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Introduction by Joseph G. Cannon
Introduction by Joseph G. Cannon
The man whose life story is here presented between book covers is at the time of writing only forty-eight years old. When I met him many years ago he was a young man full of enthusiasm. I remember saying to him then, “With your enthusiasm and the sparkle which you have in your eyes I am sure you will make good.” Why should so young a man, one so recently elevated to official prominence, write his memoirs? That question will occur to those who do not know Jim Davis. His elevation to a Cabinet pos
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PREFACE
PREFACE
“Where were you previous to the eighth and immediately subsequent thereto?” asked the city attorney. The prisoner looked sheepish and made no answer. A box car had been robbed on the eighth and this man had been arrested in the freight yards. He claimed to be a steel worker and had shown the judge his calloused hands. He had answered several questions about his trade, his age and where he was when the policeman arrested him. But when they asked him what he had been doing previous to and immediat
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CHAPTER I. THE HOME-MADE SUIT OF CLOTHES
CHAPTER I. THE HOME-MADE SUIT OF CLOTHES
A fight in the first chapter made a book interesting to me when I was a boy. I said to myself, “The man who writes several chapters before the fighting begins is like the man who sells peanuts in which a lot of the shells haven't any goodies.” I made up my mind then that if I ever wrote a book I would have a fight in the first chapter. So I will tell right here how I whipped the town bully in Sharon, Pennsylvania. I'll call him Babe Durgon. I've forgotten his real name, and it might be better no
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CHAPTER II. A TRAIT OF THE WELSH PEOPLE
CHAPTER II. A TRAIT OF THE WELSH PEOPLE
My family is Welsh, and I was born in Tredegar, Wales. David and Davies are favorite names among the Welsh, probably because David whipped Goliath, and mothers named their babies after the champion. The Welsh are a small nation that has always had to fight against a big nation. The idea that David stopped Goliath seemed to reflect their own national glory. The ancient invasions that poured across Britain were stopped in Wales, and they never could push the Welshmen into the sea. The Welsh pride
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CHAPTER III. NO GIFT FROM THE FAIRIES
CHAPTER III. NO GIFT FROM THE FAIRIES
From my father I learned many things. He taught me to be skilful and proud of it. He taught me to expect no gift from life, but that what I got I must win with my hands. He taught me that good men would bring forth good fruits. This was all the education he could give me, and it was enough. My father was an iron worker, and his father before him. My people had been workers in metal from the time when the age of farming in Wales gave way to the birth of modern industries. They were proud of their
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CHAPTER IV. SHE SINGS TO HER NEST
CHAPTER IV. SHE SINGS TO HER NEST
From my mother I learned to sing. She was always working and always singing. There were six children in the house, and she knitted and sewed and baked and brewed for us all. I used to toddle along at her side when she carried each day the home-made bread and the bottle of small beer for father's dinner at the mill. I worshiped my mother, and wanted to be like her. And that's why I went in for singing. I have sung more songs in my life than did Caruso. But my voice isn't quite up to his! So my si
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CHAPTER V. THE LOST FEATHER BED
CHAPTER V. THE LOST FEATHER BED
I didn't care very much for day school. The whipping that I got there rather dulled the flavor of it for me. But I was a prize pupil at Sunday-school. Father had gone to America and had saved enough money to send for the family. I asked my mother if there were Sunday-schools in America, but she did not know. In those days we knew little about lands that lay so far away. My boy chums told me we were going to Pennsylvania to fight Indians. This cheered me up. Fighting Indians would be as much fun
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CHAPTER VI. HUNTING FOR LOST CHILDREN
CHAPTER VI. HUNTING FOR LOST CHILDREN
The loss of our baggage was only the beginning of our troubles in New York. With the feather ticks went also the money mother had got from selling the bedsteads and other furniture. She had nothing with which to buy food and while we were walking the streets we smelt the delicious odor of food from the restaurants and became whining and petulant. This was the first time mother had ever heard her children crying for bread when she had none to give them. The experience was trying, but her stout he
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CHAPTER VII. HARD SLEDDING IN AMERICA
CHAPTER VII. HARD SLEDDING IN AMERICA
It had been our plan to go from New York to Pittsburgh, but the mill that father was working in had shut down. And so he had sent us tickets to Hubbard, Ohio, where his brother had a job as a muck roller—the man who takes the bloom from the squeezer and throws it into the rollers. That's all I can tell you now. In later chapters I shall take you into a rolling mill, and show you how we worked. I believe I am the first puddler that ever described his job, for I have found no book by a puddler in
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CHAPTER VIII. MY FIRST REGULAR JOB
CHAPTER VIII. MY FIRST REGULAR JOB
We stayed a week with father's brother in Hubbard. Then we went to Sharon, Pennsylvania, where father had a temporary job. A Welshman, knowing his desperate need of money, let him take his furnace for a few days and earn enough money to move on to Pittsburgh. There father found a job again, but mother was dissatisfied with the crowded conditions in Pittsburgh. She wanted to bring up her boys amid open fields. In those days the air was black with soot and the crowded quarters where the workers li
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CHAPTER IX. THE SCATTERED FAMILY
CHAPTER IX. THE SCATTERED FAMILY
For three years after we came to Sharon I went to school, and in my spare time worked at my shoe shining and other odd jobs. We had bought feather beds again and our little home was a happy one. By hanging around the depot spotting traveling men who needed a shine, or their grips carried, I got acquainted with the telegraph agent. And so I got the job of telegraph messenger boy. Few telegrams were sent, and then only when somebody died. So whenever I carried a telegram I knew that I was the bear
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CHAPTER X. MELODRAMA BECOMES COMEDY
CHAPTER X. MELODRAMA BECOMES COMEDY
Every race gets a nickname in America. A Frenchman is a “frog,” a negro a “coon” and a Welshman a “goat.” All the schoolboys who were not Welsh delighted in teasing us by applying the uncomplimentary nickname. This once resulted at the Sharon operahouse, in turning a dramatic episode into a howling farce. I was acting as a super in the sensational drama She, by H. Rider Haggard. Two Englishmen were penetrating the mysterious jungles of Africa, and I was their native guide and porter. They had me
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CHAPTER XI. KEEPING OPEN HOUSE
CHAPTER XI. KEEPING OPEN HOUSE
Our little four-room company-house in Sharon had its doors open to the wayfarer. There was always some newcomer from Wales, looking for a stake in America, who had left his family in Wales. Usually he was a distant kinsman, but whether a blood relation or not, we regarded all Welshmen as belonging to our clan. Our house was small, but we crowded into the corners and made room for another. His food and bed were free as long as he stayed. We helped him find a job, and then he thanked us for our ho
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CHAPTER XII. MY HAND TOUCHES IRON
CHAPTER XII. MY HAND TOUCHES IRON
When I was eleven I got a regular job that paid me fifty cents a day. So I quit school just where the Monitor had sunk the Merrimac in the “first fight of the ironclads.” Thereafter my life was to be bound up with the iron industry. My job was in a nail factory. I picked the iron splinters from among the good nails that had heads on them. This taught me that many are marred in the making. Those that are born with bad heads must not be used in building a house or the house will fall. In the head
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CHAPTER XIII. SCENE IN A ROLLING MILL
CHAPTER XIII. SCENE IN A ROLLING MILL
The rolling mill where father worked was Life's Big Circus tent to me, and like a kid escaped from school, eager to get past the tent flap and mingle with the clowns and elephants, I chucked my job sorting nails when I found an opening for a youngster in the rolling mill. Every puddler has a helper. Old men have both a helper and a boy. I got a place with an old man, and so at the age of twelve I was part of the Big Show whose performance is continuous, whose fire-eaters have real flame to conte
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CHAPTER XIV. BOILING DOWN THE PIGS
CHAPTER XIV. BOILING DOWN THE PIGS
An iron puddler is a “pig boiler.” The pig boiling must be done at a certain temperature (the pig is iron) just as a farmer butchering hogs must scald the carcasses at a certain temperature. If the farmer's water is too hot it will set the hair, that is, fix the bristles so they will never come out; if the water is not hot enough it will fail to loosen the bristles. So the farmer has to be an expert, and when the water in his barrel is just hot enough, he souses the porker in it, holding it in t
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CHAPTER XV. THE IRON BISCUITS
CHAPTER XV. THE IRON BISCUITS
In the Sharon town band I played the clarinet from the time I was thirteen until I left that town several years later to chase the fireflies of vanishing jobs that marked the last administration of Cleveland. A bands-man at thirteen, I became a master puddler at sixteen. At that time there were but five boys of that age who had become full-fledged puddlers. Of these young iron workers, I suppose there were few that “doubled in brass.” But why should not an iron worker be a musician? The anvil, s
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CHAPTER XVI. WRESTING A PRIZE FROM NATURE'S HAND
CHAPTER XVI. WRESTING A PRIZE FROM NATURE'S HAND
After melting down the pig-iron as quickly as possible, which took me thirty minutes, there was a pause in which I had time to wipe the back of my hand on the dryest part of my clothing (if any spot was still dry) and with my sweat cap wipe the sweat and soot out of my eyes. For the next seven minutes I “thickened the heat up” by adding iron oxide to the bath. This was in the form of roll scale. The furnace continued in full blast till that was melted. The liquid metal in the hearth is called sl
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CHAPTER XVII. MAN IS IRON TOO
CHAPTER XVII. MAN IS IRON TOO
For twenty-five minutes while the boil goes on I stir it constantly with my long iron rabble. A cook stirring gravy to keep it from scorching in the skillet is done in two minutes and backs off blinking, sweating and choking, having finished the hardest job of getting dinner. But my hardest job lasts not two minutes but the better part of half an hour. My spoon weighs twenty-five pounds, my porridge is pasty iron, and the heat of my kitchen is so great that if my body was not hardened to it, the
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CHAPTER XVIII. ON BEING A GOOD GUESSER
CHAPTER XVIII. ON BEING A GOOD GUESSER
The charge which I have been kneading in my furnace has now “come to nature,” the stringy sponge of pure iron is separating from the slag. The “balling” of this sponge into three loaves is a task that occupies from ten to fifteen minutes. The particles of iron glowing in this spongy mass are partly welded together; they are sticky and stringy and as the cooling continues they are rolled up into wads like popcorn balls. The charge, which lost part of its original weight by the draining off of sla
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CHAPTER XIX. I START ON MY TRAVELS
CHAPTER XIX. I START ON MY TRAVELS
Now that I was a master puddler, I faced the problem of finding a furnace of my own. I saw no chance in Sharon. Furnaces passed from father to son, so I could not hope to get one of the furnaces controlled by another family. My father was not ready to relinquish his furnace to me, as he was good for twenty years more of this vigorous labor. I wanted to be a real boss puddler, and so, when I was eighteen I went to Pittsburgh and got a furnace. But a new period of hard times was setting in, jobs w
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CHAPTER XX. THE RED FLAG AND THE WATERMELONS
CHAPTER XX. THE RED FLAG AND THE WATERMELONS
I have said that the labor problem has three parts. I call them (1) Wages, (2) Working Conditions and (3) Living Conditions. By living conditions I mean the home and its security. My father had reached the stage where this was the problem that worried him. He was growing old and must soon cease working. But his home was not yet secure and he was haunted with the fear that his old age might be shelterless. We told him not to worry; the Davis boys were many and we would repay him for the fatherly
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CHAPTER XXI. ENVY IS THE SULPHUR IN HUMAN PIG-IRON
CHAPTER XXI. ENVY IS THE SULPHUR IN HUMAN PIG-IRON
While I was feasting on the watermelons and feeling at peace with all the world, a long passenger train pulled into the junction. The train was made up of Pullmans and each car was covered with flags, streamers and lodge insignia. On the heels of this train came another and then another. These gay cars were filled with members of the Knights of Pythias going to their convention in Denver. At the sight of these men in their Pullmans, my friend the communist first turned pale, then green, then red
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CHAPTER XXII. LOADED DOWN WITH LITERATURE
CHAPTER XXII. LOADED DOWN WITH LITERATURE
After I had read the various pamphlets that Bannerman gave me I was like the old negro who went to sleep with his mouth open. A white man came along and put a spoonful of quinine in his mouth. When the negro woke up the bitter taste worried him. “What does it mean?” he asked. The white man told him it meant that he “had done bu'sted his gall bladder and didn't have long to live.” A mighty bad taste was left in my mouth by those communist pamphlets. If they were telling the truth I realized that
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CHAPTER XXIII. THE PUDDLER HAS A VISION
CHAPTER XXIII. THE PUDDLER HAS A VISION
That caravan of railroad cars bearing the happy lodge members to their meeting in the Rockies, had started a train of thought that went winding through my mind ever after. In fancy I saw the envious Bannerman shaking his fist at his thriftier, happier brothers. Should I denounce the banding together of men for the promotion of fun and good fellowship? Were these men hastening the downfall of America as the communist predicted? Is not good fellowship a necessary feeling in the hearts of civilized
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CHAPTER XXIV. JOE THE POOR BRAKEMAN
CHAPTER XXIV. JOE THE POOR BRAKEMAN
A brakeman stuck his head in the end window of the box car and shouted at me: “Where're you going?” “Birmingham,” I answered. “What have you got to go on?” I had some money in my belt, but I would need that for the boarding-house keeper in the Alabama iron town. So I drew something from my vest pocket and said: “This is all I've got left.” The trainman examined it by the dim light at the window. His eye told him that it was a fine gold watch. “All right,” he said as he pocketed it and went away.
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CHAPTER XXV. A DROP IN THE BUCKET OF BLOOD
CHAPTER XXV. A DROP IN THE BUCKET OF BLOOD
In Birmingham I found a job in a rolling mill and established myself in a good boarding-house. In those days a “good boarding-house” in iron workers' language meant one where you got good board. One such was called “The Bucket of Blood.” It got its name because a bloody fight occurred there almost every day. Any meal might end in a knock-down-and-drag-out. The ambulance called there almost as often as the baker's cart. But it was a “good” boarding-house. And I established myself there. Good boar
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CHAPTER XXVI. A GRUB REFORMER PUTS US OUT OF GRUB
CHAPTER XXVI. A GRUB REFORMER PUTS US OUT OF GRUB
The Greasy Spoon isn't an appetizing name; not appetizing to men who live a sedentary life. But it was meant as a lure to men who live by muscular toil. It sounded good to us mill workers for, like Eskimos, we craved much fat in our diet. We were great muscular machines, and fat was the fuel for our engines. Muckraking was just beginning in those days, and a prying reformer came to live for a while at the Greasy Spoon. He told us that so much grease in our food would kill us. We were ignorant of
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CHAPTER XXVII. THE PIE EATER'S PARADISE
CHAPTER XXVII. THE PIE EATER'S PARADISE
The Greasy Spoon was all right. It was a peaceful place. The landlady was Irish, and her motto was: “If there's any fighting to be done here I'll do it myself.” On the sideboard she kept a carving knife as big as a cavalry saber. Whenever two men started a row, she grabbed this carving knife and with a scream like a panther she lit into them. “Stop yer fightin' before I hack your hands off!” The men were in deadly fear of her because they knew she meant business. The sight of that swinging knife
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CHAPTER XXVIII. CAUGHT IN A SOUTHERN PEONAGE CAMP
CHAPTER XXVIII. CAUGHT IN A SOUTHERN PEONAGE CAMP
It was while I was in Birmingham that the industrial depression reached rock bottom. In the depth of this industrial paralysis the iron workers of Birmingham struck for better pay. I, with a train load of other strikers, went to Louisiana and the whole bunch of us were practically forced into peonage. It was a case of “out of the frying pan into the fire.” We had been saying that the mill owners had driven us “into slavery,” for they had made us work under bad conditions; but after a month in a
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CHAPTER XXIX. A SICK, EMACIATED SOCIAL SYSTEM
CHAPTER XXIX. A SICK, EMACIATED SOCIAL SYSTEM
The hard times I have been describing were in the early nineties. The year before there had been a financial crash. Nobody seemed to know what was the matter at the time, but it has since been learned that the hard times were the fruit of crop failures, if one can call failure fruit. All over the world bad years had destroyed the harvests. This great loss of foodstuffs was exactly the same as if armies in war had ravaged the fields. Farmers had to borrow money to buy food. They had no other buyi
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CHAPTER XXX. BREAKING INTO THE TIN INDUSTRY
CHAPTER XXX. BREAKING INTO THE TIN INDUSTRY
I decided to leave Birmingham as soon as my stomach had got used to regular meals and my pocket knew what real money felt like again. The dry years had ended and once more the northern farms were yielding mammoth crops. But the country was so sick that it couldn't sit up and eat as it ought to. So the farmers were selling their crops at steadily falling prices. This drove some of them frantic. They couldn't pay interest on their mortgaged farms, and they were seeking to find “the way out” by iss
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CHAPTER XXXI. UNACCUSTOMED AS I AM TO PUBLIC SPEAKING
CHAPTER XXXI. UNACCUSTOMED AS I AM TO PUBLIC SPEAKING
With father's warning on my mind I went to the meeting where the strike was to be voted. Nobody had opposed the strike, for the cause was plainly a just one. The men wanted their pay to be issued to them every week, and they were entitled to it. The only question in my mind was one of expediency. Could we hope to win a strike at a time like that when the mills were on the verge of closing because of bad business? While the speakers were presenting the reasons for the strike I noticed that not a
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CHAPTER XXXII. LOGIC WINS IN THE STRETCH
CHAPTER XXXII. LOGIC WINS IN THE STRETCH
At seven o'clock we met again and several men made short talks opposing the strike. Each fellow, when he got up, seemed to have a lot of ideas, but when he tried to express them he grew confused, and after stammering a while he could only put forth the bare opinion, “I don't think we ought to strike.” This meeting was quite different from the other one. Here every man was thinking for himself but nobody could say anything. In the previous meeting the speakers had talked passionately, and the res
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CHAPTER XXXIII. I MEET THE INDUSTRIAL CAPTAINS
CHAPTER XXXIII. I MEET THE INDUSTRIAL CAPTAINS
Elwood, Indiana, was a small village that had been called Duck Creek Post-Office until the tin mill and other industries began making it into a city. In my capacity as president of the local union and head of the wage mill committee, I was put in personal contact with the heads of these great industrial enterprises. This was my first introduction to men of large affairs. I approached them with the inborn thought that they must be some sort of human monsters. The communist books that Comrade Bann
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CHAPTER XXXIV. SHIRTS FOR TIN ROLLERS
CHAPTER XXXIV. SHIRTS FOR TIN ROLLERS
In summer the temperature in the tin mills is very high. It is as hot as the Fourth of July in Abyssinia. One day a philosophical fellow was talking religion to me. He said, “I don't believe in hell as a place where we boil forever in a lake of brimstone. It can't be as hot as that. My constitution never could stand it.” His constitution stood up under the heat in the tin mill. So it is plain that the tin-mill temperature was somewhat less than the temperature of the Pit. Outsiders began coming
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CHAPTER XXXV. AN UPLIFTER RULED BY ENVY
CHAPTER XXXV. AN UPLIFTER RULED BY ENVY
The uplifter saw the men between heats drinking beer out of tin pails. “Why do those big fine fellows drink beer,” he asked me, “when they have plenty of water?” I asked him: “Why don't you drink beer?” “It makes me bilious,” he replied. “If I drink one glass of beer every day for a week it upsets me and I get weak and dizzy.” “Do you think that one drink of beer a day will upset those fellows and make them dizzy?” “Evidently not.” “Then when you oppose beer you are doing it to keep yourself fro
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CHAPTER XXXVI. GROWLING FOR THE BOSSES' BLOOD
CHAPTER XXXVI. GROWLING FOR THE BOSSES' BLOOD
I thought I made a number of enemies among the men while I was head of the mill committee. When a man dissipated and afterward came back to work, trembling and weak, the boss would refuse to let him take up his tools, but would lay the man off for a few days. The man usually thought this a useless and cruel punishment; and to lose a few days' wages would make him all the poorer. The man thus laid off would come to me and ask that I get him reinstated. “Tell 'em you'll call a strike,” the man wou
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CHAPTER XXXVII. FREE AND UNLIMITED COINAGE
CHAPTER XXXVII. FREE AND UNLIMITED COINAGE
It was during the panic in 1894 that the strike vote was defeated. We worked on until the first of July, 1896, when our agreement expired. By that time the tin mill was on its feet. The town of Elwood had grown from a country cross-roads to a city of the first class. As president of the union, I had steadily gained concessions for the workers. We were getting paid every two weeks. It is not practical to pay oftener in the tin trade. A man's work has to be measured and weighed, and the plate he r
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CHAPTER XXX VIII. THE EDITOR GETS MY GOAT
CHAPTER XXX VIII. THE EDITOR GETS MY GOAT
Madison county, Indiana, was a Democratic stronghold outside the mill towns, and a few farming townships. Free silver orators were telling the farmers that under a gold standard no factory could run. The farmers could see the smoke of the tin mills which had built a great city just beyond their corn-fields. The silver men explained that smoke as “a dummy factory set up by Mark Hanna with Wall Street money to make a smoke and fool the people into thinking that it was a real factory and that indus
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CHAPTER XXXIX. PUTTING JAZZ INTO THE CAMPAIGN
CHAPTER XXXIX. PUTTING JAZZ INTO THE CAMPAIGN
I will go back and relate more details of my race for office. Having won the nomination, I thrilled with pleasure and excitement, but I was at a loss as to how to begin my campaign for election. Should I hope for support among the white-collar classes in the “swell” end of town, among the merchants and mill owners or only in the quarter where the workers lived? The first act of a candidate is to have cards printed and pass them out to every one he meets. My cards bore my name and my slogan: “Pla
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CHAPTER XL. FATHER TOOK ME SERIOUSLY
CHAPTER XL. FATHER TOOK ME SERIOUSLY
There was an interval of nearly five months between the time of my election, which was in May, and the date of taking office in September. I decided to use this time to improve my qualifications for the job. I returned to the old home town of Sharon and took a course in a business college. Again I walked the old familiar paths where as a boy I had roamed the woods, fished the streams, brought the cows along the dusty road from pasture and blacked the boots of the traveling dudes at the hotel. Th
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CHAPTER XLI. A PAVING CONTRACTOR PUTS ME ON THE PAVING
CHAPTER XLI. A PAVING CONTRACTOR PUTS ME ON THE PAVING
I was the only Republican elected that year. But for this exception the Democrats would have made a clean sweep of the city. If the editor had not charged me with being illiterate I would neither have been nominated nor elected. When I appeared before audiences in the “swell end” of town and wrote my lessons on my little slate, I gained their sympathy. They believed in fair play. And I found I had not lost their support by thrashing the editor. Nearly all of the mill workers in Elwood voted for
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CHAPTER XLII. THE EVERLASTING MORALIZER
CHAPTER XLII. THE EVERLASTING MORALIZER
I played the game fair throughout my term of office. I hate dishonesty instinctively. I like the approval of my own conscience and the approval of men. This is egotism, of course. I claim nothing else for it. I am no prophet. I do not claim to be inspired. The weaknesses that all flesh is heir to, I am not immune from. I write this story not to vindicate my own wit nor to point out new paths for human thought to follow. I am a follower of the old trails, an endorser of the old maxims. I merely a
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CHAPTER XLIII. FROM TIN WORKER TO SMALL CAPITALIST
CHAPTER XLIII. FROM TIN WORKER TO SMALL CAPITALIST
During my term as county recorder at Anderson, Indiana, I saved money. I was unmarried and had no dissipations but books, and books cost little. I had lent money to several fellows who wanted to get a business education. By the year 1906, or ten years after I quit the mill, the money I had lent to men for their education in business colleges had all come back to me with interest. All my brothers had grown up and left home, and mother wrote that I ought not to send so much money to her as she had
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CHAPTER XLIV. A CHANCE TO REALIZE A DREAM
CHAPTER XLIV. A CHANCE TO REALIZE A DREAM
On October 27, 1906, I joined the Loyal Order of Moose at Crawfordsville, Indiana, and a new chapter in my life began. The purpose of the Order was merely social, but its vast possibilities took my imagination by storm. For I believed that man's instinct for fraternity was a great reservoir of social energy which, if harnessed aright, could lift our civilization nearer to perfection. On the night of my election and initiation to membership, the Supreme Lodge was in convention and they requested
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CHAPTER XLV. THE DREAM COMES TRUE
CHAPTER XLV. THE DREAM COMES TRUE
What kind of school is Mooseheart? That can not be answered by making comparisons, for it is the only school of its kind. When the Moose committee met to decide what sort of school it would build, somebody suggested a normal school, a school to teach the young how to become teachers. I objected. “The world is well supplied with teachers,” I said. “Everybody wants to teach the other fellow what to do, but nobody cares to do it. Hand work will make a country rich and mouth work make it poor. All t
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CHAPTER XLVI. THE MOOSEHEART IDEA
CHAPTER XLVI. THE MOOSEHEART IDEA
The majority of the Moose are men in the mechanical trades. But the primary trade, the one on which all others rest, is agriculture. The men knew this, and so they founded Mooseheart on the soil. It is an agricultural school. It occupies more than a thousand acres in the richest farming region of Illinois. The first thing the students learn is that all wealth comes out of the earth. The babies play in the meadows and learn the names of flowers and birds. The heritage of childhood is the out-of-d
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CHAPTER XLVII. LIFE'S PROBLEMS
CHAPTER XLVII. LIFE'S PROBLEMS
Mooseheart is at once a farm, a school and a town. The boys help handle the crops and herds under the guidance of the experts who teach the classes in agriculture. For extra work in the fields the boys receive pay. They save their money to buy the tools of their trade. The bandsmen when they graduate go out with fine instruments bought with their own earnings during their school years. “Preparation for life” is the one aim of Mooseheart. Therefore at Mooseheart the boy or girl will encounter eve
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CHAPTER XLVIII. BUILDING A BETTER WORLD BY EDUCATION
CHAPTER XLVIII. BUILDING A BETTER WORLD BY EDUCATION
And so the great dream of my life has been realized. In youth I saw the orphans of the worker scattered at a blow, little brothers and sisters doomed to a life of drudgery, and never to see one another again. No longer need such things be. The humblest worker can afford to join an association that guarantees a home and an education to his children. In Mooseheart the children are kept together. Family life goes on, and with it comes an education better than the rich man's son can buy. As individu
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CHAPTER XLIX. CONCLUSION
CHAPTER XLIX. CONCLUSION
H. G. Wells has asked all scholars to unite in writing a “Bible of the New Education.” I am no scholar, but if Wells will take suggestions from an iron puddler, I offer him these random thoughts. This generation is rich because the preceding generation stored up lots of capital. We are living in the houses and using the railroads that our fathers built by working overtime. When labor loafs on the job it makes itself poor. We are not building fast enough to keep ourselves housed. Were it not for
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