THE PRODUCERS
On the wonderful background which the passing life of that valley has
filled with dim epic figures that are now but the incarnations of European
longings, as rich in color as that which lies more consciously back of
Greece and Rome or in the fields of Gaul (the splendors of the court of
Versailles shining through the sombre forests and into the huts of the
simple habitants)--on this I have depicted the rather shadowy suggestions
of a matter-of-fact, drab democracy which is usually made to obscure all
that background with its smoke. But if I have made your eyes see what I
have tried to show, the colors and figures of the background still show
themselves.
I have now to put against that wonderful background, dim as it is, the new
habitants. I suggested earlier the emergence of their gaunt figures from
the forests and the processional of their ships of the prairies through
the tall grass that seemed as the sea itself.
I had in my thought to speak of these new inhabitants as workers, but that
word has in it too much of the suggestion of endless, hopeless, playless
labor. Yet they are workers all-or nearly all. There are some tramps,
vagrants, idlers, to be sure, the spray of that restless sea. But when a
man of great wealth wishes to give up systematic work he generally goes
out of the valley or begins a migratory life, as do the wild birds of the
valley.
But these busy, ever-working people of the valley are better characterized
by other names, and they may be divided into three overlapping classes:
I. The precursors, those that run before, the explorers, the discoverers,
the inventors, the prophets.
II. The producers, those, literally, who lead forth: the dukes, marshals,
generals of democracy, bringers forth of things from the ground, the
waters, by brain and muscle; and the transporters of the things brought
forth to the places of need.
III. The poets, that is, in the old pristine Greek sense, the makers, the
creators, in the generic sense, and not merely in the specific sense of
makers of verses.
If you object to my terminology as exalting too much the common man, as
putting sacred things to profane use, as demeaning prophecy and nobility
and poesy, I shall answer that it is because of the narrowing definitions
of convention that only the makers of verses, and not all of those, are
poets, that only men of certain birth or ancestry or favor are dukes, and
that prophets have entirely disappeared. And I bring to my support the
more liberal lexicography of science, whose spectroscopy now admits the
humblest elements into the society of the stars; whose microscopy, as
Maeterlinck has helped us to become aware, has permitted the flowers to
share the aspirations of animal intelligence; whose chemistry has gathered
the elements into a social democracy in which no permanent aristocracy
seems now to be possible, except that of service to man; whose physics has
divided the atom and yet exalted it to a place which would lead Lucretius,
were he writing now, to include it in Natura Deorum instead of Natura
Rerum.
The son of Sirach, in his Book of Wisdom, has described the man who did
the work of the world in ancient times; for "how shall he become wise,"
begins this essay, "that holdeth the plough, that glorieth in the shaft of
the goad, that driveth oxen, and is occupied in their labors, and whose
discourse is of the stock of bulls? He will set his heart upon turning his
furrows, his wakefulness is to give his heifers their fodder. So is every
artificer and work-master that passeth his time by night as by day, they
that cut gravings of signets; and his diligence is to make great variety;
he will set his heart to preserve likeness in his portraiture, and will be
wakeful to finish his work. So is the smith, sitting by the anvil, and
considering the un-wrought iron; the vapor of the fire will waste his
flesh, and in the heat of the furnace will he wrestle with his work; the
noise of the hammer will be ever in his ears, and his eyes are upon the
pattern of the vessel; he will set his heart upon perfecting his works,
and he will be wakeful to adorn them perfectly. So is the potter sitting
at his work, and turning the wheel about with his feet, who is always
anxiously set at his work, and all his handiwork is by number; he will
fashion the clay with his arm, and will bend its strength in front of his
feet; he will apply his heart to finish the glazing, and he will be
wakeful to make clean the furnace. All these put their trust in their
hands; and each becometh wise in his own work. Without these shall not a
city be inhabited, and men shall not sojourn or walk up or down therein.
They shall not be sought for in the council of the people, and in the
assembly they shall not mount on high; they shall not sit on the seat of
the judge, and they shall not understand the covenant of judgment; neither
shall they declare instruction and judgment, and where parables are they
shall not be found. But they will maintain the fabric of the world; and in
the handiwork of their craft is their prayer."
The wisdom of the scribe, however, he said, "cometh by opportunity of
leisure." That wisdom the west, as I have already intimated, has not yet
learned. Such a scene as I witnessed a little time ago in the amphitheatre
of the Sorbonne, a scene typical of what occurs many times a day there, is
not yet to be seen in the valley. I saw that hall filled in the early
afternoon with an audience markedly masculine, listening to a lecture on
early Greek life, interspersed with readings from the Homeric epics. I
cannot visualize, much as I could wish to, a like scene in the Mississippi
Valley, except in the atmosphere of a woman's club, or at an assembly on
the shore of the lake Chautauqua, which I have described in the narrative
of the "sowing of the leaden plates," where men and women are for a little
time shut away from their normal occupations in a fenced or walled town;
or in a university where attendance upon the lecture is required for a
degree. I cannot visualize it even with such a charming and amphionic
lecturer as the great scholar who gave the lecture on Greece [Footnote:
Dean Croiset.] to which I have referred.
It is that want, in the valley, of appreciation of the value of leisure
and of its wisdoms, it is that worship of what the son of Sirach called
the "wisdom of business," or busyness, it is that disposition not to
listen to the voices of the invisible multitude of spirits of the past
(who after all help to constitute a nation no less than the multitude of
spirits of the present, and of the future), it is that inability to credit
disinterested, materially unproductive, purposes and pursuits, and fit
them into the philosophy of a perfectibility based on material prosperity
--it is all of these that intimate the shortcomings of that life of the
Valley of Hurry.
I saw another great and, as it seemed, non-university audience in the same
amphitheatre in Paris listening just after midday to a lecture on
Montesquieu, and I had not sufficient imagination to picture such an
audience as near the Stock Exchange of Chicago as the Sorbonne is to the
Bourse--in that western city where men take hardly time at that hour of
day to eat, much less to philosophize. They will not pause to hear
Montesquieu remind them that "democracy is virtue" or to hear Homer speak
of virtue as the ancients conceived it.'
But, on the other hand, and there is another side, they will give up
private business, eating, and all to stop a patent dishonesty, to improve
the mail service, to discuss the smoke nuisance that happens to be choking
their throats, or get rid of the beggar at the door, or to go to a ball
game.
They do not there in any great number appreciate the wonderful,
indefatigable, disinterested efforts of scholars, artists, poets, in the
narrower sense--the wisdoms of seeming idleness or leisure. On the other
hand, I am sure that the poetry and prophecy of those who (again in the
language of the son of Sirach) are "building the fabric of the world" are
not appreciated either in Paris or Chicago, partly because of convention
and inadequate representation in the old world, and because of the smoke
and noise and the thought of the "unwrought iron" in the new world.
Of the geographical precursors of that valley I have spoken. But there are
others who have enlarged the boundaries and increased the size of acres
discovered by the first precursors. Let me without fatiguing statistics
give intimation of what I mean in one or two illustrations of the
successors of the coureurs de bois, the runners before, the later prophets
of the valley.
Out of a trough up in the Alleghany Mountains--one of those troughs
occupied by the sinewy Scotch-Irish pioneers who first, after the French,
as you will recall, crept down into the great valley--there journeyed one
day, a century after Céloron, a young man on horseback. He rode as many
miles as La Salle went on foot in that memorable heart-breaking journey
from Fort Crèvecoeur to Fort Frontenac. He rode through the territory
which La Salle had so appealingly described to Louis XIV, now yellow with
ripe wheat. Men and women, children and grandmothers, were toiling day and
night with scythes and sickles to harvest it by hand, but could not gather
it all, and tons were left to rot under the "hoofs of cattle." [Footnote:
"He saw hogs and cattle turned into fields of ripe wheat, for lack of
laborers to gather it in. The fertile soil had given Illinois five million
bushels of wheat, and it was too much. It was more than the sickle and the
scythe could cut. Men toiled and sweltered to save the yellow affluence
from destruction. They worked by day and by night; and their wives and
children worked. But the tragic aspect of the grain crop is this--it must
be gathered quickly or it breaks down and decays. It will not wait. The
harvest season lasts from four to ten days only. And whoever cannot snatch
his grain from the field during this short period must lose it."--H. N.
Casson, "Cyrus Hall McCormick," pp. 65, 66.]
This precursor came with a sword, beaten not into a ploughshare but into a
something quite as indispensable, a sickle--a vibrating sickle driven by
horses, that would in a day do the work of a dozen, twenty, thirty, forty
men, women, children, and grandmothers. In his eastern home he had, like
La Salle, suffered from creditors, from jeering neighbors who thought him
visionary, if not crazed, and from fearful laborers who broke his
machines; but there in that golden western valley he found sympathy, and,
on the Chicago portage, a site for the making of his sickles, fitted into
machines called harvesters--there where the French precursor's boat and
sword were found not long ago. Seventeen years later, on his imperial
farm, Napoleon III (whose royal ancestors had given the very site for the
factory) fastened the cross of the Legion of Honor upon the breast of this
prophet.
There were others who went with him or followed him into that richer
valley, adding the self-rake to the sickle, then putting a platform on the
harvester so that the men who bound the sheaves had no longer to walk and
bend over the grain on the ground, as they had done since before the days
of Ruth and Naomi, then devising an iron arm to take the place of one of
flesh, and finally putting a piece of twine in the hand of that iron arm
and making it do the work of the binder. I cannot help wondering what
Tonty of the iron hand would have said could he have seen that half-human
machine cutting the wheat, and with its iron hand tying it in bundles,
there in the fields of Aramoni, just back of the Rock St. Louis.
But I do not need to idealize or emphasize to men of France the service of
this particular precursor, who was for years considering the unwrought
iron, making experiment after experiment before he came down into that
golden valley, literally to multiply its acres a hundredfold; for the
French Academy of Science declared that he had "done more for the cause of
agriculture than any other living man," and a late President of the French
Republic is quoted as saying that without this harvester "France would
starve." The King of Spain, the Emperor of Germany, the Czar of Russia,
the Sultan of Turkey, and the Shah of Persia have added their tributes to
those of the President of the French Republic, and all the nations of the
earth are literally bringing their glory and their honor into that city of
the portage strip, which, in a sense, has leading across and out of it
paths to all the other golden valleys of the earth, for we are told that
the sickles are reaping the fields of "Argentina in January, Upper Egypt
in February, East India in March, Mexico in April, China in May, Spain in
June, Iowa in July, Canada in August, Sweden in September, Norway in
October, South Africa in November, and Burma in December."
When in France, walking one afternoon from Orange to Avignon, the first
object I saw as I entered that charming city of the palace of the Pope was
a sign advertising the McCormick harvester.
I do not mean to intimate that all the sickles, that is, harvesters, are
made on that portage strip, for if all the factories and coal lands
(twenty thousand acres) and timber lands (one hundred thousand acres) and
ore lands (with their forty million tons of ore) and railway tracks that
unite to make these harvesters were brought together around that portage
strip there would be no place for the city itself; but through one
building on that strip the myriad paths do run, connecting all the
tillable, grain-growing valleys of this planet; and yet a recent, most
observing English critic, Mr. Wells, saw as he left that city only a
"great industrial desolation" netted by railroads. He smelled an
unwholesome reek from the stock-yards, and saw a bituminous reek that
outdoes London, with vast chimneys right and left, "huge blackened grain-
elevators, flame-crowned furnaces, and gauntly ugly and filthy factory
buildings, monstrous mounds of refuse, desolate, empty lots, littered with
rusty cans, old iron, and indescribable rubbish. Interspersed with these
are groups of dirty, disreputable, insanitary-looking wooden houses."
[Footnote: H. G. Wells, "Future in America," p. 59.] Nothing but these in
a place whose very smoke was a sign of what had made it possible for the
nations of the earth even to subsist at all in any such numbers, or if at
all, on anything better than black bread.
And, after all, this precursor, this runner before, was but one of
hundreds of later Champlains, Nicolets, and La Salles, in the wake of
whose visions came the producers, those who led forth the corn and wheat
from the furrows, the trees from the forests, the coal from the ground,
the iron from the hills, the steel from the retorts, the fire from the
wells, the water from the mountains, electricity from the clouds and the
cataract--dukes, field-marshals, generals, demigods whom no myth has
enhaloed or poetry immortalized.
Prometheus, bringing fire to mortals, did in a more primitive way what
they have done who have led forth the oil of the rocks (petroleum) to
light the lamps of the earth. Orpheus, who sang so entrancingly that
mortals forgot their punishments and followed him, and Amphion, who drew
the stones into their places in the walls by his music, performed no more
of a miracle than a lad who tips a Bessemer converter. Hercules is
remembered as a hero of the garden of the Hesperides for all time, whereas
he probably but imported oranges from Spain to the eastern Mediterranean,
and is hardly to be mentioned by the side of such a Mississippi Valley
transporter and importer as Mr. Hill.
But let us follow more particularly the producers of the fields, whom we
call the farmers there, the men whom the son of Sirach had in mind when he
said in the ancient days: "How shall he become wise that holdeth the
plough, that glorieth in the shaft of the goad, ... and whose discourse is
of the stock of bulls?" It was a farmer's son who invented the harvester,
and four-fifths of the men (whom the writer, to whom I am indebted for
many of these facts about the farmer, calls "harvester kings")--along with
the plough kings and wagon kings of whom democracy has been dreaming-were
farmers' sons. The plough, the self-binder, the thresher were all invented
on the farm.
The son of Sirach said: "They shall not be sought for in the council of
the people, and in the assembly they shall not mount on high"; but
fourteen of the first twenty-six Presidents were farmers' sons, and that
statistic gives but merest suggestion of the farmer's part in all the
councils of the people.
Here are a few significant, graphic facts which would furnish interesting
material for a new edition of Virgil's "Georgics" and "Bucolics" or lead
Horace to revise his verses on rural life.
There are practically five times as many farmers (under the early man-
power definition of the farmer) as the census shows, for the farmer now
works with the old-time power of five men.
Six per cent of the human race (and the larger part of that six per cent
is in the Mississippi Valley) produces, one-fifth of the wheat of the
world, two-thirds of the cotton, and three fourths of the corn (and this
takes no account of its reapers and mowers that gather the crops in other
valleys).
It would cost three hundred million dollars more to harvest the world's
wheat by hand, if it were possible, than it costs now by the aid of the
harvester and reaper. [Footnote: H. N. Casson, "Romance of the Reaper," p.
178.]
Some years ago in a trial made in Germany in the presence of the Emperor
and his ministers, it was shown that a Mississippi Valley harvester driven
by one man could do more in one day than forty Polish women with old-
fashioned sickles. [Footnote: H. N. Casson, "Romance of the Reaper," pp.
134, 135.]
The precursor of the harvester saw grandmothers and mothers in the fields
working day and night to cut and gather the harvest, but he could not now
(except among the new immigrant farmers) see that spectacle. I cannot
recall that, until I met that old-world population coming over the
mountains as I made my first journey east out of that valley, over twenty
years ago, I ever saw a woman at work in the fields.
The gallantry of that primitive pioneer life kept her in the cabin, which
was the castle, and, while her labor was doubtless not less than her
husband's, it had the sanctity of its seclusion and its maternal
ministries to life. In the new industrialism that has invited the
daughters of the Polish women harvesters into the factories yonder there
is this constant and increasing concern which is insisting upon a living
wage, wholesome sanitary environment, and on shorter hours of labor for
women and children--this purpose that will ultimately bring skies and
sunsets without exposure or back-breaking labor.
On my way to a provincial university in the north of France not long ago,
I saw a peasant mother standing in the misty morning at the mouth of a
small thresher, feeding into it the sheaves handed her by her husband, the
horse in a treadmill furnishing the power. When I passed in the misty
morning of the next day she was still feeding the yellow sheaves into the
thresher; and I thought how much better that was than the flail.
On a farm in the northwest, a hundred miles square, as long ago as 1893,
three hundred self-binders were reaping the wheat at the cost of less than
a cent a bushel--with practically no human labor beyond driving,
[Footnote: H. N. Casson, "Romance of the Reaper," p. 178.] and there are
seven thousand harvesting machines made each week [Footnote: H. N. Casson,
"Cyrus Hall McCormick," p. 196.] by the one great harvester company alone.
The time needed to handle an acre of wheat has been reduced by the use of
machinery from sixty-one hours to three; of an acre of hay from twenty-one
to four; of oats from sixty-six to seven; of potatoes from one hundred and
nine to thirty-eight--which is significant in its promise of the wisdoms
of leisure. [Footnote: H. N. Casson, "Romance of the Reaper," p. 179.]
But machinery has also increased the size of the farm. In France and
Germany, I am told, the average farm is but five acres in size, and in
England nine; while in the United States it is one hundred and thirty-
eight acres, and in the States west of the Mississippi two hundred and
eleven acres.
And the product? One harvest, in the picturesque words of Mr. Casson,
would buy Belgium, two would buy Italy, three would buy Austria-Hungary,
and five, at a spot-cash price, would take Russia from the Czar. Seven
bushels of wheat for every man, woman, and child of the ninety or more
millions in America and a thousand million dollars' worth of food to other
nations! That is the sum of the product--of what has been led forth in a
single year.
But the leader forth, the producer, the man who set his heart upon
"turning his furrows," whose "wakefulness was to give heifers their
fodder," he has himself risen. He has, as I said of the farmers of Aramoni
(the sons of the first settlers who are still turning up occasionally a
flint arrow-head in the fields)--he has his daily paper, his daily mail,
his telephone. He "pays his taxes with a week's earnings." He ploughs,
plants, sows, cultivates, reaps by machinery. The poet Gray could find
only with difficulty in that valley a footsore ploughman homeward wending
his weary way, and Millet would in vain look for a sower, a man with a
hoe, a woman reaper with a sickle, a man with a scythe or cradle. The new-
world peasant is not only maintaining more than his per-capita share of
the "fabric of the world" but he is taking his place in the councils of
men.
What is most promising now is that these followers of the old pioneers of
France in that valley are beginning to add to their acres new dominions,
discovered by the new pioneers of France, such as the chemists Lavoisier
and Berthelot, forerunners of the modern schools of agricultural chemistry
and physical chemistry. One hundred years after La Salle completed the
waterway journey to the gulf through that valley, Lavoisier made a
discovery of the composition of water itself that has been of immense
benefit, I am told, to the farmer of that valley and of other valleys. And
then came Berthelot with his teaching of how to put together again, to
synthetize, what man has waste-fully dissipated. France's men of the lens
and the retort have become precursors where France's men of the boat and
the sword went first, and have opened paths to even richer fields than
those in which the harvesters have reaped.
There are as many agricultural colleges in the United States as there are
States; there are at least fifty agricultural experiment stations, and
there is ever new provision for scientific agricultural research.
Here is a partial catalogue of the enactments and appropriations of the
legislature in the valley States for two years only:
LAWS AND APPROPRIATIONS SHOWING WORK DONE IN AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENT AND
EXTENSION WORK BY CERTAIN OF THE STATES, 1911-14.
ALABAMA
1912.--$27,000, experiments with fertilizers, combating boll-weevil,
plant breeding, horticultural investigations, agricultural
extension, etc.
1913.--Same as for 1912.
COLORADO
1911-12.--$5,500, experiments with potatoes.
5,000, experiments with alfalfa, grain, etc.
3,500, dry farming.
1913.--$47,500, experimental work in dry farming, dairying, etc.
1913-l4.--County commissioners, on petition of one hundred taxpayers, to
appoint county agriculturist; salary paid by county and expenses
by county, State, and United States.
ILLINOIS
1913.--Authorized counties to appropriate $5,000 annually for soil and
crop improvement.
See "American Year Book, 1913," p. 466.
IOWA
1913.--$500, cross-breeding of fruits and edible nuts. Authorizing
establishment of county corporations for improvement of
agriculture.
40,000, experiment station.
10,000, veterinary investigation.
17,000, experimental farm.
40,000, agricultural extension.
See "American Year Book, 1913," p. 465.
KANSAS
1913-14.--$55,000, experiment station.
15,000, production and dissemination of improved seeds.
102,500, for six branch stations, two of which are new.
125,000, pumping-plants at experiment station.
LOUISIANA
1912.--Police juries of several parishes authorized to appropriate not to
exceed $1,000 annually in aid of farmers' co-operative
demonstration work; also to acquire and establish experimental
farms.
MICHIGAN
1912.--Authorizing and regulating county agricultural departments for
advice and assistance to farmers.
MINNESOTA
1913.--$60,000, maintenance of county agricultural agents;
counties each to pay $1,000.
MISSOURI
1913-14.--$25,000, county farm advisers.
20,000, soil experiments.
30,000, agricultural investigations.
5,000, promotion of corn growing.
12,000, soil survey.
50,000, hog-cholera serum work.
2,500, orchard demonstration.
10,000, agricultural laboratories.
12,000, animal husbandry.
5,000, dairying.
MONTANA
1912.--$20,000, demonstration of dry-land farming.
1913.--County commissioners may, upon vote of 51 per cent of electors,
appropriate $100 per month for agricultural instructor, remainder
of salary to be paid by State and United States.
NEBRASKA
1911-12.--$100,000, establishment of school of agriculture.
3,000, agricultural botanical work.
1913-14.--$3,000, agricultural botanical work. County to employ farm
demonstrator on petition of 10 per cent of farm-land
owners.
1,250 (maximum), annually to each accredited high school
teaching agriculture, manual training, and home
economics.
85,000, for fireproof building for agronomy, horticulture,
botany, and entomology.
OHIO
1913.--$229,200, aggregate of station appropriation.
OKLAHOMA
1913.--Counties authorized to appropriate $500 annually for farmers'
demonstration work.
See "American Year Book, 1913," pp. 465-6.
TEXAS
1911.--Authorizing county commissioners' courts to establish experimental
farms.
1913.--Railroads may own and operate experimental farms.
WISCONSIN
1913.--Beginning January 1, 1914, $10,000, county agricultural
representatives, agricultural development, etc.
WYOMING
1912.--$4,000, agriculture and soil-culture experiments.
1913.--$4,000, experiments along lines of agriculture and soil culture.
5,000, purchase and maintenance of experimental farm.
1914-15.--$5,000, dry-farm experiments.
See "American Year Book, 1913," p. 466.
And nearly every State availed itself by specific act of certain
appropriations under a federal grant. In addition to all this,
appropriations are generally made for the holding of farmers' institutes
at which instruction is given by experts and farmers exchange experiences.
The agricultural colleges have a total of over one hundred thousand
graduates, men and women, and it is they, and those who follow in
increasing numbers, who are to cultivate the valley of Lavoisier and
Berthelot even as the pioneers and producers of the past have cultivated
for the world the valley of Marquette and La Salle.
It is not all as bright and promising as this rather generalized picture
may seem to indicate. There are still isolations, there are bad crops in
unfavorable places and untoward seasons. There are human failures. It is
an intimation of the darker side that President Roosevelt appointed a
commission [Footnote: Commission on Country Life.] a few years ago to see
what could be done for the ignorances, the lonesomenesses, the monotonies
of country life in America, and to prevent the migration to cities, even
as Louis XIV. But all that I have described is there--aggressively,
blusteringly, optimistically there--and is going most confidently on. It
is for the most part a temperate life. All through that valley there has
swept a movement, moral, economic, or both, which has closed saloons and
prevented the sale of intoxicating drink of any sort in States or
communities all the way from the lakes to the gulf.
But, singularly enough, there is promise of a new age of alcohol, I am
told. Farmers can distil a variety of alcohol from potatoes at a cost of
ten cents a gallon and use it in gasolene engines most profitably, which
leads one who has written most informingly and hopefully of the American
farmer to foreshadow the day when the farmer "will grow his own power and
know how to harness for his own use the omnipotence of the soil" and get
its fruits most beneficially distributed.
That there is a strong utilitarian spirit possessing all the valley I do
not deny. But I often wonder whether we are not conventionally astigmatic
to much of the beauty and moral value of such utilitarian life and its
disciplines. There is intimation of this in a recent statement of a
western economist to the effect that there was as great cultural value in
developing the lines of a perfect milk cow as in studying a Venus de Milo,
and in growing a perfect ear of corn as in representing it by means of
color or expressing the rhythm of its growth in metered words. But, I
believe that there is as much beauty and poetry there as among the isles
of Greece, if only it were interpreted by the disinterested spirit and
skill of the artist, the scholar, and the poet.
If we turn for a moment to the precursors who have led the way to the
valley that lies beneath, the valley of the strata of coal and iron, with
its subterranean streams of precious metal, its currents of gold and
silver, and its lakes of oil and gas, and from these precursors to the
producers and transporters who have led these elements forth to the uses
of man, we shall find a like story--another chapter of democracy's
dreaming of kings.
The same author whom I have quoted liberally above has written what he
calls "The Romance of Steel" in that valley. It begins with an Englishman
of French ancestry, Bessemer, and one Kelly, an Irish-American, born on
the old Fort Duquesne point. They had discovered and developed, each
without the knowledge of the other, the pneumatic process of treating
iron--that is, of refining it with air and making steel. Bessemer's name
became associated with the process. But the industry has made Kelly's
birthplace, the site of the old French fort, its capital (with another of
those poetic fitnesses that multiply as we put the present against the
past).
France not only gave to Pittsburgh her site but the crucibles in which her
fortunes lay. Bessemer was the son of a French artist living in London in
poverty. Young Bessemer had invented many devices, when Napoleon III, one
day in a conversation, complained to him that the metal used in making
cannon was of poor quality and expensive. He began experiments in London
at the Emperor's suggestion and later sent the Emperor a toy cannon of his
own making. It was in this experimenting, as I infer, that the idea struck
him of making malleable iron by introducing air into the fluid metal. But
his first experiments were not particularly encouraging, and when he read
a paper on the process of manufacturing steel without fuel before the
British Association for the Advancement of Science, it is said that every
British steelmaker roared with laughter at the "crazy Frenchman" and that
it was voted not to mention his silly paper in the minutes of the
association. [Footnote: "On the 13th of August, 1856, the author had the
honor of reading a paper before the mechanical section of the British
Association at Cheltenham. This paper, entitled 'The Manufacture of
Malleable Iron and Steel without Fuel,' was the first account that
appeared shadowing forth the important manufacture now generally known as
the Bessemer process.
"It was only through the earnest solicitation of Mr. George Rennie, the
then president of the mechanical section of this association, that the
invention was, at that early stage of its development, thus prominently
brought forward; and when the author reflects on the amount of labor and
expenditure of time and money that were found to be still necessary before
any commercial results from the working of the process were obtained, he
has no doubt whatever but that, if the paper at Cheltenham had not then
been read, the important system of manufacture to which it gave rise would
to this hour have been wholly unknown."
Henry Bessemer, "On the Manufacture of Cast Steel: Its Progress and
Employment as a Substitute for Wrought Iron." British Association for the
Advancement of Science, Report, 1865. Mechanical Science Section, pp. 165-
6.]
To-day, on the same authority, "there are more than a hundred Bessemer
converters in the United States," and they "breathe iron into steel at the
rate of eighteen billion pounds a year"--"two and a quarter millions of
pounds every hour of the day and night."
With their companion open-hearth converters and attendant furnaces and
mills, they not only hold the site of the old fort but make a circle of
glowing fortresses around the valley--in Buffalo, in Birmingham, Alabama,
and in the "red crags" of the Rockies at Pueblo, beneath Pike's Peak. And
within ten years a whole new city, [Footnote: Gary, Indiana.] not far from
Chicago, on Lake Michigan, has been made to order. A river was turned from
its course, a town was moved, and an entirely new city was constructed
with homes for nearly twenty thousand workmen near a square mile of
furnaces and mills.
The attention of the world has been centred upon the millionaires whom
this mighty trade has made. The very book which I have quoted so literally
carries as its luring subtitle, "The Story of a Thousand Millionaires." "A
huge, exclusive preoccupation with dollar-getting," says H. G. Wells. But
an occupation that finds the red earth and the white earth, carries it
hundreds of miles to where the coal is stored or the gas is ready to be
lighted, assembles the labor from Europe, and converts that red earth,
with almost human possibilities, into rails and locomotives (that have
together made a republic such as the United States possible), into forty-
story buildings and watch-springs, into bridges and mariners' needles,
into battle-ships and lancets, into almost every conceivable instrument of
human use, can hardly be rightfully called a preoccupation with dollar-
getting, though it has brought the perplexing problem that has so much
disturbed the hopes of democracy, dreaming of such masterful children,
producers, and poets, yet dreading the very inequalities that their
energies create.
There comes constantly the question as to how all this initiative which
has been so titanic is to be reconciled with the general good--a world-
wide and insistent problem, which will be more serious there when the
neighborliness is not so intimate. But the new neighborly element will be
found, we must believe, as an element has been found for the strengthening
of steel.
I was told by a chemist, when visiting the mills in Pittsburgh, that every
steelmaker knows that a little titanium mixed with the molten iron after
its boiling in air multiplies its tensile strength immeasurably, though no
one knows just why it is so. Perhaps, in the plans for the new cities of
Pittsburgh and Chicago, we have sign of the social titanium that will
increase the tensile strength of democracy in the places where the stress
and strain are greatest.
But my concern just now is that the reader shall see how the valley first
explored by the French has given and is giving bread to the world, and has
postponed the dread augury of the Malthusian doctrine; how the larger
valley of the explorers of the lens and crucible, Lavoisier and Berthelot,
is opening into infinite distances; and how the under valley, when
breathed upon by the air, has given its wealth to the over valley--and
through this all to realize that France's geographical descendants are out
of those three valleys evoking, making, a new world.
For they are a people of makers--of new-age poets, not mere workers
glorying in the shafts of their goads, wakeful to adorn their work and
keep clean the furnace, and making their "craft their prayer" (an
impossibility in these days of the high division of labor) but rough,
noisy, grimy, braggart creators, caring not for the straightness of the
furrow unless it produces more, the beauty of the goad unless it promotes
speed, the cleanliness of the furnace unless it increases the output, or
the craft itself; but only of the product, the thing led forth, and its
value to the world. If so much is said of the dollar, it is because the
dollar is the kilowatt, the measure of the product. And while we have not
yet found the ideal way of distributing what has been led forth, do not
let that fact obscure the world service of these new-world Prometheans,
who have carried the fire to a mortal use which even the gods of Greece
could not have imagined and have turned the air itself into fuel to feed
it.
A young man, born son of a stone-mason in that valley, who has been
successively a student, clerk, lawyer, solicitor-general of a great
railroad, its president, and later the head of an industry that is
carrying electricity over the world, said to me not long ago that he was
building a trolley-line in Rome. It seemed a profanation. But if the
titular function of the official who holds the highest spiritual office
there was once the care of bridges (Pontifex Maximus), will the higher
utilization of those bridges not be some day made as poetic, as spiritual,
as high a function of state and society?
I see that son of the stone-mason, with blanched face and set jaw, facing
and quelling a body of strikers threatening to tear up the tracks along
the Chicago River, as brave as Horatius at the bridge across the Tiber.
There is a vivid picture of democracy's greatest problem in that valley.
Then I see him flinging almost in a day a new bridge across the Tiber.
There is a companion picture, a gleam of democracy's poesy.
One writing of the habitants of one of those smoky valley cities said:
"They are not below poetry but above it." Rather are they making it--
rough, virile, formless, rhymeless. It reminds me of some of Walt
Whitman's verses that at first seem but catalogues of homely objects on
his horizon but that by and by are singing, in some rough rhythm, a song
that stirs one's blood.
Oil of rocks, led from cisterns in the valley, that Bonnecamp found so
dark and gloomy on the Céloron journey, to the lamp of the academician and
the peasant; wheat from millions of age-long fallow acres to keep the
world from fear of hunger; flour from the grinding of the mills of the
saint to whom La Salle prayed; wagons, sewing-machines, ploughs,
harvesters from the places of the portages; bridges, steel rails, cars,
ready-made structures of twenty stories from the places of the forts;
unheard-of fruits from the trees of the new garden of the Hesperides
(under the magic of such as Burbank); flowers from wildernesses! Would
Whitman were come back to put all together into a song of the valley that
should acquaint our ears with that rugged music-that rugged music wakened
by the plash of the paddle and the swirl of the water in the wake of the
Frenchman's canoe! As he is not, I can only wish that you who have read
these chapters may have intimation of it, as not long ago in New York,
standing before a rough, unsightly, entirely isolate frame in a university
corridor--where there were heard normally only the noises of closing doors
and shuffling feet--I put a receiver to my ears and heard, in the midst of
these nearer, every-day noises, some distant cello whose vibrations were
but waiting in the air to be heard. Some said there was but the slamming
of doors, but I had evidence of my own ears that the music was there. I
have not imagined this song of the valley, nor have I improvised it. Its
vibrations which I myself feel are but transmitted as best an imperfect,
detached frame in the midst of other sounds and interests can.