You pity yourselves,
but you do not pity your brothers,
or you would stand together
to help one another.
-Mother Jones
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Hellraisers Journal, Wednesday July 27, 1898
Chicago, Illinois – Workers Walk in Rain as Street Cars Pass By
From the Appeal to Reason of July 16, 1898:
WHY DO WE WALK?
E. B. Webster in National Tribune.
As I started home from “down town,” when I reached Madison street I noticed hundreds of people walking, all going west.
I was intending to take a car, but seeing so many people walking, I says to myself: “The cars must have stopped.” But, no, the cars were moving right along, one every half minute.
Then why do the people walk? I determined to walk home with the rest and punish myself for having been dormant and letting the street railway company buy up the street for a few thousand dollars from the aldermen who had the power to give away what they never owned and had cost them nothing.
What a contemptible system. But I am walking to pay for my apathy. Thousands upon thousands, yes, millions, every week walk to pay for their negligence in this matter. But why walk when cars are passing them every moment? The answer is they cannot afford 5 cents. I will show you plainly that they cannot. There are 25,000 clerks in Chicago that get $5 per week or less and board themselves. Can they ride? There are 5,000 cash and bundle girls that get $2 per week and board themselves. Do you think they can ride? Not unless they steal; $3 per month for car fare. Just think of giving the railroad company $75,000 per month from these clerks and $15,000 per month wrung from these cash girls. They simply cannot do it; so they walk. Not only the clerks walk, but hundreds of thousands of others who cannot afford 10 cents per day for car fare. I have seen thousands of girls walk home one, two and three miles in the rain with the cars passing them constantly. This ought not to be so, for if the government owned the roads they could carry them any distance in the city for one cent, and keep the entire equipage in repair forever.
I had been home but a few moments when the bell rang and a “special delivery” United States mail man had a letter for me. “Whew,” says he, “I’m tired.” “What makes you tired? You look like a strong, robust fellow and able to walk twenty miles without stopping?” “Well,” says he, “I’ve walked more than that today.” “How’s that?” I inquired. “Don’t Uncle Sam furnish you with free tickets?” “Not on your life. We pay our own fare or walk, and if we rode it would cost more than our salary.”
This, to me, seems very humiliating. The United States postoffice department pays annually for carrying mails millions of dollars that might be carried without extra expense if they owned the railroads and street car lines as they should.
———-
Lives of plutocrats remind us
We can make our lives a crime,
And departing leave behind us,
Blood spots on the sands of Time.———-
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SOURCE & IMAGE
Appeal to Reason
(Girard, Kansas)
-July 16, 1898
https://www.newspapers.com/image/66970711/
See also:
The Gilded Age
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_Age
The Gilded Age
A Tale of To-Day
(In Two Volumes)
-by Mark Twain & Charles Dudley Warner
American Publishing Company, 1899
Volume I
https://books.google.com/books?id=i5gOAQAAMAAJ
Volume II
https://books.google.com/books?id=7xkRAAAAYAAJ
RE: The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gilded_Age:_A_Tale_of_Today
Complete First Edition, 1873 – at Project Gutenberg
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3178/3178-h/3178-h.htm
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1937 Victory at Flint – Dan Hall
Lyrics by Dan Hall and David O. Norris
(What it looks like when workers do stand together.)