Эптон Синклер - Oil!

“No, that’s not fair, Dad; we don’t propose to teach any doctrines. We want to teach the open mind—that has always been Mr. Irving’s idea. He wants the labor men to think for themselves.”

But that kind of talk didn’t fool Dad for a moment. “They’ll all turn into reds before they get through,” he said. “And see here, son—I don’t mind your giving five hundred to Mr. Irving, but it’s going to be kind of tough on me if I’m to spend my life earning money, and then you spend it teaching young people that I haven’t got any right to it!”

And Bunny laughed—that was the best way to take it. But he thought it over—more and more as the years passed—and he realized how that shrewd old man looked into the future and read life!

Bunny was studying and thinking, trying to make up his mind about the problem of capital versus labor. It had become clear to him that the present system could not go on forever—the resources and wealth of the country thrown into an arena, to be scrambled for and carried off by the greediest. And when you asked, who was to change the system, there was only one possible answer—the great mass of the workers, who did not have the psychology of gamblers, but had learned that wealth is produced by toil. In the very nature of their position, the workers could only prevail by combining; and so, whether they would or not, they had to develop solidarity, an ideal of brotherhood and co-operation.

Such was the fundamental faith of all “radicals,” and Bunny accepted the doctrine joyfully, as a way of escape from the tangle of commercialism and war. Labor was to organize, and take over industry, and rebuild it upon a basis of service. The formula was simple, and worthy of all trust; but alas, Bunny was being forced to admit that the reality was complicated. The makers of the new society were not able to agree upon plans for the structure, nor how to get the old one out of the way. They were split into a number of factions, and spent a good part of their energies quarreling among themselves. Bunny would have thought that here in Southern California at least, the labor movement had enemies enough in the federations of the employers, with their strike-breaking and spy agencies, their system of blacklist and persecution, and their politicians, hired to turn the law against the workers. But alas, it did not seem so to the young radicals; they had to make enemies of one another!

Just now they were in a fever over the Russian revolution; a colossal event that had shaken the labor movement of the whole world. Here for the first time in history the workers had got possession of a government; and what were they making of the chance? The capitalist press of the world was, of course, portraying Russia as a nightmare; but the Soviets continued to survive, and every day of survival was a fresh defeat for the newspaper campaign. The workers could run a government! The workers were running a government! Just look!

So, in every country of the world, the labor movement became divided into two factions, those who thought the workers in their country could follow the example of the Russians, and should organize and prepare to do it; and those who thought that for one reason or another it couldn’t be done, and the attempt was madness. This great division showed itself in every faction and school of thought. The Socialists split into those who wanted to follow Russia and those who didn’t; the Anarchists split in the same way, and so did the “wobblies”; even the old line labor leaders divided into those who wanted to let the Soviet government alone, and those who wanted to help the capitalists to put it down!

For Bunny this struggle was embodied in the Menzies family. Papa Menzies was an old-time Social-Democrat from abroad, active in the clothing workers’ union. Of his six children, two daughters had followed their mother—an old-time, orthodox Jewess who wore a dirty wig, and kept all the feast days in the home, and wept and prayed for the souls of her lost ones, stolen from the faith of their fathers by America, which had made them work on Saturdays, and by the radical movement, which had made them agnostics and scoffers. Rachel and the oldest boy, Jacob, were Socialists like their father; but the other two, Joe and Ikey, had gone over to the “left wing,” and were clamoring for the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Bunny received a letter from Rachel. “Dear Mr. Ross”—she always addressed him that way, alone of his class-mates; it was her way of maintaining her proletarian dignity, in dealing with a person of great social pretensions. “We are home after picking all the prunes in California, and next week we begin on the grapes. You said you wanted to attend a meeting of the Socialist local, and there is to be an important one tomorrow evening, at the Garment-workers’ Hall. My father and brothers will be there, and would be glad to meet you.”

Bunny replied by a telegram, inviting one old and four young Jewish Socialists to have dinner with him before the meeting. He took them to an expensive restaurant—thinking to do them honor, and forgetting that they might feel uneasy as to their clothes and their table manners. Verily, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the feelings of the disinherited.

Bunny found Rachel quite altered from the drab, hard-working girl he had known. She belonged to that oriental type which can pick fruit in the sun for several weeks without worrying about complexions; she had sunset in her cheeks and sunrise in her spirit, and for the first time it occurred to Bunny that she was quite an interesting-looking girl. She told about their adventures, which seemed to him extraordinarily romantic. Most people, when they indulged in day-dreaming, would picture themselves as the son and heir of a great oil-magnate, with millions of dollars pouring in upon them, and a sporty car to drive, and steel widows and other sirens to make love to them. But Bunny’s idea of a fairy-story was to go off with a bunch of youngsters in a rattle-trap old Ford that broke down every now and then, and camp out in a tent that the wind blew away, and get a job picking fruit along side of Mexicans and Japanese and Hindoos, and send home a post-office order for ten or twelve dollars every week!

Papa Menzies was a stocky, powerful-looking man with curly yellow hair over his head, and a deep chest—though most of it seemed to be in back instead of in front, so much was he bent over by toil. There were certain English letters he could never pronounce; he would say, contemptuously, “Dis talk about de vorld revolution.” His son Jacob, the Socialist one, Bunny knew as a stoop-shouldered, pale student, and found him much improved by outdoor life. The other two boys, the young “left wingers,” were talkative and egotistical, and repelled the fastidious Bunny, who had not insight enough to guess that they were meeting a young plutocrat for the first time in their lives, and this was their uneasy effort to protect their working-class integrity. Nobody was going to say that they had been overawed! In addition to this, they were hardly on speaking terms with the rest of the family, because of the bitter political dispute going on.

They went to the hall, which was crowded with people, mostly workers, all tense with excitement. There had been a committee appointed to deal with the policy of the “local,” and this committee brought in a report in favor of expelling the “left wingers”; also there was a minority report, in favor of expelling everybody else! So then the fat was in the fire; and Bunny listened, and tried valiantly to keep from being disillusioned with the radical movement. They were so noisy, and Bunny had such a prejudice in favor of quiet! He wouldn’t expect working people to have perfect manners, he told himself, nor to use perfect English; but did they need to shriek and shake their fists in the air? Couldn’t they debate ideas, without calling each other “labor fakers” and “yellow skunks” and so on? Bunny had chosen to call upon Local Angel City of the Socialist party at a critical moment of its history; and decidedly it was not putting on company manners for him!