The Workers: An Experiment in Reality. The WestWyckoff, Walter A. (Walter Augustus)
History
The Workers: An Experiment in Reality. The West
Wyckoff, Walter A. (Walter Augustus)
Unemployed -- United States; Working class -- United States
Our place is by no means a sinecure. The roads are constantly falling
into unrepair and a deal of hard work is necessary to keep them in
order. Pick and shovel work, that most heart-breaking of manual toil so
far as my experience goes, is mostly in demand, for the old trenches
must be kept open and new ones dug, and sometimes the sides of long
sections of the road must be buried under a layer of earth to prevent
the bare planks from warping in the sun. After six hours of such labor
there remain two in the early evening in which we go over every foot
of roadway on the grounds and make whatever immediate repairs are
necessary. At seven o’clock, Harry reports to the fire department, and
then we are free.
It is not altogether easy to account for Harry as a common laborer.
A well-set-up, muscular American of about fifty, with a singularly
intelligent, shrewd face and the merriest of blue eyes, he might be,
from his appearance, a well-to-do contractor. Only once with me has he
touched upon the general subject of his past, and then he intimated
that formerly he was well off, but that in his business relations he
had always passed as a “good fellow.” “And that means, you know,” he
said, turning upon me with a significant look, “that means a ‘damn
fool!’”
Among the workmen on the grounds whom I have come to know, none has
interested me more as a type than an American carpenter with whom I
sometimes spend an evening. The man is lonely and uncomfortable in
his new surroundings. The novel conditions which here beset him as a
workingman are quite as disturbing to him as the unfamiliar setting of
his daily life. He clings tenaciously to his individuality, and the new
order of things which confronts him here lightly makes strange havoc of
all that.
We had not been talking many minutes on the embankment, where one day
after dinner we first met, when the man’s case shone clear as day. He
is a master-carpenter from a village home in Ohio, and the certainty of
steady work for many months at four dollars a day was tempting enough
to induce him to leave his family behind and come here. He had arrived
a few days before and had found instant employment.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account