From the Bottom Up

From the Bottom Up

The Project Gutenberg eBook, From the Bottom Up, by Alexander Irvine
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Title: From the Bottom Up The Life Story of Alexander Irvine
Author: Alexander Irvine

Release Date: February 27, 2006 [eBook #17881]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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+--------------------------------------------------------------+ | Transcriber's Note: | | | | A number of obvious typographical errors have been corrected | | in this text. For a complete list, please see the bottom of | | this document. | | | +--------------------------------------------------------------+

FROM THE BOTTOM UP
The Life Story of Alexander Irvine
Illustrated

[Illustration: Alexander Irvine, 1909. Photograph by Vanderweyde]

New York Doubleday, Page & Company 1910 All Rights Reserved, Including that of Translation into Foreign Languages, Including the Scandinavian Copyright, 1909, 1910 by Doubleday, Page & Company Published, February, 1910

TO
MAUDE HAZEN IRVINE

CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. Boyhood in Ireland 3
II. The Beginning of an Education 24
III. On Board a Man o' War 40
IV. Problems and Places 53
V. The Gordon Relief Expedition 63
VI. Beginnings in the New World 82
VII. Fishing for Men on the Bowery 90
VIII. A Bunk-house and Some Bunk-house Men 105
IX. The Waif's Story 119
X. I Meet Some Outcasts 126
XI. A Church in the Ghetto 144
XII. Working Way Down 156
XIII. Life and Doubt on the Bottoms 166
XIV. My Fight in New Haven 183
XV. A Visit Home 193
XVI. New Haven Again--and a Fight 207
XVII. I Join a Labour Union and Have Something to Do with Strikes 213
XVIII. I Become a Socialist 235
XIX. I Introduce Jack London to Yale 250
XX. My Experiences as a Labourer in the Muscle Market of the South 256
XXI. At the Church of the Ascension 274
XXII. My Socialism, My Religion and My Home 285

ILLUSTRATIONS
Alexander Irvine, 1909 Frontispiece
FACING PAGE Mr. Irvine's Birthplace 4
Where Irvine Spent His Boyhood 8
Alexander Irvine as a Marine 38
Officers of H.M.S. "Alexandra" Ashore at Cattaro 50
A Page from Mr. Irvine's Diary 54
Dowling, Tinker and Colporter 110
Alexander Irvine. From a sketch by Juliet Thompson 146
State Convention of the Socialist Party of Connecticut 238
The Lunch Hour in an Interborough Shop 248
Alexander Irvine and Jack London 252
In Muckers' Camp in Alabama 258
Irvine and Three Other Muckers as They Left Greenwich Street for the South 258
Irvine, Punching Logs in the Gulf of Mexico, 1907 270
The Church of the Ascension 276
"Happy Hollow," Mr. Irvine's Present Home Near Peekskill, New York 294
Happy Hollow in the Winter, Looking from the House 298

FROM THE BOTTOM UP
CHAPTER I
BOYHOOD IN IRELAND
The world in which I first found myself was a world of hungry people.
My earliest sufferings were the sufferings of hunger--physical hunger. It was not an unusual sight to see the children of our neighbourhood scratching the offal in the dunghills and the gutterways for scraps of meat, vegetables, and refuse. Many times I have done it myself.
My father was a shoemaker; but something had gone wrong with the making of shoes. Improvements in machinery are pushed out into the commercial world, and explanations follow. A new shoemaker had arrived--a machine--and my father had to content himself with the mending of the work that the machine produced. It took him about ten years to find out what had happened to him.
There were twelve children in our family, five of whom died in childhood. Those of us who were left were sent out to work as soon as we were able. I began at the age of nine. My first work was peddling newspapers. I remember my first night in the streets. Food was scarce in the home, and I begged to be allowed to do what other boys were doing. But I was not quite so well prepared. I began in the winter. I was shoeless, hatless, and in rags. My contribution to the family treasury amounted to about fifty cents a week; but it looked very large to me then. It was my first earning.
Our home was a two-room cottage. Over one room was a little loft, my bedroom for fourteen years. The cottage floor was hard, dried mud. There was a wide, open fireplace. Several holes made in the wall by displacing of bricks here and there contained my father's old pipes. A few ornaments, yellow with the smoke of years, adorned the mantelpiece. At the front window sat my father, and around him his shoemaking tools. Beside the window hung a large cage, made by his own hands, and in which singing thrushes had succeeded one another