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 URBAN RENEWAL IN
EUROPEAN COUNTRIES:
ITS E M E R G E N C E A N D P O T E N T I A L S
 Publications in the City Planning Series
Institute for Urban Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Robert B. Mitchell, Director

T H E P L A C E OF T H E IDEAL C O M M U N I T Y IN CITY PLANNING

Thomas A. Reiner

HOUSING M A R K E T S AND P U B L I C POLICY

William G. Grigsby

E X P L O R A T I O N S INTO URBAN STRUCTURE

M. M. Webber, J . W. Dyckman, D. L. Foley, A. Z.
Guttenberg, W. L. C. Wheaton, C. B. Wurster

STRUCTURING T H E J O U R N E Y TO WORK
Howard S. Lapin

URBAN R E N E W A L IN E U R O P E A N COUNTRIES: Its Emergence

and Potentials
Leo Grebler
 URBAN RENEWAL IN
EUROPEAN COUNTRIES:
ITS EMERGENCE
AND POTENTIALS

LEO GREBLER

PHILADELPHIA

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

© 1964 by the Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania

Published in Great Britain, India, and Pakistan

by the Oxford University Press
London, Bombay, and Karachi

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 63-81714

STORAGE
7/1-

7427

Printed in the United States of America

 PREFACE

T h e field tour for this study was undertaken in the period

July, 1961, to January, 1962, and included the following
countries: Denmark, France, Great Britain, Greece, Italy,
Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and West Germany
including Berlin. In France, Greece, and Poland, only the
capitals were visited to obtain basic information on na-
tional policies and trends and to look into local renewal
or reconstruction projects. In each of the other countries,
the tour was extended to several other citics and towns of
varying size. A total of thirty-one cities was included. Docu-
mentary materials were obtained for additional countries
and cities. Also, some of the results of the author's 1954
field investigation of the reconstruction of war-destroyed
European cities, covering twenty-eight cities in five coun-
tries, were useful to the present study. 1 A l l of these five
countries and eight cities were revisited in 1961-1962.
T h e field tour was made possible by a sabbatical leave
from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a
travel grant from the Ford Foundation, which was ad-
ministered by the Institute of International Education.
Both kinds of assistance are gratefully acknowledged. T h e
staff of the United Nations, and especially of the Economic
Commission for Europe, which had held an Urban Re-
newal Symposium in J u n e , 1961, were helpful in establish-
ing contacts and providing orientation, and so was the
1
Leo Grebler, Europe's Reborn Cities (Urban Land Institute, Washing-
ton, D.C., Technical Bulletin 28, 1956).

5
6 PREFACE

Division of International Affairs of the Housing and H o m e

Finance A g e n c y . In addition, I am greatly indebted to
the many European government officials and the nongov-
ernmental specialists w h o made themselves generously
available for interviews and tours of projects and provided
me with study materials. However, they must be exoner-
ated of any responsibility for the facts and interpretations
in this report.
I wish to express my gratitude to colleagues who read
and c o m m e n t e d on drafts of the report: Professors James
Gillies and L e l a n d S. Burns of the University of Califor-
nia, Los Angeles; and Professor Leo H. Klaassen of the
Netherlands Economic Institute and the Netherlands
School of Economics, w h o spent the spring semester of
1962 at U C L A . Special thanks are due to Dr. Nathaniel
Lichfield of L o n d o n w h o saved me from errors in dealing
with the c o m p l e x British programs and offered incisive
criticism and suggestions. Mrs. Rose Altman provided in-
valuable secretarial service, and the careful editing by Mrs.
Grace M i l g r a m of the Institute for Urban Studies at the
University of Pennsylvania did a great deal to improve the
quality of the monograph.
Several portions of the monograph were published in
the f o r m of articles in the Journal of the American In-
stitute of Planners (November, 1962), Land Economics
(November, 1962), The Appraisal Journal (January, 1963),
Progressive Architecture (February, 1963), and The Town
Planning Review (April, 1963). I am indebted to these
journals for permission to use adapted versions of the
articles in the present study.
L . G.
 CONTENTS

Chapter Page
I. I n t r o d u c t i o n 11
S c o p e of U r b a n R e n e w a l 12
T h e A m e r i c a n Lead and the E u r o p e a n L a g 17
II. Pressures f o r C i t y R e n e w a l i n E u r o p e 23
Traffic Problems and "Solutions" 23
Renewal for Central Area Functions 32
A Digression: Berlin W i t h o u t a Center 32
Expansion of Existing Centers 34
E m e r g e n c e of N e w C e n t e r s 39
Conservation and Rehabilitation 42
O t h e r F o r c e s in U r b a n R e n e w a l 47
I I I . S t a t u s of N a t i o n a l P r o g r a m s 51
France 52
Denmark 56
Netherlands 58
Great Britain 60
Sweden 67
West Germany 68
Italy 73
IV. T h e I n d i v i d u a l a n d the State in U r b a n R e n e w a l 76
L a n d Assembly and Disposition 77
Relocation 84
V. Reflections on P l a n n i n g Problems 89
T h e C o m e b a c k of M u l t i p l e L a n d Uses 90
P e d e s t r i a n S h o p p i n g in C i t y C e n t e r s 94
Is the B l o c k - F r o n t D o o m e d ? 97
Related Problems: Greenbelts and New T o w n s 100
T h e S e a r c h f o r R e n e w a l O b j e c t i v e s a n d Strategy 103
VI. N o t e s o n the N e w S c a l e 111
T h e S c a l e of T h r e e - D i m e n s i o n a l P l a n n i n g 112
T h e Size of E n t e r p r i s e s 116
Building Dimensions 119
T i m e Dimensions 123
T h e N e w S c a l e in U r b a n R e n e w a l 125
C r i t i c i s m of the N e w S c a l e 128
 ILLUSTRATIONS
The following illustrations appear as a group after page 64.

T h e Pirelli office building, near the Milan railroad station.

T h e Centro Direzionale, a new business district in Milan.
T h e Lijnbaan pedestrian shopping area in Rotterdam.
Partial view of Warsaw's reconstructed Old Town.
Partial view of the new government office center in Warsaw,
before and after reconstruction.
Model of the Barbican scheme in London.
T h e Castrol House in London.
Commercial redevelopment along the ring road in Birming-
ham.
Expansion of Birmingham's central business district.
Partial view of the Nedre Norrmalm urban renewal project in
Stockholm.
Models of Hamburg's new central business district.
T h e Thyssen office building in Duesseldorf.
Hamburg's Grindelberg project, an example of the "new scale"
of urban redevelopment.
An u r b a n expressway in Hannover.
Example of changed layout and street pattern in a residential
section of Hamburg.
 URBAN RENEWAL IN
EUROPEAN COUNTRIES:
ITS E M E R G E N C E A N D P O T E N T I A L S
 I

INTRODUCTION

For many decades the United States looked to the advanced

European countries for models and guidance in the de-
velopment of housing policies and the improvement of
city planning. In the case of urban renewal, the shoe is on
the other foot. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that
the evolution of an articulate national program for the re-
newal of its cities and towns since 1949 has placed the
United States in a position of leadership. Most of the West-
ern countries on the European Continent are only now
on the threshold of national renewal programs. A few have
adopted legislation in the past few years, and others are
busily engaged in drafting new statutes. But more is in-
volved than mere precedence in time. T h e legal and finan-
cial tools of our program have set a pattern for adaptation
in other nations and are under intensive study by Eu-
ropean specialists and governments. Our experience is
being keenly watched. Although much more needs to be
done to make our program better known and more widely
understood abroad, the stream of influence has been re-
versed. Instead of American experts traveling to Europe
for inspiration and instruction on housing policies, the
Europeans now come to our shores to look into American
problems and policies in city renewal.
While the development of specific national programs
11
12 URBAN RENEWAL IN EUROPEAN COUNTRIES

in Europe is lagging behind that of the United States, a

great deal of urban renewal activity can be observed. First,
a special kind of urban renewal, on a scale far exceeding
the American program, has been executed in the rebuild-
ing of war-damaged European cities and towns. Second,
several countries, most notably Great Britain, whose over-
age housing stock is one of the worst legacies of the early
industrial revolution, have resumed their traditional slum-
clearance schemes that were interrupted by war and urgent
reconstruction tasks. Third, substantial renewal is going
forward in many localities without the benefit of national
programs, though often with the assistance of planning,
housing, and road-building measures or ad hoc legislation
for individual undertakings. Finally, the replacement of
old buildings by new ones, the conventional form in which
cities have always renewed themselves, is in abundant evi-
dence, visible especially in office skyscrapers from Man-
chester to Naples. This activity is but one manifestation of
the great real estate boom that has developed in Western
Europe in response to strong urban growth, new tech-
nology, prosperity, and long-deferred demands.

SCOPE OF URBAN RENEWAL

Obviously, then, the United States' lead in developing

an urban renewal program pertains to a highly specific
activity that requires definition. T h e term "urban re-
newal" has come to be used so loosely that its meaning
is often blurred, especially in international comparisons,
where it is essential to distinguish city renewal from con-
ventional slum clearance for the improvement of housing.
In fact, the very concept is so recent that it has called for
coining new words not only in our own language but in
 INTRODUCTION 13

others as w e l l — f o r example, renovation urbaine and

Stadternenerung.
In the context of this volume, urban renewal refers to
a deliberate effort to change the urban environment
through planned, large-scale adjustment of existing city
areas to present and future requirements for urban living
and working. It extends to nonresidential as well as resi-
dential land uses. T h e process involves the replanning and
comprehensive redevelopment of land or the conservation
and rehabilitation of areas w h i c h are threatened by blight
or are to be preserved because of their historical setting
and cultural values—all in the framework of an over-all
plan for a city's development. Because public as well as
private improvements are required and because of the
common difficulties of large-scale land assembly in built-up
areas, urban renewal is usually characterized by substan-
tial government action as well as by new private invest-
ment. T h e existence of a national program, accompanied
by financial and other assistance by the central govern-
ment, manifests a nation-wide interest in urban problems
by far exceeding the earlier concern with poor housing. 1
T h e ingredients of governmental initiative and financial
support, planning, and large-scale enterprise distinguish
urban renewal from the piecemeal replacement of struc-
tures, building by building, that has been going on for
centuries. T h e close association with an over-all city plan,
the inclusion of nonresidential as well as residential land
uses, and greater reliance on private investment distin-
1 T h i s definition obviously docs not a t t e m p t to c o m e to grips w i t h im-

p o r t a n t operational p r o b l e m s in u r b a n renewal. W h a t are the present and

f u t u r e requirements for l i v i n g a n d w o r k i n g in cities? H o w can the most
u s e f u l land uses be d e t e r m i n e d and relative utilities be measured? T h e
definition is merely designed to distinguish u r b a n r e n e w a l f r o m o t h e r
activities; it is not intended to solve o p e r a t i o n a l problems. Also, the defini-
tion is couched in terms of economic systems characterized by p r i v a t e and
p u b l i c sectors.
14 URBAN RENEWAL IN EUROPEAN COUNTRIES

guish urban renewal from the conventional slum-clearance

and housing programs in which many European countries
have played the role of pioneers. 2
When other aspects of urban renewal than the adoption
of a national program are considered, the American lead is
much less clear. As was indicated earlier, urban renewal in
European countries sometimes proceeds without the bene-
fit of national programs specifically designed to assist in
this process. T h e rebuilding of war-damaged cities and
towns is the most gigantic process of urban renewal in
history, compressed in one generation. T h e problems of
rebuilding the cities that fell victim to the war and those
of peacetime renewal are largely similar. Both processes
involve a measure of urban land reform and pose essen-
tially identical planning questions. For example, what
means should be employed to consolidate or merge the
typically small parcels that militate against an efficient
layout for a city area? Should existing street patterns be
changed in spite of the vast amount of underground capital
invested in utilities along the street lines? Should new land
uses replace the old ones and, if so, which ones? What
density patterns should be considered? Should land uses
be finely segregated or boldly mixed? Should new princi-
ples (or, rather, revised ancient ones), such as pedestrian
shopping areas in city centers, be incorporated in the
scheme? Should the "corridor" street lined with buildings
be given up in favor of orienting structures to maximum
light, air, and sun, in "open planning" fashion?
2 Despite its initial emphasis on residential redevelopment, the United

States urban renewal program from its inception departed from the ex-
clusive housing orientation of earlier slum-clearance schemes in Europe
as well as in this country. T h e 1949 Act merely required that an area
designated for clearance must be predominantly residential either before
or after redevelopment. Later amendments have enacted exceptions from
this rule, allowing nonresidential redevelopment in nonresidential clear-
ance areas within progressively expanded limitations.
 INTRODUCTION 15

Moreover, as the reconstruction of war-damaged areas

approaches its final stage, it often merges imperceptibly
into regular renewal projects. T h e completion of Coven-
try's new center, for example, requires considerable demo-
lition of buildings spared by the bombs and a new layout
rounding out the rebuilding plan. T h e r e are numerous
similar cases. Finally, the process of rebuilding has had
significant implications for peacetime renewal activity. In
many European countries, it has made people more aware
of the obsolescence of real estate facilities that were left
untouched by the war, and of the potentials of concerted
action to deal with it. T h e legal and financial methods that
were used to accomplish reconstruction are leaving their
mark on the techniques to be applied to regular renewal.
Another related phenomenon is privately initiated re-
development, especially of central city areas. This activity
has gained impressive momentum in some of the European
countries. Here, as well as in urban renewal under public
auspices, one can observe a new scale of operations, and
sometimes a new intensity of private planning, that blur
the definitional distinction between urban renewal in-
itiated and specifically controlled by public agencies and
urban renewal by private investors under general city-
planning regulation. And there are hybrid projects where
it is difficult to find a clear demarcation between public
and private enterprise.
Nowhere is the evidence of privately initiated renewal
so startling as in Great Britain, the country par excellence
of governmental urban planning, and especially in Lon-
don, whose skyline is being transformed through a series of
widely dispersed tall office buildings. T h e r e has been a
veritable burst of investment interest in the redevelopment
of centrally located property; and the resulting pressures
have become so acute that the ponderous planning ma-
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 It came then of itself, needing only an occasional prompting
question, and the narrative was essentially true, I fancy; for, free
from embellishment, it moved with the directness of reality.
Born in Wisconsin of parents who had emigrated from Ireland,
Farrell was bred in an Illinois village, about fifty miles north of where
we were walking at the time. His two sisters lived there still, he
thought, but his mother had died when he was but a lad. His father
was a day laborer at work in Peoria, so far as Farrell knew. He had
not seen him for many years, and he kept up no contact with his
people.
Much the most interesting part of the story to me was that which
related to the past year. Farrell was twenty-two; he had grown up he
hardly knew how, and was already a confirmed roadster, with an
inordinate love for tobacco, and a well-developed taste for drink.
In the early summer he had drifted into Ottawa, the very town
that we were nearing, and, being momentarily tired of the road, he
sought and found a job in a tile factory. At this point his narrative
grew deeply absorbing, because of the unconscious art of it in its
simple adherence to life; but being unable to reproduce his words, I
can only suggest their import.
It was a crisis in his history. The change began with an experience
of a mechanics’ boarding-house. He was a vagabond by breeding,
with no clearly defined ideas beyond food and drink, and immunity
from work. He was awaking to manhood, and there began to dawn
for him at the boarding-house a sense of home, and of something
more in the motherly care of the housekeeper.
“Say, she was good to me,” was his own expression, “she done me
proud. She used to mend me clothes, and if I got drunk, she never
chewed the rag, but I see it cut her bad, and I swore off for good;
and then I used to give her me wages to keep for me, and she’d
allow me fifty cents a week above me board.”
The picture went on unfolding itself naturally in the portrayal of
interests undreamed of beyond idleness, and enough of plug and
beer. The savings grew to a little store; then there came the
suggestion of a new suit of clothes, and a hat and boots, and a
boiled shirt and collar, and a bright cravat. Farrell little thought of the
native touch of art in his description of how, when all these were
procured, he would fare forth on a Sunday morning, not merely
another man, but other than anything that he had imagined. A sense
of achievement came and brought a dawning feeling of obligation,
and a desire to take standing with other men, and to know
something and to bear a part in the work of a citizen of the town.
Some glimmer had remained to him of religious teaching before
his mother died, and, in the conscious virtue of new dress, he
sought out the church, and began to go regularly to mass.
I knew what was coming then; there had been an inevitableness
that foretold it in the tale, and I found myself breathing more freely
when he began to speak without self-consciousness of the girl.
He said very little of her, but it was not at all difficult to catch the
ampler meaning of his words. Sunday began to hold a new interest,
quite apart from Sunday clothes. He found himself looking forward
through the week to a glimpse of her at church, but the week was
far too long, and in the autumn evenings he would dress himself in
his best, regardless of the jeers of the other men, and would walk
past her father’s corner grocery. Sometimes he saw her on the
pavement in front of the shop, or helping her father to wait on
customers within.
All this was very disturbing; a new world had opened to him with
a steady job. It was unfolding itself with quite wonderful revelations
in the home-life of his boarding-house, and the friendship of the
matron, and the companionship of other workingmen, and the
responsibility which was beginning to replace his former
recklessness. Moreover, he was getting on in the tile factory. He was
strong and active, and the chances of being transferred to piece-
work was a spur to do his best at his present unskilled labor. Utterly
unforeseen in its train of consequences had come into this budding
consciousness, the vision of a girl. He had merely seen her at
church, then seen her again, then found himself looking forward to
sight of her, and unable to wait patiently for Sunday. The very
thought of her carried with it a feeling of contempt for his former
life, and a distressing sense of difference in their present stations,
which developed, sometimes, into the temptation to go back to the
road and forget. That was the temptation that was always in the
background, and always coming to the fore when the craving for
drink was strongest, or when the monotony of ten hours’ daily labor
grew more than commonly burdensome. For four months and more
he had resisted now, and, as a reward, he had become just man
enough to know feebly that he could not easily forget, even on the
road.
How he plucked up courage to meet her I do not know, for he did
not tell me, and not for treasure would I have asked him at this
point of the story. He did meet her, however, and the wonder of it
was upon him still, as he told me modestly, in quaint speech, that
she smiled upon him.
Oh, ineffable mystery of life, that he, a hobo of a few months
before, should be reading now in a good girl’s eyes an answering
liking to his own! He was little more than a lad, and she but a slip of
a girl, and I do not know what it may have meant to her, but to him
it was life from the dead. Very swiftly the winter sped and very hard
he worked until he earned a job at piecework in the factory, and
then harder than ever until he was making good wages. He could
see little of her, for she had an instinctive knowledge of her father’s
probable displeasure, but there grew up a tacit understanding
between them that kept his hope and ambition fired.
Nothing in experience could have been more wonderful than those
winter months, when he felt himself getting a man’s grip of things
unutterable, that came as from out a boundless sea into the range of
his strange awakening. And this new life was centred in her, as
though she were its source. He lived for her, and worked and
thought for her and tried to be worthy of her, and between his
former and his present life was a gulf which by some miracle she
had created.
It came upon him with the suddenness of a pistol-shot one
evening late in March when they stood talking for a moment before
saying good-night at her father’s door. Thundering down the steps
from the living-rooms over the shop rushed the grocer, a large, florid
Irishman. In a moment he was upon them, hot in the newly
acquired knowledge that Farrell was “keeping steady company” with
his daughter. His ire was up, and his Irish tongue was loosed, and
Farrell got the sting of it. It lashed him for a beggarly factory laborer
of doubtful birth, and, gaining vehemence, it lashed him for a hobo
predestined to destruction, and finally, with strong admonition, it
charged him never to speak to the girl and never to enter her home
again.
If only he could have known, if only there had been a voice to tell
him convincingly that now there had come a crucial test in his life
between character and circumstance, a voice “to lift him through the
fight”! But all his past was against him. In another hour he was dead
drunk and he went drunk to work in the morning, and was
discharged.
The pleading of his landlady was of no avail. He thought that he
had lost the girl. Nothing remained but the road, and back to the
road he would go, and soon, with his savings in his pocket, he was
“beating his way” to Chicago. There he could live on beer and free
lunches, and, at dives and brothels, he would “blow in” the savings
of ten months and try to forget how sacred the sum had seemed to
him, when, little by little, he added to it, while planning for the
future. Its very sacredness gave a hellish zest to utter abandonment
to vice while the money lasted; then he took again to begging on
the streets with “a hard-luck story,” until, in the warm April days, he
felt the old drawing to the open country and began once more to
“beat his way” up and down the familiar railway lines and to beg his
bread from the kind-hearted folk, who, in feeding him, were fast
completing his ruin.
 We were entering Seneca now, and another thunder-storm was
upon us, but, as it broke in a deluge of rain, we ran for shelter under
the eaves of the railway station. A west-bound passenger-train drew
in as we stood there.
“That’s the way to travel,” I heard Farrell say, half to himself. It
was the sheltered comfort of the passengers that he envied, I
supposed. But not at all.
“See that hobo?” he continued, and, following the line of his
outstretched finger, I saw a ragged wretch dripping like a drowned
rat as he walked slowly up and down beside the panting locomotive.
“Yes,” I answered.
“The train’s got a blind baggage-car on,” he continued. “That’s a
car that ain’t got no door in the end that’s next the engine. You can
get on the front platform when the train starts, and the brakemen
can’t reach you till she stops, but then you’re off before they are and
on again when she starts up. The fireman can reach you all right,
and if he’s ugly, he’ll heave coal at you, and sometimes he’ll kick you
off when the train’s going full speed; but generally he lets you be.
That hobo come in two hours from Chicago and he’s got a snap for
as long as he wants to ride,” he concluded.
Nevertheless, I was glad to see the train go without Farrell’s
saying anything about joining our adventurous brother on the fore-
platform of the “blind baggage-car.”
In the seething sunlight that followed the storm we left the station
and walked along the village street which lay parallel with the
railway. At a mineral spring we stopped to drink, while a group of
school-children who were loitering homeward stood watching us, the
fascination in their eyes which all children feel in the mystery which
surrounds the lives of vagabonds and gypsies.
On the outskirts of the village, when we were about to resume the
railway, Farrell suggested that he should go foraging. He was
hungry, for he had eaten nothing since early morning, while I had
bought food at Morris. I promised to wait for him and very gladly sat
down on the curbstone in the shade.
Two bare-foot urchins, their trousers rolled up to their knees, who
had evidently been watching us from behind a picket-fence, stole
stealthily out of the gate when Farrell turned the corner. Creeping as
near as they dared, they gathered a handful of small, sun-baked
clods and began to throw them at me as a target. It was rare sport
for a time, but I was beyond their range and much absorbed in
Farrell’s story. Disappointed at not having the excitement of being
chased back to the shelter of their yard, they gave up the game and
seated themselves on the curb, with their naked, brown feet bathed
in the pool which had formed in the gutter. I had become quite
unconscious of them, when I suddenly realized that they were in
warm discussion. It was about me, I found, for I heard one of them
raise his voice in stem insistence.
“Naw,” he said, “that ain’t the same bum, that’s another bum!”
Farrell returned empty-handed and a trifle dejected, I thought. His
mind was evidently on food. A little farther down the line he pointed
out a farm-house to the right and suggested our trying there. Along
the edge of a soft meadow, where the damp grass stood high,
nearly ready for mowing, we walked to a muddy lane which led to
the barn-yard. A lank youth in overalls tucked into top-boots and a
gingham shirt and a wide-brimmed straw hat stood in the open
doorway of the barn, calmly staring at us as we approached.
Farrell greeted him familiarly and was answered civilly. Then,
without further parley, he explained that we were come for
something to eat.
“Go up to the house and ask the boss,” said the hired man.
The farmer was plainly well-to-do. His house was a large, square,
white-painted, wooden structure topped with a cupola, and with
well-kept grounds about it, while the farm buildings wore a
prosperous air of plenitude. Just then a well-grown watch-dog of the
collie type came walking toward us across the lawn, a menacing
inquiry in his face.
“Won’t you go?” suggested Farrell.
The hired man had caught sight of the dog, and there was a
twinkle in his eye as he answered, airily,
“Oh, no, thank you.”
“Does the dog bite?” Farrell ventured, cautiously.
“Yes,” came sententiously from the hired man.
“We’d better get back to the road,” Farrell said to me, and we
could feel amused eyes upon us as we retraced our steps to the
track.
Once more Farrell tried his luck; this time at a meagre, wooden,
drab cottage that faced a country lane, a hundred yards from the
railway. I watched him from the line and noticed that he talked for
some time with the woman who answered his knock and stood
framed in the door.
When he returned he had two large slices of bread in his hand
and some cold meat.
“I didn’t like to take it,” he remarked. “Her husband’s a carpenter
and ain’t had no work for six weeks. But she says she couldn’t have
me go away hungry. That’s the kind that always helps you, the kind
that’s in hard luck themselves, and knows what it is.”
He was for sharing the forage and, hungry as he was, he had not
eaten a morsel of it when he rejoined me. That I would take none
seemed to him at first a personal slight, but he understood it better
when I explained that I had had food at Morris.
There was a cloudless sunset that evening, the sun sinking in a
crimson glow that foretold another day of great heat. The stars
came slowly out over a firmament of slaty blue, and shone obscurely
through the humid air. Farrell and I were silent for some time. Both
of us had walked about thirty-six miles that day, and were intent on
a resting-place. At last we began to catch the glitter of street-lights
in Ottawa, and, at sight of them, Farrell’s spirits rose. He was like
one returning home after long absence. The sound of a church-bell
came faintly to us. Farrell held me by the arm.
“You hear that?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“That’s the Methodist church bell.”
I could see his face light up, as though something were rousing
the best that was in him.
At the eastern end of the town, and close to the railway, we came
upon a brick-kiln. Farrell was perfectly familiar with his surroundings
now, and we stopped for a drink. For some reason the water would
not run in the faucet, so we went around to a barn-like building in
the rear. Through a large, open doorway he entered, while I
remained outside. Soon I heard him in conversation with someone,
who proved to be the night-watchman, and, finding that Farrell was
not likely to rejoin me soon, I also entered.
Some moments were necessary to accustom one’s eyes to the
interior, but I could see at once the figure of a white-bearded old
man lying at full length on a bed of gunny-sacks thrown over some
sloping boards. His head was propped up, and he held a newspaper
which he had been reading by the light of two large torches that
hung suspended near him, and from which columns of black smoke
rose, curling upward into dark recesses among the rafters.
Everything was black with smut and grimy dust. Soon I could see
that on one side were great heaps of coal that sloped away to the
outer walls like the talus against a cliff.
Farrell was seated on a coal-heap, and was absorbed in the news
of the town, as he gathered it from the old man. Quite unnoticed, I
sat down on a convenient board and listened dreamily, hoping
heartily the while that we should not have to go much further that
night.
 Presently I found myself alert to what was being said, for they
were discussing the question of a night’s lodging. It was from the
watchman that the suggestion came that we should remain where
we were, and very readily we agreed. Taking a torch from its socket,
he lighted us through a long passage to another room that was used
as a carpenter’s shop. A carpenter’s bench ran the length of it, and
the tools lay strewn over its surface. From a corner he drew a few
yards of old matting, which he offered to Farrell as a bed; and he
found a door off its hinges, which, when propped up at one end as it
lay on the floor, made what proved that night a comfortable bed for
me. With a promise to call us early, he left us in the dark, and,
quickly off with our boots, we wrapped ourselves in our coats and
were soon fast asleep.
The watchman was true to his word; for the stars were still
shining when Farrell and I, hungry and stiff, set off down the track in
the direction of the railway station. His mood was that of the
evening before, as though, after long wandering, he was returning
to his native place. Recollections of those ten months of sober
industry crowded painfully upon him, and he shrunk like a culprit
from possible recognition. Yet every familiar sight held a fascination
for him. With kindling interest he pointed out the locality of the
boarding-house, and again held me by the arm and made me listen,
until I, too, could catch the sound of escaping steam at the tile
factory where he had worked.
The iron was entering into his soul, but he knew it only as a
painful struggle between a desire to return to a life of work and the
inertia that would keep him on the road. We walked on, in silence
for the most part, under the morning stars that were dimming at the
approach of day. When Farrell spoke, it was to reveal, unconsciously,
the progress of the struggle within him.
“It ain’t no use tryin’ for a job; I’ve been lookin’ seven weeks
now.” That was the lie to smooth the road to vagabondage.
“I’d have a hell of a time to get square in this town again.
Everybody that knowed me, knowed I got fired for drinkin’.” That
was the truth that made strait the gate and narrow the way that led
to life.
In a moment of encouragement he spoke of the boarding-house
keeper and of her promise to take him back again, if he would return
to work; but his thoughts of the girl he kept to himself, and deeply I
liked him for it.
We were leaving Ottawa behind. With a sharp curve the railway
swept around the base of bluffs that rose sheer on our right from
the road-bed, rugged and grim in the twilight, the trees on top
darkly outlined against the sky. At our left were the flooded lowlands
of the Illinois bottom. We could see the decaying cornstalks of last
year’s growth just appearing above the water in the submerged
fields, and, here and there, a floating out-building which had been
carried down by the flood and was caught among the trees.
Was he man enough to hold fast to his chance, or would he allow
himself to drift? This was the drama that was unfolding itself there in
the dark before the dawn, under frowning banks beside a flooded
river, while the silent stars looked down.
We came to another brick-kiln, with its buildings on the bank just
above the railway. A light was shining from a shanty window, and a
well-worn foot-path led from the road up through the underbrush of
the hillside to the shanty door. A night-watchman was making a final
round of the kiln to see that all was right before the day’s work
began.
Farrell stood still for a moment, the struggle fierce within him.
“Let’s get a drink of water,” he said.
The night-watchman led us to a spring and answered,
encouragingly, Farrell’s inquiry about a possible job.
“Go up and ask the boss,” he said. “He’s just finished his
breakfast. That’s his house,” he added, pointing to the shanty with
the light in the window.
 From the foot of the path I watched Farrell climb to the shanty
door and knock. The door opened and the voices of two men came
faintly down to me. My hopes rose, for it was not merely a question
and a decisive reply, but the give and take of continued dialogue.
The suspense had grown to physical suffering, when I saw Farrell
turn from the door and begin to descend the path.
I could not see his face distinctly; but, as he drew nearer, I caught
its expression of distress. The half-frightened, worried bewilderment
that I had noticed on the day before was back in his eyes, as he
stood looking into mine, evidently expecting me to speak. I
remained silent.
“I’ve got a job,” he said, presently, and I could have struck him for
the joy of it.
“Me troubles is just begun, for the whole town knows me for a
bum,” he added, while his anxious eyes moved restlessly behind
frowning brows. I said nothing, but waited until I could catch his eye
at rest. Then out it came, a little painfully:
“I’ll go to the boarding-house to-night, when me day’s work is
done, and put up there, if the missus can take me.”
“Good,” I said, and I waited again until his gaze was steady upon
me.
For a day we had tramped together, and slept together for a night,
and, quite of his own accord, he had given me his confidence. We
were parting, now that he had found work, and I hoped that I might
receive the final mark of his trust, so I waited.
He read my question, and his eyes wandered, but they came back
to mine, and he spoke up like a man:
“I can’t, till I’m a bit decent again and got some clothes; but I’ll
hold down me job, and, as soon as I can, I’ll go back to her.”
A warning whistle blew; Farrell went up the path to take his place
in the brick-kiln, and I was soon far down the line in the direction of
Utica.
WITH IOWA FARMERS
 WITH IOWA FARMERS

Scarcely a generalization with the least claim to value can be

drawn from my superficial contact with the world of manual labor in
America. If there is one, it is, that a man who is able and willing to
work can find employment in this country if he will go out in real
search for it. It may not be well paid, but it need not be dishonest,
and it is difficult to conceive of its failing to afford opportunities of
making a way to improved position.
And yet, one has no sooner made such a statement than it
becomes necessary to qualify it. Suppose that the worker, able and
willing to work, is unemployed in a congested labor market, where
the supply far exceeds the demand, and suppose that he must
remain with his wife and children, since he cannot desert them and
has no means of taking them away. Or imagine him newly landed,
thrown upon the streets by an emigrant agency, ignorant of the
language and of our methods of work, and especially ignorant of the
country itself. To the number of like suppositions there is no end.
Actual experience, however, serves to focus the situation. I have
stood beside men whom I knew, and have seen them miss the
chance of employment because they were so far weakened by the
strain of the sweating system that they were incapable of the strain
of hard manual labor.
Even at the best, much of the real difficulty is often the subjective
one summed up in the sentence of a man who has wide knowledge
of wage-earners in America, to whom I once spoke of the surprising
ease with which I found employment everywhere, except in larger
towns.
 “Oh, yes,” he replied; “but you forget how little gifted with
imagination the people are who commonly form by far the greater
number of the unemployed.”
It merely serves to show again the futility of generalizing about
labor, as though it were a commodity like any other, sensitive to the
play of the law of supply and demand, while supported by a
thorough knowledge of markets and the means of reaching quickly
those that, for the time, are the most favorable.
The mass which men speak casually of as “labor” is an
aggregation of individuals, each with his human ties and prejudices
and his congenital weaknesses and strength, and each with his own
salvation to work out through difficulties without and within that are
little understood from the outside. You may enter his world and
share his life, however rigid, sustained by the knowledge that at any
moment you may leave it, and your experience, although the
nearest approach that you can make, is yet removed almost by
infinity from that of the man at your side, who was born to manual
labor and bred to it, and whose whole life, physical and mental, has
been moulded by its hard realities.
It would be quite true to say that “the problem of the unemployed
in America is a problem of the distribution of workers,” taking them
from regions where many men are looking for a job, to other
regions, where many jobs are looking for a man. But it would be a
shallow truth, with little insight into the real condition of multitudes,
whose life-struggle is for day’s bread and in whom the gregarious
instinct is an irresistible gravitation. It is not difficult to show that
congestion in an industrial centre, with its accompanying misery,
might be relieved by an exodus to country districts, where an
unsatisfied demand for hands is chronic. But the human adjustments
involved in the change would be beyond all calculation; and, even
were they effected, it would be not a little disturbing in the end to
find large numbers returning to the town, frankly preferring want
with companionship and a sense of being in touch with their time to
the comparative plenty and, with it, the loneliness and isolation of
country living. A part of the penalty that one pays for attempting to
deal with elements so fascinating as those of human nature is in
their very incalculability, in the elusive charm of men who develop
the best that is in them in spite of circumstances the most adverse,
and in an evasive quality in others who sometimes fail to respond to
the best devised plans for their betterment. But human nature never
loses its interest, and, as earnest of a good time coming, there are
always men in every generation who, through unselfish service of
their fellows, have won
The faith that meets
Ten thousand cheats,
Yet drops no jot of faith.

However little the fact may have applied to the actual “problem of
the unemployed,” it nevertheless was true, as shown in my own
experience, that there was a striking contrast throughout the country
between a struggle among men for employment and a struggle
among employers for men.
Early in the journey I began to note that every near approach to a
considerable centre of population was immediately apparent in an
increasing difficulty in finding work. I had never a long search in the
country or in country villages, and I soon learned to avoid cities,
unless I was bent upon another errand than that of employment.
I could easily have escaped Chicago and its crowded labor market.
Offers of places in the late autumn as general utility man on farms in
northern Ohio and Indiana were plentiful as I passed, and I well
knew, during a fortnight’s fruitless search for work in Chicago in
early winter, that at any time a day’s march from the city, or two
days’ march at most, would take me to regions where the difficulty
would quickly disappear. The temptation to quit the experiment
altogether, or, at least, to go out to the more hospitable country, was
then strong at times; but I could but realize that, in yielding, I
should be abandoning a very real phase of the experience of
unskilled labor, that of unemployment, and that I should miss the
chance of some contact with bodies of organized skilled workmen as
well as with the revolutionaries who can be easiest found in our
larger towns. So I remained, and for two weeks I saw and, in an
artificial way, I felt something of the grim horror of being penniless
on the streets of a city in winter, quite able and most willing to work,
yet unable to find any steady employment.
With the return of spring I went into the country again, drifting on
with no more definite plan than that of going westward until I should
reach the Pacific; and here at once was the contrast. Opportunities
of work everywhere; with farmers, when one was on the country
roads; in brick-kilns, when bad walking drove one to the railway
lines.
Farrell, a fellow-tramp for a day on the Rock Island Railway in
Illinois, had, for seven weeks, been looking for work from Omaha to
Lima and back again, he told me, and yet he got a job near Ottawa
in response to his first inquiry; while a few miles farther down the
line I, too, was offered work in a brick-kiln at Utica. I did not accept
it, only because I had savings enough from my last job to see me
through to Davenport.
It was on the afternoon of Saturday, June 4, 1892, that I reached
Davenport. I had followed the line of the Rock Island Railway from
Morris, sleeping in brick-kilns, and, one night, at Bureau Junction, in
a shed by the village church, and I was a bit fagged. I had
developed a plan to go to Minneapolis. I hoped to work the passage
as a hand on a river boat.
At the open door of a livery-stable I stopped to ask the way to the
office of the steamboat line, attracted, no doubt, by the look of a
man who sat just inside. With a kindly face of German type, he was
of middle age, a little stout, dressed in what is known as a “business
suit,” and when he spoke, it was with a trace of German accent.
Mr. Ross is a sufficiently near approach to his name. He was not
an Iowa farmer, but he was my first acquaintance in Iowa, and he
had things to say about the unemployed. A director in a bank and
the owner of a livery-stable, he was owner of I know not what
besides, but I know that he was delightfully cordial, and that his
hospitality was of a kind to do credit to the best traditions of the
West.
He answered my question obligingly, then asked me whether I
was looking for a job.
“For if you are,” he added, “there’s one right here,” and he waved
his hand expressively in the direction of the stalls at the rear.
This was more than I had bargained for; it was wholly new to my
experience to find work in a town before I even asked for it.
I told him frankly that I was out of employment and that I must
find some soon, but that there were reasons, at the moment, why I
wished to reach Minneapolis as early as possible.
Being without the smallest gift of mimicry I could not disguise my
tongue, and it had been a satisfaction from the first to find that this
lack in no way hampered me. I was accepted readily enough as a
working-man by my fellows, and my greenness and manner of
speech, I had every reason to think, were credited to my being an
immigrant of a new and hitherto unknown sort.
“What’s your trade?” the men with whom I worked would
generally ask me, supposing that clumsiness as a day laborer was
accounted for by my having been trained to the manual skill of a
handicraft.
“What country are you from?” they inquired, and when I said
“Black Rock,” which is the point in Connecticut from which I set out,
I have no doubt that there came to their minds visions of an island
in distant seas, where any manner of strange artisan might be bred.
What they thought was of little consequence; that they were
willing to receive me with naturalness to their companionship as a
fellow-workman was of first importance to me, and this was an
experience that never failed.
 At last I was west of the Mississippi, and, that I might pass as a
man of education in the dress of a laborer, was a matter of no note,
since men of education in the ranks of workmen have not been
uncommon there.
It was plainly from this point of view that Mr. Ross was talking to
me. If I was an educated man, it was my own affair. That for a time,
at least, I had been living by day’s labor was evident from my dress,
and it was not unlikely that I was looking for a job. Happening to
have a vacant place in the stable, he offered it to me, and, being
interested in what I had to say, he led me to speak on of work
during the past winter in Chicago, and my slight association there
with the unemployed and with men of revolutionary ideas.
Before I knew it, we were drifting far down a stream of talk, and
time was flying. Six months’ living in close intimacy with what is
saddest and often cruelest, in the complex industrialism of a great
city had produced a depression, which I had not shaken off in three
weeks’ sojourn in the wholesome country. I was steeped in the
views of men who told me that things could never grow better until
they had grown so much worse that society would either perish or
be reorganized. The needed change was not in men, they agreed,
but in social conditions; and from every phase of Socialism and
Anarchy, I had heard the propaganda of widely varying changes, all
alike, however, prophesying a regenerated society, the vision of
which alone remained the hope and faith of many lives.
The pent-up feelings of six months found a sympathetic response
in Mr. Ross; the more so as I discovered in him a wholly different
point of view. He had no quarrel with conditions in America. As a lad
of fourteen he came from Germany and, having begun life here
without friends or help of any kind, he was now, after years of work
and thrift, a man with some property and with many ties, not the
least of which was a love for the country which had given him so
good a chance.
The mere suggestion of a programme of radical change roused
him. He began somewhat vehemently to denounce a class of men,
foreigners, many of them, strangers to our institutions, irresponsible
for the most part, who bring with them from abroad revolutionary
ideas which they spread, while enjoying the liberties and advantages
of the nation that they try to harm.
“Why don’t they stay in their own countries and ‘reform’ them?”
he added. “Thousands of men who have come here from the Old
World have raised themselves to positions of honor and
independence and wealth as they never could have done in their
native lands. And yet these disturbers would upset it all, a system
that for a hundred years and more we have tried and found not
wanting.
“I am interested in a local bank,” he continued. “The management
has been successful; the directors are capable men, and the
investments pay a fair dividend. Now suppose someone, the least
responsible person in the corporation, were to come forward with a
new, untried system of banking and should insist upon its adoption
and even threaten the existence of the bank if his plan should be
rejected. That would be a case like this of your Socialist and
Anarchist.”
He was a little heated, but he caught himself with a laugh and was
smiling genially as he added:
“I see your ‘unemployed’ friends often. Scarcely a day passes that
men don’t come in here asking for a job. My experience is that if
they were half as much in earnest in looking for work as I am in
looking for men that can work, they wouldn’t search far or long. I’ve
tried a good many of them in my time. I can tell now in five minutes
whether a man has any real work in him; and those that are worth
their keep when you haven’t your eye on them, are as scarce as
hens’ teeth. There are good jobs looking for all the men that are
good enough for them; if you want to prove it, start right in here, or
go into the State and ask the farmers for a chance to work.”
I did not say that this last was the very thing I meant to do.
Instead, I began to tell him of the cases that I knew of men, who,
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