Charles R. Walker

“ I say it's not a beginner's job, though it's like golf—the first shovelful may be a winner. What lends life to the sport is the fact that everybody's in it—it's the team play of the open-hearth, like a house-raising in the community.
Another thing giving life is the heat. The mouth of the furnace gapes its widest, and you must hug close in order to get the stuff across. Every man has deeply smoked glasses on his nose when he faces the furnace. He's got to stare down her throat, to watch where the dolomite lands. ”

“ But after seven days of it, fourteen hours each, it gets under the skin, it burns along the nerves, as the furnace heat burns along the arms when you make back-wall. It suddenly occurred to me one day, after someone had bawled me out picturesquely for not knowing where something was that I had never heard of, that this was what every immigrant Hunky endured; it was a matter of language largely, of understanding, of knowing the names of things, the uses of things, the language of the boss. ”

“ It was dragging flat-cars, with iron boxes laid crosswise on them, as big as coffins. I went over and looked carefully at the train load, and at one or two of the boxes. They were filled with irregular shapes of iron, wire coils, bars, weights, sheets, fragments of machines, in short—scrap.
"This is what they eat," I thought, glancing at the glowing doors; "I wonder how many tons a day." I waited till the locomotive came to a shaken stop in front of the middle furnace, then left the mill by the tracks along which it had entered. ”

“ 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 [Pg 147] has similarities with cooking; any cook tends his stove part of the time by watching to see that nothing burns up. ”

“ There you can look down on the pit strewn with those giant bucket-ladles and sprinkled with the clean-up men, who gather painfully all that's spilled or slobbered of hot metal, and save it for a second melting. The whole is swept by the omnipresent crane. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We ranged from furnace to furnace, climbing up to a platform that ran around the fattest part and spending long quarter-hours on our bellies unscrewing valves. There was always something leaking. Ralph could come and take a look at the furnace, and send us after tools.
"Ralph's all right," said Lonergan, "has new names though for everything. Doesn't call a goddam wrench a wrench, calls it a 'jigger.' Have to learn all your tools over again by his goddam Hunky names." ”

“ I wonder if I shall learn Serbian, or Russian, or Hungarian? There seems to be a Slavic polyglot that any one of a half-dozen nationalities understands. That word, "Tchekai!—Watch out!"—even the Americans use it. It's a word that is crying in your [Pg 51] ears all night. Watch out for the crane that is taking a ladle of hot metal over your head, or a load of scrap, or a bundle of pipes; watch out for the hot cinder coming down the hole from the furnace-doors; watch out for "me" while I get this wheelbarrow by; and "Heow! Tchekai!" for the trainload of hot ingots that passes your shoulder. ”

“ The ladlefuls ceased as steel, becoming thirty minutes' sledging through stoppage for four men, the weight of manganese in my shovel, and the clatter of the pieces that hit the rail, sparks on my neck burning through a blue handkerchief, and the cup of tea I had with Jock, cooked over hot slag at 4.00 A.M.
A battle certainly, to make an ingot—trench work in a quiet sector, perhaps, but a year-after-year affair. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Clean-up man in the pit was my first job, which I held until I passed to third-helper on the open-hearth. Later I worked in the cast-house, became a member of the stove-gang, and at length achieved the semi-skilled job of hot-blast man on the blast-furnace. I acquired the current Anglo-Hunky language and knew speedily the grind and the camaraderie of American steel-making. In these chapters I have put down what I saw, felt, and thought as a steel-worker in 1919.
Steel is perhaps the basic industry of America. ”

“ The twelve-hour day gives a special character to the industry itself as well as to the men. I remember noticing the difference in pace, in tempo, from that of a machine shop or a cotton mill. Men learn to cultivate deliberate movement, with a view to the fourteen-hour stretch they have before them. When I began work with a pickaxe on some hot slag, on my first night, I was reproached at once: "Tak' it eas', lotza time before seven o'clock." ”

“ I shoveled between the stone arches of the furnace base, that curved overhead like the culverts of a bridge. Sometimes the flue dust was wet and clotted with mud, and came up in cakes on the shovel; sometimes it was light, and flew in your nose and eyes. I made a pile of it six feet high, and shaped it into a brick-red pyramid with my shovel. I washed the arches white with a hose.
"Change 'em before we tap," McLanahan ordered, nodding at the stoves.
I went among the rangy hundred-foot shafts with a certain sense of control over great forces. Every set differs in its special crankiness. ”

“ Nowhere does the form and pressure of the real world differ more sharply from the picture in men's heads than among different social and racial groups in industry. Nor is anywhere the accuracy of the picture of more importance. An open-hearth furnace helper, working the twelve-hour day, and a Boston broker, owning fifty shares of Steel Preferred, hold, as a rule, strikingly different pictures of the same forces and conditions. ”

“ But the ladle continues to pour, with twenty tons of steel to go. It can't be allowed to make a steel floor for the pit. It must get into those moulds.
So the craneman swings her on to the next mould, with the stream aspurt. It's like taking water from the teakettle to the sink with a punctured dipper: half goes on the kitchen floor. But the spattering of molten metal is much more exciting. A few little clots affect the flesh like hot bullets. So, when the craneman gets ready to swing the little stream down the line, the workers on the platform behave like frightened fishes in a mill pond. ”

“ Perhaps a technique may some day arise which will supply the executives of industry not only with the facts about employees in their varied racial and social groups but supply the facts with due emphasis and in three dimensions so that the controller of power may be able to see them as descriptive of men of like mind with himself. The conclusion most burned into my consciousness was the lack of such knowledge or understanding in the steel industry and the imperative need of securing it, in order to escape continual industrial war, and perhaps disaster. ”

“ I achieved my promotion from common labor in the pit to the floor of the furnace by supplying on a twenty-four-hour shift, when absentees are apt to be numerous, and it is hard fully to man the furnaces. The company kept a large number of extra men on its pay roll because of the number of absentees, and the turnover percentage ran high.
It is impossible to live under this loose régime—with high turnover, and the work-pace necessarily keyed low because of the excessive burden of hours spent under the roof of the mill—and not wonder if there isn't an engineering problem in it. ”

“ The multiform steel prop which civilization hung upon came to me for a moment—rails, skyscrapers, the locomotive just passed, machinery that was making the ornament and substance of the environment of men. ”

“ The jobs we did were pick-and-shovel jobs. But have you ever used a pick on hot slag? There is judgment and knack, and he is a fool who says that "anyone can do the job." Whenever the chance for special skill happened by, as in hooking the crane to a difficult piece of scrap, there was an abundance, and much rivalry to show it off. ”

“ At a proper and chosen instant, the senior melter shouts, "Heow!" and the great furnace rolls on its side on a pair of mammoth rockers, and points a clay spout into the ladle held for it by the crane. Before the hot soup comes rushing, the second-helper has to "ravel her out." That function of his almost destroyed my ambition to learn the steel business. Raveling is poking a pointed rod up the tap-spout, till the stopping is prodded away. You never know when the desired but terrific result is accomplished. When it is, he retires as you would from an exploding oil-well. The brew is loose. ”

“ The even whirr of the power house increased it, and the shrieks of machinery gave it a streaky quality. There were staccato punctuations, of course, by the whistles, [Pg 119] and when a distant "blaw" came to me, I thought how loudly it drove into the ears of the hot-blast man, turning his wheel by a stove. But it was mostly the summed-up roar that occupied your head—an insistent thing, that made you excited and weary at the same time. The mills had been running for ten years; they always had a night-shift in Bouton.
It is easy to get excited about a steel-mill sky at night. ”

“ It begins by being extensively intimate in personal and physical ways; you know every man's idiosyncrasies in handling a sledge or a bar or a shovel, and the expression of his face under all phases of a week's work; you know naturally the various garments he wears on all parts of his body. [Pg 93] You proceed to acquaint yourself, as the work throws up opportunity, with the mannerisms and qualities of his spirit. It is astonishing, with the barrier of a different language, only partly broken down by a dialect-American, how little is ultimately concealed or kept out of the common understanding. ”

“ When it's time for a test, the first-helper will take a spoon about the size of your hand and scoop up some of the soup. But not to taste. He pours it into a mould, and when the little ingot is cool, breaks it with a sledge. Everyone on the furnace, barring myself, looks at the broken metal and gives a wise smile. I'm not enough of a cook. They know by the grain if she has too much carbon or needs more, or is ready to tap, or isn't. With too much carbon, she'll need a "jigger," which is a few more tons of hot metal, to thin her out. ”

“ Dress up,—hat, dress, shoe,—walk all time Main Street. Bah!"
It was a refreshing shock to receive this outspoken critique of America from a Hunky, a Hungarian stove-gang boss of a blast-furnace. I was amused very much by it, except the phrase "America all right mak' money, old country place live." I coupled it up with some talks I had had with men on the open-hearth. America, steel-America, which was all they knew, was very largely a place of long hours, gas, heat, Sunday work, dirty homes, big pay. ”

“ He will swear moderately and blow a whistle. You return to the furnace, and on your heels follows a locomotive dragging a bucket, the ladle, ten feet high. Out of it arise the fumes of your fifteen tons of hot metal. The overhead crane picks it up and pours it through a spout into the furnace. As it goes in, you stand and direct the pouring. The craneman, as he tilts or raises the bucket, watches you for directions, and you stand and make gentle motions with one hand, thus easily and simply controlling the flux of the fifteen tons. That part of the job always pleased me. ”

“ The chamber had the appearance of a mine gallery de luxe. I looked at the tons of ore moving upward neatly, efficiently. What an incalculable saving of labor and time, this endless chain affair with its continually moving boxes, over the old manner of hoisting painfully, in few-pound lots, by hand!
I gave McLanahan's order to the skip-man and went up the ladders.
You've got to tap, "when the iron's right," and when a little later the keeper held the steam drill in front of the mud wall of the tap hole, the steam stayed at home. There was no time for a steam-fitter. ”