A steel employee in South Chicago made good wages but was a hard drinker and with his companions spent most of the evenings in the saloons so that there was rarely a night that he went to bed sober. A friend of the family had a chance to talk with him about the situation and tried to argue with him to show him the folly of drinking. His reply was, “Why, who cares? The mill drives me all the day long and dries me all up. I have to draw, draw, draw, or be dragged. By the end of the day there is only one thing that I want and that is beer.”
A large proportion of the workers in the steel-mills are immigrants. There are Magyars, Poles, Slovaks, Croatians, Italians, as well as Austro-Hungarians, and all the other races mixed in. Many of the men are single, or if they are married they have left their wives in the old country. The wage is very largely based on the needs of a single man. Nearly all the families take boarders. This reduces the cost of living and in some of these families, the “boarding boss” as he is known, is the head of the household consisting of himself, his wife, his children, and anywhere from four to sixteen boarders or lodgers. Each lodger pays the boarding boss a fixed sum, usually two or three dollars a month for lodging, cooking, and washing. The food is bought by the boss and its cost shared individually by the members of the group. A study was made of a community in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and it was found that the food consumed was cheap beef, bread, and coffee. Some of the people used vegetables sparingly. The Italians ate only a small quantity of meat, but used large quantities of vegetables, spaghetti, bread, and olive oil. The Austro-Hungarians used vast quantities of meat.
=Houses and Homes.= The housing conditions among the poorly paid steel workers are invariably bad. In a part of Pittsburgh known as the “strip” the living conditions are bad almost beyond belief. The reason given for this situation is that the wages are so low no better is possible. The standard of living among all the steel workers is low. Comfort or ordinary provisions for decency are almost entirely lacking in nearly every steel-producing district. The housing conditions are congested, the children play in the streets, and only the cheapest and most dangerous forms of recreation are open to the young people. A large proportion of the workers are members of the Roman Catholic Church. The men, however, for the most part have no use for the church and rarely if ever attend. The women cling to it, since they are naturally more devout.