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 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 excellences 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 bald-headed 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 tyres. 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 honour. 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 labour had to sell
was muscle. The honour of labour had no price in the marketplace.
Labour had muscle, and muscle alone, to sell.
But there was a difference, a vital difference. Shoes and trust and
honour 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 labourer'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 labourer 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 parlour 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 vendor 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 parlour 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 labour, and sweated labour, 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, there
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 parlour floor of society.
Intellectually I was as bored. Morally and spiritually I was sickened.
I remembered my intellectuals and idealists, my unfrocked preachers,
broken professors, and clean-minded, class-conscious working-men. 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 labour, crowbar in
hand, shoulder to shoulder with intellectuals, idealists, and
class-conscious working-men, 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 parlour 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.