CHAPTER XXXVII. FREE AND UNLIMITED COINAGE

It was during the panic in 1894 that the strike vote was defeated. We

worked on until the first of July, 1896, when our agreement expired.

By that time the tin mill was on its feet. The town of Elwood had grown

from a country cross-roads to a city of the first class. As president

of the union, I had steadily gained concessions for the workers. We were

getting paid every two weeks. It is not practical to pay oftener in the

tin trade. A man's work has to be measured and weighed, and the plate he

rolls on Saturday can not be cut and measured in time for him to get

his pay for it that week. For the pay envelope is handed to him Saturday

noon, and his Saturday's rolling will not go through the cutter until

Monday. He can not be paid for it until it is in shape to be measured.

So we were satisfied to be paid twice a month.

But the mill was now making big profits and we demanded a raise in pay.

The mill owners countered by refusing to “recognize” the union. They

would deal with the men only as individuals. A strike was called, and

the union won. We recovered our raise in pay and signed a new contract.

The strike was off in September after two long months of idleness, and

within a few days after the dust had settled we smelt the fireworks of

political oratory. I am telling it now as it appeared to me then, and of

course I beg the indulgence of those concerned.

Bryan, the bearcat of the Nebraska ranches, had roared with his ears

back, and the land was in a tumult. “Coin's Financial School” had

already taught the people that the “gold-bugs” owned the country and

that the people could save themselves from eternal serfdom only by

changing the color of their money. Bryan told the westerners that the

East was the “enemy's country” and that the gold standard was a game by

which the East was robbing the West, and the only way the people of

the West could save themselves was to move East and clip bonds or else

change the color of the money!

This is the way it looked to me as a working man, and I hope my good

friend Bryan will pardon me for writing of his “great paramount issue”

in a joking way. For after all it was a joke, a harmless joke--because

we didn't adopt it. I got excited by the threatened “remedy” and went

into politics. While the tin trade was on strike, crazy propagandists

from everywhere poured into Elwood and began teaching the men

bi-metalism, communism, bolshevism and anarchy. A communist propagandist

is like a disease germ; he doesn't belong in healthy bodies. If he gets

in he can't increase and is soon thrown out again. But let a strike

weaken the body of workers, and the germs swarm in and start their

scarlet fever.

As soon as the strike was won, I threw myself into the task of

combatting the rising tide of class hatred led by Bryan, representing

agrarians in a fight against bankers and industrialists. I was chairman

of the mill workers' Sound Money Club. Bryan was running for president

on a platform declaring that the laboring man should “not be crucified

upon a cross of gold.” No laboring man wanted to be. I was on the same

side of the fence with Bryan when it came to the crucifixion question,

but on the opposite side of the fence regarding the gold question. Of

course I knew little about finance, and could not answer the Nebraskan.

But had he advocated the free and unlimited coinage of pig-iron I could

have talked him into a gasping hysteria. For, we mill fellows figured

that this was exactly what Bryan's money theory amounted to. His farmer

friends had borrowed gold money from the bankers, spent it in drought

years plowing land that produced nothing, and then found themselves

unable to pay it back. They wanted to call silver and paper cash and pay

the debt with this new kind of money. He wanted a money system by which

a farmer could borrow money to put in his crop, then having failed to

raise a crop (I have mentioned the great drought years) could yet pay

back the money. But no farming nation can suffer great crop losses

without being set back financially and starved to where it hurts. You've

got to figure God's laws into your human calculations.

“Bryan might as well try to dodge the hungry days by advocating the free

and unlimited coinage of tomato cans,” is the way one of the fellows

put it; “then every man could borrow a dollar and buy a can of tomatoes.

After eating the tomatoes he could coin the can into a dollar and buy

another can of tomatoes. And so on until he got too old to eat, and

then he could use the last dollar from the tin can in paying back the

banker.” Schemes like that are all right for orators and agitators who

make their living with words. But farmers and iron workers know what it

is that turns clods into corn and what makes the iron wheels that bear

it to market. It is muscle applied with the favor of God.

Without labor, no crops. Without rain, no crops. It was world-wide crop

failures that finally brought the lean years of the nineties. The

return of big crops was already reviving the sick world. It rejected the

radicals' “remedy” and next year it was well. Had we taken that wrong

medicine in the dark it would have killed us. Thirty years later Russia

let them shoot that medicine into her arm and it paralyzed her. The

rain falls upon her fields and the soil is rich, but it brings forth no

harvest and the people starve.

Russia has had famines before, but they were acts of God. The rain

failed and there was no harvest. Their present famine is an act of man.

Labor ceased. And the ensuing hunger was man's own fault. Nations that

think labor is a curse, and adopt schemes to avoid labor, must perish

for their folly.

In 1896 we came within an inch of adopting financial bolshevism. This

taught me that a people are poorly schooled who can not tell the good

from the bad. The wise heads knew what was good for the country. Hard

work and good crops would cure our ills. But millions voted for a poison

that would have destroyed us. From that time on I dreamed of a new kind

of school, not the kind we had that turned out men to grope blindly

between good and folly. But a school based on the fundamental facts of

life and labor, the need of food and housing, and the sweating skill

that brings man most of his blessings. A school from which no man could

come out ignorant. That school should teach the eternal facts, and he

that denied the facts would then be known for a fool or a rogue--and not

be thought a Messiah.

I love sentiment, and I believe in God. And I believe that facts are

God's glorious handiwork. “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth will

set you free.” The man who shuns realities because they belittle him is

on the wrong road; he is hopelessly lost from the beginning.