LOADED DOWN WITH LITERATURE
After I had read the various pamphlets that Bannerman gave me Iwas like the old negro who went to sleep with his mouth open. Awhite man came along and put a spoonful of quinine in his mouth.
When the negro woke up the bitter taste worried him. "What does it mean?" he asked. The white man told him it meant that he "had done bu'sted his gall bladder and didn't have long to live." Amighty bad taste was left in my mouth by those communist pamphlets. If they were telling the truth I realized that labor's gall bladder had done bu'sted and we didn't have long to live.
One book said that British capitalists owned all the money in the world and that at a given signal they would draw the money out of America and the working men here would starve to death in twenty-nine days. It seemed that some crank had fasted that many days in order to get accurate statistics showing just how long the working man could hope to last after England pushed the button for the money panic.
Another book said that Wall Street now owned ninety per cent. of the wealth in America and was getting the other ten at the rate of eight per cent. a year. Within twelve years Wall Street would own everything in the world, and mankind would be left naked and starving.
The wildest book of all was called Caesar's Column. It was in the form of a novel and told how the rich in America worshiped gold and lust instead of God and brotherly love, and how they drove their carriages over the working man's children and left them crushed and bleeding in the street. America had ceased to be a republic and was an oligarchy of wealth all owned by a dozen great families while the millions were starving. The end of the book described a great revolution in which the people arose, led by an Italian communist named Caesar Spadoni. The mob took all the fine houses and killed the rich people. Caesar took the bodies and, laying them in cement like bricks, he built an enormous column of corpses in Union Square towering higher than any building in New York. He established his headquarters in a Fifth Avenue palace and was directing the slaughter of all men who owned property, when some of his followers got jealous of his fine position and killed him and burned the house. By that time everything in America was destroyed, and the hero of the book, having invented an air-ship, flew away to South Africa to escape the general demolition. This book was being circulated by communists as a true picture of what the country was coming to.
These pamphlets came into my hands at a time when work was getting scarcer every day and a million men like myself were moving about the country looking for jobs. Then for the first time I realized my need for a broader education. If these things were true, it was my duty to stop chasing the vanishing job and begin to organize the workers so that they might destroy the capitalists. But how could I know whether they were true? I had no knowledge of past history. And without knowing the past how could I judge the future? I was like the old man who had never seen a railroad train. His sons took him thirty miles over the hills and brought him to the depot where a train was standing.
The old man looked things over and saw that the wheels were made of iron. "It will never start," he said. He knew that if his wagon had heavy iron wheels, his team could never start it. But his sons said: "It will start all right." They had seen it before; they knew its past history. Soon the train started, gathered speed like a whirlwind and went roaring away down the track. The old man gazed after it and then, much excited, he exclaimed. "It will never stop!"The wisest head is no judge unless it has in it the history of past performances. I had not studied much history in my brief schooling. The mills called me because they needed men. Good times were there when I arrived, and as for hard times, I was sure they "would never start." Now the hard times were upon us and panic shook the ground beneath our feet. "It will never stop," men cried. Had they studied the history of such things they would have known that hard times come and hard times go, starting and stopping for definite reasons, like the railway train.
I had done the right thing in quitting school and going to the puddling furnaces at a time when we needed iron more than we needed education. The proverb says, "Strike while the iron is hot." The country was building, and I gave it iron to build with.
Railroads were still pushing out their mighty arms and stringing their iron rails across the western wheat lands. Bridges were crossing the Mississippi and spanning the chasms in the Rocky Mountains. Chicago and New York were rising in new growth with iron in their bones to hold them high. My youth was spent in giving to this growing land the element its body needed.
Now that body was sick. What was the matter with it? Lacking an education, I was unprepared to say. When I left school my theory was that every boy should learn a trade as soon as possible. Now I saw that a trade was not enough. A worker needs an education, also. The trade comes first, perhaps, but the education ought to follow on its heels.
During the next ten years of my life I was a worker and a student, too. My motto was that every one should have at least a high-school education and a trade.
