My American Diary. Clare Sheridan
in the middle, marble busts on pedestals all around, and a frieze by an English artist, representing the various Heinz processes. Mr. Robinson came and appointed a guide to show us all over. It is the first factory I have ever seen that was interesting. It really is wonderful to see the flat piece of tin go into the machine, become round and soldered, move along to have its bottom put on, and without stopping, go careering along overhead and down to the next floor to be mechanically filled with baked beans, and have its lid put on. From the moment the flat piece of tin gets into the machine to the moment when it is sealed up full is four and a quarter minutes. The tin manufacturing room was delightful, little bright, glistening, shining tins, ran, rolled and leapt, as it seemed, overhead and all round, dancing fairy-like to the music and hum of the machinery. The space over one’s head was full of them, impelled in different directions at different speeds on different levels, on little iron ways. The process itself interested me, but when I had grasped the process, I just stood in the middle of the hall and gave way to the impression of the whole, and it had the effect of making me laugh outright, it was so ridiculously joyous.
Mr. Robinson’s son, who is foreman in one of the departments, led me to a window and pointed out a little one-storied house in which Trotzky had lived and had a newspaper plant. Trotzky must have been a long time over here to have inhabited all the houses that claim him!
It was now twenty of one o’clock A.M. I have just returned from a marvelous evening at the Chalfont Steel Pipe works. I dined with Miss Chalfont. She had asked me whether I’d like a big party or not. I said I’d like to go to see the works, so she arranged that no one should dress for dinner and we went, a party of seven, first to the “residence” where the welfare workers live—a very nice house indeed—(there were three reproductions of Gainsborough and Reynold’s pictures of the “Beautiful Mrs. Sheridan”). Then to the cinema which is for the workers, and then to see the mill.
I have come away with a feeling of bewilderment … the noise, the power, the heat, men who did not seem to count worked machinery that seemed human.
It was terrible when a lever opened the furnace door and a giant red hot tube like a gun barrel was gently but firmly impelled along by iron fingers and pushed into the fire mouth upon which a door closed. It was relentless—like the hand of Destiny. When the cylinder came out at the other end and passed through a fountain of cold water, the cold on the heat produced explosive noises like great guns in a battle and we had to dodge the shower of sparks.
Strange looking men were the workers, mostly Slovaks, and Italians. The Chalfonts are rather proud of the good feeling that exists between them and their workers. I saw no faces of disaffection, but I minded being looked upon by them as a curious idler—did they but know … !
February 16, 1921. Pittsburgh.
Went to the Carnegie Museum where the curator, Mr. Douglas Stuart, took me a quick rush through. It was terribly American of me to make such a hustling tour, but un-American of me not to be more thorough. Truth to tell, I had an appointment for three-fifteen with the Women’s Press Club, where I was to be the guest of honor. The museum was very interesting and I longed to stay longer. Chiefly I noticed a marble vase carved with figures, by Barnard. This is the sculptor who did the Lincoln there was so much controversy about in England. There were some fine pictures. A Whistler (The Man with the Violin), an Orpen which took a gold medal! The Duchess of Rutland, by Blanche, à propos of which Mr. Stuart was rather amusing: He had been away on vacation and knew nothing of the Society’s purchase of pictures abroad; imagine his bewilderment when he received a cable, “Duchess of Rutland completely covered—Lloyds.” I saw some magnificent casts of French cathedral fronts, in the architecture room, but I had to leave and go to my Women’s Press Club. It was a terrifying moment when I walked into McCreery’s restaurant and found what seemed to me to be about forty women sitting in a solemn circle. I was introduced all round, and then told that “a few words” were expected of me.
For nearly two hours after that I was questioned, and I answered to the best of my ability. Sometimes the questions interested me—almost always they were intelligent.
I dined with Mr. Robinson who took me to see the Heinz glass factory afterwards.
Thursday, February 17, 1921. Pittsburgh.
Mr. Robinson fetched me at 1:30 and, with the foreman manager of the Carnegie Steel Works, we drove out to Duquesne. It took about three-quarters of an hour to get there—this district seemed to be even more business-like, and to contain far more blast furnace towers even than Pittsburgh.
For nearly three hours we went over these mills. Our cicerone was intelligent and interesting, but I vainly tried to follow the processes. I have carried away a nebulous idea.
First we saw the furnace where the iron soil is poured in and becomes molten. It runs out in a great channel of liquid fire which pours itself into an iron tank. The clinker, which is lighter and remains on the surface, is stopped by a sieve and diverted into another channel; thus the two separate. There are seven miles of cold clinker where it has been thrown out, great banks of it on which a track line has been built. While we were there the aperture of the furnace got choked up so the stream of fire had stopped. We watched the men with huge long pokers that required three men to move, trying to open up the aperture. After a few minutes the poker that came out was so short that one man could handle it. This happened several times. There were magnificent Czecho-Slovaks and a colored man working together on this. Their clinging, soaking shirts revealed their young, strong, conditioned bodies. The sweat poured from them. They worked rhythmically and almost leisurely, as though this thing went on forever and therefore there was no hurry. They were like dramatic pantomime actors, they never spoke. The sound of the hissing, spitting, shrieking furnace drowned all human efforts of sound. Seldom had a furnace mouth remained choked as long as this one. I wondered why we waited so long for nothing to happen, but our guide, who knew what we were waiting for, did not attempt to draw us away. Meanwhile the men probed with their iron instruments, all in vain. To me it seemed like some gigantic creature shrieking and protesting that something was wrong. Suddenly, as we stood there, a great roar and hissing and vomiting, and the flow of orange liquid fire burst forth with a great rush. As the stream proceeded along its course fire-work stars rose up and danced in the air above it, stars that burst, fairy-like, and illusive, and almost insolently flippant. At night it must be very spectacular. But I had been refused admittance at night, and even as a day visitor I was told I was the first woman admitted in ten years——!
We proceeded to follow the liquid through its other processes—though not all, for at the end of three hours we were not through. But my head was swimming with sounds and sights, it was as though one had spent half a day in Dante’s Inferno. Moreover my legs were as weary as my head, and though I had meant to be back at five, it was six when I walked through the William Penn Hotel! The attention I seemed to draw made me wonder whether in those few hours fame had overtaken me in the press, but when I reached my room and saw my black face in the glass, I understood the stir I had created in the elevator!
The press resolutely seemed to have a parti-pris against me. In spite of all my efforts to be agreeable and interesting to the reporters who came to interview me, nothing of sufficient importance ever appeared to attract the faintest notice of my existence or my lecture. Either it was an anti-British feeling, or more likely, that industrial capitalistic Pittsburgh had not the faintest desire to hear anything whatever about Lenin or Trotzky that was not vituperative.
With great weariness, and great discouragement and some fear of my audience, in fact in totally the wrong frame of mind I was driven in the Robinson’s car, and escorted by the father and son to the Carnegie Institute at eight o’clock.
The charming Professor of History, James, of Pittsburgh University, introduced me to a half empty, cold and unresponsive hall!
I prefaced my lecture by asking my audience to allow me, for my own satisfaction, to express a few words of appreciation of Pittsburgh before I began my narrative of Moscow. I said:
“I have only been in this country two weeks, but I have had a wonderful time. As for Pittsburgh, I have only been here three days, but I have been so hospitably received that I have crammed