There is a deeper thought behind that perfectly splendiferous outburst than William Jennings Bryan was thinking. Now that the Democrats are in, I dast to tell, and maybe brag, about the time Bryan called on my father at the Territorial Insane Asylum, where we had our luxurious suite of rooms. The Insane Asylum was the show place in Provo, and if a man were notable enough, he was always taken out to see the institution run by Dr. Pike. Bryan’s visit was a source of lifelong grief to me. I wanted to sit on his knees, and he did not ask me. I mean one of his knees. My sister Hattie, who was always smiling, was sitting on one of them, but I, who was always staring solemnly, could only stand as near as possible, just yearning. It was a great day in my father’s life. He was among the two or three most prominent Democrats in the State of Utah, and I can see the serious faces of the two men as they sat there, like farmers, settling the Government. Not a word of that historic dialogue do I recall—only my yearning to sit upon Bryan’s other knee.
All the time I was writing that paragraph, I was doing some more thinking—or reacting, if you believe Watson. I say, You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold, nor upon a cross of silver, nor a cross of platinum, nor a cross of any other metal, nor a cross of any kind! There was a Man who died upon a cross of wood, but what good did it do? Those who profess to follow what he died to impress, are still slaughtering each other. One crucified Man is enough! What, in God’s name, has any metal to do with the actuality of living, except as it affects the working hours of the men who mine it?
No, the sack of wheat is not the unit of value, although the unit of value must be translated into wheat, or into all the farmer’s crop, of whatever sort. The wheat or the crop is the translated unit for the farmer. Must there be a different unit of value for every industry? No. The same unit for all, but translated into the terms of each industry. For the unit of value is the worth of an hour’s work in any field of endeavor. It is not stable. It is a thing which must be re-estimated by disinterested experts from year to year. Any other course is lazy and destructive. Some of our most penetrating scientists say that there is no such thing as stability throughout the universe. Einstein has proved relativity. The unit of value must have its material manifestation re-estimated year by year, even as Nature “tries if the earth be in tune” and continues in her efforts to keep the blamed thing in tune with cosmic harmony. Continual tuning is the only way to keep a piano and a government’s economic system in working order.
An hour of the life of every man is not of the same value, even to himself, though more than once I have suspected that no executive’s hour is worth what some Captains of Industry receive. Even so, when that famous executive Mr. Insull, at several thousand dollars an hour, sat down to eat a meal, the continued absence of which would have caused his insulation underground, the man who kept him and his like from starving ought to have had a working hour worth more than minus a hundred cents. The working hour of any man is worth more than minus anything. The reason the farmer is today in desperate distress is because the world has always valued his work as a minus quantity.
How much is a working hour of the farmer’s life worth? A person might work very hard trying to keep a ball from rolling down a sloping cellar door, but the work would be worth nothing. If the farmer’s work is worth nothing, we want to know, so that we can tell him to give up farming. Tell all the farmers in the world to give up farming. It is a case of relativity.
The farmer’s case must be considered by a board of disinterested industrial experts from all industries. We must all rise together, or we shall fall together. And the agricultural industry is the keystone of the entire arch. Are you going to reckon the farmer’s working hour in silver or gold? No. They have no relation to his work. You will reckon it in terms of wheat, or the whole estimated crop, just as you are going to reckon the working hour’s value of a pants-maker by the number of pants he can make in an hour and the quality of his skill. Valued in money? Not primarily. Valued in what it takes to grow pants from the lamb to the label.
If we really do not need to eat, then let’s force the farmer to the city by continuing economics as they are at present. Do not expect him to solve his problem. He is like a reporter. Nearly all reporters are born writers. They gravitate to newspapers because there they are allowed to write all day and get paid for doing it. Not what they are worth—by no means. But publishers never have to think of reporters going on strike for the wages they deserve: they are too glad of a chance to write. They rarely get what is coming to them, unless their wrongs get mixed up with those of linotype operators—and then, look out! What the reporters would never do for themselves is done for them by the Typographical Union.
Farmers are the same. The born farmers would die of nostalgia away from the land. And there are folks, like the Baron and God’s little pet lamb, who love the growing acres so much, and the great outdoors, and the quiet, and the serenity, that they are willing to bear almost anything not to leave the farm. Some one must see that all these lovers of the soil receive a just wage for a just working hour, or the world may be starving worse than it is. Some union may appear to take the farmer’s battle out of his hands.
Of course, there would have to be money. You cannot go around jingling two or three sacks of wheat in your pocket to impress folks, and you cannot buy anything with a bunch of keys. But the money can be made out of lead, if you desire. The Government would have to be clever in reproducing some design calculated to defeat the counterfeiters. The best way to dispose of counterfeiters is to place such skilful, enterprising men where they can do something skilful and enterprising for the Government. In other words, citizens with jobs are not doing much counterfeiting.
Money might be like street-car tokens. Nobody ever counterfeits them, yet they stand for good money. I do not say that base-metal money would wipe out counterfeiters. Some folks are born wrong, and some folks get that way by envying the display of folks who get their money by law-safe robbing. Emulation is the only means of educating the ambitions and habits of a people. The rest is simply search for knowledge, usually forgotten as soon as obtained. Were there no thieves in high places, displaying their lavish gains won through speculating or grafting, there would have been no racketeers and kidnappers in low places. We can never wipe out the racketeers and kidnappers until we wipe out the speculators and grafters.
Eph Farmer is a sick man, and has been so always. He is making feeble attempts to open his own home door, but cannot do it. Mr. Inflated Dollar says, “I will dress you in this inflated suit, and you can pass through the transom without hurting you, padded so nicely as you are.” But Eph Farmer gets stuck in the transom, the suit bursts, and he falls to the ground. What can an inflated dollar buy in a market that automatically deflates it?
Mr. Tariff says, “I will dig a hole under the door, and you can crawl under.” The wood is dug away, the farmer tries to crawl through, gets caught, and is stripped naked by a pack of middlemen. What good is the tariff when it is the middleman who depresses the home market?
Next comes Mr. Government Credit. He bursts in the door, and grateful Eph Farmer tumbles in. But over him tumbles immediately the Big Bad Wolf, and he is not sick at all; so before the farmer can get over being grateful and realize what is happening, the Big Bad Wolf has gobbled up not only the three little pigs, but the farm as well. And Mr. Government Credit was just the Big Bad Wolf in sheep’s clothes.
So what? sez you. Sez I: Did nobody think of looking straight at the keyhole, which is the working hour of the farmer’s life? (And his son’s, and his daughter’s, and his wife’s.) The key is already in the lock, and nobody has thought to turn it. The key is the sack of wheat; how many working hours of an average farmer’s life did it take to produce that wheat? So many hours throughout the summer (help of everybody included) for so many sacks of wheat. Divide the sacks of wheat by the hours, and you have so much wheat per hour. What is the cost of that wheat from the seed? The result will be the worth of a farmer’s working ho
ur. Now, how much is that wheat worth as compared with the products of other industries? Remember, if worse came to worse, we could make the whole United States a nudist colony, but we should not be successful in making it a never-ending-fast colony. You would find folks dying of that. Is food worth anything? What is the farmer’s food-producing hour worth, as compared with the importance of other industries? No, not holding you up. Don’t you think it ought to be worth a slight profit? Not just mortgages?
Every living man has a working hour or an idling hour. We should not be compelled to pay for the idling hour, though we are at present. But that is another problem. The working hour of different industries is worth different amounts in this base-metal money we are using for convenience—it might be pins or street-car tokens. And that is where our industrial board of disinterested experts comes in. There they sit, ready to make comparisons, by actual vital values, of every man’s working hour, be he farmer or pants-maker. I do not believe the farmer’s hour would be valued by such men as meriting bankruptcy. No middlemen would be seated at that table. I believe the other industries, so represented, would give the farmer a square deal. He will never be able to turn the key in the door himself. He has not learned, and may not learn, the power of brotherhood. Slaves do not unite against their masters. Some one else must free them. A real, loyal union of all farmers could wag the world.
WHAT is a working hour of your life worth? If you were a farmer, slaving from dawn till dark, would you say your working hours were worth nothing? If you were his wife, slaving from before dawn until after dark, would you say your time was worth nothing? Would you be content to see your children drudge through the years and have nothing for it?
If the churches would only stop taking up the Lord’s time, pleading with him to save their little peanut souls, they might do something so wonderful here at home. And there must be among the hymn-singers enough intelligent, willing folks who are able to forget their selfish personal salvation in order to save some one else. Let the churches join together to free the slaves of the United States, the farm families. The political parties have failed. Come alive, churches! “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these...”
Charley and I succeeded as well as the majority of the farmers where we were. Nearly all those who tried to own their own farms lost them, and only the tenant farmers, shifting about from farm to farm, were able to survive adverse conditions, and that at the expense of the city owners. If the actual value of farm products had been paid while the Baron and I were on the farm, we would still be there. I loved it then; I love it now; but I am not sorry to be gone. Though, of course, I must have moments of yearning for that poverty-poor hilltop home, with my darlings running underfoot, at which times the city, where I now live, seems a pale and hollow substitute.
One of our Texas neighbors, when a lad, worked for two years on a farm and received at the end of that time, as his entire wages, five dollars. He was supposed to have slept out and eaten up the rest of his reward. Bewildered by so much money as five dollars, he went to town to spend some of it. He had been so long without money that he could think of nothing to buy but ten cents worth of gunpowder. This purchase was bruited around the countryside with the swiftness of a tumbleweed flying before a strong wind. “Hev yuh heerd the news ‘bout Buddy Hanks? He done bought hisself rich with a dime’s worth o’ gunpowder!”
The farmer is reaching the place where he will no longer sell himself poor by throwing in, for nothing, two thousand dollars’ worth of his labor, and the combined labor of his entire family, in order to buy himself rich with a dime’s worth of specious independence. I am glad we have an intelligent, practical, calm, clear-sighted extrovert in the White House. I did not vote for him, and thank God that the fate of the nation did not depend on me, for if ever there was a man of destiny, time is proving that man to be Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Yet even he might be blinded by so much cry about the tariff, inflated money, farm credit, and arbitrary price-fixing. (And I left out Mr. Arbitrary Price-Fixing because all he tried to do for Eph Farmer was to attempt to squeeze him through the crack between the door and the jamb, and it could not be done. Any price that does not represent actual value plus a reasonable profit is worse than useless.) I hope President Roosevelt will not be misled by any of the gentlemen who tried to help poor Eph Farmer through the door. If he is, he will miss the opportunity to revolutionize the whole United States economic system, by neglecting to give agriculture simple justice for the first time in the history of the world. Three thousand years before Christ they threw the farmer into the canal to drown if he could not pay his rent, and his wife and children were sold into slavery. Well...today we do not drown the farmer.
I AM MINDED at this point to tell you of the last hired hand we had on that farm. He was a sort of derelict, drifted to us from foreign lands, having been a young farming serf in Russia. His name was a mouthful of consonants, ending in vitch, or kov, or sov, or rov, but Charley always called him Mike.
After he had spent the winter on our farm, one night he was moved to tell us the story of a Chinese idol and its reputed heart of gold. This idol was worshiped in a temple just over the border from the part of Russia where Mike and others like him slaved for a nobleman.
It was known that at a certain hour after midnight the clay idol was left alone, though how the priests were then occupied, Mike did not say. No Chinese slave would have dared approach the altar, on which flares lighted up the hideous visage of the idol, in spite of the temptation of that heart of gold.
A Russian who had once been a serf on the very land that Mike plowed returned from America on a visit. From that time Mike could think of nothing but the Promised Land. He must go...he must go...But how?...how?
He and two other young men decided to steal the Chinese idol for its heart of gold. They slipped into the temple like shadows and as noiselessly, with their great muscles, lifted the ugly, squat image from its platform above the flickering altar.
Then began a journey which even in memory cast a look of agony across Mike’s wild features. Elation at first made the burden light; but after miles of torturing struggle, through deep, turbulent streams and through thick, pathless underbrush, one of the three gave up and sank exhausted. On went the other two, afraid to rest for fear of pursuit, realizing that discovery meant death. But after more miles of torture the second man lay down, refusing longer to help.
Mike said: “I go on. I go on alone. I think I cannot do...but I go on. The god, he heavy, like I cannot carry him. My arms, they hurt like knives; I cannot breathe; but I must go. This far that idol I carry him. If I not get him home, I no go to that America. So I get him there.”
His voice hoarse from exhaustion, he called to his wife for his sledge-hammer. With his last gasp of strength he split the idol open, and the heart rolled out. It was made of iron.
How Mike reached America I do not know. That story to me meant something so personal that Mike and his fate became blotted out as I constantly reviewed it in after years. For always I could not help thinking: “That is I...I who have been forced to drag the clay idol of heavy, thankless toil across all the hard years of my young womanhood, through the deep waters of despair, through the dragging, tearing underbrush of dreadful hopelessness.”
Ah, but here is where I know now that Mike’s story and mine differ! With the last gasp of strength of my spirit I have split open that terrible idol of clay, and I see...I see...yes, I see at last that it is good—all good. Is not this that I see a heart of gold?
And now, while President Roosevelt is beginning to write an order to start economic justice for the whole world by inaugurating it for the farmer—a large order for one man, but I can see him doing it; while President Roosevelt is attaching to his signature that firm straight line hooked on the t—no monkey-business nor posing there—I will take this chance to say good-by to you, dear reader, in the good old-fashioned way of the day when they always had the double book-tides so fascinating to m
e.
I am not old-fashioned when I say that I wish you were here to eat some of my pie with me, only I have no time to make any just now, though my pitchfork-handle rolling-pin is only a few steps away from my typewriter, in the little kitchenette. I hope when you finish reading this book, my very first book to be published, you will not feel like blaming Daisy in any way, even though it is true that the book would never have been written had it not been for a cow named Daisy, who died on a handkerchief of land on the outskirts of Columbus, Ohio, of indigestion in one of her five stomachs—or was it seven? So this is the end of my rambling record concerning us sagebrush folks, the Baron, God’s little pet lamb, et al.
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