The Iron Puddler Part 6

And if he wants it clean, he'll have to clean it with the labor of his hands. "Why can't we have a different system than this?" I heard a theorist complain. "I'll bite," I said. "Why can't we?" And I went on boiling out the impurities in my puddle.

Man's nature is like iron, never born in a pure state but always mixed with elements that weaken it. Envy, greed and malice are mixed with every man's nature when he comes into the world. They are the brimstone that makes him brittle. He is pig-iron until he boils them out of his system. Savages and criminals are men who have not tried to boil this dross out of their nature. Lincoln was one who boiled it out in the fires of adversity. He puddled his own soul till the metal was pure, and that's how he got the Iron Will that was strong enough to save a nation.

My purpose in slackening my heat as soon as the pig-iron was melted was to oxidize the phosphorus and sulphur ahead of the carbon. Just as alcohol vaporizes at a lower heat than water, so sulphur and phosphorus oxidize at a lower heat than carbon. When this reaction begins I see light flames breaking through the lake of molten slag in my furnace.

Probably from such a sight as this the old-time artists got their pictures of h.e.l.l. The flames are caused by the burning of carbon monoxide from the oxidation of carbon. The slag is basic and takes the sulphur and phosphorus into combination, thus ending its combination with the iron. The purpose now is to oxidize the carbon, too, without reducing the phosphorus and sulphur and causing them to return to the iron. We want the pure iron to begin crystallizing out of the bath like b.u.t.ter from the churning b.u.t.termilk.

More and more of the carbon gas comes out of the puddle, and as it bubbles out the charge is agitated by its escape and the "boil" is in progress. It is not real boiling like the boiling of a teakettle. When a teakettle boils the water turns to bubbles of vapor and goes up in the air to turn to water again when it gets cold. But in the boiling iron puddle a chemical change is taking place. The iron is not going up in vapor. The carbon and the oxygen are. This formation of gas in the molten puddle causes the whole charge to boil up like an ice-cream soda.

The slag overflows. Redder than strawberry syrup and as hot as the fiery lake in Hades it flows over the rim of the hearth and out through the slag-hole. My helper has pushed up a buggy there to receive it. More than an eighth and sometimes a quarter of the weight of the pig-iron flows off in slag and is carted away.

Meanwhile I have got the job of my life on my hands. I must stir my boiling mess with all the strength in my body. For now is my chance to defeat nature and wring from the loosening grip of her hand the pure iron she never intended to give us.

CHAPTER XVII. MAN IS IRON TOO

For twenty-five minutes while the boil goes on I stir it constantly with my long iron rabble. A cook stirring gravy to keep it from scorching in the skillet is done in two minutes and backs off blinking, sweating and choking, having finished the hardest job of getting dinner. But my hardest job lasts not two minutes but the better part of half an hour.

My spoon weighs twenty-five pounds, my porridge is pasty iron, and the heat of my kitchen is so great that if my body was not hardened to it, the ordeal would drop me in my tracks.

Little spikes of pure iron like frost spars glow white-hot and stick out of the churning slag. These must be stirred under at once; the long stream of flame from the grate plays over the puddle, and the pure iron if lapped by these gases would be oxidized--burned up.

Pasty ma.s.ses of iron form at the bottom of the puddle. There they would stick and become chilled if they were not constantly stirred. The whole charge must be mixed and mixed as it steadily thickens so that it will be uniform throughout. I am like some frantic baker in the inferno kneading a batch of iron bread for the devil's breakfast.

"It's an outrage that men should have to work like this," a reformer told me.

"They don't have to," I replied. "n.o.body forced me to do this. I do it because I would rather live in an Iron Age than live in a world of ox-carts. Man can take his choice."

The French were not compelled to stand in the flame that scorched Verdun. They could have backed away and let the Germans through. The Germans would not have killed them. They would only have saddled them and got on their backs and ridden them till the end of time.

And so men are not compelled to face the scorching furnaces; we do not have to forge the iron that resists the invading cyclone and the leveling earthquake. We could quit cold and let wild nature kick us about at will. We could have cities of wood to be wiped out by conflagrations; we could build houses of mud and sticks for the gales to unroof like a Hottentot village. We could bridge our small rivers with logs and be flood-bound when the rains descended. We could live by wheelbarrow transit like the Chinaman and leave to some braver race the task of belting the world with railroads and bridging the seas with iron boats.

n.o.body compels us to stand shoulder to shoulder and fight off nature's calamities as the French fought off their oppressor at Verdun. I repeat, we could let nature oppress us as she oppresses the meek Chinese--let her whip us with cold, drought, flood, isolation and famine.

We chose to resist as the French resisted--because we are men. Nature can chase the measly savage fleeing naked through the bush. But nature can't run us ragged when all we have to do is put up a hard fight and conquer her. The iron workers are civilization's shock troops grappling with tyrannous nature on her own ground and conquering new territory in which man can live in safety and peace. Steel houses with gla.s.s windows are born of his efforts. There is a glory in this fight; man feels a sense of grandeur. We are robbing no one. From the harsh bosom of the hills we wring the iron milk that makes us strong. Nature is no kind mother; she resists with flood and earthquake, drought and cyclone.

Nature is fierce and formidable, but fierce is man's soul to subdue her.

The stubborn earth is iron, but man is iron too.

CHAPTER XVIII. ON BEING A GOOD GUESSER

The charge which I have been kneading in my furnace has now "come to nature," the stringy sponge of pure iron is separating from the slag.

The "balling" of this sponge into three loaves is a task that occupies from ten to fifteen minutes. The particles of iron glowing in this spongy ma.s.s are partly welded together; they are sticky and stringy and as the cooling continues they are rolled up into wads like popcorn b.a.l.l.s. The charge, which lost part of its original weight by the draining off of slag, now weighs five hundred fifty to six hundred pounds. I am balling it into three parts of equal weight. If the charge is six hundred pounds, each of my b.a.l.l.s must weigh exactly two hundred pounds.

I have always been proud of the "batting eye" that enables an iron puddler to shape the b.a.l.l.s to the exact weight required. This is a mental act,--an act of judgment. The artist and the sculptor must have this same sense of proportion. A man of low intelligence could never learn to do it. We are paid by weight, and in my time, in the Sharon mill, the b.a.l.l.s were required to be two hundred pounds. Every pound above that went to the company and was loss to the men.

I have heard that "guessing pigs" was an old-time sport among farmers.

To test their skill, each farmer would guess the weight of a grazing pig. Then they would catch the porker, throw him on the scales, and find out which farmer had guessed nearest the mark. Sunday clothes used to be badly soiled in this sport.

But the iron worker does not guess his pigs. He knows exactly how much pig-iron he put into the boil. His guessing skill comes into play when with a long paddle and hook he separates six hundred pounds of sizzling fireworks into three fire b.a.l.l.s each of which will weigh two hundred pounds.

The b.a.l.l.s are rolled up into three resting places, one in the fire-bridge corner, one in the flue-bridge corner, and one in the jam, all ready for the puddler to draw them.

My batch of biscuits is now done and I must take them out at once and rush them to the hungry mouth of the squeezing machine. A bride making biscuits can jerk them out of the oven all in one pan. But my oven is larger and hotter. I have to use long-handled tongs, and each of my biscuits weighs twice as much as I weigh. Suppose you were a cook with a fork six feet long, and had three roasting sheep on the grid at once to be forked off as quickly as possible. Could you do it? Even with a helper wouldn't you probably scorch the mutton or else burn yourself to death with the hot grease? That is where strength and skill must both come into play.

One at a time the b.a.l.l.s are drawn out on to a buggy and wheeled swiftly to the squeezer. This machine squeezes out the slag which flows down like the glowing lava running out of a volcano. The motion of the squeezer is like the circular motion you use in rolling a bread pill between the palms and squeezing the water out of it. I must get the three b.a.l.l.s, or blooms, out of the furnace and into the squeezer while the slag is still liquid so that it can be squeezed out of the iron.

From cold pig-iron to finished blooms is a process that takes from an hour and ten minutes, to an hour and forty minutes, depending on the speed and skill of the puddler, and the kind of iron. I was a fast one, myself. But you expected that, from the fact that I am telling the story. The man that tells the story always comes out a winner.

CHAPTER XIX. I START ON MY TRAVELS

Now that I was a master puddler, I faced the problem of finding a furnace of my own. I saw no chance in Sharon. Furnaces pa.s.sed from father to son, so I could not hope to get one of the furnaces controlled by another family. My father was not ready to relinquish his furnace to me, as he was good for twenty years more of this vigorous labor.

I wanted to be a real boss puddler, and so, when I was eighteen I went to Pittsburgh and got a furnace. But a new period of hard times was setting in, jobs were getting scarce as they had been in 1884. That was the year when we had no money in the house and I was chasing every loose nickel in town. The mill at Sharon was down, and father was hunting work in Pittsburgh and elsewhere. Then after a period of prosperity the hard times had come again in 1891 and '92. My furnace job in Pittsburgh was not steady. The town was full of iron workers and many of them were in desperate need. Those who had jobs divided their time with their needy comrades. A man with hungry children would be given a furnace for a few days to earn enough to ward off starvation. I had no children and felt that I should not hold a furnace. I left Pittsburgh and went to Niles, Ohio, where I found less compet.i.tion for the jobs. I worked a few weeks and the mill shut down. I wandered all over the iron district and finally, deciding that the North held no openings, I began working my way toward the iron country in the South.

The Sharon mill did not shut down completely. The owner operated it at a loss rather than throw all his old hands out on the world. Twenty years later I met him on a train in the West and we talked of old times when I worked in his mill. As long as he lived he was loved and venerated by his former employees.

Father was putting in short time at Sharon and was badly worried. He was thinking of setting out again to go from town to town looking for work, but I had advised him against it. I had told him that he would merely find crowds of idle men roaming from mill to mill along with him. My brothers gave him similar advice.

"Father," we said, "it is a time of business depression and wide-spread unemployment. If you went to Pittsburgh you might find a few weeks'

work, but it would not pay you to go there for it. You would have to lay out cash for your board and lodging there before you could send anything home to mother. Keeping up two establishments is harder than keeping up one. You have a home here partly paid for, and a big garden that helps support that home. It is better for you to stick with this establishment and work at half time in the mill than to roam around at big expense seeking full time in some other mill. There may be no mill in the land that is running full time."

This had not occurred to him. What lay beyond the hills was all mystery.

But we young fellows had been brought up in the American atmosphere, we had read the Youth's Companion and the newspapers, and our outlook was widened; we could guess that conditions were the same in other states as they were in our part of Pennsylvania, for we were studying economic causes.

"It is better for you to stay here and wait for good times to come again. Hang on to your home, and if in a few months or a few years the mills begin booming again you will be secure for life. But if the iron industry doesn't revive, give up that trade and find other work here.

If necessary go out and work on a farm, for the farming industry will always have to be carried on."

Father saw the force of our argument. So he stayed and kept his home.

He has it to-day. But if he had wandered around as millions of us did in those hard days he would surely have lost it. This was my first little attempt to work out an economic problem. I had studied all the facts and then p.r.o.nounced my judgment. It proved right, and so I learned that in my small way I had a head for financiering. This encouraged me, for it taught me that the worker can solve part of his problems by using his head.

The fear of ending in the poor-house is one of the terrors that dog a man through life. There are only three parts to the labor problem, and this is one of them. This fear causes "unrest." This unrest was used by revolutionists to promote Bolshevism which turns whole empires into poor-houses. Such a "remedy," of course, is worse than the disease. I think I know a plan by which all workers can make their old age secure.

I will go into it more fully in a later chapter.

CHAPTER XX. THE RED FLAG AND THE WATERMELONS

I have said that the labor problem has three parts. I call them (1) Wages, (2) Working Conditions and (3) Living Conditions. By living conditions I mean the home and its security. My father had reached the stage where this was the problem that worried him. He was growing old and must soon cease working. But his home was not yet secure and he was haunted with the fear that his old age might be shelterless. We told him not to worry; the Davis boys were many and we would repay him for the fatherly care he had given us. But he was a proud man (as all muscular men are), and he could find no comfort in the thought of being supported by his sons. I am glad he never had to be. Independence has made his old age happy and he has proved that a worker, if he keeps his health, can provide for his old age and bring up a big family too.

We older boys left home and hunted work elsewhere. I was young and not bothered about working conditions or living conditions. I was so vigorous that I could work under any conditions, and old age was so far away that I was not worried about a home for my declining years. Wages was my sole problem. I wanted steady wages, and of course I wanted the highest I could get. To find the place where wages were to be had I was always on the go. When a mill closed I did not wait for it to reopen, but took the first train for some other mill town. The first train usually was a freight. If not, I waited for a freight, for I could sleep better in a freight car than in a Pullman--it cost less. I could save money and send it to mother, then she would not have to sell her feather beds.

All of this sounds n.o.bler than it was. In those days workers never traveled on pa.s.senger trains unless they could get a pa.s.s. Judges and statesmen pursued the same policy. To pay for a ticket was money thrown away; so thought the upper cla.s.ses and the lower cla.s.ses. About the only people that paid car fare were the Knights of Pythias on their way to their annual convention. Railroad workers could get all the pa.s.ses they wanted, and any toiler whose sister had married a brakeman or whose second cousin was a conductor "b.u.mmed" the railroad for a pa.s.s and got it. None of my relatives was a railroad man, and so to obtain the free transportation which was every American's inalienable right, I had to let the pa.s.senger trains go by and take the freights.