Part 7

At the open door of a livery-stable I stopped to ask the way to the office of the steamboat line, attracted, no doubt, by the look of a man who sat just inside. With a kindly face of German type, he was of middle age, a little stout, dressed in what is known as a “business suit,” and when he spoke, it was with a trace of German accent.

Mr. Ross is a sufficiently near approach to his name. He was not an Iowa farmer, but he was my first acquaintance in Iowa, and he had things to say about the unemployed. A director in a bank and the owner of a livery-stable, he was owner of I know not what besides, but I know that he was delightfully cordial, and that his hospitality was of a kind to do credit to the best traditions of the West.

He answered my question obligingly, then asked me whether I was looking for a job.

“For if you are,” he added, “there’s one right here,” and he waved his hand expressively in the direction of the stalls at the rear.

This was more than I had bargained for; it was wholly new to my experience to find work in a town before I even asked for it.

I told him frankly that I was out of employment and that I must find some soon, but that there were reasons, at the moment, why I wished to reach Minneapolis as early as possible.

Being without the smallest gift of mimicry I could not disguise my tongue, and it had been a satisfaction from the first to find that this lack in no way hampered me. I was accepted readily enough as a working-man by my fellows, and my greenness and manner of speech, I had every reason to think, were credited to my being an immigrant of a new and hitherto unknown sort.

“What’s your trade?” the men with whom I worked would generally ask me, supposing that clumsiness as a day laborer was accounted for by my having been trained to the manual skill of a handicraft.

“What country are you from?” they inquired, and when I said “Black Rock,” which is the point in Connecticut from which I set out, I have no doubt that there came to their minds visions of an island in distant seas, where any manner of strange artisan might be bred.

What they thought was of little consequence; that they were willing to receive me with naturalness to their companionship as a fellow-workman was of first importance to me, and this was an experience that never failed.

At last I was west of the Mississippi, and, that I might pass as a man of education in the dress of a laborer, was a matter of no note, since men of education in the ranks of workmen have not been uncommon there.

It was plainly from this point of view that Mr. Ross was talking to me. If I was an educated man, it was my own affair. That for a time, at least, I had been living by day’s labor was evident from my dress, and it was not unlikely that I was looking for a job. Happening to have a vacant place in the stable, he offered it to me, and, being interested in what I had to say, he led me to speak on of work during the past winter in Chicago, and my slight association there with the unemployed and with men of revolutionary ideas.

Before I knew it, we were drifting far down a stream of talk, and time was flying. Six months’ living in close intimacy with what is saddest and often cruelest, in the complex industrialism of a great city had produced a depression, which I had not shaken off in three weeks’ sojourn in the wholesome country. I was steeped in the views of men who told me that things could never grow better until they had grown so much worse that society would either perish or be reorganized. The needed change was not in men, they agreed, but in social conditions; and from every phase of Socialism and Anarchy, I had heard the propaganda of widely varying changes, all alike, however, prophesying a regenerated society, the vision of which alone remained the hope and faith of many lives.

The pent-up feelings of six months found a sympathetic response in Mr. Ross; the more so as I discovered in him a wholly different point of view. He had no quarrel with conditions in America. As a lad of fourteen he came from Germany and, having begun life here without friends or help of any kind, he was now, after years of work and thrift, a man with some property and with many ties, not the least of which was a love for the country which had given him so good a chance.

The mere suggestion of a programme of radical change roused him. He began somewhat vehemently to denounce a class of men, foreigners, many of them, strangers to our institutions, irresponsible for the most part, who bring with them from abroad revolutionary ideas which they spread, while enjoying the liberties and advantages of the nation that they try to harm.

“Why don’t they stay in their own countries and ‘reform’ them?” he added. “Thousands of men who have come here from the Old World have raised themselves to positions of honor and independence and wealth as they never could have done in their native lands. And yet these disturbers would upset it all, a system that for a hundred years and more we have tried and found not wanting.

“I am interested in a local bank,” he continued. “The management has been successful; the directors are capable men, and the investments pay a fair dividend. Now suppose someone, the least responsible person in the corporation, were to come forward with a new, untried system of banking and should insist upon its adoption and even threaten the existence of the bank if his plan should be rejected. That would be a case like this of your Socialist and Anarchist.”

He was a little heated, but he caught himself with a laugh and was smiling genially as he added:

“I see your ‘unemployed’ friends often. Scarcely a day passes that men don’t come in here asking for a job. My experience is that if they were half as much in earnest in looking for work as I am in looking for men that can work, they wouldn’t search far or long. I’ve tried a good many of them in my time. I can tell now in five minutes whether a man has any real work in him; and those that are worth their keep when you haven’t your eye on them, are as scarce as hens’ teeth. There are good jobs looking for all the men that are good enough for them; if you want to prove it, start right in here, or go into the State and ask the farmers for a chance to work.”

I did not say that this last was the very thing I meant to do. Instead, I began to tell him of the cases that I knew of men, who, through no fault of their own, were out of work and were not free to go where it could be easily found. Mr. Ross was sympathetic with what was real and personal in the sufferings of unfortunate workers; and gathering encouragement, I went on to speak of suffering no less real which was the result of sheer incapacity, a native weakness of will or lack of courage or perseverance. This made him smile again, and, with a twinkle in his eye, he asked me whether I did not think it was expecting a good deal of organized society to provide for the unfit. Then drawing out his watch, he glanced at it and, turning to me with a fine disregard of the outer man, he asked me to go home with him to supper. I should have been delighted. Perhaps I ought to have gone. I had not forgotten, however, a too hospitable minister in Connecticut; but at the next moment I accepted gladly Mr. Ross’s invitation to drive with him in the evening.

Behind a sorrel filly that fairly danced with delight of motion, we set out an hour or more before sunset, and Mr. Ross drove first through business streets, pointing out to me the principal buildings as we passed, then up to the higher levels of the hillside, on which the city stands, through an attractive residence quarter. From there we could look down upon the river flowing between banks of wooded hills, with its swollen, muddy waters made radiant by the sunset. Then back to the lower city we went and out over the bridge to the military post of Rock Island, past the arsenal and the barracks to the officers’ quarters among splendid trees and broad reaches of shaded lawn, and finally to an old farm-house, which had been the home of Colonel Davenport at the time of his struggles with the Indians. It was not a distant date in actual years, but the contrast with the present sway of modern civilization seemed to link it with a far antiquity.

The streets were ablaze with electrics as we drove through the cities of Rock Island and Moline, where the pavements were thronged by slowly moving crowds.

When I left Minneapolis, a little more than a week later, I had in mind Mr. Ross’s challenge that any search for work in the interior of the State would discover abundant opportunities. I was bound next, therefore, for the Iowa border. It would not have taken long to reach it at the usual rate of thirty miles a day. But I did not go through directly. For several days I worked for a fine old Irish farmer near Belle Plain, whose family was stanch Roman Catholic, and whose wife was a veritable sister of mercy to the whole country side, indefatigable in ministry to the sick and poor. A few days later I stopped again and spent a memorable week as hired man on Mr. Barton’s farm near Blue Earth City.

It was well along in July, therefore, when I crossed into Iowa from the north, walking down by way of Elmore and Ledyard and Bancroft to Algona, where I spent a few days and then set out for Council Bluffs.

The walk from Algona to Council Bluffs was a matter of two hundred miles and a little more, perhaps. The heat was intense, but, apart from some discomfort due to that, it was a charming walk, leading on through regions that varied widely but constantly presented new phases of native wealth. I should have enjoyed it more but for the awkwardness of my position. It was embarrassing to meet the farmers, yet I wished to meet all that I could. It was not easy to frame an excuse for not accepting the work that was constantly offered to me. To negotiate with a farmer for the job of helping with the chores in payment for a night’s lodging and breakfast was trying to his temper, when he was at his wit’s end for hands to help at the harvesting. I felt like one spying out the land and mocking its need.

Through a long, hot afternoon I walked from Algona in the direction of Humboldt, some twenty-six miles to the south. The country roads were deserted, the whole population being in the hay-fields, apparently. The corn, which was late in the planting, owing to the spring floods, was making now a measured growth of five inches in the day.

In the evening twilight I passed through the Roman Catholic community of St. James and walked on a few miles in the cool of the evening. Not every farm-house that I saw wore an air of prosperity. I came upon one, which, even in the dark of a starlit night, gave evidence of infirm fortune. The garden-gate was off its hinges and was decrepit besides. With some difficulty I repropped it against the tottering posts when I entered. In a much littered cow-yard, I found a middle-aged farmer, who with his hired man had just finished the evening milking. Without a word he stood pouring the last bucket of milk, slowly through a strainer into a milk-can on the other side of the fence, as he listened to an account of myself. What I wanted was a place to sleep and a breakfast in the morning. In return I offered to do whatever amount of work he thought was fair. When the bucket was empty he gave me a deliberate look, then simply asked me to follow him to the house. Throwing himself at full length on the sloping cellar-door, he pointed to a chair on the doorstep near by as a seat for me, and began to question me about the crops in the country about Algona. I was fortunate enough to divert him soon to his own concerns, and, for an hour or more, I listened, while he told me of a long struggle on his farm. For fifteen years, he had worked hard, he said, and had seen the gradual settlement and growth of the region immediately about him; yet, with slightly varying fortunes, he was little better off than when he took up the farm as a pioneer.

There was a mystery in it all that baffled him. Low prices were the ostensible cause of his ill-success; he could scarcely get more for his crops than they cost him; but back of low prices was something else, an incalculable power which took vague form in his mind as a conspiracy of the rich, who seemed to him not to work and yet to have unmeasured wealth, while he and his kind could hardly live at the cost of almost unceasing toil.