And the two girls went on to the next tenement.
They were only two of the hundreds of Trade Union girls who were "doing"
the First Electoral District (about one-third of St. Louis) on the eve of the primaries. They were thorough. They had the whole district organized on the block system, and they went over each block house by house.
_A new move, is it not, this carefully organized effort of factory women to secure justice through the ballot-box?_
How have St. Louis women attained this clear vision that their industrial future is bound up in politics? It is a three years" story.
Let us go back a little.
St. Louis is essentially a conservative city. First, it was an old French town; then a Southern town; then a German tradesman"s town. With such strata superimposed one above the other, it could hardly be other than conservative. In addition, St. Louis was crippled in the war between the states. She lost her market. This made her slow.
In the "eighties, this old French-Southern-German city began to recover from the ruin of her Southern trade. Little by little she took heart, for the great Southwest was being settled. There was a new field in which to build up trade. To-day St. Louis is _the_ great wholesale and jobbing depot, _the_ manufacturing city for that vast stretch of territory known as the Southwest.
Since 1890, great fortunes have been ama.s.sed--most of them, indeed, in the past ten years. There has been a rapid growth of industry. The old Southern city has become a soft-coal factory center. A pall of smoke hangs over the center of the city where the factories roar and pound.
In the midst of this gloom the workfolk are creating rivers of beer, carloads of shoes and woodenware, millions of garments and bags, and the thousand and one things necessary to fill the orders of hundreds of traveling salesmen in the Southwest territory--and in the South, too, for St. Louis is winning back some of her old-time trade.
And the toil of their lifting hands and flying fingers has wrought a golden age for the men who control the capital and the tools. The men who manage have been shaking hands in their clubs for the past decade and congratulating themselves and each other over their drinks. "Yes, St. Louis is a grand old business town. Solid! No mushroom real-estate booms, you know, but a big, steady growth. New plants starting every month and the old ones growing. Then, when we get our deep waterway, that"s going to be another big shove toward prosperity.
"Nice town to live in, too! Look at our handsome houses and clubs and public buildings. Never was anything like our World"s Fair in the history of men--never! Look at our parks, too. When we get "em linked together with speedways, where"ll you find anything prettier?" Thus the money-makers in this heavy German town.
But what about the employees--the clerks and the factory workers? Have they been "in" on this "big shove toward prosperity?" Have they found it a "nice" town to live in?
No, to each count. For the people at the bottom of the ladder--for the people who tend machines, dig ditches, and stand behind the notion counter--St. Louis is a smoky town, where people have gray lungs instead of pink; a town where franchise grabbing and an antiquated system of taxation have their consequence of more than New York city rents. A town whose slums, says Lee Frankel, are the worst in the country. A town where wages are low (in some occupations twenty-five per cent lower than in New York City); where employment is irregular, the speeding-up tremendous, the number of women entering industry steadily increasing, and where the influx of immigrant labor is pulling down the wage scale and the standard of living.
The average wage of the shoe-workers in the East is $550 per year. In St. Louis it is $440 if work is steady--and rents are higher than in New York City.
It must be remembered that this sum is an average, and that thousands of shoe-workers earn, less than $440, for full-time work. The same is true of thousands engaged in other kinds of manufacture and in department stores.
Somehow the town looks different from the two ends of the ladder.
The government of Missouri and St. Louis has been about as little adapted to the needs of the industrial worker as it well could be. Men have been concerned not so much with social justice as with government protection for money-making schemes.
Business opportunity has depended much on _pliable state and munic.i.p.al laws_. How the interests fought to keep them pliable; how St. Louis and Missouri became a world scandal in this steady growth to riches, we all know.
We know, too, the period of political reform. People thought the killing trouble in Missouri lay largely with the governmental machinery; and the optimists" faith in a state primary law, in the initiative and referendum as panacea, was white and shining. _They did not see that the underlying problem is industrial_.
After the reform wave had spent itself, the crooked people who had kept out of jail crept from their holes and went back to their old job of beating the game. The only essential difference is that their methods to-day are less raw and crude. They play a more gentlemanly game; but the people are still robbed of their rights.
Thus it came to pa.s.s that when the cheerful optimist went to the cupboard to get his poor dog a bone, why, lo! the cupboard was bare.
Meantime the dog has taken up the struggle for social justice on his own account, not singly but in groups and packs. As yet, although a deal of snuffing, running to and fro, barking, yelping, and fighting has been done, little has been accomplished; for one reason, because labor has lacked great organizers in St. Louis.
It has remained for the working women of St. Louis to make the industrial idea effective and to reach out with united single purpose to bend the political bow for their protection.
The Women"s Trade Union League, whose real general is Cynthelia Isgrig Knefler, the most dynamic woman in St. Louis, received its first impetus only three years ago in the idealism of a brilliant young Irish girl, Hannah Hennessy, who died at Thanksgiving, 1910, a victim of exhausting work in a garment shop and of her own tireless efforts to organize the working girls of her city.
Hannah Hennessy was sent by the Garment Workers" Union to the National Labor Convention of 1907 at Norfolk, Virginia.
There she glimpsed for the first time the inevitable great world march of women following industry as machinery takes it out of the home and into the shop--saw these women, blind, unorganized, helpless to cope with the conditions offered by organized capital. The vision fired this Irish girl to a pitch of enthusiasm peculiar to the Celtic temperament.
Back she came to St. Louis with the spirit of the Crusaders, her vision "the eight-hour day, the living wage to guard the home."
For the first time she saw the broken physical future of women who label three thousand five hundred bottles of beer an hour, and accept their cuts and gashes from the bursting bottles as inevitable; of women who put eyelets on a hundred cases of shoes a day, twenty-four pairs to the case; of women who must weave one thousand yards of hemp cloth a day to hold their job in a mill where the possible speed of woman and machine is so nicely calculated that the speediest person in the factory can weave only twelve hundred and sixty yards a day; where the lint from this hemp fills the air and is so injurious to eyes and throat that the company furnishes medical attendance free.
To undertake the huge task of organizing these thousands of St. Louis women would require not only vision but time and energy. Hannah"s return meant being engulfed in the vast roar made by rows of throbbing, whirring machines, into one of which she sewed her vitality at dizzy speed ten hours a day. Vision she had, but training, time, energy--no!
It was at this point that she met Cynthelia Isgrig Knefler, a leisure-cla.s.s young woman, who had been gripped by a sense of the unevenness of the human struggle. Cynthelia Knefler was groping her way through the maze of settlement activities to an appreciation of their relative futility in the face of long hours, low wages, and unsanitary shops.
Then the idealism of these two young women, born on the one hand of hard experience, on the other of a gentle existence, fused, and burned with a white light whose power is beginning to touch the lives of the women who toil and spin for the great Southwest.
Both women possessed fire and eloquence. Hannah"s special contribution was first-hand experience; Mrs. Knefler"s the knowledge of economic conditions necessary to an understanding of our complicated labor problems. Wise, sane, conservative, Mrs. Knefler not only helped Hannah to organize branch after branch of the Women"s Trade Union League in the different industries, but set out at once to train strong, intelligent leaders. She stimulated them to a critical study of labor laws with the evolution of industry for background.
Night after night for two years Mrs. Knefler and Hannah were out organizing groups of girls. Mrs. Knefler"s friends finally stopped remonstrating with her. Hannah, utterly self-forgetful despite ten hours a day in the mills, hurled herself into the new work. Evening after evening her mother protested anxiously, but Hannah, heedless of her own interest, would eat her supper and hurry across the city to help groups of new girls--American, Russian, Roumanian--a confused ma.s.s, to find themselves and pull together.
One June morning in 1910 the papers announced that the Manufacturers"
a.s.sociation and the Business Men"s League had decided on E.J. Troy as their candidate to the State Legislature for the First District. His candidacy was also backed by the Republican machine. The papers went on to say that E.J. Troy was one of "our ablest and most popular fellow townsmen," that he had grown up in his district, had a host of friends, and might be expected to carry the primaries by a big majority.
That evening at the weekly dinner of the officers of the Women"s Trade Union League at the Settlement, Mrs. Knefler hurried in: "Girls, have you seen the morning papers? Do you know that we"ve got E.J. Troy to contend with again?"
At the same moment in dashed Hannah Hennessy by another door, calling out, "Girls, they"re goin" to put Troy on the carpet again!"
To both speeches came half a dozen excited replies that that"s just what they were talking about!
Over the potatoes and meat and bread-pudding the situation was discussed in detail.
"Yes, "twas him, all right, that thought up most of those tricky moves when we was tryin" to get our Nine-Hour Bill before," reflected a wiry, quick-motioned girl during a second"s pause.
"Don"t it just make you boil," began another, "when you think how he riled "em up at every four corners in Missouri! He had every old country storekeeper standin" on end about that Nine-Hour Bill. He had "em puttin" on their specs and callin" to mother to come and listen to this information the manufacturers had sent him:--how the labor unions was tryin" to get a Nine-Hour Bill for women pa.s.sed; how it would keep their youngest girl, Bessie, from helping in the store when the farmers drove in of a Sat.u.r.day night; and how it was a blow at American freedom."
"E.J. Troy"s got to be squenched at the primaries," said a third, quietly and decisively.
"But how?" asked a more timid officer.
Bing! Mrs. Knefler got into action. There never was a woman for whom a difficult situation offered a more bracing tonic quality. The business meeting that followed fairly bristled with plans.
The girls" first move was to go before the Central Labor Body and ask them to indorse their objections to E.J. Troy. Definite action beyond indors.e.m.e.nt the girls did not ask or expect. This much they got.
One day a little later, when Mrs. Knefler"s campaign was beginning to take form, a representative of E.J. Troy called Mrs. Knefler on the telephone. The voice was bland, smooth, and very friendly. Wouldn"t she--that is--ah--er--wouldn"t her organization confer with Mr. E.J.
Troy? He felt sure they would come to a pleasant and mutually helpful understanding.
Mrs. Knefler explained to the mouthpiece (take it either way) that it would be quite useless; that the stand of the League was taken on Mr.
Troy"s previous record and on the "interests" he represented; that while they had nothing against him in his private capacity, as a public servant they must oppose him. All this in Mrs. Knefler"s suavest fashion. She feels intensely, but she never loses her self-possession.
That"s why she is such a formidable antagonist.
It was the last week in June--they had just a month before the primaries in which to rouse public opinion. The newspapers must help, of course.
Mrs. Knefler went to the editors. They were polite, they admitted the justice of her stand, but they were evasive. Mrs. Knefler opened her paper the next morning after she had made the rounds, to find not a single word about the danger to the working woman"s interests.
What could the papers do? Weren"t they in the hands of the "big cinch,"