A young American, a farmer’s son, he was recently come to Chicago from his home in central Iowa, and was making his way as a factory-hand and liked it greatly. His name was Albert. All of this information I gathered in barter for an equal share of my personal history, exchanged while we both ate heartily of a dinner of boiled meat and mashed potatoes, and stewed tomatoes and bread and coffee, and finally a slice of pumpkin pie, all of them excellent of their kind and most excellently cooked; and, although not neatly served, yet with as great a regard to neatness as the circumstances allowed.
My interest through the meal, aside from the food, was chiefly in Albert, but I caught, too, the drift of the general talk. It was directed at one Clarence, a fair-haired, fair-skinned, well-mannered youth who sat opposite us and at an end of the line. One noticed him immediately in the contrast which he made with the other men, for he was dressed in a “boiled” shirt and a collar, and he wore a neat black coat and a black cravat. It appeared that he had been promoted, on the day before, from a subordinate position in one of the machine-shops to the supervision of the tool-room of the factory. On this morning for the first time he had gone to work dressed, not in the usual blue jeans, but as one of the clerical force. The men were chaffing him on the change. Curiously enough, from their point of view, his working-days were over. There was no least disturbance in their personal attitude to the man nor in their feeling for him as a fellow. They recognized the change of status as a promotion, and you readily caught the note of sincere congratulation in their banter, and the boy bore his honors modestly and like a man. Yet it was a change of status most complete, for he had ceased to be a worker. To their way of thinking there may be forms of toil which are hard and even exhausting, but only that is “work” which brings your hands into immediate contact with the materials of production in their making from the raw or in their transportation. The principle is a broad one, incapable of application in full detail, but, as a principle, it figures in the minds of the workers as an unquestioned generalization that men work only with their hands and in forms of begriming labor.