A Search for America / by Frederick Philip Grove, e-Ed.2000 -- BOOK III, CHAPTER VI.
BOOK THREE -- THE DEPTHS

CHAPTER VI.

I WIDEN MY OUTLOOK.

EXT MORNING I arrived at the factory at a quarter to six, with the piercing yell of the first whistle, and started in. I cannot follow events in this interlude very closely; it would lead me too far afield. I will briefly state that I found the management considerate in the extreme and that, if I made a success of the task as outlined to me by Mr. Warburton, the superintendent, I owed it chiefly to this circumstance. It was no easy work for me; but I have always considered that it was worth while. Three factors made it so: Mansfield, the foreman; Gawrilucy, the Russian kiln-boss; and my study of the general run of workmen employed.
As for my own career, suffice it to say that within a month I was "boss" in the glue-room -- the word "boss" implying that I took orders from nobody except the superintendent himself -- that within three months the department under my charge had caught up with orders and that, when I left, the work was running smoothly enough to be left to the boys whom I found in charge. My own earnings had remained modest enough. I had started in on seventy-five cents a day; this was raised to a dollar the second week; and by the end of my first month I was getting seven dollars and fifty cents a week -- the highest wage that any one below the management could boast of; and even Mansfield, the foreman of the machine floor, received only twice as much.
I said that Mansfield's eye had impressed me as shifty-looking. He seemed to avoid your eye. But I soon found out that the reason did not lie in any inability on his part of treating the men over whom he held authority

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in a straight-forward way; he was simply excessively modest.

He, too, had come to this mill as a "raw hand" -- and not so very long ago. He had worked for maybe eight or ten years and had been foreman for a matter of three or four. His promotion, which he had literally thrust upon him, was due, not so much to sheer ability, as to his vision. Many of the other men could beat him in speed and accuracy of manipulation; but -- and here is a very important point -- suppose you had slipped him in among them as a mere hand, without their knowledge, at any one of the machines, say at a sandpaper-belt -- though they could have matched and excelled him in quantity and quality of their output, not one of them would have done so. If it had been a contest, entered into with the full knowledge of all concerned that it was a contest, many a one would have outdone him. But without such a stimulus, only he would have put forward his full effort. The reason was simply this: that he saw the mill as a thing alive -- as a living organism whose performance was his very personal pride. He had that curious ability of loving a dead machine; he adopted it into his affections as nowadays a man may love his car and never be satisfied unless it shows at all times at its best. He could tell you the history of every one of them; how the inventor had met with difficulties in getting his improvement adopted -- and how, gradually, it had swept the country and come into general use. For him there was romance in machinery. When he fed some such moving structure of knives and saws, he felt exactly as Dr. Goodwin had felt when he said at my sickbed, "I am going to help Nature along the slightest little bit."
All this implies that he was a reader. He had started with trade-journals, but had soon gone on to reading books of a technical nature; and Mr. Warburton, the superintendent, had encouraged him in every possible way -- till one day he had said to him, "Mansfield, I believe you know as much of veneers as I do. Would you like to come into the office." "No," Mansfield had answered. "I

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don't care about veneers. I want to stay where I am, with the machines." "All right," Mr. Warburton had continued, "but not as a hand, not with a single machine. I am going to put you in charge of the whole floor."

The Russian kiln-boss presented a different problem to me. Like myself he was a recent immigrant; unlike myself, he had at once made a complete and permanent economic success of his new life. But in one respect I found him to be very much in the same difficulties which I had experienced. He was the first of a long line of inarticulate immigrants with whom I was going to come into contact; and from the first I was drawn to him. Many Americans have the idea that the immigrant, as they are used to see him nowadays, is completely satisfied with material comforts. Nothing, I found, is farther from the truth; and that is precisely why I have felt encouraged in giving this record of my own struggles. Very few of them will speak up, even if they are able to do so.
This man, when he came to the United States, left a family behind in Russia. He had saved enough money by this time to let them follow him; but he hesitated.
"This country," he said to me, "good country to work in. Bad country to live in."
I questioned him on this point; and gradually I found out what was his point of view. Immigrants from Eastern Europe were wanted to do the hard work in America, that kind of work for which the man born in America had become too soft through easy living. They were highly welcome to employers who found it increasingly difficult to secure help for that class of work. But they were not at all welcome to those whom they regarded as their equals in the country.
"Why," he would say, "why me kiln-boss? Heavy work. Why no machine hand? Light work. Others do. Handle small piece. Out here, in kiln, heavy pieces. Big logs, big planks, hard work."
"But do you object to hard work?" I asked.
He laughed. "No. Not me. Like it. Can do it."

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"Well, then . . ."
"Oh," he said, and his laugh died out. "We here like Pollacks in Russia. Despised. Americans good -- we no good. Just beasts, like cattle."
"Does Mr. Warburton treat you like an ox?" I insisted.
"Him, no," he replied. "Him make money. Need me. But boys, how bout them? Slant-eyes, they say. Low-ears. Bones stick out. Cannot speak English. They laugh."
"What do you care?" I objected. "That's only the riffraff. They do the same with me. A blistering Englishman, they call me. They can't even distinguish between an Englishman and a Swede, when the Swede happens to speak English better than they do."
"I no care," he said. "I no care for myself. But the children. I care for them. I go back to Russia. All Russians there. I got money, I all right. I buy land. My children good. I stay here, my children no good. I no want my children laughed at. Not their fault, have slant-eyes. Not mine. I can't help. Slant-eyes just as good. I no speak English; they no speak Russian. I honest. I good father. I good worker. But no good here. Why? Russian! Liberty, Freedom?" He laughed. "Freedom to joke. Freedom to hurt. Fair play? Foul play!"
The upshot of it was that I started to teach him English. He proved a remarkably able scholar. I marvelled at the speed with which he learned, and above all with which he learned to read and write. In two or three months he read magazines. The paradox in it all was that he still had to go to a professional scribe to get his Russian letters written to his family -- at fifty cents a sheet -- when he could easily have written them himself in English.
Then I came back to the charge. I knew Russia too well to let him go back -- Russia as it then was, no matter how much certain people may praise it now.
"You are making good," I told him, "you are an

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American. Those boys in the mill that make fun of you might be Americans; but they aren't. They are too ignorant. They don't know any better. Your children? Why, bring them over. Teach them yourself for a while. Then send them to school. Will they ever have a chance in Russia?"

"Not much," he agreed.
"Well," I went on, "here you can give them a chance. You say you came here on their account. It's on their account that you want to stay and bring them over."
"Maybe," he said. "Maybe in fall."
Meanwhile Mr. Warburton began to notice a change in him; one day he sent him to Cincinnati to appraise and to buy, if up to standard, a supply of timbers from the raft.
Once I had a brief talk with the manager about the Russian.
"It's next to uncanny," said Mr. Warburton, "the way that man can see into a log. He'll take his axe and swing it into a timber, and he can tell what the flake will be when it is quarter-sawed. If I did not need him, I'd send him up to Chicago or Grand Rapids. But, I suppose, he'll find out himself, soon enough, that there are better places for him to work in; places where knowledge and power will bring him better pay."
As for the boys with whom I had to work, one little episode will illustrate their psychology. As the time was approaching when I intended to leave -- for, as soon as we had caught up with orders, I lost my interest in the task -- I mentioned one day that I should not be with them much longer. One of the three, Dan, I felt sure, would be able to keep the glue-room going, provided that the other two would support him. Of these two only one gave real trouble. His name was Jesse, and his aim in life seemed to be to get as much fun and to do as little work as he possibly could.
"I want to help you," I said to him, "to make your job

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permanent. Unless you show them that you can do as much work as others do, that job will disappear."

"I guess," he shouted, "I can do as much work as the next one."
"Sure," I said, "and get as much pay, too. The trouble is you aren't doing it."
"Well," he exclaimed, "let's get busy."
And for a day or so he outdid every one.
The desire to do his best could be awakened only by a sporting proposition. Make it a case of rIvalry, a contest, and he was as good as any one. In the daily grind of routine he fell down.
Spring came, and one day I sought Mr. Warburton.
"I'm going to leave," I said.
"That so?" he asked, unruffled.
"Yes," I said, "seven and a half dollars a week do not seem so alluring to me that I should give up a wider outlook."
"Anything in sight?" he enquired in his ironical way.
"No," I said. "But I want to move on. I want to see things."
"Well, Branden," Mr. Warburton proceeded, somewhat annoyed, "I've always thought so. The lure of the river's got you. It's always the same with the men that drift down the river. Spring comes, and the wanderlust gets back into their blood."
"Partly; maybe," I agreed, though I was nettled at being thought so shallow. "Yet I am not going to follow the river. I am going to foot it, but only because I haven't the money to pay my fare."
"Where do you intend to go?"
"To Indianapolis," I replied. "Maybe to Chicago. I want a wider field."
"As a veneer-hand?"
"Maybe, for a while."
"Look here, Branden," he said. "I don't want to hold you back. But I believe you are making a mistake. Here, in a small mill, you have made good. Don't think

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for a moment that I want to deny it. But in a large mill you will be just a hand again. Of course, you may make good there, too; don't forget, however, that you are not very strong. Will you be able to stand the pace?"

"I don't care," I replied. "It is beside the point. It does not enter into my ambitions to make a career out of this thing. I have an idea that there is something bigger and more important which I can do."
"Oh?" said Mr. Warburton vacantly.
"It isn't money," I went on. "As far as money goes, very little will satisfy me."
"Money is power," he drawled ironically.
"Money is slavery," I replied. "At any rate, it is not the kind of power I want. Most of you industrial Americans overrate the value of money or of the material things which it buys. Your higher standard of living, as you proudly call it, does not seem so all-satisfying to me. Life has to yield me more than a competence or even an abundance of things necessary or desirable. But I suppose, it is useless to discuss it."
This, in turn, nettled Mr. Warburton; he, closed his shell, as it were. His judgment was formed. He did not say it in so many words; but in his features I read his estimate of the tramp.
Dr. Goodwin, with whom I sat during the following afternoon -- it being Sunday -- took a different view.
"So you are going?" he said. "Well, I don't blame you. But will you find what you want?"
"I don't know," I replied. "I'll find it or perish in the attempt."
"Nothing like perishing in a worthy cause," he said. "There is a great deal of satisfaction in it. Though it sometimes seems selfish to me. Don't forget that for us ordinary mortals it is quite a worthy task merely to make an honest living."
"Not for me," I replied, "nor for you."
He laughed an embarrassed laugh. "Well . . ." And his tone was half deprecation, half admission

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"Doctor," I shot at him suddenly, "how much do I owe you?"
He was still more embarrassed. "I really couldn't tell you offhandedly," he said. "I've never figured it out. I'd have to look it up in my books."
"Suppose I wait a week before I ask you again?"
"All right," he said, visibly relieved.
This time it was I who laughed. "Do you want me to tell you what would happen?"
"How do you mean?" he asked.
"I'll tell you," I said. "Either you would not be able to find it in your books or you would try very hard to avoid me. Perhaps you'd be tempted to make a little trip in order never to see me again."
His face was a study.
I was determined, however, not to let him get away with it. I had saved a tidy little sum out of my wages. So I drew a roll of bills out of my pocket and put it on a little table which stood at my elbow.
"Listen, doctor," I said. "I am not going to offend you by insisting that you accept a fee. I have seen the good people who nursed me. They will get my bed and whatever else I own in the line of such trifles. With you I am going to leave four-fifths of what I have saved, in trust as it were, to be used by you for the relief of suffering in your parish. It is not much. Only forty dollars. But I should feel better if you would take it on these terms."
"I will," he said; "thank you."
That settled the matter.
I had still another interview, this time with Mansfield.
"Do you think," I asked him, "that Dan will be able to carry on the work as glue-room boss?"
"I do," he replied. "He has learned to see the employer's point of view, and he has given in to the better methods."
"Very well. Then you had better count me out a week from next Saturday."
"I'm sorry," he said. "But if you wish to go . . ."

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"I'll go," I replied.
As it happened, that was, against my expectations, the end of my career as a factory hand. Just a word about what it seemed to teach me.
There are three classes of men engaged in the industries of the nation: born leaders, born servants, and the rest of them who are neither the one nor the other but who work for others because they can help themselves.
Nothing needs to be said about the first two classes; if all men belonged to them, there would be no industrial troubles.
Nor do troubles necessarily arise in the third class, either. Not without intention have I given details in this CHAPTER about the foreman of the machine-floor and the Russian Gawrilucy. They fitted in; they were unable to be leaders in a large sense; they were not necessarily servants. On the other hand they did not object to the fundamental condition of being led. Being led, they had made a success of their work in life; they were satisfied. Chance had been kind to them: they lived "in abundance" where chance had dropped them. If the world as it is had been put down before them as a toy-shop, Mansfield would have chosen machines for his toys, the Russian would have chosen logs to tow about, to pick them for their flakes and figures, and to cut them open in order to verify his conjectures. They were not only satisfied with what they were doing; they were happy in doing it.
I think I can say that, without exception, the other workmen in this factory were doing what they did -- like myself -- by chance. When they had reached the age at which they thought they should be making money -- or at which others thought that they should do so -- they had gone to the mill which happened to be near. A job was easily secured. Work was work; what did it matter? But it surely does matter what we do with two-thirds of our waking hours. So long as work is work, and play play, just so long do we want to get as little of the one and as

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much of the other as possible; that is human nature, not here, but the world over; not now, but in eternity.

We will, for a moment, disregard that small fraction of the human race which would choose to live in utter sloth. We can disregard them for, I believe, humanity could afford to "carry" them as parasites. The loss entailed by them would be small as compared with the low entailed through present, faulty distribution. For the rest, we will assume that the great majority of humans want to work, want to exercise, not only their physical powers, but also their mental equipment, whatever it be.
We will, also, assume that every human being has, hidden away, maybe, in his innermost heart, never awakened perhaps, but yet has his leanings, his pet inclinations, his hobbies. Why, then, does he not make his hobby his occupation? Because he cannot do so. Chance guides him. When he starts life on his own account, at fourteen, let me say, some mill is nearby, and he goes to it. Money looms bigger than the "abundance of life". And for one thing, very few children know at fourteen years anything of themselves. They start drifting.
Raise the school-age to eighteen, and you will have made a step forward in the right direction; but you will not have solved the problem.
Alas! Our schools! We worship the fetish of reading and writing. Useful arts they are, of that there is no doubt. But -- I speak from manifold experience -- show me the grown-up who wishes to master the arts of reading and writing and cannot do so in a short time -- in one-hundredth the time which we waste on them in our schools, incidentally making our children into verbalists and spoiling them for reality -- and I will show you a mental laggard. We say that there is an age for these things; that beyond that age it becomes nearly impossible to acquire their knowledge. That is simply one of the superstitions of the ages. Reading and writing and similar inessentials have formed the curriculum of our schools

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since time immemorial. Why? Because in by-gone civilizations the man who received an education was the man of leisure. He was taught to read; he was taught to write, not because these things were prime necessities of his life, for they were that less then than now; but exactly because they were not necessities, because they were luxuries, because they were the distinctive accomplishments of his class; they marked him off from the multitude.

We want, or regard as desirable, only one class of our population: the workers. What, then, is the distinctive accomplishment which we should nurse in our schools? There is only one answer: Work which satisfies.
Why do our children break away from school as soon as they can? Because they are forced to follow what seems to them futile, silly, purposeless routine. The children are right. Convince yourselves by going to their schools yourselves; by acquiring some art which is taught there in the same, deadening way in which it is presented to them: I believe I should soon catch you yawning; I believe I should soon catch you playing truant. We are everlastingly hitching the buggy in front of the horse; and we think that unfortunately it cannot be helped. A more systematic, organized, wilfully cruel waste than that conducted in our world-wide systems of education no genius of perversity could invent.
Meanwhile there waits that one great problem of life, to be solved by chance for the countless millions. And we let it wait!
Why is the boy with fingers adapted to Tinkering, with a mind inclined to mechanics -- why does he think he is satisfied with his work in a machine-shop? Because chance was good to him, so he thinks; it placed him where he belonged. But did it? Maybe the time will come when he is at the end of his possibilities for lack of deeper knowledge. He will be a labourer when he might be an executive -- leaving all thought of the money-rewards aside for a moment. Then his life will suddenly lack that "abundance".

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Equal opportunities for all? Indeed! Do you call it giving that man an opportunity if you point back into the past and say to him, "You should have made better use of your school-days?" Was he the man he is now when he was a child? Could he foresee? As a child he looked into that school-room with horror. That was the school-room's fault, not his; all the more so is the school-room sugar-coated things. The task allotted seemed and was slavery and drudgery; Life beckoned, clad in light and the wind of the wild. Maybe it was only tinsel and shoddy: could he distinguish?

But if, when he was a boy, you had led him into a great work-shop of all the essential industries of the land and had spoken to him somewhat as follows: "Go to it; satisfy yourself; find out in the next year, or in two or four or five years, what kind of work you would like to do; then do it. Whatever you do will be paid for at current rates; henceforth you are self-supporting; the work we are turning out here is not idle play; we are doing part of the work of the world; we do not ask you to weave little paper-mats or to sew little picture-cards which seems silly to you and which indeed we should drop into the nearest waste-paper basket as soon as you do not happen to look; whatever you make, unless in the process of making it was spoiled beyond the possibility of use, will be used; in fact, our shops differ from those of our great industries in only three points: they are brought together within a comparatively small compass -- we watch that you do not overwork, for there will, I trust, be no need of watching you so you won't underwork -- and you can get help at any moment in whatever may seem puzzling to you. Above all, find out what you like best. And whenever you run up against that which you do not understand, for which you need theoretical knowledge, well, my boy, against that case we have provided class-rooms where such things are taught; you can avail yourself of them or not, as you

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please. But till you are eighteen years old, no matter what you may choose to do, you are going to do it right here, on these farms, in these workshops and offices. But, if we do not ask you to spell out silly words which you do not understand and for which you have not now and may never have any use, we do ask you most earnestly never to persist in a task which seems hateful; we require you to find a task that is pleasant to perform. By doing that you will be doing your duty" -- if you had said that to the boy or the girl, would they have responded? It is my unalterable conviction that they would.

That is nothing new, of course. I do not mean to palm it off as original thought. I hold no monopoly in common sense. But, couple such a system of education -- which would breed craftsmen instead of labourers -- with a halfways sensible system of labour-exchanges -- as any group of intelligent men could work out in an hour or so -- and you will have done away with the major part of the causes of present unrest; but you will also have done away with what brought the French Revolution about and which is be no means dead: with privilege in all its forms.
No amount of literary cramming will make a good loyal, intelligent citizen out of a reluctant child. But a craftsman who loves his work and takes pride in his work, who would rather do his work than joy-ride over the country -- such a craftsman cannot be a disloyal, troublesome, unintelligent citizen, even though he can neither read -- nor write. But, of course, he would have mastered both these arts without wasting eight years of his life on them, endangering his health to boot.

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