CHAPTER XXXIV. SHIRTS FOR TIN ROLLERS

In summer the temperature in the tin mills is very high. It is as hot

as the Fourth of July in Abyssinia. One day a philosophical fellow was

talking religion to me. He said, “I don't believe in hell as a place

where we boil forever in a lake of brimstone. It can't be as hot as

that. My constitution never could stand it.” His constitution stood

up under the heat in the tin mill. So it is plain that the tin-mill

temperature was somewhat less than the temperature of the Pit.

Outsiders began coming into the mills and giving us workers a chill by

telling us that the heat was killing us. The men used to cool

themselves down with a glass of beer at the close of the day. The social

investigators told us that alcohol taken into the system at such a time

would cause sunstroke. If beer was fatal, most of us figured that we

had been dead for years and didn't know it. The effect of constant

complaints was to demoralize us and make our work harder. I thought at

first that these investigators were our friends and I gave them all the

help I could. But instead of helping us, they only hurt us, and then

I soured on their misapplied zeal. They were a species new to me that

seemed to have sprung up in the hard times, just as cooties spring up

in time of war. And like cooties, they attached themselves to us

closer than a brother and yet they were no brothers of ours. The social

investigators nibbled away at the men and kept them restless in their

hours of ease. They sat at our boarding table and complained of the

food. Corned beef and cabbage was one of our regular dishes. Mr.

Investigator turned up his nose and said: “I never touch corned beef. If

you knew as much about it as I do, you would insist on steaks or roast

beef instead. You know what corned beef is, don't you?”

The men got mad and one fellow said: “Yes; it is dead cow. All meat is

dead animals. Now give us a rest.”

“Yes, it's all dead, but some of it is a whole lot deader than you

imagine. I've been investigating the packing business, and I'll tell

you all about corned beef and wienies.” He then went on with a lot of

sickening details and when he got through he found that the younger men

had not eaten any dinner. The older men paid no attention to him and

worked right ahead to the pie and toothpick stage, but the younger

fellows had been euchred out of dinner and went back to work with wabbly

steps and empty stomachs.

This convinced me that the investigator was a false alarm. If corned

beef was poison, as he said, there wouldn't be a working man alive in

America. But millions have eaten corned beef all their lives and have

thrived on it. Things are never one tenth so bad as the agitators

say. They merely take the heart out of men and send them back to work

weakened and unhappy.

This fellow had a favorite joke which he sprang every meal. After

sniffing at the soup and meat and cabbage he would exclaim: “Hebrews,

13-8.” We thought it was some jibe about the fat pork, and after he had

sprung it every day for a week we learned that he was hitting at the

monotony of the diet. The verse in the Bible reads:

“Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to-day, and forever.”

The fellow came into the mills and sympathized with us because we worked

with our shirts off. To withstand the heat we stripped to the waist.

We didn't want to wear a shirt. It would have clung to our flesh and

hampered our moving muscles. We were freer and cooler without any cloth

to smother us. It was a privilege to go shirtless. Adam enjoyed that

blessing in the Garden of Eden. And when he sinned they punished him by

putting a shirt, collar and necktie on him. And yet this theorist in the

mills demanded working conditions that would let us wear shirts. Why?

Who was asking for shirts? Only he, and he had a shirt. In their own

words, the fellows would have enjoyed making him eat it.