The Cinder Buggy (31 page)

John was thinking of the steel age, of what it yet required, of its still unimagined possibilities. Every railroad then existing would have to be rebuilt with heavier rails and bridges. Cars would come to be made of steel. Street railways were a new thing: they would take immense quantities of steel.

They had been silent for a long time.

“That’s the Agnes plant... way over there... that blue flame. There!” said Thane.

“I had made it out,” said John.

“What did you call it?” Agnes asked.

Sheepishly they told her that from the beginning, for luck, they had called it the Agnes plant.

“How nice!” she said.

From that their conversation became more personal, even reminiscent. They found they could speak naturally of incidents always until then taboo. They talked of Enoch, of their arrival and beginning in Pittsburgh, of the mill at Damascus which was doing well, and of each other, how they had changed and what it was like to be all grown up.

When Agnes rose to leave she shook hands with John, saying: “Alexander will give you the key. We don’t press you. But it’s there for you whenever you have the impulse to come. Day or night. Any time. And even if you never come it will please us to keep it always ready for you.”

With that she was gone, so suddenly that John had been unable to get any words together. He had not even said good-night.

“That place we’ve fixed for you means something,” said Thane, lunging out of a silence. “I can’t find any way to say it. We know how it was when you brought us to Pittsburgh and how there wasn’t any job for us until you bought the little nail mill. We know all about it. It’s lucky for all of us,—lucky for Agnes and me, I mean,—I didn’t know enough to see it then. There ain’t no way to say how we feel about it. You can just understand that’s what this key means.”

John took it, turned it over in his hand, then put it in his pocket and said nothing.

“The reason Agnes was asking you so close how you came out in Wall Street,” Thane added, “was we thought you might-a got skinned. We’ve got a lot of money. We think it’s a lot. And we want you to know—”

“Don’t!” said John. “That’s enough. Now stop it. Stop it, I tell you.”

“A-l-1 right, a-1-1 right,” said Thane. “I’m through, I ain’t a going on, am I? I’ve got it all said.”

“I’m going,” said John. “Walk down to the gate.”

At the gate they shook hands and lingered.

“You’ve got it all wrong,” said John. “There’s nothing you two—what I mean—”

“I know, I know,” said Thane.

“You don’t know anything,” said John. “Let me say something. I owe you a damn sight more than you owe me. I couldn’t have done anything without you. You’re the axle tree. I’m only the wheel. This one new wrinkle, if it proves out, is worth millions.”

“Well, don’t lose that key,” said Thane.

They shook hands again and pushed each other roughly away.

T
HE steel industry was a giant without lineage, parentage or category. Nobody knew how big it should be nor could tell by looking at it what stage it was in. Not until afterward. It was measurable only by contrast with itself. It was supposed to be already grown up when John brought the American Steel Company back from Wall Street. But it was still in the gristle. Bone and sinew had yet to be acquired.

“What, my God! if we had sold out then,” Slaymaker would say again and again, with the aghast and devout air of a man whose faith in the deity dates from some miraculous escape. “We should probably never have got in again,” he would add.

If they had got out then they would have been able to count their wealth in millions. But they had to go on. And when at last they did get out in the golden harvest time years later they counted it in scores and hundreds of millions.

Thane’s new method, which proved itself in practice, gave the American Steel Company a whip hand in steel rails. It could make them at a lower cost than anyone else in the world, owing to the saving in fuel. Nobody ever knew what that cost was. No matter at what price the Carmichael people sold rails John could sell them a little lower if he needed the business, and he became for that reason a burning thorn in the flesh of Bullguard, who had capitalized the Carmichael properties and brought the shares out in Wall Street. They had a wretched career. Everyone who touched them lost money. This was not only because of the American Steel Company’s competition; the steel industry as a whole was running wild. There was no controlling it. For a year or two the demand for steel would exceed the utmost supply at prices which made a steel mill more profitable than a gold pocket. Then new mills would appear everywhere at once and presently, although there never could be enough steel really, the bowl would slop over from sheer awkwardness.

There were still the three great groups,—the Western group, the Carmichael group and John’s—all growing very fast. Minor groups were continually springing up at precisely the wrong time. They generally smashed up or had to be bought out by the others to save themselves from ruinous competition. The steel age cared nothing about profits. All it wanted was steel—more and more and more.

Next was the phase of specialization. One mill made rails exclusively, another merchant steel, another structural shapes for bridges and skyscrapers, another sheet steel, another steel pipe, and so on. That only intensified the competition.

Then trusts began to be formed, precisely as John had formed the nail trust years before, and for the same purpose, which was to regulate the output and keep prices at a profitable level. Somebody would go around and get options on nearly all the mills of this kind, of that kind and then get bankers to make them into a trust with shares to be listed on the Stock Exchange and sold to the public. So there came to be a steel pipe trust, a sheet steel trust, a bridge and structural steel trust, a tin plate trust, a trust for everything; and matters became a great deal worse because some of the biggest mills, such as John’s, were never in a trust and if the pipe trust or the structural steel trust got prices too high the independent mills would begin to make pipe or structural steel. Besides, each trust was a law unto itself and the steel industry was still anarchic.

Now finance began to be worried. The shares of these trusts having been floated in Wall Street and the public at last having begun to buy them, an outbreak of disastrous competition among the trusts, or between the trusts and the independents, or an overrunning of the steel spool, caused a panic on the Stock Exchange. Enormous sums of capital had become involved. Every such panic caused a general commotion, like a small earthquake. Something would have to be done to stabilize the steel industry. That was the word; everybody began to say,
Stabilize it!
Gradually there crystallized the thought of a great trust of trusts to embrace everything. Not otherwise could the steel industry be stabilized. Any such colossal scheme as that would have to consider first of all the three dominant groups. But when overtures were made to John directly or through his partners, he repulsed them. To Wall Street’s emissaries he would say flatly, “No.” To his partners he would say, “Not yet.”

His word was final. Having retrieved his fortune in the first year after his inglorious shipwreck, by the most daring and brilliant selling campaign the steel industry had ever seen,—a campaign that put American rails over European rails in all the markets of the world,—his authority not only was restored: it was increased. Then, having paid off his notes with Slaymaker and Pick, he had got possession of Creed’s shares. That made his interest in the American Steel Company greater than that of any three others. There was still the North American Manufacturing Company, in which he was the largest stockholder; it controlled the manufacture of steel wire and nails, and had never ceased to pay dividends.

He enforced one policy of business. That was to make steel continuously under all conditions and never to close a plant except for repairs. Back of him was Thane steadily reducing the costs of manufacture. Sometimes they sold steel at a loss. In the long run, however, this policy paid so handsomely that they were presently able to find in their own profits the capital they needed for expansion. On an ever-increasing scale they devoted profits to the construction and purchase of new properties,—more mines, more ships, more mills. When his partners complained, saying it was time to take something out instead of putting all their gains back again, John offered to buy them out.

So he grew wise and tyrannical and a little grey at the temples. His voice became husky. He lived hard, worked hard, walked steadily on the edge of the precipice, with nothing he cared for in view. On his watch chain he carried the key to Thane’s house. Twice he got as far as the gate and turned back.

W
HEN the steel age walked across the ocean from Europe a dilemma was created. The will and mentality were here; the labor was there. Until then labor in American mills had been made up of British, Irish, Welsh, Germans, Swedes and, choicest of all, Buckwheats, meaning young American brawn released from the farm by the advent of man-saving agricultural implements. The steel age widened the gap between brain and muscle. It required a higher kind of imagination at the top and a lower grade of labor below. There was no such labor here,—at least, nowhere near enough. Hence an impouring of Hungarians, Slavs, Polacks and other inferior European types,—hairy, brutish, with slanting foreheads.

Nobody thought of the consequences. Nobody thought at all. The labor was needed. That was enough. There was no effort to Americanize or assimilate it. There wasn’t time. It had to be fed raw to the howling new genie. It lived wretchedly in sore clusters from which Americans averted their eyes. Where it came from life was wretched, even worse, perhaps; but here were contrasts, no gendarmes freedom of discontent, and a new weapon, which was the strike. These men, bred with sullen anger in their blood, melancholy and neglected in a strange land, having no bond with the light, were easily moved to unite against the work bosses who symbolized tyranny anew. Their impulse
to
violence was built upon by labor leaders and the steel industry became a battle ground. Strikes were frequent, bloody and futile, save for their educational value, which was hard to see then and is not at all clear yet.

This was all in the way of business,—big business. We imported labor and exported steel. We flung Slavs into our racial melting pot and sold rails and bridges in Hungary. One can easily imagine an invisible force to have been at work, a blind force, perhaps. The centers of power were shifted in the world. Greatness was achieved. The rest is hidden.

One advantage the Breakspeare mills had was almost complete immunity from labor troubles. In every reign of terror destruction passed them by. For this there was Thane to thank. He handled all labor problems. In disputes between the workers and the steel companies the question of wages was seldom the basic matter, even when it seemed to be. The trouble was much more subtle, or more simple, as you happen to see it, turning upon the ways and hungers of humanity. Thane knew men, he knew what drudgery costs the soul and how little it takes beyond what is due to overcome its bitterness. He knew, besides, how and in what proportions to mix different kinds of men so that the characteristics of one kind would neutralize those of another kind by a sort of chemistry.

Seven miles down the river from the Agnes plant had been built a magnificent new plate mill, called the Wyoming Steel Works. It had every element of success save one. The manager had no way with labor. He was continually engaged in desperate struggles with the Amalgamated Unions and the plant for that reason had involved its New York owners in heavy loss. These troubles, becoming chronic, culminated in a strike that spread sympathetically over the whole eastern steel industry. At the Agnes plant the men went out for the first time. They had no quarrel of their own. That was made very clear. But they felt obliged, as all other union workers did, to take up the quarrel of the men at the Wyoming Works and settle it for good; they would if necessary tie up every steel plant in the country in order to bring pressure to bear upon their arch enemy, the Wyoming manager, to whose destruction they had made a vow.

Not only did the strikers seize the Wyoming Works, as was the first step in hostilities; they took possession of the town that had grown up around the plant and organized themselves on a military basis. An Advisory Committee of workers declared martial law, mounted a siren on the town hall to give signals by a secret code, put sentinels around the works, around the town, up and down the river front, and held a mobile force of eight hundred Hungarians, Poles and Slavs in readiness for battle at any point. No one could enter the town on an unfriendly errand. Trains were not permitted to stop. The telegraph office was seized. The Advisory Committee announced that any attempt on the part of the owners to retake possession of their property,—say nothing of trying to work it with non-union labor,—would mean an abundant spilling of blood.

This was the situation when Thane received a telegram from John in New York, as follows:

“Can buy Wyoming Steel Works for a song. Will close transaction at once if you will say labor trouble can be straightened out with the plant in our hands.”

Almost without reflection Thane answered:

“Yes. Go ahead.”

He had no doubt that the mere announcement of their having bought the works would end the violent phase of the strike. The rest would be a matter of peaceable negotiation. He might have made the announcement in Pittsburgh. The strikers there would have communicated it fast enough. He might have telegraphed it to the Advisory Committee. He might have done it in one of several ways. But his natural way was to go himself and see to it. He knew the strike leaders; he talked their language. An hour after answering John’s telegram he was in a launch going down the river.

There had been no news from the scene of passion since the afternoon before. No one knew what was taking place in the Wyoming Steel Works town.