From the Bottom Up Part 21

The New Haven water company managed to get what was called an "eternal contract" pa.s.sed through both chambers of the city government. Only labouring people opposed it. Naturally there was a strong suspicion of foul play.

[Ill.u.s.tration: State Convention of the Socialist Party of Connecticut, May 31, 1906]

A year afterward a man came to me with a grip-sack full of doc.u.ments.

He had been expert book-keeper for the water company, and knew the facts and figures for twenty-five years.

Among them were two cancelled checks--one for a thousand, which was made out by and to the president, and dated the day a certain committee was to meet to go over the terms of the contract. The other was made out to a shyster lawyer and was for fifteen thousand. He expected to create a sensation. The thing had worked on his conscience until it became unbearable. He came to me because of what he had learned of me at the water company office. It takes a civic conscience to deal with such a problem and New Haven had no such thing at that time.

He took the doc.u.ments from one place to another--to ministers, lawyers, judges, legislators, etc. Nothing could be done. They were all the personal friends of the officials.

The papers wouldn't print anything about it. The book-keeper said he thought he knew why "editors never had any water bills." Some radicals got the big check printed in facsimile and scattered it abroad. The aldermen had been bought; there was no doubt of that, but it was a matter of business.

The whole agitation came back on the reformers like a boomerang.

Leading politicians determined to do something to vindicate the leading citizen who had been accused. They elected him to the State Senate! A city of a hundred thousand can by either a positive or a negative process, destroy the usefulness of any man who would be its servant.

I felt my loneliness very keenly--indeed, so much so that it was often as though I had committed a great crime. Always, however, at the breaking-point came a word of cheer--a note of approval.

Bishop Lines of Newark, New Jersey, who was then Rector of St. Paul's church, sent me a note, that reached me in a dark hour.

"I do not suppose," he said, "that I look at things as you do, in all respects, but I would like to a.s.sure you of my great regard for you and of my implicit faith in your sincerity and goodness. I know that the world's great sorrow rests upon your heart and that many men who feel it not sit in judgment upon you."

The People's Church dwindled to a vanis.h.i.+ng point. The farm produced nothing. Autumn came and we lived largely upon apples.

"Make a break!" my wife said, but it seemed like running away from the fight. The fight was already over and I was beaten--beaten, but unaware of defeat.

One morning I was at the top of a big apple tree, shaking it for three Italian women whom we believed to be worse off than ourselves. A branch broke and I fell on my back on a boulder. I lay as one dead. My wife found me there and hailed a pa.s.sing grocer's wagon. The boy whipped up his horse to bring a doctor, but on the way spread the news that I had been killed by a fall. Among the first callers after the accident were Donald G. Mitch.e.l.l and his daughter, my neighbours. I lay on a mattress on the lawn all afternoon in great agony.

Although it was with the greatest difficulty that we sc.r.a.ped together the twenty-five dollars a month for the farm, my wife, putting her philosophy of the New Thought to the test, had rented a house in the city at seventy dollars a month. When she rented it, we hadn't seventy cents. We were to move into it the day of the accident. I insisted that we proceed.

"Send for Jimmy Moohan," I said. Jimmy was a genial old Irish expressman whose stand was at the New Haven Green. Jimmy came and looked me over. Then came Bob Grant, a foreman from a near-by manufacturing concern, and after him four Socialist comrades on their way home from work.

"Ah, Mother o' G.o.d," Jimmy said, "shure it's an ambulance yer riverence shud haave."

"I want you, Jimmy; pile me in."

"Holy Saints," he exclaimed, "shure th' ould cyart'll jolt yer guts out!"

"Pile me in."

So they lifted me on the mattress and laid me in the express wagon.

Bob Grant sat beside me; the four comrades steadied it--two on each side.

"Git up now, Larry, an' be aisy wid ye."

When the wagon wheel mounted a stone, Jimmy blamed Larry and swore at him. Occasionally he would turn around and say: "How's it goin', yer riverence?"

I was in such agony that I sweat. Pains were shooting through every part of my body but I usually answered:

"Fine, Jimmy, fine!"

So I came back within the gates of the city--rejected, defeated, deserted, and practically a pauper.

It had been a long fight but the city had conquered. A few more attempts at work; a few more appeals for fair play, a few more speeches for the propaganda; but as baggage in Jimmy Moohan's express wagon I was down and out!

At a regular meeting of the Trades Council of New Haven a member moved that a letter of sympathy be sent to me. A week after my fall, another was made and carried to make me a member of the council and a third to send me a check for fifty dollars. This was the only money I ever received for my services to labour and as it arrived a few hours before the agent called for his rent, it was very welcome.

It seemed odd to all sorts of people that, after being starved out, I should bob up again in one of the largest houses on Chapel Street--I couldn't quite understand it myself. My wife could, however. She said the whole business of life was a matter of mental att.i.tude and she only laughed when I asked whether there was any chance of my being kicked to death by a mule for the next month's rent!

I made another attempt to interest the students of Yale in the human affairs of New Haven. Ten years previous to this, when there was some suggestion that I take charge of Yale's mission work, I was astounded to be told by the leaders of the Yale Y.M.C.A. that the chief end in view was not the work but the worker. Yale's mission was to give the student practice. Missions were to be laboratories--the specimens were to be humans. The eternal questions of sin and poverty were to be answered by the pious phrases and the cast-off junk of immature students. I gave a series of talks on labour unions to a selected group of students who were leaders.

I was a social evangelist then and, after the talks, took stock of the results. Many fell by the wayside, but a group of strong men formed themselves into a "University Federal Labour Union." d.i.c.k Morse, captain of the 'Varsity crew, became president of it. Representative union const.i.tutions were studied. The following sentences from the declaration of principles will ill.u.s.trate how thoroughly these young men got in line with the union movement:

"We believe it inconsistent and unworthy that a wage-worker should take the benefits that accrue to a craft as a direct result of organization and at the same time hold himself aloof from the responsibilities and from his share of the expenses of that organization.

"We believe that union men whenever possible should demand the union label as a guarantee that the goods were manufactured under conditions fair to labour. We believe that eight hours should const.i.tute a day's work."

In the preamble was this statement: "We do not look upon the labour union as an ultimate conception of labour, but we believe that whatever progress has been made in the lot of the labourer has been due wholly to the organization of the wage-workers!"

The preamble concludes with this paragraph: "Believing, therefore, in the cause of labour and desiring to add according to our ability to the support of the union movement, we pledge ourselves to study it intelligently and to support it loyally."

Here was the beginning of a splendid mission work among the students; but the New Haven labour movement wasn't big enough to take it in; nor was the American Federation of Labour. The labour men would have no dealings whatever with the students. We managed to keep the big house for a year, but we kept little else during that period. Twice we lost the mental image of the monthly rent. Sam Read supplied it the first time and Anson Phelps Stokes the other. These were my only borrowings in New Haven. In that house I had one of the most bitter experiences of my life.

"I think," said my wife to me, one morning at 2 A.M., "that the baby will be born in an hour."

The announcement chilled me. There was but five cents in the house and that was needed to telephone for the family physician. As I walked down Chapel Street it seemed as if my heart was a nest of scorpions spitting poison.

There was no breakfast in the house for the mother of the new-born babe. The churches, the homes of the wealthy and the university filled me with unutterable hate as I pa.s.sed them. I was in the frame of mind in which murder, theft, violence are committed.

I had held my integrity intact until that exigency. Then I only lacked opportunity to smash my ideals--to bend my head, my back, my morals!

Cold sweat covered my body, my teeth chattered and my hands twitched.

My Socialist philosophy told me that society was in process of evolution. Democracy at heart was correcting its own evils and like a snake sloughing off its outworn skin. I was part of that process.

Reason pounded these things in on me but hate pushed them aside and demanded something else. I wondered that morning whether after all there weren't more reforms wrapped up in a stick of dynamite than in a whole life of preaching and moralizing. In that fifteen-minute walk there pa.s.sed through my mind and heart all the elements of h.e.l.l.

It was a new experience to me--I had not travelled that way before. I went into a little restaurant to use the 'phone. I laid the nickel on the counter, when I had finished, and as I did so the waiter said, "It's a 'phone on me, Mr. Irvine;" and he rang up five cents in the cash register.

"Ah," I said, "you know me then?"

"Sure thing," he said, "don't you know me?"

I shook my head.

"Gee!" he said, "you're sick. You look like h.e.l.l!"

"I feel like it."

"What's up?"

"You heard me 'phone?"