The Cinder Buggy (28 page)

And New Damascus unawares was delivered to its fate.

N
OW the steel age was come with its deluge of things.

Man’s environment was made over twice in one generation. Nothing was built but to be built again on a greater scale. It seemed impossible to make anything big enough. Wonders were of a day’s duration.

In twenty-five years the country’s population doubled. In the same time the production of things unto the use, happiness and discontent of people increased five, ten, twenty fold. Man had now in his hand the universal power of steel. It extended his arms and legs unimaginably, grotesquely.

The production of metallic fibre increased more than one hundred fold. Railways were built which if placed end to end and run around the globe would have circled it six times. Those already grown when the steel age came were not yet old when a ton of freight was transported more than 2,500 miles annually for each man, woman and child living on American soil. Food was cheaper and more abundant than ever before in the life of man because the railways, pursuing the sun, had suddenly opened a virgin continent to bonanza farming. So was everything else. Modern cities were made and were no sooner made than torn down and built over again. Chicago grew faster than St. Louis because it had less to tear down. Rivers were moved, mountains were levelled, swamps were lifted up. Nothing was right as God left it.

O, bigger! and deeper! and higher!

O, faster! and cheaper! and plus!

And it is still incredible, like the Pyramids. Men lived in strife by doing. They labored and brought it forth. There was never a moment to think. There has not come that moment yet. What it was toward nobody knows.

Steel was to make men free. They said this who required a slogan. Men are not free. Why should they be? What shall they be free to do? Go to and fro, perhaps. What shall they be free to think? Anything wherein is refuge from the riddles they invent.

The men who delivered the steel age were not thinkers. They were magicians who monkeyed with the elements until they had conjured forth from the earth a spirit that said: “Serve me!”

Those who directly served it were of two kinds.

First were the men who thought with their hands. They were daring in invention. Mechanical impossibilities intoxicated them. They abhorred a pause in the production process as nature abhors a vacuum.

Next were the men of vision, who worked by inspiration, who had a phantasy of things beyond the feeling of them, and ran ahead.

And since men of both kinds are more available here than in Europe the steel age walked across the ocean.

Here were men like Thane whose genius fashioned tools in the guise of sentient creatures,—walking tools, thinking tools, co-operating tools, with eyes and ears and nerves and powers of discrimination. Human tools but that they lacked the sense of good and evil.

Fancy a tool larger than an elephant keeping vigil before a row of furnaces, pacing slowly up and down, apparently brooding, and then at the right moment opening a door and plucking forth a block of incandescent steel weighing many tons, neatly, with not the slightest effort, and nowhere in sight a human being!

Fancy another tool to drudge and fag for this one! It comes running up, stands still while the other gently lays upon its back the white-hot slab, then runs and dumps it on a train of rollers.

That two hundred weight of flaming iron you saw swinging through the gloom of Enoch’s mill in hand tongs now is a mass of ninety tons or more, handled, carried hither, delivered there, shaped and forged, all by automatic tools. The ladle no larger than a pot in which the fluid iron was first decanted is now a car on wheels,—no, not one but many in a string, hence called a ladle train, running through the night behind a donkey locomotive, slopping over at the turns, on the way from where the ore is smelted to where the mixers mix it and the converters change it into steel.

The Thanes did that.

And here were men like John to say: “Give us a tariff protection of six-tenths of a cent a pound for ten years and we will not only make all our own steel wire hereafter but wire for all the world,”—who got it and did it.

Here were men to say: “We spend half a million good American dollars each year in England for tin cans to throw over the alley fence. Give us a duty on tin plate and we will not only make our own but in ten years other people will be throwing our cans over the fence,”—who got it and proved it.

Here were men to say: “There is going to be only one steel concern in the world. That’s us”—They meant it literally.

They were men who knew not how to stop. They dared not stop. The one who did was lost. Every little while they had to throw away everything they had created, cast it out on the junk heap, because new ideas came in so fast. It was nothing to scrap a million dollars’ worth of machinery before it had settled in, a greater, faster engine of production having just appeared. Whereas formerly every new thing came from England, Germany or France, now Europe’s ironmongers were continually coming over here to see what the Americans were doing and how and why they had captured the steel age.

Later, when the pace of evolution began somewhat to abate, when original discoveries were fewer and a steel mill would stand awhile, when the wild and reckless youth of the steel age was past and Wall Street found it out,—then all these dynamic, self-paramount men began to get rich. And as you may suppose, they no more knew how to stop getting rich than they knew how to stop anything else. Of that in its right place.

N
O two were more the darlings of the steel age than John and Thane. They were for it and of it, lover and husband to it, remarkably possessing between them the qualities it demanded of men. No part of its mystery was unknown to them. They became miners and smelters of ore, bringers of coal, burners of coke, drawers of wire, rollers of rails, in a very large way. Their wealth in property increased alarmingly. One thing begat another so fast and new opportunities so unexpectedly appeared that their resources were chronically stretched to the utmost and they were continually in need of more capital. John was always buying something they couldn’t pay for,—an ore mountain perhaps, a ship to transport the ore down the Great Lakes, a steel plant somebody had blunderingly steered on the rocks. He was like a man on a tight rope juggling more glass balls than he can hold all at once. He has to keep them going in the air. He cannot stop. John never thought of stopping. It wasn’t that he wished to be rich; it wasn’t that he had a passion for power; he craved excitement. And there was plenty of it.

The steel industry had frightful growing pains for which there was no diagnosis. The trouble was it grew by violent starts and then had fits of coma. The profits were so great when there was any profit at all that the steel maker would pawn his hope of the everlasting to build more mills; and perhaps before they were finished the profit had vanished and his despair was as wild as his ecstasy. The time to buy steel plants was when the sky was visible at Pittsburgh; the time to sell them was when the smoke was so dense that the sun at midday resembled a pickled beet. But at one time no one had the money to buy anything with and at the other time nobody would sell.

These were conditions perfectly suited to the exercise of John’s reckless speculative genius. In the sloughs of despond he bought more property, as he had bought the Agnes plant, with his notes of hand and promises to pay. He seemed never so serene as when treading the edge of a financial precipice in a high wind with a swaying load on his back. People watched him with awe. He would do it once too often, they said, as each time he got back to safe ground again. Certainly he was a dangerous man to walk with. In an industry controlled by fatalists he was unique for daring. Yet back of his apparent passion for the gambling chance were saving qualities. He had keen, brooding vision and rare business sagacity. When he told a committee of United States Senators that with a tariff protection of six-tenths of a cent a pound he would make this country independent of the European steel wire makers (this was at the beginning),—when he said that nobody took him seriously. However, they gave him what he wanted. The price of wire was then twelve cents a pound and this country was importing from Europe three-quarters of all it used. A few years later the tables were turned. This country was making more than half the steel wire used in the whole world, selling it heavily even in England, and the price was two cents a pound. So with all things of steel. So with steel rails. When the American steel industry got started at last foreign steel rails were being imported for American railways at $125 a ton. Ultimately American steel rails sold for $18 a ton in this country, in Europe, in Asia and Africa. The United States then had become an exporting nation selling the products of its skill to the four ends of the earth.

Business is warfare in time of peace. Hence its lure for combative men. Its goal is conquest. Let alone it would perhaps wreck itself or enslave the world. No matter. When it is ruthless, knowing no law but its own necessity, then it is magnificent.

Attila, king of the Huns, vowing no grass to grow where his horse had trod the enemy’s soil, is magnificent. We can see him in that light now that he is far away in history and not pursuing us.

Business as it was in the last quarter of the nineteenth century also is far away. Nothing like it can ever happen again. It was utterly lawless, free in its own elemental might, lustful and glamorous. The barbaric invasion that overturned Roman civilization was more obvious as a spectacle but no more extraordinary, no more unexpected, and perhaps as it shall turn out, no more significant, than America’s economic invasion of the world in the steel age. One stupen dous sequel already present is the economic, financial and political supremacy of the isolate American people in the affairs of this earth. What will come of that nobody knows.

The Breakspeares conceived it, imagined it, planned it; the Thanes tooled it. There was of course labor. But labor no more invents the tools that are the means to economic conquest than soldiers invent the weapons of war, and has generally less understanding of ends than soldiers have of the strategy.

The men controlling the steel industry came to be grouped in three main divisions. There was the original Pittsburgh group, under the leadership of a round head named Carmichael; it had founded itself in iron and then gone into steel. It was steady and powerful and had gained some influential support in Wall Street. There was the western group, always falling down and getting up again, very unstable, yet dangerous as competitors.

And thirdly was the Breakspeare group, extremely unpredictable, whose interests lay in every direction.

John naturally attracted men who loved risk and lived easily with danger. Slaymaker learned the attitude, not thoroughly, but sufficiently, and walked doggedly along. His goal was wealth for its own sake. Although John’s high adventures often threatened to involve all of them in colossal bankruptcy, yet this never quite happened, and each time it didn’t happen Slaymaker took a part of his profit and hid it away, never to be risked again. Jubal Awns, the lawyer, became superstitious about John and followed him blindly. Besides these two, who had been in from the start, there were three others who would be called general partners. They not only were very large stockholders and directors in John’s companies; they joined their capital with his in new undertakings. One was Isaac Pick, a wordless man who conversed in gestures and disbelieved everything including the fact of his own existence. He had made a fortune in scrap iron and was brought into the group by Slaymaker at a time when new capital was urgently needed. Another was Col. Wingreene, an exceedingly profane man, one of the railroad officials whom John had induced to take original stock in the American Steel Company when it began to make rails. Wingreene had bought out the other railroad people and now devoted himself entirely to the steel business. A third was Justinian Creed, a Cleveland banker, very obese, who believed in the better way and twice a year was in a grovelling panic about his sins, never thinking, however, to divest himself of the fruits thereof. Thane was a partner, too, only his work was in other material. There were many others loosely affiliated, but these five,—Slaymaker, Awns, Pick, Wingreene and Creed,—were John’s own, whom he led, and who came to be known generically as the Breakspeare Crowd.

When the game was hot they worked at high pressure, wholly sustained one would have thought by strong waters; when it was won they let down with a bang. They were men of strong habits, strong wills, strong feelings and strong humor. One of their odd passions was for getting one another’s goat. In their practical jokes they were serious, grim and imaginative, with an amazing power of deception. Never was a time when some absurd hoax was not brewing; and if one knew of nothing in pickle for another he began to be uneasy about himself. His defence was to prepare something of his own against the field. They were always on guard and regarded one another askance, with a kind of owlish suspicion. One would have thought, seeing them together, that they were too distrustful of themselves to look away or turn to spit. So they were. But this was personal, part of a game, and had nothing to do with business really.

Their code of conduct was intricate. If the word passed they could trust one another implicitly. Yet they avoided the word so far as possible, preferring in all normal circumstances unlimited freedom of personal action, each fellow for himself. In an emergency they came close together, stood back to back, and presented a solid ring to the world. In all situations John led them. Often he moved them against their judgment. Sometimes he was wrong. Generally he was right. When they acted severally against his judgment, on their own, they were always wrong. His character was perhaps no stronger than theirs; his judgment intrinsically was no better. But he had above all of them a faculty of intuition, and he could change his mind. Creed used to say: “John, he looks where he isn’t going and goes where he isn’t looking. His eyes are crossed inside.”