The fear of ending in the poor-house is one of the terrors that dog a man through life. There are only three parts to the labor problem, and this is one of them. This fear causes “unrest.” This unrest was used by revolutionists to promote Bolshevism which turns whole empires into poor-houses. Such a “remedy,” of course, is worse than the disease. I think I know a plan by which all workers can make their old age secure. I will go into it more fully in a later chapter.
CHAPTER XX. THE RED FLAG AND THE WATERMELONS
I have said that the labor problem has three parts. I call them (1) Wages, (2) Working Conditions and (3) Living Conditions. By living conditions I mean the home and its security. My father had reached the stage where this was the problem that worried him. He was growing old and must soon cease working. But his home was not yet secure and he was haunted with the fear that his old age might be shelterless. We told him not to worry; the Davis boys were many and we would repay him for the fatherly care he had given us. But he was a proud man (as all muscular men are), and he could find no comfort in the thought of being supported by his sons. I am glad he never had to be. Independence has made his old age happy and he has proved that a worker, if he keeps his health, can provide for his old age and bring up a big family too.
We older boys left home and hunted work elsewhere. I was young and not bothered about working conditions or living conditions. I was so vigorous that I could work under any conditions, and old age was so far away that I was not worried about a home for my declining years. Wages was my sole problem. I wanted steady wages, and of course I wanted the highest I could get. To find the place where wages were to be had I was always on the go. When a mill closed I did not wait for it to reopen, but took the first train for some other mill town. The first train usually was a freight. If not, I waited for a freight, for I could sleep better in a freight car than in a Pullman—it cost less. I could save money and send it to mother, then she would not have to sell her feather beds.
All of this sounds nobler than it was. In those days workers never traveled on passenger trains unless they could get a pass. Judges and statesmen pursued the same policy. To pay for a ticket was money thrown away; so thought the upper classes and the lower classes. About the only people that paid car fare were the Knights of Pythias on their way to their annual convention. Railroad workers could get all the passes they wanted, and any toiler whose sister had married a brakeman or whose second cousin was a conductor “bummed” the railroad for a pass and got it. None of my relatives was a railroad man, and so to obtain the free transportation which was every American's inalienable right, I had to let the passenger trains go by and take the freights.
Once I got ditched at a junction, and while waiting for the next freight I wandered down the track to where I had seen a small house and a big watermelon patch. The man who lived there was a chap named Frank Bannerman. I always remember him because he was a communist, the first one I ever saw, and he filled my pockets with about ten pounds of radical pamphlets which I promised to read. He made a bargain with me that if I would read and digest the Red literature he would give me all the watermelons I could eat.
“I'm a comrade already,” I said, meaning it as a merry jest, that I would be anything for a watermelon. But he took it seriously and his eyes lit up like any fanatic's.
“I knew it,” he said. “With a face like yours—look at the brow, look at the intellect, the intellect.” I was flattered. “Come here, wife,” he called through the door. “Come here and look at the intellect.”
The wife, who was a barefooted, freckle-faced woman, came out on the porch and, smiling sweetly, sized up my intellect. I made up my mind that here were the two smartest people in America. For they saw I was bulging with intellect. Nobody else had ever discovered it, not even I myself. I thought I was a muscle-bound iron puddler, but they pronounced me an intellectual giant. It never occurred to me that they might have guessed wrong, while the wise old world had guessed right. If the world was in step, they were out of step, but I figured that the world was out of step and they had the right stride. I thought their judgment must be better than the judgment of the whole world because their judgment pleased me. I later learned that their judgment was just like the judgment of all Reds. That's what makes 'em Red.