A Tale of Two Workers

Abstract

Professors Woirol and Tygiel have provided another glimpse of what life was like in California's floating proletariat during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Woirol's tale is told through the eyes of Frederick C. Mills, tramping the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys in 1914 as an undercover hobo looking for connections between the Industrial Workers of the World and labor violence. What Mills found was an underclass scratching for a subsistence while living under the thumb of vicious capitalism. Tygiel's tale is of a similar working class, but mostly with unions triumphant struggling with capitalism. San Francisco's workingmen were organized, except for unskilled laborers, and they were involved in local politics and generally unified. In 1901 a seventy-eight-day lockout and strike resulted in the capitulation of the Employers' Association and the election of a labor union candidate to the mayor's office. San Francisco was firmly a union city and its workingmen a labor aristocracy in America. The irony of the strike was that the vegetables rotting on the docks in 1901 were picked by the floating army that was unorganized, in tatters, and tramping in poverty just out of sight of Nob Hill. A college student who had an interesting summer job as an investigator for the California Commission of Immigration and Housing, Frederick C. Mills traveled the central valley for two months posing as an itinerant laborer to gather information on migrant workers and the IWW. He took jobs in orange-packing houses and in a Sierra lumber camp. He walked the back roads and rode the rails, stopping at hobo jungles for food and information; he went hungry, stole food, and slept on the ground. Mills found a migrant cycle of hard physical labor, unemployment, ill health, dissipation, and despair-the evils of temporary, seasonal employment-and wrote up his reports; but of