But he got along somehow, he said--"the woman was a good manager"-- until one day he had the misfortune to get his hand caught in the machinery. It was a place which should have been protected with guards, but was not. He was laid up for several weeks, and the company, claiming that the accident was due to his own stupidity and carelessness, refused even to pay his wages while he was idle. Well, the family had to live somehow, and the woman and the daughter--"she was a little thing," he said, "and frail"--the woman and the daughter went into the mill. But even with this new source of income they began to fall behind. Money which should have gone toward making the last payments on their home (already long delayed by the strike) had now to go to the doctor and the grocer.
"We had to live," said Bill Hahn.
Again and again he used this same phrase, "We had to live!" as a sort of bedrock explanation for all the woes of life.
After a time, with one finger gone and a frightfully scarred hand--he held it up for me to see--he went back into the mill.
"But it kept getting worse and worse," said he, "and finally I couldn't stand it any longer."
He and a group of friends got together secretly and tried to organize a union, tried to get the workmen together to improve their own condition; but in some way ("they had spies everywhere," he said) the manager learned of the attempt and one morning when he reported at the mill he was handed a slip asking him to call for his wages, that his help was no longer required.
"I'd been with that one company for twenty years and four months," he said bitterly, "I'd helped in my small way to build it up, make it a big concern payin' 28 per cent. dividends every year; I'd given part of my right hand in doin' it--and they threw me out like an old shoe."
He said he would have pulled up and gone away, but he still had the little home and the garden, and his wife and daughter were still at work, so he hung on grimly, trying to get some other job. "But what good is a man for any other sort of work," he said, "when he has been trained to the mills for thirty-two years!"
It was not very long after that when the "great strike" began--indeed, it grew out of the organization which he had tried to launched--and Bill Hahn threw himself into it with all his strength. He was one of the leaders. I shall not attempt to repeat here his description of the bitter struggle, the coming of the soldiery, the street riots, the long lists of arrests ("some," said he, "got into jail on purpose, so that they could at least have enough to eat!"), the late meetings of strikers, the wild turmoil and excitement.
Of all this he told me, and then he stopped suddenly, and after a long pause he said in a low voice:
"Comrade, did ye ever see your wife and your sickly daughter and your kids sufferin' for bread to eat?"
He paused again with a hard, dry sob in his voice.
"Did ye ever see that?"
"No," said I, very humbly, "I have never seen anything like that."
He turned on me suddenly, and I shall never forget the look on his face, nor the blaze in his eyes:
"Then what can you know about working-man?"
What could I answer?
A moment passed and then he said, as if a little remorseful at having turned thus on me:
"Comrade, I tell you, the iron entered my soul--them days."
It seems that the leaders of the strike were mostly old employees like Bill Hahn, and the company had conceived the idea that if these men could be eliminated the organization would collapse, and the strikers be forced back to work. One day Bill Hahn found that proceedings had been started to turn him out of his home, upon which he had not been able to keep up his payments, and at the same time the merchant, of whom he had been a respected customer for years, refused to give him any further credit.
"But we lived somehow," he said, "we lived and we fought."
It was then that he began to see clearly what it all meant. He said he made a great discovery: that the "black people" against whom they had struck in 1894 were not to blame!
"I tell you," said he, "we found when we got started that them black people--we used to call 'em dagoes--were just workin' people like us--and in hell with us. They were good soldiers, them Eyetalians and Poles and Syrians, they fought with us to the end."
I shall not soon forget the intensely dramatic but perfectly simple way in which he told me how he came, as he said, "to see the true light." Holding up his maimed right hand (that trembled a little), he pointed one finger upward.
"I seen the big hand in the sky," he said, "I seen it as clear as daylight."
He said he saw at last what Socialism meant. One day he went home from a strikers' meeting--one of the last, for the men were worn out with their long struggle. It was a bitter cold day, and he was completely discouraged. When he reached his own street he saw a pile of household goods on the sidewalk in front of his home.
