CHAPTER VIII. MY FIRST REGULAR JOB

We stayed a week with father's brother in Hubbard. Then we went to

Sharon, Pennsylvania, where father had a temporary job. A Welshman,

knowing his desperate need of money, let him take his furnace for a few

days and earn enough money to move on to Pittsburgh. There father found

a job again, but mother was dissatisfied with the crowded conditions in

Pittsburgh. She wanted to bring up her boys amid open fields.

In those days the air was black with soot and the crowded quarters where

the workers lived offered no room for gardens. Mother wanted sunlight

and green grass such as we had about Tredegar. There Lord Tredegar had

his beautiful castle in the midst of a park. On certain days this great

park was open to the villagers, and the children came to picnic,

and Lord Tredegar gave them little cakes and tea in doll-size cups.

Doubtless he looked upon us as “my people.”

But the lords of steel in Pittsburgh were too new at the game to

practice the customs of the nobility in beautifying their surroundings.

The mills had made things ugly and the place was not what mother thought

it ought to be for bringing up children. So father took us back to

Sharon, and there we had sunlight and grass and trees. We rented a neat

little company-house with a big garden in the rear, where we raised

enough potatoes to supply our table. There were window boxes filled with

morning-glories, and lilacs grew in the yard. They company had planted

those lilacs to nourish the souls of the worker's children. They gave

me joy, and that is why the Mooseheart grounds are filled with lilac

bushes.

As soon as we landed in Sharon I started out to earn money. Those

feather beds were on my mind and I couldn't rest easy until we should

replace them. Neither could the rest of the family. I have often told

how I scraped up some capital and invested it in a shoe-shining outfit.

Nearly every traveling man who came to the hotel allowed me to shine

his shoes. The townsfolk let their shoes go gray all week, but the gay

commercial travelers all were dudes and dressed like Sunday every day.

They brought the new fashions to town and were looked upon as high-toned

fellows. Their flashy get-up caught the girls, which made the town-boys

hate them. But I liked them very well because they brought me revenue.

“Where a man's treasure is, there is his heart also,” says the proverb,

and my experience proved it true. On my first visit to the hotel I got

acquainted with the landlord and he put me on his pay-roll. Behind the

hotel was a cow pen where the milk for the guests was drawn fresh from

the cows. The cows had to be driven to a pasture in the morning and back

at night. I got a dollar and a quarter a month for driving the cows. And

so I had found a paying job within thirty days after landing in America.

The cost of pasturage was a dollar a month for each cow. That was less

than four cents a day for cow feed to produce two gallons of milk, or

about two cents a gallon. The wages of the girls who milked them and my

wages for driving them amounted to three cents a gallon. In other words,

the cost of labor in getting the milk from the cows more than doubled

the cost of the milk. This was my first lesson in political economy.

I learned that labor costs are the chief item in fixing the price of

anything.

The less labor used in producing milk, the cheaper the milk will be. The

reason wages were high in America was because America was the land of

labor-saving machinery. Little labor was put on any product, and so the

product was cheap, like the landlord's milk. In the iron industry,

for instance, the coal mines and iron ore lay near the mills, as the

landlord's pasture was near his hotel. To bring the coal and ore to the

blast furnaces took little labor, just as my driving in the cows cost

the landlord but four cents a day. Next to the blast furnaces stood the

mixer, the Bessemer open hearth furnaces, the ingot stripper building,

the soaking pits and then the loading yards with their freight cars

where the finished product in the form of wire, rails or sky-scraper

steel is shipped away.

Because the landlord had his cows milked at the back door of his hotel

the milk was still warm when it was carried into his kitchen. And so the

steel mills are grouped so closely that a single heat sometimes carries

the steel from the Bessemer hearth through all the near-by machines

until it emerges as a finished product and is loaded on the railroad

cars while it is still warm. It was this saving of labor and fuel that

made American steel the cheapest steel in the world. And that's why the

wages of steel and iron workers in America are the highest in the world.

Father was in the mills getting these good wages, though no puddler was

ever paid for all the work he does, and all of us young Davises were

eager to grow up so that we could learn the trade and get some of that

good money ourselves. My hands itched for labor, and I wanted nothing

better than to be big enough to put a finger in this industry that was

building up America before my very eyes. I have always been a doer and a

builder, it was in my blood and the blood of my tribe, as it is born in

the blood of beavers. When I meet a man who is a loafer and a destroyer,

I know he is alien to me. I fear him and all his breed. The beaver is a

builder and the rat is a destroyer; yet they both belong to the rodent

race. The beaver harvests his food in the summer; he builds a house and

stores that food for the winter. The rat sneaks to the food stores of

others: he eats what he wants and ruins the rest and then runs and hides

in his hole. He lives in the builder's house, but he is not a builder.

He undermines that house; he is a rat.

Some men are by nature beavers, and some are rats; yet they all belong

to the human race. The people that came to this country in the early

days were of the beaver type and they built up America because it was in

their nature to build. Then the rat-people began coming here, to house

under the roof that others built. And they try to undermine and ruin

it because it is in their nature to destroy. They call themselves

anarchists.

A civilization rises when the beaver-men outnumber the rat-men. When the

rat-men get the upper hand the civilization falls. Then the rats turn

and eat one another and that is the end. Beware of breeding rats in

America.