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I was born in the working-class. Early I discovered
enthusiasm, ambition, and ideals; and to satisfy these became the problem of
my child-life. My environment was crude and rough and raw. I had no outlook,
but an uplook rather. My place in society was at the bottom. Here life offered
nothing but sordidness and wretchedness, both of the flesh and the spirit;
for here flesh and spirit were alike starved and tormented.
Above me towered the colossal edifice of society,
and to my mind the only way out was up. Into this edifice I early resolved to
climb. Up above, men wore black clothes and boiled shirts, and women dressed
in beautiful gowns. Also, there were good things to eat, and there was plenty
to eat. This much for the flesh. Then there were the things of the spirit. Up
above me, I knew, were unselfishnesses of the spirit, clean and noble
thinking, keen intellectual living. I knew all this because I read
"Seaside Library" novels, in which, with the exception of the
villains and adventuresses, all men and women thought beautiful thoughts,
spoke a beautiful tongue, and performed glorious deeds. In short, as I
accepted the rising of the sun, I accepted that up above me was all that was
fine and noble and gracious, all that gave decency and dignity to life, all
that made life worth living and that remunerated one for his travail and
misery.
But it is not particularly easy for one to climb up
out of the working-class - especially if he is handicapped by the possession
of ideals and illusions. I lived on a ranch in California, and I was hard put
to find the ladder whereby to climb. I early inquired the rate of interest on
invested money, and worried my child's brain into an understanding of the
virtues and excellencies of that remarkable invention of man, compound
interest. Further, I ascertained the current rates of wages for workers of
all ages, and the cost of living. From all this data I concluded that if I
began immediately and worked and saved until I was fifty years of age, I
could then stop working and enter into participation in a fair portion of the
delights and goodnesses that would then be open to me higher up in society.
Of course, I resolutely determined not to marry, while I quite forgot to
consider at all that great rock of disaster in the working-class world -
sickness.
But the life that was in me demanded more than a
meagre existence of scraping and scrimping. Also, at ten years of age, I
became a newsboy on the streets of a city, and found myself with a changed
uplook. All about me were still the same sordidness and wretchedness, and up
above me was still the same paradise waiting to be gained; but the ladder
whereby to climb was a different one. It was now the ladder of business. Why
save my earnings and invest in government bonds, when, by buying two
newspapers for five cents, with a turn of the wrist I could sell them for ten
cents and double my capital? The business ladder was the ladder for me, and I
had a vision of myself becoming a baldheaded and successful merchant prince.
Alas for visions! When I was sixteen I had already earned
the title of "prince." But this title was given me by a gang of
cut-throats and thieves, by whom I was called "The Prince of the Oyster
Pirates." And at that time I had climbed the first rung of the business
ladder. I was a capitalist. I owned a boat and a complete oyster-pirating
outfit. I had begun to exploit my fellow-creatures. I had a crew of one man.
As captain and owner I took two-thirds of the spoils, and gave the crew
one-third, though the crew worked just as hard as I did and risked just as
much his life and liberty.
This one rung was the height I climbed up the
business ladder. One night I went on a raid amongst the Chinese fishermen.
Ropes and nets were worth dollars and cents. It was robbery, I grant, but it
was precisely the spirit of capitalism. The capitalist takes away the
possessions of his fellow-creatures by means of a rebate, or of a betrayal of
trust, or by the purchase of senators and supreme-court judges. I was merely
crude. That was the only difference. I used a gun.
But my crew that night was one of those inefficients
against whom the capitalist is wont to fulminate, because, forsooth, such
inefficients increase expenses and reduce dividends. My crew did both. What
of his carelessness he set fire to the big mainsail and totally destroyed it.
There weren't any dividends that night, and the Chinese fishermen were richer
by the nets and ropes we did' not get. I was bankrupt, unable just then to
pay sixty-five dollars for a new mainsail. I left my boat at anchor and went
off on a bay-pirate boat on a raid up the Sacramento River. While away on
this trip, another gang of bay pirates raided my boat. They stole everything,
even the anchors; and later on, when I recovered the drifting hulk, I sold it
for twenty dollars. I had slipped back the one rung I had climbed, and never
again did I attempt the business ladder.
From then on I was mercilessly exploited by other
capitalists. I had the muscle, and they made money out of it while I made but
a very indifferent living out of it. I was a sailor before the mast, a
longshoreman, a roustabout; I worked in canneries, and factories, and
laundries; I mowed lawns, and cleaned carpets, and washed windows. And I
never got the full product of my toil. I looked at the daughter of the
cannery owner, in her carriage, and knew that it was my muscle, in part, that
helped drag along that carriage on its rubber tires. I looked at the son of
the factory owner, going to college, and knew that it was my muscle that
helped, in part, to pay for the wine and good fellowship he enjoyed.
But I did not resent this. It was all in the game.
They were the strong. Very well, I was strong. I would carve my way to a
place amongst them and make money out of the muscles of other men. I was not
afraid of work. I loved hard- work. I would pitch in and work harder than
ever and eventually become a pillar of society.
And just then, as luck would have it, I found an
employer that was of the same mind. I was willing to work, and he was more
than willing that I should work. I thought I was learning a trade. In
reality, I had displaced two men. I thought he was making an electrician out
of me; as a matter of fact, he was making fifty dollars per month out of me.
The two men I had displaced had received forty dollars each per month; I was
doing the work of both for thirty dollars per month.
This employer worked me nearly to death. A man may
love oysters, but too many oysters will disincline him toward that particular
diet. And so with me. Too much work sickened me. I did not wish ever to see
work again. I fled from work. I became a tramp, begging my way from door to
door, wandering over the United States and sweating bloody sweats in slums
and prisons.
I had been born in the working-class, and I was now,
at the age of eighteen, beneath the point at which I had started. I was down
in the cellar of society, down in the subterranean depths of misery about
which it is neither nice nor proper to speak. I was in the pit, the abyss,
the human cesspool, the shambles and the charnel-house of our civilization.
This is the part of the edifice of society that society chooses to ignore.
Lack of space compels me here to ignore it, and I shall say only that the
things I there saw gave me a terrible scare.
I was scared into thinking. I saw the naked simplicities
of the complicated civilization in which I lived. Life was a matter of food
and shelter. In order to get food and shelter men sold things. The merchant
sold shoes, the politician sold his manhood, and the representative of the
people, with exceptions, of course, sold his trust; while nearly all sold
their honor. Women, too, whether on the street or in the holy bond of
wedlock, were prone to sell their flesh. All things were commodities, all
people bought and sold. The one commodity that labor had to sell was muscle.
The honor of labor had no price in the market-place. Labor had muscle, and
muscle alone, to sell.
But there was a difference, a vital difference.
Shoes and trust and honor had a way of renewing themselves. They were
imperishable stocks. Muscle, on the other hand, did not renew. As the shoe
merchant sold shoes, he continued to replenish his stock. But there was no
way of replenishing the laborer's stock of muscle. The more he sold of his
muscle, the less of it remained to him. It was his one commodity, and each
day his stock of it diminished. In the end, if he did not die before, he sold
out and put up his shutters. He was a muscle bankrupt, and nothing remained
to him but to go down into the cellar of society and perish miserably.
I learned, further, that brain was likewise a
commodity. It, too, was different from muscle. A brain seller was only at his
prime when he was fifty or sixty years old, and his wares were fetching
higher prices than ever. But a laborer was worked out or broken down at
forty-five or fifty. I had been in the cellar of society, and I did not like
the place as a habitation. The pipes and drains were unsanitary, and the air
was bad to breathe. If I could not live on the parlor floor of society, I
could, at any rate, have a try at the attic. It was true, the diet there was
slim, but the air at least was pure. So I resolved to sell no more muscle,
and to become a vender of brains.
Then began a frantic pursuit of knowledge. I
returned to California and opened the books. While thus equipping, myself to
become a brain merchant, it was inevitable that I should delve into
sociology. There I found, in a certain class of books, scientifically
formulated, the simple sociological concepts I had already worked out for
myself. Other and greater minds, before I was born, had worked out all that I
had thought and a vast deal more. I discovered that I was a socialist.
The socialists were revolutionists, inasmuch as they
struggled to overthrow the society of the present, and out of the material to
build the society of the future. I, too, was a socialist and a revolutionist.
I joined the groups of working-class and intellectual revolutionists, and for
the first time came into intellectual living. Here I found keen-flashing
intellects and brilliant wits; for here I met strong and alert-brained,
withal horny-handed, members of the working-class; unfrocked preachers too
wide in their Christianity for any congregation of Mammon-worshippers;
professors broken on the wheel of university subservience to the ruling class
and flung out because they were quick with knowledge which they strove to
apply to the affairs of mankind.
Here I found, also, warm faith in the human, glowing
idealism, sweetnesses of unselfishness, renunciation, and martyrdom - all the
splendid, stinging things of the spirit. Here life was clean, noble, and
alive. Here life rehabilitated itself, became wonderful and glorious; and I
was glad to be alive. I was in touch with great souls who exalted flesh and
spirit over dollars and cents, and to whom the thin wail of the starved slum
child meant more than all the pomp and circumstance of commercial expansion
and world empire. All about me were nobleness of purpose and heroism of
effort, and my days and nights were sunshine and starshine, all fire and dew,
with before my eyes, ever burning and blazing, the Holy Grail, Christ's own
Grail, the warm human, long-suffering and maltreated, but to be rescued and
saved at the last.
And I, poor foolish I, deemed all this to be a mere
foretaste of the delights of living I should find higher above me in society.
I had lost many illusions since the day I read "Seaside Library"
novels on the California ranch. I was destined to lose many of the illusions
I still retained.
As a brain merchant I was a success. Society opened
its portals to me. I entered right in on the parlor floor, and my
disillusionment proceeded rapidly. I sat down to dinner with the masters of
society, and with the wives and daughters of the masters of society. The
women were gowned beautifully, I admit; but to my naive surprise I discovered
that they were of the same clay as all the rest of the women I had known down
below in the cellar. "The colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady were sisters
under their skins" - and gowns.
It was not this, however, so much as their
materialism, that shocked me. It is true, these beautifully gowned, beautiful
women prattled sweet little ideals and dear little moralities; but in spite
of their prattle the dominant key of the life they lived was materialistic.
And they were so sentimentally selfish! They assisted in all kinds of sweet
little charities, and informed one of the fact, while all the time the food
they ate and the beautiful clothes they wore were bought out of dividends
stained with the blood of child labor, and sweated labor, and of prostitution
itself. When I mentioned such facts, expecting in my innocence that these
sisters of Judy O'Grady would at once strip off their blood-dyed silks and
jewels, they became excited and angry, and read me preachments about the lack
of thrift, the drink, and the innate depravity that caused all the misery in
society's cellar. When I mentioned that I couldn't quite see that it was the
lack of thrift, the intemperance, and the depravity of a half-starved child
of six that made it work twelve hours every night in a Southern cotton mill,
these sisters of Judy O'Grady attacked my private life and called me an
"agitator" - as though that, forsooth, settled the argument.
Nor did I fare better with the masters themselves. I
had expected to find men who were clean, noble, and alive, whose ideals were
clean, noble, and alive. I went about amongst the men who sat in the high
places - the preachers, the politicians, the business men, the professors,
and the editors. I ate meat with them, drank wine with them, automobiled with
them, and studied them. It is true, I found many that were clean and noble;
but with rare exceptions, they were not alive. I do verily believe I
could count the exceptions on the fingers of my two hands. Where they were
not alive with rottenness, quick with unclean life, they were merely the
unburied dead - clean and noble, like well-preserved mummies, but not alive.
In this connection I may especially mention the professors I met, the men who
live up to that decadent university ideal, "the passionless pursuit of
passionless intelligence."
I met men who invoked the name of the Prince of
Peace in their diatribes against war, and who put rifles in the hands of
Pinkertons with which to shoot down strikers in their own factories. I met
men incoherent with indignation at the brutality of prize-fighting, and who,
at the same time, were parties to the adulteration of food that killed each
year more babies than even red-handed Herod had killed.
I talked in hotels and clubs and homes and Pullmans
and steamer-chairs with captains of industry, and marvelled at how little
travelled they were in the realm of intellect. On the other hand, I
discovered that their intellect, in the business sense, was abnormally
developed. Also, I discovered that their morality, where business was
concerned, was nil.
This delicate, aristocratic-featured gentleman, was
a dummy director and a tool of corporations that secretly robbed widows and
orphans. This gentleman, who collected fine editions and was an especial
patron of literature, paid blackmail to a heavy-jowled, black-browed boss of
a municipal machine. This editor, who published patent medicine
advertisements and did not dare print the truth in his paper about said
patent medicines for fear of losing the advertising, called me a scoundrelly
demagogue because I told him that his political economy was antiquated and
that his biology was contemporaneous with Pliny.
This senator was the tool and the slave, the little
puppet of a gross, uneducated machine boss; so was this governor and this
supreme court judge; and all three rode on railroad passes. This man, talking
soberly and earnestly about the beauties of idealism and the goodness of God,
had just betrayed his comrades in a business deal. This man, a pillar of the
church and heavy contributor to foreign missions, worked his shop girls ten
hours a day on a starvation wage and thereby directly encouraged
prostitution. This man, who endowed chairs in universities, perjured himself
in courts of law over a matter of dollars and cents. And this railroad
magnate broke his word as a gentleman and a Christian when he granted a
secret rebate to one of two captains of industry locked together in a
struggle to the death.
It was the same everywhere, crime and betrayal,
betrayal and crime - men who were alive, but who were neither clean nor
noble, men who were clean and noble but who were not alive. Then there was a
great, hopeless mass, neither noble nor alive, but merely clean. It did not
sin positively nor deliberately; but it did sin passively and ignorantly by
acquiescing in the current immorality and profiting by it. Had it been noble
and alive it would not have been ignorant, and it would have refused to share
in the profits of betrayal and crime.
I discovered that I did not like to live on the
parlor floor of society. Intellectually I was bored. Morally and spiritually
I was sickened. I remembered my intellectuals and idealists, my unfrocked
preachers, broken professors, and clean-minded, class-conscious workingmen. I
remembered my days and nights of sunshine and starshine, where life was all a
wild sweet wonder, a spiritual paradise of unselfish adventure and ethical
romance. And I saw before me, ever blazing and burning, the Holy Grail.
So I went back to the working-class, in which I had
been born and where I belonged. I care no longer to climb. The imposing
edifice of society above my head holds no delights for me. It is the
foundation of the edifice that interests me. There I am content to labor,
crowbar in hand, shoulder to shoulder with intellectuals, idealists, and
class-conscious workingmen, getting a solid pry now and again and setting the
whole edifice rocking. Some day, when we get a few more hands and crowbars to
work, we'll topple it over, along with all its rotten life and unburied dead,
its monstrous selfishness and sodden materialism. Then we'll cleanse the
cellar and build a new habitation for mankind, in which there will be no
parlor floor, in which all the rooms will be bright and airy, and where the
air that is breathed will be clean, noble, and alive.
Such is my outlook. I look forward to a time when
man shall progress upon something worthier and higher than his stomach, when
there will be a finer incentive to impel men to action than the incentive of
to-day, which is the incentive of the stomach. I retain my belief in the
nobility and excellence of the human. I believe that spiritual sweetness and
unselfishness will conquer the gross gluttony of to-day. And last of all, my
faith is in the working-class. As some Frenchman has said, "The stairway
of time is ever echoing with the wooden shoe going up, the polished boot
descending."
NEWTON, IOWA,
November, 1905
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