First harvests

by Frederic Jesup Stimson

“The rich are better than we, he has the cheek to tell you. Yes, their dresses are better, and their food is finer, and they have learned how to lie and swindle with a soft tongue. They drink champagne instead of beer, and bet bigger money on their horses, and smoke cigars, and take their girls to ride in fine turnouts with a span of horses; but they don’t mean honestly by their girls, and they turn them out upon the streets at last. And they don’t have to work in the dirt, and they can take a hot bath every day, and their wives and daughters can keep their bodies clean and their faces fair, and so they go to the theatre and show themselves in dresses you’d be ashamed to see your wife in.

“But in all the rest, he’s gassin’ you. I think my girls could wear their diamonds as well as them, and flirt and show their dresses; and I could drive my span, and take my fancy drinks, and bribe the judges and the lawyers. Do you suppose if they couldn’t steal from us, they could earn even so much as Coal-Oil Patsy? And as for books and pictures, they leave all that to the long-haired fellers at the colleges; they don’t care a damn for art an’ all that stuff any more’n we do.

“Do you suppose if any boy o’ yourn studied to be a gentleman, and was as good, and as clever, and as gifted with the gab as our fine friend here, and went to him, he’d take him to his clubs and balls and parties? He’d say, ‘Your hands are coarse and rough, and you don’t talk enough like a dude’—and what he’d really mean all the time would be, ‘You ain’t got money enough.’ I tell you all this talk is guff, and it just comes down to the money. All we want is money, and they’ve got it.

“Then he says we aren’t smart enough. Of course we aren’t smart enough. This world has been run for the smart fellers about long enough, and it’s about time it was run for the honest men. It’s the rich fellers on top that are the smart ones, and we are the fools who let ’em make all the money. It’s they who are the judges and make the laws and run the legislatures, and then they have the cheek to come to us and say, ‘Oh, lord, don’t break the law!’ And they bring you men over by the shipload, and give you seventy cents a day, and rent one room of their houses to your families at their own price, and herd your girls and boys together naked in the coal-mines, and then say, ‘See how much cleaner we are! how much more virtuous we are!’ And if you strike, you starve, and they know it; and if in your despair you give a kick or two to their damned machinery, they cry like cowards as they are, ‘Oh, lord, that’s my property—don’t break the law!’ And the law is theirs, too, not ours, nor God Almighty’s whom they talk so much about.

“I tell you, friends, you can never touch these people but through their pockets. The law’s a fraud, and when they don’t find it suit, they laugh at it. And they don’t care a damn for you or your wives or children or your souls or your bodies or the lives of your boys or the virtue of your daughters—but only for what they can make out of you. And they talk about the freedom of the country, and the Declaration of Independence, and ballots and that; and all the time they ape their swell English friends and marry their girls off to rotten foreign princes and would have a king here if they could—except that it’s easier to throw the dust in our eyes under what they call a republic.

“And now I say, don’t you care a damn for their laws, either. And if they hire their Pinkerton spies who are paid to shoot you down, you shoot them too. They won’t care much for that; but then when you burn a big works, and blow up a mine or two, they’ll see their money going and squeal fast enough. That’s all I’ve got to say.”

Derwent had listened to his speech intently, none the less so that threatening glances were cast at him from time to time. As he finished, a score or more of orators leaped to the platform; and many of them began to speak at once. Starbuck, having done his work, disappeared; the crowd was beginning to thin; the speakers spoke in Polish, Bohemian, Hungarian, Sicilian, each in the dialect of his own audience. Many were waving their hands violently and making threatening gestures in the direction of the city, which lurked, black and sullen, below them in the valley, shrouded in the thick smoke itself had made, bright-pointed here and there with many torches; and now and again from the bowels of the thing would burst a blaze of white-hot metal, like the opening of the monster’s fiery eye, ending in a wide red glare and a hissing shower of sparks; and all was dark again.

Hardly any men of the English race were by this time left upon the ground. Derwent noticed it, as he stood watching, in one corner of the throng; and thought how un-American a scene it was. At last the anarchist who had first begun stood up again, as if to close the meeting. This time his voice seemed stronger or more sibilant; his speech was but a string of curses, of tales of crime, full of a savage’s lust of ruin. Let it end! Let them suffer, too; let them die, as we have died. If they mean to starve us now, let these mills and machines, these tools of wrong, these mines, these gaols of wretchedness, let them all burn or blast—what care we—we who are to be burned or hanged ourselves? Let their towns be gutted, and their homes be razed and their factories be burned—aye, let them burn, burn, burn, as this shall burn, from now on, day and night, winter and summer, for all time!

And as the orator closed, with a group of men he threw himself upon the structure of the piping of the flaming well. The wooden tower swayed and rocked and fell; and with a roar like the ocean the gas, freed from its casing, flooded the sky with its flare of fire. A great mass of pebbles and timbers rose with the first outburst, and fell flaming on the shouting crowd below; then, igniting close to the earth, and even below its surface, running rapidly around the rock, leaping and tossing in liquid tongues, the red rills seemed to spring from every crevice in the earth, until the place that had been the rostrum was sunken in a lake of flame.

The Pole had kept his arm extended, as one who invokes a spell, until the shock of the explosion had gone by, and all the flaming timbers fell; then, when the fire was steady, reddening the valley even to the distant mountain-tops, he swept his arm in a gesture not without some dignity toward the silent city. With a hoarse cry the multitude seemed to take his meaning; and the sea of swarthy faces, red-sashed men and olive-cheeked women, with their motley dresses, and their odd diversity of foreign cries, swept downward to the city’s rolling mills.