The Iron Puddler Part 3

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 pa.s.sing 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 s.h.i.+p sailing so soon," he said. "They will have to have housing till a s.h.i.+p sails."

Now this country has a shortage of houses and a surplus of s.h.i.+ps. There aren't enough roofs to house the honest people, and there are hundreds of s.h.i.+ps lying idle. Let the honest people have the houses, and the anarchists have the s.h.i.+ps. I called up the s.h.i.+pping Board, borrowed a s.h.i.+p, 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 s.h.i.+p about to sail. I learned that the children were healthy and right-minded; the mother was of honest working stock with a faith in G.o.d 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 s.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+re, 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 gla.s.s 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 G.o.dliness, but food is ahead of them all, and without food man loses his cleanliness, G.o.dliness 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 hards.h.i.+ps 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 hards.h.i.+ps 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 hards.h.i.+p 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 gra.s.s 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 n.o.bility 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 gra.s.s 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 sc.r.a.ped up some capital and invested it in a shoe-s.h.i.+ning outfit.

Nearly every traveling man who came to the hotel allowed me to s.h.i.+ne 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 fas.h.i.+ons 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-sc.r.a.per steel is s.h.i.+pped 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 s.h.i.+ne, 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 was.h.i.+ng 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."