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Alexander Irvine - From the Bottom Up

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FROM THE BOTTOM UP

The Life Story of Alexander Irvine

Illustrated







[Illustration: Alexander Irvine, 1909.
Photograph by Vanderweyde]




New York
Doubleday, Page & Company
1910
All Rights Reserved, Including that of Translation
into Foreign Languages, Including the Scandinavian
Copyright, 1909, 1910 by Doubleday, Page & Company
Published, February, 1910




TO

MAUDE HAZEN IRVINE




CONTENTS


CHAPTER PAGE
I. Boyhood in Ireland 3

II. The Beginning of an Education 24

III. On Board a Man o' War 40

IV. Problems and Places 53

V. The Gordon Relief Expedition 63

VI. Beginnings in the New World 82

VII. Fishing for Men on the Bowery 90

VIII. A Bunk-house and Some Bunk-house Men 105

IX. The Waif's Story 119

X. I Meet Some Outcasts 126

XI. A Church in the Ghetto 144

XII. Working Way Down 156

XIII. Life and Doubt on the Bottoms 166

XIV. My Fight in New Haven 183

XV. A Visit Home 193

XVI. New Haven Again--and a Fight 207

XVII. I Join a Labour Union and Have Something
to Do with Strikes 213

XVIII. I Become a Socialist 235

XIX. I Introduce Jack London to Yale 250

XX. My Experiences as a Labourer in the Muscle
Market of the South 256

XXI. At the Church of the Ascension 274

XXII. My Socialism, My Religion and My Home 285




ILLUSTRATIONS


Alexander Irvine, 1909 _Frontispiece_

FACING PAGE
Mr. Irvine's Birthplace 4

Where Irvine Spent His Boyhood 8

Alexander Irvine as a Marine 38

Officers of H.M.S. "Alexandra" Ashore at Cattaro 50

A Page from Mr. Irvine's Diary 54

Dowling, Tinker and Colporter 110

Alexander Irvine. From a sketch by Juliet Thompson 146

State Convention of the Socialist Party of Connecticut 238

The Lunch Hour in an Interborough Shop 248

Alexander Irvine and Jack London 252

In Muckers' Camp in Alabama 258

Irvine and Three Other Muckers as They Left Greenwich
Street for the South 258

Irvine, Punching Logs in the Gulf of Mexico, 1907 270

The Church of the Ascension 276

"Happy Hollow," Mr. Irvine's Present Home Near
Peekskill, New York 294

Happy Hollow in the Winter, Looking from the House 298




FROM THE BOTTOM UP




CHAPTER I

BOYHOOD IN IRELAND


The world in which I first found myself was a world of hungry people.

My earliest sufferings were the sufferings of hunger--physical hunger.
It was not an unusual sight to see the children of our neighbourhood
scratching the offal in the dunghills and the gutterways for scraps of
meat, vegetables, and refuse. Many times I have done it myself.

My father was a shoemaker; but something had gone wrong with the
making of shoes. Improvements in machinery are pushed out into the
commercial world, and explanations follow. A new shoemaker had
arrived--a machine--and my father had to content himself with the
mending of the work that the machine produced. It took him about ten
years to find out what had happened to him.

There were twelve children in our family, five of whom died in
childhood. Those of us who were left were sent out to work as soon as
we were able. I began at the age of nine. My first work was peddling
newspapers. I remember my first night in the streets. Food was scarce
in the home, and I begged to be allowed to do what other boys were
doing. But I was not quite so well prepared. I began in the winter. I
was shoeless, hatless, and in rags. My contribution to the family
treasury amounted to about fifty cents a week; but it looked very
large to me then. It was my first earning.

Our home was a two-room cottage. Over one room was a little loft, my
bedroom for fourteen years. The cottage floor was hard, dried mud.
There was a wide, open fireplace. Several holes made in the wall by
displacing of bricks here and there contained my father's old pipes. A
few ornaments, yellow with the smoke of years, adorned the
mantelpiece. At the front window sat my father, and around him his
shoemaking tools. Beside the window hung a large cage, made by his own
hands, and in which singing thrushes had succeeded one another for
twenty years. The walls were whitewashed. There was a little partition
that screened the work-bench from the door. It was made of newspapers,
and plastered all over it were pictures from the illustrated weeklies.
Two or three small dressers contained the crockery ware. A long bench
set against the wall, a table, several stools, and two or three
creepies constituted the furniture. There was not a chair in the
place.

[Illustration: Mr. Irvine's Birthplace.
There are four different houses in the picture. The third door from
the left is that of the house in which he was born.]

There was a fascination about the winter evenings in that cottage.
Scarcely a night passed that did not see some man or woman sitting in
the corner waiting for shoes. A candlestick about three feet high, in
which burned a large tallow candle, was set in front of my father. My
mother was the only one in the house who could read, and she used to
read aloud from a story paper called _The Weekly Budget_. We were
never interested in the news. The outside world was shut off from us,
and the news consisted of whatever was brought by word of mouth by the
folks who had their shoes cobbled; _that_ was interesting. In those
long winter evenings, I sat in the corner among the shoes and lasts.
On scraps of leather I used to imitate writing, and often I would
quietly steal up to my mother and show her these scratchings, and ask
her whether they meant anything or not. I thought somehow by accident
I would surely get something. My mother merely shook her head and
smiled. She taught me many letters of the alphabet, but it took me
years to string them together.

My mother had acquired a taste, indeed, it was a craving, for strong
drink; and, even from the very small earnings of my father, managed to
satisfy it in a small measure, every day, except Sunday. On Sunday
there was a change. The cobbler's bench was cleared away, and my
mother's beautiful face was surrounded with a halo of spotless,
frilled linen.

My father's Sunday mornings were spent in giving the thrush an outing
and in cleaning his cage. Neither my father nor mother made any
pretensions to religion; but they were strict Sabbatarians. My father
never consciously swore, but, within even the limitations of his small
vocabulary, he was unfortunate in his selection of phrases. I bounced
into the alley one Sunday morning, whistling a Moody and Sankey hymn.

"Shut up yer mouth!" said my father.

"It's a hymn tune," I replied.

"I don't care a damn," replied my father. "It's the Lord's day, and if
I hear you whistlin' in it I'll whale the hell out o' ye!"

That was his philosophy, and he lived it. Saturday nights when the
town clock struck the hour of midnight, he removed his leather apron,
pushed his bench back in the corner, and the work of the week was
over--and if any one was waiting for his shoes, so much the worse for
him. He would wait until the midnight clock struck twelve the next
night or take them as they were.

The first tragedy in my life was the death of a pet pigeon. I grieved
for days over its disappearance; but one Sunday morning the secret
slipped out. Around that neighbourhood there was a custom among the
very poor of exchanging samples of their Sunday broth. Three or four
samples came to our cottage every Sunday morning. We had meat once a
week, and then it was either the hoofs or part of the head of a cow,
or the same parts of a sheep or a calf. On this particular occasion, I
knew that there was something in our broth that was unusual, and I did
not rest until I learned the truth. They had grown tired of nettle
broth, and made a change on the pigeon.

There was a pigsty at the end of our alley against the gable of our
house; but we never were rich enough to own a pig. One of my earliest
recollections is of extemporizing out of the pigsty one of the most
familiar institutions in our town--a pawn shop. If anything was
missing in the house, they could usually find it in pawn.

At the age of ten, I entered the parochial school of the Episcopal
Church; but the pedagogue of that period delegated his pedagogy to a
monitor, and the monitor to one of the biggest boys, and the school
ran itself. The only thing I remember about it is the daily rushes
over the benches and seats, and the number of boys about my size I was
pitted against in fistic battles. At the close of my first school day
I came home with one of my eyes discoloured and one sleeve torn out of
my jacket, as a result of an encounter not down on the programme. The
ignominy of such a spectacle irritated my father, and I was thoroughly
whipped for my inability to defend myself better. It was an _ex parte_
judgment which a look at the other fellow might have modified.

After a few weeks at school I begged my father to allow me to devote
my mornings as well as my evenings to the selling of newspapers. The
extra work added a little to my income and preserved my looks. If
there was any misery in my life at this time I neither knew nor felt
it. I was living the life of the average boy of my neighbourhood, and
had nothing to complain of. Of course, I was in a chronic condition of
hunger, but so was every other boy in the alley and on the street. It
was quite an event for me occasionally to go bird-nesting with the son
of the chief baker of the town. He usually brought a loaf along as
toll. My knowledge of the woods was better than his, for necessity
took me there for fuel for our hearth. Sometimes the baker's son
brought a companion of his class. These boys were well-fed and
well-clothed, and it was when we spent whole days together that I
noticed the disparity. They were "quality"--the baker was called
"Mr.," wore a tall hat on Sundays, and led the psalm singing in the
Presbyterian Church. In the summer time, when the church windows were
open, the leader's voice could be heard a mile away. My childish
misgivings about the distribution of the good things of life were
quieted in the Sunday School by the dictum: "It is the will of God."
My first knowledge of God was that He was a big man in the skies who
dealt out to the church people good things and to others experiences
to make them good. The Bible was to me God's book, and a thing to
be handled reverently. We had a copy, but it was coverless, loose and
incomplete. Every morning I used to take it tenderly in my hands and
pretend to read some of it, "just for luck!" My Sunday School teacher
informed me that work was a curse that God had put upon the world and
from what I saw around me I naturally concluded that life was more of
a curse than a blessing--that was the theory. My father, however,
never seemed to be able to get enough of the curse to appease our
hunger.

[Illustration: Where Mr. Irvine Spent His Boyhood and the pig-sty that
never had a pig]

The lack of class-conscious envy did not prevent an occasional
questioning of God's arrangement of the universe; occasionally, in the
winter time, when my feet were bleeding, cut by the frozen pavements,
I wondered why God somehow or other could not help me to a pair of
shoes. Nevertheless, I reverently worshipped the God who had consigned
me to such pitiless and poorly paid labour, and believed that, being
the will of God, it was surely for my best good.

My first hero worship came to me while a newsboy. A former resident of
the town had returned from America with a modicum of fame. He had left
a labourer, and returned a "Mr." He delivered a lecture in the town
hall, and, out of curiosity, the town turned out to hear him. I was at
the door with my papers. It was a very cold night, and I was shivering
as I stood on one foot leaning against the door post, the sole of the
other foot resting upon my bare leg. But nobody wanted papers at a
lecture. The doorkeeper took pity upon me, and, to my astonishment,
invited me inside. There on a bench, with my back to the wall and my
feet dangling six inches from the floor, I listened to a lecture about
a "rail-splitter." It took me many years to find out what a
rail-splitter was; but the rail-splitter's name was Lincoln, and he
became my first hero.

From the selling of papers on the streets of Antrim, I went to work on
a farm, the owner of which was a Member of Parliament for our county,
one James Chaine by name. My first work on the farm was the keeping of
crows off the potato crop. Technically speaking, I was a scarecrow. It
was in the autumn, and the potatoes were ripe. I was permitted to help
myself to them, so three times a day I made a fire at the edge of the
wood and roasted as many potatoes as I could eat, and for the first
time in my life I enjoyed the pleasure of a full meal.

In the solitude of the potato field came my first vision. I was a firm
believer in the "wee people," but my visions were not entirely peopled
with fairies. The life of the woods was very fascinating to me. I
enjoyed the birds and the wild flowers, and the sportive rabbits, of
which the woods were full. The bell which closed the labourer's day
was always an unwelcome sound to me.

After the ingathering of the potato crop, I was given work in the
farmyard, attending to horses and cattle, as jack of all jobs. In the
spring of the following year, I went again to work in the potato
field, and later to care for the crop as before. It was during my
second autumn as a scarecrow that I had an experience which changed
the current of my life. It was on a Monday, and during the entire day
I kept humming over and over two lines of a hymn I had heard in the
Sunday School. Nothing ever happened to me that remains quite so
vividly in my mind as that experience.

I was sitting on the fence at the close of the day, a very happy day.
I must have been moved by the colour of the sky, or by the emotion
produced by the lines of the hymn. It may have been both. But, as I
sat on the fence and watched the sun set over the trees, an emotion
swept over me, and the tears began to flow. My body seemed to change
as by the pouring into it of some strange, life-giving fluid. I wanted
to shout, to scream aloud; but instead, I went rapidly over the hill
into the woods, dropped on my knees, and began to pray.

It was getting dark, but the woods were filled with light. Perhaps it
was the light of my vision or the light of my mind--I know not. But
when I came back into the open, I felt as though I were walking on
air. As I passed through the farmyard, I came in contact with some of
the men; and their questions led me to believe that some of the
experience remained on my face; but I naively set aside their
questions and passed on down the country road to the town.

That night as I climbed to the little loft, I realized for the first
time in my life that I had never slept in a bed, but on a pallet of
straw. My bed covering was composed of old gunny sacks sewed together;
and automatically, when I took my clothes off, I made a pillow of
them. Many a night I had been kept awake by the gnawing pangs of
hunger; but this night I was kept awake for a different reason. It was
an indescribable ecstasy, a new-born joy. As I lay there with my head
about a foot from the thatched roof, I hummed over and over again the
two lines of the hymn, sometimes breaking the continuity in giving way
to tears.

The second revelation came to me the following morning. I realized the
condition of my body. I was in rags and dirty. I shook my mother out
of her slumber and begged her to help me sew up the rents in my
clothes. I had no shoes, but I carefully washed my feet, combed my
tousled, unkempt hair, and took great pains in the washing of my face.
All of this was a mystery to my mother. She wanted to know what had
happened to me, and a very unusual thing ended the preparations for
the day. My mother said I looked "purty," and kissed me as I went out
of the door.

As I walked up the street that morning, I shared my joy with the first
living thing I met--the saloon-keeper's old dog, Rover. I shook his
paw and said, "Morrow, Rover." Everything looked beautiful. The world
was full of joy. I was perfectly sure that the birds were sharing it,
for they sang that morning as I had never heard them sing before. I
resolved to let at least one person into the secret. I was sure that
my sister would understand me. She used to visit me every noon hour,
on the pretence of bringing my dinner. We had a secret compact that,
whether there was any dinner to bring or not, she should come with a
bowl wrapped in a piece of cloth, as was the custom with other men's
sisters and wives.

There was a straight stretch of road a mile long, and, as I sat on the
roadside watching for her, I could tell a mile off whether she had any
dinner or not. When there was anything in the bowl, she carried it
steadily; when empty, she would swing it like a censer.

When I told my sister about these strange happenings of the heart, she
looked very anxiously into my eyes, and said:

"'Deed, I just think ye're goin' mad."

Before leaving the farm, I experienced an incident which, although of
a different character, equalled in its intensity and beauty my
awakening to what, for lack of a better term, I called a religious
life.

A young lady from the city was visiting at the home of the land
steward, and, as I knew more about the woods and the inhabitants
thereof than anybody else on the farm, I was often ordered to take
visitors around. The land steward's daughter accompanied the young
lady on her first visit to the roads; but afterward she came alone,
and we traversed the ravine from one end to the other. We collected
flowers and specimens, and watched the wild animals.

I had never seen such a beautiful human being. Her voice was soft and
musical. She wore her hair loosely down her back, and was a perfect
picture of health and beauty.

One day I lay at full length on my back, asleep by the edge of the
wood. When I awoke, this city girl was standing at my side. I jumped
to my feet and stood erect, and I remember distinctly the emotions
that swept through me. I was startled at first, startled as I had been
on a previous occasion when, at a sharp turn in the footpath in the
ravine, I met a fawn. I remembered my first impulse then was for a
word, a word of conciliation, for I was fascinated by the beauty of
the graceful beast. Graceful as a nymph it stood there, nerves
strained like a bow bent for the discharge of an arrow, its head
poised in air, fire shooting from its eyes. It remained only for an
instant, and then with a frightened plunge it cleared the clump of
laurel bushes and disappeared.

When I stood before this beautiful city girl, I remembered the fawn,
and expected the girl instantly to vanish out of my sight. There was
something of the fawn in her graceful form, some of the fire in her
blue eyes, and in her girlish laugh a suggestion of the freedom of the
mountain and glen. I think it was in that moment of intensity that I
crossed the bridge which separates the boy from the man. An impassable
gulf was fixed between this girl's station in life and mine. She was
the daughter of a florist, and I was the son of a cobbler.

She returned home shortly after this, and I was promoted from the
potato field to be a groom's helper in the stables of "the master." We
called his residence the "big house." It was like a castle on the
Rhine. A very wonderful man was this Member of Parliament to the
labourers around on his demesne. Not the least part of this wonder
consisted in the tradition that he had a different suit of clothes for
every day in the year. He was very fond of fine horses, and gloried in
the fact that he owned a winner of the Derby. He kept a large stable
of racing, hunting, and carriage horses.

This was the advent of a new life to me. I was taken in hand by the
head groom and fitted out with two suits of clothes, and in this
change the first great ambition of my life was satisfied. I became the
possessor of a hard hat. For two years, I had instinctively longed for
something on my head that I could politely remove to a lady. The first
night I marched down that village street, shoes well polished,
starched linen, and hard hat, I expected the whole town to be there to
see me. I had made several attempts at this hat business before. They
organized a flute band in the town and I joined it for the sake of the
hat. But it was too nice a thing to be lying around when people were
hungry, and, as it was in pawn most of the time, I finally redeemed
it, returned it, and quit. But this time the hat had come to stay.

With my new vision still warm in my heart, I became very active in the
parish Sunday School. My inability to read relegated me to the
children's class; but I had a retentive memory, and before I was able
to read, I memorized about three hundred texts from the Bible.

The first outworking of my vision was on a drunken stone mason of our
town. His family, relatives, and friends had all given him up. He had
given himself up. I went after him every night for weeks; talked to
him, pleaded with him, prayed for him, and was rewarded by seeing him
make a new start. Together we organized a temperance society. I think
it was the first temperance society in that town. I was much more at
home in this kind of work than in the Sunday School; for, while I
could be neither secretary, treasurer, nor president of the temperance
society I had organized, my inability to read or write did not prevent
me from hustling after such men as my first convert.

In the Sunday School, I felt keenly the fact that I was outclassed by
boys half my age; but I persevered and went from one class to another,
until I had gone through the grades, and was then given the
opportunity to organize a class of my own. This I did with the
material on the streets, children unconnected with any school or
institution. I taught them the Bible stories and helped them to
memorize the texts that I had learned myself.

Despite the fact that I was now clean and well groomed, I could not
help comparing my life to the life of the horses I was attending,
especially with regard to their sleeping accommodations. The slightest
speck of dirt of any kind around their bedding was an indictment of
the grooming. The stables were beautifully flagged and sprinkled with
fine, white sand. The mangers were kept cleaner than anything in the
houses of the poor, and, when I trotted a mount out into the yard, the
master would take out his white silk handkerchief, run it along the
horse's side, and then examine it. If the handkerchief was soiled in
the slightest degree, the horse was sent back. Probably not once in a
year was a horse returned under such circumstances. The regularity of
meals was another point of comparison, and the daily washings,
brushings, groomings.

It meant something to be a horse in that stable--much more than it
meant to be a groom. When these points of comparison arose, I pushed
them back as evil and discontent with the will of God. This master man
used to talk to his horses, but he seldom talked to his grooms.
Sometimes I was permitted the luxury of a look at the great
dining-hall, or the drawing-rooms. That also was another world to me,
a world of beauty for God's good people. Even the butlers, footmen,
and other flunkies were superior people, and I envied them, not only
the uniform of their servitude but their intimate touch with that
inner world of beautiful things.

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