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MAY
1936
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JOHN DOS PASSOS
MARY FRENCH got into Pittsburgh late on a
summer afternoon. Crossing the bridge she had a
glimpse of the level sunlight glowing pink and
orange on a confusion of metalcolored smokes from
a wilderness of chimneys ranked about the huge cor·
rugated iron structures along the riverbank. Then
she was getting out into the brownish dark gloom of
the station with her suitcase cutting into her hand.
She called up Lois Speyer from a dirty phone-
booth that smelled of cigarsmoke. "Mary French,
how lovely
I"
said her friend in her comical burbling
voice. "I'll get you a room right here at Mrs. Ganse-
meyer's, come on out to supper. It's a boarding-
house. Just wait till you see it ....
But I just can't
imagine anybody coming to Pittsburgh for their
vacation. "
Mary found herself getting red and nervous right
there in the phonebooth. "I wanted to see something
different from the socialworker angle."
"Well it's so nice the idea of having somebody
to talk to that I hope it doesn't mean you've lost
your mind ....
You know they don't employ Vassar
graduates in the openhearth furnaces."
"I'm not a Vassar graduate," Mary French
shouted into the receiver feeling the near tears sting-
ing her eyes. "I'm just like any other working girl.
. . . You ought to have seen me working in that
cafeteria in Cleveland."
"Well come on out Mary darling, I'll save some
supper for you."
It was a long ride out on the streetcar. Pittsburgh
was grim all right.
N ext day she went around to the employment
offices of several of the steel companies. When she
said she'd been a socialworker they looked at her
awful funny. Nothing doing; not taking on clerical
or secretarial workers now. She spent days with
the newspapers answering helpwanted ads. Lois
Speyer certainly laughed in that longfaced sarcastic
way she had when Mary had to take a job on the
Tim.es-Sentinel
that Lois had gotten her because she
knew the girl who wrote the society column.
As the Pittsburgh summer, hot and choky with
coal gas and the strangling fumes from blast fur-
naces, blooming mills, rolling mills that clogged
the huge smoking "Y" of the rivers, dragged into
August, there began to be talk around the office of
red agitators getting into the mills and fomenting a
strike. A certain Mr. Gorman, said to be one of
the head operatives for the Sherman Service, was
often seen smoking a cigar in the managing editor's
office. The paper began to fill up with news of alien
riots and Russian Bolshevists and the nationalization
of women and the defeat of Lenin and Trotsky.
Then one afternoon in early September Mr.
Healy called Mary French into his private office
and asked her to sit down. When he went over and
closed the door tight Mary thought for a second
he was going to make indecent proposals to her, but
instead he said in his most tired fatherly manner,
"Now Miss French I have an assignment for you
that I don't want you to take unless you really want
to. I've got a daughter myself and I hope when she
grows up she'll be a nice simple well-brought up girl
like you are. So honestly if I thought it was demean-
ing I wouldn't ask you to do it .•. you know that.
We're strictly the family newspaper
we let the
other fellers pull the rough stuff
You know,
an item never goes through my desk that I don't
think of my own wife and daughters, how I'd like
to have them read it."
Ted Healy was a large round blackhaired man
with a rolling grey eye like a codfish's eye. "What's
the story, Mr. Healy?" asked Mary briskly; she'd
made up her mind it must be something about the
white slave traffic. "Well these damned agitators,
you know they're trying to start a strike ....
Well
they\~e opened a publicity office downtown. I'm
scared to send one of the boys down might get
into some trouble with those gorillas
I don't
want a dead reporter on my front page. . . . But
sending you down ....
You know you're not work-
ing for a paper you're a socialservice worker, want
to get both sides of the story ....
A sweet innocent
looking girl can't possibly come to any harm ....
Well I want to get the lowdown on the people work-
ing there ... what part of Russia they were born in,
how they got into this country in the first place ...
where the money comes from . . . prison records,
you know ....
Get all the dope you can. It'll make
a magnificent Sunday feature."
"I'm very much interested in industrial relations
... it's a wonderful assignment ....
But Mr. Healy
aren't conditions pretty bad in the mills?"
Mr. Healy jumped to his feet and began striding
up and down the office. "I've got all the dope on
that ....
Those damn hunkies are makin' more
money than they ever made in their lives, they buy
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