CHAPTER XX. THE RED FLAG AND THE WATERMELONS

I have said that the labor problem has three parts. I call them (1)

Wages, (2) Working Conditions and (3) Living Conditions. By living

conditions I mean the home and its security. My father had reached the

stage where this was the problem that worried him. He was growing old

and must soon cease working. But his home was not yet secure and he was

haunted with the fear that his old age might be shelterless. We told him

not to worry; the Davis boys were many and we would repay him for the

fatherly care he had given us. But he was a proud man (as all muscular

men are), and he could find no comfort in the thought of being supported

by his sons. I am glad he never had to be. Independence has made his old

age happy and he has proved that a worker, if he keeps his health, can

provide for his old age and bring up a big family too.

We older boys left home and hunted work elsewhere. I was young and

not bothered about working conditions or living conditions. I was so

vigorous that I could work under any conditions, and old age was so far

away that I was not worried about a home for my declining years. Wages

was my sole problem. I wanted steady wages, and of course I wanted the

highest I could get. To find the place where wages were to be had I was

always on the go. When a mill closed I did not wait for it to reopen,

but took the first train for some other mill town. The first train

usually was a freight. If not, I waited for a freight, for I could sleep

better in a freight car than in a Pullman--it cost less. I could save

money and send it to mother, then she would not have to sell her feather

beds.

All of this sounds nobler than it was. In those days workers never

traveled on passenger trains unless they could get a pass. Judges and

statesmen pursued the same policy. To pay for a ticket was money thrown

away; so thought the upper classes and the lower classes. About the only

people that paid car fare were the Knights of Pythias on their way to

their annual convention. Railroad workers could get all the passes they

wanted, and any toiler whose sister had married a brakeman or whose

second cousin was a conductor “bummed” the railroad for a pass and got

it. None of my relatives was a railroad man, and so to obtain the free

transportation which was every American's inalienable right, I had to

let the passenger trains go by and take the freights.

Once I got ditched at a junction, and while waiting for the next freight

I wandered down the track to where I had seen a small house and a

big watermelon patch. The man who lived there was a chap named Frank

Bannerman. I always remember him because he was a communist, the first

one I ever saw, and he filled my pockets with about ten pounds of

radical pamphlets which I promised to read. He made a bargain with me

that if I would read and digest the Red literature he would give me all

the watermelons I could eat.

“I'm a comrade already,” I said, meaning it as a merry jest, that I

would be anything for a watermelon. But he took it seriously and his

eyes lit up like any fanatic's.

“I knew it,” he said. “With a face like yours--look at the brow, look

at the intellect, the intellect.” I was flattered. “Come here, wife,” he

called through the door. “Come here and look at the intellect.”

The wife, who was a barefooted, freckle-faced woman, came out on the

porch and, smiling sweetly, sized up my intellect. I made up my mind

that here were the two smartest people in America. For they saw I was

bulging with intellect. Nobody else had ever discovered it, not even I

myself. I thought I was a muscle-bound iron puddler, but they pronounced

me an intellectual giant. It never occurred to me that they might have

guessed wrong, while the wise old world had guessed right. If the world

was in step, they were out of step, but I figured that the world was out

of step and they had the right stride. I thought their judgment must

be better than the judgment of the whole world because their judgment

pleased me. I later learned that their judgment was just like the

judgment of all Reds. That's what makes 'em Red.

“Are there many of us where you come from?” the man asked.

“Many what?” I asked.

“Communists, communists,” he said excitedly.

I wanted to please him, because we were now cracking the melons and

scooping out their luscious hearts. So I told him how many comrades

there were in each of the rolling mills where I had worked. I had to

invent the statistics out of my own head, but that head was full of

intellect, so I jokingly gave him a fine array of figures. The fact was

that there may have been an addle-pated Red among the mill hands of that

time, but if there was I had never met him.

The figures that I furnished Comrade Bannerman surprised him. I counted

the seeds in each slice of watermelon and gave that as the number of

comrades in each mill. The number was too high. Comrade Bannerman knew

how many Reds there were in the country, and it appeared that the few

mills I had worked in contained practically the whole communist party.

He got rather excited and said the numbers were growing faster than he

had imagined. He had figured that it would take forty years to bring

about the Red commonwealth, but with the new light I had thrown on the

subject he concluded that the times were ripening faster than he had

dared to hope, and that there was no doubt the revolution would be upon

us within three years.

The comrade told me he was not popular in the village for two reasons.

The capitalistic storekeepers called him a dead beat and the church

people had rotten-egged him for a speech he had made denouncing

religion. I saw by his hands that he didn't work much, and from the

hands of his wife I learned who raised the watermelons he was feeding

to me. I remember wondering why he didn't pay his grocery bill with the

money he spent on pamphlets to stuff in the pockets of passers-by.