The Rising of the Tide: The Story of Sabinsport

by Ida M. Tarbell

A few weeks later a new reason for hope came to Sabinsport. Reuben Cowder had landed a munition contract. He was going to convert the linoleum factory “around the point.” It was to be a big concern, give work to a thousand girls besides the men. The wages were to be “grand,” the girls in the ten-cent store heard, and more than one of them on six dollars a week said, “Me for the munitions if it’s more money.”

The rumor was not idle, for early in December the building began. Sabinsport would not go hungry in the winter of 1914-15. The war that had raised the specter had taken it away.

“And because the war has made us easy in our pockets again, we are all for the war,” sneered Ralph.

“Are we?” said Dick. “I doubt it. So far as I can see, we are puppets of the war as is all the rest of the world.”

“We could refuse to make its infernal food. We could hold ourselves above its blood money. Reuben Cowder doesn’t care how he makes money if he makes it.”

“And by that argument the men and women in the mills and to be in the new mill don’t care as long as they make it,” retorted Ralph.

“We’re hardening our hearts,”—and to save Sabinsport’s soul, as he claimed, Ralph began a lively campaign against the making and exporting of munitions to other nations. It was a new idea to Sabinsport. To make what the world would buy, of the quality it would take, was simply common sense to her mind. She had nothing in her code of industrial ethics which put a limitation on any kind of manufacturing except beer and whiskey. Sabinsport had never had a brewery or a distillery. It would have hurt her conscience to have had one. Indeed the only time she had ever out and out fought and beaten the combination of Mulligan and Cowder was when they attempted to establish a brewery. The opposition had been so general and it had been of such a kind that the men had withdrawn. “It isn’t worth fighting to a finish,” Cowder had told Jake. “We’ll have bigger game one of these days, and we don’t want the town to be against us.”

But Sabinsport had seen without a flicker of conscience the cheapest of cheap hose, the kind that ravels at a first wearing, turned out by the tens of thousands. Somebody had once remarked that the firm must use the fact that its hose could be guaranteed to break the first time worn, with buyers. “The more sold the larger the commission,” laughed Sabinsport. It didn’t hurt her conscience that there was truth in the remark. It didn’t disturb her conscience now as a town that the mills were turning out hundreds and hundreds of spools of a crueller barbed wire than they had ever before seen. It didn’t disturb it that around the point a great-scale conversion of the never-very-successful linoleum factory into some kind of a shell factory was going on.

But if not conscience stricken, Sabinsport was interested in the discussion. It stirred deeper than Ralph in his disgust with the situation had dreamed. Letters to his Pro Bono Publico column flowed in daily. From the mill came a violent arraignment of capital for making the war in order to make munitions. It was from the leading Socialist of the labor group, an excellent fellow who talked well but difficult to argue with, both Ralph and Dick had found. There was nothing to argue about the ruining of the world, in John Starrett’s judgment. His system would remove all evils. His task was the simple one of affirmation. All evils come from capitalism—do away with capitalism, institute socialism, and the machine will run itself. The Argus was right in disapproving of munition making by a neutral country, said John Starrett, but so long as the Argus failed to see that it was the iniquitous system it supported which was to blame, etc., etc.

The one always-to-be-counted-on pulpit radical in the town seized the chance for opposition and preached eloquent and moving sermons on the horrors of wars, the gist of which he weekly sent, neatly typewritten, to Ralph for the P. B. P., as it was called in the office. His argument was that this wicked thing could not go on if all men everywhere would refuse to work on guns and shells and powder, that it was the duty of a great neutral country like the United States to head the movement, and why should not Sabinsport start it? She would go down in history as the leader in the most beneficent reform of modern times. The Rev. Mr. Pepper worked himself into a noble enthusiasm over this idea, and spent time and money his family really needed for food and clothes in writing and mailing letters to a long list of well-known radically inclined men and women in various parts of the country, begging them to join the Anti-Munition Making League. Ralph published the digests of the Pepper sermons, printed free his long circulars and listened to his argument, and Sabinsport read and smiled and went ahead with her work.