The Iron Puddler Part 7

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

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

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

The wife, who was a barefooted, freckle-faced woman, came out on the porch and, smiling sweetly, sized up my intellect. I made up my mind that here were the two smartest people in America. For they saw I was bulging with intellect. n.o.body else had ever discovered it, not even I myself. I thought I was a muscle-bound iron puddler, but they p.r.o.nounced me an intellectual giant. It never occurred to me that they might have guessed wrong, while the wise old world had guessed right. If the world was in step, they were out of step, but I figured that the world was out of step and they had the right stride. I thought their judgment must be better than the judgment of the whole world because their judgment pleased me. I later learned that their judgment was just like the judgment of all Reds. That's what makes 'em Red.

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

"Many what?" I asked.

"Communists, communists," he said excitedly.

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

The figures that I furnished Comrade Bannerman surprised him. I counted the seeds in each slice of watermelon and gave that as the number of comrades in each mill. The number was too high. Comrade Bannerman knew how many Reds there were in the country, and it appeared that the few mills I had worked in contained practically the whole communist party.

He got rather excited and said the numbers were growing faster than he had imagined. He had figured that it would take forty years to bring about the Red commonwealth, but with the new light I had thrown on the subject he concluded that the times were ripening faster than he had dared to hope, and that there was no doubt the revolution would be upon us within three years.

The comrade told me he was not popular in the village for two reasons.

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

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

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

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

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

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

He was not envious of me, of course, because he thought I was a tramp.

Indeed he thought I was as envious as he, and so he cla.s.sed the two of us as "intellectuals." From this I learned that "Intellectuals" is a name that weak men, crazed with envy, give to themselves. They believe the successful men lack intellect; are all luck. This thought soothes their envy and keeps it from driving them mad.

I thanked Comrade Bannerman for his pamphlets and threw him a few coins to pay for the melons he had given me. But my peep into his soul had taught me more than his propaganda could teach me. Later I read all the pamphlets because I had promised I would. They told of the labor movement and the theories at work in Germany. One of them was called Merrie England and declared that England had once been merry, but capitalism had crushed all joy and turned the island into a living h.e.l.l.

I remembered my mother in Wales rocking her baby's cradle and singing all day long with a voice vibrant with joy. If capitalism had crushed her heart she hadn't heard about it.

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

CHAPTER XXII. LOADED DOWN WITH LITERATURE

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

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

The wildest book of all was called Caesar's Column. It was in the form of a novel and told how the rich in America wors.h.i.+ped gold and l.u.s.t instead of G.o.d and brotherly love, and how they drove their carriages over the working man's children and left them crushed and bleeding in the street. America had ceased to be a republic and was an oligarchy of wealth all owned by a dozen great families while the millions were starving. The end of the book described a great revolution in which the people arose, led by an Italian communist named Caesar Spadoni. The mob took all the fine houses and killed the rich people. Caesar took the bodies and, laying them in cement like bricks, he built an enormous column of corpses in Union Square towering higher than any building in New York. He established his headquarters in a Fifth Avenue palace and was directing the slaughter of all men who owned property, when some of his followers got jealous of his fine position and killed him and burned the house. By that time everything in America was destroyed, and the hero of the book, having invented an air-s.h.i.+p, flew away to South Africa to escape the general demolition. This book was being circulated by communists as a true picture of what the country was coming to.

These pamphlets came into my hands at a time when work was getting scarcer every day and a million men like myself were moving about the country looking for jobs. Then for the first time I realized my need for a broader education. If these things were true, it was my duty to stop chasing the vanis.h.i.+ng job and begin to organize the workers so that they might destroy the capitalists. But how could I know whether they were true? I had no knowledge of past history. And without knowing the past how could I judge the future? I was like the old man who had never seen a railroad train. His sons took him thirty miles over the hills and brought him to the depot where a train was standing. The old man looked things over and saw that the wheels were made of iron. "It will never start," he said. He knew that if his wagon had heavy iron wheels, his team could never start it. But his sons said: "It will start all right."

They had seen it before; they knew its past history. Soon the train started, gathered speed like a whirlwind and went roaring away down the track. The old man gazed after it and then, much excited, he exclaimed.

"It will never stop!"

The wisest head is no judge unless it has in it the history of past performances. I had not studied much history in my brief schooling. The mills called me because they needed men. Good times were there when I arrived, and as for hard times, I was sure they "would never start." Now the hard times were upon us and panic shook the ground beneath our feet.

"It will never stop," men cried. Had they studied the history of such things they would have known that hard times come and hard times go, starting and stopping for definite reasons, like the railway train.

I had done the right thing in quitting school and going to the puddling furnaces at a time when we needed iron more than we needed education.

The proverb says, "Strike while the iron is hot." The country was building, and I gave it iron to build with. Railroads were still pus.h.i.+ng out their mighty arms and stringing their iron rails across the western wheat lands. Bridges were crossing the Mississippi and spanning the chasms in the Rocky Mountains. Chicago and New York were rising in new growth with iron in their bones to hold them high. My youth was spent in giving to this growing land the element its body needed.

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

During the next ten years of my life I was a worker and a student, too.

My motto was that every one should have at least a high-school education and a trade.

CHAPTER XXIII. THE PUDDLER HAS A VISION

That caravan of railroad cars bearing the happy lodge members to their meeting in the Rockies, had started a train of thought that went winding through my mind ever after. In fancy I saw the envious Bannerman shaking his fist at his thriftier, happier brothers. Should I denounce the banding together of men for the promotion of fun and good fellows.h.i.+p?

Were these men hastening the downfall of America as the communist predicted? Is not good fellows.h.i.+p a necessary feeling in the hearts of civilized men?

Love of comrades had always been a ruling pa.s.sion with me. I joined my union as soon as I had learned my trade, the Amalgamated a.s.sociation of Iron, Steel and Tin Workers of North America. It was a long name, and we liked every word in it. We felt the glow of brotherhood, and as I said before, we used to share our jobs with the brother who was out of work.

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

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

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

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

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

As we rolled along, I saw in a vision train after train of lodge men going to some happy city. They were miners and steel workers, as well as clerks and teachers, and they were banded together, not like Reds to overthrow the wage system, but to teach themselves and their children how to make the wage system shed its greatest blessings upon all. The city they were going to was one they had built with their own hands.

And in that city was a school where every trade was taught to fatherless children, as my father taught his trade to me. And with this trade each child received the liberal education that the rich man gives his son but which the poor man goes without. This was the wildest fancy I had ever entertained. It was born of my own need of knowledge. It was a dream I feared I could not hope to realize.

CHAPTER XXIV. JOE THE POOR BRAKEMAN

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

"Where're you going?"