Free Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan by Phillip Lopate Page A

said he had never been hurt, was reminded by his daughter that his toe had been cut off while he was at work,” wrote Barnes. And so on: these dockworkers seem to have been blessed with a mixture of stoicism and amnesia. Still, there was no way to put a good face on fatal accidents. Here, Barnes rose to grisly enumeration:
    The ways in which a man may meet death at longshore work are many and varied.… In four cases a heavy log or case rolled over and caught the men.Two men were overcome by the heat. Four were caught in the cog wheel of a winch or pulled around the drum end by the rope fall. Four were killed by the breaking of a boom or block. A sling thrown down the hatchway dragged two men from one of the decks to the lower hold. In two cases a draft on a lower deck became entangled, and as the power of the fall loosened it, it swung around in a circle and caught a man. While drafts were being dragged across one of the lower decks by the fall, they caught andcrushed three men. Loads coming down with a rush, swung a little too far and struck four. In four cases a spiegel iron or other cargo fell from a tub and killed the men. The insufficient foothold of ladders built too close to the bulkhead caused three men to fall. Where the vessel's rail was unshipped opposite the hatch, slight blows sent four men overboard. Two men were pulled off the deck by mooring ropes, or caught in a rope coil and dragged from the pier loft. The side door of the pier loft slipped and knocked two workers to the lower deck of the pier. In two cases a hand truck collided with a wagon and blows from the truck handles killed the men. Drums of chemicals exploded with dire result for two men. While a gangway man was leaning over the hatch coamings a box of tin slipped from a draft above and cut off his head.
    Alongside the danger of accidents were more subtle health risks attached to working on the waterfront: extremes of weather that would often lead to bronchitis, rheumatism, pneumonia, or heat prostration; the inhalation of harmful dust particles from, say, loading bulk grain, or dangerous fumes from sacks of potatoes, bone dust, rags, or sugar, strong enough to overcome the men. Barnes remarked as well on the toll taken by the irregularity of work on the piers, * which forced longshoremen into a debilitating pattern of idleness and drinking. Because there were so few dock structures in which the men could wait, and even fewer toilets, they had little choice but to hang out in saloons. Men were discouraged from straying to another pier to seek work, and each pier became a world unto itself, refusing to pool labor along the waterfront in the event of shortages. Imagine a situation in which one crew was forced to operate shorthanded, four men doing the job of five, increasing the chances of accident, while three blocks away a dozen men were sitting on their hands, desperate for work.
    The workforce was changing ethnically, Barnes observed. Traditionally the waterfront had been an Irish preserve; blacks and Italians were initially introduced as scab labor, making them unpopular, but by 1915 the docks had settled into a cosmopolitan mix. Barnes described it thus: “Variety isas characteristic of the worker as it is of the cargoes he handles. Irishmen, Scandinavian, German, Italian, Polack, and Negro jostle one another on the piers of New York. And the impact is not physical alone. The clash of race, temperament, language, industrial and personal traditions, flare up in disagreements, more or less violent, or are smothered by the exigencies of the trade and overcome by time. Most often, good-natured indifference does duty for real toleration and the work proceeds.” Lest we give Barnes more credit for lack of prejudice than he deserves, he added: “Always there is the shifting of races with the gradual increase of the less efficient types of worker; the substitution of the southern and southeastern European for the older, more easily assimilated Celt