For all the comrades who are, or who have ever been, dishwashers.

‘Memoirs of a Dishwasher’ by H.H. Lewis from New Masses. Vol. 4 No. 9. February, 1929.

I had big dreams in the days of my boyhood, my happy, happy school-days. I was going to be great in some unforeseen way or other, great in my individuality, outstanding above the American rabble. I never concerned myself with any sort of means but fixed my gaze upon a wonderfully vague goal; anticipated so intensely that the means were forgotten, joyfully transcended! In those crazy World War days. But I have lost the grip upon my egotistic confidence, the goal has faded, and here I am — washing dishes.

My job is the last resort of bums without the get-up to beg manfully for money or food. I have begged but always for some job like dishwashing. In other words, I am a craven working for my alms — 10 hours per day, for instance. I did that in Phoenix, Arizona. (I paid a labor shark 50 cents for the job! Then a Mexican boy shoved me out by offering to work for 50 cents a day!!) I envy and admire the man who can get out on the stem and mooch in a way that is more like demanding than begging. I have tried that and failed. So there is no irony in my expressing admiration for a good beggar.

Washing dishes, “pearl-diving,” is another job that the A.F. of L. doesn’t care much about unionizing. It is below the “dignity of labor” as perceived by Messrs. Green, Hoover et Al. Dishwashers cleaning the slobbers off of plates used by plasterers and bricklayers, those aristocrats of trade unionism — how damn low are the dishwashers! Big dog eat little dog. Capitalism has eaten us and cast us out. No wonder there is an odium attached to pearl-divers.

I worked for the Rivercrest Country Club, in their clubhouse kitchen, at Fort Worth. Hired to operate a dishwashing machine (more machines, more starving burns, more Reds, that’s the stuff!), I found that my main duty was to gut pullets. Guts! My fist full of them, I would look out over the beautiful grounds where the pot-bellied middle classers were waddling after golf balls. Guts! The lean-bellied fathers of these men chased the bison off these plains, now it is the destiny of bumkind to chase off the middle classers. Verily, verily, I told myself, there is too plain a line between golfers and dishwashers, seeing that I could play golf too, if my pappy was rich. Then the cook would come and urinate into an open drain right there in his kitchen, and go back grumbling about everything.

In Denver I was clean enough to wash dishes, stuff sausage into green peppers, cut ham and even fry eggs in the back of an uppity restaurant, but I was too dirty to go into the dining hall to get pie for my meal. I was bawled out for doing so. I jawed back. So they gave me a doughnut and let me go.

And that’s the way it is. I dove for pearls in the mess hall of the outfit that put through the Moffitt railroad tunnel 45 miles west of Denver. The steward was a college-bred punk of a slavedriver — damn his face — who was puffed up over a little authority. He wore leather leggins and a forest ranger hat. (Forest rangers are a punk lot too; they have been glorified by cheap fiction and the movies). We were situated in a deep canyon. Now it seems that those two ice-capped ridges holding a threat of landslide to blot us all out — it seems that the majesty of the great mountains would have subdued the man’s haughty spirit, making him less overbearing than the boss in some metropolitan sweatshop. But no, his hateful countenance reeked with the consciousness of having someone to boss. Forgetting one afternoon that God made scenery for only the rich to enjoy, I was three minutes late to work. Leather Leggins met me at the door. “You’re fired! Get out of camp!” I should have busted him in the snoot right then and there but I didn’t. He sent his lieutenant to dog my steps while I packed up; he must have feared that I was going to pocket the tunnel and make off with it. It was not payday and I had no money so I had to hoof it toward Denver through the night.

Out where the west begins and the smile lasts a little longer, the hot suds corroded my fins and I cursed just a little stronger. (Tut, tut, poesy!) I was washing tin cups and chipped enamel plates for 75, an extra gang laying new steel on the D. and R. D. down the Colorado River canyon. The cook, an inspired genius in the art of using God’s name in vain, was friendly. Cooks are an irascible breed but this one sublimated his anger into oaths directed at fate. He and his wife, both bleached to a ghostly complexion by the heat, working from 4 A.M. to 10 P.M., drew $90 per month — 45 apiece, I mean. I held down my job till one night, in having to change bunks, I got infected with my favorite aversion, lice, real greybacks about an eighth of an inch long. They get too intimate with a guy. They have such a slimy, oozy way of crawling. So I filled a tub full of water and “boiled up,” killing all the lice and Godknowshowmanyeggs. Then I rode blind baggage to Grand Junction and got pulled by a dick with a flashlight.

One morning I slept too late in a cottonseed pile at Yuma, Arizona. The town clown booted me out and told me of a restaurant where I could probably work for a meal. Man, I was famished for victuals! My navel was sore from rubbing my backbone. I dove an hour in that restaurant for all the brown beans I could stow away. Did I eat those beans? No, no, I just WRAPPED myself around them, like an amoeba, and absorbed them into my soul.

The New Masses was the continuation of Workers Monthly which began publishing in 1924 as a merger of the ‘Liberator’, the Trade Union Educational League magazine ‘Labor Herald’, and Friends of Soviet Russia’s monthly ‘Soviet Russia Pictorial’ as an explicitly Communist Party publication, but drawing in a wide range of contributors and sympathizers. In 1927 Workers Monthly ceased and The New Masses began. A major left cultural magazine of the late 1920s and early 1940s, the early editors of The New Masses included Hugo Gellert, John F. Sloan, Max Eastman, Mike Gold, and Joseph Freeman. Writers included William Carlos Williams, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Day, John Breecher, Langston Hughes, Eugene O’Neill, Rex Stout and Ernest Hemingway. Artists included Hugo Gellert, Stuart Davis, Boardman Robinson, Wanda Gag, William Gropper and Otto Soglow. Over time, the New Masses became narrower politically and the articles more commentary than comment. However, particularly in it first years, New Masses was the epitome of the era’s finest revolutionary cultural and artistic traditions.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/1929/v04n09-feb-1929-New-Masses.pdf