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.
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.”
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.
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?
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.
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.
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, you would never think of envying me.”
He had blurted out the truth. It wasn't love of comrades that gave a motive to his life. It was envy that turned him inside out. Envy was the whole story, and he admitted it.
I thought I made a number of enemies among the men while I was head of the mill committee. When a man dissipated and afterward came back to work, trembling and weak, the boss would refuse to let him take up his tools, but would lay the man off for a few days. The man usually thought this a useless and cruel punishment; and to lose a few days' wages would make him all the poorer.
The man thus laid off would come to me and ask that I get him reinstated.
“Tell 'em you'll call a strike,” the man would say. “Tell 'em that if they don't let me work, nobody will work.”
I always refused to take such complaints to the office. I never approached the boss with a demand that I did not think was right. Some of the men thought we ought to be vindictive and take every opportunity to put a crimp in the business for the owners. I envied the owners (we've all got a touch of that in our system), because they were rich and were making profits. I knew what their profits averaged. By calling fussy little strikes often enough I could have kept the profits close to the zero mark. Thus the men would be making wages out of the business and the owners would be making nothing. But I declined to let my actions be governed by envy. The Ten Commandments forbid covetousness. The Golden Rule also forbade my practicing sabotage. And I have never tried to find a better guide than the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule. The test of my misconduct would have come when, having cleverly destroyed their profits, I found them quitting in discouragement, closing up the business and throwing us all out of our jobs for keeps.
I tried to point out these things to the men. Some of them felt as I did about it. Others couldn't see it. So I learned darn early in life that you can't reform 'em all.
I used to say to the complaining man:
“Look here, Bill; you're in no shape to work. Go home and lie down for a couple of days. You wouldn't last here two hours in your present shaky condition. You'd pinch the rolls with your tongs and probably get your neck broke. That's why they won't let you work. You can't work. So back to your bed, Bill, we will not call them out to-day.”
Bill usually went away cursing me as the friend of the “plutes” and the enemy of labor. “I'll get you yet,” he'd say, “you black-headed buzzard.”
And so while I was making enemies among many of the men who thought I wasn't standing up for their rights, I was making myself even more unpopular with the owners by sticking up too firmly for the rights of the men. They told me they believed I knew as much about the tin plate business as any man in the trade. This knowledge would enable me to do better in the distributing end of the business, while as a worker I could only make the union wages that all the fellows were getting. This gave me an idea that has since become the dominating purpose of my life. Handicraft is the basis of the best schooling. By working with my hands as well as with my head I learned the actual cost of production of every kind of plate they put out. This was something that I could not have learned from books. Without such knowledge the business would have to be run partly on guesswork. With a thorough knowledge of the production end of the business I became a valuable man. The way was open for me to get out of the labor field and into the field of management.
But here is where my natural feeling of fraternity stepped in. I liked to be among the men. I felt at home there. I was only twenty-two, and salesmanship was a field I had never tried, except for a season when I sold Mark Twain's book, Following the Equator. There were plenty of men who had the knack of selling. My natural gift, if I had any, was to smooth the path for working men and help them solve their problems. I had learned that labor was the first step on the road to knowledge. It was the foundation of all true knowledge. I wanted to help the fellows take the next step. That step would be to learn how labor can enrich itself and do away with strikes and unemployment. That is a question that still fascinates me. I did not care to dodge it and become a manufacturer. I am the kind of fellow who, when he takes hold of a question, never lets go. The picture of Comrade Bannerman shaking his fist at the trainload of “plutes” lingered with me. I still heard the voice of the knock-kneed reformer who envied my husky limbs. The cry for bloody revolution was already in the air. When would the mob be started and what would it do? When Comrade Bannerman had robbed the rich and piled their corpses in a Caesar's column, would not the knock-kneed uplifter break my legs in making all men equal? These men were moved by envy and they lusted for blood. I faced the problem with a thirst for accurate knowledge, and my passion was not for bloodshed but for brotherhood.
It was during the panic in 1894 that the strike vote was defeated. We worked on until the first of July, 1896, when our agreement expired. By that time the tin mill was on its feet. The town of Elwood had grown from a country cross-roads to a city of the first class. As president of the union, I had steadily gained concessions for the workers. We were getting paid every two weeks. It is not practical to pay oftener in the tin trade. A man's work has to be measured and weighed, and the plate he rolls on Saturday can not be cut and measured in time for him to get his pay for it that week. For the pay envelope is handed to him Saturday noon, and his Saturday's rolling will not go through the cutter until Monday. He can not be paid for it until it is in shape to be measured. So we were satisfied to be paid twice a month.
But the mill was now making big profits and we demanded a raise in pay. The mill owners countered by refusing to “recognize” the union. They would deal with the men only as individuals. A strike was called, and the union won. We recovered our raise in pay and signed a new contract. The strike was off in September after two long months of idleness, and within a few days after the dust had settled we smelt the fireworks of political oratory. I am telling it now as it appeared to me then, and of course I beg the indulgence of those concerned.
Bryan, the bearcat of the Nebraska ranches, had roared with his ears back, and the land was in a tumult. “Coin's Financial School” had already taught the people that the “gold-bugs” owned the country and that the people could save themselves from eternal serfdom only by changing the color of their money. Bryan told the westerners that the East was the “enemy's country” and that the gold standard was a game by which the East was robbing the West, and the only way the people of the West could save themselves was to move East and clip bonds or else change the color of the money!
This is the way it looked to me as a working man, and I hope my good friend Bryan will pardon me for writing of his “great paramount issue” in a joking way. For after all it was a joke, a harmless joke—because we didn't adopt it. I got excited by the threatened “remedy” and went into politics. While the tin trade was on strike, crazy propagandists from everywhere poured into Elwood and began teaching the men bi-metalism, communism, bolshevism and anarchy. A communist propagandist is like a disease germ; he doesn't belong in healthy bodies. If he gets in he can't increase and is soon thrown out again. But let a strike weaken the body of workers, and the germs swarm in and start their scarlet fever.
As soon as the strike was won, I threw myself into the task of combatting the rising tide of class hatred led by Bryan, representing agrarians in a fight against bankers and industrialists. I was chairman of the mill workers' Sound Money Club. Bryan was running for president on a platform declaring that the laboring man should “not be crucified upon a cross of gold.” No laboring man wanted to be. I was on the same side of the fence with Bryan when it came to the crucifixion question, but on the opposite side of the fence regarding the gold question. Of course I knew little about finance, and could not answer the Nebraskan. But had he advocated the free and unlimited coinage of pig-iron I could have talked him into a gasping hysteria. For, we mill fellows figured that this was exactly what Bryan's money theory amounted to. His farmer friends had borrowed gold money from the bankers, spent it in drought years plowing land that produced nothing, and then found themselves unable to pay it back. They wanted to call silver and paper cash and pay the debt with this new kind of money. He wanted a money system by which a farmer could borrow money to put in his crop, then having failed to raise a crop (I have mentioned the great drought years) could yet pay back the money. But no farming nation can suffer great crop losses without being set back financially and starved to where it hurts. You've got to figure God's laws into your human calculations.
“Bryan might as well try to dodge the hungry days by advocating the free and unlimited coinage of tomato cans,” is the way one of the fellows put it; “then every man could borrow a dollar and buy a can of tomatoes. After eating the tomatoes he could coin the can into a dollar and buy another can of tomatoes. And so on until he got too old to eat, and then he could use the last dollar from the tin can in paying back the banker.” Schemes like that are all right for orators and agitators who make their living with words. But farmers and iron workers know what it is that turns clods into corn and what makes the iron wheels that bear it to market. It is muscle applied with the favor of God.
Without labor, no crops. Without rain, no crops. It was world-wide crop failures that finally brought the lean years of the nineties. The return of big crops was already reviving the sick world. It rejected the radicals' “remedy” and next year it was well. Had we taken that wrong medicine in the dark it would have killed us. Thirty years later Russia let them shoot that medicine into her arm and it paralyzed her. The rain falls upon her fields and the soil is rich, but it brings forth no harvest and the people starve.
Russia has had famines before, but they were acts of God. The rain failed and there was no harvest. Their present famine is an act of man. Labor ceased. And the ensuing hunger was man's own fault. Nations that think labor is a curse, and adopt schemes to avoid labor, must perish for their folly.
In 1896 we came within an inch of adopting financial bolshevism. This taught me that a people are poorly schooled who can not tell the good from the bad. The wise heads knew what was good for the country. Hard work and good crops would cure our ills. But millions voted for a poison that would have destroyed us. From that time on I dreamed of a new kind of school, not the kind we had that turned out men to grope blindly between good and folly. But a school based on the fundamental facts of life and labor, the need of food and housing, and the sweating skill that brings man most of his blessings. A school from which no man could come out ignorant. That school should teach the eternal facts, and he that denied the facts would then be known for a fool or a rogue—and not be thought a Messiah.
I love sentiment, and I believe in God. And I believe that facts are God's glorious handiwork. “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” The man who shuns realities because they belittle him is on the wrong road; he is hopelessly lost from the beginning.