Cornelia Stratton Parker

“ At six o'clock in the morning the bleachery whistle blows three times loud enough to shake the shingles on the roofs of the one-hundred-year-old houses and the leaves on the more than one-hundred-year-old trees about the Falls. Those women who have their breakfasts to get and houses to straighten up before they leave for work—and there are a number—must needs be about before then. ”

“ Is one to write of factory life as one finds it, or expurgated? I can hear the upbringers cry “expurgated”! Yet the way the girls talked was one of the phases of the life which set the stamp of difference on it all. What an infinitesimal portion of the population write our books! What a small proportion ever read them! How much of the nation's talking is done by the people who never get into print! ”

“ The number of books on the labor problem is indeed legion. The tragedy of the literature on any dynamic subject is that most of it is written by people who have time to do little else. Perhaps the best books on many subjects will never be written because those folk, who would be most competent to do the writing, through their vital connection with the problem at hand, never find the spare minutes to put their findings down on paper.
There could be no more dynamic subject than labor, since labor is nothing less than human beings, and what is more dynamic than human beings? ”

“ At the end of an hour the forelady beckoned me—such a neat, sweet person as she was—and I took my initial whack at a foot press. If ever I do run an automobile the edge of first enjoyment is removed. A Rolls-Royce cannot make me feel any more pleased with life than the first ten minutes of that foot press. In ten minutes the job was all done and there I sat for an hour and a half waiting for another. Hard on a person with the foot-press fever. ”

“ The outstanding conclusion forced upon any reader of such books as consciously attempt to give a picture of the worker and his job is that whoever wrote the books was bound and determined to find out everything that was wrong in every investigation made, and tell all about the wrongs and the wrongs only. Goodness knows, if one is hunting for the things which should be improved in this world, one life seems all too short to so much as make a start. In all honesty, then, such books on labor should be classified under “Troubles of Workers.” No one denies they are legion. ”

“ And all this time, how many hearts really beat as one in the labor world?
Indeed, the situation would clear up with more rapidity if we went to the other extreme and thought [228] of labor always as thirty million separate individuals. We would be nearer the truth than to consider them as this one great like-minded mass, all yearning for the same spiritual freedom; all eager for the downfall of capitalism. ”

“ If the thought of the brassworks comes in one breath and the bleachery in the next, the poetry must needs be set to music—the Song of the Bleachery. What satisfaction there must be to an employer who grows rich—or makes his income, whatever it may be—from a business where so much light-heartedness is worked into the product! Let those who prefer to sob over woman labor behind factory prison bars visit our bleachery. ”

“ To argue that women can take a place on a physical equality with man is simply not being honest. Without sentimentalizing over motherhood, it seems allowable to point out the fact that women are potential mothers, and this fact, with every detail of its complexities, feminists or no to the contrary, is a distinct handicap to women's playing a part in the industrial field on a par with man. And society pays more dearly for a weary woman than for a tired man.
Therefore, why not lunch rooms, and attractive lunch rooms, and good food, well cooked? ”

“ No wonder employers groan over holidays! The workers begin to slacken up about two days ahead and it takes two days after the day off to recover. Then, too, we indulged in too much nonsense that last week. We laughed more than we worked, and paid for it. The next week Mamie and Margaret claimed they were going to bring their dinners the whole week to work that noon hour and make up for our evil days. But as gray-haired Ella Jane said, she laughed so much that week she claimed she had a stomach ache. “We'll be a long time dead, once we die. Why not laugh when you get a chance?” ”

“ The first noon whistle—work dropped—a rush for the washroom. Let no one think his hands ever were dirty until he labors at a foot press in a brassworks. Such sticky, grimy, oily, rough blackness never was—and the factory supplies no soap nor towels. You are expected to bring your own—which is all right the second day when you have found it out and come prepared. ”

“ There is, indeed, no great like-minded mass of laborers. Instead we have millions of workers split into countless small groups, whose group interests in the great majority of cases loom larger on the horizon than any hold the labor movement, as such, might have on them. Such interests, for instance, as family, nationality, religion, politics. Besides, there is the division which sex interests and rivalries make—the conflict, too, between youth and age.
Yet for the sake of a working efficiency we must do a minimum of classifying. Thirty million is too large a number to handle separately. ”

“ There was absolutely nothing for me to do just then in my own line, so I embraced that opportunity daily to take my way to the recreation room and see what pickings I could gather up. But one afternoon Schmitz's face bore an extra-heavy frown. “Say, what you do every day that keeps you from your work all this time? Don't you know that ain't no way to do? Don't you understand hotel work is just like a factory? Everybody must be in his place all day and not go wandering off!” ”

“ The average job gave the worker little or no chance to show any initiative, to feel any sense of ownership or responsibility, to use such intellect and enthusiasm as he possessed. The attitude of the average employer built up no spirit of loyalty or co-operation between management and men. Hence these very human tendencies, compelling expression in a normal personality, became atrophied, as far as the job was concerned, and sought such functioning as a discouraging environment left them capable of in fields outside of industry—in many cases, within the labor movement [236] itself. ”

“ Another day, my Greek friend, the coffee man, said he was sure there was a little Greek in me; and an Austrian waiter guessed right away I was a bit Austrian; and every Spaniard in the kitchen—and the hotel was full of them—started by talking a mile-a-minute Spanish at me. So a cosmopolitan, nondescript, melting-pot face is an asset in the labor world in our fair land—all nationalities feel friendly because they think you are a countryman. But a Turk—that stretched boundaries a bit.
For every question Schmitz asked me I asked him one back. ”

“ The dress factory job was like another world compared with candy, brass, and the laundry. In each of those places I had worked on one floor of a big plant, doing one subdivided piece of labor among equally low-paid workers busy at the same sort of job as myself. ”

“ Suppose that for the moment your main intellectual interest was to ascertain what the average worker—not the man or woman so far advanced in the cultural scale that he or she can set his ideas intelligently on paper—thought about his job and things in general. To what books could you turn? Indeed I have come to feel that in the pages of O. Henry there is more to be gleaned on the psychology of the working class than any books to be found on economic shelves. ”

“ The proportion who read and write books, especially the female folk, live and die in the belief that it is the worst sort of bad taste, putting it mildly, to use the name of the Creator in vain, or mention hell for any purpose whatsoever. Yet suddenly, overnight, you find yourself in a group who would snap their fingers at such notions. Sweet-faced, curly-headed Annie wants another box of caramels. ”

“ Perhaps in the long run, one of the most harmful [xi] phases of modern civilization is this very contentment of not only the workers, but the employer and society at large, under conditions which are not building up a wholesome, healthy, intelligent population. Indeed, it is not so much the fault of modern industrialism as such. Perhaps it is because there are so many people in the world and the ability of us human beings, cave men only ten thousand years ago, to care for so many people has not increased with the same rapidity as the population. Our numbers have outrun our capacities. ”

“ The great majority of American labor undoubtedly are not class or group conscious in the sense that they feel themselves as workers pitted against a capitalist class. Temperamentally, intellectually, the doctrines of Karl Marx are not for them. They never heard of Karl Marx. They get up and go to work in the morning. During the day they dub away at something or other, whatever it may be—the chances are it changes rather often—putting no more effort into the day's work than is necessary to hold down an uninteresting job. They want their pay at the end of the week. ”

“ To those who care more for people than places, around every corner is something new—a world only dreamt of, if that. Why should all one's life be taken up with the kind of people we were born among, doing the sort of things our aunts and our uncles and our cousins and our friends do? ”

“ A certain type of labor agitator, or a “parlor laborite,” prefer to see only the gloomy side of the worker's life. They are as dishonest as the employer who would see only the contentment. The picture must be viewed in its entirety—and that means considering the workers not as a labor problem, but as a social problem. Workers are not an isolated group, who keep their industrial adversities or industrial blessings to themselves. They and their families and dependents are the majority of our [x] population. As a nation, we rise no higher in the long run than the welfare of the majority. ”

“ THE WORKING WOMAN I [1] No. 1075 Packs Chocolates Wise heads tell us we act first—or decide to act first—and reason afterward. Therefore, what could be put down in black and white as to why we took up factory work is of minor value or concern. Yet everyone persists in asking why? So then, being merely as honest as the Lord allows, we answer first and foremost because we wanted to. Isn't that enough? It is the why and wherefore of almost everything anyone does any place at any time. Only the more adept can concoct much weightier reasons as an afterthought. ”

“ Sometimes they were written by an immigrant, a bona-fide worker. The tragedy of such a life in this business-ridden land of ours tore one's soul.
An educated, cultured individual, used to a life of ease, or easier, if she had wished to make it that, would find the life of the factory worker well-nigh unbearable. An emotional girl longing for the higher things of life would find factory life galling beyond words. It is to be regretted that there are not more [76] educated and cultured people—that more folk do not long for the higher things of life—that factory work is not galling to everybody. ”

“ When men expressed themselves in their particular handicraft they found much of their joy in life in their work. One of the by-products of large-scale industry and the accompanying subdivision of labor has been the worker's inevitable lack of interest in the monotonous job. Since too long hours spent at mechanical, repetitious labor result in a lowered standard of efficiency, and rebellion on the part of the worker, there has followed a continual tendency toward a reduction in the length of the working day. ”

“ It is part and parcel of human nature that we can love more easily and comfortably than hate, that we can help more readily than hinder. Flourishing broadcast through all human creation is enough good will to revolutionize the world in a decade. ”

“ Her lips are very red. Sadie has the air of having just missed being a Vanderbilt. Her boudoir cap is lacy. Her smile is conscious kindness to all as inferiors. One wonders, indeed, what brought Sadie to packing chocolates in the autumn of life—a very wrinkly, powdered autumn. So Lillian, Sadie, and I are the representatives of what the nation produces—not what she gets presented with. As for the rest, there are a Hungarian, two Germans, four Italians, two Spaniards, a Swede, an Englishwoman, and numerous colored folk. Louie is an Italian. ”

“ Here was this enormous good-looking factory. On one side of the front steps, reaching all the way up into the main entrance hall, stood a line of men waiting for jobs; on the other side, though not near so long a line, the girls. The regular employees file by. At last, about eight o'clock, the first man is beckoned. Just behind the corner of a glassed-in telephone booth, but in full view of all, he is questioned by an employee in a white duck suit. Man after man is sent on out, to the growing discouragement, no doubt, of those remaining in line. ”

“ There is only one life most of us doubting humans are absolutely sure of. That one life gets filled with so much of the same sort of performance day in and day out; usually only an unforeseen calamity—or stroke of luck—throws us into a way of living and doing things which is not forever just as we lived and did things yesterday and the day before. ”

“ It is a sound business deduction that the greatest stumbling blocks in the difficulties between labor and capital to-day resolve themselves down to just that lack of understanding of our fellow-beings. ”