The Iron Puddler Part 15

What I want to emphasize is that we are not opposed to art and literature. All men want them; need them. We teach how to get them.

CHAPTER XLVI. THE MOOSEHEART IDEA

The majority of the Moose are men in the mechanical trades. But the primary trade, the one on which all others rest, is agriculture. The men knew this, and so they founded Mooseheart on the soil. It is an agricultural school. It occupies more than a thousand acres in the richest farming region of Illinois. The first thing the students learn is that all wealth comes out of the earth. The babies play in the meadows and learn the names of flowers and birds. The heritage of childhood is the out-of-doors. I heard of some children in the city who found a mouse and thought it was a rabbit. But when the city-born children come to Mooseheart they come into their own. They trap rabbits and woodchucks, fight b.u.mblebees' nests, wade and fish in the creek and go boating and swimming in the river and the clear lake.

When a boy gets old enough to leave the kindergarten and start in the primary school he mixes agricultural studies with his books. First he plants a small garden and tends it. Then he is taught to raise chickens.

Next he learns swine husbandry and then dairying and the handling of horses. The girls learn poultry-raising, b.u.t.ter-making, gardening, cooking, dressmaking and millinery.

After the boy has had a general course in all the branches of agriculture he is permitted to specialize in any one of them if he wants to. He can make an exhaustive study of grain farming, dairying, stock breeding, bee culture, horticulture and landscape gardening.

After this grounding in agriculture, which all the boys must have, the student gets an introduction to the mechanical trades. Then he may select a particular trade and specialize. The usual grammar-school and high-school courses are taught to all the students, also swimming and dancing and music, both vocal and instrumental. The kindergarten has a babies' band, and both the girls and boys have their own bra.s.s bands and orchestras.

Students are graduated when they are eighteen. Up to that time they are permitted to stay and learn as many trades as they can. Learning comes easy in such a school as Mooseheart, and many of the boys go out with two or more finished trades. Music is one of the trades that the boys double in. We have graduated many fine musicians, but none who didn't know a mechanical trade as well and, on top of it all, he knew how to run a farm. Such a boy can serve his country in peace or war. Before men can eat they have to have food, and he knows how to raise it. To enjoy their food they must have a house to live in, and he knows how to build it. After a house and food comes music. This lad can play a tune for the cabaret.

One of Mooseheart's earliest graduates made a high record in his academic studies and mastered the trade of cook, pastry cook, nurseryman, cement modeler, cornetist, saxophone player and landscape gardener. He was brilliant in all these lines and ready to make a living at any one of them. And if all these trades should fail, he was yet a scientific farmer and could go to the land anywhere and make it produce bigger crops than the untrained man who was born on the soil.

What other school in the world will give a boy at eighteen an equipment like that? I ask this, not to disparage the old-fas.h.i.+oned schools, but to call their attention to what the new are doing.

CHAPTER XLVII. LIFE'S PROBLEMS

Mooseheart is at once a farm, a school and a town. The boys help handle the crops and herds under the guidance of the experts who teach the cla.s.ses in agriculture. For extra work in the fields the boys receive pay. They save their money to buy the tools of their trade. The bandsmen when they graduate go out with fine instruments bought with their own earnings during their school years. "Preparation for life" is the one aim of Mooseheart. Therefore at Mooseheart the boy or girl will encounter every problem that he will encounter in his struggle in the wider world. Nothing is done for him that he can do for himself. He is taught no false theories. But every fact of life is placed before him in due time. The first wealth of facts comes to these city-bred children when they are set down in the middle of this great, busy, beautiful farm. John Burrows says: "No race that does not take to the soil can long hold its country. In the struggle for survival it will lose its country to some incoming race that loves the soil." Already the j.a.panese farmers in California have shown that if we should let them in they would take this whole country in a few years. They drive the American farmer out because they have a pa.s.sion for the soil, and they turn their whole families in to till it. What is the answer? Teach our young to love the soil and to till it well, or else an alien race will take away their heritage. The first lesson in Mooseheart is to till the soil.

But in addition to being a farm, Mooseheart is a town. The young folk live in cottages and do their own cooking and house-keeping. There are no great dormitories where hundreds sleep, and no vast dining-room where they march in to the goose-step. We are preparing them for a free life, and the only place they use the goose-step is in the penitentiary.

Mooseheart is a town instead of an inst.i.tution. All "inst.i.tutionalism"

is cast away. In each cottage is a group of boys or a group of girls living under family conditions. They are not all of the same age; some are big and some are little, and the big ones look after the little ones. Each cottage has its own kitchen and orders its own supplies from the general store. The girls' cottages have each a matron (sometimes a widow who with her little ones has been admitted to Mooseheart), and she advises the girls how to do the buying and the cooking.

In the boys' cottages there is a proctor to advise them and usually a woman cook. The boys who care to can learn cookery and household buying under her supervision. All the boys do their own dishwas.h.i.+ng, sweeping and bed-making. Once three boys about fourteen years old went on strike because the proctor asked them to scrub the dining-room floor on their knees. They thought this work would degrade them, and they started toward the superintendent's office. On the way they met me and told me their troubles.

"I think it is all right for a young man to scrub a floor on his knees," I said. "I've done it for my mother many a time. I have been a bootblack. But it didn't hurt my character. You are going to the superintendent for his opinion. He is a Harvard man, but he worked his way through school and one of his jobs was bellboy in a hotel. Had he been too proud to work as a servant he would never have gotten the education that makes him head of this great school. Didn't you ever scrub a floor on your knees? You can see the dirt come out with the suds and you can watch the grain of the wood appear, where before it was hidden by dust and grease. If you never saw that, you have missed something that I have seen many a time. To know how to scrub a floor is as much a part of your education as to know how to sandpaper a floor and varnish it. We could hire this work done better than you can do it, but that wouldn't be giving you a chance to learn the work. Now I'm not telling you boys to go back and do the work if you don't want to. Use your own judgment. But fellows that balk on a job never go far. A balky man is like a balky horse, everybody gets rid of him as quickly as they can. A quitter is never given a good job. They always keep him in a place where it doesn't make any difference whether he quits or not."

The leader of the boys said: "Aw, piffle, cut it out. We might as well be scrubbing the floor as listening to this talk. Come on, fellows." He led them back, one of them protesting that he would never scrub a floor for any man. He went ahead and scrubbed the floor still saying that he wouldn't. That lad was weaker than the leader. He went wherever he was led. The leader was a boy who made his own decisions. He was ashamed of calling off the strike, but he did it because he felt the strike was wrong.

This is the Mooseheart idea of education. Every boy must use his own judgment. He faces every fact that he will face in life, and by the time he is eighteen his judgment is as ripe as that of the much older average man. The Mooseheart boys are not selected students. They come from the humblest families, from homes that have been wiped out early. But the training at Mooseheart is so well adapted to human needs that these orphans soon outstrip the children of the more fortunate cla.s.ses.

They become quick in initiative, st.u.r.dy in character and brilliant in scholars.h.i.+p. Visitors who come from boys' preparatory schools where the children of the rich are trained for college are amazed to find these sons of the working people so far ahead of the young aristocrats. The Mooseheart boys as a group have the others beaten in all the qualities that go to make a young man excellent. We have prepared them for life.

CHAPTER XLVIII. BUILDING A BETTER WORLD BY EDUCATION

And so the great dream of my life has been realized. In youth I saw the orphans of the worker scattered at a blow, little brothers and sisters doomed to a life of drudgery, and never to see one another again. No longer need such things be. The humblest worker can afford to join an a.s.sociation that guarantees a home and an education to his children. In Mooseheart the children are kept together. Family life goes on, and with it comes an education better than the rich man's son can buy.

As individuals, the Moose are not rich men, but in cooperation they are wealthy. They have a plant at Mooseheart now valued at five million dollars, and they provide a revenue of one million two hundred thousand a year to maintain and enlarge it. They received no endowment from state or nation. They wanted to protect their children and they found a way to do it. They based their system of education on the actual needs of men.

They know what life is, for they have lived it. In mine and field and factory they had tasted the salty flavor of real things, and they built a school that has this flavor.

The war drove home a lesson that will forever make false education hateful to me. Education in the wrong direction can destroy a nation and wreck the happiness of the world. The German worker was taught that he would get rich, not by patient toil, but by taking by force the wealth that others had created.

On my return from France, where I had witnessed the Hindenburg drive into the heart of France, I addressed the Iron Workers in their national convention. "I am glad," I said, "that I was born an iron worker and not a Chancellor of Blood and Iron. For the iron I wrought has helped build up a civilization, while the German's 'Blood and Iron' has sought to destroy it.

"France stands knee-deep in her own blood while the iron of Germany is being hurled into her breast. Iron Workers of America, to you has G.o.d given the answer to the German thunderbolt. The iron of the republic shall beat down the iron of the kings. Wherever I walked behind the battle lines in France I told them I was an iron worker and I gave them this message for you:

"'The American iron worker will not fail you. We have been taught to believe in justice as the German believes in might. We will back up our soldiers with s.h.i.+ps and guns until Kaiserisim is beaten. We will set the workers of Germany free--free from their foul belief in murder and in kings. And when we have bound up our wounds we will build a new world that shall be a freer world than man has ever known.'

"I have dedicated my life to this purpose. We will build this freer world by the right instruction of our young. Education is of two kinds, one kind is good and the other is poison. A poisonous education took but one generation to turn the German working men into a race of blood-letters. Wrong education tears a nation down. Right education will build it up. One generation of right education will remake the world.

Who will furnish this new education? I, for one, will do my share, and more. My heart is in this one cause, and my whole life from now on shall be devoted to it.

"You will hear me speaking for it on every rostrum and in every schoolhouse in America. I have been handicapped in life because I had no education. But it is better to have no education than a false one, for I was left free to know the truth when I found it. I went into the mills when I should have been in school. As a working man I have helped get better conditions for the worker. Think how much more I could have done if I had had an education. Your leaders have done much for the iron workers because they could see farther than the common man. The worker with an education can see far. He can judge quickly and be guided rightly, for he has knowledge to guide him. I have knelt and prayed to G.o.d to direct me. Now I know He has answered my prayer. My mission is to bring to the poor man's boy the ample education that the rich man gives his son. Equal education will make men equal in the gaining of wealth.

Education is Democracy.

"A French soldier lay dying on the battle-field, and a comrade kneeling by him asked what last word he wished carried to his wife and children.

And the dying man said with his last breath: 'Tell them that I gave my body to the earth, I gave my heart to France and I gave my soul to G.o.d.'

"And so I say to you in the spirit of the French soldier that this, my body, I will give at last back to the iron earth, in whose deep mines and smoking metal shops my muscles took their form. This heart of mine that beats for liberty and equality I give--and give to its last beat--to the cause of equal education for our young. And my soul at last I shall render back unto my Maker knowing that I have served His cause as He has given me to see it."

CHAPTER XLIX. CONCLUSION

H. G. Wells has asked all scholars to unite in writing a "Bible of the New Education." I am no scholar, but if Wells will take suggestions from an iron puddler, I offer him these random thoughts.

This generation is rich because the preceding generation stored up lots of capital. We are living in the houses and using the railroads that our fathers built by working overtime.

When labor loafs on the job it makes itself poor. We are not building fast enough to keep ourselves housed. Were it not for the houses our fathers built this generation would be out-of-doors right now, with no roof but the sky.

No matter who owns the capital, capital works for everybody. Ford owns the flivver factory, but everybody owns the flivvers. The oil king owns the gasoline, but he has to tote it to the roadside where every one can get it. Equal division is the goal that capitalism constantly approaches. No man wants all the gasoline. He wants six gallons at a time, with a service station every few miles. Capital performs this service for him. Under "capitalism," so-called wealth is more equally divided than under any other system ever known.

Work is a blessing, not a curse. This country had the good luck to be settled by the hardest workers in the world. Their big production made us rich. If we slacken production we will soon be poor. The Indians owned everything in common. They did not work. And they were so poor that this whole continent would support less than two million of them.

Thousands of Indians used to starve and freeze to death every hard winter.

The white man who doesn't want to work is sick. He needs a dose of medicine, not a dose of the millennium. The Bible says that in the sweat of his face man shall eat bread. When labor loafs, it injures labor first and capital last. For labor grows poor to-day while the capitalist gets poor to-morrow. But to-morrow never comes. The capitalist can turn laborer and raise himself a mess of pork and beans.

The laborer who does not turn capitalist and have a house and garden for his old age is lacking in foresight.

Men will never be equal. John L. Sullivan had many fights, and John always whipped the other fellow, or the other fellow whipped John.

When all men are equal, every prize fight will end in a draw, and every batter will knock as many home runs as Babe Ruth.

"There is enough already created to supply everybody if it were equally divided." Yes. And there is enough ice at the North Pole to cool off the Sahara Desert if it were equally divided. There is enough water in the seven seas to flood the six continents if it were equally divided.

The time to quit work and divide the wealth is just two weeks before the end of the world. For the world's surplus of supplies is just two weeks ahead of starvation. Wheat is being harvested in one country or another every week in the year. And yet with all the hard work that men can do, they can not boost the world's supply of bread so as to increase our two weeks' lead on the wolf of famine. The wolf is ever behind us only two weeks away. And if we stumble for a moment, he gets nearer.

American machinery enabled the western farmer to raise and harvest as much wheat as twenty Russian peasants. In India where wheat is raised by hand, the labor of one family will only feed one family. But in the Dakotas, the labor of one man will deliver in Chicago enough flour to feed three hundred men a year. This increase in man's power to produce wheat caused the world's population to double itself since McCormack invented the reaper. The Chinese and Hindu millions who would have starved to death, have been fed, and that's why they're with us to-day.