It seemed a shame, when you came to realize it. This ranch had been a place where Dad could come to rest and shoot quail; but now that they had struck oil, it was the last place in the world where he could rest. There were new wells to be planned and drilled, and pipe-lines to be run, and oil to be marketed, and financing to be seen to, and houses and roads, and a gas-plant, and more water—there was something new every day. The books showed that nearly three million dollars had gone into the place so far, and now Dad was talking about the absolute necessity of having his own refinery; his mind was full of a thousand technical details along this line. There was a group of men—really big capitalists—who wanted to go in with him, and turn this into one of the monster oil fields, with a company capitalized at sixty million dollars; there would be a “tank-farm,” and several distilleries, and a chain of distributing stations. Should Dad follow this course, or should he save the business for Bunny? The boy would have to decide pretty soon, did he want to shoulder an enormous burden like this, or to let other people carry it for him? Did he want to study all kinds of things, like Paul, or did he want to buckle down to the oil-game, and give his attention to the process of cracking distillation, and the use of dephlegmators in connection with tower stills?
II
Bunny’s speculations upon the problem of capital and labor were not destined to remain academic. Spending his Christmas holidays at Paradise, he found Paul looking very serious, and asking what would be Dad’s attitude towards the matter of unions in this field. There was an organizer for the carpenters here, and Paul had talked with him, and decided that it was his duty to join. Some of the men had joined secretly, but Paul wouldn’t have any concealment in his relations with Mr. Ross. Bunny answered that his father didn’t think much of unions, but he certainly wouldn’t object to Paul’s joining, if Paul thought it was right; anyhow they’d talk it out. So that evening they had a session, which wasn’t quite the same as a class at high school.
Dad believed in organization; he always said that, and his formula would apply to workingmen—at least in theory. But in practice Dad had observed that a labor union enabled a lot of officials to live off the work of the real workers; these officials became a class by themselves, a sort of vested interest, and they looked out for themselves, and not for labor. They naturally had to make some excuse for their own existence, and so were apt to stir up the workers to discontent which otherwise the workers wouldn’t feel.
Paul said that was one way to look at it; but as a matter of fact, it was just as apt to work the other way—the men would be discontented, and officials would be trying to smooth them down. The officials made bargains with the employers, and naturally wanted the workers to fall into line. Didn’t it seem more reasonable to account for disputes in industry by the fundamental fact that one group was selling labor, and the other was buying it? Nobody was ever surprised that a man who was buying a horse didn’t value it so high as the owner.
You could see Dad didn’t like that, because it was a view that made his business more difficult. He said that what troubled him about unions was, they deprived a man of his personal liberty; he was no longer a free American citizen, he was jist a part of a machine, run by politicians, and often by grafters. What had made this country great was individual enterprise, and we ought to protect that. And Paul said yes, but the employers had set the men a bad example; they had joined a “Petroleum Employers’ Federation,” which ruled the industry very strictly. Paul had been told that in his early days Mr. Ross had paid his men a dollar a day more than the regular scale, so as to get the best labor; but when he had got into the Prospect Hill field, he had had to join the Federation, and now wasn’t allowed to pay more than the regular scale.
That was true, Dad admitted, but he hastened to explain, he hadn’t reduced anybody’s wages; his business had grown so fast, he had put his men into higher classifications, and when he engaged new men for the old jobs, they had got the regular price. But when Paul pinned him down, Dad admitted that it really was a union he belonged to, and he had sacrificed his personal liberty to that extent. It was clear enough, there had to be some order among the employers, to keep them from cutting one another’s throats; and Dad was fair enough to admit that maybe if he were a laborer, he’d see the same necessity.
Paul pleased Dad by saying that if all the employers were as fair as Mr. Ross, it would be easy to deal with them; but the fact was plain that many of them would respect only power, and the workers had no power except as a group. Why was it the carpenters were working only eight hours? Because they were organized all over the country, you couldn’t get a lot of good carpenters on any other terms. But the oil workers were poorly organized, so here was this two-shift arrangement, an inhuman thing, and the reason why Bunny couldn’t get the men to make use of his reading-room. Paul said that with a smile, to take the sting out of it; he knew it would hurt Bunny, and that Dad wouldn’t feel comfortable over it, either. Dad couldn’t give his oil workers an eight hour day, even if he wanted to—because the Petroleum Employers’ Federation had taken away his personal liberty and initiative in that respect. Paul added that the Federation would have to face this issue very shortly, because the oil workers were organizing—right in this Paradise field, as Mr. Ross no doubt knew.
Dad said he had heard it; he went so far as to admit that the Federation had sent him bulletins to keep him posted. But he wasn’t worrying, he said; if his men wanted a union, he guessed he’d find a way to get along with it—he had tried to be fair all his life, and the men knew it, most of them. Paul answered that Mr. Ross ought to understand the fundamental fact, which was that the cost of everything had been going up, ever since the war in Europe had begun; the price of oil was going up also, but the Employers’ Federation held to the old wage schedule, and that was not fair, and was making the trouble. The employers who fought the unions were short-sighted, for what they really did was to turn the men over to the I. W. W. Dad looked startled at that, for the “wobblies,” as they were called, had the reputation of being dangerous people, almost Anarchists, who wanted to seize the wells and run them for the workers; you heard terrible rumors of a thing called “sabotage,” which meant that the men, if they didn’t get what they considered a square deal, would punish the employers by damaging the property, even setting fire to wells. Were I. W. W. really in the field? Paul answered that it wouldn’t be fair for him to report on the men, that would be making him a spy; but as a matter of fact the wobblies were in every field, and in every industry—you could never keep them out, and the only thing to do was to keep their influence down by a policy of fair play.
Paul had been studying this question of capital and labor, as he studied everything that came his way. He had been reading books of which Bunny had never heard even the names—they were not taught in the high school courses, because, so Paul declared, they gave the labor side. Paul had been talking to an organizer who was here for the Oil Workers’ Union, an especially intelligent man, who had been working in oil fields for several years, and knew conditions thoroughly. Bunny was tremendously interested at that, and said he’d like to meet the man, and wouldn’t Dad like to? Dad made the answer he always made now-a-days, he was jist too crowded with business over the new pipe-line, and the problem of a refinery, but later on, perhaps, he might be interested. Dad was always fooling himself that way; there was going to be some time in the future when he would be free!