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.