It is quite fair to say that I became a Socialist in a fashion somewhat
similar to the way in which the Teutonic pagans became Christians--it was
hammered into me. Not only was I not looking for Socialism at the time
of my conversion, but I was fighting it. I was very young and callow,
did not know much of anything, and though I had never even heard of a
school called "Individualism," I sang the paean of the strong with all my
heart.
This was because I was strong myself. By strong I mean that I had good
health and hard muscles, both of which possessions are easily accounted
for. I had lived my childhood on California ranches, my boyhood hustling
newspapers on the streets of a healthy Western city, and my youth on the
ozone-laden waters of San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean. I loved
life in the open, and I toiled in the open, at the hardest kinds of work.
Learning no trade, but drifting along from job to job, I looked on the
world and called it good, every bit of it. Let me repeat, this optimism
was because I was healthy and strong, bothered with neither aches nor
weaknesses, never turned down by the boss because I did not look fit,
able always to get a job at shovelling coal, sailorizing, or manual labor
of some sort.
And because of all this, exulting in my young life, able to hold my own
at work or fight, I was a rampant individualist. It was very natural. I
was a winner. Wherefore I called the game, as I saw it played, or
thought I saw it played, a very proper game for MEN. To be a MAN was to
write man in large capitals on my heart. To adventure like a man, and
fight like a man, and do a man's work (even for a boy's pay)--these were
things that reached right in and gripped hold of me as no other thing
could. And I looked ahead into long vistas of a hazy and interminable
future, into which, playing what I conceived to be MAN'S game, I should
continue to travel with unfailing health, without accidents, and with
muscles ever vigorous. As I say, this future was interminable. I could
see myself only raging through life without end like one of Nietzsche's
_blond-beasts_, lustfully roving and conquering by sheer superiority and
strength.
As for the unfortunates, the sick, and ailing, and old, and maimed, I
must confess I hardly thought of them at all, save that I vaguely felt
that they, barring accidents, could be as good as I if they wanted to
real hard, and could work just as well. Accidents? Well, they
represented FATE, also spelled out in capitals, and there was no getting
around FATE. Napoleon had had an accident at Waterloo, but that did not
dampen my desire to be another and later Napoleon. Further, the optimism
bred of a stomach which could digest scrap iron and a body which
flourished on hardships did not permit me to consider accidents as even
remotely related to my glorious personality.
I hope I have made it clear that I was proud to be one of Nature's
strong-armed noblemen. The dignity of labor was to me the most
impressive thing in the world. Without having read Carlyle, or Kipling,
I formulated a gospel of work which put theirs in the shade. Work was
everything. It was sanctification and salvation. The pride I took in a
hard day's work well done would be inconceivable to you. It is almost
inconceivable to me as I look back upon it. I was as faithful a wage
slave as ever capitalist exploited. To shirk or malinger on the man who
paid me my wages was a sin, first, against myself, and second, against
him. I considered it a crime second only to treason and just about as
bad.
In short, my joyous individualism was dominated by the orthodox bourgeois
ethics. I read the bourgeois papers, listened to the bourgeois
preachers, and shouted at the sonorous platitudes of the bourgeois
politicians. And I doubt not, if other events had not changed my career,
that I should have evolved into a professional strike-breaker, (one of
President Eliot's American heroes), and had my head and my earning power
irrevocably smashed by a club in the hands of some militant
trades-unionist.
Just about this time, returning from a seven months' voyage before the
mast, and just turned eighteen, I took it into my head to go tramping.
On rods and blind baggages I fought my way from the open West where men
bucked big and the job hunted the man, to the congested labor centres of
the East, where men were small potatoes and hunted the job for all they
were worth. And on this new _blond-beast_ adventure I found myself
looking upon life from a new and totally different angle. I had dropped
down from the proletariat into what sociologists love to call the
"submerged tenth," and I was startled to discover the way in which that
submerged tenth was recruited.
I found there all sorts of men, many of whom had once been as good as
myself and just as _blond-beast_; sailor-men, soldier-men, labor-men, all
wrenched and distorted and twisted out of shape by toil and hardship and
accident, and cast adrift by their masters like so many old horses. I
battered on the drag and slammed back gates with them, or shivered with
them in box cars and city parks, listening the while to life-histories
which began under auspices as fair as mine, with digestions and bodies
equal to and better than mine, and which ended there before my eyes in
the shambles at the bottom of the Social Pit.
And as I listened my brain began to work. The woman of the streets and
the man of the gutter drew very close to me. I saw the picture of the
Social Pit as vividly as though it were a concrete thing, and at the
bottom of the Pit I saw them, myself above them, not far, and hanging on
to the slippery wall by main strength and sweat. And I confess a terror
seized me. What when my strength failed? when I should be unable to work
shoulder to shoulder with the strong men who were as yet babes unborn?
And there and then I swore a great oath. It ran something like this:
_All my days I have worked hard with my body_, _and according to the
number of days I have worked_, _by just that much am I nearer the bottom
of the Pit_. _I shall climb out of the Pit_, _but not by the muscles of
my body shall I climb out_. _I shall do no more hard work_, _and may God
strike me dead if I do another day's hard work with my body more than I
absolutely have to do_. And I have been busy ever since running away
from hard work.
Incidentally, while tramping some ten thousand miles through the United
States and Canada, I strayed into Niagara Falls, was nabbed by a
fee-hunting constable, denied the right to plead guilty or not guilty,
sentenced out of hand to thirty days' imprisonment for having no fixed
abode and no visible means of support, handcuffed and chained to a bunch
of men similarly circumstanced, carted down country to Buffalo,
registered at the Erie County Penitentiary, had my head clipped and my
budding mustache shaved, was dressed in convict stripes, compulsorily
vaccinated by a medical student who practised on such as we, made to
march the lock-step, and put to work under the eyes of guards armed with
Winchester rifles--all for adventuring in _blond-beastly_ fashion.
Concerning further details deponent sayeth not, though he may hint that
some of his plethoric national patriotism simmered down and leaked out of
the bottom of his soul somewhere--at least, since that experience he
finds that he cares more for men and women and little children than for
imaginary geographical lines.
* * * * *
To return to my conversion. I think it is apparent that my rampant
individualism was pretty effectively hammered out of me, and something
else as effectively hammered in. But, just as I had been an
individualist without knowing it, I was now a Socialist without knowing
it, withal, an unscientific one. I had been reborn, but not renamed, and
I was running around to find out what manner of thing I was. I ran back
to California and opened the books. I do not remember which ones I
opened first. It is an unimportant detail anyway. I was already It,
whatever It was, and by aid of the books I discovered that It was a
Socialist. Since that day I have opened many books, but no economic
argument, no lucid demonstration of the logic and inevitableness of
Socialism affects me as profoundly and convincingly as I was affected on
the day when I first saw the walls of the Social Pit rise around me and
felt myself slipping down, down, into the shambles at the bottom.