for the show. So its main result was the break-up of the " Confederation Gintrale du Trar vail" — the "C. G. T.," as it is called ordinarily, like our "A. F. of L." Its conservative members — they are Socialists — are fighting the radicals or Communists for control — without hope of peace or even quarter from either side. As a result, the labor movement here is what might be called "shot to pieces" — in spite of the dignity lent it by the organization of the country's editors, journalists, and authors in what is called "The Intellectual Workers' Union/ 1 ordinarily dubbed "The Brain Trust."

On the job or off, it looks as though the "working class," as it is called by everybody, and the employers and ordinary people who make up the "bourgeoisie " are considerably farther apart here than at home. Here in Paris, at least, it appears, also, that both groups give the rest of their time, after France's security against attack, to matters more or less aesthetic and artistic. The strange thing is that somehow the French — and presumably the Latin — temperament appears to find it entirely easy to include in the realm of the artistic the matter of sex.

I don't see how that piece can be fitted into the rest of the puzzle. Is this strange emphasis the result of any development of France's history, for instance? Could it be, for example, one result of the "generation of defeat," of the men who grew up with the bitterness of 1870 in their souls, and who hated anybody that accepted

THE PICTURES-PUZZLE OF EUROPE 9

the world as it was and tried, therefore, to make the best of it and still to find room for some sort of achievement in the field of philosophies and ideals, sentiments and emotions ?

If so, will the commerce and industry of the new post-war France — aided by the present "generation of the victory" — serve to modify these interests? Or is it less her history and more her years — her age — that furnishes the matrix in which these national characteristics have developed? In that case, will our American attitudes toward marriage and sex, and government and industry grow more like the French when we have become a settled people after a few more hundreds of years?

What a puzzle! . . . But I must get some of the pieces into my hands for a closer look ! Early to-morrow I'll be passing through Amiens in search of a steel plant or a coal-mine and a job. Up there in the midst of such thrilling names as Lens, Arras, Cambrai, Douai, Peronne, it will be odd to see no marching soldiers. But it will also be thrilling to see men spitting on their hands — if they do that here — and sweating over their shovels and picks in the effort to bring back their world again.

After all, these people over here must find the whole picture a good deal of a puzzle to themselves !

I'll feel better, anyway, if they do.

Douai, North France, Thursday, July 21, 1921.

Distance is certainly a matter not so much of miles as of mind — more of feelings than of geography. To-day has been "the day of the great removal."

Oddly enough that "one telephone per 143 inhabitants/' is very much to blame for this sensation of lonesomeness; for part of the feeling, I suspect, is furnished by my feet. The little town in which a possible employer lived furnished no midday train, and only one or two telephones ! So there was nothing for it but to walk about twelve kilometres, or seven miles, through the open country. But before that

It was at Albert, five miles northeast of Amiens, that we first ran into the battle-lines. Both Albert and Arras, five miles farther north, were fearfully shot up, with few buildings of former times left. In the country between them the battered trenches look unspeakably sinister, and the few trees left are nothing but telegraph-poles. But in both these towns signs of the "reconstitution" of things are extremely evident : the staccato of the riveting hammers make a joyful sound in the land, or at least in the stations. An amazing amount has been accomplished. Best of all, many of the former battle-fields are now ripe and yellow with great stands of grain, besides red and blue with harvesting machines said to have been made in America. These make a happy combination with the green and yellow of the landscape and the red of the newly tiled roofs of reviving farmhouses, not to mention the white kerchiefs of the men and women helping to stack the golden sheaves. At the edges of many fields, however, are huge and depressing masses of wicked and rusty barbed wire and, in others, almost acres of sheetiron stretched over low walls still kindly enough to offer a little shelter to some ambitious person.

At Douai the damage is not so much from bombardment as at Arras, a few minutes farther south. The reason is that this city — it had 30,000 before the warwas taken over by the Germans as early as October, 1914, and successfully held up to the moment of the Great Retreat in October, 1918. Before they left, the invaders burned up a large part of the town bordering on the public square. But, for the most part, the city appears to be getting back to normal with fair rapidity.

At a near-by mine town a friend was expected to honor a letter of introduction by helping to a job. In the absence of trains and telephones, I started off to "hoof it, 1 ' in high hopes of a lift from some passing driver of horse or auto. Perhaps I didn't use the right words or signs, or was too uncouth in my worker clothes. Anyway, not one of the autos even hesitated — in spite of the fact that almost all of them were of American make. Such refusals — plus a pair of weary legs — are calculated to make a fellow feel a long, long way from Leicester Square and Euclid Avenue !

Still it was worth while to have time to get acquainted with a fellow worker and to enjoy the sight of literally dozens of busy coal-mines, each topped by its little roof for the protection of the great "sheaves" or "pulley-wheels' 1 of the tipple. The invaders used the mines little and did them great damage before leaving, but they are reported in immensely better shape than those at Lens, about a dozen miles west and north. The big dumps indicate that a lot of fuel has been taken out in times past, and the neat condition of the houses, many of them new, indicates abundant hope of finding plenty more of the good fuel in the futures It gives a fellow a start, though, to see an occasional house in which people are living in apparent comfort in spite of a great round shellhole six feet wide in both walls !

The walking gave plenty of time to read the district's war adventures, .written in many languages. "Nach Douhi," with its great white German arrow, was close to "Lorries this way," and "Stragglers' collecting station" — evidences of the later pursuit. At every corner the great signs and large names were very evidently planned for men either in the dark or in a great hurry. In many places the usual roadside trees had been destroyed — with new ones often already in evidence. The few cattle have all been brought in lately, for the country's captors overlooked no such detail. One man, limping along and leading a tiny donkey hugely overtopped by a great load of bedding and furniture, suggested the dreadful days of the invasion. The load proved to be mattresses and chairs, all brand-new. It is the sign of the new times here.

The estaminet or bar-room for the noon lunch in a coal village was, strangely enough, filled with Italian miners. One boy was unhappy about his seventeen francs a day and the short distance it went toward his board and room of nine francs. All the miners of the country are reported very unhappy and more or less extreme: in the letter of introduction and protection which I carry from their chief in Paris, he addresses his associates as "Comrades," a term supposed to indicate friendliness to Bolshevism. But the decent homes and the clean faces of most of the miners encountered show prosperity and contentment. Hundreds of workers seem to live in the comfortable-looking villages, and use bicycles on the good cinder paths for getting to their work. Many of them, too, had evidently come "outside" for enjoying the usual long noon lunch period of nearly two hours with their families at home.

But of all this I hope to know more later, for there surely must be a job for me in what is said to be the heart of industrial France, and certainly looks it. No wonder the invaders broke through here and held onto it ! The strange part is that it is only three hours by fast train from Paris. It feels like several days. Supper here — the long walk was fruitless! — has been eaten over a clean white oil-cloth alongside several workers who mix many Italian words into a language which isn't French or anything else I've ever met before. They are employed in certain clothing factories here. That looks friendly to my hope to find work to-morrow in the big steel plant where I mean to try to see the director in the morning.

Here's hoping to draw as satisfactory a bed as the dinner.

Douai,

Friday, July 22, 1921.

Well; it took all my letters and a lot of very bad French. But that's a small price to pay for a chance to start work to-morrow morning at six in an attractive, modern, 2,000-man steel plant. For some reason the manager found surprisingly little trouble in understanding my idea, perhaps because one of my introductions shown him stated so well my interest in the study of "the mentality of the working class," as the French writer of the letter put it.

Without these letters from a well-known engineer and manufacturer in Paris, by the way, a job would be an utter impossibility here. Outside one of the mines of the neighborhood, for instance, a notice states that any applicant must have his card of dismissal from the army, his card of identity from his home town, and several other similar certificates. So my passport would be a give-away except for the co-operation of the a higherups."

The letter of introduction thus required also presents fewer complications than the plan suggested by a French adviser last winter in America.

"That will arrange itself/' he answered when I asked what to say in case my presence in a French town needed explanation. "First you can plan an arrival-stay in, say, a port city where there will be many Americans already. After that you will go to an interior city. When they ask you why you are there, you can merely say: 'J'ai une amieJ (I have a lady friend.) Then they will understand and they will smile and all will be well."

When it came to putting me on the job, the superintendent told my boss that I had been recommended to them as an American who was anxious to better his condition, and so had worked his way across in order to learn more about steel-making and steel-working in France during the period of unemployment at home. Oddly enough, also by great good luck, in view of my newness to "factory French," this boss is an Englishman! Apparently he's a sign of the general "mix-up" caused by the war as observed in yesterday's walk. "M'sie^ Toam" (Tom), as the others call him, is a bright-looking, light-mustached Cockney who has spent years in the factories and the cattle-ranches of "the States," Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, China, and various other points east, west, and south. After helping drive out the Germans from the town here, he married a French girl and appears to feel happy and settled for life. He says this is the best job run into yet, and that's saying a lot.

On his advice, my overalls have been secured in the market stalls of the main square — at thirty-one francs. It is to be hoped that they may some day show as good a record of manifold launderings and multitudinous mendings as do most of the working clothes of this plant, and, indeed, of the whole region. The big factory is being rebuilt with money paid by the government in view of the complete destruction of the old plant, as accomplished by the invaders who overworked a lot of acetylene torches on its steel columns and stanchions during the last few days before their retreat. As yet the new buildings are only partly filled with machinery, but it's already a very noisy and active place, filled with what look like workers well above ordinary laborers in point of skill and training.

One of these is to be my landlord. What sort of place his establishment is remains a question, but it is evidently the kind of boarding-house which goes with the job, and that's the important thing. At any rate, its name sounds good — "Estaminet Tout Va Bien" (All goes well).

"Not bad, physically," said one storekeeper this afternoon when asked how the town was treated by "les boches" as everybody calls their recent captors, "Morally, very bad. Nothing but a great prison, the whole city — with thousands of our men who didn't get off to the army in time put to work under armed guards in the trenches or the mines near by."

The situation should become plainer as the French department of my ears improves. It needed little skill, however, to learn from the verger in the old church that it had been stripped of every piece of metal — bells, chandeliers, railings, lamps, candlesticks — everything! The great organ appeared shockingly bereaved and forlorn with nothing but gaping spaces where the great pipes had been. A huge hole in the roof has just been repaired. It was made by an English bombing plane — in the attempt to "put out the eyes" of the Germans believed to be using the high tower as a point of observation. Throughout the city's lawns, squares, and parks, statues have been despoiled of every inch of metal even down to the lettering.