Why I am a socialist

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Contents

FAOB

Will You Hays Pkack or War? ... i

I. The Stokt op Two Ciim aitd a Buckst of Coal • 1

Chapter I Thk 8tort Of Two Cknt8 And A Buckbt Of Coal

LiFS in the great East Side district of New York City rerolves within exceedingly narrow limits, and conditions that in better favored regions would be trivial become here of grave moment. This, no doubt, is true generally of all poverty-stricken and over-crowded areas, where the struggle for existence being primitive, always bitter, and usually perilous, excludes all lesser topics. The comparatively small world of the well-fed and the well-to-do sweeps on ignorant of this, as of all other actual (not fictional) characteristics of the habitat of the poor, until some event not to be ignored strikes sharply for the moment on the snperior consciousness. Such a thing happening in the winter of 1891-2 suddenly revealed the nakedness of East Side life through the discovery that the region was disturbed by so small a matter as two cents.

The winter had been severe. In no season can life in the tenement houses be said to be joyous, but in a bitter cold winter what is ordinarily but gloomy discomfort becomes acute suffering. Some unfortunates freeze to death in the streets; many in the houses have diificulty to keep alive. The old-style tenements, of which an amazing number still exist in New York, were ill-adapted for human habitation in cold, or I may say, in any other kind of weather; the doors and windows gaped, the walls were thin, the floors ill-laid, the rooms at all times damp; and for the least degree of tolerable comfort^ not to say for mere life itself^ heavy coal fires were indispensable.

By the regulations of the Board of Health only anthracite coal could be burned in the city. For years the retail price had been $5 a ton. I suppose that few persons in the worst of the East Side tenement houses had ever bought at one time a ton of coal. For one reason^ there was no place to put it; and for another the average tenement dweller never had at one time $5 to expend on coal. Universally^ the poorest bought their coal at the comer grocery^ a pailful at a time. There the price was ten cents for a pailful.

When this was translated into ton weights it meant that they were buying coal at the rate of $15 a ton.

Of a sudden, in the coldest week of the winter, it was announced that the wholesale price of coal had been increased fifty cents a ton and the comer grocery had advanced the price of coal by the bucket from ten to twelve cents.

This was the two cents over which the East Side was concerned. On its face and to the comfortable the statement seems extravagant, but the two cents advance in the coal price made a great difference to the East Side. Industrial conditions that winter had been as severe as the weather. Many men were out of work, the destitution that always lowers over that unhappy region was more than usually black, and families that had balanced the relative pains of f reesing and of starving before they spent ten cents for a bucket of coal heard with dismay of the increased cost of warmth.

As a rule the East Side accepts in dogged patience its allotted troubles, but some unwonted demonstrations took place over this situation, and as (in the view of uneasy

Two Cents and a Bucket of Coal souls that dwelt in daily prophecy of proletar ian upr ising) these stirrings were assumed to be menacing^ the attention of the rest of the city was drawn thereto. The two cents became an item of news. I was then a reporter on the the New York HeralS, and the HerM assigned me to investigate the cause of the increase and its results upon the poor.

The causes were well enough known to anyone that had kept track of current events, a practice that, as a matter of fact, has astonishingly few f ollow ers. All of the anthracite coal mines were in a region lying between 100 and 170 miles from New York City. Three railroads, the Philadelphia & Reading, the Central of New Jersey, and the Lehigh Valley were chiefly engaged in transporting the coal to market and were also the owners of many mines. Looking Somewhat ahead of his times towards the industrial concentration and consolidation to be, Mr. Alexander McLeod, a daring speculator of Philadelphia, had managed to unite the three railroads. This secured to the combination the practical control of the anthracite coal output (since these roads either mined or carried almost all the coal produced), and the flrst act of the new association was to advance the wholesale price of coal fifty cents a ton. This, when it had reached the tenement house dwellers, meant an increase of two cents a bucket.

I climbed the rickety and ill-smelling stairway of many a rear tenement to see what this increase signified for the people on whom it was levied. Some rather painful things had happened over there. A family in Henrj^^gtreet had taken the lids from the kitchen stove to increase the output of heat and retard the con^mption of coal, and, sleeping on the floor together, had been asphyxiated by the egcaping fumes. In another quarter, inhabited by foreigners.

people had broken the windows of a grocer who refused to sell at the ol d g rice. Wherever an old building was being wrecked there was a horde of little chilifreD picking up tne precious fragments of wood^ sometimes at the risk of their lives. The^haritable focieties working hard to cope with the situation yet were overwhelmed by it^ for indeed the need was too great; no ordinary society could have provided for so many persons that had neither work nor fuel. An old woman in a rear tenement attic^ who with her needle had managed for years to win some scanty subsistence, was found dead in her bed from starvation and cold. I went up to see the place, and the snow from the s^light lay in a little drift across the bed, so it was no wonder she died; she had over her nothing but a rag. The other people in the house told me they would have helped her if they had known — in itself a bitter commentary; for the house was but a wretched shell, the inhabibmts all but destitute and how they coula have afforded help I could not pretend to say. ^ It struck me as rather o^ and incongruous that among well-fed and comfortable persons there was a disposition to base upon the situation much philosophical reflection to the effect that the poor brought their troubles upon themselves. For instance, they were so improvident, it was urged; they bought their coal by the pailful, which was t£e*most exp ensive w ay. If they would practice thrift, save a little money, and buy a ton^of^co^ at a time, of course they would get it at the ton rate. I suppose that it was because I had been so much among the tenements that these comments, offered in obvious good faith, seemed to me to possess a kind of grim and almost horriUgJumor. I had mind upon the dwelling places I had seen, and upon the^people in them, and the idea of their saving

Two Cents and a Bucket of Coal

money from their hand-to-mouth existence, or the idea of domping a ton of coal in the midst of their cramped, crowd ed quar ters, moved me to sar donic mjjr th. I was, to be sure, largely of the opinion apparently held by all other comfor table p ersons, that all was well in the world, and if here and there an imperfection showed, why, a little tinkering — no more. I was also in the main prepared to accept the notion that if people got hurt by the profit hunt the fact was, of course, melancholy, but the hunt was right and good and not to be criticised. Yet I confessed at times that none of these theories seemed quite to cover the cases of the poor on the East Side.

From this tour of investigation I was sent to the region of the mines to note what upon the miners had been the effect of the new order of things and of the process of industrial consolidation and unification. Here, to my astonishment, I found even greater and moreg^eral sufferipg than there had been in the tene ment hous es, though from a different cause. That they might keep down the supply of coal and thereby support its increased price the gentlemen in control of the new railroad combination had restricted mining operations to work on no more than two days a week. The result was that of all the coal ininers in the region hardly one was able to earn support for himself and his family.

This, being probably a temporary restriction, might not have been particularly serious if there had been for years anything like a normal condition of employment in the mining region ; but the fact was that the miners had worked under a system that made them unable to accumulate or to save, or to live otherwise than precariously; so that they were unprepared for the least reduction of their earning power. They were, in fact, the slaves of the mine ewners. I shall expect this term to be regarded by the uninitiated as extreme or extravagant; yet it is soberly used; for I can think of no other that applies adequately to the miners' condition, and I have read few descriptions of any state of acknowledged slavery that does not on the whole seem better than theirs.

These men were not merely enslaved, in a way I shall now proceed to explain, but they were systematically despoiled and robbed.

In practically all of the mines the methods were the same. When a man began to work he opened an account at the company store. You may assume with entire confidence that he opened this account because if he failed to do so he ceased to work in the mine. This store was owned (not openly but through a subterfuge) by the firm or company that operated the mine. By the laws of the State such dual ownership was strictly forbidden, but with the assistance of the convenient subterfuge was almost universal. Some years before there had been a violent revolt against conditions in the anthracite region, and at that time men that greatly profited by this subterfuge bad uttered splendid sentiments in favor of law and order. I could not learn that their attention had ever been officially called to this inconsistency. The company store had for sale everything the miner needed in his household and also everything he needed in his work. These things were supplied to him in advance or on credit and their cost was subtracted at the end of the month from his recorded earnings.

Payment for mining was on the basis of the carload, so much for every mine car of coal brought to the surface and delivered at the breaker, which is a kind of coal elevator at the mouth of the mine. The miners hired their

Two Cents and a Bucket of Coal

own laborers^ and furnished their own tools^ gunpowder, oil, and accessories — all purchased at the company stores. The mine owners furnished only the mine, the breaker, and the cars that brought the coal to the surface.

This system opened the door to many abuses. Mixed with the coal in the original strata was a small quantity of slate. Necessarily, this was carried to the surface with the coal, and for the slate a purely arbitrary and unreasonable deduction was made, apparently in a spirit of C3mical disregard of justice. On their way to the breaker the cars passed swiftly up an inclined plane, and on a bridge over this stood a functionary called the docking boas, who estimated and recorded the amount of slate in each car as it passed. The whole performance i was admittedly a farce. As the cars went hurtling along, the docking boss could no more than glance at each of them and in no way could the surface of the load be any trustworthy indicator of the amount of slate it contained. Moreover, the man was in the employ of the mine owners; his judgment was necessarily ex parte; and from it there was no appeal. On his instantaneous guess the deductions were from fifteen to forty-five per cent. A car that contained no slate might be docked nearly one-half and probably no car ever contained as much slate as was charged against it.

As there was no mine inspection worth the name, the miners had likewise no redress against another grievance that arose from the arbitrary size of the car. This the mine owners regulated to suit themselves, and while each car was supposed to contain about the same amount of coal there were variations, and these all in favor of the mine owner. At some mines a rule had been made that, to be recorded with full credit^ a car must be heaped with coal until the coal would touch and ring a bell suspended over the tracks. No agreements regulated the height of this bell. The charge repeatedly made that a mine boss or superintendent^ ambitious for large showings, would surreptitiously increase the height of the bell seemed improbable^ and yet I met with it so often from many sources and so well supported that I was obliged to think it not without foundation. Nothing exist^^to prevent any such species of tEeft^ and it would in fact be quite in accord witfr other practices toward the miner. For example^ I found mines where the size of the car had undoubtedly been increased without any increase of payment to the miner^ and it seemed quite true that in some instances when the coal on any cfLt failed to ring the b^ that carload had been confiscated to the mine and the miner had receivedJittle for it.

Why, then, did the miners remain at work when they were so unfairly treated? That was the first question that arose when I had established these facts. In the big, free, bustling country of which they were citizens were many other employments besides mining. Why did they not turn to something else? Or why did they stay a day in a region so forlorn and unhapgy? There was the Great West, for instance, that traditionally needed men to develop it and offered so many golden chances. Why did they not move thither?

I turned this question to and fro for some time before I found the answer. Occasionally one of the younger or more fortunate men would indeed make his escape, but the others could not go or did not go because tKey were bouQdhand and foot to the company store — ^by debt.

They were in debt; they alwayshaSH^een in debt; they

T^wo Cents and a Biicket of Coal

always would be in debt; it was part of the system to keep them in debt.

One reason why they were in debt at some of the mines was because they were overcharged for everything they bought For a $3 keg of powder they paid $^ for a can of oil worth six ty cen ts they paid $1. for a rubber c oal worth $4 they paid $6, for a sack of flour worth $ 2S^ they pai5*$2.50. ""^

They mustlbuy at the company store or they could not work in the mines^ and for everything they bought at the company store they were scandalously overcharged*

Most of them lived in houses (so to call them) owned by the company^ and were behind in their rent. These houses were of wood, sometimes constructed by nailing upright boards against a flimsy fra me, much as a western farmer might build his woodshed. They were often unpainted, usually ramshackle, and always repulsive to look at. At some mines they stood in long dreary rows, forming one of the forlomest spectacles I can remember. All the anthracite region had been made by the hand of man a place repulsive, but surely the sorriest spots in it were dwellings maintained by the mining companies; and for shelter in one of these wretc hed s heds the rent exacted seemed to be calculated on the idea oF recovering^in a year the entire cost of construction. "**~

You would naturally assume offhand that persons living in these houses and submitting to so many extortions were of low intelligence and belonged to what we are pleased to call the riffr aff of Eu rope. I was astonished to find that they were Americans of long Americanlineage, inteUigenty and, strange as it may seem, iHlense ly patriot ic. PiSctically aU of them had grown up in the mmes. Their fathers* had been miners; they themselves had begun life an slate-pickers or mole-drivers in the drifts^ and by years of practice had mastered' a difficult and ^an fferous tr^ e. I do not know^ indeed^ why anyone should think a miner can be an unintellig ent per son; to do the work performed by these men in the anthracite region requires a hi^ degree of skill and much knowledge; they are not merely laborers but experts and engineers. Many u^aera had married the d augh ters of other miners; their children were already in the mines; and on faGEer and child was the mark that one comes quickly to recognize as the stamp of the mines. '**'

These children were in themselves an interesting study. The law of the State strictly forbade their emp loym ent in or a^0Ht the m|o^s; it was a law everywhere and openly violated. Everybody knew the substance of the law; everybody knew it was a dead letter. I have seen a father going inltf'a mine wiUTthrte children all under the le^d age limit and all at wo rk fo r^ ^ages. Parents did not deliberately choose to ruin thus the lives of their chiljrf n » they have spoken to me of it with tears; but under the existing conditions the thing was inevitable. The children s wages were necessary for .the support of the family^ and the struggle for life was always "grim and terrible. A fa^er, men said^ could not let his clHldre^^jBtaixiB. After a time I was driven to question whether in some instances^ at leasts starvation or some less painful form of death would not have been preferable to the^Tlow, long drawn out murder of bod^ mind, and soul that was accomplished upon the child that labored in the mines. The records of their employment scored upon them were both obvious and shocking. I never saw one that was not pidlid^ gaunt^ prematurely old> overwi^ght, underfed^ and an easy prey to anyHbacterial dise ase, but particularly to tuber-

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I^wo Cents and a Bucket of Coal

cnloflis. I foond boys passing into man's estate that had never had any childhood they could recollect. They had never played nor had any recre ation nor drawn from life any conception except that of eternally facing the one battle for dail y foo d amid surrojjnSIngs that seemed calculated to crush out every sweet and worthy thought. Against the system that produced these "^conditions it seemed to me that thousands of ruin ed l ives daily protesj^.

Near one of the mines a mine owner had built his handsome residence in a vast and beautifuJL.CState. He was reputed, on just grounds, I believe, to be the fairest and most charitable employer in the r egion ; he had made a sincere but futile effor);^to withstand the methods that increasingly bound clminijf upon the w orker , he had no sympathy with the new coalition; and at the time I visited his colEery he had determined to resist the combination or retire from the business. He was a type of the old sty le employer that had individual and kindly relations with his men, and yet there were features about even his situation that provoked gprave questions.

On the road below his beautiful estate the miners trooped to and from the mines, and I cannot pretend that the contrast they suggested was reassuring to one that knew the kind of houses they left in the morning and would return to at night. This mine owner had a son twelve or thirteen yearsold for whom as a plaything he had built a miniature railroad that ran two or three miles about the hills. With real locojQQti'^^s^ cars, tracks, and switches the fortunate boy had gpreat amusement running his trains from miniature station to station. The locomotive was so large that he could ride in the cab and the cars would accommodate several of his friends. At two places the track

TT crossed the highway and the boy would blow the whistle of his locomotive as he approached a crossing. It was great fan. Sometimes his train would come along as the mine boys were going to work or returning home and they would stand and watch the little cars fly past^ the bell ringings and the youthful engineer seated in his cab, happy and smiling. Then they would go on, swinging their dinner pails.

The miners' houses were always very poor and bare, inside as well as outside, and I think I found in the melancholy region nothing more pathetic than the efforts of the overburdened housewives to preserve in the midst of such surroundings the decency, cleanliness, and goodjaste characteristic of their race. The walls had little treasured ornaments and framed prints cut from the illustrated papers; there was often a vase with wild flowers from the hills, and to my amazement I found some of the sad-eyed housewives managed to gprow a trifle of a garden by the door. But over everything was a terrible blight of poverty and insufficiency. The miners' families went badly clothed and plainly some of them did not have enough to eat They seemed to be a grave, self-respecting, and orderly people; when the father SLnS'the boys returned from the day's work in the mines they plunged at once into Ae washtubs of water the wife and mother kept standing for them, and with soap and brushes scrubbed away all the grime of the mines. Then they dressed in clean, if patched, clothes and had supper. Afterwards there was nothing to do except to smoke and to go to bed. The rows of barracks on the bleak hillside afforded no vestige of human amusement. I was rather nonplussed to find that practically none of them drank intoxicating liquor to excess, and many drank it not at_all, but it ^as explained to me that a

Ttoo Cents and a Bucket of Coal

miner's work is such he cannot wisely use alcoholic stimnlants. NeverUielesSy I am quite sore that in the luLe condiBons I should be drunken erery night if in any way I could come by liquor.

This was the siEuation at the mines when (by some violence of speech) work was called " good." I mean when on all the days of the week the miners were allowed to mine coal, or to work in the mines preparing (without compensation) to mine coal, and when the deductions were not unusually large. They were very anxious to work all the time that they might earn money to live on, and whenever work was interrupted, as by explosions in the mines (which were fr$c|aent and usuall y fa taH, by floodings, or by the caprice of the mine owners, they thought *t&emselves unfortunate. At the end of each month each miner received a due-biU or ticket showing his account with his kind, indulgent employer. On this ticket was recorded first all the coal he had mined in the month — so many cars. Then there was noted the de ductio ns Iot slate or for underweu^t^ being the amounts reported by the dockingjboss as Defore described. Next were subtracted the wages of the laborers employed by the miner, for while these laborers received their wages at first hand from the company they were in reality paid by the miners. Then were deducted the supplies the miner had drawn in the month; and from all this was struck a balance of the amount due to him.

This amount the company store usually took to apply on the back account

As a result the average miner seldom saw any actual money he could call his own, and on every side the comf>any store was the horizon of his material life.

Very often when all the deductions fiii3 been made the remaindcTj even for Ae taking of the company store, was if pitifully small. I collected about two hundred duebills^ each representing the proceeds of a miner's work for one month in the times that were called good. Tl'fiey showed balances of from $15 to $45. The average was $36. One man that had toiled all the month had a balance due to him of $16 and another of $l'Lii0. These men had spent most of the month in preparing their drifts to take out coal^ a work for which they received nothing. This might be tolerable if their earnings when they began to deliver coal were sufficient to afford compensation for the unprofitable month, but they never were. The man that earned $16 for the month of hard and dangerous toil had four children, all girls, and therefore unproductive of wages; for even the barbarism of the anthracite region did not go so far as to compel little girls to mine coaL How this family lived I do not know, but certainly the fare in that household was far less than any child of earth should have.

Upon conditions like these there had now fallen the order that no more than two days' work should be done in any week, a policy deemed necessary to keep down the supply and to keep up the price. To the people that for years had lived thus perilously upon the edge of the abyss the order seemed an intolerable hardship. They had hands and the will to work, they needed the work that they might live, the work that they wanted to do stared them in the face, and a wholly arbitrary power, unconnected in any way with normal conditions, refused them the work they begged.

All these facts were clear to any observation; they were physical and palpable results of certain causes. But one phase of the matter not so easily discerned was long a poasle to me. The price of coal in New York had been

Two Cents and a Bucket of Coal

$5 and was now $5.50 a ton. Evidently this was wholly disproportionate to the cost of producing the coal. Figures based upon the expense of mine operation^ including everything except interest and taxes^ showed that the cost of a ton of coal loaded upon a car at the mine sidetrack was about $1. Over night the car was hauled to New York where its contents became worth $5 a ton. This increase, in turn, bore no proportion to the actual cost of the service of transporting the coal and showed an abnormal profit, easy to understand, when one remembered that the railroad company that transported the coal usually owned it and was a great or preponderating influence in fixing the price of all coal. So far all was plain.

But what became of all these various and great profits? The company store must have paid very handsomely, the abuse of dockage must have yielded large returns, the price at which the coal was sold was an enormous advance upon the mining cost. Most of this money flowed into one channel ; that is to say, into the hands of the owners * of the mines, who were in turn the owners of the railroads. But no one heard that any extraordinary dividends %r profits were paid to these owners ; according to the records and reports the dividend rates paid by all these railroads were not to be regarded as excessive, being little above the current market rates for money. What, then, became of all these profits?

This remained a mystery until I looked into the lists of securities that these railroads had issued; then the trSI of the missing profits was Slearly revealed. All of these railroads had in the current phrase " capitalize d thei r eam-

* In the case of mines not in one way or another owned by the railroads the exorbitant freight rates absorbed the greater part of the profit ing power." That is to aaj, they had issued secnri tiea up to the limit of the money that could be obtained from the public on on e hand and from the miners on the other; and the docking boss, the company store, the wretched houses, the overcharges, the pallid-faced children, and the violated laws merely represented so much watered stock and so many bonds. Finally, it was to meet thcTr^uirements of a fresE issue of securities that the combination of the railroads had been formed, the price of coal increased, the days of labor at the mines diminished, and here was the heart and real secret of the murmurs of the East Side and the added two cents in the price of the bucket of coal.