The Rising of the Tide: The Story of Sabinsport

by Ida M. Tarbell

“Don’t you think it’s a matter of concern to Sabinsport whether the mills are open or shut this winter, whether we have half or full time?” asked Dick.

“It isn’t the working man they think of; it’s themselves,” Ralph insisted.

“And I suppose the only one the working man thinks of is himself. We must each figure it for himself, Ralph, or become public charges. It strikes me this concern is quite a proper matter for men who are not as lucky as you and I are. We have our income; no thanks, however, to anything either of us ever did. Our fathers were men of thrift and foresight, and the war will hardly disturb us. But there are few in Sabinsport like us. I should say it was as much the duty of Sabinsport business men to concern themselves about orders as it is the business of Paris to put in munitions. No work and you’ll soon have no town.”

“It is a rich town,” challenged Ralph. “There’s lot of money here—they could keep things going if they would.”

“Rich when there are orders to fill, and only then. Don’t be unreasonable. You know this town lives by work.”

“Reuben Cowder and Jake Mulligan have $500,000 a year income if they have a cent; do you suppose they earn it?”

“Well, they won’t have a hundredth part of that, Ralph, if the mills and mines are closed this year. You certainly are not supposing that the money they circulate here is piled up in a chest in the banks. It comes from the sale of coal and barbed wire and iron plates and bars and hosiery and sewer pipe, and stops when they are no longer made. Let the shut-down continue, and who is going to use the street railways and the electric lights that Mulligan and Cowder and half High Town draw dividends from? Who is going to support the shops, buy the farmers’ produce? Sabinsport is rich only when her properties are active. You know that. There are few men in the country who make every dollar work all the time as Mulligan and Cowder do, and if the work stops, their incomes stop. Their activity is the biggest factor in the life of the place, and every business man knows it.”

But Ralph broke in with a bitter harangue. Sabinsport, he declared, thought only of herself, her comfort, her pleasures. She had no real interest in human betterment, no concern that the men and women who did the work of her industries were well or happy. If her business men worried about having no work to give now it was simply because, as Dick himself admitted, that they would have no income if the fires were out. Did they concern themselves about the worker when things were going well? Not for a moment. Did they study a proper division of the returns of labor? Not on your life, they studied how to get the lion’s share. Ralph’s ordinary dissatisfaction with affairs in Sabinsport was intensified by his disgust at the incredible turn things had taken in his world and by his helplessness to change them or to escape them. He might rail at the war in the Argus, but nobody listened. He might beg and implore that they put their house in order instead of keeping their eyes turned overseas, but it was so useless that even he sensed it was silly. Sabinsport was concerned only with figuring where she was going to get bed and board for 15,000 people through the coming winter.

The first relief from threatening idleness and bankruptcy that came was an order for barbed wire for England. Reuben Cowder had gone East and brought it back. It looked easy enough to Ralph, but Cowder himself had put in two as hard and anxious weeks as he had ever known, landing the contract. The “big ones” were after all there was and they got most of it. Moderate-sized, independent plants, like the Sabinsport wire mill, had to compete with companies which as yet were only names—but they were names backed by the great bankers that controlled the orders. Companies long ago launched by financiers for making rubber shoes or tin cans or vacuum cleaners—anything and everything except what was needed for war—landed huge contracts, and the orders waited while they converted and manned the plants and sold at high prices stock that had long lain untouched in the tens or twenties or thirties. This was happening when men like Cowder, ready at once to go to work, begged and threatened to get what they felt was their share.

The news that the wire mill would open at once on full time ran up and down the street on quick feet, and such rejoicing as it brought! Women who had ceased to go to the butcher’s went confidently in. “Jim goes to work to-morrow, can you trust me for a boiling piece?” and the butcher, as pleased as his customer, said, “Sure,” cut it with a whistle and threw in a few ounces. Over on the South Side where there had been grumblings and quarreling for nights, there was singing and laughing. The women cleaned houses that, in their despair, they’d let grow sloven, and the men brought in the water and played games with the children. Oh, the promise of wire to make stirred all Sabinsport with hope. Dick, going over to the live South Side Club, found a larger group than usual and a livelier curiosity about the war. They could think of it, now that they were not forced to think so much and so sullenly of where the next meal was coming from.