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The Iron Puddler: My Life in the Rolling Mills and What Came of It

by James J. Davis · English · Gutenberg #1297 · 292,117 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Iron Puddler: My Life in the Rolling Mills and What Came of It

Author: James J. Davis


        
Release date: May 1, 1998 [eBook #1297]
                Most recently updated: October 29, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE IRON PUDDLER: MY LIFE IN THE ROLLING MILLS AND WHAT CAME OF IT ***

THE IRON PUDDLER

MY LIFE IN THE ROLLING MILLS AND WHAT CAME OF IT

By James J. Davis




Introduction by Joseph G. Cannon

The man whose life story is here presented between book covers is at the
time of writing only forty-eight years old. When I met him many years
ago he was a young man full of enthusiasm. I remember saying to him
then, “With your enthusiasm and the sparkle which you have in your eyes
I am sure you will make good.”

Why should so young a man, one so recently elevated to official
prominence, write his memoirs? That question will occur to those who
do not know Jim Davis. His elevation to a Cabinet post marks not the
beginning of his career, but rather is the curtain-rise on the second
act of one of those dramatic lives with which America has so often
astounded the world. Bruised and bleeding in a southern, peon camp,
where he and other hungry men had been trapped by a brutal slave driver,
he drank the bitter cup of unrequited toil. And from this utter depth,
in less than thirty years, he rose to the office of secretary of labor.
There is drama enough for one life if his career should end to-day.
And while this man fought his way upward, he carried others with him,
founding by his efforts and their cooperation, the great school called
Mooseheart. More than a thousand students of both sexes, ranging from
one to eighteen years, are there receiving their preparation for life.
The system of education observed there is probably the best ever devised
to meet the needs of all humanity.

The brain of James J. Davis fathered this educational system. It is his
contribution to the world, and the world has accepted it. The good it
promised is already being realized, its fruits are being gathered. Its
blessings are falling on a thousand young Americans, and its influence
like a widening ripple is extending farther every day. It promises to
reach and benefit every child in America. And to hasten the growth of
this new education, James J. Davis has here written the complete story.
I have known Mr. Davis many years and am one of the thousands who
believe in him and have helped further his work.

The author of this autobiography is indeed a remarkable man. He is
sometimes called the Napoleon of Fraternity. Love of his fellows is his
ruling passion. He can call more than ten thousand men by their first
names. His father taught him this motto: “No man is greater than his
friends. All the good that comes into your life will come from your
friends. If you lose your friends your enemies will destroy you.” Davis
has stood by his friends. As a labor leader and a fraternal organizer,
he has proved his ability. Thousands think he is unequaled as an orator,
thinker and entertainer. His zeal is all for humanity and he knows man's
needs. He has dedicated his life to the cause of better education for
the workers of this land. His cause deserves a hearing.

J G Cannon WASHINGTON, D. C., JUNE, 1922.



PREFACE

“Where were you previous to the eighth and immediately subsequent
thereto?” asked the city attorney.

The prisoner looked sheepish and made no answer. A box car had been
robbed on the eighth and this man had been arrested in the freight
yards. He claimed to be a steel worker and had shown the judge his
calloused hands. He had answered several questions about his trade,
his age and where he was when the policeman arrested him. But when they
asked him what he had been doing previous to and immediately subsequent
thereto, he hung his head as if at a loss for an alibi.

I was city clerk at the time and had been a steel worker. I knew why the
man refused to answer. He didn't understand the phraseology.

“Where were you previous to the eighth and immediately subsequent
thereto?” the attorney asked him for the third time.

All the prisoner could do was look guilty and say nothing.

“Answer the question,” ordered the judge, “or I'll send you up for
vagrancy.”

Still the man kept silent. Then I spoke up:

“John, tell the court where you were before you came here and also where
you have been since you arrived in the city.”

“I was in Pittsburgh,” he said, and he proceeded to tell the whole story
of his life. He was still talking when they chased him out of court and
took up the next case. He was a free man, and yet he had come within an
inch of going to jail. All because he didn't know what “previous to the
eighth and immediately subsequent thereto” meant.

The man was an expert puddler. A puddler makes iron bars. They were
going to put him behind his own bars because he couldn't understand
the legal jargon. Thanks to the great educational system of America the
working man has improved his mental muscle as well as his physical.

This taught me a lesson. Jargon can put the worker in jail. Big words
and improper phraseology are prison bars that sometimes separate the
worker from the professional people. “Stone walls do not a prison make,”
 because the human mind can get beyond them. But thick-shelled words do
make a prison. They are something that the human mind can not penetrate.
A man whose skill is in his hands can puddle a two hundred-pound ball of
iron. A man whose skill is on his tongue can juggle four-syllable words.
But that iron puddler could not savvy four-syllable words any more than
the word juggler could puddle a heat of iron. The brain worker who talks
to the hand worker in a special jargon the latter can not understand has
built an iron wall between the worker's mind and his mind. To tear down
that wall and make America one nation with one language is one of the
tasks of the new education.

If big words cause misunderstandings, why not let them go? When the
stork in the fable invited the fox to supper he served the bean soup in
a long-necked vase. The stork had a beak that reached down the neck of
the vase and drank the soup with ease. The fox had a short muzzle and
couldn't get it. The trick made him mad and he bit the stork's head off.
Why should the brain worker invite the manual worker to a confab and
then serve the feast in such long-necked language that the laborer can't
get it? “Let's spill the beans,” the agitator tells him, “then we'll all
get some of the gravy.”

This long-necked jargon must go. It is not the people's dish. With foggy
phrases that no one really understands they are trying to incite the
hand worker to bite off the head of the brain worker. When employer and
employee sit together at the council table, let the facts be served in
such simple words that we can all get our teeth into them.

When I became secretary of labor I said that the employer and employee
had a duty to perform one to the other, and both to the public.

Capital does not always mean employer. When I was a boy in Sharon,
Pennsylvania, I looked in a pool in the brook and discovered a lot of
fish. I broke some branches off a tree, and with this I brushed the fish
out of the pool. I sold them to a teamster for ten cents. With this I
bought shoe blacking and a shoe brush and spent my Saturdays blacking
boots for travelers at the depot and the hotel. I had established a
boot-blacking business which I pushed in my spare time for several
years. My brush and blacking represented my capital. The shining of the
travelers' shoes was labor. I was a capitalist but not an employer; I
was a laborer but not an employee.

“Labor is prior to and independent of capital,” said Lincoln. This is
true. I labored to break the branches from the tree before I had any
capital. They brought me fish, which were capital because I traded them
for shoe blacking with which I earned enough money to buy ten times more
fish than I had caught.

So labor is prior to capital--when you use the words in their right
meaning. But call the employee “labor” and the employer “capital,”
 and you make old Honest Abe say that the employee is prior to and
independent of the employer, or that the wage earner is independent of
the wage payer or, in still shorter words, the man is on the job before
the job is created. Which is nonsense.

Capital does not always mean employer. A Liberty Bond is capital but it
is not an employer; the Government is an employer but it is not capital,
and when any one is arguing a case for an employee against his
employer let him use the proper terms. The misuse of words can cause a
miscarriage of justice as the misuse of railway signals can send a train
into the ditch.

All my life I have been changing big words into little words so that the
employee can know what the employer is saying to him. The working man
handles things. The professional man plies words. I learned things
first and words afterward. Things can enrich a nation, and words can
impoverish it. The words of theorists have cost this nation billions
which must be paid for in things.

When I was planning a great school for the education of orphans, some of
my associates said: “Let us teach them to be pedagogues.” I said:
“No, let us teach them the trades. A boy with a trade can do things. A
theorist can say things. Things done with the hands are wealth, things
said with the mouth are words. When the housing shortage is over and we
find the nation suffering from a shortage of words, we will close the
classes in carpentry and open a class in oratory.”

This, then is the introduction to my views and to my policies. They
are now to have a fair trial, like that other iron worker in the Elwood
police court. I know what the word “previous” means. I can give an
account of myself. So, in the following pages I will tell “where I was
before I came here.”

If my style seems rather flippant, it is because I have been trained
as an extemporaneous speaker and not as a writer. For fifteen years I
traveled over the country lecturing on the Mooseheart School. My task
was to interest men in the abstract problems of child education. A
speaker must entertain his hearers to the end or lose their attention.
And so I taxed my wit to make this subject simple and easy to listen to.
At last I evolved a style of address that brought my points home to the
men I was addressing.

After all these years I can not change my style. I talk more easily than
I write; therefore, in composing this book I have imagined myself facing
an audience, and I have told my story. I do not mention the names of the
loyal men who helped work out the plans of Mooseheart and gave the money
that established it, for their number is so great that their names alone
would fill three volumes as large as this.

J.J.D.


CONTENTS

     CHAPTER

         I  THE HOME-MADE SUIT OF CLOTHES

        II  A TRAIT OF THE WELSH PEOPLE

       III  NO GIFT FROM THE FAIRIES

        IV  SHE SINGS TO HER NEST

         V  THE LOST FEATHER BED

        VI  HUNTING FOR LOST CHILDREN

       VII  HARD SLEDDING IN AMERICA

      VIII  MY FIRST REGULAR JOB

        IX  THE SCATTERED FAMILY

         X  MELODRAMA BECOMES COMEDY

        XI  KEEPING OPEN HOUSE

       XII  MY HAND TOUCHES IRON

      XIII  SCENE IN A ROLLING MILL

       XIV  BOILING DOWN THE PIGS

        XV  THE IRON BISCUITS

       XVI  WRESTING A PRIZE FROM NATURE'S HAND

      XVII  MAN IS IRON TOO

     XVIII  ON BEING A GOOD GUESSER

       XIX  I START ON MY TRAVELS

        XX  THE RED FLAG AND THE WATERMELONS

       XXI  ENVY IS THE SULPHUR IN HUMAN PIG-IRON

      XXII  LOADED DOWN WITH LITERATURE

     XXIII  THE PUDDLER HAS A VISION

      XXIV  JOE THE POOR BRAKEMAN

       XXV  A DROP IN THE BUCKET OF BLOOD

      XXVI  A GRUB REFORMER PUTS US OUT OF GRUB

     XXVII  THE PIE EATER'S PARADISE

     XXVIII CAUGHT IN A SOUTHERN PEONAGE CAMP

      XXIX  A SICK, EMACIATED SOCIAL SYSTEM

       XXX  BREAKING INTO THE TIN INDUSTRY

      XXXI  UNACCUSTOMED AS I AM TO PUBLIC SPEAKING

     XXXII  LOGIC WINS IN THE STRETCH

     XXXIII I MEET THE INDUSTRIAL CAPTAINS

     XXXIV  SHIRTS FOR TIN ROLLERS

      XXXV  AN UPLIFTER RULED BY ENVY

     XXXVI  GROWLING FOR THE BOSSES BLOOD

     XXXVII FREE AND UNLIMITED COINAGE

     XXXVIII THE EDITOR GETS MY GOAT

     XXXIX  PUTTING JAZZ INTO THE CAMPAIGN

        XL  FATHER TOOK ME SERIOUSLY

       XLI  A PAVING CONTRACTOR PUTS ME ON THE PAVING

      XLII  THE EVERLASTING MORALIZER

     XLIII  FROM TIN WORKER TO SMALL CAPITALIST

      XLIV  A CHANCE TO REALIZE A DREAM

       XLV  THE DREAM COMES TRUE

      XLVI  THE MOOSEHEART IDEA

     XLVII  LIFE'S PROBLEMS

     XLVIII BUILDING A BETTER WORLD BY EDUCATION

      XLIX  CONCLUSION



THE IRON PUDDLER



CHAPTER I. THE HOME-MADE SUIT OF CLOTHES


A fight in the first chapter made a book interesting to me when I was a
boy. I said to myself, “The man who writes several chapters before the
fighting begins is like the man who sells peanuts in which a lot of the
shells haven't any goodies.” I made up my mind then that if I ever wrote
a book I would have a fight in the first chapter.

So I will tell right here how I whipped the town bully in Sharon,
Pennsylvania. I'll call him Babe Durgon. I've forgotten his real name,
and it might be better not to mention it anyhow. For though I whipped
him thirty years ago, he might come back now in a return match and
reverse the verdict, so that my first chapter would serve better as my
last one. Babe was older than I, and had pestered me from the time I was
ten. Now I was eighteen and a man. I was a master puddler in the mill
and a musician in the town band (I always went with men older than
myself). Two stove molders from a neighboring factory were visiting me
that day, and, as it was dry and hot, I offered to treat them to a cool
drink. There were no soda fountains in those days and the only place to
take a friend was to the tavern. We went in and my companions ordered
beer. Babe, the bully, was standing by the bar. He had just come of age,
and wanted to bulldoze me with that fact.

“Don't serve Jimmy Davis a beer,” Babe commanded. “He's a minor. He
can't buy beer.”

“I didn't want a beer,” I said. “I was going to order a soft drink.”

“Yes, you was. Like hell you was,” Babe taunted. “You came in here to
get a beer like them fellers. You think you're a man, but I know you
ain't. And I'm here to see that nobody sells liquor to a child.”

I was humiliated. The bully knew that I wanted to be a man, and his shot
stung me. My friends looked at me as if to ask: “Are you going to take
that?” And so the fight was arranged, although I had no skill at boxing,
and was too short-legged, like most Welshmen, for a fast foot race. Babe
had me up against a real problem.

“Come on over the line,” he said.

Sharon was near the Ohio border and it was customary to go across the
state line to fight, so that on returning the local peace officers would
have no jurisdiction. We started for the battle ground. Babe had never
been whipped; he always chose younger opponents. He was a good gouger,
and had marked up most of the boys on the “flats” as we called the
lowlands where the poorer working people lived. A gouger is one who
stabs with his thumb. When he gets his sharp thumb-nail into the
victim's eye, the fight is over. Biting and kicking were his second
lines of attack.

As we walked along I was depressed by the thought that I was badly
outclassed. There was only one thing in my favor. I hated Babe Durgon
with a bitter loathing that I had been suppressing for years. It all
went back to the summer of 1884 when I was eleven years old. Times were
hard, and the mill was “down.” Father had gone to Pittsburgh to look
for work. I was scouring the town of Sharon to pick up any odd job that
would earn me a nickel. There were no telephones and I used to carry
notes between sweethearts, pass show bills for the “opry,” and ring a
hand-bell for auctions. An organized charity had opened headquarters on
Main Street to collect clothing and money for the destitute families of
the workers. I went up there to see if they needed an errand boy. A
Miss Foraker--now Mrs. F. H. Buhl--was in charge. She was a sweet and
gracious young woman and she explained that they had no pay-roll.

“Everybody works for nothing here,” she said. “I get no pay, and the
landlord gives us the use of the rooms free. This is a public charity
and everybody contributes his services free.”

I saw a blue serge boy's suit among the piles of garments. It was about
my size and had seen little wear. I thought it was the prettiest suit I
had ever seen. I asked Miss Foraker how much money it would take to buy
the suit. She said nothing was for sale. She wrapped up the suit and
placed the package in my arms, saying, “That's for you, Jimmy.”

I raced home and climbed into the attic of our little
four-dollar-a-month cottage, and in the stifling heat under the low roof
I changed my clothes. Then I proudly climbed down to show my blue
suit to my mother. “Where did you get those clothes, James?” she asked
gravely.

I told her about Miss Foraker.

“Did you work for them?”

“No; everything is free,” I said.

Mother told me to take the suit off. I went to the attic, blinking a
tear out of my eyes, and changed into my old rags again. Then mother
took the blue suit, wrapped it up carefully and putting it in my hands
told me to take it back to Miss Foraker.

“You don't understand, James,” she said. “But these clothes are not for
people like us. These are to be given to the poor.”

I have often smiled as I looked back on it. I'll bet there wasn't a dime
in the house. The patches on my best pants were three deep and if laid
side by side would have covered more territory than the new blue suit.
To take those clothes back was the bitterest sacrifice my heart has ever
known.

A few days later there was a fire sale by one of the merchants, and
I got the job of ringing the auction bell. Late in the afternoon the
auctioneer held up a brown overcoat. “Here is a fine piece of goods,
only slightly damaged,” he said. He showed the back of the coat where a
hole was burned in it. “How much am I offered?”

I knew that I would get fifty cents for my day's work, so I bid ten
cents--all that I could spare.

“Sold,” said the auctioneer, “for ten cents to the kid who rang the bell
all day.”

I took the garment home and told my mother how I had bought it for cash
in open competition with all the world. My mother and my aunt set to
work with shears and needles and built me a suit of clothes out of the
brown overcoat. It took a lot of ingenuity to make the pieces come out
right. The trousers were neither long nor short. They dwindled down and
stopped at my calves, half-way above my ankles. What I hated most was
that the seams were not in the right places. It was a patchwork, and
there were seams down the front of the legs where the crease ought to
be. I didn't want to wear the suit, but mother said it looked fine on
me, and if she said so I knew it must be true. I wore it all fall and
half the winter.

The first time I went to Sunday-school, I met Babe Durgon. He set up the
cry:


         “Little boy, little boy,
     Does your mother know you're out;

     With your breeches put on backward,
       And the seams all inside out!”


This was the first time that my spirit had been hurt. His words were
a torment that left a scar upon my very soul. Even to this day when
I awake from some bad dream, it is a dream that I am wearing crazy
breeches and all the world is jeering at me. It has made me tender
toward poor children who have to wear hand-me-downs.

To-day psychologists talk much of the “inferiority complex” which spurs
a man forward to outdo himself. But Babe Durgon and I didn't go into
these matters as we trudged along through the dark on our way to do
battle “over the line.” At the foot of the hill, Babe exclaimed:

“What's the use of going any farther? Let's fight here.” It was in front
of a new building--a church-school half completed. We took off our coats
and made belts of our suspenders. Then we squared off and the fight
began. Babe rushed me like a wild boar and tried to thrust his deadly
thumb into my eye. I threw up my head and his thumb gashed my lips and
went into my mouth. The impact almost knocked me over, but my teeth
had closed on his thumb and when he jerked back he put me on my balance
again. I clouted him on the jaw and knocked him down. He landed in the
lime box. The school had not yet been plastered, and the quicklime was
in an open pit. I started in after the bully, but stopped to save my
pants from the lime. There was a hose near by, and I turned the water on
Babe in the lime bath. The lime completely covered him. He was whipped
and in fear of his life. Choking and weeping he hollered, “Nuff.” We got
him out, too weak to stand, and gently leaned him up in a corner of the
school building. There we left the crushed bully and returned to town.
But before I went I gave him this parting shot:

“Do you know why I licked you, Babe? It wasn't what you said in the
tavern that made me mad. I didn't want a glass of beer, and you were
right in saying I was a minor. Where you made your mistake was when you
made fun of my breeches, seven years ago. And do you remember that blue
suit you had on at the time? I know where you got that blue suit of
clothes, and I know who had it before you got it. If you still think
that a bully in charity clothes can make fun of a boy in clothes that he
earned with his own labor, just say so, and I'll give you another clout
that will finish you.”

All bullies, whether nations, parties or individuals, get licked in
the same way. They outrage some one's self-respect, and then the old
primordial cyclone hits them.



CHAPTER II. A TRAIT OF THE WELSH PEOPLE


My family is Welsh, and I was born in Tredegar, Wales. David and Davies
are favorite names among the Welsh, probably because David whipped
Goliath, and mothers named their babies after the champion. The Welsh
are a small nation that has always had to fight against a big nation.
The idea that David stopped Goliath seemed to reflect their own national
glory. The ancient invasions that poured across Britain were stopped in
Wales, and they never could push the Welshmen into the sea.

The Welsh pride themselves on hanging on. They are a nation that has
never been whipped. Every people has its characteristics. “You can't
beat the Irish” is one slogan, “You can't kill a Swede” is another, and
“You can't crowd out a Welshman” is a motto among the mill people.

I didn't want to leave Wales when my parents were emigrating. Though I
was not quite eight years old I decided I would let them go without me.
The last act of my mother was to reach under the bed, take hold of my
heels and drag me out of the house feet first. I tried to hang on to the
cracks in the floor, and tore off a few splinters to remember the old
homestead by. I never was quite satisfied with that leave-taking, and
nearly forty years later when I had car fare, I went back to that town.
I never like to go out of a place feet first, and I cleared my record
this time by walking out of my native village, head up and of my own
free will.

On that trip I paid a visit to the home of Lloyd George in Cricuth.
Joseph Davies, one of the war secretaries to the prime minister, invited
me to dinner and we talked of the American form of government. (Note the
spelling of Davies. It is the Welsh spelling. When my father signed his
American naturalization papers he made his mark, for he could not read
nor write. The official wrote in his name, spelling it Davis and so
it has remained.) “You have this advantage,” said Mr. Davies. “Your
president is secure in office for four years and can put his policies
through. Our prime minister has no fixed term and may have to step out
at any minute.”

“Yes,” I replied jokingly, “but your prime minister this time is a
Welshman.”

Since then four years have passed and our president is out. But Lloyd
George is still there (1922). And he'll still be there, for all I know,
until he is carried out feet first. The instinct of a Welshman is to
hang on.

These things teach us that racial characteristics do not change. In
letting immigrants into this country we must remember this. Races that
have good traits built up good countries there abroad and they will in
the same way build up the country here. Tribes that have swinish traits
were destroyers there and will be destroyers here. This has been common
knowledge so long that it has become a proverb: “You can't make a silk
purse out of a sow's ear.”

Proverbs are the condensed wisdom of the ages. Life has taught me
that the wisdom of the ages is the truth. The Proverbs and the Ten
Commandments answer all our problems. My mother taught them to me when
I was a child in Wales. I have gone out and tasted life, and found her
words true. Starting at forge and furnace in the roaring mills, facing
facts instead of books, I have been schooled in life's hard lessons.
And the end of it all is the same as the beginning: the Proverbs,--the
Commandments,--and the Golden Rule.



CHAPTER III. NO GIFT FROM THE FAIRIES


From my father I learned many things. He taught me to be skilful and
proud of it. He taught me to expect no gift from life, but that what
I got I must win with my hands. He taught me that good men would bring
forth good fruits. This was all the education he could give me, and it
was enough.

My father was an iron worker, and his father before him. My people had
been workers in metal from the time when the age of farming in Wales
gave way to the birth of modern industries. They were proud of their
skill, and the secrets of the trade were passed from father to son as
a legacy of great value, and were never told to persons outside the
family. Such skill meant good wages when there was work. But there was
not work all the time. Had there been jobs enough for all we would have
taught our trade to all. But in self-protection we thought of our own
mouths first. All down the generations my family has been face to face
with the problem of bread.

My Grandfather Davies, held a skilled job at the blast furnace where
iron was made for the rolling mill in which my father was a puddler.
Grandfather Davies had been to Russia and had helped the Russians build
blast furnaces, in the days when they believed that work would make them
wealthy. Had they stuck to that truth they would not be a ruined people
to-day. Grandfather also went to America, where his skill helped build
the first blast furnace in Maryland. The furnace fires have not ceased
burning here, and Russia is crying for our steel to patch her broken
railways. Her own hills are full of iron and her hands are as strong as
ours. Let them expect no gift from life.

Grandfather told my father that America offered a rich future for him
and his boys. “The metal is there,” he said, “as it is in Russia. Russia
may never develop, but America will. A nation's future lies not in its
resources. The American mind is right. Go to America.”

And because my father believed that a good people will bring forth good
fruit, he left his ancient home in Wales and crossed the sea to cast his
lot among strangers.

I started to school in Wales when I was four years old. By the time I
was six I thought I knew more than my teachers. This shows about how
bright I was. The teachers had forbidden me to throw paper wads,
or spitballs. I thought I could go through the motion of throwing a
spitball without letting it go. But it slipped and I threw the wad right
in the teacher's eye. I told him it was an accident, that I had merely
tried to play smart and had overreached myself.

“Being smart is a worse fault,” he said, “than throwing spitballs.
I forgive you for throwing the spitball, but I shall whip the smart
Aleckness out of you.”

He gave me a good strapping, and I went home in rebellion. I told my
father. I wanted him to whip the teacher. Father said:

“I know the teacher is a good man. I have known him for years, and he is
honest, he is just, he is kind. If he whipped you, you deserved it. You
can not see it that way, so I am going to whip you myself.”

He gave me a good licking, and, strange to say, it convinced me that he
and the teacher were right. They say that the “hand educates the mind,”
 and I can here testify that father's hand set my mental processes
straight. From that day I never have been lawless in school or out. The
shame of my father's disapproval jolted me so that I decided ever after
to try to merit his approval.

To-day there is a theory that the child ought never to be restrained.
Solomon said: “Spare the rod and spoil the child.” We have no corporal
punishment at Mooseheart, but we have discipline. A child must be
restrained. Whenever a crop of unrestrained youngsters takes the reins I
fear they will make this country one of their much talked of Utopias. It
was an unrestricted bunch that made a “Utopia” out of Russia.

Anyhow, my father lived his life according to his simple rules. He is
living to-day, a happy man in the cozy home he won, by his own work. The
things he taught me I have seen tested in his long life, proved true.
He never expected any gift from life. I thought once to surprise him. I
wanted to buy a fine house and give it to him. He wouldn't have it. He
stayed in his own little cottage. It was not in his theory of life that
a house should come to him as a gift. It was a sound theory, and like a
true Welshman, he hangs on to it to the end. He is a good man, and the
fruits that his life of labor has brought forth are good fruits.



CHAPTER IV. SHE SINGS TO HER NEST


From my mother I learned to sing. She was always working and always
singing. There were six children in the house, and she knitted and sewed
and baked and brewed for us all. I used to toddle along at her side when
she carried each day the home-made bread and the bottle of small beer
for father's dinner at the mill. I worshiped my mother, and wanted to be
like her. And that's why I went in for singing. I have sung more songs
in my life than did Caruso. But my voice isn't quite up to his! So my
singing has brought me no returns other than great chunks of personal
satisfaction. The satisfaction was not shared by my hearers, and so I
have quit. But my heart still sings, and always will. And this I owe to
my mother.

I can see her yet in our tiny Welsh cottage, her foot on a wooden cradle
rocking a baby, my baby brother, her hands busy with her knitting, her
voice lifted in jubilant song for hours at a time. And all her songs
were songs of praise.

She thanked God for life and for strong hands to labor for her little
ones. In those days furniture was rare, and few were the pieces in a
worker's home. It took a dozen years for her to acquire two feather
beds. And when at last we owned two bedsteads, we rated ourselves pretty
rich. We boys slept five in a bed. Why were bedsteads in those days
harder to get than automobiles are to-day? Because the wooden age still
lingered, the age of hand work. And it took so long to make a bed by
hand that people came into the world faster than beds. But within my
lifetime the iron mills have made possible the dollar bedstead. The
working man can fill his house with beds bought with the wage he earns
in half a week. This, I suppose, is one of the “curses of capitalism.”

I have heard how “the rights of small peoples” have been destroyed by
capitalism; and if the right to sleep five in a bed was prized by the
little folks, this privilege has certainly been taken away from them.
At the Mooseheart School we are pinched for sleeping room for our
fast-growing attendance. I suggested that, for the time being, we might
double deck the beds like the berths in a sleeping car. “No,” cried the
superintendent. “Not in this age do we permit the crowding of children
in their sleeping quarters.” So this is the slavery that capitalism has
driven us to; we are forced to give our children more comforts than we
had ourselves. When I was sleeping five in a bed with my brothers, there
was one long bolster for five hot little faces. The bolster got feverish
and a boy sang out: “Raise up.” We lifted our tired heads. “Turn over.”
 Two boys turned the bolster. “Lie down.” And we put our faces on the
cool side and went to sleep.

Those were not hardships, and life was sweet, and we awoke from our
crowded bed, like birds in a nest awakened by their mother's morning
song. For, as I have said, my mother was always singing. Her voice was
our consolation and delight.

One of the most charming recollections of my boyhood is that of my
mother standing at our gate with a lamp in her hands, sending one boy
out in the early morning darkness, to his work, and at the same time
welcoming another boy home. My brother was on the day shift and I on the
night, which meant that he left home as I was leaving the mills, about
half past two in the morning. On dark nights--and they were all dark at
that hour--my mother, thinking my little brother afraid, would go with
him to the gate and, holding an old-fashioned lamp high in her hands,
would sing some Welsh song while he trudged out toward the mills and
until he got within the radius of the glare from the stacks as they.
belched forth the furnace flames. And as he passed from the light of the
old oil burner into the greater light from the mills, I walked wearily
out from that reflection and was guided home by my mother's lamp and
song on her lips.

Happy is the race that sings, and the Welsh are singers. After the
tiring labor in the mills we still had joy that found its voice in song.
When I was six years old I joined a singing society. The whole land of
Wales echoes with the folk songs of a people who sing because they must.

The memory of my mother singing, has made my whole life sweet. When blue
days came for me, and hardship almost forced me to despair, I turned my
thoughts to her, singing as she rocked a cradle, and from her spirit
my own heart took hope again. I think the reason I have never cared for
drink is this: the ease from mental pain that other men have sought in
alcohol, I always found in song.



CHAPTER V. THE LOST FEATHER BED


I didn't care very much for day school. The whipping that I got there
rather dulled the flavor of it for me. But I was a prize pupil at
Sunday-school. Father had gone to America and had saved enough money to
send for the family. I asked my mother if there were Sunday-schools in
America, but she did not know. In those days we knew little about lands
that lay so far away.

My boy chums told me we were going to Pennsylvania to fight Indians.
This cheered me up. Fighting Indians would be as much fun as going to
Sunday-school. A trip to America for such a purpose was a sensible move.
But when mother exploded the Indian theory and said we were going to
work in a rolling mill, I decided that it was a foolish venture.

This shows how much my judgment was worth. I thought it foolish to go to
America merely to better our condition. But I thought it a wise move
to go there and kill Indians to better the living conditions of the
Americans. I know grown men to-day with the same kind of judgment. They
are unwilling to do the simple things that will save their own scalps;
but they are glad to go fight imaginary Indians who they believe are
scalping the human race. “Capitalism” is one of these imaginary Indians.
And Lenin and Trotsky are the boy Indian-fighters of the world. These
poor children are willing to go to any country to help kill the Indian
of capitalism. Meanwhile their own people are the poorest in the world,
but they do nothing to better their condition. Such men have minds that
never grew up.

When our household was dissolving and we were packing our baggage for
America, I tried to break up the plan by hiding under the bed. Mother
took the feather ticks off the two bedsteads and bundled them up to take
to America. Then she reached under the bedstead and pulled me out by the
heels. She sold the bedsteads to a neighbor. And so our household ended
in Wales and we were on our way to establish a new one in a far country.

As I said before, the feather beds were mother's measure of wealth.
Before she was married she had begun saving for her first feather bed.
It had taken a long time to acquire these two tickfuls of downy goose
feathers. The bed is the foundation of the household. It is there that
the babies are born. There sleep restores the weary toiler that he may
rise and toil anew. And there at last when work is done, the old folks
fall into a sleep that never ends.

We traveled steerage to Castle Garden. Having passed the immigrant
tests, we found ourselves set out on the dock, free to go where we
pleased. But our baggage had disappeared. Some one had made off with our
precious feather beds!

This was the first real tragedy of my mother's life. All the joy
of setting foot in the new land was turned to dismay. The stored-up
pleasure with which she awaited the greeting of her husband was dashed
in a moment, like sweet water flung upon the ground. When I saw the
anguish in my mother's face, I was sobered to life's responsibilities.
The song had died out of her heart, and I must make it sing again. While
she was crying in distraction, I wrapped my own tearful face in her
skirts and prayed to God that I might grow up in a day--that He would
make my arms strong so I could go to work at once earning money to
replace the lost feather beds. I was then not quite eight years old. It
was early in April, 1881. Before the month was out I had found a job
in the new country and was earning money. I gave all my earnings to my
mother. I have been earning money ever since. As long as I lived at home
I turned over all my wages to my mother. When I went away I sent her
weekly a percentage of my earnings. This I have ever continued to do.

My love for my mother and her grief at the loss of the feather beds
turned a careless boy into a serious money-maker. This led to the study
of economics and finance. A man's destiny is often made by trifles light
as feathers.



CHAPTER VI. HUNTING FOR LOST CHILDREN


The loss of our baggage was only the beginning of our troubles in New
York. With the feather ticks went also the money mother had got from
selling the bedsteads and other furniture. She had nothing with which
to buy food and while we were walking the streets we smelt the delicious
odor of food from the restaurants and became whining and petulant. This
was the first time mother had ever heard her children crying for bread
when she had none to give them. The experience was trying, but her stout
heart faced it calmly. In the Old World, her folks and father's folks
had been rated as prosperous people. They always had good food in the
larder and meat on Sunday, which was more than many had. They were the
owners of feather beds, while many never slept on anything but straw.
True they could not raise the passage money to America until father
came and earned it--that would have been riches in Wales. Now we were
in America hungry and penniless, and hard was the bed that we should lie
on.

From Pittsburgh father had sent us railroad tickets, and these tickets
were waiting for us at the railroad office. All we would have to do
would be to hold our hunger in check until we should reach Hubbard,
Ohio, where a kinsman had established a home. But while mother was
piloting her family to the depot, two of the children got lost. She had
reached Castle Garden with six children and her household goods. Now her
goods were gone and only four of the children remained. My sister was
ten and I was eight; we were the oldest. The baby, one year old, and the
next, a toddler of three, mother had carried in her arms. But two boys,
Walter and David, four and six years old, had got lost in the traffic.
Mother took the rest of us to a hotel and locked us in a room while she
went out to search for the missing ones. For two days she tramped the
streets visiting police stations and making inquiry everywhere. At night
she would return to us and report that she had found no trace of little
Walter and David. To try to picture the misery of those scenes is beyond
me. I can only say that the experience instilled in me a lasting terror.
The fear of being parted from my parents and from my brothers and
sisters, then implanted in my soul, has borne its fruit in after-life.

Finally mother found the boys in a rescue home for lost children.
Brother David, curly-haired and red-cheeked, had so appealed to the
policeman who found them that he had made application to adopt the boy
and was about to take him to his own home.

After finding the children, mother stood on Broadway and, gazing at the
fine buildings and the good clothes that all classes wore in America,
she felt her heart swell with hope. And she said aloud: “This is the
place for my boys.”

Every one had treated her with kindness. A fellow countryman had lent
her money to pay the hotel bill, telling her she could pay it back after
she had joined her husband. And so we had passed through the gateway
of the New World as thousands of other poor families had done. And our
temporary hardships had been no greater than most immigrants encountered
in those days.

I later learned from a Bohemian of the trials his mother met with on her
first days in New York. He told me that she and her three children,
the smallest a babe in arms, tramped the streets of New York for days
looking in vain for some one who could speak their native tongue. They
slept at night in doorways, and by day wandered timid and terrified
through the streets.

“At last a saloon-keeper saw that we were famishing,” the Bohemian told
me. “He was a--a--Oh, what do you call them in your language? I can
think of the Bohemian word but not the English.”

“What was he like?” I asked to help find the word. “Red-headed? Tall?
Fat?”

“No; he was one of those people who usually run clothing stores and are
always having a 'SALE.'”

“Jew,” I said.

“Yes, he was a Jew saloon-keeper. He took pity on us and took us into
his saloon and gave us beer, bread and sausages. We were so nearly
starved that we ate too much and our stomachs threw it up. The
saloon-keeper sent word to the Humane Society, and they came and put us
on the train for Chicago, where our father was waiting for us.”

The Bohemians saved from starvation by the pity of a Jewish
saloon-keeper is a sample of how our world was running fifty years ago.
Who can doubt that we have a better world to-day? And the thing that has
made it better is the thing that Jew exhibited, human sympathy.

When I found myself head of the Labor Department one of my earliest
duties was to inspect the immigrant stations at Boston and New York. In
spite of complaints, they were being conducted to the letter of the
law; to correct the situation it was only necessary to add sympathy and
understanding to the enforcement of the law.

An American poet in two lines told the whole truth about human courage:

     “The bravest are the tenderest,
     The loving are the daring.”

Tenderness and human sympathy to the alien passing through Ellis Island
does not mean that we are weak, or that the unfit alien is welcome. The
tenderer we treat the immigrant who seeks our hospitality, the harder
will we smash him when he betrays us. That's what “the bravest are
the tenderest” means. He who is tenderest toward the members of his
household is bravest in beating back him who would destroy that house.

For example, I received a hurry-up call for more housing at Ellis Island
in the early days of my administration. The commissioner told me he had
five hundred more anarchists than he had roofs to shelter.

“Have these anarchists been duly convicted?” I asked.

He said they had been, and were awaiting deportation.

I told the commissioner not to worry about finding lodging for his
guests; they would be on their way before bedtime.

“But there is no ship sailing so soon,” he said. “They will have to have
housing till a ship sails.”

Now this country has a shortage of houses and a surplus of ships. There
aren't enough roofs to house the honest people, and there are hundreds
of ships lying idle. Let the honest people have the houses, and the
anarchists have the ships. I called up the Shipping Board, borrowed a
ship, put the Red criminals aboard and they went sailing, sailing, over
the bounding main, and many a stormy wind shall blow “ere Jack come home
again.”

On the other hand I discovered a family that had just come to America
and was about to be deported because of a technicality. The family
consisted of a father and mother and four small children. The order
of deportation had been made and the family had been put aboard a
ship about to sail. I learned that the children were healthy and
right-minded; the mother was of honest working stock with a faith in God
and not in anarchy. I had been one of such a family entering this port
forty years ago. Little did I dream then that I would ever be a member
of a President's Cabinet with power to wipe away this woman's tears
and turn her heart's sorrowing into a song of joy. I wrote the order of
admission, and the family was taken from the departing ship just
before it sailed. I told the mother that the baby in her arms might be
secretary of labor forty years hence.



CHAPTER VII. HARD SLEDDING IN AMERICA


It had been our plan to go from New York to Pittsburgh, but the mill
that father was working in had shut down. And so he had sent us tickets
to Hubbard, Ohio, where his brother had a job as a muck roller--the man
who takes the bloom from the squeezer and throws it into the rollers.
That's all I can tell you now. In later chapters I shall take you into
a rolling mill, and show you how we worked. I believe I am the first
puddler that ever described his job, for I have found no book by a
puddler in any American library. But I wanted to explain here that a
muck roller is not a muck raker, but a worker in raw iron.

When we boarded the train for Ohio, mother had nothing to look after
except the six children. When the porter asked her where her baggage
was, she smiled sadly and said that was a question for a wiser head
than hers to answer. She was glad enough to have all her babies safe.
Everything we owned was on our backs. Our patient father had toiled
for months in Pittsburgh and had sent us nearly every cent to pay our
transportation from the Old World. Now he was out of a job, and we were
coming to him without as much as a bag of buns in our hands.

Before leaving New York, I want to tell what kind of city it was in
those days.

In a recent magazine article a writer picturing our arrival at Castle
Garden said that we “climbed the hill into Broadway and gazed around
at the highest buildings we had ever seen.” But there were no tall
buildings in New York at that time. The spires of Trinity Church and St.
Paul's towered above everything. And we had seen such churches in the
Old Country. Brooklyn Bridge had just been built and it overtopped the
town like a syrup pitcher over a plate of pancakes. The tallest business
blocks were five or six stories high, and back in Wales old Lord
Tredegar, the chief man of our shire, lived in a great castle that was
as fine as any of them.

The steel that made New York a city in the sky was wrought in my own
time. My father and his sons helped puddle the iron that has braced this
city's rising towers. A town that crawled now stands erect. And we whose
backs were bent above the puddling hearths know how it got its spine. A
mossy town of wood and stone changed in my generation to a towering city
of glittering glass and steel. “All of which”--I can say in the words of
the poet--“all of which I saw and part of which I was.”

The train that was taking us to Ohio was an Erie local, and the stops
were so numerous that we thought we should never get there. A man on the
train bought ginger bread and pop and gave us kids a treat. It has been
my practice ever since to do likewise for alien youngsters that I meet
on trains.

When we reached Hubbard, father met us and took us to an uncle's. We did
not stop to wash the grime of travel from our faces until after we had
filled our stomachs. Once refreshed with food, our religion returned to
us, in the desire to be clean and to establish a household. I learned
then that food is the first thing in the world. Cleanliness may be next
to godliness, but food is ahead of them all, and without food man loses
his cleanliness, godliness and everything else worth having. When I wish
to sound out a man, I ask him if he has ever been hungry. If I find
he has never missed a meal in his life, I know his education has been
neglected. For I believe that experience is the foremost teacher. I
have learned something from every experience I ever had, and I hold that
Providence has been kind to me in favoring me with a lot of rather tough
adventures.

Our hardships on entering America taught me sympathy and filled me with
a desire to help others. I have heard aliens say that America had not
treated them with hospitality, and that this had made them bitter, and
now these aliens would take revenge by tearing down America. This is
a lie that can not fool me. My hardships did not turn me bitter. And I
know a thousand others who had harder struggles than I. And none of them
showed the yellow streak. The Pilgrim Fathers landed in the winter when
there were no houses. Half of them perished from hardship in a single
year. Did they turn anarchists?

The man who says that hard sledding in America made a yellow cur out
of him fools no one. He was born a yellow cur. Hard sledding in America
produced the man who said: “With malice toward none; with charity for
all.”



CHAPTER VIII. MY FIRST REGULAR JOB


We stayed a week with father's brother in Hubbard. Then we went to
Sharon, Pennsylvania, where father had a temporary job. A Welshman,
knowing his desperate need of money, let him take his furnace for a few
days and earn enough money to move on to Pittsburgh. There father found
a job again, but mother was dissatisfied with the crowded conditions in
Pittsburgh. She wanted to bring up her boys amid open fields.

In those days the air was black with soot and the crowded quarters where
the workers lived offered no room for gardens. Mother wanted sunlight
and green grass such as we had about Tredegar. There Lord Tredegar had
his beautiful castle in the midst of a park. On certain days this great
park was open to the villagers, and the children came to picnic,
and Lord Tredegar gave them little cakes and tea in doll-size cups.
Doubtless he looked upon us as “my people.”

But the lords of steel in Pittsburgh were too new at the game to
practice the customs of the nobility in beautifying their surroundings.
The mills had made things ugly and the place was not what mother thought
it ought to be for bringing up children. So father took us back to
Sharon, and there we had sunlight and grass and trees. We rented a neat
little company-house with a big garden in the rear, where we raised
enough potatoes to supply our table. There were window boxes filled with
morning-glories, and lilacs grew in the yard. They company had planted
those lilacs to nourish the souls of the worker's children. They gave
me joy, and that is why the Mooseheart grounds are filled with lilac
bushes.

As soon as we landed in Sharon I started out to earn money. Those
feather beds were on my mind and I couldn't rest easy until we should
replace them. Neither could the rest of the family. I have often told
how I scraped up some capital and invested it in a shoe-shining outfit.
Nearly every traveling man who came to the hotel allowed me to shine
his shoes. The townsfolk let their shoes go gray all week, but the gay
commercial travelers all were dudes and dressed like Sunday every day.
They brought the new fashions to town and were looked upon as high-toned
fellows. Their flashy get-up caught the girls, which made the town-boys
hate them. But I liked them very well because they brought me revenue.
“Where a man's treasure is, there is his heart also,” says the proverb,
and my experience proved it true. On my first visit to the hotel I got
acquainted with the landlord and he put me on his pay-roll. Behind the
hotel was a cow pen where the milk for the guests was drawn fresh from
the cows. The cows had to be driven to a pasture in the morning and back
at night. I got a dollar and a quarter a month for driving the cows. And
so I had found a paying job within thirty days after landing in America.
The cost of pasturage was a dollar a month for each cow. That was less
than four cents a day for cow feed to produce two gallons of milk, or
about two cents a gallon. The wages of the girls who milked them and my
wages for driving them amounted to three cents a gallon. In other words,
the cost of labor in getting the milk from the cows more than doubled
the cost of the milk. This was my first lesson in political economy.
I learned that labor costs are the chief item in fixing the price of
anything.

The less labor used in producing milk, the cheaper the milk will be. The
reason wages were high in America was because America was the land of
labor-saving machinery. Little labor was put on any product, and so the
product was cheap, like the landlord's milk. In the iron industry,
for instance, the coal mines and iron ore lay near the mills, as the
landlord's pasture was near his hotel. To bring the coal and ore to the
blast furnaces took little labor, just as my driving in the cows cost
the landlord but four cents a day. Next to the blast furnaces stood the
mixer, the Bessemer open hearth furnaces, the ingot stripper building,
the soaking pits and then the loading yards with their freight cars
where the finished product in the form of wire, rails or sky-scraper
steel is shipped away.

Because the landlord had his cows milked at the back door of his hotel
the milk was still warm when it was carried into his kitchen. And so the
steel mills are grouped so closely that a single heat sometimes carries
the steel from the Bessemer hearth through all the near-by machines
until it emerges as a finished product and is loaded on the railroad
cars while it is still warm. It was this saving of labor and fuel that
made American steel the cheapest steel in the world. And that's why the
wages of steel and iron workers in America are the highest in the world.

Father was in the mills getting these good wages, though no puddler was
ever paid for all the work he does, and all of us young Davises were
eager to grow up so that we could learn the trade and get some of that
good money ourselves. My hands itched for labor, and I wanted nothing
better than to be big enough to put a finger in this industry that was
building up America before my very eyes. I have always been a doer and a
builder, it was in my blood and the blood of my tribe, as it is born in
the blood of beavers. When I meet a man who is a loafer and a destroyer,
I know he is alien to me. I fear him and all his breed. The beaver is a
builder and the rat is a destroyer; yet they both belong to the rodent
race. The beaver harvests his food in the summer; he builds a house and
stores that food for the winter. The rat sneaks to the food stores of
others: he eats what he wants and ruins the rest and then runs and hides
in his hole. He lives in the builder's house, but he is not a builder.
He undermines that house; he is a rat.

Some men are by nature beavers, and some are rats; yet they all belong
to the human race. The people that came to this country in the early
days were of the beaver type and they built up America because it was in
their nature to build. Then the rat-people began coming here, to house
under the roof that others built. And they try to undermine and ruin
it because it is in their nature to destroy. They call themselves
anarchists.

A civilization rises when the beaver-men outnumber the rat-men. When the
rat-men get the upper hand the civilization falls. Then the rats turn
and eat one another and that is the end. Beware of breeding rats in
America.



CHAPTER IX. THE SCATTERED FAMILY


For three years after we came to Sharon I went to school, and in my
spare time worked at my shoe shining and other odd jobs. We had bought
feather beds again and our little home was a happy one. By hanging
around the depot spotting traveling men who needed a shine, or their
grips carried, I got acquainted with the telegraph agent. And so I got
the job of telegraph messenger boy.

Few telegrams were sent, and then only when somebody died. So whenever
I carried a telegram I knew that I was the bearer of bad news. Accidents
happened in the mines and iron mills. And when a man was killed, it
often meant his wife and babies would face hunger, for the jobs were not
the kind for women and children; muscular men were needed. Aside from
the occupation of housewife, there was nothing for a woman to do in
those days except to take in washing or sewing.

Of the many death messages that I bore to the workers' homes in Sharon,
few found a home that was able to last a day after the burial of the
bread-winner. He had failed to make provision for such an accident,--no
savings in the bank, no life insurance. As soon as the worker was
stricken his children were at the mercy of the world. I saw so much
of this, that the pity of it entered deep into my boy-heart and never
afterward could I forget it.

I talked with the station agent, the banker and the hotel keeper. The
station agent had money in the bank which he was saving to educate his
boy to be a telegrapher. He also carried life insurance. “If I should
die,” he said, “my wife would collect enough insurance to start a
boarding-house. My boy would have money enough to learn a trade. Then he
could get as good a job as I have.” The hotel keeper told me that if he
should die his wife could run the hotel just the same, it being free
of debt and earning enough money so that she could hire a man to do the
work he had been doing. The banker owned bonds and if he died the bonds
would go right on earning money for his children.

These men were capitalists and their future was provided for. Most of
the mill-workers were only laborers, they had no capital and the minute
their labors ended they were done for. The workers were kind-hearted,
and when a fellow was killed in the mill or died of sickness they went
to his widow and with tears in their eyes reached into their pockets
and gave her what cash they had. I never knew a man to hang back when a
collection for a widow was being taken. Contributions sometimes were as
high as five dollars. It made a heartrending scene: the broken body of
a once strong man lying under a white sheet; the children playing around
and laughing (if they were too young to know what it meant); the mother
frantic with the thought that her brood was now homeless; and the big
grimy workers wiping their tears with a rough hand and putting silver
dollars into a hat.

With this money and the last wages of the dead man, the widow paid for
the funeral and sometimes bought a ticket to the home of some relative
who would give her her “keep” in return for her labor in the house.
Other relatives might each take one of the children “to raise,” who,
thus scattered, seldom if ever got together again. When I became an iron
worker there were several fellows in our union who didn't know whether
they had a relative on earth. One of them, Bill Williams, said to me:
“Jim, no wonder you're always happy. You've got so many brothers that
there's always two of you together, whether it's playing in the band,
on the ball nine or working at the furnace. If I had a brother around I
wouldn't get the blues the way I do. I've got some brothers somewhere in
this world, but I'll probably never know where they are.”

Then he told how his father had died when he was three years old. There
were several children, and they were taken by relatives. He was sent to
his grandmother, whose name was Williams. That was not his name. Before
he was seven both his grandparents died and he was taken by a farmer who
called him Bill. The farmer did not send him to school and he grew up
barely able to write his name, Will Williams, which was not his real
name. He didn't even know what his real name was.

“Probably my brothers are alive,” he said, “but what chance have I got
of ever finding them when I don't know what the family name is. Maybe
they've all got new names now like I have. Maybe I've met my own
brothers and we never knew it. I'd give everything in the world, if I
had it, to look into a man's face and know that he was my brother. It
must be a wonderful feeling.”

These things are the tragedies of the poor. And although such a
misfortune never happened to me, this problem stared me in the face when
I began carrying those fatal telegrams. I tackled the problem with a
boyish mind. I soon resolved it into these propositions:

When a laborer dies his little children are scattered to the winds.
Brothers and sisters may never see one another again.

When a man with property dies, his children are kept together. Their
future is made safe by the property.

Labor provides for to-day. Property provides for to-morrow.

That truth was driven into my mind when I saw one family after another
scattered by the death of a laborer. A merchant in Sharon died, and his
children, after the funeral, kept right on going to school. There was no
doubting the truth of my rule: Labor makes the present day safe--but the
present day only. Capital safeguards the future.

From that day on, I argued that we should buy a home and save a little
every day for capital. It was our duty thus to protect ourselves, should
our father die, against being scattered among strangers.



CHAPTER X. MELODRAMA BECOMES COMEDY


Every race gets a nickname in America. A Frenchman is a “frog,” a negro
a “coon” and a Welshman a “goat.” All the schoolboys who were not Welsh
delighted in teasing us by applying the uncomplimentary nickname. This
once resulted at the Sharon operahouse, in turning a dramatic episode
into a howling farce.

I was acting as a super in the sensational drama She, by H. Rider
Haggard. Two Englishmen were penetrating the mysterious jungles of
Africa, and I was their native guide and porter. They had me all blacked
up like a negro minstrel, but this wasn't a funny show, it was a drama
of mystery and terror. While I was guiding the English travelers through
the jungle of the local stage, we penetrated into the land of the
wall-eyed cannibals.

The cannibals captured me and prepared to eat me in full view of the
audience while the Englishmen behind the trees looked on in horror. The
cannibals, who were also supers led by an actor of the “troupe,” set
up a hot pot to boil my bones in. I was bound hand and foot, while the
cannibals, armed with spears, danced around me in a heathen ceremony,
chanting a voodoo chant and reciting a rigmarole by which cannibals
are supposed to make their human feast on a sacred rite. As they danced
about me in a circle, they sang:

“Is it an ox? Him-yah, him-yah.” And they jabbed their spears into me.
Some of the supers jabbed me pretty hard, among them Babe Durgon, who
delighted in tormenting me.

“Is it a sheep? Him-yah, him-yah.” Again they jabbed me, and I was so
mad I was cussing them under my breath.

“Is it a pig? Him-yah, him-yah.”

The audience was breathless with tense excitement.

“Is it a goat?”

The entire gallery broke into a whirlwind roar: “Yes! yes! He's a goat.”

Laughter rocked the audience. They all knew I was Welsh and saw the
joke. The horror and suspense had been so great that when it broke with
comic relief the house was really hysterical. It stopped the show.

I played supernumerary parts in many shows that winter including Richard
III and other Shakespearean plays. At the battle of Bosworth field where
Richard cries: “A horse, a horse; my kingdom for a horse,” the supers in
the army were clattering their swords on the opposing shields in a great
hubbub and shouting, “Hay, hay hay!” I was of a thrifty turn of mind,
and said: “Hold on, boys. Don't order too much hay until we see whether
he gets the horse or not.”

A hypnotist came to the opera-house and I volunteered to be hypnotized.
He couldn't hypnotize me. I felt rather bad about it. I was out of the
show. Later I learned that all of the “Perfessor's” best subjects came
with him under salary, and the local boys who made good were faking like
the professionals. The whole thing was a cheat and I had not caught on.
I was too serious-minded to think of faking. But several of the boys
took to it naturally, and among them was Babe Durgon, the bully. He
could be hypnotized and I couldn't. But several years later I had the
satisfaction of “hypnotizing” him myself, as I told about in my first
chapter.

Although I always regarded myself as a humorist, the impression I made
on my comrades was that of a serious and religious fellow. I quoted the
Bible to them so often that they nicknamed me “the Welsh Parson.” I was
the general errand boy of the town. Everybody knew me. And when there
was a job of passing hand-bills for the operahouse, or ringing bells for
auction sales, I always got the job. Every nickel that rolled loose in
the town landed in my pocket and I took it home to mother. Mother was my
idol and what she said was law. One night I heard the band playing
and started down-town. Mother told me to be sure to be in bed by nine
o'clock. I found that a minstrel show had been thrown out of its regular
route by a flood and was playing our town unexpectedly. The stage hands
knew me and passed me in. I was seeing a high-priced show for nothing.
But when it came nine o'clock, I went home. I told my mother that I had
walked out of the most gorgeous minstrel show. She asked me why and I
told her because she wanted me to be in bed by nine o'clock.

“Why, Jimmy,” she said, “I wanted you to be in bed so you wouldn't be in
bad company. It would have been all right for you to have stayed at the
minstrel show. All I want to know is that you are in good company.”

I guess mother thought I was a bit soft, but I had seen the best part of
the show, as in those days the curtain rose at seven forty-five.

Minstrel shows were the greatest delight of my youth. I learned to dance
and could sing all the songs and get off the jokes. Dupree & Benedict's
were the first minstrels I ever saw. I marched in their parade and
carried the drum. George Evans (Honey Boy) was a life-long friend. We
were born within three miles of each other in Wales and came to this
country at about the same time.



CHAPTER XI. KEEPING OPEN HOUSE


Our little four-room company-house in Sharon had its doors open to the
wayfarer. There was always some newcomer from Wales, looking for a stake
in America, who had left his family in Wales. Usually he was a distant
kinsman, but whether a blood relation or not, we regarded all Welshmen
as belonging to our clan. Our house was small, but we crowded into the
corners and made room for another. His food and bed were free as long
as he stayed. We helped him find a job, and then he thanked us for our
hospitality and went out of our house with our blessings upon him. This
form of community life was the social law in all the cottages of the
Welsh.

It was like the law of tobacco among Americans. Tobacco has always been
“nationalized” in America, and so have matches. Your pipe is your own,
but your tobacco and matches belong to everybody. So it was with food
and shelter in the Welsh colony at Sharon. Each newcomer from the Old
Country was entitled to free bed and board until he could get a job in
the mills. When he found a job his money was his; we never expected him
to pay for the food he had eaten any more than you would expect pay for
the tobacco and matches you furnish your friends.

These sojourners in our family were heroes to us kids. They brought us
news from the Old World, and each one had tricks or tales that were new
to us. One man showed us that we could put our hand on the bottom of
a boiling teakettle and find the bottom cool. Another told us about
milking goats in the Old Country. We asked him how much milk a goat
would give. He said, “About a thimbleful,” and we thought him very
witty. Another had shipped as an “able seaman” to get his passage to
America. When out at sea it was discovered he didn't know one rope from
another. During a storm he and the mate had a terrible fight. “The sea
was sweeping the deck and we were ordered to reef a shroud. I didn't
know how, and the mate called me a name that no Welshman will stand for.
I thought we were all going to be drowned anyhow, and I might as well
die with my teeth in his neck. So I flew into him and we fought like
wildcats. I couldn't kill him and he couldn't kill me. And the sea
didn't sweep us overboard. But after that fight the mate let me do as I
pleased for the rest of the voyage.”

Knowing how strong are the arms of an iron worker and what a burly man
is a ship's mate, we realized that the fight must have been a struggle
between giants.

We were fluent readers, much better readers than our parents, but we had
no books. We took the Youth's Companion, and it was the biggest thing in
our lives. Every week we were at the post-office when the Companion was
due. We could hardly wait, we were so eager to see what happened next in
the “continued” story. Surely so good a children's paper as the Youth's
Companion could never be found in any country but America. America was
the land of children, and that's why parents broke their old-home ties
and made the hard pilgrimage to America; it was for the benefit of their
children.

Our home was a happy one, for we children were fond of one another and
all loved the father and mother who worked so hard for us. We were the
first to realize that our home was insecure, upheld by a single prop,
our father's labor. The breaking of his right arm might have broken up
our home. We wanted to acquire property so that mother would be safe.
For we knew that God was a just God. He did not ordain that one class
should labor and be insecure while another class owned property and was
safe. I learned that the banker, the hotel keeper and the station agent
had all been poor boys like myself. They started with nothing but their
hands to labor with. They had worked hard and saved a part of their
wages, and this had given them “a start.” The hotel keeper had been a
hack driver. He slept in the haymow of a livery stable. He had to meet
the train that came at two o'clock in the morning. No other man was
willing to have his sleep broken at such an hour. He hated to lose the
sleep, but he wanted the money. At the end of four years he had saved
a thousand dollars. He wanted to buy a hotel but needed more money. The
banker, knowing he was a stayer, lent him the cash he needed, and so he
became a property owner. He no longer slept in the haymow but had a room
of his own and other rooms to rent to the “high-toned traveling men.”

From this I learned that laborers became capitalists when they saved
their money. Right then I made up my mind that some day mother would
own a home. If father couldn't save the money to buy it, I would. Years
afterward a wealthy Pittsburgh man who had just built a fine residence
in the fashionable section of that town found himself in difficulties
and unable to occupy the house. He offered it to me at a bargain. So I
took my parents to this place and told them it was to be theirs. Mother
declared that she certainly never dreamed of having a “magnificent home
like this.” She seemed to be greatly pleased. But now I know that
the sparkle in her eyes was for me. Her boy had done all this for his
mother. If I had given her a pair of shoes that pinched her feet, she
would have worn them smiling for my sake. Father looked out the windows
at the neighboring residences. “Who lives there?” he asked. “And who
lives yonder?” I told him the great names of his neighbors.

“Son,” he said, “you do not wish to lock your parents up in a prison, do
you?”

Then he explained: “We do not know these people. We are too old to make
new friends. We would never be at ease here, we would be lonely. We like
the little home that we bought with our own savings. It has become a
part of ourselves; it fits us like the wrinkles on our faces. If we
moved here our old friends would never come to see us. This magnificence
would scare them away. No, son. We thank you for offering us this house,
but it is not for us. We will stay in the little cottage where our old
friends will be free to come and light a pipe and chat and drowse away
the evening hours that yet remain.”

How wise he was! He knew the fitness of things. His simple comforts, his
old friends, these he valued more than riches, and the valuation that he
put upon them was the right one.



CHAPTER XII. MY HAND TOUCHES IRON


When I was eleven I got a regular job that paid me fifty cents a day. So
I quit school just where the Monitor had sunk the Merrimac in the “first
fight of the ironclads.” Thereafter my life was to be bound up with the
iron industry. My job was in a nail factory. I picked the iron splinters
from among the good nails that had heads on them. This taught me that
many are marred in the making. Those that are born with bad heads must
not be used in building a house or the house will fall. In the head of
the nail is its power to hold fast. Men are like nails, some have the
hold-fast will in their heads. Others have not. They were marred in the
making. They must be thrown aside and not used in building the state, or
the state will fall.

I put the good nails into kegs, and the headless nails and splinters
were sent back to be melted into window weights. Handling sharp nails
is hard on the hands. And the big half-dollar that I earned was not
unmarred with blood. Every pay-day I took home my entire earnings and
gave them to mother. All my brothers did the same. Mother paid the
household expenses, bought our clothing and allotted us spending money
and money for Sunday-school.

This is a cynical age and I can imagine that I hear somebody snicker
when I confess the fondness I had for the Sunday-school. I don't want
any one to think I am laying claim to the record of having always been a
good little boy; nor that everything I did was wise. No; I confess I did
my share of deviltry, that some of my deeds were foolish, and (to use
the slang of that time) I often got it in the neck. Once I bantered a
big fat boy to a fight. He chased me and I ran and crawled into a place
so narrow that I knew he couldn't follow me. I crawled under the floor
of a shed that was only about six inches above the ground. Fatty was at
least ten inches thick and I thought I was safe. But he didn't try to
crawl under the floor after me. He went inside the shed and found that
the boards of the floor sank beneath his weight like spring boards. And
there that human hippopotamus stood jumping up and down while he mashed
me into the mud like a mole under a pile-driver. I had showed that I had
“a head on me like a nail” when I crawled under that floor and let Fatty
step on me. There is a saying, “You can't keep a good man down.” But
Fatty kept me down, and so I must admit he was a better man than I
was. Some people say you should cheer for the under-dog. But that isn't
always fair. The under-dog deserves our sympathy, the upper-dog must be
a better dog or he couldn't have put the other dog down. I give three
cheers for the winner. Any tribe that adopts the rule of always hissing
the winner has found a real way to discourage enterprise.

I owned a part interest in some pigeons with a boy named Jack Thomas.
The pigeons' nests were in Jack's back yard. He told me that my share
of the eggs had rotted and his share had hatched, so that my interest in
the young pigeons had died out and they were all his now. I was sure it
was a quibble and that he was cheating me. It made me mad and I sneaked
up to the pigeon loft and put a tiny pin prick in all the eggs in the
nests. This was invisible but it caused the eggs to rot as he said mine
had, and I felt that this was only justice. Turn about is fair play.

When Jack's eggs didn't hatch he suspected me, for I had been so foolish
as to predict that his eggs wouldn't hatch. And so he was sure I was
responsible, although he didn't know how. In fact his mother had seen
me enter the barn and had told Jack about it. One day when I went to the
pasture to get the hotel keeper's cows, I ran into Jack hunting ground
squirrels with his dog. He set his dog chasing the cows and then ran
away out of my reach. The dog yelped at the cows heels and they galloped
about the pasture in a panic. I shouted to Jack to call off his dog or
there would be trouble the next time I met him. But Jack, who was out of
reach, shouted encouragement instead. Round and round the cattle raced
with that howling dog scaring them into fits. At last the dog tired
of the fun and trotted off to join Jack, who was disappearing over the
hill. I then tried to round up the cows and get them out of the pasture.
But the brutes were wet with sweat and as wild as deer. I saw that they
could not be milked in that condition and felt that Jack's conduct was
outrageous. He had not only made trouble for me; he had injured the
hotel keeper. There would be no milk that night fit to be used.

I started straight for Jack's home to tell his mother of his lawless
act. As I went along, I turned the case over in my mind, and the case
grew stronger and stronger all the time. Before I reached Jack's door I
had, satisfied myself that his mother would be shocked at the news and
would at once cut a big switch to give Jack the licking he deserved.

But when I began to tell Mrs. Thomas of her son's crime, she sided with
Jack and wouldn't listen to me. “Don't come to me with your troubles,
you nasty little whiffet,” she cried. “You started the whole thing when
you sneaked in and ruined Jack's pigeon eggs. Now that you've got
the worst of it you come here with your tattle-tales. You ought to be
ashamed to show your face--” She had become so threatening that I turned
and ran. My whole case had gone to pieces on her sharp tongue like a toy
balloon pricked with a pin. I had been blowing it up until it got so
big I couldn't see anything else. It burst right in my face, and there
wasn't even a scrap of rubber to tell where it had been.

This taught me one of the best lessons I ever learned. By looking only
at his side of a case a man can kid himself into thinking that he is
wholly right, that his cause is greater than himself and represents the
rights of the entire community. But a counter-blast from the other
side will deflate his balloon in a second and he'll come down to earth
without even a parachute to soften the jolt when he lands.

I learned that blood is not only thicker than water, but it is thicker
than curdled milk, and you can't line up a mother against her own child
even if he chased the cows until they got so wild they gave strawberry
pop instead of milk. Any argument that goes contrary to human nature
has struck a snag before it is started. A man must come into court with
clean hands. I had started by rotting the other fellow's eggs and he
finished by souring my milk. I wanted justice and I got it, but I didn't
recognize it when it landed on me with all four feet. Chickens come home
to roost, and my pigeons had found a nesting-place on my anatomy; and
the spot they had chosen was right in the neck.



CHAPTER XIII. SCENE IN A ROLLING MILL


The rolling mill where father worked was Life's Big Circus tent to me,
and like a kid escaped from school, eager to get past the tent flap and
mingle with the clowns and elephants, I chucked my job sorting nails
when I found an opening for a youngster in the rolling mill. Every
puddler has a helper. Old men have both a helper and a boy. I got a
place with an old man, and so at the age of twelve I was part of the Big
Show whose performance is continuous, whose fire-eaters have real flame
to contend with, and whose snake-charmers risk their lives in handling
great hissing, twisting red-hot serpents of angry iron.

In this mill there is a constant din by day and night. Patches of white
heat glare from the opened furnace doors like the teeth of some great
dark, dingy devil grinning across the smoky vapors of the Pit. Half
naked, soot-smeared fellows fight the furnace hearths with hooks,
rabbles and paddles. Their scowling faces are lit with fire, like
sailors manning their guns in a night fight when a blazing fire ship
is bearing down upon them. The sweat runs down their backs and arms and
glistens in the changing lights. Brilliant blues and rays of green and
bronze come from the coruscating metal, molten yet crystallizing into
white-hot frost within the furnace puddle. Flaming balls of woolly iron
are pulled from the oven doors, flung on a two-wheeled serving tray, and
rushed sputtering and flamboyant to the hungry mouth of a machine,
which rolls them upon its tongue and squeezes them in its jaw like a cow
mulling over her cud. The molten slag runs down red-hot from the jaws of
this squeezer and makes a luminous rivulet on the floor like the water
from the rubber rollers when a washer-woman wrings out the saturated
clothes. Squeezed dry of its luminous lava, the white-hot sponge is
drawn with tongs to the waiting rollers--whirling anvils that beat
it into the shape they will. Everywhere are hurrying men, whirring
flywheels, moving levers of steam engines and the drum-like roar of the
rolling machines, while here and there the fruits of this toil are seen
as three or four fiery serpents shoot forth from different trains of
rollers, and are carried away, wrought iron fit for bridging the creek,
shoeing the mule and hooping the barrel that brings the farmers apples
into town.

“Life in these mills is a terrible life,” the reformers say. “Men are
ground down to scrap and are thrown out as wreckage.” This may be so,
but my life was spent in the mills and I failed to discover it. I
went in a stripling and grew into manhood with muscled arms big as a
bookkeeper's legs. The gases, they say, will destroy a man's lungs,
but I worked all day in the mills and had wind enough left to toot a
clarinet in the band. I lusted for labor, I worked and I liked it.
And so did my forefathers for generations before me. It is no job for
weaklings, but neither was tree-felling, Indian fighting, road-making
and the subduing of a wild continent to the hand of man as was done by
the whole tribe of Americans for the sheer joy of conquering the wild.

There is something in man that drives him forward to do the world's work
and build bigger for the coming generations, just as there is something
in nature that causes new growth to come out of old dirt and new worlds
to be continually spawned from the ashes of old played-out suns and
stars. When nature ceases to mold new worlds from the past decay, the
universe will wither; and when man loses the urge to build and goes to
tearing down, the end of his story is at hand.

A tired Thomas whose wife supported him by running a rooming house once
asked me:

“How many do you 'spose there are in the United States that don't have
to work?”

“None,” I replied, “except invalids and cripples. Every healthy man
in this country has to work just the same as he has to breathe. If you
don't want to work it is because you're sick. I'm a well man, and I've
got to be working all the time or I'd go crazy. I have no more desire
to be idle like you than I have a desire to wear women's clothes. It is
contrary to normal nature, and that's why I say that any man that gets
that way is a sick man.”

The fellow was a “free thinker,” as he called himself. He was too lazy
to shave and his beard was always about two weeks ahead of him. He was
working out a plan for communism in the United States. He believed that
enough work had now been done to supply the race forever. It was just a
question of so evenly dividing the goods that all men instead of a few
could loaf the rest of their years.

He had such a tired feeling that he didn't have the ambition of an
oyster. He didn't have enough energy to realize he was all in. He took
it for granted that the whole race was as tired as he was.

He thought he needed one of the Utopias they talk so much about. What
he needed was a dose of castor-oil. I never knew a communist in my life
that was a well man.



CHAPTER XIV. BOILING DOWN THE PIGS


An iron puddler is a “pig boiler.” The pig boiling must be done at a
certain temperature (the pig is iron) just as a farmer butchering hogs
must scald the carcasses at a certain temperature. If the farmer's water
is too hot it will set the hair, that is, fix the bristles so they will
never come out; if the water is not hot enough it will fail to loosen
the bristles. So the farmer has to be an expert, and when the water in
his barrel is just hot enough, he souses the porker in it, holding it in
the hot bath the right length of time, then pulling it out and scraping
off the hair. Farmers learned this art by experience long before the
days of book farming.

And so the metal “pig boiler” ages ago learned by experience how to make
the proper “heat” to boil the impurities out of pig-iron, or forge iron,
and change it into that finer product, wrought iron. Pig-iron contains
silicon, sulphur and phosphorus, and these impurities make it brittle so
that a cast iron teakettle will break at a blow, like a china cup. Armor
of this kind would have been no good for our iron-clad ancestors. When a
knight in iron clothes tried to whip a leather-clad peasant, the peasant
could have cracked him with a stone and his clothes would have fallen
off like plaster from the ceiling. So those early iron workers learned
to puddle forge iron and make it into wrought iron which is tough and
leathery and can not be broken by a blow. This process was handed down
from father to son, and in the course of time came to my father and so
to me. None of us ever went to school and learned the chemistry of it
from books. We learned the trick by doing it, standing with our faces
in the scorching heat while our hands puddled the metal in its glaring
bath.

And that is the way the farmer's son has learned hog scalding from the
time when our ancient fathers got tired of eating bristles and decided
to take their pork clean shaven. To-day there are books telling just
how many degrees of heat make the water right for scalding hogs, and the
metallurgists have written down the chemical formula for puddling
iron. But the man who learns it from a book can not do it. The mental
knowledge is not enough; it requires great muscular skill like that of
the heavyweight wrestler, besides great physical endurance to withstand
the terrific heat. The worker's body is in perfect physical shape and
the work does not injure him but only exhilarates him. No iron worker
can be a communist, for communists all have inferior bodies. The iron
worker knows that his body is superior, and no sour philosophy could
stay in him, because he would sweat it out of his pores as he sweats out
all other poisons.

The old man that I worked with when I first entered the rolling mill was
gray with his sixty years of toil. Yet his eye was clear and his
back was straight and when he went to the table he ate like a
sixteen-year-old and his sleep was dreamless. A man so old must conserve
his strength, and he made use of his husky helper whenever he could to
save his own muscles and lengthen his endurance. My business was to do
the little chores and save time for the helper. I teased up the furnace,
I leveled the fire, I dished the cinders in to thicken the heat, and I
watched the cobbles. During the melting of the pig-iron the furnace had
to be kept as hot as coal could make it.

Before the use of coal was discovered, the ancient iron makers used
charcoal. So iron could only be made where there were forests to give
fuel. Even as late as 1840 the iron smelters in Pennsylvania were using
wood in their furnaces. Our forefathers did not know that coal would
burn. And yet here lay the coal, the ore and the limestone side by side,
which meant that Pittsburgh was to be the iron capital of the world. But
Americans will not long sleep in the presence of such an opportunity.
Other races will. The Chinese have slumbered for five thousand years
above a treasure trove of oil, coal and iron. They never discovered
its uses. Instead of oil they lit themselves to bed with mutton tallow.
Instead of burning coal they put on two pairs of pants when winter came.
In place of steel plows drawn by oil-burning tractors they scratched
the ground with a wooden stick, and when the crop failed they starved to
death by millions. With our steel ships we send bread to China to
save them. If they had the wit to use their resources they could save
themselves. In man's fight against the hostile forces of nature, his
safety lies in applying his wit to the resources that nature gave him.
The Americans can do that. There are others that can not.


I was riding on a train in Indiana when a gypsy-looking youth came in
and sat beside me. His hair was black, his skin was yellow and he was
dressed in flashy American clothes. He had a cock-sure air about him
that attracted my attention. I have seldom seen a young man more pleased
with himself. He was entirely too cocky for me. He began talking. He
said he was a Syrian and was worth a thousand dollars. Soon he would be
worth a million, he said. He was already putting on his million-dollar
airs.

While selling bananas and ginger pop, he told me, “I made some money
and learned the American ways. I have a brother in South Bend who has
made some money shining shoes. I am going to get my brother and we will
go back to the old home in Asia Minor. The hills where we were born are
full of coal. The people call it black stone. They do not know that it
will burn. We will go back there with our American knowledge and set the
world on fire.”

There is a people who have been kicking coal around for five thousand
years and have not yet learned that it will burn. Those hills produced
gypsies who travel around cheating, dickering and selling gewgaws that
are worth nothing. They come among a people who have used their heads.
From these people they learned to heat a banana stand with a little coal
stove. Having mastered that coal-stove principle, they are going back to
their native hills with black magic up their sleeves.

“What a superior man am I,” thought that young tribesman swollen with
vanity, although he had done nothing.

This taught me that some of these thick-headed tribes can be all swelled
up with pride when they have little to be proud of.



CHAPTER XV. THE IRON BISCUITS


In the Sharon town band I played the clarinet from the time I was
thirteen until I left that town several years later to chase the
fireflies of vanishing jobs that marked the last administration of
Cleveland. A bands-man at thirteen, I became a master puddler at
sixteen. At that time there were but five boys of that age who had
become full-fledged puddlers. Of these young iron workers, I suppose
there were few that “doubled in brass.” But why should not an iron
worker be a musician? The anvil, symbol of his trade, is a musical
instrument and is heard in the anvil chorus from Trovatore. In our
rolling mill we did not have an anvil on which the “bloom” was beaten
by a trip-hammer as is done in the Old Country. The “squeezer” which
combines the functions of hammer and anvil did the work instead.

When I became my father's helper he began teaching me to handle the
machinery of the trade. The puddling furnace has a working door on a
level with a man's stomach. Working door is a trade name. Out in the
world all doors are working; if they don't work they aren't doors
(except cellar doors, which are nailed down under the Volstead Act).
But the working door of a puddling furnace is the door through which the
puddler does his work. It is a porthole opening upon a sea of flame. The
heat of these flames would wither a man's body, and so they are enclosed
in a shell of steel. Through this working door I put in the charge of
“pigs” that were to be boiled. These short pieces of “mill iron” had
been smelted from iron ore; they had taken the first step on their
journey from wild iron to civilized iron. There isn't much use for
pig-iron in this world. You've got to be better iron than that. Pig-iron
has no fiber; it breaks instead of bending. Build a bridge of it and
a gale will break it and it will fall into the river. Some races are
pig-iron; Hottentots and Bushmen are pig-iron. They break at a blow.
They have been smelted out of wild animalism, but they went no further;
they are of no use in this modern world because they are brittle. Only
the wrought-iron races can do the work. All this I felt but could not
say in the days when I piled the pig-iron in the puddling furnace and
turned with boyish eagerness to have my father show me how.

Six hundred pounds was the weight of pig-iron we used to put into a
single hearth. Much wider than the hearth was the fire grate, for we
needed a heat that was intense. The flame was made by burning bituminous
coal. Vigorously I stoked that fire for thirty minutes with dampers open
and the draft roaring while that pig-iron melted down like ice-cream
under an electric fan. You have seen a housewife sweating over her oven
to get it hot enough to bake a batch of biscuits. Her face gets pink and
a drop of sweat dampens her curls. Quite a horrid job she finds it. But
I had iron biscuits to bake; my forge fire must be hot as a volcano.
There were five bakings every day and this meant the shoveling in of
nearly two tons of coal. In summer I was stripped to the waist and
panting while the sweat poured down across my heaving muscles. My palms
and fingers, scorched by the heat, became hardened like goat hoofs,
while my skin took on a coat of tan that it will wear forever.

What time I was not stoking the fire, I was stirring the charge with a
long iron rabble that weighed some twenty-five pounds. Strap an Oregon
boot of that weight to your arm and then do calisthenics ten hours in a
room so hot it melts your eyebrows and you will know what it is like to
be a puddler. But we puddlers did not complain. There is men's work to
be done in this world, and we were the men to do it. We had come into a
country built of wood; we should change it to a country built of steel
and stone. There was grandeur for us to achieve, like the Roman who
said, “I found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble.”

The spirit of building was in our blood; we took pride in the mill, and
the mill owners were our captains. They honored us for our strength and
skill, they paid us and we were loyal to them. We showed what bee men
call “the spirit of the hive.” On holidays our ball team played against
the team of a neighboring mill, and the owners and bosses were on the
sidelines coaching the men and yelling like boys when a batter lifted a
homer over the fence. That was before the rattle heads and fanatics
had poisoned the well of good fellowship and made men fear and hate
one another. Sometimes the Welsh would play against the Irish or the
English. At one time most all the puddlers in America were English,
Irish or Welsh.

In these ball games, I am glad to say, I was always good enough to make
the team. After telling of being a bandsman at thirteen and a puddler at
sixteen, I would like to say that at seventeen I was batting more home
runs than Babe Ruth in his prime, but everything I say must be backed up
by the records, and when my baseball record is examined it will be found
that my best playing on the diamond was done in the band.



CHAPTER XVI. WRESTING A PRIZE FROM NATURE'S HAND


After melting down the pig-iron as quickly as possible, which took me
thirty minutes, there was a pause in which I had time to wipe the back
of my hand on the dryest part of my clothing (if any spot was still dry)
and with my sweat cap wipe the sweat and soot out of my eyes. For the
next seven minutes I “thickened the heat up” by adding iron oxide to the
bath. This was in the form of roll scale. The furnace continued in full
blast till that was melted. The liquid metal in the hearth is called
slag. The iron oxide is put in it to make it more basic for the chemical
reaction that is to take place. Adding the roll scale had cooled the
charge, and it was thick like hoecake batter. I now thoroughly mixed it
with a rabble which is like a long iron hoe.

       “Snake bake a hoecake,
     And lef' a frog to mind it;
         Frog went away, an'
     De lizard come and find it.”

Any lizard attracted by my hoecake would have to be a salamander--that
fire-proof creature that is supposed to live in flames. For the cooling
down of that molten batter didn't go so far but that it still would make
too hot a mouthful for any creature alive.

The puddler's hand-rag is one of his most important tools. It is about
the size of a thick wash-rag, and the puddler carries it in the hand
that clasps the rabble rod where it is too hot for bare flesh to endure.

The melted iron contains carbon, sulphur and phosphorus, and to get rid
of them, especially the sulphur and phosphorus, is the object of all
this heat and toil. For it is the sulphur and phosphorus that make the
iron brittle. And brittle iron might as well not be iron at all; it
might better be clay. For a good brick wall is stronger than a wall of
brittle iron. Yet nature will not give us pure iron. She always gives
it to us mixed with the stuff that weakens it--this dross and brimstone.
Nature hands out no bonanzas, no lead-pipe cinches to mankind. Man must
claw for everything he gets, and when he gets it, it is mixed with dirt.
And if he wants it clean, he'll have to clean it with the labor of
his hands. “Why can't we have a different system than this?” I heard a
theorist complain. “I'll bite,” I said. “Why can't we?” And I went on
boiling out the impurities in my puddle.

Man's nature is like iron, never born in a pure state but always mixed
with elements that weaken it. Envy, greed and malice are mixed with
every man's nature when he comes into the world. They are the brimstone
that makes him brittle. He is pig-iron until he boils them out of his
system. Savages and criminals are men who have not tried to boil this
dross out of their nature. Lincoln was one who boiled it out in the
fires of adversity. He puddled his own soul till the metal was pure, and
that's how he got the Iron Will that was strong enough to save a nation.

My purpose in slackening my heat as soon as the pig-iron was melted
was to oxidize the phosphorus and sulphur ahead of the carbon. Just as
alcohol vaporizes at a lower heat than water, so sulphur and phosphorus
oxidize at a lower heat than carbon. When this reaction begins I see
light flames breaking through the lake of molten slag in my furnace.
Probably from such a sight as this the old-time artists got their
pictures of Hell. The flames are caused by the burning of carbon
monoxide from the oxidation of carbon. The slag is basic and takes the
sulphur and phosphorus into combination, thus ending its combination
with the iron. The purpose now is to oxidize the carbon, too, without
reducing the phosphorus and sulphur and causing them to return to the
iron. We want the pure iron to begin crystallizing out of the bath like
butter from the churning buttermilk.

More and more of the carbon gas comes out of the puddle, and as it
bubbles out the charge is agitated by its escape and the “boil” is in
progress. It is not real boiling like the boiling of a teakettle. When
a teakettle boils the water turns to bubbles of vapor and goes up in the
air to turn to water again when it gets cold. But in the boiling iron
puddle a chemical change is taking place. The iron is not going up
in vapor. The carbon and the oxygen are. This formation of gas in the
molten puddle causes the whole charge to boil up like an ice-cream soda.
The slag overflows. Redder than strawberry syrup and as hot as the fiery
lake in Hades it flows over the rim of the hearth and out through the
slag-hole. My helper has pushed up a buggy there to receive it. More
than an eighth and sometimes a quarter of the weight of the pig-iron
flows off in slag and is carted away.

Meanwhile I have got the job of my life on my hands. I must stir my
boiling mess with all the strength in my body. For now is my chance to
defeat nature and wring from the loosening grip of her hand the pure
iron she never intended to give us.



CHAPTER XVII. MAN IS IRON TOO


For twenty-five minutes while the boil goes on I stir it constantly with
my long iron rabble. A cook stirring gravy to keep it from scorching in
the skillet is done in two minutes and backs off blinking, sweating
and choking, having finished the hardest job of getting dinner. But my
hardest job lasts not two minutes but the better part of half an hour.
My spoon weighs twenty-five pounds, my porridge is pasty iron, and the
heat of my kitchen is so great that if my body was not hardened to it,
the ordeal would drop me in my tracks.

Little spikes of pure iron like frost spars glow white-hot and stick
out of the churning slag. These must be stirred under at once; the long
stream of flame from the grate plays over the puddle, and the pure iron
if lapped by these gases would be oxidized--burned up.

Pasty masses of iron form at the bottom of the puddle. There they would
stick and become chilled if they were not constantly stirred. The whole
charge must be mixed and mixed as it steadily thickens so that it will
be uniform throughout. I am like some frantic baker in the inferno
kneading a batch of iron bread for the devil's breakfast.

“It's an outrage that men should have to work like this,” a reformer
told me.

“They don't have to,” I replied. “Nobody forced me to do this. I do
it because I would rather live in an Iron Age than live in a world of
ox-carts. Man can take his choice.”

The French were not compelled to stand in the flame that scorched
Verdun. They could have backed away and let the Germans through. The
Germans would not have killed them. They would only have saddled them
and got on their backs and ridden them till the end of time.

And so men are not compelled to face the scorching furnaces; we do
not have to forge the iron that resists the invading cyclone and the
leveling earthquake. We could quit cold and let wild nature kick
us about at will. We could have cities of wood to be wiped out by
conflagrations; we could build houses of mud and sticks for the gales to
unroof like a Hottentot village. We could bridge our small rivers with
logs and be flood-bound when the rains descended. We could live by
wheelbarrow transit like the Chinaman and leave to some braver race the
task of belting the world with railroads and bridging the seas with iron
boats.

Nobody compels us to stand shoulder to shoulder and fight off nature's
calamities as the French fought off their oppressor at Verdun. I repeat,
we could let nature oppress us as she oppresses the meek Chinese--let
her whip us with cold, drought, flood, isolation and famine.

We chose to resist as the French resisted--because we are men. Nature
can chase the measly savage fleeing naked through the bush. But nature
can't run us ragged when all we have to do is put up a hard fight and
conquer her. The iron workers are civilization's shock troops grappling
with tyrannous nature on her own ground and conquering new territory in
which man can live in safety and peace. Steel houses with glass windows
are born of his efforts. There is a glory in this fight; man feels a
sense of grandeur. We are robbing no one. From the harsh bosom of the
hills we wring the iron milk that makes us strong. Nature is no kind
mother; she resists with flood and earthquake, drought and cyclone.
Nature is fierce and formidable, but fierce is man's soul to subdue her.
The stubborn earth is iron, but man is iron too.



CHAPTER XVIII. ON BEING A GOOD GUESSER


The charge which I have been kneading in my furnace has now “come to
nature,” the stringy sponge of pure iron is separating from the slag.
The “balling” of this sponge into three loaves is a task that occupies
from ten to fifteen minutes. The particles of iron glowing in this
spongy mass are partly welded together; they are sticky and stringy
and as the cooling continues they are rolled up into wads like popcorn
balls. The charge, which lost part of its original weight by the
draining off of slag, now weighs five hundred fifty to six hundred
pounds. I am balling it into three parts of equal weight. If the charge
is six hundred pounds, each of my balls must weigh exactly two hundred
pounds.

I have always been proud of the “batting eye” that enables an iron
puddler to shape the balls to the exact weight required. This is a
mental act,--an act of judgment. The artist and the sculptor must have
this same sense of proportion. A man of low intelligence could never
learn to do it. We are paid by weight, and in my time, in the Sharon
mill, the balls were required to be two hundred pounds. Every pound
above that went to the company and was loss to the men.

I have heard that “guessing pigs” was an old-time sport among farmers.
To test their skill, each farmer would guess the weight of a grazing
pig. Then they would catch the porker, throw him on the scales, and find
out which farmer had guessed nearest the mark. Sunday clothes used to be
badly soiled in this sport.

But the iron worker does not guess his pigs. He knows exactly how much
pig-iron he put into the boil. His guessing skill comes into play when
with a long paddle and hook he separates six hundred pounds of sizzling
fireworks into three fire balls each of which will weigh two hundred
pounds.

The balls are rolled up into three resting places, one in the
fire-bridge corner, one in the flue-bridge corner, and one in the jam,
all ready for the puddler to draw them.

My batch of biscuits is now done and I must take them out at once and
rush them to the hungry mouth of the squeezing machine. A bride making
biscuits can jerk them out of the oven all in one pan. But my oven is
larger and hotter. I have to use long-handled tongs, and each of my
biscuits weighs twice as much as I weigh. Suppose you were a cook with a
fork six feet long, and had three roasting sheep on the grid at once
to be forked off as quickly as possible. Could you do it? Even with a
helper wouldn't you probably scorch the mutton or else burn yourself to
death with the hot grease? That is where strength and skill must both
come into play.

One at a time the balls are drawn out on to a buggy and wheeled swiftly
to the squeezer. This machine squeezes out the slag which flows down
like the glowing lava running out of a volcano. The motion of the
squeezer is like the circular motion you use in rolling a bread pill
between the palms and squeezing the water out of it. I must get the
three balls, or blooms, out of the furnace and into the squeezer while
the slag is still liquid so that it can be squeezed out of the iron.

From cold pig-iron to finished blooms is a process that takes from an
hour and ten minutes, to an hour and forty minutes, depending on the
speed and skill of the puddler, and the kind of iron. I was a fast
one, myself. But you expected that, from the fact that I am telling the
story. The man that tells the story always comes out a winner.



CHAPTER XIX. I START ON MY TRAVELS


Now that I was a master puddler, I faced the problem of finding a
furnace of my own. I saw no chance in Sharon. Furnaces passed from
father to son, so I could not hope to get one of the furnaces controlled
by another family. My father was not ready to relinquish his furnace to
me, as he was good for twenty years more of this vigorous labor.

I wanted to be a real boss puddler, and so, when I was eighteen I went
to Pittsburgh and got a furnace. But a new period of hard times was
setting in, jobs were getting scarce as they had been in 1884. That was
the year when we had no money in the house and I was chasing every loose
nickel in town. The mill at Sharon was down, and father was hunting work
in Pittsburgh and elsewhere. Then after a period of prosperity the hard
times had come again in 1891 and '92. My furnace job in Pittsburgh was
not steady. The town was full of iron workers and many of them were in
desperate need. Those who had jobs divided their time with their needy
comrades. A man with hungry children would be given a furnace for a few
days to earn enough to ward off starvation. I had no children and felt
that I should not hold a furnace. I left Pittsburgh and went to Niles,
Ohio, where I found less competition for the jobs. I worked a few
weeks and the mill shut down. I wandered all over the iron district and
finally, deciding that the North held no openings, I began working my
way toward the iron country in the South.

The Sharon mill did not shut down completely. The owner operated it at a
loss rather than throw all his old hands out on the world. Twenty years
later I met him on a train in the West and we talked of old times when
I worked in his mill. As long as he lived he was loved and venerated by
his former employees.

Father was putting in short time at Sharon and was badly worried. He was
thinking of setting out again to go from town to town looking for work,
but I had advised him against it. I had told him that he would merely
find crowds of idle men roaming from mill to mill along with him. My
brothers gave him similar advice.

“Father,” we said, “it is a time of business depression and wide-spread
unemployment. If you went to Pittsburgh you might find a few weeks'
work, but it would not pay you to go there for it. You would have to lay
out cash for your board and lodging there before you could send anything
home to mother. Keeping up two establishments is harder than keeping up
one. You have a home here partly paid for, and a big garden that helps
support that home. It is better for you to stick with this establishment
and work at half time in the mill than to roam around at big expense
seeking full time in some other mill. There may be no mill in the land
that is running full time.”

This had not occurred to him. What lay beyond the hills was all mystery.
But we young fellows had been brought up in the American atmosphere, we
had read the Youth's Companion and the newspapers, and our outlook was
widened; we could guess that conditions were the same in other states
as they were in our part of Pennsylvania, for we were studying economic
causes.

“It is better for you to stay here and wait for good times to come
again. Hang on to your home, and if in a few months or a few years the
mills begin booming again you will be secure for life. But if the iron
industry doesn't revive, give up that trade and find other work here.
If necessary go out and work on a farm, for the farming industry will
always have to be carried on.”

Father saw the force of our argument. So he stayed and kept his home.
He has it to-day. But if he had wandered around as millions of us did in
those hard days he would surely have lost it. This was my first little
attempt to work out an economic problem. I had studied all the facts and
then pronounced my judgment. It proved right, and so I learned that in
my small way I had a head for financiering. This encouraged me, for it
taught me that the worker can solve part of his problems by using his
head.

The fear of ending in the poor-house is one of the terrors that dog a
man through life. There are only three parts to the labor problem, and
this is one of them. This fear causes “unrest.” This unrest was used
by revolutionists to promote Bolshevism which turns whole empires into
poor-houses. Such a “remedy,” of course, is worse than the disease. I
think I know a plan by which all workers can make their old age secure.
I will go into it more fully in a later chapter.



CHAPTER XX. THE RED FLAG AND THE WATERMELONS


I have said that the labor problem has three parts. I call them (1)
Wages, (2) Working Conditions and (3) Living Conditions. By living
conditions I mean the home and its security. My father had reached the
stage where this was the problem that worried him. He was growing old
and must soon cease working. But his home was not yet secure and he was
haunted with the fear that his old age might be shelterless. We told him
not to worry; the Davis boys were many and we would repay him for the
fatherly care he had given us. But he was a proud man (as all muscular
men are), and he could find no comfort in the thought of being supported
by his sons. I am glad he never had to be. Independence has made his old
age happy and he has proved that a worker, if he keeps his health, can
provide for his old age and bring up a big family too.

We older boys left home and hunted work elsewhere. I was young and
not bothered about working conditions or living conditions. I was so
vigorous that I could work under any conditions, and old age was so far
away that I was not worried about a home for my declining years. Wages
was my sole problem. I wanted steady wages, and of course I wanted the
highest I could get. To find the place where wages were to be had I was
always on the go. When a mill closed I did not wait for it to reopen,
but took the first train for some other mill town. The first train
usually was a freight. If not, I waited for a freight, for I could sleep
better in a freight car than in a Pullman--it cost less. I could save
money and send it to mother, then she would not have to sell her feather
beds.

All of this sounds nobler than it was. In those days workers never
traveled on passenger trains unless they could get a pass. Judges and
statesmen pursued the same policy. To pay for a ticket was money thrown
away; so thought the upper classes and the lower classes. About the only
people that paid car fare were the Knights of Pythias on their way to
their annual convention. Railroad workers could get all the passes they
wanted, and any toiler whose sister had married a brakeman or whose
second cousin was a conductor “bummed” the railroad for a pass and got
it. None of my relatives was a railroad man, and so to obtain the free
transportation which was every American's inalienable right, I had to
let the passenger trains go by and take the freights.

Once I got ditched at a junction, and while waiting for the next freight
I wandered down the track to where I had seen a small house and a
big watermelon patch. The man who lived there was a chap named Frank
Bannerman. I always remember him because he was a communist, the first
one I ever saw, and he filled my pockets with about ten pounds of
radical pamphlets which I promised to read. He made a bargain with me
that if I would read and digest the Red literature he would give me all
the watermelons I could eat.

“I'm a comrade already,” I said, meaning it as a merry jest, that I
would be anything for a watermelon. But he took it seriously and his
eyes lit up like any fanatic's.

“I knew it,” he said. “With a face like yours--look at the brow, look
at the intellect, the intellect.” I was flattered. “Come here, wife,” he
called through the door. “Come here and look at the intellect.”

The wife, who was a barefooted, freckle-faced woman, came out on the
porch and, smiling sweetly, sized up my intellect. I made up my mind
that here were the two smartest people in America. For they saw I was
bulging with intellect. Nobody else had ever discovered it, not even I
myself. I thought I was a muscle-bound iron puddler, but they pronounced
me an intellectual giant. It never occurred to me that they might have
guessed wrong, while the wise old world had guessed right. If the world
was in step, they were out of step, but I figured that the world was out
of step and they had the right stride. I thought their judgment must
be better than the judgment of the whole world because their judgment
pleased me. I later learned that their judgment was just like the
judgment of all Reds. That's what makes 'em Red.

“Are there many of us where you come from?” the man asked.

“Many what?” I asked.

“Communists, communists,” he said excitedly.

I wanted to please him, because we were now cracking the melons and
scooping out their luscious hearts. So I told him how many comrades
there were in each of the rolling mills where I had worked. I had to
invent the statistics out of my own head, but that head was full of
intellect, so I jokingly gave him a fine array of figures. The fact was
that there may have been an addle-pated Red among the mill hands of that
time, but if there was I had never met him.

The figures that I furnished Comrade Bannerman surprised him. I counted
the seeds in each slice of watermelon and gave that as the number of
comrades in each mill. The number was too high. Comrade Bannerman knew
how many Reds there were in the country, and it appeared that the few
mills I had worked in contained practically the whole communist party.
He got rather excited and said the numbers were growing faster than he
had imagined. He had figured that it would take forty years to bring
about the Red commonwealth, but with the new light I had thrown on the
subject he concluded that the times were ripening faster than he had
dared to hope, and that there was no doubt the revolution would be upon
us within three years.

The comrade told me he was not popular in the village for two reasons.
The capitalistic storekeepers called him a dead beat and the church
people had rotten-egged him for a speech he had made denouncing
religion. I saw by his hands that he didn't work much, and from the
hands of his wife I learned who raised the watermelons he was feeding
to me. I remember wondering why he didn't pay his grocery bill with the
money he spent on pamphlets to stuff in the pockets of passers-by.



CHAPTER XXI. ENVY IS THE SULPHUR IN HUMAN PIG-IRON


While I was feasting on the watermelons and feeling at peace with all
the world, a long passenger train pulled into the junction. The train
was made up of Pullmans and each car was covered with flags, streamers
and lodge insignia. On the heels of this train came another and then
another. These gay cars were filled with members of the Knights of
Pythias going to their convention in Denver.

At the sight of these men in their Pullmans, my friend the communist
first turned pale, then green, then red. His eyes narrowed and blazed
like those of a madman. He stood up on his porch, clenched his fists and
launched into the most violent fit of cursing I ever heard. The sight of
those holiday-makers had turned him into a demon. He thought they were
capitalists. Here was the hated tribe of rich men, the idle classes, all
dressed up with flags flying, riding across the country on a jamboree.

“The blood-sucking parasites! The bleareyed barnacles!” yelled Comrade
Bannerman. He shook his fists at the plutocrats and cursed until he made
me sick. He was a tank-town nut who didn't like to work; had built up a
theory that work was a curse and that the “idle classes” had forced
this curse on the masses, of which he was one. He believed that all the
classes had to do was to clip coupons, cash them and ride around the
country in Pullman palace cars. Here was the whole bunch of them in
seven “specials” rolling right by his front door. He cursed them again
and prayed that the train might be wrecked and that every one of
the blinkety blinkety scoundrels might be killed. If all these idle
plutocrats could be destroyed in a heap they would be lifted from the
backs of the masses, and the masses would not have to work any more.

Bannerman was a fool, and I could even then see just what made him
foolish. He was full of the brimstone of envy. The sight of those
well-dressed travelers eating in the dining cars drove him wild. He
wanted to be in their places, but he was too lazy to work and earn the
money that would put him there. I knew that they were not rich men;
they were school-teachers, doctors, butchers and bakers, machinists and
puddlers. They had saved their money for a year in order to have the
price of this convention trip to Denver. Comrade Bannerman was pig-iron,
and envy made him brittle. He should have been melted down and had the
sulphur boiled out of him. Then he would have been wrought iron; as were
the men he was so envious of.

He was not envious of me, of course, because he thought I was a tramp.
Indeed he thought I was as envious as he, and so he classed the two of
us as “intellectuals.” From this I learned that “Intellectuals” is a
name that weak men, crazed with envy, give to themselves. They believe
the successful men lack intellect; are all luck. This thought soothes
their envy and keeps it from driving them mad.

I thanked Comrade Bannerman for his pamphlets and threw him a few coins
to pay for the melons he had given me. But my peep into his soul had
taught me more than his propaganda could teach me. Later I read all
the pamphlets because I had promised I would. They told of the labor
movement and the theories at work in Germany. One of them was called
Merrie England and declared that England had once been merry, but
capitalism had crushed all joy and turned the island into a living hell.
I remembered my mother in Wales rocking her baby's cradle and singing
all day long with a voice vibrant with joy. If capitalism had crushed
her heart she hadn't heard about it.

When the lodge excursion train had passed on toward the convention city,
I hopped a freight and bade Comrade Bannerman goodby. Had I told him
that from my earnings I had salted away enough money to buy his little
shack he would have hated me as he hated the lodge members in the
Pullmans. I did not hate those men. They were doing me a service by
traveling across the country. For they belonged to the fare-paying
classes; their money kept the railroads going so they could carry
politicians and some of us working men free.



CHAPTER XXII. LOADED DOWN WITH LITERATURE


After I had read the various pamphlets that Bannerman gave me I was like
the old negro who went to sleep with his mouth open. A white man came
along and put a spoonful of quinine in his mouth. When the negro woke up
the bitter taste worried him. “What does it mean?” he asked. The white
man told him it meant that he “had done bu'sted his gall bladder and
didn't have long to live.” A mighty bad taste was left in my mouth by
those communist pamphlets. If they were telling the truth I realized
that labor's gall bladder had done bu'sted and we didn't have long to
live. One book said that British capitalists owned all the money in
the world and that at a given signal they would draw the money out of
America and the working men here would starve to death in twenty-nine
days. It seemed that some crank had fasted that many days in order to
get accurate statistics showing just how long the working man could hope
to last after England pushed the button for the money panic.

Another book said that Wall Street now owned ninety per cent. of the
wealth in America and was getting the other ten at the rate of eight per
cent. a year. Within twelve years Wall Street would own everything in
the world, and mankind would be left naked and starving.

The wildest book of all was called Caesar's Column. It was in the form
of a novel and told how the rich in America worshiped gold and lust
instead of God and brotherly love, and how they drove their carriages
over the working man's children and left them crushed and bleeding in
the street. America had ceased to be a republic and was an oligarchy
of wealth all owned by a dozen great families while the millions were
starving. The end of the book described a great revolution in which the
people arose, led by an Italian communist named Caesar Spadoni. The mob
took all the fine houses and killed the rich people. Caesar took the
bodies and, laying them in cement like bricks, he built an enormous
column of corpses in Union Square towering higher than any building in
New York. He established his headquarters in a Fifth Avenue palace and
was directing the slaughter of all men who owned property, when some of
his followers got jealous of his fine position and killed him and burned
the house. By that time everything in America was destroyed, and the
hero of the book, having invented an air-ship, flew away to South Africa
to escape the general demolition. This book was being circulated by
communists as a true picture of what the country was coming to.

These pamphlets came into my hands at a time when work was getting
scarcer every day and a million men like myself were moving about the
country looking for jobs. Then for the first time I realized my need for
a broader education. If these things were true, it was my duty to stop
chasing the vanishing job and begin to organize the workers so that they
might destroy the capitalists. But how could I know whether they were
true? I had no knowledge of past history. And without knowing the past
how could I judge the future? I was like the old man who had never seen
a railroad train. His sons took him thirty miles over the hills and
brought him to the depot where a train was standing. The old man looked
things over and saw that the wheels were made of iron. “It will never
start,” he said. He knew that if his wagon had heavy iron wheels, his
team could never start it. But his sons said: “It will start all right.”
 They had seen it before; they knew its past history. Soon the train
started, gathered speed like a whirlwind and went roaring away down the
track. The old man gazed after it and then, much excited, he exclaimed.
“It will never stop!”

The wisest head is no judge unless it has in it the history of past
performances. I had not studied much history in my brief schooling. The
mills called me because they needed men. Good times were there when I
arrived, and as for hard times, I was sure they “would never start.” Now
the hard times were upon us and panic shook the ground beneath our feet.
“It will never stop,” men cried. Had they studied the history of such
things they would have known that hard times come and hard times go,
starting and stopping for definite reasons, like the railway train.

I had done the right thing in quitting school and going to the puddling
furnaces at a time when we needed iron more than we needed education.
The proverb says, “Strike while the iron is hot.” The country was
building, and I gave it iron to build with. Railroads were still pushing
out their mighty arms and stringing their iron rails across the western
wheat lands. Bridges were crossing the Mississippi and spanning the
chasms in the Rocky Mountains. Chicago and New York were rising in new
growth with iron in their bones to hold them high. My youth was spent in
giving to this growing land the element its body needed.

Now that body was sick. What was the matter with it? Lacking an
education, I was unprepared to say. When I left school my theory was
that every boy should learn a trade as soon as possible. Now I saw that
a trade was not enough. A worker needs an education, also. The trade
comes first, perhaps, but the education ought to follow on its heels.

During the next ten years of my life I was a worker and a student, too.
My motto was that every one should have at least a high-school education
and a trade.



CHAPTER XXIII. THE PUDDLER HAS A VISION


That caravan of railroad cars bearing the happy lodge members to their
meeting in the Rockies, had started a train of thought that went winding
through my mind ever after. In fancy I saw the envious Bannerman shaking
his fist at his thriftier, happier brothers. Should I denounce the
banding together of men for the promotion of fun and good fellowship?
Were these men hastening the downfall of America as the communist
predicted? Is not good fellowship a necessary feeling in the hearts of
civilized men?

Love of comrades had always been a ruling passion with me. I joined my
union as soon as I had learned my trade, the Amalgamated Association of
Iron, Steel and Tin Workers of North America. It was a long name, and we
liked every word in it. We felt the glow of brotherhood, and as I said
before, we used to share our jobs with the brother who was out of work.
The union paid a weekly benefit to men who had to strike for better
working conditions. At that time there were no death benefits nor any
fund to educate the children of members killed in the mills. When such
a death happened, the union appointed a committee to stand at the office
window on pay-day and ask every man to contribute something from his
wages. There is a charitable spirit among men who labor together and
they always gave freely to any fund for the widow and orphans. This
spirit is the force that lifts man above the beasts and makes his
civilization. There is no mercy in brute nature. The hawk eats the
sparrow; the fox devours the young rabbit; the cat leaps from under a
bush and kills the mother robin while the young are left to starve in
the nest. There is neither right nor wrong among the brutes because they
have no moral sense. They do not kill for revenge nor torture for the
love of cruelty, as Comrade Bannerman would in praying that the train
be wrecked and the rich men burned to death in the ruin. The beasts
can feel no pity, no sympathy, no regret, for nature gave them no
conscience. But man differs from all creation because he has a moral
sense, he has a conscience. My conscience has been a very present thing
with me through all my life. I am a praying man. I never take a doubtful
step until I have prayed for guidance.

“You'll never get anywhere, Jim,” fellows have said to me, “as long as
your conscience is so darn active. To win in this world you have got to
be slick. What a man earns will keep him poor. It's what he gains that
makes him rich.” If this is so, the nation with the lowest morals will
have the most wealth. But the truth is just the opposite. The richest
nations are those that have the highest moral sense.

But this was a great problem for a young uneducated man. To be told by
some of my fellows that dishonesty was the only road to wealth, and to
be shown in communist documents that the capitalists of America were
stealing everything from the workers, put a mighty problem up to me. And
that's what made me pray for guidance. I pray because I want an answer,
and when it comes I recognize in it my own conscience. Praying banishes
all selfish thoughts from mind, and gives the voice of conscience a
chance to be heard. I pray for a higher moral sense, that which lifts
man above beasts, and when my answer comes and I feel morally right,
then all hell can't make me knuckle under. For civilization is built on
man's morals not on brute force (as Germany learned to her sorrow), and
I fight for the moral law as long as there is any fight left in me.

Nature planned that when the cat ate the mother robin, the young robins
in the nest must starve. Nature had other robins that would escape the
enemy. But among men it is wrong for the little ones to suffer when the
hand that feeds them is destroyed. For man has sympathy, which beasts
have not. Sympathy is the iron fiber in man that welds him to his
fellows. Envy is the sulphur that pollutes these bonds and makes them
brittle. Suppose some master puddler of humanity could gather thousands
of men into a melting-pot, a fraternity whose purpose was to boil out
the envy, greed and malice as much as possible, and purify the good
metal of human sympathy. How much greater the social value of these men
would be. Bound together by good fellowship and human sympathy these men
could pool their charity and build a happy city where all the children
of their stricken comrades could be sent to school together, there to
learn that man is moral, that the strong do not destroy the weak, that
the nestling is not left to fate, but that the fatherless are fathered
by all men whose hearts have heard their cry.

This vision came to me in the darkest days of my life. I had seen the
children of my dead comrades scattered like leaves from a smitten tree
never to meet again. I had left my parents' roof to be buffeted about by
strikes and unemployment, and I feared that our home would be lost and
my brothers scattered forever. The voice of hate was whispering that the
“classes” would ride down the children of the poor, and with this gloomy
thought I went to bed. My couch was a bed of coal slack, and I was
journeying to a mill town in a freight car.

As we rolled along, I saw in a vision train after train of lodge men
going to some happy city. They were miners and steel workers, as well
as clerks and teachers, and they were banded together, not like Reds to
overthrow the wage system, but to teach themselves and their children
how to make the wage system shed its greatest blessings upon all. The
city they were going to was one they had built with their own hands.
And in that city was a school where every trade was taught to fatherless
children, as my father taught his trade to me. And with this trade each
child received the liberal education that the rich man gives his son but
which the poor man goes without. This was the wildest fancy I had ever
entertained. It was born of my own need of knowledge. It was a dream I
feared I could not hope to realize.



CHAPTER XXIV. JOE THE POOR BRAKEMAN


A brakeman stuck his head in the end window of the box car and shouted
at me:

“Where're you going?”

“Birmingham,” I answered.

“What have you got to go on?”

I had some money in my belt, but I would need that for the
boarding-house keeper in the Alabama iron town. So I drew something from
my vest pocket and said:

“This is all I've got left.”

The trainman examined it by the dim light at the window. His eye told
him that it was a fine gold watch. “All right,” he said as he pocketed
it and went away. I never knew whether I cheated the brakeman or the
brakeman cheated me. The watch wasn't worth as much as the ride, but the
ride wasn't his to sell.

I had bought the watch in Cincinnati. A fake auction in a pawnshop
attracted my attention as I walked along a street near the depot. The
auctioneer was offering a “solid gold, Swiss movement, eighteen jeweled
watch” to the highest bidder. “This watch belongs to my friend Joe
Coupling,” he said, “a brakeman on the B. & O. He was in a wreck and
is now in the hospital. Everybody knows that one of the best things a
railroader has is his watch. He only parts with it as a matter of life
and death. Joe has got to sell his watch and somebody is going to get
a bargain. This watch cost eighty-five dollars and you couldn't buy the
like of it to-day for one hundred. How much am I offered?” Some one bid
five dollars, and the bidding continued until it was up to twenty-five
dollars. At that price the watch was declared sold, and I strolled on,
thinking the matter over. I figured that the story of Joe the injured
brakeman must be false. If he had an eighty-five-dollar watch he could
borrow forty on it. Why should his “friend” have sold it outright for
twenty-five? The fakery of it was plain to any one who stopped to think.
Who then would be fool enough to pay twenty-five dollars for a fake
watch at a side auction? Not I. I was too wise. “How easy it is,” I said
to myself, “to solve a skin game.”

The next day I happened to pass the place again and they were selling
the same watch. I listened for the second time to the sad story of
Joe the brakeman. He was still in the hospital and still willing to
sacrifice his eighty-five-dollar gold watch to the highest bidder. Just
for fun I started off the bidding at two dollars. The auctioneer at once
knocked down the watch to me and took my money. The speed of it dazed
me, and I stumbled along the street like a fool. What was the game? I
held the glittering watch in my hand and gazed at it like a hypnotized
bird. I came to another pawnshop and went in. “What will you give me on
this watch?” I asked. The pawnbroker glanced at it and said he couldn't
give me anything but advice.

“I can buy these watches for three dollars a dozen. They are made to be
sold at auction. The case is not gold and the works won't run.”

I had been caught in the game after all. The whole show had been put on
for me. The men who did the bidding the first day were “with the show.”
 Their scheme was to get a real bid from me. When I failed to bite, they
rung down the curtain and waited for the next come-on. The show was
staged again for me the following day, and that time they got me. I had
the “brakeman's watch” and he had the laugh on me. In the next wreck
that Brakeman Joe got into I wished him the same luck Comrade Bannerman
wished for the trainload of plutocrats. “If I should meet Joe now,” I
said, “I'd gladly give him back the timepiece that he prizes so.” Let us
hope that the brakeman I gave the watch to down in Alabama was Brakeman
Joe.

There was much to think of in that auction incident. Experience will
often give the lie to theory. My theory of the game was good enough for
me. I acted on my theory, and they got my money. Perhaps the theory of
Bannerman was wrong. He claimed he knew just how the capitalists were
robbing labor. Suppose we backed his theory with some money and got
stung? I was now theory shy and I have stayed away from theories ever
since.

If you know the facts, no swindle can deceive you. I spend my life in
getting facts. I now have seen enough to know that capitalism is not a
swindle. If all hands labored hard and honestly the system would enrich
us all. Some workers are dishonest and they gouge the employers. Some
employers are dishonest and they gouge the workers. But whether employer
or employee does the robbing, the public is the one that's robbed. And
they are both members of the public. In making the world poorer they are
rendering a sorry service to the world.

Dishonesty is the thing that does the trick. And it is not confined to
any class. It was not a capitalist but a slick wind worker who robbed
me by the watch swindle. He had to swing his jaw for hours every day in
order to steal a few dollars.



CHAPTER XXV. A DROP IN THE BUCKET OF BLOOD


In Birmingham I found a job in a rolling mill and established myself
in a good boarding-house. In those days a “good boarding-house” in
iron workers' language meant one where you got good board. One such was
called “The Bucket of Blood.” It got its name because a bloody
fight occurred there almost every day. Any meal might end in a
knock-down-and-drag-out. The ambulance called there almost as often as
the baker's cart. But it was a “good” boarding-house. And I established
myself there.

Good board consists in lots of greasy meat, strong coffee and slabs of
sweet pie with gummy crusts, as thick as the palm of your hand. At the
Bucket of Blood we had this delicious fare and plenty of it. When a man
comes out of the mills he wants quantity as well as quality. We had both
at the Bucket of Blood, and whenever a man got knocked out by a fist and
was carted away in the ambulance, the next man on the waiting list was
voted into our club to fill the vacancy. We had what is called “family
reach” at the table (both in feeding and fighting). Each man cut off a
big quivering hunk of roast pork or greasy beef and passed the platter
to his neighbor. The landlady stood behind the chairs and directed two
colored girls to pour coffee into each cup as it was emptied.

These cups were not china cups with little handles such as you use in
your home. They were big “ironstone” bowls the size of beer schooners,
such as we used to see pictured at “Schmiddy's Place,” with the legend,
“Largest In The City, 5c.” (How some of us would like to see those signs
once more!) To prevent the handles from being broken off, these cups
were made without handles. They were so thick that you could drop them
on the floor and not damage the cups. When one man hit another on the
head with this fragile china, the skull cracked before the teacup did.
The “family reach” which we developed in helping ourselves to food, was
sometimes used in reaching across the table and felling a man with a
blow on the chin. Kipling has described this hale and hearty type of
strong man's home in Fulta Fisher's Boarding-House where sailors rested
from the sea.


     “A play of shadows on the wall,
       A knife thrust unawares
     And Hans came down (as cattle fall),
       Across the broken chairs.”


But the boarders did not fight with knives at the Bucket of Blood.
Knifing is not an American game. We fought with fists, coffee cups and
pieces of furniture, after the furniture went to pieces. We were not
fighting to make the world safe for democracy, although we were the most
democratic fellows in the world. We slept two to a bed, four to a room.
Not always the same four, for like soldiers on the firing line, some
comrade was missing after every battle.

These fights started in friendly banter. One fellow would begin teasing
another about his girl. The whole table would take it up, every man
doing his best to insult and enrage the victim. It was all fun until
some fellow's temper broke under the strain. Then a rush, and a few
wild swings that missed. Then the thud of a blow that connected, and the
fight was over. These men had arms with the strength of a horse's leg,
and as soon as their “kick” struck solid flesh, the man hit was knocked
out. He wouldn't be back for supper, but the rest of us would, without
having our appetites disturbed in the least. I didn't like these
methods, but if the boys did I was not going to complain.

My practice of studying at night offended my roommates. The lamplight
got in their eyes. There were three fellows in the room besides myself.
For several nights they advised me to “cut out the higher education,
douse that light and come to bed.” Finally they spoke about it in the
daytime. “Majority rules,” they said, “and there's three of us against
you. We can't sleep while you have that lamp burning. The light keeps
us awake and it also makes the room so hot that the devil couldn't stand
it. If you stay up reading to-night we'll give you the bum's rush.”

I was so interested in my books that I couldn't help lingering with them
after the other fellows went to bed. Everything grew quiet. Suddenly six
hands sized me and flung me out the window. It was a second-story window
and I carried the screen with me. But as it was full of air holes it
didn't make a very competent parachute. I landed with a thud on the roof
of the woodshed, which, being old and soft with southern moss, caved in
and carried me to the ground below--alive. The fellows up above threw my
books out the window, aiming them at my head. They threw me my hat and
coat and my valise, and I departed from the Bucket of Blood, and took up
my abode at “The Greasy Spoon.”



CHAPTER XXVI. A GRUB REFORMER PUTS US OUT OF GRUB


The Greasy Spoon isn't an appetizing name; not appetizing to men who
live a sedentary life. But it was meant as a lure to men who live by
muscular toil. It sounded good to us mill workers for, like Eskimos, we
craved much fat in our diet. We were great muscular machines, and fat
was the fuel for our engines. Muckraking was just beginning in those
days, and a prying reformer came to live for a while at the Greasy
Spoon. He told us that so much grease in our food would kill us. We
were ignorant of dietetics; all we knew was that our stomachs cried for
plenty of fat. The reformer said that our landlady fed us much fat meat
because it was the cheapest food she could buy. Milk, eggs and fruits
would cost more, and so this greedy cruel woman was lining her pocket at
the expense of our lives.

The landlady was a kindly person, and she took the reformer's advice.
She banished the fat pork, and supplied the table with other food
substitutes, but she was generous and gave us plenty of them. We ate
this reformed food and found we were growing weaker every day at the
puddling furnace. We got the blues and became sullen. Gradually all
laughter ceased in that boarding-house. We even felt too low to fight.
At the end of two weeks there was one general cry: “Hog fat, and plenty
of it!” Our engines had run out of fuel; and now we knew what we needed.
We were so crazy for bacon that if a hog had crossed our path we would
have leaped on him like a lion and eaten him alive.

Fat came back to the table, and the Greasy Spoon again rang with
laughter. How foolish that reformer was! He did no work himself and was
a dyspeptic. He tried to force his diet upon us, and he made us as weak
as he was. How many reformers there are who are trying to reshape the
world to fit their own weakness. I never knew a theorist who wasn't a
sick man.

To-day we understand that we can't run a motor-car after the gasoline
is played out. The burning of the oil in the engine gives the power. The
burning of fats in the muscles gives the laborer his power. Sugar and
starches are the next best things to fat, and that's why we could eat
the thick slabs of sweet pie. We relished it well and have burned it all
up in our labor in the mills. We came out with that healthy sparkle that
dyspeptics never know.

When we realized that the reformer didn't know what he was talking
about, and that in his effort to help us he was hurting us, we saw
he was our enemy, and we gave all of his ideas the “horse laugh.” His
theory that the boarding-house keepers were in a conspiracy to rob the
workers by feeding them pork instead of pineapples turned out to be much
like all the “capitalist conspiracies” in Comrade Bannerman's pamphlets.
I am glad I have lived in a world of facts, and that I went therefrom to
the world of books. For I have found there is much falsehood taught in
books. But life won't tell a fellow any lies.

A man who knows only books may believe that by writing a new
prescription he can cure the world of what ails it. A man who knows life
knows that the world is not sick. Give it plenty of food and a chance to
work and it will have perfect digestion.



CHAPTER XXVII. THE PIE EATER'S PARADISE


The Greasy Spoon was all right. It was a peaceful place. The landlady
was Irish, and her motto was: “If there's any fighting to be done here
I'll do it myself.” On the sideboard she kept a carving knife as big
as a cavalry saber. Whenever two men started a row, she grabbed this
carving knife and with a scream like a panther she lit into them.

“Stop yer fightin' before I hack your hands off!”

The men were in deadly fear of her because they knew she meant business.
The sight of that swinging knife quelled every riot before it got
started. We fellows were like children in that we only thought of one
thing at a time. And when we saw the landlady's carving knife we forgot
whatever else was on our minds. This woman was a real peacemaker. She
not only wanted peace, she knew how to get it. Such things afford us
lessons that are useful all our lives. This woman had learned by sad
experience that healthy men will quarrel and thump each other; that
these fights put men in the hospital, after breaking her dishes and
splattering her tablecloths with blood. Hating bloodshed, she prevented
it by being ever ready to shed blood herself. She stood for the moral
law, but she stood armed and ready.

Impractical men have told me that right will always triumph of itself;
it needs no fighters to support it. The man who believes that is
ignorant, and such ignorance is dangerous. Right is always trampled down
when no fighter upholds it. But men will fight for right who will not
fight for wrong. And so right conquers wrong because right has the
most defenders. Let no man shirk the battle because he thinks he isn't
needed.

The reason a woman with a carving knife was strong enough to put a stop
to fighting in the Greasy Spoon was this: she had behind her every man
except the two who were fighting. Had either of those men struck down
the woman, then twenty other men, outraged by such a deed, would then
and there have swarmed upon the two and crushed them. The woman stood
for right and she always triumphed because she had (and these two knew
she had) the biggest bunch of fighters on her side.

This is what peace means, an equilibrium between forces. It is the
natural law,--God's way of keeping peace. And any plan for World Peace
that is builded not upon this law is nothing. Justice must stand with an
upraised sword. When two states quarrel she must admonish them, and let
them know that should they overthrow her, all good nations would rush in
and crush them. The same law that keeps peace in a rowdy boarding-house
will keep the peace of the world. For what is this world but a big wide
boarding-house, and all the nations rough and greedy grabbers at the
table?

I left the Greasy Spoon and went to the “Pie Boarding-House.” The Greasy
Spoon had peace, but peace is not enough. After peace comes prosperity.
The Pie House represented prosperity. For the woman who ran it knew how
to make more pies than the fellows ever heard of. You see, we were all
from the British Isles where they have pudding. The pie is an American
institution. Nobody knows how to make pies but an American housewife.
And lucky that she does, for men can not thrive in America without
pie. I do not mean the standardized, tasteless things made in great pie
factories. I refer to the personally conducted pies that women used to
make. The pioneer wives of America learned to make a pie out of every
fruit that grows, including lemons, and from many vegetables, including
squash and sweet potatoes, as well as from vinegar and milk and eggs and
flour. Fed on these good pies the pioneers--is there any significance
in the first syllable of the word--hewed down the woods and laid the
continent under the plow. Some men got killed and their widows started
boarding-houses. Here we workers fed on proper pie, and we soon changed
this wooden land into a land of iron. Now the pie is passing out and we
are feeding on French pastry. Is our downfall at hand?

Life in the Pie Boarding-House was a never-ending delight. You never
knew when you sat down at the table what kind of pie would be dealt you.
Some of the fellows had been there half a year and swore that they had
seen fifty-seven varieties and were expecting new ones at any meal. The
crowd here was a selected crowd. It was made up of the pie connoisseurs
of mill-town. Word was quietly passed out among the wisest fellows to
move to this boarding-house and get a liberal education in pie. So it
was a selected and well-behaved crowd. They didn't want to start any
rumpus and thus lose their places at this attractive table.

And that is one way that virtue is its own reward. Only the well-behaved
fellows were tipped off to the pie bonanza. From this I learned that the
better manners you have, the better fare you will get in this world.
I had steadily risen from the “Bucket of Blood,” through the “Greasy
Spoon” to a seat at the cherished “Pie” table. Here the cups were so
thin that you couldn't break a man's head with them. I was steadily
rising in the social world.



CHAPTER XXVIII. CAUGHT IN A SOUTHERN PEONAGE CAMP


It was while I was in Birmingham that the industrial depression reached
rock bottom. In the depth of this industrial paralysis the iron workers
of Birmingham struck for better pay. I, with a train load of other
strikers, went to Louisiana and the whole bunch of us were practically
forced into peonage. It was a case of “out of the frying pan into the
fire.” We had been saying that the mill owners had driven us “into
slavery,” for they had made us work under bad conditions; but after
a month in a peon camp, deep in the swamps of Louisiana, we knew more
about slavery than we did before. And we knew that work in the rolling
mills, bad as it was, was better than forced labor without pay. To-day
when I hear orators rolling out the word “slavery” in connection with
American wages and working conditions, I have to laugh. For any man who
has ever had a taste of peonage, to say nothing of slavery, knows that
the wage system is not real slavery; it's not the genuine, lash-driven,
bloodhound-hunted, swamp-sick African slavery. None is genuine without
Simon Legree and the Louisiana bloodhounds. The silk-socked wage slave,
toiling eight hours for six dollars, is not the genuine old New Orleans
molasses slave. He may carry a band and give a daily street parade, but
if he's not accompanied by Simon Legree and the bloodhounds, he is not
a genuine Uncle Tom, his slavery is less than skin deep. You can't fool
me. I know what real slavery is. I know as much about slavery as the man
that made it. He's the guy that taught me. I worked under Simon Legree
in Louisiana.

On the way to New Orleans we paused at a siding, and a native asked me,
“Who are all them men, and which way are they goin'?”

I told him “which way” we were going, and that we were needing jobs. He
replied:

“You-all are comin' down hyah now looking for food and work. In '65 you
was down hyah lookin' fo' blood!”

When we reached the great city on the Mississippi, we scattered over
the town looking for jobs. I saw a pile of coal in the street before a
boarding-house. I asked for the job of carrying in the coal. There were
two tons of it. I toted it in and was paid a dollar. New Orleans was a
popular winter resort where northerners came to escape the severe cold
of the North Atlantic States. I was given the job of yard-man in this
boarding-house. I carried in groceries, peeled potatoes, scrubbed the
kitchen floor and built fires each evening in the guests' rooms. Each
room had a grate, and I carried up kindling and coal for all of them.
For this work I received a dollar a day, with two meals (dinner and
supper) and was permitted to carry away from the kitchen all the cooked
food that remained after the guests had eaten. This privilege had grown
out of the custom of the colored help in the South having their “man”
 to feed. I had several men to feed. My “gang” was still looking for work
and not finding any. Times were desperate. For five cents a man could
get a glass of beer and floor room to sleep on in a lodging-house for
homeless men. This was called a “Five Cent Flop” house. My pals were not
able at times to raise the five cents a day to buy sleeping quarters. It
was late fall and too cold to sleep in the “jungle” down by the levee.
The poor fellows were able to stave off starvation by visiting various
free lunches during the day. Every night I arrived with my dollar, and
that meant beer and beds for a score. I also brought along a flour sack
half full of biscuits, cold pancakes, corn bread, chicken necks and
wings and scraps of roasts and steaks. These hungry men, with their
schooners of beer, made a feast of these scraps. My loyalty in coming
every night and giving them everything I could scrape together touched
them deeply. They regarded me as deserving special honor, and while they
believed in democracy as a general proposition, they voted that it would
be carrying equality too far if they permitted me to get no more out
of my work than all the rest got. So they decided that I was to have a
fifteen-cent bed each night instead of a five-cent flop with the rest
of them. And I was assigned to the royal suite of that flop house, which
consisted of a cot with a mosquito bar over it.

At this time they were holding “kangaroo” court in the New Orleans
jail. Every vagrant picked up by the police was tried and sentenced and
shipped out to a chain-gang camp. Nearly every man tried was convicted.
And there were plenty of camp bosses ready to “buy” every vagrant the
officers could run in. My bunch down at the flop house was in deadly
terror of being “kangarooed” and sent to a peon camp in the rice swamps.

One day when I was renewing the fuel in the room of a Mrs. Hubbard from
Pittsburgh, I found no one in the apartment and Mrs. Hubbard's pearls
and other jewels lying on the dresser. Immediately I was terrified with
thought of the kangaroo court. I knew that the jewels were valued at
several thousands of dollars. If I went away some one else might come
into the room and possibly steal the jewels, for they were lying in
plain sight and were valuable enough to tempt a weak-willed person. I
sounded an alarm and stayed in the doorway. I refused to leave the room
until Mrs. Hubbard returned and counted her valuables.

She found them all there and thanked me for guarding them. She said
it was by an oversight that she had gone away without locking up her
treasures. She asked me how she should reward me. I told her that I
was already rewarded, for I had guarded her jewels in order to protect
myself from being suspected of their theft and so kangarooed into a
slave-camp.

But in spite of all my precautions, I landed there after all. The gang
down at the flop house was dazzled by an employment agent, who offered
to ship them out into the rice country to work on the levee for a dollar
a day and cakes. The men were wild for a square meal and the feel of a
dollar in their jeans. So they all shipped out to the river levee and I
went along with the gang.

As our train rattled over the trestles and through the cypress swamps
the desperate iron workers were singing:

     “We'll work a hundred days,
       And we'll get a hundred dollars,
     And then go North,
       And all be rich and happy!”


When we reached the dyke-building camp I learned how ignorant I really
was. I could not do the things the older men could. I was young and
familiar only with the tools of an iron puddler. The other men were ten
years older and had acquired skill in handling mule-teams and swinging
an ax. They saw I couldn't do anything, so they appointed me water
carrier. The employing boss was what is now called hard-boiled. He was a
Cuban, with the face of a cutthroat. Doubtless he was the descendant of
the Spanish-English buccaneers who used to prowl the Caribbean Sea and
make headquarters at New Orleans. Beside this pirate ancestry I'll bet
he was a direct descendant of Simon Legree. He suspected that I couldn't
do much in a dyking camp, so he swarmed down on me the second week I was
there and ordered me to quit the water-carrying job and handle a mule
team and a scraper. I saw death put an arm around my neck right then and
there. But I wouldn't confess that I couldn't drive a team.

I put the lines over my head, said “Go 'long” as I had heard other
muleteers say, and, grasping the handles of the scraper, I scooped up a
slip load of clay. My arms were strong and this was no trick at all. But
getting the load was not the whole game. The hardest part was to let go.
I guided the lines with one hand and steadied the scraper with the other
as I drove up on the dump. Then I heaved up on the handles, the scraper
turned over on its nose and dumped the load. But that isn't all it
dumped. The mules shot ahead when the load was released, and the lines
around my neck jerked me wrong side up. The handle of the scraper hit
me a stunning blow in the face and the whole contraption dragged over
my body bruising me frightfully. I staggered to my feet with one eye
blinded by the blood that flowed from a gash in my brow. Simon Legree
cursed me handsomely and told me I was fired. I asked him where I would
get my pay, and he told me he was paying me a compliment by letting me
walk out of that camp alive. I went to the cook shack and washed the
blood off my face. I was a pretty sick boy. The cook was a native and
was kind to me.

“Boy, you're liable to get lockjaw from that cut,” he said. “I'll put
some of this horse liniment on it and it'll heal up.” He then bandaged
it with court-plaster.

“It's a long way back to New Orleans,” the cook concluded. “And you
might as well have something to keep your ribs from hitting together.”
 He cut off a couple of pounds of raw bacon and put it in my pocket
together with a “bait” of Plowboy tobacco. And so I hit the road. When I
came to the place where my pals were working, cutting willows along the
levee, I told them of my plight.

“Never mind, boy,” they said. “You go back to New Orleans and wait for
us. After we've worked our hundred days to get a hundred dollars each,
we will work a few days more to get a hundred dollars for you. Then
we'll all go north and be rich together.”

I began footing it thirty-five miles to the city. I decided, like Queen
Isabella, to pawn my jewels to enable me to discover America again. I
had an old ring and I met a darky who had a quarter. He got my ring.
After tramping all day I was exhausted. I came to a negro cabin and went
in and offered the “mammy” a pound of bacon for a pound of corn pone. I
further bargained to give the first half of my other pound of bacon if
she'd cook the second half for me to eat. She cooked my share of the
bacon and set it and the corn bread on the table. I ate heartily for a
while, but after two or three slices of the bacon, I was fed up on it.
She hadn't cooked enough of the grease out of it. I began feeding this
bacon to a pickininny who sat beside me.

“Man, don't give away your meat,” the mammy said. I told her that I had
had all I wanted. Then she said to the pickininny:

“Child, doan eat that meat. Save it foh you papa when he come home.”

When I got into New Orleans the next morning, I traded my Plowboy
tobacco for a bar of laundry soap. With my twenty-five cents I bought
a cotton undershirt. Then I went into the “jungle” at Algiers, a town
across the river from New Orleans, and built a fire in the jungle (a
wooded place where hoboes camp) and heated some water in an old tin pail
I found there. Then I took off all my clothes and threw my underwear
away. A negro who stood watching me said:

“White man, are you throwing them clothes away?”

“I certainly am,” I replied.

“Why, them underclothes is northern underclothes. Them's woolen clothes.
Them's the kind of underclothes I like.”

“You wouldn't like that bunch of underclothes,” I said.

“Why not?”

“Because if you look in the seams you will find something that is
unseemly. I've been out in a levee camp.”

“Hush mah mouf, white man,” laughed the negro. “Them little things would
never bother a Louisiana nigger. Why we have them things with us all the
time. We just call 'em our little companions.”

He picked up the garments and walked off proud and happy. I took my soap
and warm water and scrubbed myself from crown to heel. I put my clothing
in the pail with more soap and water and boiled the outfit thoroughly.

Then I went back to New Orleans and got my old job in the
boarding-house. I saved all my money except my fifteen cents for the
nightly flop. A month later my gang came roaring back from the peon
camp. They had worked thirty days and had not got a cent. Slave-driver
Legree had driven them out when they demanded a reckoning. They were
lucky to escape with their lives, their cooties and their appetites.
Instead of financing me, I had to finance them again. They finally got
cleaned up and we all went back to Birmingham, where the strike was
over.

“Show us that spieler,” they said, “who told us the wage system was the
worst kind of slavery. If daily wages is slavery, God grant that they
never set us free again.”



CHAPTER XXIX. A SICK, EMACIATED SOCIAL SYSTEM


The hard times I have been describing were in the early nineties. The
year before there had been a financial crash. Nobody seemed to know what
was the matter at the time, but it has since been learned that the hard
times were the fruit of crop failures, if one can call failure fruit.
All over the world bad years had destroyed the harvests. This great loss
of foodstuffs was exactly the same as if armies in war had ravaged
the fields. Farmers had to borrow money to buy food. They had no other
buying power. So trade languished, credit was strained, and finally
came the financial collapse. It happened after the good crop years were
returning. That's why the people could not understand it. Farmers were
raising crops again, but labor was idle and could not buy bread.

The lesson is this, when commerce is starved down to a certain point, it
goes to pieces. Then when the food comes it can not assimilate it. It is
like a man who has been without food for thirty days. His muscles have
disappeared, his organs have shrunk, he can not walk; he is only skin
and bones. The disappearance of the muscles is like the disappearance
of labor's jobs in hard times. The shrinkage of the vital organs is like
the shrinkage of capital and values. When the starved man is faced with
food he can not set in and eat a regular dinner. He must be fed on a
teaspoonful of soup, and it is many months before his muscles come back,
his organs regain their normal size and he is a well-fed man again. So
it is with the industrial state. It can be starved by crop failures,
by war waste or by labor slacking on the job. Anything that lessens the
output of field and factory, whether it be heaven's drought or man's
loafing, starves the economic state and starves all men in it. If crop
failure should last long enough, as it does in China, millions of men
would die. If war lasts long enough, as it did in Austria, millions of
citizens must starve. If labor should try slacking, as it did in Russia,
the economic state would starve to death and the workers die with it.

Men who have been through strikes and lockouts until they have been
reduced to rags and hunger place no trust in the Russian theory that men
can quit work and loaf their way to wealth. We loafed our way to hunger,
misery and peonage. We saw that the whole world would come to our fate,
if all should follow our example. Luckily we won our point, so we went
back to work and helped feed the starved social state, and in a few
years America was rich again. And America continued rich and fat until
the World War wastage shrank her to skin and bones again. Much of her
muscle has disappeared (1921: five million workers are idle) and she
must be nursed back by big crops, and big output by labor before she
will be strong enough to reabsorb into her system every muscle in
America.

That's my belief. That's my gospel. I did not make this gospel. It is
God's law and we can not alter it. If I were asked to write the BIBLE
OF LABOR, this chapter would be the law and the prophets. And from these
truths I would advise each man to write his own Ten Commandments.



CHAPTER XXX. BREAKING INTO THE TIN INDUSTRY


I decided to leave Birmingham as soon as my stomach had got used to
regular meals and my pocket knew what real money felt like again.

The dry years had ended and once more the northern farms were yielding
mammoth crops. But the country was so sick that it couldn't sit up and
eat as it ought to. So the farmers were selling their crops at steadily
falling prices. This drove some of them frantic. They couldn't pay
interest on their mortgaged farms, and they were seeking to find “the
way out” by issuing paper money, or money from some cheap metal with
which they could repudiate their debts. Banks could not collect their
loans, merchants could not get money for their goods, manufacturers were
swamped by their pay-rolls and had to discharge their men. Coxey was
raising a great army of idle men to march on Washington and demand that
the government should feed and clothe the people.

All my savings had long since gone, and from the high life in the Pie
Boarding-House I had descended to my days of bread and water. All men
were in a common misery. If a hobo managed to get a steak and cook it in
the bushes by the railroad track, the smell of it would draw a score of
hungry men into the circle of his firelight. It was a trying time, and
it took all the fortitude I had to look hopefully forward toward a day
when things would begin picking up and the wheels of industry would
whirl again. The idle men who had camped by the railroads had drunk
their water from, and cooked their mulligan stews in, tomato cans.
The tin can had become the badge of hoboing. The tin trade was new in
America and I foresaw a future in the industry, for all kinds of food
were now being put up in tin, whereas when I was a child a tin can was
rarely seen. I decided that two trades were better than one, and I would
learn the tin plate trade. I went to Elwood, Indiana, and found a place
there in a tin mill. My knowledge of puddling, heating and rolling,
occasionally working in a sheet mill similar to a tin mill, prepared me
for this new work. In tin making a piece of wrought iron is rolled thin
and then covered with a thinner coating of pure tin. After this is done
the plate remains soiled and discolored, and the next process is to
remove the stain and polish the tin until it shines like silver.

To have a job and eat pie again made me happy. Our union contained
several hundred members, so I had a lot of prospective friends to get
acquainted with. I was then nearly twenty-one and a pretty good mixer;
I liked men and enjoyed mingling with them and learning all I could from
what they told me. When they drifted into a saloon I went along for the
company. I did not care to drink, so I would join some impromptu quartet
and we would sing popular songs while the other fellows cheered us with
the best will in the world. A drink of beer or two heightens a man's
appreciation of music, and the way the boys applauded my singing
makes me rather regret the Volstead Act. It queered my act. Since beer
disappeared nobody has asked me to sing. Prohibition may be good for the
health but it is sure death to art.

Those were happy days. But just when all my troubles seemed ended and
the rainbow of promise in the sky, a new cloud appeared, black and
threatening. In fact it swept down like a tornado. The men decided to
strike.

A strike! Of all things! We owned about the only jobs in Indiana. Our
strike wouldn't last long--for the mills. For us it would last forever.
The day we walked out, others would walk in. And it would be so small
a part of Coxey's army that the main body would march on and never miss
it. I had just gone through that long, soul-killing period of idleness
and had barely managed to find a job before I collapsed. Now that we
were to strike I would have to push that job aside and sink back into
the abyss.

In reaching Elwood, I had tramped from Muncie, Indiana, to Anderson, a
long weary walk for one whose feet, like mine, were not accustomed to
it. From Anderson I tramped to Frankton, and there I caught a freight
and rode the bumpers to Elwood. The train took me right into the mill.
It was summer and the mill had been shut down by the hard times. The
boss was there looking over the machinery. They were getting ready to
start up. I faced him and he said: “Do you want a job?”

“Yes,” I said.

“What at? Greasing up to-night,” he said. Weary and hungry as I was from
my hoboing, I went right to work, and all night I, with a few others,
greased the bearings. The next day he gave me a job as a catcher. A
catcher is one who seizes the rolled plate as it comes out and throws it
back to the roller. It has to be rolled many times. The boss who gave me
this much-wanted job was Daniel G. Reid, who afterward became one of the
big men in the tin industry.

After I became Secretary of Labor I was a dinner guest at the White
House. When I arrived the President said: “Here's an old friend of
yours.” To my surprise and keen pleasure President Harding led forward
my old boss, Daniel G. Reid. There was much laughing and old-time talk
between us. “Do you recall,” said Mr. Reid, “how during the tin strike
of '96, you steered to the lodge room and unionized men who came to take
the place of the strikers?” Mr. Reid thought this was a great joke. He
had always been favorable to ending the strike and signing the men's
agreement, but for a long time had been deterred by his partners. Mr.
Reid in nearly every conference was selected for chairman, and this
was considered by the employers a very fine tribute of respect and
confidence. Turning to the president, Mr. Reid said: “If Jim is as
industrious in your service as he was in the Elwood tin mill you have
got a good secretary. Jim knew more about the tin plate business when he
was a worker than any other man in America. I wanted to get him to join
our sales department but he declined my offer!”

When the matter of the Elwood strike was referred to the next regular
meeting I had been working only three weeks. I wrote to my father in
Sharon asking for his counsel on the subject. He wrote back: “In as much
as it isn't a question of wages or rules, I'd vote to stay on the job
and wait for my pay. There's no pay out here to be had even by waiting.
The mill is down, and if we hadn't raised a big potato crop we wouldn't
know where to look for our next meal.”



CHAPTER XXXI. UNACCUSTOMED AS I AM TO PUBLIC SPEAKING


With father's warning on my mind I went to the meeting where the strike
was to be voted. Nobody had opposed the strike, for the cause was
plainly a just one. The men wanted their pay to be issued to them every
week, and they were entitled to it. The only question in my mind was one
of expediency. Could we hope to win a strike at a time like that when
the mills were on the verge of closing because of bad business?

While the speakers were presenting the reasons for the strike I noticed
that not a man examined or discussed the dangers in it. The mind of the
meeting was made up. I was talking to the fellow who sat beside me, and
I told him what my father had written me.

“I agree,” he said. “A strike at a time like this doesn't seem to be the
right thing to do.”

“If you don't think it a wise move,” I said, “why don't you get up
and say so. For this meeting is going to vote strike in the next two
minutes, sure as fate.”

“I can't make a speech,” he said. “You do it.”

The men were paid monthly checks and had never heard any complaint from
their landlords and grocerymen who were willing to wait for their pay.
The complaint had been made by a few outsiders who wanted to see money
circulate faster in town and thus boom things up a bit. They had aroused
the strike spirit of the men by speeches like this:

“The bosses own you body and soul. They regard you as slaves. Your work
makes them rich and yet they won't pay for your work. While they are
piling up profits you go around without a nickel in your jeans. At
the end of the week you want your pay. Why don't they give it to you?
Because they would sooner borrow money without interest from you than
go to the bank and pay eight per cent. for it. You men are their bankers
and don't know it. You could have your money in the bank instead of in
their pockets--it would be drawing interest for you instead of drawing
interest for them! The interest on the wages of you men is five hundred
sixty dollars a month. No wonder they hold your pay for a month and put
that five hundred and sixty dollars in their pockets. But those wages
are yours as fast as you earn them. The interest on your money belongs
to you. That five hundred and sixty dollars a month belongs in your
pockets. But it will go into the bosses' pockets as long as you are
willing to be robbed. You have rights, but they trample on them when you
will not fight for your rights. Are you mice or men?”

When it was put that way they answered that they were men. The strike
was “sold” to them before the meeting, without their having had a chance
to state their side of it. I felt that this was wrong. There are lynch
verdicts in this world as well as verdicts of justice. When men have a
chance to make up their own minds their verdict is always just. But here
a little group who knew what they wanted had stampeded the minds of the
men, and a verdict won that way is like a mob verdict.

I decided to get up and speak, although it was really too late. It
seemed to me like calling a doctor after the patient is dead. “Men,”
 I said, “I'm a newcomer here and I never made a speech in my life. I
wouldn't try to now, only I've been asked to by others--by somebody
that's been here a long time. He thinks there ought to be a little more
said before we ballot. It's a hot day and I don't want to keep you here
if you don't want to listen to me. What I've got to say probably don't
amount to much.”

“Go ahead,” somebody said.

“We've decided to strike, and I don't know how it will turn out. I've
been out of work for several months and you fellows haven't, so I can
tell you what it's like. The country is thronging with idle men. If we
lose this strike we can roam all over the country before we find another
job. I came all the way here from Alabama, where they drove a bunch of
iron workers into the peonage camps, and I was glad to get out alive.
Conditions are awful bad in this country and I have been trying to study
'em. Money is scarcer now than it's ever been before. They tell us that
the bosses are keeping our wages in their pockets. That's a mistake.
They haven't got anything in their pockets. They've mortgaged their
homes and pledged everything they own. They're having a devil of a time
to rake up the money every month to meet the pay-roll when it's due.
They aren't taking in the money as fast as they're paying it out. Their
salesmen are on the road trying to sell tin plate, but the tinners are
so hard up that few of them can buy.

“I believe we ought to get our pay every week, but how can we get it if
the boss hasn't got it? We've got to look at this thing in the light of
facts. The facts are that we have our jobs and are sure of our pay once
a month. There are a million men who would like to have what we have.
Those men will swarm in and take our jobs. You can't stop them. A hungry
man can't be stopped by the cry of 'scab.' You all know that there are
so many union men now idle that we have to pass around our jobs to keep
the men in this town from starving. When word goes out that we have
struck, you'll see the workers swarm in here like locusts. They'll be
glad to take their pay by the month. What's the use of a strike that
hasn't got a chance to win? We joined the union to make our jobs secure
and to get good pay. We're getting good pay. Our jobs are secure unless
we lose them in this strike.

“I don't believe we've looked at both sides of the case. I don't believe
the boys really want this strike. The demand for it originated outside
our ranks. Who started it? Wasn't it started by fellows who want us to
get our pay quicker so they can get it quicker? They're the ones that
worked up this strike. They tell us that the bosses are robbing us
because they hold our pay till the end of the month. They say we ought
to have it in the bank. They know we wouldn't put it in the bank. You
know we wouldn't put it in the bank. We don't want to put it in the
bank, and you bet your boots they don't want us to put it in the bank.
They're liars when they say they're boosting for the banks. They're
boosting for their own pockets.

“But we've really got our money in a bank--or what's good as a bank. The
mill keeps our money for us just the way a bank would. No bank in town
pays interest on checking accounts, you know that. Then why take our
money out of the mill office and put it in a bank? It's just as safe in
the mill office. And you've got the right to draw on it if you really
need money in the middle of the month. Only in case of death or accident
does a man need money in the middle of the month. And he can go to the
pay window and get it when he needs it. The doctor doesn't send his bill
till the end of the month. The landlord doesn't collect the rent till
the end of the month. The grocer and butcher let you run a bill till the
end of the month. Some of us are really better off getting our pay at
the end of the month. For it's all there for us and we can pay our bills
promptly and hold up our heads as men. If we didn't leave our money in
the office until the end of the month, we might blow it in at a bar, and
when the wife wanted money to pay the rent and food bill we would have
to tell her we were broke and she would have to hang her head. When the
landlord and butcher came for the money she would have to try to stand
them off. Do we want to let the rent go unpaid until the landlord cusses
us out? Is that what we are striking for? If the landlord and butcher
are willing to wait till we draw our pay, we ought to be willing too.
Isn't it better to wait a month for pay than to wait a year? I'm right
here to tell you that after this strike we'll wait for our pay until
hell freezes over and the devil goes skating.

“Let us make no mistake. We are calling this strike not of our own free
will, but were shoved into it by a lot of slick talkers that are in
business and are not workers. They have hoodwinked us. They have made
fools of us. A speaker asked are we mice or men. I ask them are they
rats or men. I want these rats to come out of their holes and stand upon
this floor. Who was the first man that suggested this strike? I want to
see the color of his hair. Stand up, if he's in the hall. If he isn't
here, why isn't he?”

No one answered.

“If this strike was called by outsiders,” I cried, “why don't the
outsiders do the striking? Whose jobs will be lost in this strike--our
jobs or the outsiders' jobs? If the man who started this strike has a
job that won't be lost in the strike, then I claim that we have made a
bad mistake. And if we're making a mistake, men, what are we going to do
about it?”

I sat down, exhausted by the first attempt at public pleading I had ever
made. Everything grew dark about me, and I knew that I had done my best
and that I was through. I was quite young, and I went to pieces like an
untrained runner who had overdone himself.

The men were talking to one another, and somebody moved that the meeting
take a recess until after supper. It would give time to think it over
and find out what the men really thought about the strike proposition.



CHAPTER XXXII. LOGIC WINS IN THE STRETCH


At seven o'clock we met again and several men made short talks opposing
the strike. Each fellow, when he got up, seemed to have a lot of ideas,
but when he tried to express them he grew confused, and after stammering
a while he could only put forth the bare opinion, “I don't think we
ought to strike.” This meeting was quite different from the other one.
Here every man was thinking for himself but nobody could say anything.
In the previous meeting the speakers had talked passionately, and the
rest had been swept along with them as a unit. In other words, the first
session had become group-minded instead of individual-minded. It is like
the difference between a stampede and a deliberative body. The second
meeting was calmly deliberative and it finally voted a reconsideration,
and the strike resolution was overwhelmingly defeated.

If this were a novel, it would be fine to record in this chapter that
the young orator who at the last moment turned the tide and saved the
day became the hero of the union and was unanimously elected president.
That's the way these things go in fiction. And that is exactly what
happened. In due time I found myself at the head of the Local, and
nearly every man had voted for me. I started negotiations for more
frequent paydays, and a few months later we were being paid on the first
and fifteenth of the month. Life is indeed dramatic,--at least it has
seemed so to me. Some men say that life has no meaning; that men are the
playthings of blind forces that crush them, and there is no answer to
the riddle. This is nonsense. I admit that we are in the grip of blind
forces. But we are not blind. We can not change those forces. If we
fight against them they will crush us. But by going with them, guiding
our careers along their courses, they will bear us to the port we're
steering for.

The mob spirit in man is one of those blind forces that so often lead
to shipwreck. The mob-mind differs from the mind of reason. To tell them
apart is like distinguishing mushrooms from toadstools. They look alike,
but one means health and the other is poison. Life has taught me the
difference between a movement and a mob. A movement is guided by logic,
law and personal responsibility. A mob is guided by passion and denies
responsibility.

I have seen meetings turned into mobs and mobs dissolved again into
meetings. Swept by passion we willed a strike. That strike would have
been just, and, yet, it would have ruined us. We were like a mob in
which every man forgets his own responsibility, The mob mind would have
rushed us to our own ruin. My speech called for individuals to stand up.
That set each individual thinking: “If I stand up, that crazy guy will
smash me.” Each man became responsible again. The mob was gone, and all
we had was individual men, each thinking for himself. That thinking then
went on and each man reached a verdict based on logic, sense and duty.
The meeting could no longer speak with one voice. It couldn't talk at
all. It stammered. The action showed that each mind stood apart, alone.
And yet the vote revealed that they were all together.

I have watched the long struggle of unionism in America and I know the
law that has governed all its ups and downs. Wherever it was still a
movement it has thrived; wherever it became a mob it fell. The one Big
Union was a mob. No movement based on passion finally wins; no movement
based on reason finally fails. Why then say life is a riddle and man
helpless?

When I became Secretary of Labor, one of the first letters I received
was from Mrs. Eli Baldwin whose coal oil I burned shamelessly, studying
far into the night. Mrs. Eli Baldwin wrote from Atlanta, Indiana, where
she now lives:


“When your roommates complained because your light kept them awake, I
knew what you were doing. I knew that you were studying their problems
for them, getting yourself an education so you would know how to get
them better wages and better working conditions.”


This letter pleased me more than I can tell. This kind old lady, now
eighty-two, had faith in me and feels that her faith was justified. Now,
then, can I believe that life is meaningless,--that there is no plan,
and that all man's efforts are foredoomed to failure?



CHAPTER XXXIII. I MEET THE INDUSTRIAL CAPTAINS


Elwood, Indiana, was a small village that had been called Duck Creek
Post-Office until the tin mill and other industries began making it into
a city. In my capacity as president of the local union and head of the
wage mill committee, I was put in personal contact with the heads of
these great industrial enterprises. This was my first introduction to
men of large affairs.

I approached them with the inborn thought that they must be some sort of
human monsters. The communist books that Comrade Bannerman had given
me taught me to believe that capitalists had no human feelings like
ordinary mortals. I therefore expected to find the mill-boss as cunning
as the fox and ape combined. I supposed that his word would be worthless
as a pledge and would be given only for the purpose of tricking me. His
manners I expected to be rude; he would shout at me and threaten me,
hoping to take away my courage and send me back to my fellows beaten.

What I found, of course, was a self-possessed man, the model of courtesy
and exactness. He differed from us men in one respect. His mind was
complex instead of simplex. That is, he could think on two sides of a
question at the same time. He had so trained his mind by much use of
it that it was as nimble as the hands of a juggler who can keep
several objects tossing in the air at the same time. We men were clumsy
thinkers, and one thing at a time was all we could handle without
fumbling it.

The great manufacturer never showed any emotion. He was never angry,
domineering, sneering or insulting. He kept these emotions under control
because they could do him no good, and because they would give pain to
others. We fellows never hesitated to show how we felt. We would jibe
one another, laugh at a fellow to his chagrin, and when we were angry
bawl each other out unmercifully. For a fellow to smile when he was
angry and not let the other fellow know it, was a trick we had not
learned. That a bloodthirsty, cruel capitalist should be such a graceful
fellow was a shock to me. I saw from the start that the communist
picture of a capitalist as a bristling, snorting hog was the farthest
thing from the truth. The picture was drawn by malice and not from a
desire to tell the truth.

I learned that when Mr. Reid and his fellows gave their word they never
broke it. It was hard to get a promise from them, but once they made a
promise they always fulfilled it. If they said they would meet us at a
certain hour, they were always there on the minute. They were patient,
firm and reasonable, and they always treated us as their equals.

They always gave us the reasons for the stand they took. At first I
doubted their sincerity, but in the end I learned that the reasons they
cited were the true reasons. At first they thought that they would have
to guard themselves against roguery and double-dealing on the part of the
tin workers. This showed that they had had unpleasant experiences. For,
men who knew their business as well as they did must surely have
had some cause for their suspicion. Baseless suspicion is a trait of
ignorant men, and these men were not ignorant. A burnt child dreads the
fire.

I decided to take them as my models, to learn all their virtues and let
them know that I was as square in my dealings with them as they were
with me. I studied their business as thoroughly as I studied the case of
the men. I soon got from them all the concessions we had demanded
when we called the strike. It was fortunate for us that the strike was
cancelled, for we kept our jobs and in due course got all the things
that we were going to strike for.

In fact, I got so many concessions by dickering with those bosses that I
made life a burden for them at times. I knew the cost of every different
kind of plate the mill put out, and so I could demand a high rate of
wages and support my demands with logic. My midnight studies had not
been in vain. It all came back in cash to the working man; and yet it
was my own pals who had rebuked me for being too bookish. This did not
make me sour. I loved the fellows just the same, and when they showed
their faith in me, it more than paid me back.

But I had learned this general rule: The average working man thinks
mostly of the present. He leaves to students and to capitalists the
safeguarding of his future.



CHAPTER XXXIV. SHIRTS FOR TIN ROLLERS


In summer the temperature in the tin mills is very high. It is as hot
as the Fourth of July in Abyssinia. One day a philosophical fellow was
talking religion to me. He said, “I don't believe in hell as a place
where we boil forever in a lake of brimstone. It can't be as hot as
that. My constitution never could stand it.” His constitution stood
up under the heat in the tin mill. So it is plain that the tin-mill
temperature was somewhat less than the temperature of the Pit.

Outsiders began coming into the mills and giving us workers a chill by
telling us that the heat was killing us. The men used to cool
themselves down with a glass of beer at the close of the day. The social
investigators told us that alcohol taken into the system at such a time
would cause sunstroke. If beer was fatal, most of us figured that we
had been dead for years and didn't know it. The effect of constant
complaints was to demoralize us and make our work harder. I thought at
first that these investigators were our friends and I gave them all the
help I could. But instead of helping us, they only hurt us, and then
I soured on their misapplied zeal. They were a species new to me that
seemed to have sprung up in the hard times, just as cooties spring up
in time of war. And like cooties, they attached themselves to us
closer than a brother and yet they were no brothers of ours. The social
investigators nibbled away at the men and kept them restless in their
hours of ease. They sat at our boarding table and complained of the
food. Corned beef and cabbage was one of our regular dishes. Mr.
Investigator turned up his nose and said: “I never touch corned beef. If
you knew as much about it as I do, you would insist on steaks or roast
beef instead. You know what corned beef is, don't you?”

The men got mad and one fellow said: “Yes; it is dead cow. All meat is
dead animals. Now give us a rest.”

“Yes, it's all dead, but some of it is a whole lot deader than you
imagine. I've been investigating the packing business, and I'll tell
you all about corned beef and wienies.” He then went on with a lot of
sickening details and when he got through he found that the younger men
had not eaten any dinner. The older men paid no attention to him and
worked right ahead to the pie and toothpick stage, but the younger
fellows had been euchred out of dinner and went back to work with wabbly
steps and empty stomachs.

This convinced me that the investigator was a false alarm. If corned
beef was poison, as he said, there wouldn't be a working man alive in
America. But millions have eaten corned beef all their lives and have
thrived on it. Things are never one tenth so bad as the agitators
say. They merely take the heart out of men and send them back to work
weakened and unhappy.

This fellow had a favorite joke which he sprang every meal. After
sniffing at the soup and meat and cabbage he would exclaim: “Hebrews,
13-8.” We thought it was some jibe about the fat pork, and after he had
sprung it every day for a week we learned that he was hitting at the
monotony of the diet. The verse in the Bible reads:

“Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to-day, and forever.”

The fellow came into the mills and sympathized with us because we worked
with our shirts off. To withstand the heat we stripped to the waist.
We didn't want to wear a shirt. It would have clung to our flesh and
hampered our moving muscles. We were freer and cooler without any cloth
to smother us. It was a privilege to go shirtless. Adam enjoyed that
blessing in the Garden of Eden. And when he sinned they punished him by
putting a shirt, collar and necktie on him. And yet this theorist in the
mills demanded working conditions that would let us wear shirts. Why?
Who was asking for shirts? Only he, and he had a shirt. In their own
words, the fellows would have enjoyed making him eat it.



CHAPTER XXXV. AN UPLIFTER RULED BY ENVY


The uplifter saw the men between heats drinking beer out of tin pails.

“Why do those big fine fellows drink beer,” he asked me, “when they have
plenty of water?”

I asked him: “Why don't you drink beer?”

“It makes me bilious,” he replied. “If I drink one glass of beer every
day for a week it upsets me and I get weak and dizzy.”

“Do you think that one drink of beer a day will upset those fellows and
make them dizzy?”

“Evidently not.”

“Then when you oppose beer you are doing it to keep yourself from
getting sick, aren't you? Do you really care a darn whether those
fellows get sick at the stomach or not?”

“Certainly, I--”

“You don't want them to get sick at the stomach?”

“Then, why did you give that lecture on corned beef and make those
strong fellows all sick at the stomach while you enjoyed your own
dinner?”

“I didn't know it would disturb them so. Besides I wanted to keep them
from getting sick later.”

“Well, they prefer to have their health now, and wait for their sickness
until later on. You are doing no man a favor by making him sick when he
is feeling well. If God is willing for them to be well, and they want
to be well, and the only thing that keeps them from being well is you,
aren't you afraid that they will pile on to you and knock the daylights
out of you?”

“I am really working for their good.”

“Then you want their stomachs to have what agrees with them?”

“Certainly.”

“Well, I'll tell you something, then. Water doesn't always agree with
the stomach as well as beer does. You never worked at terrific muscular
exertion handling white-hot iron in a mill like this. You haven't got
the muscles to do it, and I doubt if you've got the heart. You can not
know the condition a man is in when he hits his hardest lick here. But
they know, and I know. Some of the men feel they can't drink water at
that time. My pal tells me that his stomach rejects it; his throat seems
to collapse as he gulps it. But beer he can drink and it eases him.
The alcohol in beer is a blessing at that time. It soothes his laboring
stomach until the water can get into his system and quench the man's
thirst. Iron workers in the Old World have used malt beverages for
generations. Why take away the other man's pleasure if it doesn't injure
you? If it was deadly we would have been weakened in the course of
generations. But look at the worker's body. It is four times as strong
as yours.” I saw an envious look in his eye.

“Of course I inherited my muscular build,” I apologized, “and so I
try to make the most of it in boasting to you fellows who haven't any
muscle. But really I envy you. You have education and brain power.
That's what I lack and that's what I want above all other things. I
try to study at night and educate myself. But I haven't got any chance
against you fellows who are born intellectual and have college training
on top of it. So if I have talked sharp to you, my cussedness is really
due to envy. I really want to be in your shoes, and I haven't got the
brains for the job.”

This worked.

“There is nothing about me for a fellow like you to envy,” he said
condescendingly. “I'm no better off than you are. In fact, I envy you
fellows. You are never sick; you can eat and digest anything. I really
envy you. You are built like a young Hercules and are never ashamed when
you strip. When I put on a bathing suit I am embarrassed until I get out
of sight in the water, because I'm all skin and bones. My arms and legs
are the size of broomsticks.”

“Oh, well,” I said, “you're just as well off without the Hercules shape.
You are always healthy.”

“Healthy? What I call health, you fellows would regard as the last
stages of decrepitude. A little beer and tobacco knocks me over. If I
drank coffee and ate pie the way you do, I'd have to take morphine to
get a night's sleep. You fellows need never envy us intellectuals. You
can drink and smoke and eat anything, and all the poisons you take in
are sweated out of your pores in this terrific labor, so that every
night you come out as clean and lusty as a new-born child. I'd swap all
my education in a minute for the mighty body and the healthy and lusty
living that you enjoy. If you knew how much I envy you,

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