The Iron Heel

SLAVES OF THE MACHINE

The more I thought of Jackson’s arm, the more shaken I was. I was
confronted by the concrete. For the first time I was seeing life. My
university life, and study and culture, had not been real. I had
learned nothing but theories of life and society that looked all very
well on the printed page, but now I had seen life itself. Jackson’s arm
was a fact of life. “The fact, man, the irrefragable fact!” of Ernest’s
was ringing in my consciousness.

It seemed monstrous, impossible, that our whole society was based upon
blood. And yet there was Jackson. I could not get away from him.
Constantly my thought swung back to him as the compass to the Pole. He
had been monstrously treated. His blood had not been paid for in order
that a larger dividend might be paid. And I knew a score of happy
complacent families that had received those dividends and by that much
had profited by Jackson’s blood. If one man could be so monstrously
treated and society move on its way unheeding, might not many men be so
monstrously treated? I remembered Ernest’s women of Chicago who toiled
for ninety cents a week, and the child slaves of the Southern cotton
mills he had described. And I could see their wan white hands, from
which the blood had been pressed, at work upon the cloth out of which
had been made my gown. And then I thought of the Sierra Mills and the
dividends that had been paid, and I saw the blood of Jackson upon my
gown as well. Jackson I could not escape. Always my meditations led me
back to him.

Down in the depths of me I had a feeling that I stood on the edge of a
precipice. It was as though I were about to see a new and awful
revelation of life. And not I alone. My whole world was turning over.
There was my father. I could see the effect Ernest was beginning to
have on him. And then there was the Bishop. When I had last seen him he
had looked a sick man. He was at high nervous tension, and in his eyes
there was unspeakable horror. From the little I learned I knew that
Ernest had been keeping his promise of taking him through hell. But
what scenes of hell the Bishop’s eyes had seen, I knew not, for he
seemed too stunned to speak about them.

Once, the feeling strong upon me that my little world and all the world
was turning over, I thought of Ernest as the cause of it; and also I
thought, “We were so happy and peaceful before he came!” And the next
moment I was aware that the thought was a treason against truth, and
Ernest rose before me transfigured, the apostle of truth, with shining
brows and the fearlessness of one of God’s own angels, battling for the
truth and the right, and battling for the succor of the poor and lonely
and oppressed. And then there arose before me another figure, the
Christ! He, too, had taken the part of the lowly and oppressed, and
against all the established power of priest and pharisee. And I
remembered his end upon the cross, and my heart contracted with a pang
as I thought of Ernest. Was he, too, destined for a cross?—he, with his
clarion call and war-noted voice, and all the fine man’s vigor of him!

And in that moment I knew that I loved him, and that I was melting with
desire to comfort him. I thought of his life. A sordid, harsh, and
meagre life it must have been. And I thought of his father, who had
lied and stolen for him and been worked to death. And he himself had
gone into the mills when he was ten! All my heart seemed bursting with
desire to fold my arms around him, and to rest his head on my
breast—his head that must be weary with so many thoughts; and to give
him rest—just rest—and easement and forgetfulness for a tender space.

I met Colonel Ingram at a church reception. Him I knew well and had
known well for many years. I trapped him behind large palms and rubber
plants, though he did not know he was trapped. He met me with the
conventional gayety and gallantry. He was ever a graceful man,
diplomatic, tactful, and considerate. And as for appearance, he was the
most distinguished-looking man in our society. Beside him even the
venerable head of the university looked tawdry and small.

And yet I found Colonel Ingram situated the same as the unlettered
mechanics. He was not a free agent. He, too, was bound upon the wheel.
I shall never forget the change in him when I mentioned Jackson’s case.
His smiling good nature vanished like a ghost. A sudden, frightful
expression distorted his well-bred face. I felt the same alarm that I
had felt when James Smith broke out. But Colonel Ingram did not curse.
That was the slight difference that was left between the workingman and
him. He was famed as a wit, but he had no wit now. And, unconsciously,
this way and that he glanced for avenues of escape. But he was trapped
amid the palms and rubber trees.

Oh, he was sick of the sound of Jackson’s name. Why had I brought the
matter up? He did not relish my joke. It was poor taste on my part, and
very inconsiderate. Did I not know that in his profession personal
feelings did not count? He left his personal feelings at home when he
went down to the office. At the office he had only professional
feelings.

“Should Jackson have received damages?” I asked.

“Certainly,” he answered. “That is, personally, I have a feeling that
he should. But that has nothing to do with the legal aspects of the
case.”

He was getting his scattered wits slightly in hand.

“Tell me, has right anything to do with the law?” I asked.

“You have used the wrong initial consonant,” he smiled in answer.

“Might?” I queried; and he nodded his head. “And yet we are supposed to
get justice by means of the law?”

“That is the paradox of it,” he countered. “We do get justice.”

“You are speaking professionally now, are you not?” I asked.

Colonel Ingram blushed, actually blushed, and again he looked anxiously
about him for a way of escape. But I blocked his path and did not offer
to move.

“Tell me,” I said, “when one surrenders his personal feelings to his
professional feelings, may not the action be defined as a sort of
spiritual mayhem?”

I did not get an answer. Colonel Ingram had ingloriously bolted,
overturning a palm in his flight.

Next I tried the newspapers. I wrote a quiet, restrained, dispassionate
account of Jackson’s case. I made no charges against the men with whom
I had talked, nor, for that matter, did I even mention them. I gave the
actual facts of the case, the long years Jackson had worked in the
mills, his effort to save the machinery from damage and the consequent
accident, and his own present wretched and starving condition. The
three local newspapers rejected my communication, likewise did the two
weeklies.

I got hold of Percy Layton. He was a graduate of the university, had
gone in for journalism, and was then serving his apprenticeship as
reporter on the most influential of the three newspapers. He smiled
when I asked him the reason the newspapers suppressed all mention of
Jackson or his case.

“Editorial policy,” he said. “We have nothing to do with that. It’s up
to the editors.”

“But why is it policy?” I asked.

“We’re all solid with the corporations,” he answered. “If you paid
advertising rates, you couldn’t get any such matter into the papers. A
man who tried to smuggle it in would lose his job. You couldn’t get it
in if you paid ten times the regular advertising rates.”

“How about your own policy?” I questioned. “It would seem your function
is to twist truth at the command of your employers, who, in turn, obey
the behests of the corporations.”

“I haven’t anything to do with that.” He looked uncomfortable for the
moment, then brightened as he saw his way out. “I, myself, do not write
untruthful things. I keep square all right with my own conscience. Of
course, there’s lots that’s repugnant in the course of the day’s work.
But then, you see, that’s all part of the day’s work,” he wound up
boyishly.

“Yet you expect to sit at an editor’s desk some day and conduct a
policy.”

“I’ll be case-hardened by that time,” was his reply.

“Since you are not yet case-hardened, tell me what you think right now
about the general editorial policy.”

“I don’t think,” he answered quickly. “One can’t kick over the ropes if
he’s going to succeed in journalism. I’ve learned that much, at any
rate.”

And he nodded his young head sagely.

“But the right?” I persisted.

“You don’t understand the game. Of course it’s all right, because it
comes out all right, don’t you see?”

“Delightfully vague,” I murmured; but my heart was aching for the youth
of him, and I felt that I must either scream or burst into tears.

I was beginning to see through the appearances of the society in which
I had always lived, and to find the frightful realities that were
beneath. There seemed a tacit conspiracy against Jackson, and I was
aware of a thrill of sympathy for the whining lawyer who had
ingloriously fought his case. But this tacit conspiracy grew large. Not
alone was it aimed against Jackson. It was aimed against every
workingman who was maimed in the mills. And if against every man in the
mills, why not against every man in all the other mills and factories?
In fact, was it not true of all the industries?

And if this was so, then society was a lie. I shrank back from my own
conclusions. It was too terrible and awful to be true. But there was
Jackson, and Jackson’s arm, and the blood that stained my gown and
dripped from my own roof-beams. And there were many Jacksons—hundreds
of them in the mills alone, as Jackson himself had said. Jackson I
could not escape.

I saw Mr. Wickson and Mr. Pertonwaithe, the two men who held most of
the stock in the Sierra Mills. But I could not shake them as I had
shaken the mechanics in their employ. I discovered that they had an
ethic superior to that of the rest of society. It was what I may call
the aristocratic ethic or the master ethic.[1] They talked in large
ways of policy, and they identified policy and right. And to me they
talked in fatherly ways, patronizing my youth and inexperience. They
were the most hopeless of all I had encountered in my quest. They
believed absolutely that their conduct was right. There was no question
about it, no discussion. They were convinced that they were the
saviours of society, and that it was they who made happiness for the
many. And they drew pathetic pictures of what would be the sufferings
of the working class were it not for the employment that they, and they
alone, by their wisdom, provided for it.

[1] Before Avis Everhard was born, John Stuart Mill, in his essay, On
Liberty, wrote: “Wherever there is an ascendant class, a large
portion of the morality emanates from its class interests and its
class feelings of superiority.”

Fresh from these two masters, I met Ernest and related my experience.
He looked at me with a pleased expression, and said:

“Really, this is fine. You are beginning to dig truth for yourself. It
is your own empirical generalization, and it is correct. No man in the
industrial machine is a free-will agent, except the large capitalist,
and he isn’t, if you’ll pardon the Irishism.[2] You see, the masters
are quite sure that they are right in what they are doing. That is the
crowning absurdity of the whole situation. They are so tied by their
human nature that they can’t do a thing unless they think it is right.
They must have a sanction for their acts.

[2] Verbal contradictions, called bulls, were long an amiable
weakness of the ancient Irish.

“When they want to do a thing, in business of course, they must wait
till there arises in their brains, somehow, a religious, or ethical, or
scientific, or philosophic, concept that the thing is right. And then
they go ahead and do it, unwitting that one of the weaknesses of the
human mind is that the wish is parent to the thought. No matter what
they want to do, the sanction always comes. They are superficial
casuists. They are Jesuitical. They even see their way to doing wrong
that right may come of it. One of the pleasant and axiomatic fictions
they have created is that they are superior to the rest of mankind in
wisdom and efficiency. Therefrom comes their sanction to manage the
bread and butter of the rest of mankind. They have even resurrected the
theory of the divine right of kings—commercial kings in their case.[3]

[3] The newspapers, in 1902 of that era, credited the president of the
Anthracite Coal Trust, George F. Baer, with the enunciation of the
following principle: “The rights and interests of the laboring man
will be protected by the Christian men to whom God in His infinite
wisdom has given the property interests of the country.”

“The weakness in their position lies in that they are merely business
men. They are not philosophers. They are not biologists nor
sociologists. If they were, of course all would be well. A business man
who was also a biologist and a sociologist would know, approximately,
the right thing to do for humanity. But, outside the realm of business,
these men are stupid. They know only business. They do not know mankind
nor society, and yet they set themselves up as arbiters of the fates of
the hungry millions and all the other millions thrown in. History, some
day, will have an excruciating laugh at their expense.”

I was not surprised when I had my talk out with Mrs. Wickson and Mrs.
Pertonwaithe. They were society women.[4] Their homes were palaces.
They had many homes scattered over the country, in the mountains, on
lakes, and by the sea. They were tended by armies of servants, and
their social activities were bewildering. They patronized the
university and the churches, and the pastors especially bowed at their
knees in meek subservience.[5] They were powers, these two women, what
of the money that was theirs. The power of subsidization of thought was
theirs to a remarkable degree, as I was soon to learn under Ernest’s
tuition.

[4] Society is here used in a restricted sense, a common usage of
the times to denote the gilded drones that did no labor, but only
glutted themselves at the honey-vats of the workers. Neither the
business men nor the laborers had time or opportunity for society.
Society was the creation of the idle rich who toiled not and who in
this way played.

[5] “Bring on your tainted money,” was the expressed sentiment of the
Church during this period.

They aped their husbands, and talked in the same large ways about
policy, and the duties and responsibilities of the rich. They were
swayed by the same ethic that dominated their husbands—the ethic of
their class; and they uttered glib phrases that their own ears did not
understand.

Also, they grew irritated when I told them of the deplorable condition
of Jackson’s family, and when I wondered that they had made no
voluntary provision for the man. I was told that they thanked no one
for instructing them in their social duties. When I asked them flatly
to assist Jackson, they as flatly refused. The astounding thing about
it was that they refused in almost identically the same language, and
this in face of the fact that I interviewed them separately and that
one did not know that I had seen or was going to see the other. Their
common reply was that they were glad of the opportunity to make it
perfectly plain that no premium would ever be put on carelessness by
them; nor would they, by paying for accident, tempt the poor to hurt
themselves in the machinery.[6]

[6] In the files of the Outlook, a critical weekly of the period, in
the number dated August 18, 1906, is related the circumstance of a
workingman losing his arm, the details of which are quite similar to
those of Jackson’s case as related by Avis Everhard.

And they were sincere, these two women. They were drunk with conviction
of the superiority of their class and of themselves. They had a
sanction, in their own class-ethic, for every act they performed. As I
drove away from Mrs. Pertonwaithe’s great house, I looked back at it,
and I remembered Ernest’s expression that they were bound to the
machine, but that they were so bound that they sat on top of it.