The Iron Puddler Part 12

"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 l.u.s.ty as a new-born child. I'd swap all my education in a minute for the mighty body and the healthy and l.u.s.ty 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.

CHAPTER x.x.xVI. GROWLING FOR THE BOSSES' BLOOD

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, n.o.body 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 salesmans.h.i.+p 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 l.u.s.ted for blood. I faced the problem with a thirst for accurate knowledge, and my pa.s.sion was not for bloodshed but for brotherhood.

CHAPTER x.x.xVII. FREE AND UNLIMITED COINAGE

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 cla.s.s. 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 Sat.u.r.day noon, and his Sat.u.r.day'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 cla.s.s 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 G.o.d'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 G.o.d.

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 G.o.d. 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 G.o.d. And I believe that facts are G.o.d'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.

CHAPTER x.x.x VIII. THE EDITOR GETS MY GOAT

Madison county, Indiana, was a Democratic stronghold outside the mill towns, and a few farming towns.h.i.+ps. Free silver orators were telling the farmers that under a gold standard no factory could run. The farmers could see the smoke of the tin mills which had built a great city just beyond their corn-fields. The silver men explained that smoke as "a dummy factory set up by Mark Hanna with Wall Street money to make a smoke and fool the people into thinking that it was a real factory and that industry was reviving under a Republican tariff." The orators said the best proof that it was a sham mill lay in the fact that the plutocrats claimed it was a tin mill, while "everybody knows it is impossible to manufacture tin plate in America."

My method of getting votes for the tariff was to take young Democrats from the mill and transport them to Democratic rallies in the far corner of the county where they heard their Democratic orators saying that the mill was a sham put up to fool voters and that it was not manufacturing any tin. When the young Democrats heard such rot they turned against their party. They were farm boys who had been brought up in that county and had quit the farm and gone into the tin mill because they could earn twice as much making tin as they could farming. A worker at work is hard-headed enough to know that when an orator tells him he is not working and not earning any money, the orator is an a.s.s. These lies about fake factories hurt the Democrats by turning all the mill Democrats into Republicans. This is the only method I have ever used in campaigning. The Republicans carried the town. When, two years later, I ran for city clerk, they pa.s.sed around the rumor that I was a wild Welshman from a land where the tribes lived in caves and wore leather skirts and wooden shoes, and that I had had my first introduction to a pants-wearing people when I came to America. They said that I had not yet learned to speak English, could not spell my own name, and was unable to count above ten.

These charges printed in the opposition paper offered me my only chance for election. I went to all my meetings with a big slate. I asked my audience to call out numbers. I wrote down the figures and then did sums in arithmetic to prove that I could count. I would ask if there was a school-teacher in the audience (there was always one there). He would rise, and I would ask him to verify my calculations. I would also have him ask me to spell words. He would give me such words as "combustion,"

"garbage disposal," "bonded indebtedness" and so on. I would spell the words and write them on the slate. He would then ask me questions in history, geography and political economy. Then the school-teacher would turn to the crowd and say:

"Friends, I came to this meeting because I had read that Mr. Davis is an ignorant foreigner unfitted for the duties of city clerk. I find to my surprise that he is well informed. I am glad we came here and investigated, for we can all rest a.s.sured that if he is elected to the office, he is entirely capable of filling it."

I handled the money and kept the books for the union, and this work in addition to my campaign efforts wore me down at last. Two nights before the election I decided that I had small chance of winning. I was on the Republican ticket, and the Republicans had been in office four years and their administration had proved unfortunate. There had been rich pickings for contractors in that new and overgrown city, and the people blamed the Republicans and were determined on a change.

I was pa.s.sing the office of the opposition editor late at night after canva.s.sing for votes all day. I thought of the nasty slurs he had written about me and my whole ancestry. I had fought hard to educate myself and had been helpful to others. My self-respect revolted under this editor's malicious goading. I happened to see him in his front office, and on a sudden impulse, I went in, took hold of his collar, and gave him a good licking.

The next day he bawled me out worse than ever. He said I was not only a wild Welshman and a blockhead, but what is more deadly still, I was a gorilla and an a.s.sa.s.sin.

And the next day I was elected.

CHAPTER x.x.xIX. PUTTING JAZZ INTO THE CAMPAIGN

I will go back and relate more details of my race for office. Having won the nomination, I thrilled with pleasure and excitement, but I was at a loss as to how to begin my campaign for election. Should I hope for support among the white-collar cla.s.ses in the "swell" end of town, among the merchants and mill owners or only in the quarter where the workers lived?

The first act of a candidate is to have cards printed and pa.s.s them out to every one he meets. My cards bore my name and my slogan: "Play the game square." I argued that the workers should take part in the city government. I quit the tin mill and went around making speeches. And as there were no movies, and the men had nothing to do evenings but listen to speeches, it was no trouble at all to find an audience. I learned that a politician or an orator has the same appet.i.te for audiences that a drunkard has for gin. When is an orator not an orator? When he hasn't got an audience. I found that when a horse fell down on the street and a crowd gathered to pick it up, somebody began "addressing the gathering on the issues of the day."

Now I know why the cranks from everywhere swarm into any region where a strike is on. They are seeking audiences. They have no love for humanity except that portion of humanity which is forced to be an audience for their itching tongues. I have known rich Jawbone Janes to travel half across the continent to harangue a poor bunch of striking hunyaks. These daughters of luxury wanted one luxury that money could not buy. The luxury of chinning their drivel to an audience. You can't buy audiences as you buy orchids and furs. Accidents make audiences. When a horse falls down and a crowd gathers, he'll be up again and the crowd gone before a girl from Riverside Drive can come a hundred miles in a Pullman. But when the job falls down, the strike crowd sticks together for days. This gives the crack-brained lady opportunity to catch the Transcontinental limited and get there in time to pound their ears with her oratory. She prefers a foreign crowd that can not understand English; they are slower to balk on her. Not understanding what she says, it fails to irritate them greatly. I know of one radical rich girl who boasts she has spread the glad tidings to audiences of thousands representing every foreign language in America. She still hopes some time to catch an audience that understands her own language. That would be a little better fun, she thinks; but still the joy of talking is the main thing, so it matters little whether their audience understands. She wants her audiences to be alive, that's all; she doesn't care much what they're alive with.

When the worker comes to understand that these "leaders" from high society care nothing for him but only want a prominence for themselves and have no natural talents with which to earn that prominence, then the worker will get rid of that tribe forever. Bill Haywood lacked the qualities that made Sam Gompers a labor leader. Bill decided to be a leader without qualifying for it, and history tells the rest.

I circulated among the audiences that were listening to other candidates and waited for the men to express their opinions. I heard one stalwart old fellow declare he was going to vote for Jazz. "Jazz is the fellow we want for City Clerk," I heard him tell his comrades. I had never heard of Jazz in those days: Jazz was decidedly a dark horse. But the man was strong for him and wanted his friends to vote the same way.