Then he left the ship yards and went into a warehouse, where the work lay mainly in handling cargoes of foreign ships. And starting life all over again he tried to make up for lost time. The first year he was a shipping clerk; the second, a bookkeeper; the third, he kept two sets of books for two different docks, one by day and the other at night. And by forty he had become a part owner in the old warehouse in which he now sat grimly reading the record of his life—of a long stubborn losing fight, for he stuck to his dream of Yankee sails.
He married my mother when he was still strong and full of hope. He must have been so much kindlier then and brighter, more human to live with. They bought that pleasant house of ours with its hospitable front door. My father's doddering Brooklynites seemed wonderful neighbors to his young wife. And so that front door waited for friends. As the years dragged on and they did not come, she blamed it all on the harbor. She saw what it was making him, jealous of every dollar and every hour spent at home. He worked all day and half the night. It took him into politics, on countless trips to Washington, and she knew he spent thousands of dollars there in ways that were by no means "fine." It made him morose and gloomy, a man of one idea, to be shunned.
And she no more saw behind all this than I did when I was a boy. For his vision was neither of pirates nor of bringing the heathen to Christ, but of imports and of exports. He dreamed in terms of battleships and of a mercantile marine. Each year he watched the chances grow, vast continents opening up to commerce with hints of such riches as staggered the mind. He saw the ocean world an arena into which rushed all nations but ours.
"Everyone but us," he said, "had learned the big lesson—that you can get nothing on land or sea unless you're ready to fight for it hard!"
He saw other nations get ready to fight. He watched them build huge navies and grant heavy subsidies to their fast growing merchant fleets, send vessels by thousands over the seas. He saw their shipowners draw swiftly together in great corporations. Here was an age for immense adventures in this growing trade of the world. To wait, to hold on grimly, to keep up the fight at Washington for that miracle, Protection, which would start the boom. To see the shipping yards teeming again with the building of ships by the hundreds and thousands, to see them go out again over the seas with our flag at the mast and our sailors below. To feel the new call go over the nation—"Young men, come east and west, come out! The first place on the oceans can still be yours!" This was my father's great idea.
Ship subsidies and battleships, discriminating tariffs. What a religion. But it was his. Of the miracles these things would work my father was more sure than of a god in heaven. For he had thought very little about a god, and all his life he had thought about this. For this he had spent at least half his wealth on the congressmen that he despised. Bribery? Yes. But for a religion.
"Go all around South America and to the Far East," he told me. "And you'll see the flags at sea of England, Germany, Austria, France, of Russia, Norway, Spain, Japan. But if you see the American flag you'll see it waved by a little girl from the deck of a British liner. This means that we are losing in marine freights and foreign trade billions of dollars every year. And it means more and worse than that. For it's ship building and ship sailing that take a nation's men out of their ruts, whip up their minds and imaginations, make 'em broad as the seven seas. And we've lost all that, we've thrown it away, to breed a race of farmers—of factory hands and miners and anarchists in slums. We've built a nation of high finance—and graft—and a rising angry mob. But sooner or later, boy, this country will wake up to what it has done. And with our grip on both oceans and the blood we've still got in our veins, we'll reach out and take what is ours—as soon as we're ready to fight for it hard—the mastery of the ocean world!"
For this idea he had lived his life. For this he had neglected his business, for this he had lost favor with the usurping foreign ships—until his dock and his warehouse were often idle for weeks at a time.
And the very bigness of things, the era of big companies which at forty had thrilled him by the first signs of its coming, now crushed down upon his old age. Vaguely he knew that the harbor had changed and that he was too old to change with it. An era no longer of human adventures for young men but of financial adventures for mammoth corporations, great foreign shipping companies combining in agreements with the American railroads to freeze out all the little men and take to themselves the whole port of New York. My father was one of these little men. The huge company to which he was selling owned the docks and warehouses for over two miles, and this was only a part of their holdings.
"Nothing without fighting." That had been his motto. And he had fought and he had lost. And so in this new harbor of big companies my father was now closing out. Too late for any business here, too late for life up there in his home. He had kept my mother waiting too long, he was ready at last but she was dead. Too late. He had been born too late, had dreamed his dream of sails too late, and now he was too late in dying. There was nothing left to live for. How much better for him to be dead.