Manassas was completed in the spring of 1904 and published in August. Meanwhile I was reading the socialist weekly, Appeal to Reason, which was published in Girard, Kansas; it then had a circulation of half a million, and doubled it in the next few years. At that time two Western Miners’ officials, Moyer and Haywood, were being tried for a murder that they probably did not commit. The Appeal was sure of their innocence. I was too, and in general I was becoming a red-hot “radical.” When the twenty thousand workers in the Chicago stockyards had their strike smashed in a most shocking way, I wrote a manifesto addressed to them: “You have lost the strike, and now what are you going to do about it?” This was just the sort of thing the Appeal wanted, and they made it into a shouting first-page broadside and distributed hundreds of thousands of copies. I wrote a second broadside, “Farmers of America, Unite!” The Appeal paid me for this by sending me twenty or thirty thousand copies, which was like a present of a herd of white elephants! I had to hire a boy and a horse and buggy for a couple of weeks to distribute them over the countryside around Princeton. Two years later I ran for Congress on the socialist ticket in that district, and maybe my propaganda got me half a dozen extra votes.
I learned something about the American small farming community during my three and a half years near Princeton. What their fathers had done, they did; as their fathers had voted, so voted they, and thought it was for Lincoln, or perhaps Tilden. They lived in pitiful ignorance and under the shadow of degeneracy. I often thought of writing a book about them—but you would not have believed me, because the facts fitted so perfectly into my socialist thesis that you would have been sure I was making them to order.
In a neighborhood two miles square, which I knew by personal contact and the gossip of neighbors, the only decent families were half a dozen that lived on farms of a hundred acres or more. The families that lived on ten or twenty-acre farms contained drunkards, degenerates, mental or physical defectives, semi-idiots, victims of tuberculosis or of venereal disease, and now and then a petty criminal. You could descend in the scale, according to the size of the farm, until you came to the Jukes—I don’t recall their real name, but students of eugenics will accept that substitute. The Jukes had no farm at all, but squatted in an old barn, and had six half-naked brats, and got drunk on vinegar, and beat each other, and howled and screamed and rioted, and stole poultry and apples from the neighbors.
These small farmers of New Jersey and other eastern states represented what had been left behind from wave after wave of migration—either to the West or to the cities. The capable and active ones escaped, while the weak ones stayed behind and constituted our “farm problem.” Prohibition did not touch them because they made their own “applejack,” with sixty per cent alcohol. Politics touched them only once a year, when they were paid from two to five dollars for each vote the family could produce. They worked their children sixteen hours a day and sent them to school three or four months in winter, where they learned enough to figure a list of groceries, and to read a local weekly containing reports of church “sociables” and a few canned items supplied by the power trust; also a Methodist or Baptist paper, with praises of the “blood of the Lamb” and of patent medicines containing opium and coal-tar poisons. Such was agricultural New Jersey almost sixty years ago. The farms still go on voting for Lincoln and McKinley, and hating the labor unions that force up the prices of the things farmers have to buy.
V
A play called Candida by a new British dramatist had been produced in New York. I had no money to see plays, but I borrowed the book, and it was like meeting Shelley face to face, a rapturous experience. Then came Man and Superman—I remember reading it in the summertime, lying in a hammock by my woodland cabin and kicking my heels in the air with delight over the picture of the British aristocracy in heaven—not understanding the music, and being bored to death, but staying because they considered that their social position required it.
I was supporting my wife now, after a fashion, and so was in better standing with my father-in-law. He had a six-week vacation in the latter half of the summer, and invited me to accompany him on a canoe trip in northern Ontario. My father-in-law was a city-bred man with a passion for the primitive; he wanted to get to some place where no man had ever been before, and then he would explode with delight and exclaim, “Wild as hell!” We went up to the head of Lake Temeskaming, made a long portage, and paddled over a chain of lakes some two or three hundred miles, coming out by the Sturgeon River to Lake Winnipeg. We took two canoes, and lugged them heroically on our shoulders, and learned to use a “tumpline,” and ran dangerous rapids with many thrills, and killed a dozen great pike in a day, and paddled up to a dozen moose so close that we could have touched them with our paddles. This country, which is full of cobalt and copper, is now a great mining region, but at that time there were not even trails, and the only white man we saw in several weeks was the keeper of a Hudson’s Bay Company post.
Here were Indians living in their primitive condition, and this interested me greatly. I asked many questions, and the trader at the post told me how in wintertime these Indians would kill a moose, and then move to the moose, and camp there until they had picked the bones. When I was writing Oil! I remembered this; I told about “Dad,” my oilman, who would drill a well, and move his family to the well; I compared him to the Indians who moved their families to a moose. Later in the book I remarked, “Dad had moved to another moose”; and this got me into trouble with printers and proofreaders, who would insist upon making “moose” into “house.” I changed it back two or three times—until finally I received a letter from one of the executives of the firm, calling my attention to the difficulty; surely I could not be meaning to say that Dad had moved to a moose!
Going back home, I found Manassas about to appear, and this was the psychological moment to make a killing with the magazines. Gertrude Atherton had published in the North American Review an article speculating as to why American literature, with so many opportunities to be robust, should be so bourgeois. I wrote a reply, interpreting American literature in terms of economics; but the Review turned me down. I took the article to Colliers, then edited by Norman Hapgood, and he published it. The article was one of the strongest I have ever written, but there was not a line about it in the capitalist newspapers. I could not comprehend this; but now, after it has happened to me so many times, I know what to think.
Collier’s published another article of mine, telling the American people what socialists believed and aimed at. But that was the last. The editors accepted an open letter to Lincoln Steffens about his series of articles on “The Shame of the Cities,” which was appearing in McClure’s. I had written a criticism of his articles, pointing out that the corruption he reported came about because big business bought the politicians or elected them; and that there could never be an end to it until the government owned businesses, especially the public utilities. I sent the article to Steffens. He wrote me that it was the best criticism of his work that he had seen; he wanted McClure’s to publish it, but they didn’t dare to. So I turned it into an open letter and sent it to Collier’s. I have told in The Brass Check how I was invited to Robbie Collier’s for dinner, and how old Peter Collier, ex-packpeddler, announced to me that he would not permit my articles to appear in his paper and “scare away” his half-million subscribers. The greater part of the letter to Steffens was published in my book, The Industrial Republic, long since out of print. It contained a remarkable prophecy of our successive world crises.