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Updated: June 7, 2025
Praying to strike Lord Devonport dead was the dockers' way of saying to God that there was something on their minds that simply could not be said. I can imagine that this would interest a God, a prayer like the dockers' prayer, so spent, so desperate, so unreasonable, breaking through to that still, white floor of Heaven!
During the dockers' strike I took up my morning paper and read Ben Tillett's speech, at the meeting the day before, to fifty thousand strikers on Tower Hill. "'I am going to ask you to join me in a prayer, Tillett said. 'Lord Devonport has contributed to the murder, by starvation, of your children, your women, and your men.
I discovered that by making friends with "Micks" and "Dockers" and the like, you find they are no fearful goblins, giants bursting savagely up among the flowers of your life, but people as human as yourself, or rather, much more human, because they live so close to the harbor, close to the deep rough tides of life.
It seems as if, possibly, we might stop criticising people who pray harder than we do, pointing out that wrestling with God is really rather rude as if we might stop and see what it means to God and what it means to us, and what there is that we might do, you and I, oh, Gentle Reader, to make it possible for the dockers on Tower Hill to be more polite, perhaps, more polished, as it were, when they speak to God next time.
It was not the last word of wisdom or reasonableness. But I have not lost all courage for the dockers who made it. They still want something! They still are men! They still stand up when they speak to Heaven! There is some stuff in them yet! They make heaven and earth ring to get a word with God! This all means something to God, probably. Perhaps it might mean something to us.
They sat on the street with their backs to the warehouse wall, eating their dinners out of pails, and from other pails they took long drinks of a curious stuff all white on top. Some of them were always crossing the street and disappearing from my view into a little store directly underneath me. Belle spoke of this store as a "vile saloon" and of these men as "dockers."
I understood these conditions better after I spent a night in a typical one-room home in the dockers' quarters near the Liffey. Widow Hannan was my hostess. The widow is a strong, black-haired young woman who took an active part in the rebellion of 1916, and whose husband was killed fighting under James Connolly. We slept in the first floor front.
It was called "Our Special Sabotage Number," and in it various stokers and dockers, in response to an appeal from Joe, had crudely written their ideas upon just how the engines of a ship or the hoisting winches on a dock could be most effectively put out of order in time of strike. "So that the scabs," wrote one contributor, "can see how they like it." "Why not have blue-penciled some of this?"
He was certainly suspected of endeavoring to cause trouble among the dockers of New York, in the hope of preventing or delaying the shipment of war material to the Allies; but even Bielaski admitted before the Senate Committee that there was no tangible evidence of this.
The very fact that it has such strong allurement for human nature makes harder the struggle for life with those engaged in its pursuit. I gather from facts brought under my personal notice that at the present time there are, proportionately with its numbers, more unemployed in the business of journalism than in any other, not exceeding that of the dockers.
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