Poor White: A Novel

by Sherwood Anderson

The crowds of people, who in the evenings walked out along Turner's Pike to look at the field with its long rows of sturdy young cabbages, moved restlessly about and talked of the new days. From the field they went along the railroad tracks to the site of the factory. The brick walls began to mount up into the sky. Machinery began to arrive and was housed under temporary sheds against the time when it could be installed. An advance horde of workmen came to town and new faces appeared on Main Street in the evening. The thing that was happening in Bidwell happened in towns all over the Middle West. Out through the coal and iron regions of Pennsylvania, into Ohio and Indiana, and on westward into the States bordering on the Mississippi River, industry crept. Gas and oil were discovered in Ohio and Indiana. Over night, towns grew into cities. A madness took hold of the minds of the people. Villages like Lima and Findlay, Ohio, and like Muncie and Anderson in Indiana, became small cities within a few weeks. To some of these places, so anxious were the people to get to them and to invest their money, excursion trains were run. Town lots that a few weeks before the discovery of oil or gas could have been bought for a few dollars sold for thousands. Wealth seemed to be spurting out of the very earth. On farms in Indiana and Ohio giant gas wells blew the drilling machinery out of the ground, and the fuel so essential to modern industrial development rushed into the open. A wit, standing in the presence of one of the roaring gas wells exclaimed, “Papa, Earth has indigestion; he has gas on his stomach. His face will be covered with pimples.”

Having, before the factories came, no market for the gas, the wells were lighted and at night great torches of flame lit the skies. Pipes were laid on the surface of the ground and by a day's work a laborer earned enough to heat his house at tropical heat through an entire winter. Farmers owning oil-producing land went to bed in the evening poor and owing money at the bank, and awoke in the morning rich. They moved into the towns and invested their money in the factories that sprang up everywhere. In one county in southern Michigan, over five hundred patents for woven wire farm fencing were taken out in one year, and almost every patent was a magnet about which a company for the manufacture of fence formed itself. A vast energy seemed to come out of the breast of earth and infect the people. Thousands of the most energetic men of the middle States wore themselves out in forming companies, and when the companies failed, immediately formed others. In the fast-growing towns, men who were engaged in organizing companies representing a capital of millions lived in houses thrown hurriedly together by carpenters who, before the time of the great awakening, were engaged in building barns. It was a time of hideous architecture, a time when thought and learning paused. Without music, without poetry, without beauty in their lives or impulses, a whole people, full of the native energy and strength of lives lived in a new land, rushed pell-mell into a new age. A man in Ohio, who had been a dealer in horses, made a million dollars out of a patent churn he had bought for the price of a farm horse, took his wife to visit Europe and in Paris bought a painting for fifty thousand dollars. In another State of the Middle West, a man who sold patent medicine from door to door through the country began dealing in oil leases, became fabulously rich, bought himself three daily newspapers, and before he had reached the age of thirty-five succeeded in having himself elected Governor of his State. In the glorification of his energy his unfitness as a statesman was forgotten.

In the days before the coming of industry, before the time of the mad awakening, the towns of the Middle West were sleepy places devoted to the practice of the old trades, to agriculture and to merchandising. In the morning the men of the towns went forth to work in the fields or to the practice of the trade of carpentry, horse-shoeing, wagon making, harness repairing, and the making of shoes and clothing. They read books and believed in a God born in the brains of men who came out of a civilization much like their own. On the farms and in the houses in the towns the men and women worked together toward the same ends in life. They lived in small frame houses set on the plains like boxes, but very substantially built. The carpenter who built a farmer's house differentiated it from the barn by putting what he called scroll work up under the eaves and by building at the front a porch with carved posts. After one of the poor little houses had been lived in for a long time, after children had been born and men had died, after men and women had suffered and had moments of joy together in the tiny rooms under the low roofs, a subtle change took place. The houses became almost beautiful in their old humanness. Each of the houses began vaguely to shadow forth the personality of the people who lived within its walls.

In the farmhouses and in the houses on the side streets in the villages, life awoke at dawn. Back of each of the houses there was a barn for the horses and cows, and sheds for pigs and chickens. At daylight a chorus of neighs, squeals, and cries broke the silence. Boys and men came out of the houses. They stood in the open spaces before the barns and stretched their bodies like sleepy animals. The arms extended upward seemed to be supplicating the gods for fair days, and the fair days came. The men and boys went to a pump beside the house and washed their faces and hands in the cold water. In the kitchens there was the smell and sound of the cooking of food. The women also were astir. The men went into the barns to feed the animals and then hurried to the houses to be themselves fed. A continual grunting sound came from the sheds where pigs were eating corn, and over the houses a contented silence brooded.

After the morning meal men and animals went together to the fields and to the doing of their tasks, and in the houses the women mended clothes, put fruit in cans against the coming of winter and talked of woman's affairs. On the streets of the towns on fair days lawyers, doctors, the officials of the county courts, and the merchants walked about in their shirt sleeves. The house painter went along with his ladder on his shoulder. In the stillness there could be heard the hammers of the carpenters building a new house for the son of a merchant who had married the daughter of a blacksmith. A sense of quiet growth awoke in sleeping minds. It was the time for art and beauty to awake in the land.

Instead, the giant, Industry, awoke. Boys, who in the schools had read of Lincoln, walking for miles through the forest to borrow his first book, and of Garfield, the towpath lad who became president, began to read in the newspapers and magazines of men who by developing their faculty for getting and keeping money had become suddenly and overwhelmingly rich. Hired writers called these men great, and there was no maturity of mind in the people with which to combat the force of the statement, often repeated. Like children the people believed what they were told.

While the new factory was being built with the carefully saved dollars of the people, young men from Bidwell went out to work in other places. After oil and gas were discovered in neighboring states, they went to the fast-growing towns and came home telling wonder tales. In the boom towns men earned four, five and even six dollars a day. In secret and when none of the older people were about, they told of adventures on which they had gone in the new places; of how, attracted by the flood of money, women came from the cities; and the times they had been with these women. Young Harley Parsons, whose father was a shoemaker and who had learned the blacksmith trade, went to work in one of the new oil fields. He came home wearing a fancy silk vest and astonished his fellows by buying and smoking ten-cent cigars. His pockets were bulging with money. “I'm not going to stay long in this town, you can bet on that,” he declared one evening as he stood, surrounded by a group of admirers before Fanny Twist's Millinery Shop on lower Main Street. “I have been with a Chinese woman, and an Italian, and with one from South America.” He took a puff of his cigar and spat on the sidewalk. “I'm out to get what I can out of life,” he declared. “I'm going back and I'm going to make a record. Before I get through I'm going to be with a woman of every nationality on earth, that's what I'm going to do.”

Joseph Wainsworth the harness maker, who had been the first man in Bidwell to feel the touch of the heavy finger of industrialism, could not get over the effect of the conversation had with Butterworth, the farmer who had asked him to repair harnesses made by machines in a factory. He became a silent disgruntled man and muttered as he went about his work in the shop. When Will Sellinger his apprentice threw up his place and went to Cleveland he did not get another boy but for a time worked alone in the shop. He got the name of being disagreeable, and on winter afternoons the farmers no longer came into his place to loaf. Being a sensitive man, Joe felt like a pigmy, a tiny thing walking always in the presence of a giant that might at any moment and by a whim destroy him. All his life he had been somewhat off-hand with his customers. “If they don't like my work, let 'em go to the devil,” he said to his apprentices. “I know my trade and I don't have to bow down to any one here.”

When Steve Hunter organized the Bidwell Plant-Setting Machine Company, the harness maker put his savings, twelve hundred dollars, into the stock of the company. One day, during the time when the factory was building, he heard that Steve had paid twelve hundred dollars for a new lathe that had just arrived by freight and had been set on the floor of the uncompleted building. The promoter had told a farmer that the lathe would do the work of a hundred men, and the farmer had come into Joe's shop and repeated the statement. It stuck in Joe's mind and he came to believe that the twelve hundred dollars he had invested in stock had been used for the purchase of the lathe. It was money he had earned in a long lifetime of effort and it had now bought a machine that would do the work of a hundred men. Already his money had increased by a hundred fold and he wondered why he could not be happy about the matter. On some days he was happy, and then his happiness was followed by an odd fit of depression. Suppose, after all, the plant-setting machine wouldn't work? What then could be done with the lathe, with the machine bought with his money?

One evening after dark and without saying anything to his wife, he went down along Turner's Pike to the old factory at Pickleville where Hugh with the half-wit Allie Mulberry, and the two mechanics from the city, were striving to correct the faults in the plant-setting machine. Joe wanted to look at the tall gaunt man from the West, and had some notion of trying to get into conversation with him and of asking his opinion of the possibilities of the success of the new machine. The man of the age of flesh and blood wanted to walk in the presence of the man who belonged to the new age of iron and steel. When he got to the factory it was dark and on an express truck in front of the Wheeling Station the two city workmen sat smoking their evening pipes. Joe walked past them to the station door and then returned along the platform and got again into Turner's Pike. He stumbled along the path beside the road and presently saw Hugh McVey coming toward him. It was one of the evenings when Hugh, overcome with loneliness, and puzzled that his new position in the town's life did not bring him any closer to people, had gone to town to walk through Main Street, half hoping some one would break through his embarrassment and enter into conversation with him.