The world was vast.
On an early winter morning, beneath a gray and overcast sky,
another day began at a dock in New York. Dawn had barely broken, yet the place was already packed with noisy crowds.
Red-brick warehouses, black-painted steamships, cranes, trucks, wooden crates and ropes, white smoke drifting through the air—workers moved back and forth through the cluttered dockyard.
A great many people gathered at the dock entrance.
They were all men, dressed in similarly worn dark coats, with equally rough old vests and shirts underneath. They all wore the sort of hat everyone wore in this era.
Their hollow-eyed faces bore the same defeated wrinkles.
They had risen beneath the dim yellow light bulbs of cramped rooms and come here before dawn to wait. Then, when someone from inside the docks walked toward the entrance—
everyone surged forward at once!
Like prisoners yearning for freedom, they crowded against the dock's iron gates. Everyone tried to stand at the front, while those behind desperately stood on tiptoe to show their faces.
The cold wind swept over their uniformly dark clothing, casting a bleak filter over the gray world.
On the ground lay a newspaper whose headline had been trampled into the mud.
'1930, The Great Depression'
Inside the noisy iron gates at the dock entrance,
a man who looked like a foreman approached. Wearing a brown Panama hat, he bellowed roughly, loud enough to suppress the chaotic clamor outside the gate:
"I only need ten men!"
Having said that, he began selecting people from the crowded mass outside by pointing at them.
"One! Two! Three! Four!"
He picked only the tall, sturdy ones with healthy complexions, as though choosing livestock.
Yet those he selected showed not the slightest dissatisfaction. They merely hurried through a side gate, while those