Hellraisers Journal: “Behind the Picket Line, The Story of a Slovak Steel Striker” by Mary Heaton Vorse, Part II

Quote MHV Immigrants Fight for Freedom, Quarry Jr p2, Nov 1, 1919 ———-

Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday February 11, 1920
Youngstown, Ohio – Mary Heaton Vorse Visit the Home of a Striker

From The Outlook of January 21, 1920:

BEHIND THE PICKET LINE

THE STORY OF A SLOVAK STEEL STRIKER
-HOW HE LIVES AND THINKS

BY MARY HEATON VORSE

[Part I of II.]

[Leaving the Picket Line in Youngstown, Ohio:]

It was seven o’clock. The morning vigil was over; the strike was unbroken. The deluge had not occurred. The men, weary with watching, broken with inaction and with suspense, drifted to their homes.

“You’re cold, ma’am,” my guide said to me, gently; “I want you should come to my house to get breakfast; my house it ain’t far.”

It seemed to me an imposition to appear in a strange woman’s house at that hour in the morning, especially as Mike let fall casually that he had eight children. A strike and eight children and a husband seemed to me quite enough for any woman to cope with, but he would not let me go without a cup of coffee. We walked past little detached dwellings, small frame houses and some of concrete.

These have been lately built. They show the modern impulse toward better housing. Here and there a rambler was planted over a door; there were porches, and plots of ground surrounded the houses. This was the most meritorious community, from the point of view of decency, that I have seen in any steel town.

Later we met a handsome lad coming out of the gate—Steve’s oldest boy on his way to high school. Then we went into the kitchen, and my first impression was of rows and rows of brightly polished shoes all ready to be hopped into—any amount of brightly polish-little shoes standing neatly two by two.

Now, any student of domestic life will know what this means. How many families are there who can get the boys to black their shoes the night before? I can’t in my household—indeed, it takes savage pertinacity to st shoes blacked at all. Just the sight of those shoes made me realize that my hostess was no ordinary woman. In the meantime Mike was calling up the stairs:

Mother, come down and see who’s here! Come down and see what I’ve got in the kitchen!” To hear him one would have supposed that I was a birthday present. And when “mother” appeared there was nothing that could have shown a third person that I was not an old friend. The owners of the shiny shoes came into the room with their shy “good mornings.”

They went to the sink, one after the other, to finish their washing; the older girl—a beautiful blonde child with a wide, placid face—scrutinized the three boys in the “dark uncharted tracts behind the ears ” and turned the skeptical and disillusioned eye of an elder sister upon the backs of their necks. They went into the next room and got for themselves spotless shirts elaborately patched as to the elbows. Meanwhile my hostess fried eggs for Steve and myself and poured us coffee, asking rapid questions about the strike: Had they gone back? It wasn’t true, thank God! W’ere there more than yesterday? Above all, had any of our own people gone back?

Little Mike, Stephen, and Joe had become possessed of great bowls of porridge and wide slices of bread and butter. I listened to the conversation, but my attention was really enthralled by the best brought-up children, bar none, I had ever seen.

Never for a moment did they interrupt the conversation. No one cried out: “Ma, where’s this?” “Ma, I can’t ﬁnd that.” They dressed and ate their breakfast and got themselves off for school, not forgetting to shake hands with me before they went. Eight splendid, beautifully brought up children, sound, good tempered, and good-mannered, were my friends’ contribution to this country.

Mike had been here for twenty years. After twenty years of the hardest sort of work underground in the mines and in the heat of the steel mills, after twenty years of unremitting industry, he had achieved a four-room house. It had a grape arbor and a little garden. That is what the conditions of labor in this country had permitted him to achieve—and he is incomparably better oﬁ than the average steel worker.

The baby came and laid her head against the father’s knee, and Tisa, who is still nearly a baby, climbed up and put her arms around his neck. He put his great arm around both of them and hugged them to him.

“They only get to know their papa now, since the strike. When father works fourteen hours night and ten light, he never sees the children.”

He nodded. “You see, that’s why I stopped work. How do you think the strike go? You think we goin’ to win now—pretty soon?”

[My hostess broke in, briskly:]

Well, father, if this strike ain’t won, we’re goin’ to win another strike. Our people ain’t never goin’ to stop until our fathers can be home sometimes and not be just like a horse—take out of the stall and put back in the stall.

[Said Mike:]

You see, twelve hours, that’s too long for a man to work,” s. “A man can’t work so long and be anything but tired out like a beast. I used to be a miner when first I worked in this country. We worked thirteen hours; we struck, we don’t win. We go to because we picket—for all kinds of reasons. But now the miners they only work eight hours. You see my boys—I got four. By and by they goin’ to grow up. Maybe they goin’ to go and work in the mills, like me. Well, I want those boys to have a chance to learn more than I have a chance. I want they shouldn’t have to work fourteen hours night and ten hours light. I want, when they’re old enough so they get married, that they see their babies sometime when they’re little. We all feel like that. But when we see how so many of the Americans went back so soon as the mill is opened, we Slovaks feel like we was out skating and that we skate out far and the ice cracks and we look around and only us, everybody else goes ashore—but we got to win just the same, sometime!

[Said mother, briskly:]

Of course we got to win. What you been through before we can go through again, and we can’t go through anything so bad as we’ve been through. When my oldest girl was a baby and before my big boy you saw going to school was born, father was on strike in the mines. Those days they was worse to strikers than they are now. You think they do everything to strikers now. They even worse then, in those days. So father got thirteen months for picketing. We got all our furniture paid for except fourteen dollars. After they took father away I couldn’t pay any more. They took away everything from my house. They took my bed from my baby. They took my cook stove—I couldn’t cook no more. They didn’t leave me nothing. I sat down on the floor of my empty house with my baby in my arms and thought about my new baby that was going to come, and I thought, “No matter, I’m a strong young woman,” I thought; “never mind what they do to me, I’ll take care of both my babies until father gets out.” I sat like that on the bare floor of my house and thought to comfort myself that father was right to strike like he did and that I was goin’ to fight right alongside of him. I know we got to win, because it’s right we should.

It is on such a spirit that this strike is builded. It is because of such beliefs that it endured as it has.

On September 22 something like three hundred and fifty thousand men struck in the steel industry. They were very slenderly organized. Many of them joined the American Federation of Labor at the moment when the strike began. There was never a strike less founded on oratory or agitation. The people welled up and out of the mills in a heaving mass. After three months at least a third of them were still out.

Consider what sacrifices this involves. What mute heroisms, what desperate resistances! These people have given voluntarily their income for three months. They have risked their jobs, their only source of income. Poor people have to think a cause very just to do such things. They have to believe with all their hearts. They must have courage; they must have fervor. When you consider that a very large majority have children depending upon them, we wonder that they can do it at all.

You must meet people like this Slovak woman to understand why they stay out.

No one can live here and go about among the people’s homes without having that sense of isolation which Steve expressed. You feel, indeed, as if you stood alone on a cake of ice which had broken off and with a widening gulf of black water between you and the rest of mankind. The ordinary channels of communication seem to be blocked. It has been prejudged a “Hunky strike”—a blind stirring of ignorant people who do not know what they want.

Personally I agree with the splendid Slovak priest, Father Kazinci, of Braddock, who from the beginning has fought the battle of the strikers as a righteous battle and part of the great struggle for democracy now in progress in the world. He believes that every priest of God fails in understanding his duty who does not put the whole weight of his influence behind the strikers. He believes that there has been no truer single impulse toward Americanization in its larger sense among any group of foreigners. Like the Slovak mother, my hostess, he believes they must ultimately win, because they are right.

To make every one in the country understand what this strike is about I would not speak in terms of double shifts and “ten hours light and fourteen night.” I would not emphasize the question of collective bargaining, but I would show a picture of the mean streets and bleak houses which surround those mills, the children who play amid the litter of these streets and their patient, wide faced peasant mothers who are living here in bondage, prisoners of poverty, the victims of squalor. I would show this picture against a background of the inhuman, terrible beauty of the mills. The mills are as beautiful as a volcanic convulsion. The great chimneys follow one another like the pipes of a black organ, and from these chimneys belches forth a mighty symphony of smoke. But in the foreground you will see sights every day in the streets of the steel towns that will wring your heart.

As the pioneer spirit of America slackened and grew fat on possessions and prosperity these people replenished it with their adventurous blood. Their men are strong. Their women are calm-looking and have the tranquil eyes of those accustomed to lookin over wide fields to distant horizons. Their faces are still brown with wind and sun, and they brought with them a bright treasure of hope, and it is buried—these dreams and these hopes-under the garbage of the streets.

This young army came here and spilled its youth and its strength over the streets of Homestead and Braddock. They came here flying the bright banners of courage. Hope led them here—hope for freedom, a desire for a wider life. They came and brought their children, because they expected opportunity for their children.

As one goes about among the women the two things that it hurts most to hear them talk about are their memories and their hopes.

This strike is concerned with these dreams and these hopes. Men leave the intensity of the picket line to go back to their homes, and in the last analysis these homes are what any strike is about. This strike technically concerns the right of organization, hours, and conditions. Follow these issues to their source, and they will lead you back to a home and a woman sitting in it. This fight for conditions and hours will take you from the sinister splendor of the mills to a kitchen where Mike and Steve and Joe are getting ready to go to school, and whose father and mother are such good Americans that they are willing to risk every thing so that these boys shall live in a more American way.

Strikes are not abstract things, and they are all much alike—they are about the kind of world the strikers’ children are going to live in when they grow up.

[Photograph and emphasis added.]