The Brooklyn Daily Eagle from Brooklyn, New York • Page 16

workers and the 'rusts je Jt Jt Social and Industrial Studies BY CHARLES M. SKINNER, Staff Correspondent of the 'BROOKLYN DAILY EAGLE. really there are more people than, associations. In the. mass these Germans are a plodding, honest, industrious, uncomplaining company.

They are hearty drinkers, but except when they work in the breweries they are not guzzlers, and there is little drunkenness a fact that our prohibition friends can never quite understand, considering that provocations are so plentiful. Though not a highly educated people, there are few illiterates, and if they have a fault it is apt to be an unregulated temper. When one of them is thoroughly turned against the world he commits suicide, hut he generally recovers from it next day and feels better for months afterward. Few murders happen in Dutchtown, but it has more suicides than any other part of Brooklyn. There is a disturbing element in this national harmony, however.

The Polacks are getting in. and not oniy the Christian Poles, but the Polish Jews. Within a few years a ghetto has been formed in the heart of Dutchtown, with synagogues, sidewalk markets and dirt, and the hearts of the neighbors shake within them. The Poles in the sugar refineries are as different from the Poles in the ghetto as an American is different from a Frenchman. The Hebrew Pole will not work with his hands, unless it may be in a sweatshop, indoors.

He will patiently sell shoestrings for sixteen hours a day, rather than work with his muscles three hours a day. The Christian Pole is dull, not very shrewd or progressive, not invariably so honest as a bank cashier, but he is faithful to his family, gets drunk principally at weddings and funerals and christenings, hence, he likes to have those thingrs happen as often as possible; lives miserably in order to save money, and is a good workman at any task that doss not require much skill or intellect. In religion he is a P.omau or Greek Catholic, and among the sugar workers it is pretty safe to say that a decided majority is Catholic also. The principal Catholic church in the German section is one of the largest and finest in the city. Tur nioeMH As the oriSina! sugar THt rAbSING refiners in Brooklyn jt jt jt jt jt Jt NINTH LETTER.

The Sugar Trust and Its Employes or sf tf if being expelled In this vehement revolution through small holes In the metal. When the fill mass, as the sugar is now called, has been strained in this fashion, it is scraped out and lifted to the top of another house, to be dried of its remaining 2 per cent, ot moisture in steam heated drums. After this the graded sugars are poured into bins and are ready for barreling. While each barrel is in process of filling it is rocked by a machine with a sharp, jolting, thumping shake, in order to settle it as firmly as possible, and a dozen of these barrels, dancing sullenly in the middle of the floor, make an odd sight. freely.

Indeed, it would be hard to associate politics and sugar at present at least, the kind of sugar they make from sugar cane. Our newly acquired Polacks may awaken to the importance of being represented in the Board of Aldermen a little later, hut at present they would rather have a few gal Ions of whisky than an office. That the Pole is feared by the Germans and Irish is obvious enough. You do not have i to talk long with the people in the sugar districts to discover that. They know that he is willing to work for whatever he can i get, and that he will do faithful service with i out attempt to change his lot through the made in Brooklyn.

The flames shot into the air for a hundred feet, and the building was reduced to a shell. Danger from this source has been reduced by the general introduction of incandescent electric lights, and the refineries are provided with ample hose, sprinklers and other Are extinguishing apparatus. Business of the IMPROVEMENTS ON Havemeyer refin 0LD METHODS. eT at the piers, where tons of sugar of the kind usually known as high grade raw are landed from the steamers in bags and closely woven baskets. The Javanese insist on putting their sugar into 'these baskets, because the making of them gives employment to their women.

The bags are opened on gratings in a big room on the ground, dim with steam, and the sugar, or a yellow brown eclor and more cr less lumpy, falls through a grating into three large melting pans of a capacity of 60,000 pounds an hour. It is thence pumped to the eleventh floor of the next building and pours into twelve "blow ups" which are stirred by air blasts. This replaces the old treatment with those grades flows down to the re heating station on the next floor where steam in pipes and melted sugar in vats raise the temperature to nearly a hundred degrees. Now the llcjuor flows into char filters on the next floor which hold GO.OOO pounds of bone black. Until recently a good deal of this bone dust has been made from the relics of the buffalo, which could be gathered by tons from the Western plains, where the animal murderers had left them; but this supply is practically at an end.

The dust is afterward washed and burned clean, and this makes the peculiar sickish, almost nauseating odor that pertains to the refineries. The run begins with the best sugar and ends with the cheap grades. Samples are taken from time to time in bottles that are racked against the light, and the expert In charge has learned to detect differences in tint that a stranger hardly recognizes, and that mean nothing to him if he does. This determination of quality involves something of chemical and optical knowledge and is beset with such difficulties that nobody tries to master it unless he is going into the business. In its next stage the sugar goes into a vast hall in which loom the huge, boiler like shapes of vacuum pans, which are not pans service of labor unions that is, until he is absolutely in control, and then you cannot Although loaf sugar is not often seen in the groceries, an immenso quantity of it is made.

SAWED SUGAR IS THE BEST. spreading rapidly into the Fifteenth, Eighteenth and Twenty first, cover.3 several square miles and is almost solidly German. It is here that the sugar makers, who are also German, elect to live. The Teutonic population of this district may be safely estimated at 200,000. The Sixteenth Ward, or typical German section, is the meat densely peopled ward in the city, except one.

and is as un American as Cincinnati. Though it extends from one to three miles from the sugar houses, thousands 0" the workers choose it as their place of residence, because they feel at home among people of their own race and speech; they find here German shops and saloons, German is spoken everywhere, the churches are German, and it is no rare thing to see a man or woman in the costume of the German farmer in the streets, for the populace is constantly growing through arrivals from over the sea. These I say exactly what he will do, for out West he has shown himself to be capable of nasty conduct. Hence, when a reference is made to the Pole there is apt to be a pitying smile, or a shrug, or a little curl of the lip. But he has his friends, and they say that when he is immersed in a big American city he re forms his ways, in a measure; even that he may one day become entirely civilized anil wash ns often as anybody.

Indeed, his wife OF THE IRISH. the Havemeyers, the Mollenhauers, the Hol beef blood to secure the coagulation of al lers, the Siercks, the Donners, the Ileikes were Germans, it was natural that they should gather German workingmen about them. Thirty years ago the indoor men were almost already washes the Hour at New ear's and I buminoids sometimes changes the baby's clothes. He is out. Saw which are presently to be altered dust and bone black are pumped '(Copyright.

1000, bytheErooklyn Daily Eagle.) If, as one physician says, manufactured sugar is a poison, then there is another count against the sugar trust. But another medico says it isn't poison; that it is a useful food, and that the craving of children for it is natural. Ho allows that it is best in its natural lorm of fruit juice, but when you cannot get fruit he would permit the youakers to eat candy. The charge that lies against the sugar makers, in case the first physician is right, 5s that by cheapening merchandise they have it to an inordinate degree. The American has a sweet tooth that is bigger than his wisdom tooth, and when it decays and has in be filled it gives him a good deal trouble.

With sugar at a dollar a pound there would he a general refraining from it. And that is what it used to be. They allege that when the Dutch occupied the ground where most of our sugar is now made it was the custom to hang a large lump of this substance by a string from the ceiling over the middle of the table, and it was thus swung from hand to hand during tea drinking. The custom was to take a nibble, and while the taste of it was in the mouth to swallow the tea. In those times sugar was commonly made in loaves, of cone shape, and was pounded up in sizes to suit.

A person who could afford all the sugar he wanted was looked upon "With respect, as in our days we look upon a man who keeps an automobile, or takes ice. According to one chronicler, whose veracity should not be doubted, because he is dead and de tnortuis nil desperandum there was a colonial dame with whom the father of his country one day took suppeT. 'When she pour el the tea she loaded the General's cup with sugar. After the second spoonful he cried out in protest, but she continued to shovel it in, remarking, with a well bred smile: "Oh, we have plenty, and nothing in this house is too good for General Washington." A vision of the present state of the sugar Industry in these times would have been regarded as freakish and fantastic in a high degree. Our grandfathers in their cocked hats and our grandmothers in their ruffles and furbelows could have had no more njjtionQf what this century had AlistoreTtn that manufacture, than theyould have had of steam engines and electric lighting.

In giving employment to tr.tcny jaws it also supplies work to many hans anQ fatly lines many purses. 'i' where most of the sugar eaten in the United States is made occupy blocks on the East River front of Brooklyn. They tower above the water and the streets like Rhenish castles on their craggy pedestals, and r.t night are more impressive than those ruins, especially when they are running on full time and are lighted from top to bottom, and steam and smoke and sparks are pouring from their pipes and chimneys. Even Brooislynitcs, returning from the opera, have been itnciv: to leave the cabin of the ferryboat and go out on deck to see the spectacle, and people from other villages concede that the show is better than a theater. Big industries all have their romantic and pictorial aspect, which is obvious to everyone, unless he works in them, or passes them daily, and to the Erookiynite the monster refineries are merely obstructions to daylight, the teaming about them is merely a hindrance to trolley traffic, and the smells that leak from them arc trials to the flesh that conduce to a spirit of Christian resignation or an outbreak of nausea u.id wrath, according to the state of one's nose and stomach and sotil.

The largest sugar re LARGEST OF finery in the world is It takes the cone shape because the metal mold narrows to a point at the bottom, in order to drain the mass while it Is drying. Thousands of these molds are filled and stand for ten days In a room where the temperature is 90 degrees, and where the men are attired in trousers and smiles. These mc have to 'chip off the ragged crust that forms at the upper 'or open and broad end of the mold and pour on a syrup that will leave a smoother surface. The loaf, which weighs forty eight pounds, is next dried in a so called stove at a temperature of 130 degrees. Not many of these loaves are sold.

They are mostly sawed up on the premises into disks, sputtering blue light as they divide under the saw teeth, and are then subdivided into cubes or lumps. Lump sugar is also pressed from soft sugar in cube shaped dies, direct, but the sawed pieces are hardest and best. The processes are now over, the barrels and parcels are ready for shipment, and the teams have only to back against the long platform that lines the street front of the buildings to receive their cargo; or, the barrels can be rolled directly down the dock to the waiting ships. In the final packing for grocery orders a number of girls find employment. They attend the machines that automatically pour, weigh and seal small packages of sugar, enabling two girls to do the work recently done by eight, and do it more accurately.

Some of the sugar is put up by thorn in bags and some in paper boxes. These girls have most of a room to themselves, a relatively clean and quiet apartment, with good dressing roo. ns and free from heat. The sugar worker is an occupant of the tenements. Excepting a few mechanics, bosses or superintendents, few, if any, ot the employes occupy houses of their own.

The lowest price for a house large enough for an average family and convenient In location to the refineries is about $20 a month, and unless he can sublet rooms or induce his wife to take boarders this is an. expense that cannot be borne by a man earn ing from 'J to $15 a week. The tenements vary, of course, according to place and size, but an average of them will contain four rooms and will rent for a month. It is rather close squeezing sometimes, for the sugar people are addicted to large families: but on the day when the sons grow up and find work for themselves the father can share the expense of a house with them or tumble them out of the old nest and stretch himself without any danger of smiting his progeny. Near tho refineries the tenements and boarding houses are relics ot a faded gentility deplorable in their decay.

There are mansions dating back to the period of Ionio columns, tall parlor windows and broad front steps, which are now faded, rusty, shabby, and arc peopled by men and women who have come here too recently to know anything of their past grandeurs. Hundreds of these homes that were formerly occupied by thriving merchants and manufacturers or by well paid clerks and other employes of New York houses are now boarding places for mechanics and laborers. They arc oftener commonplace than mean, but they, are rarely kept in repair, and as a majority of them are built of wood their collapse is imminent. 'r With your permis A SAMPLE sion we will make I MM sNpil W'KJ it I fi mm PSrfK hi lit fl fmS Iff REFINERIES. thai of Havemeyer Elder, which occupies BOARDING HOUSE.

a call in one of them. It is a five blocks of water front and several lots of land beside, to say nothing of the associated structures the barrel shops, the stabler, the railroad tracks, floats, piers and sheds and the coff roasting plant; for it need hardly be told to a generati.in eager for information which may damage a trust, that the big sugar company has sone into the coffee trade in order to punish a man who added a sugar branch to his coffee business, and that it is copying his methods by putting up its sugar In paper parcels specially labeled and guaranteed. It is spending money liberally to advertise its coffee, and its coffee department alone is a respectable industry In ecurins a water front for their operations the refiners effect a great economy, for not only do they ship the sugar directly on steamers and freight cars, but the raw materia! is brc to their doors from Pernam buco, Hawaii. Cuba, Egypt and Java and poured into their melting pants after a single hrrdly thirty steps from the wharf wiyrc it is landed; their ccal, too. is delivered at the doors of their boiler rooms on canal boats, and, what is cf no slight consequence, they have plenty of water.

It is not pretty to lock at. is thi.s water. It is salt, it in fouled with no end of city waste, and vulgar little boys bathe in it in summer; but It will put out fires and will cool vacuum pans. For this latter purpose no less than 000,000 gallons a day are required, and they have to be pumped into a room 120 feet above the street. The 142 boilers for the engines are fed with fresh water from the reservoirs, and the water bill, especially In these days of half empty reservoirs, would frighten anyone but a millionaire.

Then there Is an advantage In this water side situation, also, in that the wooden house of two full stories, a basement and an attic that has little low windows, from which you can look only by going on your knees. There ara four rooms in this attic, three better onea on tho second floor, a parlor and mysterious apartments in which the landlady and her three sons bestow themselves on the first floor, and the basement contains a kitchon and dining room. When the house is full the dining room is used for a bedroom and meals are served the kitchon. The hoarders who sit nearest the range are unhappy in summer. The landlady is fat, 50, and it would not be exactly just to call her fair, thought she has a good natured face and is ruddy from her exercise in tho culinary department.

She is a widow and has never known prosperity since her husband died. She cannot afford a servant, but obliges her two younger boys to hel her sweep, make the beds, wait on the table and do the errands. Tho oldest bpy has a place as waiter in a fifteen cent restaurant and is doing well, in the maternal estimation. Her rates are $0 a week for boqfd, but if one had the narrowest bedroom he could probably argue her into the giving of a slight discount. There is an extra chargo for heat in winter, for the house has no furnace, and there aro little sheet iron stoves in the larger rooms.

Sugar men are frequent occupants of the smaller rooms and they have no way to heat them. Commonly they occupy them only when they at'j asleep, and they probably take comfort in the coolness after tho tropic temperature of the refineries. The rooms are bare, except of a few prints and photographs that tho boarders have put on the walls. Tho beds have a certain unholy suggest iveiiess in their appearance. There are curtains of the cheapest cotton lace at the front windows, a faded carpet on the parlor floor, matting in the bedrooms and no gas, the bills for that lumlnant being a trifle too high.

The lamps supplied are of that small, dim sort, that one finds in farm houaos, Thoro is no plumbing in the house except in and back ot the kitchen, hence no running water In any of the rooms. The atmosphere is musty and the walls exhalo that catarrhal odor which Balzac speaks of in "Pere Goriot." The wail paper is of a shiny, obsolete sort, with a dim green pattern on a buff ground, and Time has left his finger marks upon it. Or, maybe they are the marks of the boarders' fingers. Tho place is fairly clean and Continued on Page 17. I alleged to keen alleged to keen above the naticr of cleanliness.

ulatcd material, the filtering process being I natter of cleanliness. material, the filtering process being I mere is little aooui nuuiuiaci ore 01 ny straining through panels of There is little about the manufacture of facilitated by straining through panels of air is cooler, and it a breeze Is blowing it will be felt here more readily than in the built up districts; for sugar making is a warm business, and men will dare pneumonia and several other kinds of death in order to cool off. When the air goes into the rooms they are eater than when they go out Into the air. All the refineries, both those connected with the trust and the independent ones, except the recently constructed works of the Arbuckles, are in the part of Brooklyn that is called the Eastern District, because It is due north of the rest of the town. Foreigners who come here to see the Colorado Canyon and Yellowstone Park seldom visit Williamsburgh, as It is likewise tailed for It was once a municipality of that name but other foreigners, who do not Intend to see the Colorado or the Yellowstone, not merely visit this section, but they bring their pois, pans and mattresses and.

stay. sugar that calls for skilled labor, and the work has been lightened and conditions modified within fifteen or twenty years by improved machinery and by the introduction of ventilators and blowing fans in the hottest 'i he Pole has. thcref.re, arrived in time to benefit by these changes, though ho would have taken the ivo. Ittst the same hud it been twice as hot or hurd. There is also an increasing safety in this industry, inas as the modern buildings a.

fireproof, with brick walls, steel frames and cement Sugar is inflammable stuff, and the ignition of sugar dust by an nc ai flame prorfti so rapid a oosibtMiImi ih tl ir is virtually mi explosion. If it once Rains headway it Is tin almost hopeless task tu slop a lire in a room. The burning ol the Hayemeyer refinery, through Hie supposed all Germans, and the yard men, laborers and teamsters were Irish. The latter gave way before the Swedes, ar.d for a time there were many Danes in the refineries. Where these rj i silent fellows came from, and where they wont, to, nobody appears to know.

They looked like sailors, they did their work, and they disappeared. Twenty years ago there were still many Irish in the refineries and there were not a few associations of refinery men that to have a political purpose. The Sugar House Guards, Tor example, used to parade just before election, and ostensibly shoot at a target in some of the heer parks on the outskirts of Williamsburgh, but they first called on all the candidates who were up for election to state and local ofllcca and asked for money or kegs of beer for prizes, and they usually got something. These target companies would number seventy livp or a hundred, and would parade in blue shirts or jackets, black trousers and white caps. They do not parade any more and the candidate for the Legislature breathes more Germans are a social pecple, and moderately hospitable, considering that they are almost unanimously of the peasant class anil poor.

There Is a wein SUGARMAKERS stube and dis GERMAN IN TASTES. anZ ever a gap in the tenements permits the insertion of one; there arc halls for dances and concerts in which one finds sanded floors and gaudy ami impossible landscapes on the walls; at least half of the signs are in German, and over saloon has from one to a dozen placards in blue and red announcing the annua! festival or ball or picnic or chowder party or excursion or target shoot of the Gottfried Muth Association, or the Friederich Eckstein Association, or tuisc elations named for Joseph Lederer, or Arnold Feder, or Carl Boehnlr.in. or Wilhclm Zuckert. or Emll Fassnacht. or the Swell Guys, or the Hung Chang Coterie, or the Jolly Fellows, or the Kareher Guard.

There are so many of these things that you wonder if the people ever sleep. But into a filter press and they gather the coagulated jute a vul cotton which are removed as fast as 1 hey arc clogged. In this room the average temperature is 8a degrees, and the men wear only trousers and undershirt. Fans coal the air somewhat, in summer. The older way of filtering through bags is also to bo seen here, and the bags mut be partly washed by hand, whereas the cleaning of tho cloth panels, which measure 92 by 40 Inches, and arc used at the rate of 7j a day, is mostly done by machinery.

Economy is used in all these processes, and these panels have the remnant of Btigar soaked out of them before they to the dryer. The floors, too, which become thick and rough with sugar, are scraped, and even the piers, trodden though they are by hundreds of dirty feet, are periodically cloaned of the precious sap, which is refined free of all Impurity. As certain grades of sugar require more heat than others tho strained product of in the ordinary understanding. Each one of these great cylinders, ugaiust which the air is pressing fifteen pounds to the square inch, holds 250 barrels, and the evaporation in vacuum requires a heat of 125 degrees Instead of 212 degrees which would be necessary in the air an Item, when one is burning 600 tons of ccal a day. The length of the boiling determines the whiteness and firmness of the sugar, and In order to see how it is getting on, a proof stick is thrust into the tnasc.

This is a motal rod, suggesting a cheese sampler, which fits so tightly Into its Btcket that tho air does not enter with it, and a notch cut into Its side holds a spoonful of the sugar which is withdrawn with it. The man who studies these samples is, of course, another expert. The centrifugal machines which next receive tho sugar, still wet ar.d heavy, are like boys' tops, of metal, large and hollow. They revolve "00 times a minute and tho sugar, thus driven up their sides, visibly pales while you watch it, for the syrup is "vn," the and ci.r'olessness of a mechanic, a number of years i ago, was the most spectacular exhibition ever on included in venth Wards,.