Hellraisers Journal – Sunday January 9, 1921 New York, New York – Mary Heaton Vorse Reports from Employment Bureau
From the Oklahoma Leader of January 3, 1921: (Note: the leader is a member of Federated Press.)
IN THE EMPLOYMENT BUREAU —–
BY MARY HEATON VORSE
New York Daily News December 15, 1920
In the employment bureau of the Amalgamated [Clothing Workers of America] on East Tenth street, groups of women gather every morning. There are bareheaded women, and smart, well dressed women, who look as if they had just stepped off Fifth avenue. In the same room Sicilian peasants meet and talk with advanced workers of Tuscan descent.
Labor contests are lost and won in such little groups. Put a dozen of them together and you have the temper of the people. It is not what people shout for in big meetings that always counts most, it’s what they say at home or among themselves in slack moments on gray, rainy mornings, waiting in the employment bureau.
Out of the murmur and talk a voice cuts with corroding sharpness: “Children! I haven’t any children! Children break strikes. The worker’s children make it easy for the employers to tramp us. The workers are afraid because they are afraid for the children. Look at our Sicilian women who have a baby every year. How terrible a strike is for them! Babies are scab makers and strikebreakers for a worker! I’ll not have babies to live wretched like me! Let the rich people have the children! Let the employers’ children do the work!“
The revolt in this woman was a hot blue flame. It never went out. It was a spirit like this that had taken the factories in Italy. With that example before her, what a scorn she had for the American workers.
“The people in this country lie down for the bosses to walk on. My husband he’s just come back from Italy. The workers here make me ashamed-when a policeman waves a club at a crowd they run; there it takes fifty guards to capture thirty workers.”
Three comely pleasant looking girls were standing together and she challenged them.
“How’s you shop standing. What are you going to do?”
“We-we will do what the Union says,” they answered. They had no initiative. They were not fighters. They were good solid union girls though.
“Do what the Union says! If I thought anyone should go back on the Union in my shop-if I thought that-but they won’t.”
A slender girl in black had been sitting by herself. She was straight as a lance with distinction in every line of her. She joined us now.
“A strike is no new thing for me,” she said. “We have been on strike for nine months in my shop.” Then she added as if it were on after-thought, “My husband is sick and I am supporting him and my two children.”
“How do you make out?”
“Oh, I get odd jobs here and there. We have to go through such things, I you see to hold what we have won,” she explained.
Behind her quiet there was an intensity of conviction that carried further than emphasis. “You know what we used to make?” She appealed to the bare-headed women sitting by the wall. “Little by little they’ll try to get us back to the old wages. If we don’t stand solid now.”
The three peasant women nodded.
“The union has made things better,” they said gravely.
They sat against the wall in attitudes of immemorial patience. Their faces were wrinkled and their sad eyes looked ahead at nothing. There was in them no revolt, only the age-old acquiescence of the down-trodden to things as they are.
The young girl with them was a a patient as the older women. America had not touched her. She like the older ones, was bare-headed. She had a gentle and submissive air, as of a woman who has never asked herself disquieting questions about life or its eternal injustice.
These were the women on whom the lockout presses heaviest; they’re most easily bullied, the most defenseless. They knew little about America. A civilization separated them from the fiery woman from the north who talked of Russia and looked forward to an Italy that was industrially free, but they knew one thing and that was what the Amalgamated had done for them.
It is in meetings like this that the Amalgamated spirit-in other words Solidarity-shows itself. Here in this intimate gossip you hear the real spirit of the workers. Here at 8 o’clock in the morning they are led away by no oratory; the stark realities stare them in the face, here they voice daily their unalterable decision:
“We will never go back to the old slavery!”
———-
[Photograph and emphasis added.]
From the New York Daily News of December 15, 1920:
———–
