A note on two items of American working life which are, in fact, connected to one another. A little follow-up to my 8/14 posting “The watch and the microscope”, where I wrote:
the watch is … from my grandfather Melchior Arnold Zwicky’s (1879-1965) retirement from the Textile Machine Works in Wyomissing PA
The factory whistle. From the Corning Museum of Glass site, “The Corning Factory Whistle”:
History of the Factory Whistle: Many American factory towns used steam whistles to alert laborers at a time when clocks and watches were rare. For over a hundred years, Corning Glass Works has blown a piercing steam whistle eight times a day, signaling the workers to awaken, to come to work, to start and stop lunchtime, and to return home.
Note that the steam whistles governed the daily lives of laborers. Managers and owners had their own pocket watches. Meanwhile clock towers announcing the time in public places were very common. And in fact on evenings and weekends, for serious occasions like going to church or having your picture taken, many male laborers carried a cheap pocket watch, on a chain, secured in a vest pocket.
What set the laborers apart from employees of higher status was that they were in fact not allowed to carry a watch of any kind in the factory. Life in the factory (unlike life in offices and schools and on the street) was obligatorily clockless, governed instead by the steam whistles. The factory ruled your time.
In the US, a gift of a gold-cased pocket watch is traditionally awarded to an employee upon their retirement.
For laborers, such a watch was a potent symbol of their release from bondage (the bondage of the factory whistle), and a reward for their docile service. You carry that beautiful watch whenever you want, as a free man in Paris TX or IN or wherever.
[Yes, my language here is loaded, as loaded as I can make it, because I truly am a child of the working class; and I am also a radical egalitarian (see my 2/19/25 posting “A coat of arms”); and a union guy; and a maker of good trouble; and a voice shredding the contempt of the privileged for the proles; and a noisy faggot who won’t sit down and be quiet.]
Textile Machine Works was in fact a good place to work, and the company treated its retirees with respect and generosity. So my grandfather saw that retirement pocket watch as, uncomplicatedly, a treasure (while he dealt with some pain his prickly status as no longer fully Swiss and not able to become fully American). But now I will object to the tyranny of the factory whistle, on his behalf, as an abridgment of liberty in the country we shared, whose Declaration of Independence proclaims:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Those are not just words.
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