Read Online The Waterworks by E. L. Doctorow - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: E. L. Doctorow
Tags: Fiction, Literary, Historical fiction, General, Historical, History, Young men, New York, New York (State), New York (N.Y.), 19th century, City and Town Life, Urban Life, City and Town Life - New York (State) - New York - History - 19th Century - Fiction, Young Men - New York (State) - New York - Fiction, New York (N.Y.) - Fiction
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temple building…. And now here is young McIlvaine in his first months on the job as a reporter of monumental news. His lean face is unlined and shining … he does not at this time in his life require spectacles…. It is Independence Day, 1842. The War Between the States is two decades ahead…. He stands on the elevated bank of a huge cubic crater. In his nostrils is the odor of wet sand, the dank air of new stone construction. Arranged along the south embankment in solemn black ranks are the shades of municipal life—the mayor, former mayors, would-be mayors, aldermen, commissioners of this and that, philosophes of the chamber of commerce, ward heelers, andfellow newspaper wretches. And after speeches spoken grandly and at inconsiderate length, oratorios of self-congratulation, the ribbon is cut, the wheels are turned, the sluice gates are opened, and the water thunders in … as if it were not a reservoir at all, but a baptismal font for the gigantic absolution we require as a people.
Ten
I ’M not sure what obligation I’m under to give you a sense of the life around this matter, the degrees of my consciousness taken up with all my regular duties, or indeed my sense of the expanding, pulsating city pumping its energies outward furiously in every direction … except that, of course, all of it was indicative, all meaningful of the story I sought out, just as any chosen point on the compass can lead you to the earth’s core…. I suppose I would be justified in reciting to you all twelve pages of our paper every day for several years of the post-war, from the shipping news to the commercial reports on the corn and cotton crops, the fortunes made or lost on the Exchange, the latest technical marvels from our inventors, the murder trials, the social scandals, the politics from Washington, and the glories of the western tribal expurgations. But this is a municipal matter, a municipal matter … and I should keep to the streets, whether they are paved with stones or, as they were farther north, merely laid out with string over mud lots. In any event you will see that invariably what it is we need to discover is exactly what we already know.
Somewhere in this season, in May, or early June, workingmen in various industries began spontaneously to leave their workplaces in support of the idea of an eight-hour workday. In fact the legislature had several years before made this the law, but the employers of our city had simply ignored it… and now, their patience spent, brewery workers, mechanics, carpenters, blacksmiths, bricklayers, were laying down their tools, removing their aprons, and taking to the street. Even the stolid burghers at the Steinway piano factory walked out. All over the city men were meeting in halls, making speeches, marching through the streets, throwing up picket lines, and police units were dispatched to break up these meetings, arrest these marchers, and crack the heads of these speakers, who were disturbing the peace and refusing to do an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay. Our headline by the third day defined the circumstances as a general strike. I looked over my editorial floor and dared any reporter to join the fun. Instead they spread out over Manhattan and came back to file their war reports. From Elizabeth Street as far uptown as the gasworks, from the Eleventh Avenue abattoirs with their hooked cow carcasses to the Water Street docks, police and workingmen were doing battle. I stood at my open office window and imagined I could hear a kind of ground song, as if I were overlooking a prospect of woods and fields with burbling freshets and the chirrups of small perching birds.
Our publisher dictated an editorial for the front page to the effect that the infamous communistic ideas of the foreign workers’ internationals had finally taken root in American soil. Other papers published similar sentiments. After a few weeks the whole thing blew over with a series of symbolic
Ten
I ’M not sure what obligation I’m under to give you a sense of the life around this matter, the degrees of my consciousness taken up with all my regular duties, or indeed my sense of the expanding, pulsating city pumping its energies outward furiously in every direction … except that, of course, all of it was indicative, all meaningful of the story I sought out, just as any chosen point on the compass can lead you to the earth’s core…. I suppose I would be justified in reciting to you all twelve pages of our paper every day for several years of the post-war, from the shipping news to the commercial reports on the corn and cotton crops, the fortunes made or lost on the Exchange, the latest technical marvels from our inventors, the murder trials, the social scandals, the politics from Washington, and the glories of the western tribal expurgations. But this is a municipal matter, a municipal matter … and I should keep to the streets, whether they are paved with stones or, as they were farther north, merely laid out with string over mud lots. In any event you will see that invariably what it is we need to discover is exactly what we already know.
Somewhere in this season, in May, or early June, workingmen in various industries began spontaneously to leave their workplaces in support of the idea of an eight-hour workday. In fact the legislature had several years before made this the law, but the employers of our city had simply ignored it… and now, their patience spent, brewery workers, mechanics, carpenters, blacksmiths, bricklayers, were laying down their tools, removing their aprons, and taking to the street. Even the stolid burghers at the Steinway piano factory walked out. All over the city men were meeting in halls, making speeches, marching through the streets, throwing up picket lines, and police units were dispatched to break up these meetings, arrest these marchers, and crack the heads of these speakers, who were disturbing the peace and refusing to do an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay. Our headline by the third day defined the circumstances as a general strike. I looked over my editorial floor and dared any reporter to join the fun. Instead they spread out over Manhattan and came back to file their war reports. From Elizabeth Street as far uptown as the gasworks, from the Eleventh Avenue abattoirs with their hooked cow carcasses to the Water Street docks, police and workingmen were doing battle. I stood at my open office window and imagined I could hear a kind of ground song, as if I were overlooking a prospect of woods and fields with burbling freshets and the chirrups of small perching birds.
Our publisher dictated an editorial for the front page to the effect that the infamous communistic ideas of the foreign workers’ internationals had finally taken root in American soil. Other papers published similar sentiments. After a few weeks the whole thing blew over with a series of symbolic
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