Steel: The Diary of a Furnace Worker. Charles R. Walker
range in the United States.
After wallowing in bog road through Virginian forest, one came with a shock of relief to a wide, raised, concrete roadbed, which passed newly built warehouses and, after an eighth of a mile, curved into the centre of the camp.
It was like any one of the score of mushroom military centres that grew up on American soil in the years from 1917 to 1919, except that there was an unusual abundance of heavy guns. They covered field upon field, opposite the ordnance warehouses, and their yellow and green camouflage looked absurdly showy in the spring sunshine. Mornings, there was apt to be a captive balloon or two afloat from the balloon school, against blue sky and white clouds; and the landscape held several gaunt observation towers, constructed of steel girders and rising from the forest to a height of seventy-five or eighty feet.
The camp was crowded with returning overseas units, awaiting demobilization and praying earnestly for it day by day, as men pray for pardon.
In a few weeks I should be out of this, going to work somewhere, wearing cits. What a variety of moods the world had split into, from the enormous tension that relaxed on the eleventh of November. Geographically the training-camp was two thousand miles from the devastations of Europe; and from the new forces that were destroying or renewing civilization, how many more? It seemed like the aftermath of an exciting play that had just been acted; waiting here was like staying to put away properties, and dismiss the actors. It occurred to me that the camp was at least ten thousand miles from America.
There was one consolation in this interminable lingering amid the spring muds and rains of Virginia. Duties were light, and there were a hundred and fifty cavalry horses in the stables, needing exercise. Sometimes we went out on the drill-ground and were taught tricks by an old cavalry officer; or hurdles were set up and we practised jumping our horses. The roads were deeply gutted by spring rains and the pressure of heavy trucks, but there were wood-trails good to explore, and interesting objectives like Williamstown or Yorktown. I fell into doing my thinking in the saddle.
Naturally I wondered about my new job—my civilian job. It was not just an ordinary change from one breadwinning place to another. It was a new job in a world never convertible quite to the one that had kindled the war. It was impossible not to feel that the civilized structure had shaken and disintegrated a bit, or to escape the sense of great powers released. I was unable to decide whether the powers were cast for a rôle of great destruction or of great renewal.
Even in Eustis we received newspapers. The urge and groan of those powers naturally worked into phrases now and then, and even into special tightly worded formulæ. I remember newspaper ejaculations, professorial dissertations, orators' exaggerations: "Capital and labor—Labor in its place—The proletariat—A new order"—and so forth. I felt confused and distrustful in the face of phrases and of the implied doctrines, old and new.
Besides the business of demobilizing the national army, the remaining regular officers and non-coms went into the school of fire, and practised observation of shots over a beautiful relief map of the "Chemin-des-Dames." This was the most warlike thing we did and continued for several months.
One day I took a walk beside the ordnance warehouses, and looked over at the rows of guns stretching for a quarter of a mile beside railroad tracks. In a short time I would be turning my back on these complicated engines. I was even sorry about it, a little; I had spent so much sweat and brain learning about their crankinesses.
In that civil life to follow, I began to see that I wanted two things: 1, a job to give me a living; 2, a chance to discover and build under the new social and economic conditions.
I was twenty-five, a college graduate, a first-lieutenant in the army. In the civilian world into which I was about to jump, most of my connections were with the university I had recently left, few or none in the business world. Why not enlist, then, in one of the basic industries, coal, oil, or steel? I liked steel—it was the basic American industry, and technically and economically it interested me. Why not enlist in steel? Get a laborer's job? Learn the business? And, besides, the chemical forces of change, I meditated, were at work at the bottom of society—
The next day I sent in the resignation of my commission in the regular army of the United States.
Outside the car window, ore piles were visible, black stacks and sooty sheet-iron mills, coal dumps and jagged cuts in the hills against greenness and the meadows and mountains beyond. There were farms, here and there, but they seemed to have been let in by sufferance amid the primary apparatus of the steel-makers.
What an amazingly primary thing steel had become in the civilization we called modern! Steel was the basic industry of America; but, more than that, it was, in a sense, the buttress, the essential frame, rather, of present-day life. It made rails, surgical instruments, the girders of skyscrapers, the tools which cut, bored, and filed all the other tools that made, in their turn, the material basis of our living. It was interesting to think that it contained America's biggest "trust," the greatest example of integration, of financial, of managerial combination, anywhere to be found. Steel was critical in America's future, wasn't it—critical for business, critical for labor?
I met a salesman on the train, who was about to go into business for himself. "I intend to start out on a new tack," he said.
He told me briefly his life-story, and how things were forcing him to start a new enterprise, alone. He was very much excited by the idea. He was going to quit his employer, having been with him twenty-nine years.
"I'm getting a new job myself," I said; "I've just got out of the army."
We both fell into silence, and thought of our own separate futures.
What were a young man's chances in American business to-day? I thought of a book I had just been reading called, "The Age of Big Business." In it was the story of the first captains who saw a vision of immense material development, and with the utmost vigor and hardihood pushed on and marked the leading trails. But apparently the affair had been too roughly done, the structure too crudely wrought: machinery jarred, broke, threatened to bring life down in a rusty heap. "No, you are wrong," I fancied the business leader saying; "it is the agitator who, by dwelling on imaginary ills, has stirred up the masses of mankind."
I gazed out of the window at the black mills as we passed them. I was about to learn the steel business. I knew perfectly well that the men who built this basic structure were as hardy and intelligent—no less and no more so, I hazarded—as this new generation of mine. But the job—difficult technical job though it was—appeared too simple in their eyes. "Build up business, and society will take care of itself," they had said. A partial breakdown, a partial revolution had resulted. Perhaps a thoroughgoing revolution threatened. I didn't know.
I knew there was no "solution." There was nothing so neat as that for this multiform condition. But an adjustment, a working arrangement would be found out, somehow, by my generation. I expected to discover no specific—no formula with ribbons—after working at the bottom of the mill. I did expect to learn something of the practical technique of making steel, and alongside it—despite, or perhaps because of, an outsider's fresh vision—some sense of the forces getting ready at the bottom of things to make or break society. Both kinds of education were certainly up to my generation.
The train jarred under its brakes, and began to slow down.
"Good luck," I said to the salesman; "I hope you make it all right."
"Good luck," he said.
The train stopped and I found the Bouton station, small and neatly built, of a gray stone, with deeply overhanging roof and Gothicized windows. It seemed unrelated to the rest of the steel community. On the right, across tracks, loomed a dark gathering of stacks arising from irregular acres of sheet-iron roofs. Smoke-columns of various texture, some colored gold from an interior light, streaked the sky immediately above the mill stacks. The town spread itself along a valley and on the sides of encircling hills on my left. In the foreground was Main Street, with stores and restaurants and a fruit-seller. I went across the street to explore for breakfast.
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