CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 LIBRARY 
 
 FROM 
 C. R. Kingsley 
 
Date Due 
 
 AUG V -^" g *^T^5TT& S " 
 
 olin 
 
 3 1924 032 381 430 
 
-H-ll Cornell University 
 WB Library 
 
 The original of this book is in 
 the Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924032381430 
 
THE 
 
 IRON 
 
 PUDDLER 
 
THE IRON 
 PUDDLER 
 
 MY LIFE IN THE 
 ROLLING MILLS AND 
 WHAT CAME OF IT 
 
 BY 
 
 JAMES J. DAVIS 
 
 INTRODUCTION BY 
 
 JOSEPH G. CANNON 
 
 GROSSET & DUNLAP 
 
 PUBLISHERS NEW YORK 
 
 Made in the United States of America 
 
Copyright, 1922 
 By The Bobbs-Mebkill Compamy 
 
 J\yrf#3p, 
 
 Printed in the United States of America 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 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 post marks not the beginning of 
 his career, but rather is the curtain-rise on the 
 second act of one of those dramatic lives with 
 which America has so often astounded the 
 world. Bruised and bleeding in a southern 
 peon camp, where he and other hungry men 
 had been trapped by a brutal slave driver, he 
 drank the bitter cup of unrequited toil. And 
 from this utter depth, in less than thirty 
 years, he rose to the office of secretary of 
 labor. There is drama enough for one life if 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 his career should end to-day. And while this 
 man fought his way upward, he carried others 
 with him, founding by his efforts and their 
 cooperation, the great school called Moose- 
 heart. More than a thousand students of both 
 sexes, ranging from one to eighteen years, are 
 there receiving their preparation for life. The 
 system of education observed there is prob- 
 ably the best ever devised to meet the needs 
 of all humanity. 
 
 The brain of James J. Davis fathered this 
 educational system. It is his contribution to 
 tfae world, and the world has accepted it. The 
 good it promised is already being realized, its 
 fruits are being gathered. Its blessings are 
 falling on a thousand young Americans, and 
 its influence like a widening ripple is extend- 
 ing farther every day. It promises to reach 
 and benefit every child in America. And to 
 hasten the growth of this new education, 
 James J. Davis has here written the complete 
 story. I have known Mr. Davis many years 
 and am one of the thousands who believe in 
 Mm and have helped further his work. 
 
 The author of this autobiography is indeed 
 a remarkable man. He is sometimes called 
 Ihe Napoleon of Fraternity. Love of bis fej- 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 lows is his ruling passion. He can call more 
 than ten thousand men by their first names. 
 His father taught him this motto : "No man is 
 greater than his friends. All the good that 
 comes into your life "will come from yomr 
 friends. If you lose your friends your 
 enemies will destroy you." Davis has stood 
 by his friends. As a labor leader and a fra- 
 ternal organizer, he has proved his ability. 
 Thousands think he is unequaled as an ora- 
 tor, thinker and entertainer. His zeal is all 
 for humanity and he knows man's needs. He 
 has dedicated his life to the cause of better 
 education for the workers of this land. His 
 cause deserves a hearing. 
 
 Washington, D. C, 
 June, 1922. 
 
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 bis 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 immediately subsequent 
 thereto, he hung his head as if at a loss for an 
 alibi. 
 
 I was city clerk at the time and had been a 
 steel worker. I knew why the man refused 
 to answer. He didn't understand the phrase- 
 ology. 
 
 "Where were you previous to the eighth 
 and immediately subsequent thereto?" the at- 
 torney asked him for the third time. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 All the prisoner could do was look guilty 
 and say nothing. 
 
 "Answer the question," ordered the judge, 
 "or I'll send you up for vagrancy." 
 
 Still the man kept silent. Then I spoke up : 
 
 "John, tell the court where you were be- 
 fore you came here and also where you have 
 been since you arrived in the city." 
 
 "I was in Pittsburgh," he said, and he pro- 
 ceeded to tell the whole story of his life. He 
 was still talking when they chased him out of 
 court and took up the next case. He was a 
 free man, and yet he had come within an inch 
 of going to jail. All because he didn't know 
 what "previous to the eighth and immediately 
 subsequent thereto" meant. 
 
 The man was an expert puddler. A pud- 
 dler makes iron bars. They were going to 
 put him behind his own bars because he 
 couldn't understand the legal jargon. Thanks 
 to the great educational system of America 
 the working man has improved his mental 
 muscle as well as his physical. 
 
 This taught me a lesson. Jargon can put 
 the worker in jail. Big words and improper 
 phraseology are prison bars that sometimes 
 separate the worker from the professional 
 
PREFACE 
 
 people. "Stone walls do not a prison make," 
 because the human mind can get beyond 
 them. But thick-shelled words do make a 
 prison. They are something that the human 
 mind can not penetrate. A man whose skill 
 is in his hands can puddle a two hundred- 
 
 ' pound ball of iron. A man whose skill is on 
 his tongue can juggle four-syllable words. 
 But that iron puddler could not savvy four- 
 syllable words any more than the word jug- 
 gler could puddle a heat of iron. The brain 
 worker who talks to the hand worker in a 
 special jargon the latter can not understand 
 has built an iron wall between the worker's 
 mind and his mind. To tear down that wall 
 and make America one nation with one 
 language is one of the tasks of the new 
 education. 
 
 If big words cause misunderstandings, why 
 not let them go? When the stork in the fable 
 invited the fox to supper he served the bean 
 
 ' soup in a long-necked vase. The stork had a 
 beak that reached down the neck of the vase 
 and drank the soup with ease. The fox bad 
 a short muzzle and couldn't get it. The trick 
 made him mad and he bit the stork's head off. 
 Why should the brain worker invite the 
 
PREFACE 
 
 manual worker to a confab and then serve 
 the feast in such long-necked language that 
 the laborer can't get it? "Let's spill the 
 beans," the agitator tells him, "then we'll all 
 get some of the gravy." 
 
 This long-necked jargon must go. It is not 
 the people's dish. With foggy phrases that 
 no one really understands they are trying to 
 incite the hand worker to bite off the head of 
 the brain worker. When employer and em- 
 ployee sit together at the council table, let the 
 facts be served in such simple words that we 
 can all get our teeth into them. 
 
 When I became secretary of labor I said 
 that the employer and employee had a duty 
 to perform one to the other, and both to the 
 public. 
 
 Capital does not always mean employer. 
 When I was a boy in Sharon, Pennsylvania, I 
 looked in a pool in the brook and discovered 
 a lot of fish. I broke some branches off a 
 tree, and with this I brushed the fish out of 
 the pool. I sold them to a teamster for ten 
 cents. With this I bought shoe blacking and 
 a shoe brush and spent my Saturdays black- 
 ing boots for travelers at the depot and the 
 hotel. I had established a boot-blacking 
 
PREFACE 
 
 business which I pushed in my spare time for 
 several years. My brush and blacking repre- 
 sented my capital. The shining of the travel- 
 ers' shoes was labor. I was a capitalist but 
 not an employer; I was a laborer but not an 
 employee. 
 
 "Labor is prior to and independent of capi- 
 tal," said Lincoln. This is true. I labored to 
 break the branches from the tree before I had 
 any capital. They brought me fish, which 
 were capital because I traded them for shoe 
 blacking with which I earned enough money 
 to buy ten times more fish than I had caught. 
 
 So labor is prior to capital — when you use 
 the words in their right meaning. But call 
 the employee "labor" and the employer "cap- 
 ital," and you make old Honest Abe say that 
 the employee is prior to and independent of 
 the employer, or that the wage earner is inde- 
 pendent of the wage payer or, in still shorter 
 words, the man is on the job before the job is 
 created. Which is nonsense. 
 
 Capital does not always mean employer. 
 A Liberty Bond is capital but it is not an em- 
 ployer; the Government is an employer but 
 it is not capital, and when any one is arguing 
 a case for an employee against his employer 
 
PREFACE 
 
 let him use the proper terms. The misuse of 
 words can cause a miscarriage of justice as 
 the misuse of railway signals can send a train 
 into the ditch. 
 
 All my life I have been changing big words 
 into little words so that the employee can 
 know what the employer is saying to him. 
 The working man handles things. The pro- 
 fessional man plies words. I learned things 
 first and words afterward. Things can enrich 
 a nation, and words can impoverish it. The 
 words of theorists have cost this nation bil- 
 lions which must be paid for in things. 
 
 When I was planning a great school for the 
 education of orphans, some of my associates 
 said: "Let us teach them to be pedagogues." 
 I said: "No, let us teach them the trades. A 
 boy with a trade can do things. A theorist can 
 say things. Things done with the hands are 
 wealth, things said with the mouth are words. 
 When the housing shortage is over and we 
 find the nation suffering from a shortage of 
 words, we will close the classes in carpentry 
 and open a class in oratory." 
 
 This, then is the introduction to my views 
 and to my policies. They are now to have a 
 fair trial, like that other iron worker in the 
 
\ 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 Elwood police court. I know what the word 
 "previous" means. I can give an account of 
 myself. So, in the following pages I will tell 
 "where I was before I came here." 
 
 If my style seems rather flippant, it is be- 
 cause I have been trained as an extempora- 
 neous speaker and not as a writer. For fifteen 
 years I traveled over the country lecturing on 
 the Mooseheart School. My task was to inter- 
 est men in the abstract problems of child edu- 
 cation. A speaker must entertain his hearers 
 to the end or lose their attention. And so I 
 taxed my wit to make this subject simple and 
 easy to listen to. At last I evolved a style of 
 address that brought my points home to the 
 men I was addressing. 
 
 After all these years I can not change my 
 style. I talk more easily than I write; there- 
 fore, in composing this book I have imagined 
 myself facing an audience, and I have told 
 my story. I do not mention the names of the 
 loyal men who helped work out the plans of 
 Mooseheart and gave the money that estab- 
 lished it, for their number is so great that 
 their names alone would fill three volumes 
 as large as this. 
 
 J. J. D. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I The Home-Made Suit of 
 
 Clothes 17 
 
 II A Trait of the Welsh 
 
 People 26 
 
 III No Gift from the Fairies . 30 
 
 IV She Sings to Her Nest . . 35 
 V The Lost Feather Bed . . 40 
 
 VI Hunting for Lost Children 44 
 
 VII Hard Sledding in America 
 VIII My First Regular Job . 
 IX The Scattered Family . 
 
 X Melodrama Becomes Comedy 6& 
 
 XI Keeping Open House 
 XII My Hand Touches Iron . 
 
 XIII Scene in a Rolling Mill . 
 
 XIV Boiling Down the Pigs . 
 XV The Iron Biscuits . 
 
 XVI Wresting a Prize from 
 
 Nature's Hand . 
 
 XVII Man is Iron Too . . , 
 
 XVIII On Being a Good Guesser 
 
 XIX I Start on My Travels . 
 
 XX The Red Flag and the 
 
 Watermelons . 
 XXI Envy is the Sulphur in 
 
 Human Pig-Iron . 
 XXII Loaded Down with Litera- 
 ture 
 
 XXIV Joe the Poor Brakeman . 
 XXV A Drop in the Bucket of 
 Blood 
 
 51 
 56 
 62 
 
 140 
 145 
 
CONTENTS— Continued 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 XXVI A Grub Reformer Puts Us 
 , Out of Grub .... 150 
 XXVII The Pie Eater's Paradise . 153 
 XXVIII Caught in a Southern Peon- 
 age Camp 158 
 
 XXIX A Sick, Emaciated Social 
 
 System 169 
 
 XXX Breaking into the Tin 
 
 Industry ■.■ 172 
 
 XXXI Unaccustomed as I am to 
 
 Public Speaking . . . 178 
 XXXII Logic Wins in the Stretch 187 
 
 XXXIII I Meet the Industrial 
 
 Captains 191 
 
 XXXIV Shirts for Tin Rollers . . 195 
 XXXV An Uplifter Ruled by Envy 199 
 
 XXXVI Growling for the Bosses' 
 
 Blood 204 
 
 XXXVII Free and Unlimited Coinage 209 
 
 XXXVIII The Editor Gets My Goat 215 
 XXXIX Putting Jazz into the 
 
 Campaign 219 
 
 XL Father Took Me Seriously 224 
 XLI A Paving Contractor Puts 
 
 Me on the Paving ... 228 
 
 XLII The Everlasting Moralizer 236 
 XLIII From Tin Worker to Small 
 
 Capitalist ..... 240 
 XLIV A Chance to Realize a 
 
 Dream 244 
 
 XLV The Dream Comes True . 248 
 
 XL VI The Mooseheart Idea . . 253 
 
 XL VII Life's Problems .... 257 
 XL VIII Building a Better World 
 
 by Education .... 263 
 
 XLIX Conclusion ••• v . > ? . 268 
 
THE 
 
 IRON 
 
 PUDDLER 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 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 chap- 
 ters 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 not to mention 
 it anyhow. For though I whipped him thirty 
 years ago, he might come back now in a 
 return match and reverse the verdict, so that 
 my first chapter would serve better as my last 
 one. Babe was older than I, and had pestered 
 me from the time I was ten. Now I was 
 
 17 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 ■eighteen and a man. I was a master puddler 
 in the mill and a musician in the town band 
 (I always went with men older than myself). 
 Two stove molders from a neighboring fac- 
 tory were visiting me that day, and, as it was 
 dry and hot, I offered to treat them to a cool 
 drink. There were no soda fountains in 
 those days and the only place to take a friend 
 was to the tavern. We went in and my com- 
 panions ordered beer. Babe, the bully, was 
 standing by the bar. He had just come of 
 age, and wanted to bulldoze me with that 
 fact. 
 
 "Don't serve Jimmy Davis a beer," Babe 
 commanded. "He's a minor. He can't buy 
 beer." 
 
 "I didn't want a beer," I said. "I was going 
 to order a soft drink." 
 
 "Yes, you was. Like hell you was," Babe 
 taunted. "You came in here to get a beer like 
 them fellers. You think you're a man, but 
 I know you ain't. And I'm here to see that 
 nobody sells liquor to a child." 
 
 I was humiliated. The bully knew that I 
 wanted to be a man, and his shot stung me. 
 My friends looked at me as if to ask: "Are 
 you going to take that?" And so the fight was 
 
 18 
 
THE HOME-MADE SUIT OF CLOTHES 
 
 arranged, although I had no skill at boxing, 
 and was too short-legged, like most Welsh- 
 men, for a fast foot race. Babe had me up 
 against a real problem. 
 
 "Come on over the line," he said. 
 
 Sharon was near the Ohio border and it was 
 customary to go across the state line to fight, 
 so that on returning the local peace officers 
 would have no jurisdiction. We started for the 
 battle ground. Babe had never been whipped; 
 he always chose younger opponents. He was 
 a good gouger, and had marked up most of 
 the boys on the "flats" as we called the low- 
 lands where the poorer working people lived. 
 A gouger is one who stabs with his thumb. 
 When he gets his sharp thumb-nail into the 
 victim's eye, the fight is over. Biting and 
 kicking were his second lines of attack. 
 
 As we walked along I was depressed by the 
 thought that I was badly outclassed. There 
 was only one thing in my favor. I hated 
 Babe Durgon with a bitter loathing that I had 
 been suppressing for years. It all went back 
 to the summer of 1884 when I was eleven 
 years old. Times were hard, and the mill was 
 "down." Father had gone to Pittsburgh to 
 look for work. I was scouring the town of 
 
 19 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 Sharon to pick up any odd job that would 
 earn me a nickel. There were no telephones 
 and I used to carry notes between sweet- 
 hearts, pass show bills for the "opry," and 
 ring a hand-bell for auctions. An organized 
 charity had opened headquarters on Main 
 Street to collect clothing and money for the 
 destitute families of the workers. I went up 
 there to see if they needed an errand boy. A 
 Miss Foraker — now Mrs. F. H. Buhl — was in 
 charge. She was a sweet and gracious young 
 woman and she explained that they had no 
 pay-roll. 
 
 "Everybody works for nothing here," she 
 said. "I get no pay, and the landlord gives 
 us the use of the rooms free. This is a public 
 charity and everybody contributes his ser- 
 vices free." 
 
 I saw a blue serge boy's suit among the 
 piles of garments. It was about my size and 
 had seen little wear. I thought it was the 
 prettiest suit I had ever seen. I asked Miss 
 Foraker how much money it would take to 
 buy the suit. She said nothing was for sale. 
 She wrapped up the suit and placed the pack- 
 age in my arms, saying, "That's for you, 
 Jimmy." 
 
 20 
 
THE HOME-MADE SUIT OF CLOTHES 
 
 I raced home and climbed into the attic 
 of our little four-dollar-a-month cottage, 
 and in the stifling heat under the low roof I 
 changed my clothes. Then I proudly climbed 
 down to show my blue suit to my mother. 
 
 "Where did you get those clothes, James?" 
 she asked gravely. 
 
 I told her about Miss Foraker. 
 
 "Did you work for them?" 
 
 "No; everything is free," I said. 
 
 Mother told me to take the suit off. I went 
 to the attic, blinking a tear out of my eyes, 
 and changed into my old rags again. Then 
 mother took the blue suit, wrapped it up care- 
 fully and putting it in my hands told me to 
 take it back to Miss Foraker. 
 
 "You don't understand, James," she said. 
 "But these clothes are not for people like us. 
 These are to be given to the poor." 
 
 I have often smiled as I looked back on it. 
 I'll bet there wasn't a dime in the house. The 
 patches on my best pants were three deep 
 and if laid side by side would have covered 
 more territory than the new blue suit. To 
 take those clothes back was the bitterest 
 sacrifice my heart has ever known. 
 
 A few days later there was a fire sale by 
 21 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 one of the merchants, and I got the job of 
 ringing the auction bell. Late in the after- 
 noon the auctioneer held up a brown- over- 
 coat. "Here is a fine piece of goods, only 
 slightly damaged," he said. He showed the 
 back of the coat where a hole was burned in 
 it. "How much am I offered?" 
 
 I knew that I would get fifty cents for my 
 day's work, so I bid ten cents — all that I could 
 spare. 
 
 "Sold," said the auctioneer, "for ten cents 
 to the kid who rang the bell all day." 
 
 I took the garment home and told my 
 mother how I had bought it for cash in open 
 competition with all the world. My mother 
 and my aunt set to work with shears and 
 needles and built me a suit of clothes out of 
 the brown overcoat. It took a lot of ingenu- 
 ity to make the pieces come out right. The 
 trousers were neither long nor short. They 
 dwindled down and stopped at my calves, 
 half-way above my ankles. What I hated 
 most was that the seams were not in the right 
 places. It was a patchwork, and there were 
 seams down the front of the legs where the 
 crease ought to be. I didn't want to wear the 
 suit, but mother said it looked fine on me, 
 
 22 
 
THE HOME-MADE SUIT OF CLOTHES 
 
 and if she said so I knew it must be true. I 
 wore it all fall and half the winter. 
 
 The first time I went to Sunday-school, I 
 met Babe Durgon. He set up the cry: 
 
 "Little boy, little boy, 
 
 Does your mother know you're out; 
 
 With your breeches put on backward, 
 
 And the seams all inside out !" 
 
 This was the first time that my spirit had 
 been hurt. His words were a torment that 
 left a scar upon my very soul. Even to this 
 day when I awake from some bad dream, it 
 is a dream that I am wearing crazy breeches 
 and all the world is jeering at me. It has 
 made me tender toward poor children who 
 have to wear hand-me-downs. 
 
 To-day psychologists talk much of the 
 "inferiority complex" which spurs a man for- 
 ward to outdo himself. But Babe Durgon and 
 I didn't go into these matters as we trudged 
 along through the dark on our way to do 
 battle "over the line." At the foot of the hill, 
 Babe exclaimed: 
 
 "What's the use of going any farther? Let's 
 fight here." It was in front of a new building 
 , — a church-school half completed. We took 
 
 23 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 off our coats and made belts of our suspend- 
 ers. Then we squared off and the fight 
 began. Babe rushed me like a wild boar and 
 tried to thrust his deadly thumb into my eye. 
 I threw up my head and his thumb gashed 
 my lips and went into my mouth. The impact 
 almost knocked me over, but my teeth had 
 closed on his thumb and when he jerked back 
 he put me on my balance again. I clouted 
 him on the jaw and knocked him down. He 
 landed in the lime box. The school had not 
 yet been plastered, and the quicklime was in 
 an open pit. I started in after the bully, but 
 stopped to save my pants from the lime. 
 There was a hose near by, and I turned the 
 water on Babe in the lime bath. The lime 
 completely covered him. He was whipped 
 and in fear of his life. Choking and weeping 
 he hollered, "Nuff." We got him out, too weak 
 to stand, and gently leaned him up in a corner 
 of the school building. There we left the 
 crushed bully and returned to town. But 
 before I went I gave him this parting shot : 
 
 "Do you know why I licked you, Babe? 
 It wasn't what you said in the tavern that 
 made me mad. I didn't want a glass of beer, 
 and you were right in saying I was a minor. 
 
 24 
 
THE HOME-MADE SUIT OF CLOTHES 
 
 ^Where you made your mistake was when you 
 made fun of my breeches, seven years ago. 
 And do you remember that blue suit you had 
 on at the time? I know where you got that 
 blue suit of clothes, and I know who had it 
 before you got it. If you still think that a 
 bully in charity clothes can make fun of a 
 boy in clothes that he earned with his own 
 labor, just say so, and I'll give you another 
 clout that will finish you." 
 
 All bullies, whether nations, parties or indi- 
 viduals, get licked in the same way. They 
 outrage some one's self-respect, and then the 
 old primordial cyclone hits them. 
 
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 Welsh- 
 men into the sea. 
 
 The Welsh pride themselves on hanging on. 
 They are a nation that has never been 
 whipped. Every people has its characteris- 
 tics. "You can't beat the Irish" is one slogan, 
 "You can't kill a Swede" is another, and "You 
 can't crowd out a Welshman" is a motto 
 among the mill people. 
 
 I didn't want to leave Wales when my pa- 
 26 
 
A TRAIT OF THE WELSH PEOPLE 
 
 rents were emigrating. Though I was not 
 quite eight years old I decided I would let 
 them go without me. The last act of my 
 mother was to reach under the bed, take hold 
 of my heels and drag me out of the house 
 feet first. I tried to hang on to the cracks in 
 the floor, and tore off a few splinters to re- 
 member the old homestead by. I never was 
 quite satisfied with that leave-taking, and 
 nearly forty years later when I had car fare, 
 I went back to that town. I never like to go 
 out of a place feet first, and I cleared my 
 record this time by walking out of my native 
 village, head up and of my own free will. 
 
 On that trip I paid a visit to the home of 
 Lloyd George in Cricuth. Joseph Davies, one 
 of the war secretaries to the prime minister, 
 invited me to dinner and we talked of the 
 American form of government. (Note the 
 spelling of Davies. It is the Welsh spelling. 
 When my father signed his American natur- 
 alization papers he made his mark, for he 
 could not read nor write. The official wrote in 
 his name, spelling it Davis and so it has 
 remained.) "You have this advantage," said 
 Mr. Davies. "Your president is secure in 
 offiee for four years and can put his policies 
 
 27 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 through. Our prime minister has no fixed 
 term and may have to step out at any 
 minute." 
 
 "Yes," I replied jokingly, "but your prime 
 minister this time is a Welshman." 
 
 Since then four years have passed and our 
 president is out. But Lloyd George is still 
 there (1922). And he'll still be there, for all 
 I know, until he is carried out feet first. The 
 instinct of a Welshman is to hang on. 
 
 These things teach us that racial charac- 
 teristics do not change. In letting immigrants 
 into this country we must remember this. 
 Races that have good traits built up good 
 countries there abroad and they will in the 
 same way build up the country here. Tribes 
 that have swinish traits were destroyers there 
 and will be destroyers here. This has been 
 common knowledge so long that it has 
 become a proverb: "You can't make a silk 
 purse out of a sow's ear." 
 
 Proverbs are the condensed wisdom of the 
 ages. Life has taught me that the wisdom of 
 the ages is the truth. The Proverbs and the 
 Ten Commandments answer all our problems. 
 My mother taught them to me when I was a 
 child in Wales. I have gone out and tasted 
 28 
 
A TRAIT OF THE WELSH PEOPLE 
 
 life, and found her words true. Starting at 
 forge and furnace in the roaring mills, facing 
 facts instead of books, I have been schooled 
 in lif e's hard lessons. And the end of it all is 
 the same as the beginning: the Proverbs, — < 
 the Commandments, — and the Golden Rule. 
 
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 
 skill, and the secrets of the trade were passed 
 from father to son as a legacy of great value, 
 and were never told to persons outside the 
 family. Such skill meant good wages when 
 there was work. But there was not work all 
 the time. Had there been jobs enough for all 
 we would have taught our trade to all. But in 
 self-protection we thought of our own mouths 
 
 30 
 
NO GIFT FROM THE FAIRIES 
 
 first. All down the generations my family 
 has been face to face with the problem of 
 bread. 
 
 My Grandfather Davies, held a skilled job 
 at the blast furnace where iron was made for 
 the rolling mill in which my father was a 
 puddler. Grandfather Davies had been to 
 Russia and had helped the Russians build 
 blast furnaces, in the days when they believed 
 that work would make them wealthy. Had 
 they stuck to that truth they would not be a 
 ruined people to-day. Grandfather also went 
 to America, where his skill helped build the 
 first blast furnace in Maryland. The furnace 
 fires have not ceased burning here, and Rus- 
 sia is crying for our steel to patch her broken 
 railways. Her own hills are full of iron and 
 her hands are as strong as ours. Let them 
 expect no gift from lif e. 
 
 Grandfather told my father that America 
 offered a rich future for him and his boys. 
 "The metal is there," he said, "as it is in Rus- 
 sia. Russia may never develop, but America 
 will. A nation's future lies not in its re- 
 sources. The American mind is right. Go to 
 America." 
 
 And because my father believed that a good 
 31 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 people will bring forth good fruit, he left his 
 ancient home in Wales and crossed the sea to 
 cast his lot among strangers. 
 
 I started to school in Wales when I was 
 four years old. By the time I was six I 
 thought I knew more than my teachers. This 
 shows about how bright I was. The teachers 
 had forbidden me to throw paper wads, or 
 spitballs. I thought I could go through the 
 motion of throwing a spitball without letting 
 it go. But it slipped and I threw the wad 
 right in the teacher's eye. I told him it was 
 an accident, that I had merely tried to play 
 smart and had overreached myself. 
 
 "Being smart is a worse fault," he said, 
 "than throwing spitballs. I forgive you for 
 throwing the spitball, but I shall whip the 
 smart Aleckness out of you." 
 
 He gave me a good strapping, and I went 
 home in rebellion. I told my father. I 
 wanted him to whip the teacher. Father 
 said: 
 
 "I know the teacher is a good man. I 
 have known him for years, and he is honest, 
 he is just, he is kind. If he whipped you, you 
 deserved it. You can not see it that way, so 
 I am going to whip you myself." 
 
 32 
 
NO GIFT FROM THE FAIRIES 
 
 He gave me a good licking, and, strange to 
 say, it convinced me that he and the teacher 
 were right. They say that the "hand educates 
 the mind," and I can here testify that father's 
 hand set my mental processes straight. From 
 that day I never have been lawless in school 
 or out. The shame of my father's disapproval 
 jolted me so that I decided ever after to try 
 to merit his approval. 
 
 To-day there is a theory that the child 
 ought never to be restrained. Solomon said: 
 "Spare the rod and spoil the child." We 
 have no corporal punishment at Mooseheart, 
 but we have discipline. A child must be 
 restrained. Whenever a crop of unrestrained 
 youngsters takes the reins I fear they will 
 make this country one of their much talked of 
 Utopias. It was an unrestricted bunch that 
 made a "Utopia" out of Russia. 
 
 Anyhow, my father lived his life according 
 to his simple rules. He is living to-day, a 
 happy man in the cozy home he won by his 
 own work. The things he taught me I have 
 seen tested in his long life, proved true. He 
 never expected any gift from life. I thought 
 once to surprise him. I wanted to buy a fine 
 house and give it to him. He wouldn't have 
 
 33 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 it. He stayed in his own little cottage. It was 
 not in his theory of life that a house should 
 come to him as a gift. It was a sound theory, 
 and like a true Welshman, he hangs on to it 
 to the end. He is a good man, and the fruits 
 that his life of labor has brought forth are 
 good fruits. 
 
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 din- 
 ner 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 singing has brought me no 
 returns other than great chunks of personal 
 satisfaction. The satisfaction was not shared 
 by my hearers, and so I have quit. But my 
 heart still sings, and always will. And this I 
 owe to my mother. 
 
 I can see her yet in our tiny Welsh cottage, 
 her foot on a wooden cradle rocking a baby, 
 my baby brother, her hands busy with her 
 
 35 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 knitting, her voice lifted in jubilant song for 
 hours at a time. And all her songs were songs 
 of praise. 
 
 She thanked God for life and for strong 
 hands to labor for her little ones. In those 
 days furniture was rare, and few were the 
 pieces in a worker's home. It took a dozen 
 years for her to acquire two feather beds. 
 And when at last we owned two bedsteads, 
 we rated ourselves pretty rich. We boys slept 
 five in a bed. Why were bedsteads in those 
 days harder to get than automobiles are 
 to-day? Because the wooden age still lin- 
 gered, the age of hand work. And it took so 
 long to make a bed by hand that people came 
 into the world faster than beds. But within 
 my lifetime the iron mills have made possi- 
 ble the dollar bedstead. The working man 
 can fill his house with beds bought with the 
 wage he earns in half a week. This, I sup- 
 pose, is one of the "curses of capitalism." 
 
 I have heard how "the rights of small peo- 
 ples" have been destroyed by capitalism; and 
 if the right to sleep five in a bed was prized by 
 the little folks, this privilege has certainly 
 been taken away from them. At the Moose- 
 heart School we are pinched for sleeping 
 
 36 
 
SHE SINGS TO HER NEST 
 
 room for our fast-growing attendance. I sug- 
 gested that, for the time being, we might 
 double deck the beds like the berths in a 
 sleeping car. "No," cried the superintendent. 
 "Not in this age do we permit the crowding of 
 children in their sleeping quarters." So this 
 is the slavery that capitalism has driven us 
 io; we are forced to give our children more 
 comforts than we had ourselves. When I was 
 sleeping five in a bed with my brothers, there 
 was one long bolster for five hot little faces. 
 The bolster got feverish and a boy sang out: 
 "Raise up." We lifted our tired heads. "Turn 
 over." Two boys turned the bolster. "Lie 
 down." And we put our faces on the cool side 
 and went to sleep. 
 
 Those were not hardships, and life was 
 sweet, and we awoke from our crowded bed, 
 like birds in a nest awakened by their moth- 
 er's morning song. For, as I have said, my 
 mother was always singing. Her voice was 
 our consolation and delight. 
 
 One of the most charming recollections of 
 my boyhood is that of my mother standing at 
 our gate with a lamp in her hands, sending 
 one boy out in the early morning darkness, to 
 his work, and at the same time welcoming 
 
 37 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 another boy home. My brother was on the 
 day shift and I on the night, which meant that 
 he left home as I was leaving the mills, about 
 half past two in the morning. On dark nights 
 — and they were all dark at that hour — my 
 mother, thinking my little brother afraid, 
 would go with him to the gate and, holding an 
 old-fashioned lamp high in her hands, would 
 sing some Welsh song while he trudged out 
 toward the mills and until he got within the 
 radius of the glare from the stacks as they 
 belched forth the furnace flames. And as he 
 passed from the light of the old oil burner into 
 the greater light from the mills, I walked 
 wearily out from that reflection and was 
 guided home by my mother's lamp and song 
 on her lips. 
 
 Happy is the race that sings, and the Welsh 
 are singers. After the tiring labor in the mills 
 we still had joy that found its voice in song. 
 When I was six years old I joined a singing 
 society. The whole land of Wales reechoes 
 with the folk songs of a people who sing be- 
 cause they must. 
 
 The memory of my mother singing, has 
 made my whole life sweet. When blue days 
 came for me, and hardship almost forced me 
 
 38 
 
SHE SINGS TO HER NEST 
 
 to despair, I turned my thoughts to her, sing- 
 ing as she rocked a cradle, and from her 
 spirit my own heart took hope again. I think 
 the reason I have never cared for drink is 
 this: the ease from mental pain that other 
 men have sought in alcohol, I always found 
 in song. 
 
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 as going to Sunday-school. A trip to 
 America for such a purpose was a sensible 
 move. But when mother exploded the Indian 
 theory and said we were going to work in a 
 rolling mill, I decided that it was a foolish 
 venture. 
 
 This shows how much my judgment was 
 worth. I thought it foolish to go to America 
 merely to better our condition. But I thought 
 
 40 
 
THE LOST FEATHER BED 
 
 it a wise move to go there and kill Indians to 
 better the living conditions of the Americans. 
 I know grown men to-day with the same kind 
 of judgment. They are unwilling to do the 
 simple things that will save their own scalps; 
 but they are glad to go fight imaginary In- 
 dians who they believe are scalping the hu- 
 man race. "Capitalism" is one of these imag- 
 inary Indians. And Lenine and Trotsky are 
 the boy Indian-fighters of the world. These 
 poor children are willing to go to any country 
 to help kill the Indian of capitahsm. Mean- 
 while their own people are the poorest in the 
 world, but they do nothing to better their con- 
 dition. Such men have minds that never 
 grew up. 
 
 When our household was dissolving and 
 we were packing our baggage for America, I 
 tried to break up the plan by hiding under 
 the bed. Mother took the feather ticks off the 
 two bedsteads and bundled them up to take 
 to America. Then she reached under the bed- 
 stead and pulled me out by the heels. She 
 sold the bedsteads to a neighbor. And so our 
 household ended in Wales and we were on 
 our way to establish a new one in a far coun- 
 try. 
 
 41 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 As I said before, the feather beds were 
 mother's measure of wealth. Before she was 
 married she had begun saving for her first 
 feather bed. It had taken a long time to 
 acquire these two tickfuls of downy goose 
 feathers. The bed is the foundation of the 
 household. It is there that the babies are 
 born. There sleep restores the weary toiler 
 that he may rise and toil anew. And there at 
 last when work is done, the old folks fall into 
 a sleep that never ends. 
 
 We traveled steerage to Castle Garden. 
 Having passed the immigrant tests, we found 
 ourselves set out on the dock, free to go where 
 we pleased. But our baggage had disap- 
 peared. Some one had made off with our 
 precious feather beds ! 
 
 This was the first real tragedy of my moth- 
 er's life. AH the joy of setting foot in the new 
 land was turned to dismay. The stored-up 
 pleasure with which she awaited the greeting 
 of her husband was dashed in a moment, like 
 sweet water flung upon the ground. When I 
 saw the anguish in my mother's face, I was 
 sobered to life's responsibilities. The song 
 had died out of her heart, and I must make 
 it sing again. While she was crying in dis- 
 
 42 
 
THE LOST FEATHER BED 
 
 traction, I wrapped my own tearful face in 
 her skirts and prayed to God that I might 
 grow up in a day — that He would make my 
 arms strong so I could go to work at once 
 earning money to replace the lost feather 
 beds. I was then not quite eight years old. It 
 was early in April, 1881. Before the month was 
 out I had found a job in the new country and 
 was earning money. I gave all my earnings 
 to my mother. I have been earning money 
 ever since. As long as I lived at home I 
 turned over all my wages to my mother. 
 When I went away I sent her weekly a per- 
 centage of my earnings. This I have ever 
 continued to do. 
 
 My love for my mother and her grief at the 
 loss of the feather beds turned a careless boy 
 into a serious money-maker. This led to the 
 study of economics and finance. A man's 
 destiny is often made by trifles light as 
 feathers. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 HUNTING FOR LOST CHILDREN 
 
 The loss of our baggage was only the be- 
 ginning 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 expe- 
 rience was trying, but her stout heart faced it 
 calmly. In the Old World, her folks and 
 father's folks had been rated as prosperous 
 people. They always had good food in the 
 larder and meat on Sunday, which was more 
 than many had. They were the owners of 
 feather beds, while many never slept on any- 
 thing but straw. True they could not raise the 
 
 44 " 
 
HUNTING FOR LOST CHILDREN 
 
 passage money to America until father came 
 and earned it — that would have been riches 
 in Wales. Now we were in America hungry 
 and penniless, and hard was the bed that we 
 should he on. 
 
 From Pittsburgh father had sent us rail- 
 road tickets, and these tickets were waiting 
 for us at the railroad office. All we would 
 have to do would be to hold our hunger in 
 check until we should reach Hubbard, Ohio, 
 where a kinsman had established a home. 
 But while mother was piloting her family to 
 the depot, two of the children got lost. She 
 had reached Castle Garden with six children 
 and her household goods. Now her goods 
 were gone and only four of the children re- 
 mained. My sister was ten and I was eight; 
 we were the oldest. The baby, one year old, 
 and the next, a toddler of three, mother had 
 carried in her arms. But two boys, Walter 
 and David, four and six years old, had got 
 lost in the traffic Mother took the rest of us 
 to a hotel and locked us in a room while she 
 went out to search for the missing ones. For 
 two days she tramped the streets visiting 
 police stations and making inquiry every- 
 where. At night she would return to us and 
 
 45 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 report that she had found no trace of little 
 Walter and David. To try to picture the mis- 
 ery of those scenes is beyond me. I can only 
 say that the experience instilled in me a last- 
 ling terror. The fear of being parted from my 
 parents and from my brothers and sisters, 
 then implanted in my soul, has borne its fruit 
 in after-life. 
 
 Finally mother found the boys in a rescue 
 home for lost children. Brother David, curly- 
 haired and red-cheeked, had so appealed to 
 the policeman who found them that he had 
 made application to adopt the boy and was 
 about to take him to his own home. 
 
 After finding the children, mother stood on 
 Broadway and, gazing at the fine buildings 
 and the good clothes that all classes wore in 
 America, she felt her heart swell with hope. 
 And she said aloud: "This is the place for 
 my boys." 
 
 Every one had treated her with kindness. 
 A fellow countryman had lent her money to 
 pay the hotel bill, telling her she could pay it 
 back after she had joined her husband. And 
 so we had passed through the gateway of the 
 New World as thousands of other poor fam- 
 ilies had done. And our temporary hard- 
 
 46 
 
HUNTING FOR LOST CHILDREN 
 
 ships had been no greater than most immi- 
 grants encountered in those days. 
 
 I later learned from a Bohemian of the 
 trials his mother met with on her first days in 
 New York. He told me that she and her three 
 children, the smallest a babe in arms, tramped 
 the streets of New York for days looking in 
 vain for some one who could speak their 
 native tongue. They slept at night in door r 
 ways, and by day wandered timid and terri- 
 fied through the streets. 
 
 "At last a saloon-keeper saw that we were 
 famishing," the Bohemian told me. "He was 
 a — a — Oh, what do you call them in your 
 language? I can think of the Bohemian word 
 but not the English." 
 
 "What was he like?" I asked to help find 
 the word. "Red-headed? Tall? Fat?" 
 
 "No; he was one of those people who 
 usually run clothing stores and are always 
 having a 'SALE.' " 
 
 "Jew," I said. 
 
 "Yes, he was a Jew saloon-keeper. He took 
 pity on us and took us into his saloon and 
 gave us beer, bread and sausages. We were 
 so nearly starved that we ate too much and 
 our stomachs threw it up. The saloon-keeper 
 
 47 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 sent word to the Humane Society, and they 
 came and put us on the train for Chicago, 
 where our father was waiting for us." 
 
 The Bohemians saved from starvation by 
 the pity of a Jewish saloon-keeper is a sample 
 of how our world was running fifty years ago. 
 Who can doubt that we have a better world 
 to-day? And the thing that has made it bet- 
 ter is the thing that Jew exhibited, human 
 sympathy. 
 
 When I found myself head of the Labor 
 Department one of my earliest duties was to 
 inspect the immigrant stations at Boston and 
 New York. In spite of complaints, they were 
 being conducted to the letter of the law; to 
 correct the situation it was only necessary to 
 add sympathy and understanding to the en- 
 forcement of the law. 
 
 An American poet in two lines told the 
 whole truth about human courage : 
 
 "The bravest are the tenderest, 
 The loving are the daring." 
 
 Tenderness and human sympathy to the 
 alien passing through Ellis Island does not 
 mean that we are weak, or that the unfit alien 
 is welcome. The tenderer we treat the immi- 
 
 48 
 
HUNTING FOR LOST CHILDREN 
 
 grant who seeks our hospitality, the harder 
 will we smash him when he betrays us. 
 That's what "the bravest are the tenderest" 
 means. He who is tenderest toward the 
 members of his household is bravest in beat- 
 ing back him who would destroy that house. 
 
 For example, I received a hurry-up call for 
 more housing at Ellis Island in the early days *■ 
 of my administration. The commissioner 
 told me he had five hundred more anarchists 
 than he had roofs to shelter. 
 
 "Have these anarchists been duly con- 
 victed?" I asked. 
 
 He said they had been, and were awaiting 
 deportation. 
 
 I told the commissioner not to worry about 
 finding lodging for his guests; they would be 
 on their way before bedtime. 
 
 "But there is no ship sailing so soon," he 
 said. "They will have to have housing till 
 a ship sails." 
 
 Now this country has a shortage of houses 
 and a surplus of ships. There aren't enough 
 roofs to house the honest people, and there 
 are hundreds of ships lying idle. Let the hon- 
 est people have the houses, and the anarchists 
 have the ships. I called up the Shipping 
 
 49 
 
THE ffiON PUDDLER 
 
 Board, borrowed a ship, put the Red crim- 
 inals aboard and they went sailing, sailing, 
 over the bounding main, and many a stormy 
 wind shall blow "ere Jack come home again." 
 On the other hand I discovered a family 
 that had just come to America and was about 
 to be deported because of a technicality. The 
 family consisted of a father and mother and 
 four small children. The order of deporta- 
 tion had been made and the family had been 
 put aboard a ship about to sail. I learned 
 that the children were healthy and right- 
 minded; the mother was of honest working 
 stock with a faith in God and not in anarchy. 
 I had been one of such a family entering this 
 port forty years ago. Little did I dream then 
 that I would ever be a member of a Presi- 
 dent's Cabinet with power to wipe away this 
 woman's tears and turn her heart's sorrow- 
 ing into a song of joy. I wrote the order of 
 admission, and the family was taken from 
 the departing ship just before it sailed. I told 
 the mother that the baby in her arms might be 
 secretary of labor forty years hence. 
 
CHAPTER VH 
 
 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 any American library. 
 But I wanted to explain here that a muck 
 roller is not a muck raker, but a worker in 
 raw iron. 
 
 When we boarded the train for Ohio, 
 mother had nothing to look after except the 
 six children. When the porter asked her 
 where her baggage was, she smiled sadly and 
 said that was a question for a wiser head than 
 
 51 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 hers to answer. She was glad enough to have 
 all her babies safe. Everything we owned 
 was on our backs. Our patient father had 
 toiled for months in Pittsburgh and had sent 
 us nearly every cent to pay our transportation 
 from the Old World. Now he was out of a 
 job, and we were coming to him without as 
 much as a bag of buns in our hands. 
 
 Before leaving New York, I want to tell 
 what kind of city it was in those days. 
 
 In a recent magazine article a writer pic- 
 turing our arrival at Castle Garden said that 
 we "climbed the hill into Broadway and 
 gazed around at the highest buildings we had 
 ever seen." But there were no tall buildings 
 in New York at that time. The spires of 
 Trinity Church and St. Paul's towered above 
 everything. And we had seen such churches 
 in the Old Country. Brooklyn Bridge had 
 just been built and it overtopped the town 
 like a syrup pitcher over a plate of pancakes. 
 The tallest business blocks were five or six 
 stories high, and back in Wales old Lord 
 Tredegar, the chief man of our shire, lived in 
 a great castle that was as fine as any of them. 
 
 The steel that made New York a city in the 
 sky was wrought in my own time. My father 
 
 52 
 
HARD SLEDDING IN AMERICA 
 
 and his sons helped puddle the iron that has 
 braced this city's rising towers. A town that 
 crawled now stands erect. And we whose 
 backs were bent above the puddling hearths 
 know how it got its spine. A mossy town of 
 wood and stone changed in my generation to 
 a towering city of glittering glass and steel. 
 "All of which" — I can say in the words of the 
 poet — "all of which I saw and part of 
 which I was." 
 
 The train that was taking us to Ohio was 
 an Erie local, and the stops were so numerous 
 that we thought we should never get there. 
 A man on the train bought ginger bread and 
 pop and gave us kids a treat. It has been my 
 practise ever since to do likewise for alien 
 youngsters that I meet on trains. 
 
 "When we reached Hubbard, father met us 
 and took us to an uncle's. We did not stop 
 to wash the grime of travel from our faces 
 until after we had filled our stomachs. Once 
 refreshed with food, our religion returned to 
 us, in the desire to be clean and to establish 
 a household. I learned then that food is the 
 first thing in the world. Cleanliness may be 
 next to godliness, but food is ahead of them 
 all, and without food man loses his cleanli- 
 
 53 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 ness, godliness and everything else worth 
 having. When I wish to sound out a man, 
 I ask him if he has ever been hungry. If I 
 find he has never missed a meal in his life, I 
 know his education has been neglected. For 
 I believe that experience is the foremost 
 teacher. I have learned something from 
 every experience I ever had, and I hold that 
 Providence has been kind to me in favoring 
 me with a lot of rather tough adventures. 
 
 Our hardships on entering America taught 
 me sympathy and filled me with a desire to 
 help others. I have heard aliens say that 
 America had not treated them with hospital- 
 ity, and that this had made them bitter, and 
 now these aliens would take revenge by tear- 
 ing down America. This is a he that can not 
 fool me. My hardships did not turn me bit- 
 ter. And I know a thousand others who had 
 harder struggles than I. And none of them 
 showed the yellow streak. The Pilgrim 
 Fathers landed in the winter when there were 
 no houses. Half of them perished from hard- 
 ship in a single year. Did they turn anarch- 
 ists? 
 
 The man who says that hard sledding in 
 America made a yellow cur out of him fools 
 54 
 
HARD SLEDDING IN AMERICA 
 
 no one. He was born a yellow cur. Hard 
 sledding in America produced the man who 
 said: "With malice toward none; with char- 
 ity for all." 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 MY FIRST REGULAR JOB 
 
 We stayed a week with father's brother in 
 Hubbard. Then we went to Sharon, Pennsyl- 
 vania, 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 
 lived offered no room for gardens. Mother 
 wanted sunlight and green grass such as we 
 had about Tredegar. There Lord Tredegar 
 had his beautiful castle in the midst of a park. 
 On certain days this great park was open to 
 the villagers, and the children came to picnic, 
 and Lord Tredegar gave them little cakes and 
 56 
 
MY FIRST REGULAR JOB 
 
 tea in doll-size cups. Doubtless he looked 
 upon us as "my people." 
 
 But the lords of steel in Pittsburgh were too 
 new at the game to practise the customs of 
 the nobility in beautifying their surroundings. 
 The mills had made things ugly and the place 
 was not what mother thought it ought to be 
 for bringing up children. So father took us 
 back to Sharon, and there we had sunlight 
 and grass and trees. We rented a neat little 
 company-house with a big garden in the rear, 
 where we raised enough potatoes to supply 
 our table. There were window boxes filled 
 with morning-glories, and lilacs grew in the 
 yard. The company had planted those lilacs 
 to nourish the souls of the worker's children, 
 They gave me joy, and that is why the Moose- 
 heart grounds are filled with lilac bushes. 
 
 As soon as we landed in Sharon I started 
 out to earn money. Those feather beds were 
 on my mind and I couldn't rest easy until we 
 should replace them. Neither could the rest 
 of the family. I have often told how I scraped 
 up some capital and invested it in a shoe-shin- 
 ing outfit. Nearly every traveling man who 
 came to the hotel allowed me to shine his 
 shoes. The townsfolk let their shoes go gray 
 
 57 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 all week, but the gay commercial travelers all 
 were dudes and dressed like Sunday every 
 day. They brought the new fashions to town 
 and were looked upon as high-toned fellows. 
 Their flashy get-up caught the girls, which 
 made the town-boys hate them. But I liked 
 them very well because they brought me 
 revenue. "Where a man's treasure is, there 
 is his heart also," says the proverb, and my 
 experience proved it true. On my first visit 
 to the hotel I got acquainted with the land- 
 lord and he put me on his pay-roll. Behind 
 the hotel was a cow pen where the milk for 
 the guests was drawn fresh from the cows. 
 The cows had to be driven to a pasture in the 
 morning and back at night. I got a dollar and 
 a quarter a month for driving the cows. And 
 so I had found a paying job within thirty 
 days after landing in America. The cost of 
 pasturage was a dollar a month for each cow. 
 That was less than four cents a day for cow 
 feed to produce two gallons of milk, or about 
 two cents a gallon. The wages of the girls 
 who milked them and my wages for driving 
 them amounted to three cents a gallon. In 
 other words, the cost of labor in getting the 
 milk from the cows more than doubled the 
 
 58 
 
MY FIRST REGULAR JOB 
 
 cost of the milk. This was my first lesson in 
 political economy. I learned that labor costs 
 are the chief item in fixing the priee of any- 
 thing. 
 
 The less labor used in producing milk, the 
 cheaper the milk will be. The reason wages 
 were high in America was because America 
 was the land of labor-saving machinery. 
 Little labor was put on any product, and so 
 the product was cheap, like the landlord's 
 milk. In the iron industry, for instance, the 
 coal mines and iron ore lay near the mills, 
 as the landlord's pasture was near his hotel. 
 To bring the coal and ore to the blast furnaces 
 took little labor, just as my driving in the 
 cows cost the landlord but four cents a day. 
 Next to the blast furnaces stood the mixer, the 
 Bessemer open hearth furnaces, the ingot 
 stripper building, the soaking pits and then 
 the loading yards with their freight cars 
 where the finished product in the form of 
 wire, rails or sky-scraper steel is shipped 
 away. 
 
 Because the landlord had his cows milked 
 at the back door of his hotel the milk was 
 still warm when it was carried into his 
 kitchen. And so the steel mills are grouped 
 
 59 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 so closely that a single heat sometimes carries 
 the steel from the Bessemer hearth through 
 all the near-by machines until it emerges as a 
 finished product and is loaded on the railroad 
 cars while it is still warm. It was this saving 
 of labor and fuel that made American steel 
 the cheapest steel in the world. And that's 
 why the wages of steel and iron workers in 
 America are the highest in the world. 
 
 Father was in the mills getting these good 
 wages, though no puddler was ever paid for 
 all the work he does, and all of us young 
 Davises were eager to grow up so that we 
 could learn the trade and get some of that 
 good money ourselves. My hands itched for 
 labor, and I wanted nothing better than to be 
 big enough to put a finger in this industry 
 that was building up America before my very 
 eyes. I have always been a doer and a build- 
 er, it was in my blood and the blood of my 
 tribe, as it is born in the blood of beavers. 
 When I meet a man who is a loafer and a 
 destroyer, I know he is alien to me. I fear 
 him and all his breed. The beaver is a build- 
 er and the rat is a destroyer; yet they both 
 belong to the rodent race. The beaver har- 
 vests bis food in the summer; he builds a 
 
 60 
 
MY FIRST REGULAR JOB 
 
 house and stores that food for the winter. 
 The rat sneaks to the food stores of others: 
 he eats what he wants and ruins the rest and 
 then runs and hides in his hole. He lives in 
 the builder's house, but he is not a builder. 
 He undermines that house; he is a rat. 
 
 Some men are by nature beavers, and some 
 are rats; yet they all belong to the human 
 race. The people that came to this country 
 in the early days were of the beaver type and 
 they built up America because it was in their 
 nature to build. Then the rat-people began 
 coming here, to house under the roof that 
 others built. And they try to undermine and 
 ruin it because it is in their nature to destroy. 
 They call themselves anarchists. 
 
 A civilization rises when the beaver-men 
 outnumber the rat-men. When the rat-men 
 get the upper hand the civilization falls. Then 
 the rats turn and eat one another and that 
 is the end. Beware of breeding rats in 
 America. 
 
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 ac- 
 quainted 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 bearer of 
 bad news. Accidents happened in the mines 
 and iron mills. And when a man was killed, 
 it often meant his wife and babies would face 
 hunger, for the jobs were not the kind for 
 women and children; muscular men were 
 needed. Aside from the occupation of house- 
 wife, there was nothing for a woman to do in 
 those days except to take in washing or sew- 
 ing. 
 
 62 
 
THE SCATTERED FAMILY 
 
 Of the many death messages that I bore to 
 the workers' homes in Sharon, few found a 
 home that was able to last a day after the 
 burial of the bread-winner. He had failed to 
 make provision for such an accident,— no 
 savings in the bank, no life insurance. As 
 soon as the worker was stricken his children 
 were at the mercy of the world. I saw so 
 much of this, that the pity of it entered deep 
 into my boy-heart and never afterward could 
 I forget it. 
 
 I talked with the station agent, the banker 
 and the hotel keeper. The station agent had 
 money in the bank which he was saving to 
 educate his boy to be a telegrapher. He also 
 carried life insurance. "If I should die," he 
 said, "my wife would collect enough insur- 
 ance to start a boarding-house. My boy 
 would have money enough to learn a trade. 
 Then he could get as good a job as I have." 
 The hotel keeper told me that if he should die 
 his wife could run the hotel just the same, it 
 being free of debt and earning enough money 
 so that she could hire a man to do the work 
 he had been doing. The banker owned bonds 
 and if he died the bonds would go right on 
 earning money for his children. 
 
 63 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 These men were capitalists and their future 
 was provided for. Most of the mill-workers 
 were only laborers, they had no capital and 
 the minute their labors ended they were done 
 for. The workers were kind-hearted, and 
 when a fellow was killed in the mill or died 
 of sickness they went to his widow and with 
 tears in their eyes reached into their pockets 
 and gave her what cash they had. I never 
 knew a man to hang back when a collection 
 for a widow was being taken. Contributions 
 sometimes were as high as five dollars. It 
 made a heartrending scene : the broken body 
 of a once strong man lying under a white 
 sheet; the children playing around and laugh- 
 ing (if they were too young to know what it 
 meant) ; the mother frantic with the thought 
 that her brood was now homeless ; and the big 
 grimy workers wiping their tears with a rough 
 hand and putting silver dollars into a hat. 
 
 With this money and the last wages of the 
 dead man, the widow paid for the funeral and 
 sometimes bought a ticket to the home of 
 some relative who would give her her "keep" 
 in return for her labor in the house. Other 
 relatives might each take one of the children 
 "to raise," who, thus scattered, seldom if ever 
 
 64 
 
THE SCATTERED FAMILY 
 
 got together again. When I became an iron 
 worker there were several fellows in our 
 union who didn't know whether they had a 
 relative on earth. One of them, Bill Will- 
 iams, said to me: "Jim, no wonder you're 
 always happy. You've got so many brothers 
 that there's always two of you together, 
 whether it's playing in the band, on the ball 
 nine or working at the furnace. If I had a 
 brother around I wouldn't get the blues the 
 way I do. I've got some brothers somewhere 
 in this world, but I'll probably never know 
 where they are." 
 
 Then he told how his father had died when 
 he was three years old. There were several 
 children, and they were taken by relatives. 
 He was sent to his grandmother, whose name 
 was Williams. That was not his name. 
 Before he was seven both his grandparents 
 died and he was taken by a farmer who called 
 him Bill. The farmer did not send him to 
 school and he grew up barely able to write 
 his name, Will Williams, which was not his 
 real name. He didn't even know what his 
 real name was. 
 
 "Probably my brothers are alive," he said, 
 "but what chance have I got of ever finding 
 
 65 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 them when I don't know what the family 
 name is. Maybe they've all got new names 
 now like I have. Maybe I've met my own 
 brothers and we never knew it. I'd give 
 everything in the world, if I had it, to look 
 into a man's face and know that he was my 
 brother. It must be a wonderful feeling." 
 
 These things are the tragedies of the poor. 
 And although such a misfortune never hap- 
 pened to me, this problem stared me in the 
 face when I began carrying those fatal tele- 
 grams. I tackled the problem with a boyish 
 mind. I soon resolved it into these proposi- 
 tions: 
 
 When a laborer dies his little children are 
 scattered to the winds. Brothers and sisters 
 may never see one another again. 
 
 When a man with property dies, his chil- 
 dren are kept together. Their future is made 
 safe by the property. 
 
 Labor provides for to-day. Property pro' 
 vides for to-morrow. 
 
 That truth was driven into my mind when 
 I saw one family after another scattered by 
 the death of a laborer. A merchant in Sharon 
 died, and his children, after the funeral, kept 
 right on going to school. There was no doubt- 
 
 66 
 
THE SCATTERED FAMILY 
 
 ing the truth of my rule: Labor makes the 
 present day safe — but the present day only. 
 Capital safeguards the future. 
 
 From that day on, I argued that we should 
 buy a home and save a little every day for 
 capital. It was our duty thus to protect our- 
 selves, should our father die, against being 
 scattered among strangers. 
 
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 sehoolboys 
 who were not Welsh delighted in teasing us 
 by applying the uncomplimentary nickname. 
 This once resulted at the Sharon opera-house, 
 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 Eng- 
 lishmen were penetrating the mysterious 
 jungles of Africa, and I was their native guide 
 and porter. They had me all blacked up like 
 a negro minstrel, but this wasn't a funny 
 show, it was a drama of mystery and terror. 
 While I was guiding the English travelers 
 through the jungle of the local stage, we 
 penetrated into the land of the wall-eyed can- 
 nibals. 
 
 The cannibals captured me and prepared 
 68 
 
MELODRAMA BECOMES COMEDY 
 
 to eat me in full view of the audience while 
 the Englishmen behind the trees looked on in 
 horror. The cannibals, who were also supers 
 led by an actor of the "troupe," set up a hot 
 pot to boil my bones in. I was bound hand 
 and foot, while the cannibals, armed with 
 spears, danced around me in a heathen cere- 
 mony, chanting a voodoo chant and reciting 
 a rigmarole by which cannibals are supposed 
 to make their human feast on a sacred rite. 
 As they danced about me in a circle, they 
 sang: 
 
 "Is it an ox? Him-yah, him-yah." And 
 they jabbed their spears into me. Some of 
 the supers jabbed me pretty hard, among 
 them Babe Durgon, who delighted in torment- 
 ing me. 
 
 "Is it a sheep? Him-yah, him-yah." Again 
 they jabbed me, and I was so mad I was cuss- 
 ing them under my breath. 
 
 "Is it a pig? Him-yah, him-yah." 
 
 The audience was breathless with tense ex- 
 citement. 
 
 "Is it a goat?" 
 
 The entire gallery broke into a whirlwind 
 roar : "Yes ! yes ! He's a goat." 
 
 Laughter rocked the audience. They all 
 69 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 knew I was Welsh and saw the joke. The 
 horror and suspense had been so great that 
 when it broke with comic relief the house was 
 really hysterical. It stopped the show. 
 
 I played supernumerary parts in many 
 shows that winter including Richard HI and 
 other Shakespearean plays. At the battle of 
 Bosworth field where Richard cries: "A 
 horse, a horse; my kingdom for a horse," the 
 supers in the army were clattering their 
 swords on the opposing shields in a great hub- 
 bub and shouting, "Hay, hay hay!" I was of 
 a thrifty turn of mind, and said: "Hold on, 
 boys. Don't order too much hay until we 
 see whether he gets the horse or not." 
 
 A hypnotist came to the opera-house and 
 I volunteered to be hypnotized. He couldn't 
 hypnotize me. I felt rather bad about it. I 
 was out of the show. Later I learned that all 
 of the "Perfessor's" best subjects came with 
 him under salary, and the local boys who 
 made good were faking like the professionals. 
 The whole thing was a cheat and I had not 
 caught on. I was too serious-minded to think 
 of faking. But several of the boys took to it 
 naturally, and among them was Babe Durgon, 
 the bully. He could be hypnotized and I 
 
 70 
 
MELODRAMA BECOMES COMEDY 
 
 couldn't. But several years later I had the 
 satisfaction of "hypnotizing" him myself, as 
 I told about in my first chapter. 
 
 Although I always regarded myself as a 
 humorist, the impression I made on my com- 
 rades was that of a serious and religious fel- 
 low. I quoted the Bible to them so often that 
 they nicknamed me "the Welsh Parson." 
 
 I was the general errand boy of the town. 
 Everybody knew me. And when there was 
 a job of passing hand-bills for the opera- 
 house, or ringing bells for auction sales, I 
 always got the job. Every nickel that rolled 
 loose in the town landed in my pocket and I 
 took it home to mother. Mother was my idol 
 and what she said was law. One night I heard 
 the band playing and started down-town. 
 Mother told me to be sure to be in bed by 
 nine o'clock. I found that a minstrel show 
 had been thrown out of its regular route by 
 a flood and was playing our town unex- 
 pectedly. The stage hands knew me and 
 passed me in. I was seeing a high-priced show 
 for nothing. But when it came nine o'clock, 
 I went home. I told my mother that I had 
 walked out of the most gorgeous minstrel 
 show. She asked me why and I told her be- 
 
 71 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 cause she wanted me to be in bed by nine 
 o'clock. 
 
 "Why, Jimmy," she said, "I wanted you to 
 be in bed so you wouldn't be in bad company. 
 It would have been all right for you to have 
 stayed at the minstrel show. All I want to 
 know is that you are in good company." 
 
 I guess mother thought I was a bit soft, but 
 I had seen the best part of the show, as in 
 those days the curtain rose at seven forty-five. 
 
 Minstrel shows were the greatest delight of 
 my youth. I learned to dance and could sing 
 all the songs and get off the jokes. Dupree & 
 Benedict's were the first minstrels I ever saw. 
 I marched in their parade and carried the 
 drum. George Evans (Honey Boy) was a 
 life-long friend. We were born within three 
 miles of each other in Wales and came to this 
 country at about the same time. 
 
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 rela- 
 tion or not, we regarded all Welshmen as be- 
 longing 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 
 hospitality and went out of our house with 
 our blessings upon him. This form of com- 
 munity life was the social law in all the cot- 
 tages of the Welsh. 
 
 It was like the law of tobacco among 
 Americans. Tobacco has always been "na- 
 tionalized" in America, and so have matches, 
 your pipe is your own, but your tobacco and 
 
 73 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 matches belong to everybody. So it was with 
 food and shelter in the Welsh colony at Shar- 
 on. Each newcomer from the Old Country 
 was entitled to free bed and board until he 
 could get a job in the mills. When he found 
 a job his money was his; we never expected 
 him to pay for the food he had eaten any 
 more than you would expect pay for the 
 tobacco and matches you furnish your 
 friends. 
 
 These sojourners in our family were heroes 
 to us kids. They brought us news from the 
 Old World, and each one had tricks or tales 
 that were new to us. One man showed us 
 that we could put our hand on the bottom of 
 a boiling teakettle and find the bottom cool. 
 Another told us about milking goats in the 
 Old Country. We asked him how much milk 
 a goat would give. He said, "About a thim- 
 bleful," and we thought him very witty. 
 Another had shipped as an "able seaman" to 
 get his passage to America. When out at sea 
 it was discovered he didn't know one rope 
 from another. During a storm he and the 
 mate had a terrible fight. "The sea was 
 sweeping the deck and we were ordered to 
 reef a shroud. I didn't know how, and the 
 
 74 
 
KEEPING OPEN HOUSE 
 
 mate called me a name that no Welshman 
 will stand for. I thought we were all going to 
 be drowned anyhow, and I might as well die 
 with my teeth in his neck. So I flew into him 
 and we fought like wildcats. I couldn't kill 
 him and he couldn't kill me. And the sea 
 didn't sweep us overboard. But after that 
 fight the mate let me do as I pleased for the 
 rest of the voyage." 
 
 Knowing how strong are the arms of an 
 iron worker and what a burly man is a ship's 
 mate, we realized that the fight must have 
 been a struggle between giants. 
 
 We were fluent readers, much better read- 
 ers than our parents, but we had no books. 
 We took the Youth's Companion, and it was 
 the biggest thing in our lives. Every week we 
 were at the post-office when the Companion 
 was due. We could hardly wait, we were so 
 eager to see what happened next in the "con- 
 tinued" story. Surely so good a children's 
 paper as the Youth's Companion could never 
 be found in any country but America, Ameri- 
 ca was the land of children, and that's why 
 parents broke their old-home ties and made 
 the hard pilgrimage to America; it was for 
 the benefit of their children. 
 
 75 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 Our home was a happy one, for we children 
 were fond of one another and all loved the 
 father and mother who worked so hard for 
 us. We were the first to realize that our 
 home was insecure, upheld by a single prop, 
 our father's labor. The breaking of his right 
 arm might have broken up our home. We 
 wanted to acquire property so that mother 
 would be safe. For we knew that God was 
 a just God. He did not ordain that one class 
 should labor and be insecure while another 
 class owned property and was safe. I learned 
 that the banker, the hotel keeper and the sta- 
 tion agent had all been poor boys like myself. 
 They started with nothing but their hands to 
 labor with. They had worked hard and saved 
 a part of their wages, and this had given them 
 "a start." The hotel keeper had been a hack 
 driver. He slept in the haymow of a livery 
 stable. He had to meet the train that came 
 at two o'clock in the morning. No other man 
 was willing to have his sleep broken at such 
 an hour. He hated to lose the sleep, but he 
 wanted the money. At the end of four years 
 he had saved a thousand dollars. He wanted 
 to buy a hotel but needed more money. The 
 banker, knowing he was a stayer, lent him the 
 
 76 
 
KEEPING OPEN HOUSE 
 
 cash he needed, and so he became a property 
 owner. He no longer slept in the haymow 
 but had a room of his own and other rooms 
 to rent to the "high-toned traveling men." 
 
 From this I learned that laborers became 
 capitalists when they saved their money. 
 Right then I made up my mind that some day 
 mother would own a home. If father couldn't 
 save the money to buy it, I would. Years 
 afterward a wealthy Pittsburgh man who had 
 just built a fine residence in the fashionable 
 section of that town found himself in diffi- 
 culties and unable to occupy the house. He 
 offered it to me at a bargain. So I took my 
 parents to this place and told them it was to 
 be theirs. Mother declared that she certainly 
 never dreamed of having a "magnificent 
 home like this." She seemed to be greatly 
 pleased. But now I know that the sparkle in 
 her eyes was for me. Her boy had done all 
 this for his mother. If I had given her a pair 
 of shoes that pinched her feet, she would 
 have worn them smiling for my sake. Father 
 looked out the windows at the neighboring 
 residences. "Who lives there?" he asked. 
 "And who lives yonder?" I told him the 
 great names of his neighbors. 
 
 77 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 "Son," he said, "you do not wish to lock 
 your parents up. in a prison, do you?" 
 
 Then he explained: "We do not know 
 these people. We are too old to make new 
 friends. We would never be at ease here, we 
 would be lonely. We like the little home 
 that we bought with our own savings. It has 
 become a part of ourselves; it fits us like the 
 wrinkles on our faces. If we moved here our 
 old friends would never come to see us. This 
 magnificence would scare them away. No, 
 son. We thank you for offering us this house, 
 but it is not for us. We will stay in the little 
 cottage where our old friends will be free to 
 come and light a pipe and chat and drowse 
 away the evening hours that yet remain." 
 
 How wise he was! He knew the fitness of 
 things. His simple comforts, his old friends, 
 these he valued more than riches, and the 
 valuation that he put upon them was the right 
 one. 
 
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 Merri- 
 mac 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 fac- 
 tory. I picked the iron splinters from among 
 the good nails that had heads on them. This 
 taught me that many are marred in the mak- 
 ing. Those that are born with bad heads 
 must not be used in building a house or the 
 house will fall. In the head of the nail is its 
 power to hold fast. Men are like nails, some 
 have the hold-fast will in their heads. Others 
 have not. They were marred in the making. 
 They must be thrown aside and not used in 
 building the state, or the state will fall. 
 
 I put the good nails into kegs, and the head- 
 less nails and splinters were sent back to be 
 melted into window weights. Handling sharp 
 
 79 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 nails is hard on the hands. And the big half- 
 dollar that I earned was not unmarred with 
 blood. Every pay-day I took home my entire 
 earnings and gave them to mother. All my 
 brothers did the same. Mother paid the 
 household expenses, bought our clothing and 
 allotted us spending money and money for 
 Sunday-school. 
 
 This is a cynical age and I can imagine that 
 I hear somebody snicker when I confess the 
 fondness I had for the Sunday-school. I don't 
 want any one to think I am laying claim to the 
 record of having always been a good little 
 boy; nor that everything I did was wise. No; 
 I confess I did my share of deviltry, that some 
 of my deeds were foolish, and (to use the 
 slang of that time) I often got it in the neck. 
 Once I bantered a big fat boy to a fight. He 
 chased me and I ran and crawled into a place 
 so narrow that I knew he couldn't follow me. 
 I crawled under the floor of a shed that was 
 only about six inches above the ground. 
 Fatty was at least ten inches thick and I 
 thought I was safe. Rut he didn't try to crawl 
 under the floor after me. He went inside the 
 shed and found that the boards of the floor 
 sank beneath his weight like spring boards. 
 
 80 
 
MY HAND TOUCHES IRON 
 
 And there that human hippopotamus stood 
 jumping up and down while he mashed me 
 into the mud like a mole under a pile-driver. 
 I had showed that I had "a head on me like 
 a nail" when I crawled under that floor and 
 let Fatty step on me. There is a saying, "You 
 can't keep a good man down." But Fatty 
 kept me down, and so I must admit he was a 
 better man than I was. Some people say you 
 should cheer for the under-dog. But that 
 isn't always fair. The under-dog deserves 
 our sympathy, the upper-dog must be a better 
 dog or he couldn't have put the other dog 
 down. I give three cheers for the winner. 
 Any tribe that adopts the rule of always hiss- 
 ing the winner has found a real way to dis- 
 courage enterprise. 
 
 I owned a part interest in some pigeons 
 with a boy named Jack Thomas. The 
 pigeons' nests were in Jack's back yard. He 
 told me that my share of the eggs had rotted 
 and his share had hatched, so that my interest 
 in the young pigeons had died out and they 
 were all his now. I was sure it was a quibble 
 and that he was cheating me. It made me 
 mad and I sneaked up to the pigeon loft and 
 put a tiny pin prick in all the eggs in the nests. 
 
 81 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 This was invisible but it caused the eggs to rot 
 as he said mine had, and I felt that this was 
 only justice. Turn about is fair play. 
 
 When Jack's eggs didn't hatch he suspected 
 me, for I had been so foolish as to predict 
 that his eggs wouldn't hatch. And so he was 
 sure I was responsible, although he didn't 
 know how. In fact his mother had seen me 
 eDter the barn and had told Jack about it. 
 One day when I went to the pasture to get 
 the hotel keeper's cows, I ran into Jack hunt- 
 ing ground squirrels with his dog. He set his 
 dog chasing the cows and then ran away out 
 of my reach. The dog yelped at the cows' 
 heels and they galloped about the pasture in 
 a panic. I shouted to Jack to call off his dog 
 or there would be trouble the next time I met 
 him. But Jack, who was out of reach, shouted 
 encouragement instead. Round and round 
 the cattle raced with that howling dog scaring 
 them into fits. At last the dog tired of the 
 fun and trotted off to join Jack, who was dis- 
 appearing over the hill. I then tried to round 
 up the cows and get them out of the pasture. 
 But the brutes were wet with sweat and as 
 wild as deer. I saw that they could not be 
 milked in that condition and felt that Jack's 
 conduct was outrageous. He had not only 
 
 82 
 
MY HAND TOUCHES IRON 
 
 made trouble for me; he had injured the 
 hotel keeper. There would be no milk that 
 night fit to be used. 
 
 I started straight for Jack's home to tell his 
 mother of his lawless act. As I went along, 
 I turned the case over in my mind, and the 
 case grew stronger and stronger all the time. 
 Before I reached Jack's door I had satisfied 
 myself that his mother would be shocked at 
 the news and would at once cut a big switch 
 to give Jack the licking he deserved. 
 
 But when I began to tell Mrs. Thomas of 
 her son's crimp, she sided with Jack and 
 wouldn't listen to me. "Don't come to me 
 with your troubles, you nasty little whiffet," 
 she cried. "You started the whole thing when 
 you sneaked in and ruined Jack's pigeon eggs. 
 Now that you've got the worst of it you come 
 here with your tattle-tales. You ought to be 
 ashamed to show your face — " She had be- 
 come so threatening that I turned and ran. 
 My whole case had gone to pieces on her 
 sharp tongue like a toy balloon pricked with 
 a pin. I had been blowing it up until it got 
 so big I couldn't see anything else. It burst 
 right in my face, and there wasn't even a 
 scrap of rubber to tell where it had been. 
 
 This taught me one of the best lessons I 
 83 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 ever learned. By looking only at his side of 
 a case a man can kid himself into thinking 
 that he is wholly right, that his cause is 
 greater than himself and represents the rights 
 of the entire community. But a counter-blast 
 from the other side will deflate his balloon in 
 a second and he'll come down to earth with- 
 out even a parachute to soften the jolt when 
 he lands. 
 
 I learned that blood is not only thicker 
 than water, but it is thicker than curdled 
 milk, and you can't line up a mother against 
 her own child even if he chased the cows 
 until they got so wild they gave strawberry 
 pop instead of milk. Any argument that goes 
 contrary to human nature has struck a snag 
 before it is started. A man must come into 
 court with clean hands. I had started by 
 rotting the other fellow's eggs and he fin- 
 ished by souring my milk. I wanted justice 
 and I got it, but I didn't recognize it when 
 it landed on me with all four feet. Chickens 
 come home to roost, and my pigeons had 
 found a nesting-place on my anatomy; and 
 the spot they had chosen was right in the 
 neck. 
 
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 per- 
 formance is continuous, whose fire-eaters 
 have real flame to contend with, and whose 
 snake-charmers risk their lives in handling 
 great hissing, twisting red-hot serpents of 
 angry iron. 
 
 In this mill there is a constant din by day 
 and night. Patches of white heat glare from 
 the opened furnace doors like the teeth of 
 some great dark, dingy devil grinning across 
 the smoky vapors of the Pit Half naked, 
 
 85 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 soot-smeared fellows fight the furnace 
 hearths with hooks, rabbles and paddles. 
 Their scowling faces are lit with fire, like 
 sailors manning their guns in a night fight 
 when a blazing fire ship is bearing down 
 upon them. The sweat runs down their backs 
 and arms and glistens in the changing lights. 
 Brilliant blues and rays of green and bronze 
 come from the coruscating metal, molten yet 
 crystallizing into white-hot frost within the 
 furnace puddle. Flaming balls of woolly iron 
 are pulled from the oven doors, flung on a 
 two-wheeled serving tray, and rushed sput- 
 tering and flamboyant to the hungry mouth 
 of a machine, which rolls them upon its 
 tongue and squeezes them in its jaw like a 
 cow mulling over her cud. The molten slag 
 runs down red-hot from the jaws of this 
 squeezer and makes a luminous rivulet on 
 the floor like the water from the rubber roll- 
 ers when a washer-woman wrings out the 
 saturated clothes. Squeezed dry of its lumi- 
 nous lava, the white-hot sponge is drawn with 
 tongs to the waiting rollers — whirling anvils 
 that beat it into the shape they will. Every- 
 where are hurrying men, whirring flywheels, 
 moving levers of steam engines and the drum- 
 
 86 
 
SCENE IN A ROLLING MILL 
 
 like roar of the rolling machines, while here 
 and there the fruits of this toil are seen as 
 three or four fiery serpents shoot forth from 
 different trains of rollers, and are carried 
 away, wrought iron fit for bridging the creek, 
 shoeing the mule and hooping the barrel that 
 brings the farmers' apples into town. 
 
 "Life in these mills is a terrible life," the 
 reformers say. "Men are ground down to 
 scrap and are thrown out as wreckage." This 
 may be so, but my life was spent in the mills 
 and I failed to discover it. I went in a strip- 
 ling and grew into manhood with muscled 
 arms big as a bookkeeper's legs. The gases, 
 they say, will destroy a man's lungs, but I 
 worked all day in the mills and had wind 
 enough left to toot a clarinet in the band. 
 I lusted for labor, I worked and I liked it. 
 And so did my forefathers for generations 
 before me. It is no job for weaklings, but 
 neither was tree-felling, Indian fighting, road- 
 making and the subduing of a wild continent 
 to the hand of man as was done by the whole 
 tribe of Americans for the sheer joy of con- 
 quering the wild. 
 
 There is something in man that drives him 
 forward to do the world's work and build 
 
 87 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 bigger for the coming generations, just as 
 there is something in nature that causes new 
 growth to come out of old dirt and new 
 worlds to be continually spawned from the 
 ashes of old played-out suns and stars. When 
 nature ceases to mold new worlds from the 
 past decay, the universe will wither; and 
 when man loses the urge to build and goes «. 
 to tearing down, the end of his story is at 
 hand. 
 
 A tired Thomas whose wife supported him 
 by running a rooming house once asked me : 
 
 "How many do you 'spose there are in the 
 United States that don't have to work?" 
 
 "None," I replied, "except invalids and 
 cripples. Every healthy man in this country 
 has to work just the same as he has to 
 breathe. If you don't want to work it is be- 
 cause you're sick. I'm a well man, and I've 
 got to be working all the time or I'd go crazy. 
 I have no more desire to be idle like you than 
 I have a desire to wear women's clothes. It 
 is contrary to normal nature, and that's why 
 I say that any man that gets that way is a 
 sick man." 
 
 The fellow was a "free thinker," as he 
 called himself. He was too lazy to shave and 
 
 88 
 
SCENE IN A ROLLING MILL 
 
 his beard was always about two weeks ahead 
 of him. He was working out a plan for com- 
 munism in the United States. He believed 
 that enough work had now been done to 
 supply the race forever. It was just a ques- 
 tion of so evenly dividing the goods that all 
 men instead of a few could loaf the rest of 
 their years. 
 
 He had such a tired feeling that he didn't 
 have the ambition of an oyster. He didn't 
 have enough energy to realize he was all in. 
 He took it for granted that the whole race 
 was as tired as he was. 
 
 He thought he needed one of the Utopias 
 they talk so much about. What he needed 
 was a dose of castor-oil. I never knew a com- 
 munist in my life that was a well man. 
 
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 the 
 hot bath the right length of time, then pulling 
 it out and scraping off the hair. Farmers 
 learned this art by experience long before 
 the days of book farming. 
 
 And so the metal "pig boiler" ages ago 
 learned by experience how to make the 
 proper "heat" to boil the impurities out of 
 pig-iron, or forge iron, and change it into 
 
 90 
 
BOILING DOWN THE PIGS 
 
 that finer product, wrought iron. Pig-iron 
 contains silicon, sulphur and phosphorus, and 
 these impurities make it brittle so that a cast 
 iron teakettle will break at a blow, like a 
 china cup. Armor of this kind would have 
 been no good for our iron-clad ancestors. 
 When a knight in iron clothes tried to whip 
 a leather-clad peasant, the peasant could 
 have cracked him with a stone and his clothes 
 would have fallen off like plaster from the 
 ceiling. So those early iron workers learned 
 to puddle forge iron and make it into wrought 
 iron which is tough and leathery and can 
 not be broken by a blow. This process was 
 handed down from father to son, and in the 
 course of time came to my father and so to 
 me. None of us ever went to school and 
 learned the chemistry of it from books. We 
 learned the trick by doing it, standing with 
 our faces in the scorching heat while our 
 hands puddled the metal in its glaring bath. 
 And that is the way the farmer's son has 
 learned hog scalding from the time when our 
 ancient fathers got tired of eating bristles and 
 decided to take their pork clean shaven. 
 To-day there are books telling just how many 
 degrees of heat make the water right for 
 
 91 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 scalding hogs, and the metallurgists have 
 written down the chemical formula for pud- 
 dling iron. But the man who learns it from 
 a book can not do it. The mental knowledge 
 is not enough; it requires great muscular 
 skill like that of the heavyweight wrestler, 
 besides great physical endurance to withstand 
 the terrific heat. The worker's body is in 
 perfect physical shape and the work does not 
 injure him but only exhilarates him. No iron 
 worker can be a communist, for communists 
 all have inferior bodies. The iron worker 
 knows that his body is superior, and no sour 
 philosophy could stay in him, because he 
 would sweat it out of his pores as he sweats 
 out all other poisons. 
 
 The old man that I worked with when I 
 first entered the rolling mill was gray with 
 his sixty years of toil. Yet his eye was clear 
 and his back was straight and when he went 
 to the table he ate like a sixteen-year-old 
 and his sleep was dreamless. A man so old 
 must conserve his strength, and he made use 
 of his husky helper whenever he could to 
 save his own muscles and lengthen his endur- 
 ance. My business was to do the little chores 
 and save time for the helper. I teased up the 
 
 92 
 
BOILING DOWN THE PIGS 
 
 furnace, I leveled the fire, I dished the cinders 
 in to thicken the heat, and I watched the 
 cobbles. During the melting of the pig-iron 
 the furnace had to be kept as hot as coal 
 could make it. 
 
 Before the use of coal was discovered, the 
 ancient iron makers used charcoal. So iron 
 could only be made where there were forests 
 to give fuel. Even as late as 1840 the iron 
 smelters in Pennsylvania were using wood in 
 their furnaces. Our forefathers did not know 
 that coal would burn. And yet here lay the 
 coal, the ore and the limestone side by side, 
 which meant that Pittsburgh was to be the 
 iron capital of the world. But Americans will 
 not long sleep in the presence of such an 
 opportunity. Other races will. The Chinese 
 have slumbered for five thousand years 
 above a treasure trove of oil, coal and iron. 
 They never discovered its uses. Instead of 
 oil they nt themselves to bed with mutton 
 tallow. Instead of burning coal they put on 
 two pairs of pants when winter came. In 
 place of steel plows drawn by oil-burning 
 tractors they scratched the ground with a 
 wooden stick, and when the crop failed they 
 starved to death by millions. Witt our steel 
 
 93 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 ships we send bread to China to save them. 
 If they had the wit to use their resources 
 they could save themselves. In man's fight 
 against the hostile forces of nature, his safety 
 lies in applying his wit to the resources that 
 nature gave him. The Americans can do that. 
 There are others that can not. 
 
 I was riding on a train in Indiana when a 
 gypsy-looking youth came in and sat beside 
 me. His hair was black, his skin was yellow 
 and he was dressed in flashy American 
 clothes. He had a cock-sure air about him 
 that attracted my attention. I have seldom 
 seen a young man more pleased with himself. 
 He was entirely too cocky for me. He began 
 talking. He said he was a Syrian and was 
 worth a thousand dollars. Soon he would be 
 worth a million, he said. He was already put- 
 ting on his million-dollar airs. 
 
 "While selling bananas and ginger pop," 
 he told me, "I made some money and learned 
 the American ways. I have a brother in 
 South Bend who has made some money shin- 
 ing shoes. I am going to get my brother and 
 we will go back to the old home in Asia 
 Minor. The hills where we were born are full 
 
 94 
 
BOILING DOWN THE PIGS 
 
 of coal. The people call it black stone. They 
 do not know that it will burn. We will go 
 back there with our American knowledge and 
 set the world on fire." 
 
 There is a people who have been kicking 
 coal around for five thousand years and have 
 not yet learned that it will burn. Those hills 
 produced gypsies who travel around cheat- 
 ing, dickering and selling gewgaws that are 
 worth nothing. They come among a people 
 who have used their heads. From these 
 people they learned to heat a banana stand 
 with a little coal stove. Having mastered 
 that coal-stove principle, they are going back 
 to their native hills with black magic up their 
 sleeves. 
 
 "What a superior man am I," thought that 
 young tribesman swollen with vanity, al- 
 though he had done nothing. 
 
 This taught me that some of these thick- 
 headed tribes can be all swelled up with pride 
 when they have little to be proud of. 
 
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, symbol of his 
 trade, is a musical instrument and is heard in 
 the anvil chorus from Trovatore. In our roll- 
 ing mill we did not have an anvil on which 
 the "bloom" was beaten by a trip-hammer as 
 is done in the Old Country. The "squeezer" 
 which combines the functions of hammer and 
 anvil did the work instead. 
 
 96 
 
THE IRON BISCUITS 
 
 When I became my father's helper he 
 began teaching me to handle the machinery 
 of the trade. The puddling furnace has a 
 working door on a level with a man's stom- 
 ach. Working door is a trade name. Out in 
 the world all doors are working; if they don't 
 work they aren't doors (except cellar doors, 
 which are nailed down under the Volstead 
 Act). But the working door of a puddling 
 furnace is the door through which the pud- 
 dler does his work. It is a porthole opening 
 upon a sea of flame. The heat of these flames 
 would wither a man's body, and so they are 
 enclosed in a shell of steel. Through this 
 working door I put in the charge of "pigs" 
 that were to be boiled. These short pieces of 
 "mill iron" had been smelted from iron ore; 
 they had taken the first step on their journey 
 from wild iron to civilized iron. There isn't 
 much use for pig-iron in this world. You've 
 got to be better iron than that. Pig-iron has 
 no fiber; it breaks instead of bending. Build 
 a bridge of it and a gale will break it and it 
 will fall into the river. Some races are pig- 
 iron; Hottentots and Bushmen are pig-iron. 
 They break at a blow. They have been 
 smelted out of wild animalism, but they went 
 
 97 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 no further; they are of no use in this modern 
 world because they are brittle. Only the 
 wrought-iron races can do the work. All this 
 I felt but could not say in the days when I 
 piled the pig-iron in the puddling furnace 
 and turned with boyish eagerness to have my 
 father show me how. 
 
 Six hundred pounds was the weight of pig- 
 iron we used to put into a single hearth. 
 Much wider than the hearth was the fire 
 grate, for we needed a heat that was intense. 
 The flame was made by burning bituminous 
 coal. Vigorously I stoked that fire for thirty 
 minutes with dampers open and the draft 
 roaring while that pig-iron melted down like 
 ice-cream under an electric fan. You have 
 seen a housewife sweating over her oven to 
 get it hot enough to bake a batch of biscuits. 
 Her face gets pink and a drop of sweat 
 dampens her curls. Quite a horrid job she 
 finds it. But I had iron biscuits to bake; my 
 forge fire must be hot as a volcano. There 
 were five bakings every day and this meant 
 the shoveling in of nearly two tons of coal. 
 In summer I was stripped to the waist and 
 panting while the sweat poured down across 
 my heaving muscles. My palms and fingers, 
 
 98 
 
THE IRON BISCUITS 
 
 scorched by the heat, became hardened like 
 goat hoofs, while my skin took on a coat of 
 tan that it will wear forever. 
 
 What time I was not stoking the fire, I was 
 stirring the charge with a long iron rabble 
 that weighed some twenty-five pounds. Strap 
 an Oregon boot of that weight to your arm 
 and then do calisthenics ten hours in a room 
 so hot it melts your eyebrows and you will 
 know what it is like to be a puddler. But we 
 puddlers did not complain. There is men's 
 work to be done in this world, and we were 
 the men to do it. We had come into a coun- 
 try built of wood; we should change it to a 
 country built of steel and stone. There was 
 grandeur for us to achieve, like the Roman 
 who said, "I found Rome a city of brick and 
 left it a city of marble." 
 
 The spirit of building was in our blood; 
 we took pride in the mill, and the mill owners 
 were our captains. They honored us for our 
 strength and skill, they paid us and we were 
 loyal to them. We showed what bee men 
 call "the spirit of the hive." On holidays our 
 ball team played against the team of a neigh- 
 boring mill, and the owners and bosses were 
 on the sidelines coaching the men and yelling 
 
 99 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 like boys when a batter lifted a homer 
 over the fence. That was before the rattle 
 heads and fanatics had poisoned the well of 
 good fellowship and made men fear and hate 
 one another. Sometimes the Welsh would 
 play against the Irish or the English. At one 
 time most all the puddlers in America were 
 English, Irish or Welsh. 
 
 In these ball games, I am glad to say, I was 
 always good enough to make the team. After 
 telling of being a bandsman at thirteen and a 
 puddler at sixteen, I would like to say that 
 at seventeen I was batting more home runs 
 than Babe Ruth in his prime, but everything 
 I say must be backed up by the records, and 
 when my baseball record is examined it will 
 be found that my best playing on the diamond 
 was done in the band. 
 
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 slag. The iron oxide is put 
 in it to make it more basic for the chemical 
 reaction that is to take place. Adding the roll 
 scale had cooled the charge, and it was thick 
 like hoecake batter. I now thoroughly mixed 
 it with a rabble which is like a long iron hoe. 
 
 "Snake bake a hoecake, 
 And lef a frog to mind it; 
 
 Frog went away, an' 
 De lizard come and find it." 
 101 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 Any lizard attracted by my hoecake would 
 have to be a salamander — that fire-proof 
 creature that is supposed to live in flames. 
 For the cooling down of that molten batter 
 didn't go so far but that it still would make 
 too hot a mouthful for any creature alive. 
 
 The puddler's hand-rag is one of his most 
 important tools. It is about the size of a 
 thick wash-rag, and the puddler carries it in 
 the hand that clasps the rabble rod where it 
 is too hot for bare flesh to endure. 
 
 The melted iron contains carbon, sulphur 
 and phosphorus, and to get rid of them, espe- 
 cially the sulphur and phosphorus, is the ob- 
 ject of all this heat and toil. For it is the sul- 
 phur and phosphorus that make the iron 
 brittle. And brittle iron might as well not be 
 iron at all; it might better be clay. For a good 
 brick wall is stronger than a wall of brittle 
 iron. Yet nature will not give us pure iron. 
 She always gives it to us mixed with the stuff 
 that weakens it — this dross and brimstone. 
 Nature hands out no bonanzas, no lead-pipe 
 cinches to mankind. Many must claw for 
 everything he gets, and when he gets it, it is 
 mixed with dirt. And if he wants it clean, 
 he'll have to clean it with the labor of his 
 102 
 
WRESTING A PRIZE 
 
 hands. "Why can't we have a different sys- 
 tem than this?" I heard a theorist complain. 
 "I'll bite," I said. "Why can't we?" And I 
 went on boiling out the impurities in my 
 puddle. 
 
 Man's nature is like iron, never born in a 
 pure state but always mixed with elements 
 that weaken it. Envy, greed and malice are 
 mixed with every man's nature when he 
 comes into the world. They are the brim- 
 stone that makes him brittle. He is pig-iron 
 until he boils them out of his system. Sav- 
 ages and criminals are men who have not 
 tried to boil this dross out of their nature. 
 Lincoln was one who boiled it out in the fires 
 of adversity. He puddled his own soul till 
 the metal was pure, and that's how he got the 
 Iron Will that was strong enough to save a 
 nation. 
 
 My purpose in slackening my heat as soon 
 as the pig-iron was melted was to oxidize the 
 phosphorus and sulphur ahead of the carbon. 
 Just as alcohol vaporizes at a lower heat than 
 water, so sulphur and phosphorus oxidize at 
 a lower heat than carbon. When this reac- 
 tion begins I see light flames breaking through 
 the lake of molten slag in my furnace. Prob- 
 103 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 ably from such a sight as this the old-time 
 artists got their pictures of Hell. The flames 
 are caused by the burning of carbon monox- 
 ide from the oxidation of carbon. The slag 
 is basic and takes the sulphur and phosphorus 
 into combination, thus ending its combina- 
 tion with the iron. The purpose now is to 
 oxidize the carbon, too, without reducing the 
 phosphorus and sulphur and causing them to 
 return to the iron. We want the pure iron to 
 begin crystallizing out of the bath like butter 
 from the churning buttermilk. 
 
 More and more of the carbon gas comes out 
 of the puddle, and as it bubbles out the charge 
 is agitated by its escape and the "boil" is in 
 progress. It is not real boiling like the boiling 
 of a teakettle. When a teakettle boils the 
 water turns to bubbles of vapor and goes up 
 in the air to turn to water again when it gets 
 cold. But in the boiling iron puddle a chemi- 
 cal change is taking place. The iron is not 
 going up in vapor. The carbon and the oxy- 
 gen are. This formation of gas in the molten 
 puddle causes the whole charge to boil up 
 like an ice-cream soda. The slag overflows. 
 Redder than strawberry syrup and as hot as 
 the fiery lake in Hades it flows over the rim 
 1Q4 
 
WRESTING A PRIZE 
 
 of the hearth and out through the slag-hole. 
 My helper has pushed up a buggy there to 
 receive it. More than an eighth and some- 
 times a quarter of the weight of the pig-iron 
 flows off in slag and is carted away. 
 
 Meanwhile I have got the job of my life on 
 my hands. I must stir my boiling mess with 
 all the strength in my body. For now is my 
 chance to defeat nature and wring from the 
 loosening grip of her hand the pure iron she 
 never intended to .give up- 
 
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 chok- 
 ing, 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 por- 
 ridge is pasty iron, and the heat of my kitchen 
 is so great that if my body was not hardened 
 to it, the ordeal would drop me in my tracks. 
 
 Little spikes of pure iron like frost spars 
 glow white-hot and stick out of the churning 
 slag. These must be stirred under at once; 
 the long stream of flame from the grate plays 
 over the puddle, and the pure iron if lapped 
 by these gases would be oxidized — burned up. 
 
 Pasty masses of iron form at the bottom of 
 the puddle. There they would stick and 
 106 
 
MAN IS IRON TOO 
 
 become chilled if they were not constantly 
 stirred. The whole charge must be mixed 
 and mixed as it steadily thickens so that it 
 will be uniform throughout. I am like some 
 frantic baker in the inferno kneading a batch 
 of iron bread for the devil's breakfast. 
 
 "It's an outrage that men should have to 
 work like this," a reformer told me. 
 
 "They don't have to," I replied. "Nobody 
 forced me to do this. I do it because I would 
 rather live in an Iron Age than live in a world 
 of ox-carts. Man can take his choice." 
 
 The French were not compelled to stand in 
 the flame that scorched Verdun. They could 
 have backed away and let the Germans 
 through. The Germans would not have killed 
 them. They would only have saddled them 
 and got on their backs and ridden them till 
 the end of time. 
 
 And so men are not compelled to face the 
 scorching furnaces; we do not have to forge 
 the iron that resists the invading cyclone and 
 the leveling earthquake. We could quit cold 
 and let wild nature kick us about at will. We 
 could have cities of wood to be wiped out by 
 conflagrations; we could build houses of mud 
 and sticks for the gales to unroof like a Hot- 
 107 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 tentot village. We could bridge our small 
 rivers with logs and be flood-bound when the 
 rains descended. We could live by wheelbar- 
 row transit like the Chinaman and leave to 
 some braver race the task of belting the world 
 with railroads and bridging the seas with 
 iron boats. 
 
 Nobody compels us to stand shoulder to 
 shoulder and fight off nature's calamities as 
 the French fought off their oppressor at Ver- 
 dun. I repeat, we could let nature oppress us 
 as she oppresses the meek Chinese — let her 
 whip us with cold, drought, flood, isolation 
 and famine. 
 
 We chose to resist as the French resisted — 
 because we are men. Nature can chase the 
 measly savage fleeing naked through the 
 bush. Rut nature can't run us ragged when 
 all we have to do is put up a hard fight and 
 conquer her. The iron workers are civiliza- 
 tion's shock troops grappling with tyrannous 
 nature on her own ground and conquering 
 new territory in which man can live in safety 
 and peace. Steel houses with glass windows 
 are born of his efforts. There is a glory in 
 this fight ; man feels a sense of grandeur. We 
 are robbing no one. From the harsh bosom 
 108 
 
MAN IS IRON TOO 
 
 of the hills we wring the iron milk that makes 
 us strong. Nature is no kind mother; she 
 resists with flood and earthquake, drought 
 and cyclone. Nature is fierce and formid- 
 able, but fierce is man's soul to subdue her. 
 The stubborn earth is iron, but roan is iron 
 too. 
 
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 slag, now weighs five hundred 
 fifty to six hundred pounds. I am balling it 
 into three parts of equal weight. If the charge 
 is six hundred pounds, each of my balls must 
 weigh exactly two hundred pounds. 
 
 I have always been proud of the "batting 
 
 eye" that enables an iron puddler to shape 
 
 the balls to the exact weight required. This is 
 
 a mental act, — an act of judgment. The artist 
 
 110 
 
ON BEING A GOOD GUESSER 
 
 and the sculptor must have this same sense 
 of proportion. A man of low intelligence 
 could never learn to do it. We are paid by 
 weight, and in my time, in the Sharon mill, 
 the balls were required to be two hundred 
 pounds. Every pound above that went to the 
 company and was loss to the men. 
 
 I have heard that "guessing pigs" was an 
 old-time sport among farmers. To test their 
 skill, each farmer would guess the weight of 
 a grazing pig. Then they would catch the 
 porker, throw him on the scales, and find 
 out which farmer had guessed nearest the 
 mark. Sunday clothes used to be badly soiled 
 in this sport. 
 
 But the iron worker does not guess his pigs. 
 He knows exactly how much pig-iron he put 
 into the boil. His guessing skill comes into 
 play when with a long paddle and hook he 
 separates six hundred pounds of sizzling fire- 
 works into three fire balls each of which will 
 weigh two hundred pounds. 
 
 The balls are rolled up into three resting 
 places, one in the fire-bridge corner, one in 
 the flue-bridge corner, and one in the jam, all 
 ready for the puddler to draw them. 
 
 My batch of biscuits is now done and I must 
 111 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 take them out at once and rush them to the 
 hungry mouth of the squeezing machine. A 
 bride making biscuits can jerk them out of 
 the oven all in one pan. But my oven is 
 larger and hotter. I have to use long-handled 
 tongs, and each of my biscuits weighs twice 
 as much as I weigh. Suppose you were a 
 cook with a fork six feet long, and had three 
 roasting sheep on the grid at once to be forked 
 off as quickly as possible. Could you do it? 
 Even with a helper wouldn't you probabry 
 scorch the mutton or else burn yourself to 
 death with the hot grease? That is where 
 strength and skill must both come into play. 
 
 One at a time the balls are drawn out on to 
 a buggy and wheeled swiftly to the squeezer. 
 This machine squeezes out the slag which 
 flows down like the glowing lava running out 
 of a volcano. The motion of the squeezer is 
 like the circular motion you use in rolling a 
 bread pill between the palms and squeezing 
 the water out of it. I must get the three balls, 
 or blooms, out of the furnace and into the 
 squeezer while the slag is still liquid so that 
 it can be squeezed out of the iron. 
 
 From cold pig-iron to finished blooms is a 
 process that takes from an hour and ten 
 112 
 
ON BEING A GOOD GUESSER 
 
 minutes, to an hour and forty minutes, de- 
 pending on the speed and skill of the puddler, 
 and the kind of iron. I was a fast one, my- 
 self. But you expected that, from the fact 
 that I am telling the story. The man that tells 
 the story always comes out a winner. 
 
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 gel 
 one of the furnaces controlled by another 
 family. My father was not ready to relin- 
 quish 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 were getting scarce 
 as they had been in 1884. That was the year 
 when we had no money in the house and I 
 was chasing every loose nickel in town. The 
 mill at Sharon was down, and father was 
 hunting work in Pittsburgh and elsewhere. 
 Then after a period of prosperity the hard 
 times had come again in 1891 and '92. My 
 furnace job in Pittsburgh was not steady. 
 The town was full of iron workers and many 
 114 
 
I START ON MY TRAVELS 
 
 of them were in desperate need. Those who 
 had jobs divided their time with their needy 
 comrades. A man with hungry children 
 would be given a furnace for a few days to 
 earn enough to ward off starvation. I had 
 no children and felt that I should not hold a 
 furnace. I left Pittsburgh and went to Niles, 
 Ohio, where I found less competition for the 
 jobs. I worked a few weeks and the mill 
 shut down. I wandered all over the iron dis- 
 trict and finally, deciding that the North held 
 no openings, I began working my way toward 
 the iron country in the South. 
 
 The Sharon mill did not shut down com- 
 pletely. The owner operated it at a loss 
 rather than throw all his old hands out on the 
 world. Twenty years later I met him on a 
 train in the West and we talked of old times 
 when I worked in his mill. As long as he lived 
 he was loved and venerated by his former 
 employees. 
 
 Father was putting in short time at Sharon 
 and was badly worried. He was thinking of 
 setting out again to go from town to town 
 looking for work, but I had advised him 
 against it. I had told him that he would 
 merely find crowds of idle men roaming from 
 115 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 mill to mill along with him. My brothers 
 gave him similar advice. 
 
 "Father," we said, "it is a time of business 
 depression and wide-spread unemployment. 
 If you went to Pittsburgh you might find a 
 few weeks' work, but it would not pay you 
 to go there for it. You would have to lay out 
 cash for your board and lodging there before 
 you could send anything home to mother. 
 Keeping up two establishments is harder 
 than keeping up one. You have a home here 
 partly paid for, and a big garden that helps 
 support that home. It is better for you to 
 stick with this establishment and work at 
 half time in the mill than to roam around at 
 big expense seeking full time in some other 
 mill. There may be no mill in the land that 
 is running full time." 
 
 This had not occurred to him. What lay 
 beyond the hills was all mystery. But we 
 young fellows had been brought up in the 
 American atmosphere, we had read the 
 Youth's Companion and the newspapers, and 
 our outlook was widened; we could guess 
 that conditions were the same in other states 
 as they were in our part of Pennsylvania, for 
 we were studying economic causes. 
 116 
 
I START ON MY TRAVELS 
 
 "It is better for you to stay here and wait for 
 good times to come again. Hang on to your 
 home, and if in a few months or a few years 
 the mills begin booming again you will be 
 secure for life. But if the iron industry 
 doesn't revive, give up that trade and find 
 other work here. If necessary go out and 
 work on a farm, for the farming industry will 
 always have to be carried on." 
 
 Father saw the force of our argument. So 
 he stayed and kept his home. He has it 
 to-day. But if he had wandered around as 
 millions of us did in those hard days he would 
 surely have lost it. This was my first little 
 attempt to work out an economic problem. 
 I had studied all the facts and then pro- 
 nounced my judgment. It proved right, and 
 so I learned that in my small way I had a 
 head for financiering. This encouraged me, 
 for it taught me that the worker can solve 
 part of his problems by using his head. 
 
 The fear of ending in the poor-house is one 
 of the terrors that dog a man through life. 
 There are only three parts to the labor prob- 
 lem, and this is one of them. This fear causes 
 "unrest." This unrest was used by revolu- 
 tionists to promote Bolshevism which turns 
 117 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 whole empires into poor-houses. Such a 
 "remedy," of course, is worse than the 
 disease. I think I know a plan by which all 
 workers can make their old age secure. I will 
 go into it more fully in a later chapter. 
 
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 care he had 
 given us. But he was a proud man (as all 
 muscular men are), and he could find no 
 comfort in the thought of being supported by 
 his sons. I am glad he never had to be. In- 
 dependence has made his old age happy and 
 he has proved that a worker, if he keeps his 
 health, can provide for his old age and bring 
 up a big family too. 
 
 119 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 We older boys left home and hunted work 
 elsewhere. I was young and not bothered 
 about working conditions or living condi- 
 tions. I was so vigorous that I could work 
 under any conditions, and old age was so far 
 away that I was not worried about a home 
 for my declining years. Wages was my sole 
 problem. I wanted steady wages, and of 
 course I wanted the highest I could get. To 
 find the place where wages were to be had I 
 was always on the go. When a mill closed 
 I did not wait for it to reopen, but took the 
 first train for some other mill town. The 
 first train usually was a freight. If not, I 
 waited for a freight, for I could sleep better 
 in a freight car than in a Pullman — it cost 
 less. I could save money and send it to 
 mother, then she would not have to sell her 
 feather beds. 
 
 All of this sounds nobler than it was. In 
 those days workers never traveled on pas- 
 senger trains unless they could get a pass. 
 Judges and statesmen pursued the same 
 policy. To pay for a ticket was money thrown 
 away; so thought the upper classes and the 
 lower classes. About the only people that 
 paid car fare were the Knights of Pythias on 
 120 
 
THE RED FLAG 
 
 their way to their annual convention. Rail- 
 road workers could get all the passes they 
 wanted, and any toiler whose sister had mar- 
 ried a brakeman or whose second cousin was 
 a conductor "bummed" the railroad for a pass 
 and got it. None of my relatives was a rail- 
 road man, and so to obtain the free transpor- 
 tation which was every American's inalien- 
 able right, I had to let the passenger trains 
 go by and take the freights. 
 
 Once I got ditched at a junction, and while 
 waiting for the next freight I wandered down 
 the track to where I had seen a small house 
 and a big watermelon patch. The man who 
 lived there was a chap named Frank Ranner- 
 man. I always remember him because he 
 was a communist, the first one I ever saw, 
 and he filled my pockets with about ten 
 pounds of radical pamphlets which I prom- 
 ised to read. He made a bargain with me 
 that if I would read and digest the Red litera- 
 ture he would give me all the watermelons I 
 could eat. 
 
 "I'm a comrade already," I said, meaning 
 it as a merry jest, that I would be anything 
 for a watermelon. Rut he took it seriously 
 and his eyes lit up like any fanatic's. 
 
 121 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 "I knew it," he said. "With a face like 
 yours — look at the brow, look at the intellect, 
 the intellect." I was flattered. "Come here, 
 wife," he called through the door. "Come 
 here and look at the intellect." 
 
 The wife, who was a barefooted, freckle- 
 faced woman, came out on the porch and, 
 smiling sweetly, sized up my intellect. I made 
 up my mind that here were the two smartest 
 people in America. For they saw I was bulg- 
 ing with intellect. Nobody else had ever dis- 
 covered it, not even I myself. I thought I was 
 a muscle-bound iron puddler, but they pro- 
 nounced me an intellectual giant. It never 
 occurred to me that they might have guessed 
 wrong, while the wise old world had guessed 
 right. If the world was in step, they were out 
 of step, but I figured that the world was out 
 of step and they had the right stride. I 
 thought their judgment must be better than 
 the judgment of the whole world because 
 their judgment pleased me. I later learned 
 that their judgment was just like the judg- 
 ment of all Reds. That's what makes 'em 
 Red. 
 
 "Are there many of us where you come 
 from?" the man asked. 
 122 
 
THE RED FLAG 
 
 "Many what?" I asked. 
 
 "Communists, communists," he said ex- 
 citedly. 
 
 I wanted to please him, because we were 
 ^ow cracking the melons and scooping out 
 their luscious hearts. So I told him how many 
 comrades there were in each of the rolling 
 mills where I had worked. I had to invent 
 the statistics out of my own head, but that 
 head was full of intellect, so I jokingly gave 
 him a fine array of figures. The fact was that 
 there may have been an addle-pated Red 
 among the mill hands of that time, but if there 
 was I had never met him. 
 
 The figures that I furnished Comrade Ban- 
 nerman surprised him. I counted the seeds 
 in each slice of watermelon and gave that as 
 the number of comrades in each mill. The 
 number was too high. Comrade Bannerman 
 knew how many Reds there were in the coun- 
 try, and it appeared that the few mills I had 
 worked in contained practically the whole 
 communist party. He got rather excited and 
 said the numbers were growing faster than 
 he had imagined. He had figured that it 
 would take forty years to bring about the 
 Red commonwealth, but with the new light I 
 
 123 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 had thrown on the subject he concluded that 
 the times were ripening faster than he had 
 dared to hope, and that there was no doubt 
 the revolution would be upon us within three 
 years. 
 
 The comrade told me he was not popular 
 in the village for two reasons. The capitalis- 
 tic storekeepers called him a dead beat and 
 the church people had rotten-egged him for 
 a speech he had made denouncing religion. 
 I saw by his hands that he didn't work much, 
 and from the hands of his wife I learned who 
 raised the watermelons he was feeding to me. 
 I remember wondering why he didn't pay his 
 grocery bill with the money he spent on 
 pamphlets to stuff in the pockets of passers- 
 by. 
 
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 Den- 
 ver. 
 
 At the sight of these men in their Pullmans, 
 my friend the communist first turned pale, 
 then green, then red. His eyes narrowed and 
 blazed like those of a madman. He stood up 
 on his porch, clenched his fists and launched 
 into the most violent fit of cursing I ever 
 heard. The sight of those holiday-makers 
 had turned him into a demon. He thought 
 they were capitalists. Here was the hated 
 tribe of rich men, the idle classes, all dressed 
 125 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 up with flags flying, riding across the country 
 on a jamboree. 
 
 "The blood-sucking parasites! The blear- 
 eyed barnacles!" yelled Comrade Banner- 
 man. He shook his fists at the plutocrats and 
 cursed until he made me sick. He was a tank- 
 town nut who didn't like to work; had built 
 up a theory that work was a curse and that 
 the "idle classes" had forced this curse on 
 the masses, of which he was one. He be- 
 lieved that all the classes had to do was to 
 clip coupons, cash them and ride around the 
 country in Pullman palace cars. Here was 
 the whole bunch of them in seven "specials" 
 rolling right by his front door. He cursed 
 them again and prayed that the train might 
 be wrecked and that every one of the blinkety 
 blinkety scoundrels might be killed. If all 
 these idle plutocrats could be destroyed in a 
 heap they would be lifted from the backs of 
 the masses, and the masses would not have to 
 work any more. 
 
 Bannerman was a fool, and I could even 
 then see just what made him foolish. He was 
 full of the brimstone of envy., The sight of 
 those well-dressed travelers eating in the din- 
 ing cars drove him wild. He wanted to be in 
 126 
 
ENVY IS THE SULPHUR 
 
 their places, but he was too lazy to work and 
 earn the money that would put him there. I 
 knew that they were not rich men; they were 
 school-teachers, doctors, butchers and bakers, 
 machinists and puddlers. They had saved 
 their money for a year in order to have the 
 price of this convention trip to Denver. Com- 
 rade Bannerman was pig-iron, and envy 
 made him brittle. He should have been 
 melted down and had the sulphur boiled out 
 of him. Then he would have been wrought 
 iron; as were the men he was so envious of. 
 
 He was not envious of me, of course, be- 
 cause he thought I was a tramp. Indeed 
 he thought I was as envious as he, and so he 
 classed the two of us as "intellectuals." From 
 this I learned that "Intellectuals" is a name 
 that weak men, crazed with envy, give to 
 themselves. They believe the successful men 
 lack intellect; are all luck. This thought 
 soothes their envy and keeps it from driving 
 them mad. 
 
 I thanked Comrade Bannerman for his 
 pamphlets and threw him a few coins to pay 
 for the melons he had given me. But my 
 peep into his soul had taught me more than 
 his propaganda could teach me. Later I 
 127 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 read all the pamphlets because I had prom- 
 ised I would. They told of the labor move- 
 ment and the theories at work in Germany. 
 One of them was called Merrie England and 
 declared that England had once been merry, 
 but capitalism had crushed all joy and turned 
 the island into a living hell. I remembered 
 my mother in Wales rocking her baby's 
 cradle and singing all day long with a voice 
 vibrant with joy. If capitalism had crushed 
 her heart she hadn't heard about it. 
 
 When the lodge excursion train had passed 
 on toward the convention city, I hopped a 
 freight and bade Comrade Bannerman good- 
 by. Had I told him that from my earnings 
 I had salted away enough money to buy his 
 little shack he would have hated me as he 
 hated the lodge members in the Pullmans. 
 I did not hate those men. They were doing 
 me a service by traveling across the country. 
 For they belonged to the fare-paying classes; 
 their money kept the railroads going so they 
 could carry politicians and some of us work- 
 ing men free. 
 
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 labor's gall 
 bladder had done bu'sted and we didn't have 
 long to live. One book said that British capi- 
 talists owned all the money in the world and 
 that at a given signal they would draw the 
 money out of America and the working men 
 here would starve to death in twenty-nine 
 days. It seemed that some crank had fasted 
 that many days in order to get accurate statis- 
 129 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 tics showing just how long the working man 
 could hope to last after England pushed the 
 button for the money panic. 
 
 Another book said that Wall Street now 
 owned ninety per cent, of the wealth in 
 America and was getting the other ten at the 
 rate of eight per cent, a year. Within twelve 
 years Wall Street would own everything in 
 the world, and mankind would be left naked 
 and starving. 
 
 The wildest book of all was called Caesar's 
 Column. It was in the form of a novel and 
 told how the rich in America worshiped gold 
 and lust instead of God and brotherly love, 
 and how they drove their carriages over the 
 working man's children and left them 
 crushed and bleeding in the street. America 
 had ceased to be a republic and was an 
 oligarchy of wealth all owned by a dozen 
 great families while the millions were starv- 
 ing. The end of the book described a great 
 revolution in which the people arose, led by 
 an Italian communist named Csesar Spadoni. 
 The mob took all the fine houses and killed 
 the rich people. Csesar took the bodies and, 
 laying them in cement like bricks, he built an 
 enormous column of corpses in Union Square 
 130 
 
LOADED DOWN WITH LITERATURE 
 
 towering higher than any building in New 
 York. He established his headquarters in a 
 Fifth Avenue palace and was directing the 
 slaughter of all men who owned property, 
 when some of his followers got jealous of his 
 fine position and killed him and burned the 
 house. By that time everything in America 
 was destroyed, and the hero of the book, hav- 
 ing invented an air-ship, flew away to South 
 Africa to escape the general demolition. This 
 book was being circulated by communists as 
 a true picture of what the country was coming 
 to. 
 
 These pamphlets came into my hands at a 
 time when work was getting scarcer every 
 day and a million men like myself were mov- 
 ing about the country looking for jobs. Then 
 for the first time I realized my need for a 
 broader education. If these things were true, 
 it was my duty to stop chasing the vanishing 
 job and begin to organize the workers so that 
 they might destroy the capitalists. But how 
 could I know whether they were true? I had 
 no knowledge of past history. And without 
 knowing the past how could I judge the fu- 
 ture? I was like the old man who had never 
 seen a railroad train. His sons took him 
 131 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 thirty miles over the hills and brought him 
 to the depot where a train was standing. The 
 old man looked things over and saw that the 
 wheels were made of iron. "It will never 
 start," he said. He knew that if his wagon 
 had heavy iron wheels, his team could never 
 start it. But his sons said: "It will start all 
 right." They had seen it before; they knew 
 its past history. Soon the train started, gath- 
 ered speed like a whirlwind and went roar- 
 ing away down the track. The old man gazed 
 after it and then, much excited, he exclaimed, 
 "It will never stop !" 
 
 The wisest head is no judge unless it has 
 in it the history of past performances. I had 
 not studied much history in my brief school- 
 ing. The mills called me because they needed 
 men. Good times were there when I arrived, 
 and as for hard times, I was sure they "would 
 never start." Now the hard times were upon 
 us and panic shook the ground beneath our 
 feet. "It will never stop," men cried. Had 
 they studied the history of such things they 
 would have known that hard times come and 
 hard times go, starting and stopping for 
 definite reasons, like the railway train. 
 
 I had done the right thing in quitting school 
 132 
 
LOADED DOWN WITH LITERATURE 
 
 and going to the puddling furnaces at a time 
 when we needed iron more than we needed 
 education. The proverb says, "Strike while 
 the iron is hot." The country was building, 
 and I gave it iron to build with. Railroads 
 were still pushing out their mighty arms and 
 stringing their iron rails across the western 
 wheat lands. Bridges were crossing the Miss- 
 issippi and spanning the chasms in the Rocky 
 Mountains. Chicago and New York were ris- 
 ing in new growth with iron in their bones 
 to hold them high. My youth was spent in 
 giving to this growing land the element its 
 body needed. 
 
 Now that body was sick. What was the 
 matter with it? Lacking an education, I was 
 unprepared to say. When I left school my 
 theory was that every boy should learn a 
 trade as soon as possible. Now I saw that a 
 trade was not enough. A worker needs an 
 education, also. The trade comes first, per- 
 haps, but the education ought to follow on its 
 heels. 
 
 During the next ten years of my life I was 
 a worker and a student, too. My motto was 
 that every one should have at least a high- 
 school education and a trade. 
 133 
 
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 shak- 
 ing his fist at his thriftier, happier brothers. 
 Should I denounce the banding together of 
 men for the promotion of fun and good fel- 
 lowship? Were these men hastening the 
 downfall of America as the communist pre- 
 dicted? Is not good fellowship a necessary 
 feeling in the hearts of civilized men? 
 
 Love of comrades had always been a ruling 
 passion with me. I joined my union as soon 
 as I had learned my trade, the Amalgamated 
 Association of Iron, Steel and Tin Workers of 
 North America. It was a long name, and we 
 liked every word in it. We felt the glow of 
 brotherhood, and as I said before, we used to 
 share our jobs with the brother who was out 
 134 
 
THE PUDDLER HAS A VISION 
 
 of work. The union paid a weekly benefit 
 to men who had to strike for better working 
 conditions. At that time there were no death 
 benefits nor any fund to educate the children 
 of members killed in the mills. When such 
 a death happened, the union appointed a 
 committee to stand at the office window on 
 pay-day and ask every man to contribute 
 something from his wages. There is a chari- 
 table spirit among men who labor together 
 and they always gave freely to any fund for 
 the widow and orphans. This spirit is the 
 force that lifts man above the beasts and 
 makes his civilization. There is no mercy in 
 brute nature. The hawk eats the sparrow; 
 the fox devours the young rabbit; the cat 
 leaps from under a bush and kills the mother 
 robin while the young are left to starve in the 
 nest. There is neither right nor wrong among 
 the brutes because they have no moral sense. 
 They do not kill for revenge nor torture for 
 the love of cruelty, as Comrade Bannerman 
 would in praying that the train be wrecked 
 and the rich men burned to death in the ruin. 
 The beasts can feel no pity, no sympathy, no 
 regret, for nature gave them no conscience. 
 But man differs from all creation because he 
 
 135 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 has a moral sense, he has a conscience. My 
 conscience has been a very present thing with 
 me through all my life. I am a praying man. 
 I never take a doubtful step until I have 
 prayed for guidance. 
 
 "You'll never get anywhere, Jim," fellows 
 have said to me, "as long as your conscience 
 is so darn active. To win in this world you 
 have got to be slick. What a man earns will 
 keep him poor. It's what he gains that makes 
 him rich." If this is so, the nation with the 
 lowest morals will have the most wealth. But 
 the truth is just the opposite. The richest na- 
 tions are those that have the highest moral 
 sense. 
 
 But this was a great problem for a young 
 uneducated man. To be told by some of my 
 fellows that dishonesty was the only road to 
 wealth, and to be shown in communist docu- 
 ments that the capitalists of America were 
 stealing everything from the workers, put a 
 mighty problem up to me. And that's what 
 made me pray for guidance. I pray because 
 I want an answer, and when it comes I recog- 
 nize in it my own conscience. Praying ban- 
 ishes all selfish thoughts from mind, and gives 
 the voice of conscience a chance to be heard. I 
 136 
 
THE PUDDLER HAS A VISION 
 
 pray for a higher moral sense, that which 
 lifts man above beasts, and when my answer 
 comes and I feel morally right, then all hell 
 can't make me knuckle under. For civiliza- 
 tion is built on man's morals not on brute 
 force (as Germany learned to her sorrow), 
 and I fight for the moral law as long as there 
 is any fight left in me. 
 
 Nature planned that when the cat ate the 
 mother robin, the young robins in the nest 
 must starve. Nature had other robins that 
 would escape the enemy. But among men it 
 is wrong for the little ones to suffer when the 
 hand that feeds them is destroyed. For man 
 has sympathy, which beasts have not. Sym- 
 pathy is the iron fiber in man that welds him 
 to his fellows. Envy is the sulphur that pol- 
 lutes these bonds and makes them brittle. 
 Suppose some master puddler of humanity 
 could gather thousands of men into a melting- 
 pot, a fraternity whose purpose was to boil 
 out the envy, greed and malice as much as 
 possible, and purify the good metal of human 
 sympathy. How much greater the social 
 value of these men would be. Bound together 
 by good fellowship and human sympathy 
 Jhese men could pool their charity and build 
 
 137 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 a happy city where all the children of their 
 stricken comrades could be sent to school 
 together, there to learn that man is moral, 
 that the strong do not destroy the weak, that 
 the nestling is not left to fate, but that the 
 fatherless are fathered by all men whose 
 hearts have heard their cry. 
 
 This vision came to me in the darkest days 
 of my life. I had seen the children of my 
 dead comrades scattered like leaves from a 
 smitten tree never to meet again. I had left 
 my parents' roof to be buffeted about by 
 strikes and unemployment, and I feared that 
 our home would be lost and my brothers 
 scattered forever. The voice of hate was 
 whispering that the "classes" would ride 
 down the children of the poor, and with this 
 gloomy thought I went to bed. My couch was 
 a bed of coal slack, and I was journeying to 
 a mill town in a freight car. 
 
 As we rolled along, I saw in a vision train 
 after train of lodge men going to some happy 
 city. They were miners and steel workers, as 
 well as clerks and teachers, and they were 
 banded together, not like Reds to overthrow 
 the wage system, but to teach themselves and 
 their children how to make the wage system 
 138 
 
THE PUDDLER HAS A VISION 
 
 shed its greatest blessings upon all. The city 
 they were going to was one they had built 
 with their own hands. And in that city was 
 a school where every trade was taught to 
 fatherless children, as my father taught his 
 trade to me. And with this trade each child 
 received the liberal education that the rich 
 man gives his son but which the poor man 
 goes without. This was the wildest fancy I 
 had ever entertained. It was born of my own 
 need of knowledge. It was a dream I feared 
 I could not hope to realize. 
 
CHAPTER XXIV 
 
 JOE THE POOR BRAKEMAN 
 
 A brakeman stuck his head in the end win- 
 dow 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 some- 
 thing 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. I never knew 
 whether I cheated the brakeman or the brake- 
 man cheated me. The watch wasn't worth 
 as much as the ride, but the ride wasn't his 
 to sell. 
 
 I had bought the watch in Cincinnati. A 
 fake auction in a pawnshop attracted my at- 
 140 
 
JOE THE POOR BRAKEMAN 
 
 tention as I walked along a street near the 
 depot. The auctioneer was offering a "solid 
 gold, Swiss movement, eighteen jeweled 
 watch" to the highest bidder. "This watch 
 belongs to my friend Joe Coupling," he said, 
 "a brakeman on the B. & 0. He was in a 
 wreck and is now in the hospital. Everybody 
 knows that one of the best things a railroader 
 has is his watch. He only parts with it as a 
 matter of life and death. Joe has got to sell 
 his watch and somebody is going to get a 
 bargain. This watch cost eighty-five dollars 
 and you couldn't buy the like of it to-day for 
 one hundred. How much am I offered?" 
 Some one bid five dollars, and the bidding 
 continued until it was- up to twenty-five dol- 
 lars. At that price the watch was declared 
 sold, and I strolled on, thinking the matter 
 over. I figured that the story of Joe the 
 injured brakeman must be false. If he had 
 an eighty-five-dollar watch he could borrow 
 forty on it. Why should^his "friend" have 
 sold it outright for twenty-five? The fakery 
 of it was plain to any one who stopped to 
 think. Who then would be fool enough to 
 pay twenty-five dollars for a fake watch at a 
 side auction? Not I. I was too wise. "How 
 
 141 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 easy it is," I said to myself, "to solve a skin 
 game." 
 
 The next day I happened to pass the place 
 again and they were selling the same watch. 
 I listened for the second time to the sad story 
 of Joe the brakeman. He was still in the 
 hospital and still willing to sacrifice his 
 eighty-five-dollar gold watch to the highest 
 bidder. Just for fun I started off the bidding 
 at two dollars. The auctioneer at once 
 knocked down the watch to me and took my 
 money. The speed of it dazed me, and I 
 stumbled along the street like a fool. What 
 was the game? I held the glittering watch in 
 my hand and gazed at it like a hypnotized 
 bird. I came to another pawnshop and went 
 in. "What will you give me on this watch?" 
 I asked. The pawnbroker glanced at it and 
 said he couldn't give me anything but advice. 
 
 "I can buy these watches for three dollars 
 a dozen. They are made to be sold at auc- 
 tion. The case is not gold and the works 
 won't run." 
 
 I had been caught in the game after all. 
 
 The whole show had been put on for me. The 
 
 men who did the bidding the first day were 
 
 "with the show." Their scheme was to get a 
 
 142 
 
JOE THE POOR BRAKEMAN 
 
 real bid from me. When I failed to bite, they 
 rung down the curtain and waited for the 
 next come-on. The show was staged again 
 for me the following day, and that time they 
 got me. I had the "brakeman's watch" and 
 he had the laugh on me. In the next wreck 
 that Brakeman Joe got into I wished him the 
 same luck Comrade Bannerman wished for 
 the trainload of plutocrats. "If I should meet 
 Joe now," I said, "I'd gladly give him back 
 the timepiece that he prizes so." Let us hope 
 that the brakeman I gave the watch to down 
 in Alabama was Brakeman Joe. 
 
 There was much to think of in that auction 
 incident. Experience will often give the lie 
 to theory. My theory of the game was good 
 enough for me. I acted on my theory, and 
 they got my money. Perhaps the theory of 
 Bannerman was wrong. He claimed he knew 
 just how the capitalists were robbing labor. 
 Suppose we backed his theory with some 
 money and got stung? I was now theory shy 
 and I have stayed away from theories ever 
 since. 
 
 If you know the facts, no swindle can 
 deceive you. I spend my life in getting facts. 
 I now have seen enough to know that capi- 
 143 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 talism is not a swindle. If all hands labored 
 hard and honestly the system would enrich 
 us all. Some workers are dishonest and they 
 gouge the employers. Some employers are 
 dishonest and they gouge the workers. But 
 whether employer or employee does the rob- 
 bing, the public is the one that's robbed. And 
 they are both members of the public. In mak- 
 ing the world poorer they are rendering a 
 sorry service to the world. 
 
 Dishonesty is the thing that does the trick. 
 And it is not confined to any class. It was not 
 a capitalist but a slick wind worker who 
 robbed me by the watch swindle. He had to 
 swing his jaw for hours every day in order to 
 steal a few dollars. 
 
CHAPTER XXV 
 
 A DBOP IN THE BUCKET OF BLOOD 
 
 In Birmingham I found a job in a rolling 
 mill and established myself in a good board- 
 ing-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 es- 
 tablished myself there. 
 
 Good board consists in lots of greasy meat, 
 strong coffee and slabs of sweet pie with 
 gummy crusts, as thick as the palm of your 
 hand. At the Bucket of Blood we had this 
 delicious fare and plenty of it. When a man 
 comes out of the mills he wants quantity as 
 well as quality. We had both at the Bucket 
 of Blood, and whenever a man got knocked 
 145 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 out by a fist and was carted away in the am- 
 bulance, the next man on the waiting list was 
 voted into our club to fill the vacancy. We 
 had what is called "family reach" at the table 
 (both in feeding and fighting). Each man 
 cut off a big quivering hunk of roast pork or 
 greasy beef and passed the platter to his 
 neighbor. The landlady stood behind the 
 chairs and directed two colored girls to pour 
 coffee into each cup as it was emptied. 
 
 These cups were not china cups with little 
 handles such as you use in your home. They 
 were big "ironstone" bowls the size of beer 
 schooners, such as we used to see pictufed at 
 "Schmiddy's Place," with the legend, "Largest 
 In The City, 5c." (How some of us would 
 like to see those signs once more!) To pre- 
 vent the handles from being broken off, these 
 cups were made without handles. They were 
 so thick that you could drop them on the 
 floor and not damage the cups. When one 
 man hit another on the head with this fragile 
 china, the skull cracked before the teacup 
 did. The "family reach" which we developed 
 in helping ourselves to food, was sometimes 
 used in reaching across the table and felling 
 a man with a blow on the chin. Kipling has 
 146 
 
A DROP IN THE BUCKET 
 
 described this hale and hearty type of strong 
 man's home in Fulta Fisher's Boarding- 
 House where sailors rested from the sea. 
 
 "A play of shadows on the wall, 
 
 A knife thrust unawares, 
 And Hans came down (as cattle fall), 
 
 Across the broken chairs." 
 
 But the boarders did not fight with knives 
 at the Bucket of Blood. Knifing is not an 
 American game. We fought with fists, coffee 
 cups and pieces of furniture, after the furni- 
 ture went to pieces. We were not fighting to 
 make the world safe for democracy, although 
 we were the most democratic fellows in the 
 world. We slept two to a bed, four to a room. 
 Not always the same four, for like soldiers 
 on the firing line, some comrade was missing 
 after every battle. 
 
 These fights started in friendly banter. One 
 fellow would begin teasing another about his 
 girl. The whole table would take it up, every 
 man doing his best to insult and enrage the 
 victim. It was all fun until some fellow's 
 temper broke under the strain. Then a rush, 
 and a few wild swings that missed. Then 
 the thud of a blow that connected, and the 
 fight was over. These men had arms with 
 147 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 the strength of a horse's leg, and as soon as 
 their "kick" struck solid flesh, the man hit 
 was knocked out. He wouldn't be back for 
 supper, but the rest of us would, without hav- 
 ing our appetites disturbed in the least. I 
 didn't like these methods, but if the boys did 
 I was not going to complain. 
 
 My practise of studying at night offended 
 my roommates. The lamplight got in their 
 eyes. There were three fellows in the room 
 besides myself. For several nights they 
 advised me to "cut out the higher education, 
 douse that light and come to bed." Finally 
 they spoke about it in the daytime. "Ma- 
 jority rules," they said, "and there's three of 
 us against you. We can't sleep while you 
 have that lamp burning. The light keeps us 
 awake and it also makes the room so hot that 
 the devil couldn't stand it If you stay up 
 reading to-night we'll give you the bum's 
 rush." 
 
 I was so interested in my books that I 
 i couldn't help lingering with them after the 
 other fellows went to bed. Everything grew 
 quiet. Suddenly six hands seized me and 
 flung me out the window. It was a second- 
 story window and I carried the screen with 
 148 
 
A DROP IN THE BUCKET 
 
 me. But as it was full of air holes it didn't 
 make a very competent parachute. I landed 
 with a thud on the roof of the woodshed, 
 which, being old and soft with southern moss, 
 caved in and earried me to the ground 
 below — alive. The fellows up above threw 
 my books out the window, aiming them at my 
 head. They threw me my hat and coat and 
 my valise, and I departed from the Bucket of 
 Blood, and took up my abode at "The Greasy 
 Spoon." 
 
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 dietetics ; all we 
 knew was that our stomachs cried for plenty 
 of fat The reformer said that our landlady 
 fed us much fat meat because it was the 
 cheapest food she could buy. Milk, eggs and 
 fruits would cost more, and so this greedy 
 cruel woman was lining her pocket at the 
 expense of our lives. 
 
 The landlady was a kindly person, and she 
 took the reformer's advice. She banished 
 150 
 
A GRUB REFORMER 
 
 the fat pork, and supplied the table with 
 other food substitutes, but she was generous 
 and gave us plenty of them. "We ate this 
 reformed food and found we were growing 
 weaker every day at the puddling furnace. 
 We got the blues and became sullen. Grad- 
 ually all laughter ceased in that boarding- 
 house. We even felt too low to fight. At the 
 end of two weeks there was one general cry : 
 "Hog fat, and plenty of it!" Our engines had 
 run out of fuel; and now we knew what we 
 needed. We were so crazy for bacon that if 
 a hog had crossed our path we would have 
 leaped on him like a lion and eaten him alive. 
 
 Fat came back to the table, and the Greasy 
 Spoon again rang with laughter. How foolish 
 that reformer was ! He did no work himself 
 and was a dyspeptic. He tried to force his diet 
 upon us, and he made us as weak as he was. 
 How many reformers there are who are try- 
 ing to reshape the world to fit their own weak- 
 ness. I never knew a theorist who wasn't a 
 sick man. 
 
 To-day we understand that we can't run a 
 motor-car after the gasoline is played out. 
 The burning of the oil in the engine gives the 
 power. The burning of fats in the muscles 
 
 151 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 gives the laborer his power. Sugar and 
 starches are the next best things to fat, and 
 that's why we could eat the thick slabs of 
 sweet pie. We relished it well and have 
 burned it all up in our labor in the mills. We 
 came out with that healthy sparkle that dys- 
 peptics never know. 
 
 When we realized that the reformer didn't ' 
 know what he was talking about, and that in 
 his effort to help us he was hurting us, we 
 saw he was our enemy, and we gave all of his 
 ideas the "horse laugh." His theory that the 
 boarding-house keepers were in a conspiracy 
 to rob the workers by feeding them pork 
 instead of pineapples turned out to be much 
 like all the "capitalist conspiracies" in Com- 
 rade Bannerman's pamphlets. I am glad I 
 have lived in a world of facts, and that I went 
 therefrom to the world of books. For I have 
 found there is much falsehood taught in 
 books. But life won't tell a fellow any lies. 
 
 A man who knows only books may believe 
 that by writing a new prescription he can 
 cure the world of what ails it. A man who 
 knows life knows that the world is not sick. 
 Give it plenty of food and a chance to work 
 and it will have perfect digestion. 
 152 
 
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 quelled every riot before 
 it got started. We fellows were like children 
 in that we only thought of one thing at a 
 time. And when we saw the landlady's carv- 
 ing knife we forgot whatever else was on our 
 minds. This woman was a real peacemaker. 
 She not only wanted peace, she knew how to 
 get it Such things afford us lessons that are 
 
 153 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 useful all our lives. This woman had learned 
 by sad experience that healthy men will quar- 
 rel and thump each other; that these fights 
 put men in the hospital, after breaking her 
 dishes and splattering her tablecloths with 
 blood. Hating bloodshed, she prevented it 
 by being ever ready to shed blood herself. 
 She stood for the moral law, but she stood 
 armed and ready. 
 
 Impractical men have told me that right 
 will always triumph of itself; it needs no 
 fighters to support it. The man who believes 
 that is ignorant, and such ignorance is danger- 
 ous. Right is always trampled down when 
 no fighter upholds it. But men will fight for 
 right who will not fight for wrong. And so 
 right conquers wrong because right has the 
 most defenders. Let no man shirk the battle 
 because he thinks he isn't needed. 
 
 The reason a woman with a carving knife 
 was strong enough to put a stop to fighting in 
 the Greasy Spoon was this: she had behind 
 her every man except the two who were fight- 
 ing. Had either of those men struek down 
 the woman, then twenty other men, outraged 
 by such a deed, would then and there have 
 swarmed upon the two and crushed them. 
 154 
 
THE PIE EATER'S PARADISE 
 
 The woman stood for right and she always 
 triumphed because she had (and these two 
 knew she had) the biggest bunch of fighters 
 on her side. 
 
 This is what peace means, an equilibrium 
 between forces. It is the natural law, — God's 
 way of keeping peace. And any plan for 
 World Peace that is builded not upon this 
 law is nothing. Justice must stand with an 
 upraised sword. When two states quarrel 
 she must admonish them, and let them know 
 that should they overthrow her, all good na- 
 tions would rush in and crush them. The 
 same law that keeps peace in a rowdy board- 
 ing-house will keep the peace of the world. 
 For what is this world but a big wide board- 
 ing-house, and all the nations rough and 
 greedy grabbers at the table? 
 
 I left the Greasy Spoon and went to the 
 "Pie Boarding-House." The Greasy Spoon 
 had peace, but peace is not enough. After 
 peace comes prosperity. The Pie House 
 represented prosperity. For the woman who 
 ran it knew how to make more pies than the 
 fellows ever heard of. You see, we were all 
 from the British Isles where they have pud- 
 ding. The pie is an American institution. 
 155 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 Nobody knows how to make pies but an 
 American housewife. And lucky that she 
 does, for men can not thrive in America with- 
 out pie. I do not mean the standardized, 
 tasteless things made in great pie factories. 
 I refer to the personally conducted pies that 
 women used to make. The pioneer wives of 
 America learned to make a pie out of every 
 fruit that grows, including lemons, and from 
 many vegetables, including squash and sweet 
 potatoes, as well as from vinegar and milk 
 and eggs and flour. Fed on these good pies 
 the pioneers — is there any significance in the 
 first syllable of the word — hewed down the 
 woods and laid the continent under the plow. 
 Some men got killed and their widows started 
 boarding-houses. Here we workers fed on 
 proper pie, and we soon changed this wooden 
 land into a land of iron. Now the pie is pass- 
 ing out and we are feeding on French pastry. 
 Is our downfall at hand? 
 
 Life in the Pie Boarding-House was a nev- 
 er-ending delight. You never knew when you 
 sat down at the table what kind of pie would 
 be dealt you. Some of the fellows had been 
 there half a year and swore that they had 
 seen fifty-seven varieties and were expect- 
 156 
 
THE PIE EATER'S PARADISE 
 
 ing new ones at any meal. The crowd here 
 was a selected crowd. It was made up of the 
 pie connoisseurs of mill-town. Word was 
 quietly passed out among the wisest fellows to 
 move to this boarding-house and get a liberal 
 education in pie. So it was a selected and 
 well-behaved crowd. They didn't want' to 
 start any rumpus and thus lose their places 
 at this attractive table. 
 
 And that is one way that virtue is its own 
 reward. Only the well-behaved fellows were 
 tipped off to the pie bonanza. From this I 
 learned that the better manners you have, 
 the better fare you will get in this world. I 
 had steadily risen from the "Bucket of 
 Blood," through the "Greasy Spoon" to a seat 
 at the cherished "Pie" table. Here the cups 
 were so thin that you couldn't break a man's 
 head with them. I was steadily rising in the 
 social world. 
 
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 bet- 
 ter 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 peon camp, deep in the swamps of 
 Louisiana, we knew more about slavery than 
 we did before. And we knew that work in 
 the rolling mills, bad as it was, was better than 
 forced labor without pay. To-day when I 
 hear orators rolling out the word "slavery" in 
 connection with American wages and working 
 conditions, I have to laugh. For any man 
 who has ever had a taste of peonage, to say 
 158 
 
CAUGHT IN A PEONAGE CAMP 
 
 nothing of slavery, knows that the wage sys- 
 tem is not real slavery; it's not the genuine, 
 lash-driven, bloodhound-hunted, swamp-siek 
 African slavery. None is genuine without 
 Simon Legree and the Louisiana blood- 
 hounds. The silk-socked wage slave, toiling 
 eight hours for six dollars, is not the genu- 
 ine old New Orleans molasses slave. He may 
 carry a band and give a daily street parade, 
 but if he's not accompanied by Simon Legree 
 and the bloodhounds, he is not a genuine 
 Uncle Tom, his slavery is less than skin deep. 
 You can't fool me. I know what real slavery 
 is. I know as much about slavery as the man 
 that made it. He's the guy that taught me. I 
 worked under Simon Legree in Louisiana. 
 
 On the way to New Orleans we paused at 
 a siding, and a native asked me, "Who are all 
 them men, and which way are they goin'?" 
 I told him "which way" we were going, and 
 that we were needing jobs. He replied : 
 
 "You-all are comin' down hyah now look- 
 ing for food and work. In '65 you was down 
 hyah lookin' fo' blood!" 
 
 When we reached the great city on the 
 Mississippi, we scattered over the town look- 
 ing for jobs. I saw a pile of coal in the street 
 
 159 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 before a boarding-house. I asked for the job 
 of carrying in the coal. There were two tons 
 of it. I toted it in and was paid a dollar. 
 New Orleans was a popular winter resort 
 where northerners came to escape the severe 
 cold of the North Atlantic States. I was given 
 the job of yard-man in this boarding-house. 
 I carried in groceries, peeled potatoes, 
 scrubbed the kitchen floor and built fires 
 each evening in the guests' rooms. Each 
 room had a grate, and I carried up kindling 
 and coal for all of them. For this work I 
 received a dollar a day, with two meals (din- 
 ner and supper) and was permitted to carry 
 away from the kitchen all the cooked food 
 that remained after the guests had eaten. 
 This privilege had grown out of the custom of 
 the colored help in the South having their 
 "man" to feed. I had several men to feed. 
 My "gang" was still looking for work and not 
 finding any. Times were desperate. For five 
 cents a man could get a glass of beer and 
 floor room to sleep on in a lodging-house for 
 homeless men. This was called a "Five Cent 
 Flop" house. My pals were not able at times 
 to raise the five cents a day to buy sleeping 
 quarters. It was late fall and too cold to 
 160 
 
CAUGHT IN A PEONAGE CAMP 
 
 sleep in the "jungle" down by the levee. The 
 poor fellows were able to stave off starvation 
 by visiting various free lunches during the 
 day. Every night I arrived with my dollar, 
 and that meant beer and beds for a score. I 
 also brought along a flour sack half full of 
 biscuits, cold pancakes, corn bread, chicken 
 necks and wings and scraps of roasts and 
 steaks. These hungry men, with their schoon- 
 ers of beer, made a feast of these scraps. My 
 loyalty in coming every night and giving them 
 everything I could scrape together touched 
 them deeply. They regarded me as deserv- 
 ing special honor, and while they believed 
 in democracy as a general proposition, they 
 voted that it would be carrying equality too 
 far if they permitted me to get no more out 
 of my work than all the rest got. So they 
 decided that I was to have a fifteen-cent bed 
 each night instead of a five-cent flop with the 
 rest of them. And I was assigned to the royal 
 suite of that flop house, which consisted of a 
 cot with a mosquito bar over it. 
 
 At this time they were holding "kangaroo" 
 court in the New Orleans jail. Every vagrant 
 picked up by the police was tried and sen- 
 tenced and shipped out to a chain-gang camp. 
 
 161 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 Nearly every man tried was convicted. And 
 there were plenty of camp bosses ready to 
 "buy" every vagrant the officers could run 
 in. My bunch down at the flop house was 
 in deadly terror of being "kangarooed" and 
 sent to a peon camp in the rice swamps. 
 
 One day when I was renewing the fuel in 
 the room of a Mrs. Hubbard from Pittsburgh, 
 I found no one in the apartment and Mrs. 
 Hubbard's pearls and other jewels lying on 
 the dresser. Immediately I was terrified with 
 thought of the kangaroo court I knew that 
 the jewels were valued at several thousands 
 of dollars. If I went away some one else 
 might come into the room and possibly 
 steal the jewels, for they were lying in plain 
 sight and were valuable enough to tempt a 
 weak-willed person. I souiided an alarm and 
 stayed in the doorway. I refused to leave the 
 room until Mrs. Hubbard returned and 
 counted her valuables. 
 
 She found them all there and thanked me 
 for guarding them. She said it was by an 
 oversight that she had gone away without 
 locking up her treasures. She asked me how 
 she should reward me. I told her that I was 
 already rewarded, for I had guarded her 
 162 
 
CAUGHT IN A PEONAGE CAMP 
 
 jewels in order to protect myself from being 
 suspected of their theft and so kangarooed 
 into a slave-camp. 
 
 But in spite of all my precautions, I landed 
 there after all. The gang down at the flop 
 house was dazzled by an employment agent, 
 who offered to ship them out into the rice 
 country to work on the levee for a dollar a 
 day and cakes. The men were wild for a 
 square meal and the feel of a dollar in their 
 jeans. So they all shipped out to the river 
 levee and I went along with the gang. 
 
 As our train rattled over the trestles and 
 through the cypress swamps the desperate 
 iron workers were singing: 
 
 "We'll work a hundred days, 
 And we'll get a hundred dollars, 
 
 And then go North, 
 And all be rich and happy !" 
 
 When we reached the dyke-building camp 
 I learned how ignorant I really was. I could 
 not do the things the older men could. I was 
 young and familiar only with the tools of 
 an iron puddler. The other men were ten 
 years older and had acquired skill in han- 
 dling mule-teams and swinging an ax. They 
 saw I couldn't do anything, so they appointed 
 
 163 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 me water carrier. The employing boss was 
 what is now called hard-boiled. He was a 
 Cuban, with the face of a cutthroat. Doubt- 
 less he was the descendant of the Spanish- 
 English buccaneers who used to prowl the 
 Caribbean Sea and make headquarters at 
 New Orleans. Beside this pirate ancestry I'll 
 bet he was a direct descendant of Simon 
 Legree. He suspected that I couldn't do much 
 in a dyking camp, so he swarmed down on me 
 the second week I was there and ordered me 
 to quit the water-carrying job and handle a 
 mule team and a scraper. I saw death put 
 an arm around my neck right then and there. 
 But I wouldn't confess that I couldn't drive a 
 team. 
 
 I put the lines over my head, said "Go 
 'long" as I had heard other muleteers say, 
 and, grasping the handles of the scraper, I 
 scooped up a slip load of clay. My arms were 
 strong and this was no trick at all. But get- 
 ting the load was not the whole game. The 
 hardest part was to let go. I guided the lines 
 with one hand and steadied the scraper with 
 the other as I drove up on the dump. Then 
 I heaved up on the handles, the scraper 
 turned over on its nose and dumped the load. 
 164 
 
CAUGHT IN A PEONAGE CAMP 
 
 But that isn't all it dumped. The mules shot 
 ahead when the load was released, and the 
 lines around my neck jerked me wrong side 
 up. The handle of the scraper hit me a stun- 
 ning blow in the face and the whole contrap- 
 tion dragged over my body bruising me fright- 
 fully. I staggered to my feet with one eye 
 blinded by the blood that flowed from a gash 
 in my brow. Simon Legree cursed me hand- 
 somely and told me I was fired. I asked him 
 where I would get my pay, and he told me he 
 was paying me a compliment by letting me 
 walk out of that camp alive. I went to the 
 cook shack and washed the blood off my face. 
 I was a pretty sick boy. The cook was a 
 native and was kind to me. 
 
 "Boy, you're liable to get lockjaw from that 
 cut," he said. "I'll put some of this horse lini- 
 ment on it and itll heal up." He then band- 
 aged it with court-plaster. 
 
 "It's a long way back to New Orleans," the 
 cook concluded. "And you might as well 
 have something to keep your ribs from hitting 
 together." He cut off a couple of pounds of 
 raw bacon and put it in my pocket together 
 with a "bait" of Plowboy tobacco. And so I 
 hit the road. When I came to the place where 
 
 165 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 my pals were working, cutting willows along 
 the levee, I told them of my plight. 
 
 "Never mind, boy," they said. "You go 
 back to New Orleans and wait for us. After 
 we've worked our hundred days to get a hun- 
 dred dollars each, we will work a few days 
 more to get a hundred dollars for you. Then 
 well all go north and be rich together." 
 
 I began footing it thirty-five miles to the 
 city. I decided, like Queen Isabella, to pawn 
 my jewels to enable me to discover America 
 again. I had an old ring and I met a darky 
 who had a quarter. He got my ring. After 
 tramping all day I was exhausted. I came to 
 a negro cabin and went in and offered the 
 "mammy" a pound of bacon for a pound of 
 corn pone. I further bargained to give the 
 first half of my other pound of bacon if she'd 
 cook the second half for me to eat. She 
 cooked my share of the bacon and set it and 
 the corn bread on the table. I ate heartily for 
 a while, but after two or three slices of the 
 bacon, I was fed up on it. She hadn't cooked 
 enough of the grease out of it. I began feed- 
 ing this bacon to a pickininny who sat beside 
 me. 
 
 "Man, don't give away your meat," the 
 166 
 
CAUGHT IN A PEONAGE GAMP 
 
 mammy said. I told her that I had had all 
 I wanted. Then she said to the pickininny: 
 
 "Child, doan eat that meat. Save it foh 
 you papa when he come home." 
 
 When I got into New Orleans the next 
 morning, I traded my Plowboy tobacco for a 
 bar of laundry soap. With my twenty-five 
 cents I bought a cotton undershirt. Then I 
 went into the "jungle" at Algiers, a town 
 across the river from New Orleans, and built 
 a fire in the jungle (a wooded place where 
 hoboes camp) and heated some water in an 
 old tin pail I found there. Then I took off all 
 my clothes and threw my underwear away. 
 A negro who stood watching me said : 
 
 "White man, are you throwing them 
 clothes away?" 
 
 "I certainly am," I replied. 
 
 "Why, them underclothes is northern un- 
 derclothes. Them's woolen clothes. Them's 
 the kind of underclothes I like." 
 
 "You wouldn't like that bunch of under- 
 clothes," I said. 
 
 "Why not?" 
 
 "Because if you look in the seams you will 
 find something that is unseemly I've been 
 out in a levee camp." 
 
 167 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 "Hush mah mouf, white man," laughed the 
 negro. "Them little things would never 
 bother a Louisiana nigger. Why we have 
 them things with us all the time. We just 
 call 'em our little companions." 
 
 He picked up the garments and walked off 
 proud and happy. I took my soap and warm 
 water and scrubbed myself from crown to 
 heel. I put my clothing in the pail with more 
 soap and water and boiled the outfit thor- 
 oughly. 
 
 Then I went back to New Orleans and got 
 my old job in the boarding-house. I saved all 
 my money except my fifteen cents for the 
 nightly flop. A month later my gang came 
 roaring back from the peon. camp. They had 
 worked thirty days and had not got a cent. 
 Slave-driver Legree had driven them out 
 when they demanded a reckoning. They 
 were lucky to escape with their lives, their 
 cooties and their appetites. Instead of financ- 
 ing me, I had to finance them again. They 
 finally got cleaned up and we all went back 
 to Birmingham, where the strike was over. 
 
 "Show us that spieler," they said, "who told 
 us the wage system was the worst kind of 
 slavery. If daily wages is slavery, God grant 
 that they never set us free again." 
 168 
 
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. Farm- 
 ers had to borrow money to buy food. They 
 had no other buying power. So trade lan- 
 guished, credit was strained, and finally 
 came the financial collapse. It happened 
 after the good crop years were returning. 
 That's why the people could not understand 
 it. Farmers were raising crops again, but 
 labor was idle and could not buy bread. 
 
 The* lesson is this, when commerce is 
 starved down to a certain point, it goes to 
 pieces. Then when the food comes it can 
 
 169 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 not assimilate it. It is like a man who has 
 been without food for thirty days. His mus- 
 cles have disappeared, his organs have 
 shrunk, he can not walk; he is only skin and 
 bones. The disappearance of the muscles is 
 like the disappearance of labor's jobs in hard 
 times. The shrinkage of the vital organs is 
 like the shrinkage of capital and values. 
 When the starved man is faced with food he 
 can not set in and eat a regular dinner. He 
 must be fed on a teaspoonful of soup, and it 
 is many months before his muscles come 
 back, his organs regain their normal size and 
 he is a well-fed man again. So it is with the 
 industrial state. It can be starved by crop 
 failures, by war waste or by labor slacking 
 on the job. Anything that lessens the out- 
 put of field and factory, whether it be heav- 
 en's drought or man's loafing, starves the 
 economic state and starves all men in it. If 
 crop failure should last long enough, as it 
 does in China, millions of men would die. If 
 war lasts long enough, as it did in Austria, 
 millions of citizens must starve. If labor 
 should try slacking, as it did in Russia, the 
 economic state would starve to death and the 
 workers die with it. 
 
 170 
 
A SICK SOCIAL SYSTEM 
 
 Men who have been through strikes and 
 lockouts until they have been reduced to rags 
 and hunger place no trust in the Russian 
 theory that men can quit work and loaf their 
 way to wealth. We loafed our way to hunger, 
 misery and peonage. We saw that the whole 
 world would come to our fate, if all should 
 follow our example. Luckily we won our 
 point, so we went back to work and helped 
 feed the starved social state, and in a few 
 years America was rich again. And Ameri- 
 ca continued rich and fat until the World 
 War wastage shrank her to skin and bones 
 again. Much of her muscle has disappeared 
 (1921 : five million workers are idle) and she 
 must be nursed back by big crops, and big 
 output by labor before she will be strong 
 enough to reabsorb into her system every 
 muscle in America. 
 
 That's my belief. That's my gospel. I did 
 not make this gospel. It is God's law and we 
 can not alter it. If I were asked to write the 
 BIBLE OF LABOR, this chapter would be the 
 law and the prophets. And from these truths 
 I would advise each man to write his own Ten 
 Commandments. 
 
CHAPTER XXX 
 
 BREAKING INTO THE TIN INDOSTBY 
 
 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\ 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 issuing paper money, 
 or money from some cheap metal with which 
 they could repudiate their debts. Banks 
 could not collect their loans, merchants could 
 not get money for (heir goods, manufacturers 
 were swamped by their pay-rolls and had to 
 discharge their men. Coxey was raising a 
 great army of idle men to march on Washing- 
 172 
 
THE TIN INDUSTRY 
 
 ton and demand that the government should 
 feed and clothe the people. 
 
 All my savings had long since gone, and 
 from the high life in the Pie Boarding-House 
 I had descended to my days of bread and 
 water. All men were in a common misery. 
 If a hobo managed to get a steak and cook it 
 in the bushes by the railroad track, the smell 
 of it would draw a score of hungry men into 
 the circle of his firelight. It was a trying, 
 time, and it took all the fortitude I had to 
 look hopefully forward toward a day when 
 things would begin picking up and the wheels 
 of industry would whirl again. The idle 
 men who had camped by the railroads had 
 drunk their water from, and cooked their 
 mulligan stews in, tomato cans. The tin can 
 had become the badge of hoboing. The tin. 
 trade was new in America and I foresaw a 
 future in the industry, for all kinds of food 
 were now being put up in tin, whereas when 
 I was a child a tin can was rarely seen. 
 
 I decided that two trades were better than 
 one, and I would learn the tin plate trade. I 
 went to Elwood, Indiana, and found a place 
 there in a tin mill. My knowledge of pud- 
 dling, heating and rolling, occasionally work- 
 
 173 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 ing in a sheet mill similar to a tin mill, pre- 
 pared me for this new work. In tin making 
 a piece of wrought iron is rolled thin and then 
 covered with a thinner coating of pure tin. 
 After this is done the plate remains soiled 
 and discolored, and the next process is to 
 remove the stain and polish the tin until it 
 shines like silver. 
 
 To have a job and eat pie again made me 
 happy. Our union contained several hun- 
 dred members, so I had a lot of prospective 
 friends to get acquainted with. I was then 
 nearly twenty-one and a pretty good mixer; 
 I liked men and enjoyed mingling with them 
 and learning all I could from what they told 
 me. When they drifted into a saloon I went 
 along for the company. I did not care to 
 drink, so I would join some impromptu 
 quartet and we would sing popular songs 
 while the other fellows cheered us with the 
 best will in the world. A drink of beer or two 
 heightens a man's appreciation of music, and 
 the way the boys applauded my singing makes 
 me rather regret the Volstead Act. It queered 
 my act. Since beer disappeared nobody has 
 asked me to sing. Prohibition may be good 
 for the health but it is sure death to art. 
 174 
 
THE TIN INDUSTRY 
 
 Those were happy days. But just when all 
 my troubles seemed ended and the rainbow 
 of promise in the sky, a new cloud appeared, 
 black and threatening. In fact it swept down 
 like a tornado. The men decided to strike. 
 
 A strike! Of all things! We owned about 
 the only jobs in Indiana. Our strike wouldn't 
 last long — for the mills. For us it would last 
 forever. The day we walked out, others 
 would walk in. And it would be so small a 
 part of Coxey's army that the main body 
 would march on and never miss it. I had 
 just gone through that long, soul-killing pe- 
 riod of idleness and had barely managed to 
 find a job before I collapsed. Now that we 
 were to strike I would have to push that job 
 aside and sink back into the abyss. 
 
 In reaching Elwood, I had tramped from 
 Muncie, Indiana, to Anderson, a long weary 
 walk for one whose feet, like mine, were not 
 accustomed to it. From Anderson I tramped 
 to Frankton, and there I caught a freight and 
 rode the bumpers to Elwood. The train took 
 me right into the mill. It was summer and 
 the mill had been shut down by the hard 
 times. The boss was there looking over the 
 machinery. They were getting ready to start 
 
 175 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 up. I faced him and he said : "Do you want 
 a job?" 
 
 "Yes," I said. 
 
 "What at? Greasing up to-night," he said. 
 
 Weary and hungry as I was from my hobo- 
 ing, I went right to work, and all night I, with 
 a few others, greased the bearings. The next 
 day he gave me a job as a catcher. A catcher 
 is one who seizes the rolled plate as it comes 
 out and throws it back to the roller. It has to 
 be rolled many times. The boss who gave me 
 this much-wanted job was Daniel G. Reid, 
 who afterward became one of the big men in 
 the tin industry. 
 
 After I became Secretary of Labor I was a 
 dinner guest at the White House. When I 
 arrived the President said: "Here's an old 
 friend of yours." To my surprise and keen 
 pleasure President Harding led forward my 
 old boss, Daniel G. Reid. There was much 
 laughing and old-time talk between us. "Do 
 you recall," said Mr. Reid, "how during the 
 tin strike of '96, you steered to the lodge room 
 and unionized men who came to take the 
 place of the strikers?" Mr. Reid thought this 
 was a great joke. He had always been favor- 
 able to ending the strike and signing the men's 
 176 
 
THE TIN INDUSTRY 
 
 agreement, but for a long time had been de- 
 terred by his partners. Mr. Reid in nearly 
 every conference was selected for chairman, 
 and this was considered by the employers a 
 very fine tribute of respect and confidence. 
 Turning to the president, Mr. Reid said: "If 
 Jim is as industrious in your service as he was 
 in the Elwood tin mill you have got a good 
 secretary. Jim knew more about the tin plate 
 business when he was a worker than any 
 other man in America. I wanted to get him 
 to join our sales department but he declined 
 my offer!" 
 
 "When the matter of the Elwood strike was 
 referred to the next regular meeting I had 
 been working only three weeks. I wrote to 
 my father in Sharon asking for his counsel on 
 the subject. He wrote back: "Inasmuch as it 
 isn't a question of wages or rules, I'd vote to 
 stay on the job and wait for my pay. There's 
 no pay out here to be had even by waiting. The 
 mill is down, and if we hadn't raised a big 
 potato crop we wouldn't know where to look 
 for our next meal." 
 
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 he 
 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 clos- 
 ing because of bad business? 
 
 While the speakers were presenting the 
 reasons for the strike I noticed that not a man 
 examined or discussed the dangers in it. The 
 mind of the meeting was made up. I was 
 talking to the fellow who sat beside me, and 
 I told him what my father had written me. 
 
 "I agree," he said. "A strike at a time like 
 this doesn't seem to be the right thing to do." 
 
 "If you don't think it a wise move," I said, 
 "why don't you get up and say so. For this 
 178 
 
UNACCUSTOMED TO PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 meeting is going to vote strike in the next two 
 minutes, sure as fate." 
 
 "I can't make a speech," he said. "You do 
 it." 
 
 The men were paid monthly checks and 
 had never heard any complaint from their 
 landlords and grocerymen who were willing 
 to wait for their pay. The complaint had 
 been made by a few outsiders who wanted to 
 see money circulate faster in town and thus 
 boom things up a bit. They had aroused the 
 strike spirit of the men by speeches like this : 
 
 "The bosses own you body and soul. They 
 regard you as slaves. Your work makes them 
 rich and yet they won't pay for your work^ 
 While they are piling up profits you go 
 around without a nickel in your jeans. At 
 the end of the week you want your pay. Why 
 don*t they give it to you? Because they would 
 'sooner borrow money without interest from 
 you than go to the bank and pay eight per 
 cent, for it. You men are their bankers and 
 don't know it. You could have your money 
 in the bank instead of in their pockets — it 
 would be drawing interest for you instead of 
 drawing interest for them! The interest on 
 the wages of you men is five hundred sixty 
 179 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 dollars a month. No wonder they hold your 
 pay for a month and put that five hundred 
 and sixty dollars in their pockets. But those 
 wages are yours as fast as you earn them. 
 The interest on your money belongs to you. 
 That five hundred and sixty dollars a month 
 belongs in your pockets. But it will go into 
 the bosses' pockets as long as you are willing 
 to be robbed. You have rights, but they 
 trample on them when you will not fight for 
 your rights. Are you mice or men?" 
 
 When it was put that way they answered 
 that they were men. The strike was "sold" 
 to them before the meeting, without their 
 having had a chance to state their side of it. 
 I felt that this was wrong. There are lynch 
 verdicts in this world as well as verdicts of 
 justice. When men have a chance to make 
 up their own minds their verdict is always 
 just. But here a little group who knew what 
 they wanted had stampeded the minds of the 
 men, and a verdict won that way is bike a 
 mob verdict. 
 
 I decided to get up and speak, although it 
 was really too late. It seemed to me like call- 
 ing a doctor after the patient is dead. 
 
 "Men," I said, "I'm a newcomer here and I 
 180 
 
UNACCUSTOMED TO PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 never made a speech in my life. I wouldn't 
 try to now, only I've been asked to by others — 
 by somebody that's been here a long time. He 
 thinks there ought to be a little more said 
 before we ballot. It's a hot day and I don't 
 want to keep you here if you don't want to 
 listen to me. What I've got to say probably 
 don't amount to much." 
 
 "Go ahead," somebody said. 
 
 "We've decided to strike, and I don't know 
 how it will turn out. I've been out of work 
 for several months and you fellows haven't, 
 so I can tell you what it's like. The country 
 is thronging with idle men. If we lose this 
 strike we can roam all over the country before 
 we find another job. I came all the way here 
 from Alabama, where they drove a bunch of 
 iron workers into the peonage camps, and I 
 was glad to get out alive. Conditions are 
 awful bad in this country and I have been 
 trying to study 'em. Money is scarcer now 
 than it's ever been before. They tell us that 
 the bosses are keeping our wages in their 
 pockets. That's a mistake. They haven't got 
 anything in their pockets. They've mortgaged 
 their homes and pledged everything they 
 own. They're having a devil of a time to 
 181 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 rake up the money every month to meet the 
 pay-roll when it's due. They aren't taking in 
 the money as fast as they're paying it out. 
 Their salesmen are on the road trying to sell 
 tin plate, but the tinners are so hard up that 
 few of them can buy. 
 
 "I believe we ought to get our pay every 
 Jweek, but how can we get it if the boss hasn't 
 got it? We've got to look at this thing in the 
 light of facts. The facts are that we have our 
 ■jobs and are sure of our pay once a month. 
 There are a million men who would like to 
 have what we have. Those men will swarm 
 in and take our jobs. You can't stop them. 
 A hungry man can't be stopped by the cry of 
 'scab.' You all know that there are so many 
 union men now idle that we have to pass 
 around our jobs to keep the men in this town 
 from starving. When word goes out that we 
 have struck, you'll see the workers swarm in 
 here like locusts. They'll be glad to take 
 their pay by the month. What's the use of a 
 strike that hasn't got a chance to win? We 
 joined the union to make our jobs secure and 
 to get good pay. We're getting good pay. 
 Our jobs are secure unless we lose them in 
 this strike. 
 
 182 
 
UNACCUSTOMED TO PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 "I don't believe we've looked at both sides 
 of the case. I don't believe the boys really 
 want this strike. The demand for it orig- 
 inated outside our ranks. Who started it? 
 Wasn't it started by fellows who want us to 
 get our pay quicker so they can get it quick- 
 er? They're the ones that worked up this 
 strike. They tell us that the bosses are rob- 
 bing us because they hold our pay till the end 
 of the month. They say we ought to have it 
 in the bank. They know we wouldn't put it 
 in the bank. Yon know we wouldn't put it in 
 the bank. We don't want to put it in the 
 bank, and you bet your boots they don't want 
 us to put it in the bank. They're liars when 
 they say they're boosting for the banks. 
 They're boosting for their own pockets. 
 
 "But we've really got our money in a bank 
 — or what's good as a bank. The mill keeps 
 our money for us just the way a bank would. 
 No bank in town pays interest on checking 
 accounts, you know that. Then why take our 
 money out of the mill office and put it in a 
 bank? It's just as safe in the mill office. 
 And you've got the right to draw on it if you 
 really need money in the middle of the 
 month. Only in case of death or accident 
 
 183 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 does a man need money in the middle of the 
 month. And he can go to the pay window 
 and get it when he needs it. The doctor 
 doesn't send his bill till the end of the month. 
 The landlord doesn't collect the rent till the 
 end of the month. The grocer and butcher 
 let you run a bill till the end of the month. 
 Some of us are really better off getting our 
 pay at the end of the month. For it's all there 
 for us and we can pay our bills promptly and 
 hold up our heads as men. If we didn't leave 
 our money in the office until the end of the 
 month, we might blow it in at a bar, and 
 wh»n the wife wanted money to pay the rent 
 and food bill we would have to tell her we 
 were broke and she would have to hang her 
 head. When the landlord and butcher came 
 for the money she would have to try to stand 
 them off. Do we want to let the rent go un- 
 paid until the landlord cusses us out? Is that 
 what we are striking for? If the landlord 
 and butcher are willing to wait till we draw 
 our pay, we ought to be willing too. Isn't it 
 better to wait a month for pay than to wait a 
 year? I'm right here to tell you that after 
 this strike we'll wait for our pay until hell 
 freezes over and the devil goes skating. 
 184 
 
UNACCUSTOMED TO PUBLIC SPEAKING 
 
 "Let us make no mistake. We are calling 
 this strike not of our own free will, but were 
 shoved into it by a lot of slick talkers that are 
 in business and are not workers. They have 
 hoodwinked us. They have made fools of 
 us. A speaker asked are we mice or men. I 
 ask them are they rats or men. I want these 
 rats to come out of their holes and stand upon 
 this floor. Who was the first man that sug- 
 gested this strike? I want to see the color of 
 his hair. Stand up, if he's in the hall. If he 
 isn't here, why isn't he?" 
 
 No one answered. 
 
 "If this strike was called by outsiders," I 
 cried, "why don't the outsiders do the strik- 
 ing? Whose jobs will be lost in this strike — 
 our jobs or the outsiders' jobs? If the man 
 who started this strike has a job that won't 
 be lost in the strike, then I claim that we 
 have made a bad mistake. And if we're 
 making a mistake, men, what are we going to 
 do about it?" 
 
 I sat down, exhausted by the first attempt 
 at public pleading I had ever made. Every- 
 thing grew dark about me, and I knew that I 
 had done my best and that I was through. I 
 was quite young, and I went to pieces like 
 185 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 an untrained runner who had overdone him- 
 self. 
 
 The men were talking to one another, and 
 somebody moved that the meeting take a 
 recess until after supper. It would give time 
 to think it over and find out what the men 
 really thought about the strike proposition. 
 
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 stammer- 
 ing 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 rest had been swept 
 along with them as a unit. In other words, 
 the .first session had become group-minded 
 instead of individual-minded. It is like the 
 difference between a utampede and a delib- 
 erative body. The second meeting was calmly 
 deliberative and it finally voted a recon- 
 sideration, and the strike resolution was over- 
 whelmingly defeated. 
 
 187 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 If this were a novel, it would be fine to 
 record in this chapter that the young orator 
 who at the last moment turned the tide and 
 saved the day became the hero of the union 
 and was unanimously elected president. 
 That's the way these things go in fiction. 
 And that is exactly what happened. In due 
 time I found myself at the head of the Local, 
 and nearly every man had voted for me. I 
 started negotiations for more frequent pay- 
 days, and a few months later we were being 
 paid on the first and fifteenth of the month. 
 Life is indeed dramatic, — at least it has 
 seemed so to me. Some men say that life 
 has no meaning; that men are the playthings 
 of blind forces that crush them, and there is 
 no answer to the riddle. This is nonsense. I 
 admit that we are in the grip of blind forces. 
 But we are not blind. We can not change 
 those forces. If we fight against them they 
 will crush us. But by going with them, guid- 
 ing our careers along their courses, they will 
 bear us to the port we're steering for. 
 
 The mob spirit in man is one of those blind 
 
 forces that so often lead to shipwreck. The 
 
 mob-mind differs from the mind of reason. 
 
 To tell them apart is like distinguishing 
 
 188 
 
LOGIC WINS IN THE STRETCH 
 
 mushrooms from toadstools. They look alike, 
 but one means health and the other is poison. 
 Life has taught me the difference between a 
 movement and a mob. A movement is guided 
 by logic, law and personal responsibility. A 
 mob is guided by passion and denies respon- 
 sibility. 
 
 I have seen meetings turned into mobs and 
 mobs dissolved again into meetings. Swept 
 by passion we willed a strike. That strike 
 would have been just, and, yet, it would have 
 ruined us. We were like a mob in which 
 every man forgets his own responsibility. 
 The mob mind would have rushed us to our 
 own ruin. My speech called for individuals 
 to stand up. That set each individual think- 
 ing : "If I stand up, that crazy guy will smash 
 me." Each man became responsible again. 
 The mob was gone, and all we had was indi- 
 vidual men, each thinking for himself. That 
 thinking then went on and each man reached 
 a verdict based on logic, sense and duty. The 
 meeting could no longer speak with one voice. 
 It couldn't talk at all. It stammered. The 
 action showed that each mind stood apart, 
 alone. And yet the vote revealed that they 
 were all together. 
 
 189 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 I have watched the long struggle of union- 
 ism in America and I know the law that has 
 governed all its ups and downs. Wherever 
 j it was still a movement it has thrived ; wher- 
 ever it became a mob it fell. The one Big 
 Union was a mob. No movement based on 
 passion finally wins; no movement based on 
 reason finally fails. "Why then say life is a 
 riddle and man helpless? 
 
 When I became Secretary of Labor, one of 
 the first letters I received was from Mrs. Eli 
 Baldwin whose coal oil I burned shamelessly, 
 studying far into the night. Mrs. Eli Baldwin 
 wrote from Atlanta, Indiana, where she now 
 lives: 
 
 "When your roommates complained be- 
 cause your light kept them awake, I knew 
 what you were doing. I knew that you were 
 studying their problems for them, getting 
 yourself an education so you would know 
 how to get them better wages and better work- 
 ing conditions." 
 
 This letter pleased me more than I can tell. 
 This kind old lady, now eighty-two, had faith 
 in me and feels that her faith was justified. 
 Now, then, can I believe that life is meaning- 
 less, — that there is no plan, and that all man's 
 efforts are foredoomed to failure? 
 190 
 
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 mak- 
 ing 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 enter- 
 prises. 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 mon- 
 sters. The communist books that Comrade 
 Bannerman had given me taught me to be- 
 lieve that capitalists had no human feelings 
 like ordinary mortals. I therefore expected 
 to find the mill-boss as cunning as the fox 
 and ape combined. I supposed that his word 
 would be worthless as a pledge and would be 
 given only for the purpose of tricking me. 
 His manners I expected to be rude; he would 
 shout at me and threaten me, hoping to take 
 191 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 away my courage and send me back to my 
 fellows beaten. 
 
 What I found, of course, was a self-pos- 
 sessed man, the model of courtesy and exact- 
 ness. He differed from us men in one 
 respect. His mind was complex instead of 
 simplex. That is, he could think on two sides 
 of a question at the same time. He had so 
 trained his mind by much use of it that it 
 was as nimble as the hands of a juggler who 
 can keep several objects tossing in the air at 
 the same time. We men were clumsy think- 
 ers, and one thing at a time was all we could 
 handle without fumbling it. 
 
 The great manufacturer never showed any 
 emotion. He was never angry, domineering, 
 sneering or insulting. He kept these emotions 
 under control because they could do him no 
 good, and because they would give pain to 
 others. We fellows never hesitated to show 
 how we felt. We would jibe one another, 
 laugh at a fellow to his chagrin, and when we 
 were angry bawl each other out unmercifully. 
 For a fellow to smile when he was angry and 
 not let the other fellow know it, was a trick 
 we had not learned. That a bloodthirsty, 
 cruel capitalist should be such a graceful fel- 
 low was a shock to me. I saw from the start 
 192 
 
I MEET THE INDUSTRIAL CAPTAINS 
 
 that the communist picture of a capitalist as 
 a bristling, snorting hog was the farthest 
 thing from the truth. The picture was drawn 
 by malice and not from a desire to tell the 
 truth. 
 
 I learned that when Mr. Reid and his fel- 
 lows gave their word they never broke it. It 
 was hard to get a promise from them, but 
 once they made a promise they always ful- 
 filled it. If they said they would meet us at 
 a certain hour, they were always there on the 
 minute. They were patient, firm and reason- 
 able, and they always treated us as their 
 equals. 
 
 They always gave us the reasons for the 
 stand they took. At first I doubted their sin- 
 cerity, but in the end I learned that the rea- 
 sons they cited were the true reasons. At 
 first they thought that they would have to 
 guard themselves against roguery and 
 doubledealing on the part of the tin workers. 
 This showed that they had had unpleasant 
 experiences. For, men who knew their busi- 
 ness as well as they did must surely have had 
 some cause for their suspicion. Raseless sus- 
 picion is a trait of ignorant men, and these 
 men were not ignorant. A burnt child dreads 
 the fire. 
 
 193 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 I decided to take them as my models, to 
 learn all their virtues and let them know that 
 I was as square in my dealings with them as 
 they were with me. I studied their business 
 as thoroughly as I studied the case of the 
 men. I soon got from them all the conces- 
 sions we had demanded when we called the 
 strike. It was fortunate for us that the strike 
 was cancelled, for we kept our jobs and in 
 due course got all the things that we were 
 going to strike for. 
 
 In fact, I got so many concessions by dick- 
 ering with those bosses that I made hfe a 
 burden for them at times. I knew the cost of 
 every different kind of plate the mill put out, 
 and so I could demand a high rate of wages 
 and support my demands with logic. My 
 midnight studies had not been in vain. It all 
 came back in cash to the working man; and 
 yet it was my own pals who had rebuked me 
 for being too bookish. This did not make me 
 sour. I loved the fellows just the same, and 
 when they showed their faith in me, it more 
 than paid me back. 
 
 But I had learned this general rule: The 
 average working man thinks mostly of the 
 present. He leaves to students and to capi- 
 talists the safeguarding of his future. 
 194 
 
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 into the mills and 
 giving us workers a chill by telling us that 
 the heat was killing us. The men used to 
 cool themselves down with a glass of beer at 
 the close of the day. The social investigators 
 told us that alcohol taken into the system at 
 such a time would cause sunstroke. If beer 
 was fatal, most of us figured that we had 
 been dead for years and didn't know it. The 
 195 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 effect of constant complaints was to demor- 
 alize us and make our work harder. I 
 thought at first that these investigators were 
 our friends and I gave them all the help I 
 could. But instead of helping us, they only 
 hurt us, and then I soured on their misap- 
 plied zeal. They were a species new to me 
 that seemed to have sprung up in the hard 
 times, just as cooties spring up in time of 
 war. And like cooties, they attached them- 
 selves to us closer than a brother and yet 
 they were no brothers of ours. The social 
 investigators nibbled away at the men and 
 kept them restless in their hours of ease. 
 They sat at our boarding table and com- 
 plained of the food. Corned beef and cab- 
 bage was one of our regular dishes. Mr. In- 
 vestigator turned up his nose and said: "I 
 never touch corned beef. If you knew as 
 much about it as I do, you would insist on 
 steaks or roast beef instead. You know what 
 corned beef is, don't you?" 
 
 The men got mad and one fellow said: 
 "Yes; it is dead cow. All meat is dead 
 animals. Now give us a rest." 
 
 "Yes, it's all dead, but some of it is a whole 
 lot deader than you imagine. I've been in- 
 196 
 
SHIRTS FOR TIN ROLLERS 
 
 vestigating the packing business, and I'll tell 
 you all about corned beef and wienies." He 
 then went on with a lot of sickening details 
 and when he got through he found that the 
 younger men had not eaten any dinner. The 
 older men paid no attention to him and 
 worked right ahead to the pie and toothpick 
 stage, but the younger fellows had been 
 euchered out of dinner and went back to work 
 with wabbly steps and empty stomachs. 
 
 This convinced me that the investigator 
 was a false alarm. If corned beef was poison, 
 as he said, there wouldn't be a working man 
 alive in America. But millions have eaten 
 corned beef all their lives and have thrived 
 on it. Things are never one tenth so bad as 
 the agitators say. They merely take the 
 heart out of men and send them back to 
 work weakened and unhappy. 
 
 This fellow had a favorite joke which he 
 sprang every meal. After sniffing at the ! 
 soup and meat and cabbage he would ex- 
 claim : "Hebrews, 13-8." We thought it was 
 some jibe about the fat pork, and after he 
 had sprung it every day for a week we 
 learned that he was hitting at the monotony 
 of the diet. The verse in the Bible reads : 
 197 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 "Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and 
 to-day, and forever." 
 
 The fellow came into the mills and sym- 
 pathized with us because we worked with our 
 shirts off. To withstand the heat we stripped 
 to the waist. We didn't want to wear a shirt. 
 It would have clung to our flesh and ham- 
 pered our moving muscles. We were freer 
 and cooler without any cloth to smother us. 
 It was a privilege to go shirtless. Adam 
 enjoyed that blessing in the Garden of Eden. 
 And when he sinned they punished him by 
 putting a shirt, collar and necktie on him. 
 And yet this theorist in the mills demanded 
 working conditions that would let us wear 
 shirts. Why? Who was asking for shirts? 
 Only he, and he had a shirt. In their own 
 words, the fellows would have enjoyed mak- 
 ing him eat it. 
 
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 from getting sick, aren't 
 you? Do you really care a darn whether 
 those fellows get sick at the stomach or not?" 
 
 "Certainly, I " 
 
 "You don't want them to get sick at the 
 stomach?" 
 
 "No." 
 
 195* 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 "Then, why did you give that lecture on 
 corned beef and make those strong fellows 
 all sick at the stomach while you enjoyed your 
 own dinner?" 
 
 "I didn't know it would disturb them so. 
 Besides I wanted to keep them from getting 
 sick later." 
 
 "Well, they prefer to have their health now, 
 and wait for their sickness until later on. You 
 are doing no man a favor by making him 
 sick when he is feeling well. If God is willing 
 for them to be well, and they want to be well, 
 and the only thing that keeps them from being 
 well is you, aren't you afraid that they will 
 pile on to you and knock the daylights out of 
 you?" 
 
 "I am really working for their good." 
 
 "Then you want their stomachs to have 
 what agrees with them?" 
 
 "Certainly." 
 
 "Well, I'll tell you something, then. Water 
 doesn't always agree with the stomach as well 
 as beer does. You never worked at terrific 
 muscular exertion handling white-hot iron 
 in a mill like this. You haven't got the mus- 
 cles to do it, and I doubt if you've got the 
 heart. You can not know the condition a 
 200 
 
AN UPLIFTER RULED BY ENVY 
 
 man is in when he hits his hardest lick here. 
 But they know, and I know. Some of the 
 men feel they can't drink water at that time. 
 My pal tells me that his stomach rejects it; 
 his throat seems to collapse as he gulps it. 
 But beer he can drink and it eases him. The 
 alcohol in beer is a blessing at that time. It 
 soothes his laboring stomach until the water 
 can get into his system and quench the man's 
 thirst. Iron workers in the Old World have 
 used malt beverages for generations. Why 
 take away the other man's pleasure if it 
 doesn't injure you? If it was deadly we 
 would have been weakened in the course of 
 generations. But look at the worker's body. 
 It is four times as strong as yours." I saw 
 an envious look in his eye. 
 
 "Of course I inherited my muscular build," 
 I apologized, "and so I try to make the most 
 of it in boasting to you fellows who haven't 
 any muscle. But really I envy you. You have 
 education and brain power. That's what I 
 lack and that's what I want above all other 
 things. I try to study at night and educate 
 myself. But I haven't got any chance against 
 you fellows who are born intellectual and 
 have college training on top of it So if I 
 201 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 have talked sharp to you, my oussedness is 
 really due to envy. I really want to be in 
 your shoes, and I haven't got the brains for 
 the job." 
 
 This worked. 
 
 "There is nothing about me for a fellow 
 like you to envy," he said condescendingly. 
 "I'm no better off than you are. In fact, I 
 envy you fellows. You are never sick; you 
 can eat and digest anything. I really envy 
 you. You are built like a young Hercules 
 and are never ashamed when you strip. 
 When I put on a bathing suit I am embar- 
 rassed until I get out of sight in the water, 
 because I'm all skin and bones. My arms and 
 legs are the size of broomsticks." 
 
 "Oh, well," I said, "you're just as well off 
 without the Hercules shape. You are always 
 healthy." 
 
 "Healthy? What I call health, you fellows 
 would regard as the last stages of decrepitude. 
 A little beer and tobacco knocks me over. If 
 I drank coffee and ate pie the way you do, 
 I'd have to take morphine to get a night's 
 sleep. You fellows need never envy us intel- 
 lectuals. You can drink and smoke and eat 
 anything, and all the poisons you take in are 
 202 
 
AN UPLIFTER RULED BY ENVY 
 
 sweated out of your pores in this terrific 
 labor, so that every night you come out as 
 clean and lusty as a new-born child. I'd 
 swap all my education in a minute for the 
 mighty body and the healthy and lusty living 
 that you enjoy. If you knew how much I 
 envy you, you would never think of envying 
 me." 
 
 He had blurted out the truth. It wasn't 
 love of comrades that gave a motive to his 
 life. It was envy that turned him inside out. 
 Envy was the whole story, and he admitted 
 it 
 
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 af- 
 terward 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 
 would say. "Tell 'em that if they don't let 
 me work, nobody will work." 
 
 I always refused to take such complaints 
 to the office. I never approached the boss 
 with a demand that I did not think was right. 
 Some of the men thought we ought to be vin- 
 dictive and take every opportunity to put a 
 204 
 
GROWLING FOR THE BOSSES' BLOOD 
 
 crimp in the business for the owners. I en- 
 vied the owners (we've all got a touch of that 
 in our system), because they were rich and 
 were making profits. I knew what their 
 profits averaged. By calling fussy little 
 strikes often enough I could have kept the 
 profits close to the zero mark. Thus the men 
 would be making wages out of the business 
 and the owners would be making nothing. 
 But I declined to let my actions be governed 
 by envy. The Ten Commandments forbid 
 covetousness. The Golden Rule also forbade 
 my practising sabbotage. And I have never 
 tried to find a better guide than the Ten Com- 
 mandments and the Golden Rule. The test of 
 my misconduct would have come when, hav- 
 ing cleverly destroyed their profits, I found 
 them quitting in discouragement, closing up 
 the business and throwing us all out of our 
 jobs for keeps. 
 
 ■ I tried to point out these things to the men. 
 Some of them felt as I did about it. Others 
 couldn't see it. So I learned darn early in 
 life that you can't reform 'em all. 
 
 I used to say to the complaining man : 
 "Look here, Bill; you're in no shape to 
 work. Go home and lie down for a couple of 
 205 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 days. You wouldn't last here two hours in 
 your present shaky condition. You'd pinch 
 the rolls with your tongs and probably get 
 your neck broke. That's why they won't let 
 'you work. You can't work. So back to your 
 bed, Bill, we will not call them out to-day." 
 
 Bill usually went away cursing me as the 
 friend of the "plutes" and the enemy of labor. 
 "I'll get you yet," he'd say, "you black-headed 
 buzzard." 
 
 And so while I was making enemies among 
 many of the men who thought I wasn't stand- 
 ing up for their rights, I was making myself 
 even more unpopular with the owners by 
 sticking up too firmly for the rights of the 
 men. They told me they believed I knew as 
 much about the tin plate business as any man 
 in the trade. This knowledge would enable 
 me to do better in the distributing end of the 
 business, while as a worker I could only make 
 the union wages that all the fellows were get- 
 ting. This gave me an idea that has since 
 become the dominating purpose of my life. 
 Handicraft is the basis of the best schooling. 
 By working with my hands as well as with 
 my head I learned the actual cost of produc- 
 tion of every kind of plate they put out. This 
 206 
 
GROWLING FOR THE BOSSES' BLOOD 
 
 was something that I could not have learned 
 from books. Without such knowledge the 
 business would have to be run partly on 
 guesswork. With a thorough knowledge of 
 the production end of the business I became 
 a valuable man. The way was open for me 
 to get out of the labor field and into the field 
 of management. 
 
 But here is where my natural feeling of 
 fraternity stepped in. I liked to be among the 
 men. I felt at home there. I was only twen- 
 ty-two, and salesmanship was a field I had 
 never tried, except for a season when I sold 
 Mark Twain's book, Following the Equator. 
 There were plenty of men who had the knack 
 of selling. My aatural gift, if I had any, was 
 to smooth the path for working men and 
 help them solve their problems. I had 
 learned that labor was the first step on the 
 road to knowledge. It was the foundation of 
 all true knowledge. I wanted to help the fel- 
 lows take the next step. That step would be 
 to learn how labor can enrich itself and do 
 away with strikes and unemployment. That 
 is a question that still fascinates me. I did 
 not care to dodge it and become a manufac- 
 turer. I am the kind of fellow who, when he 
 
 207 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 takes hold of a question, never lets go. The 
 picture of Comrade Bannerman shaking his 
 fist at the trainload of "plutes" lingered with 
 me. I still heard the voice of the knock-kneed 
 reformer who envied my husky limbs. The 
 cry for bloody revolution was already in the 
 air. "When would the mob be started and 
 what would it do? When Comrade Banner- 
 man had robbed the rich and piled their 
 corpses in a Caesar's column, would not the 
 knock-kneed uplifter break my legs in mak- 
 ing all men equal? These men were moved 
 by envy and they lusted for blood. I faced 
 the problem with a thirst for accurate knowl- 
 edge, and my passion was not for bloodshed 
 but for brotherhood. 
 
CHAPTER XXXVII 
 
 FBEE 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 agree- 
 ment 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 rolls on Saturday 
 can not be cut and measured in time for him 
 to get his pay for it that week. For the pay 
 envelope is handed to him Saturday noon, 
 and his Saturday's rolling will not go through 
 the cutter until Monday. He can not be paid 
 for it until it is in shape to be measured. So 
 we were satisfied to be paid twice a month. 
 
 But the mill was now making big profits 
 209 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 and we demanded a raise in pay. The mill 
 owners countered by refusing to "recognize" 
 the union. They would deal with the men 
 only as individuals. A strike was called, and 
 the union won. We recovered our raise 
 in pay and signed a new contract. The 
 strike was off in September after two long 
 months of idleness, and within a few days 
 after the dust had settled we smelt the fire- 
 works of political oratory. I am telling it 
 now as it appeared to me then, and of course 
 I beg the indulgence of those concerned. 
 
 Bryan, the bearcat of the Nebraska ranches, 
 had roared with his ears back, and the land 
 was in a tumult. "Coin's Financial School" 
 had already taught the people that the "gold- 
 bugs" owned the country and that the people 
 could save themselves from eternal serfdom 
 only by changing the color of their money. 
 Bryan told the westerners that the East was 
 the "enemy's country" and that the gold 
 standard was a game by which the East was 
 robbing the West, and the only way the 
 people of the West could save themselves was 
 to move East and clip bonds or else change 
 the color of the money! 
 
 This is the way it looked to me as a working 
 210 
 
FREE AND UNLIMITED COINAGE 
 
 man, and I hope my good friend Bryan will 
 pardon me for writing of his "great para- 
 mount issue" in a joking way. For after all it 
 was a joke, a harmless joke — because we 
 didn't adopt it I got excited by the threat- 
 ened "remedy" and went into politics. While 
 the tin trade was on strike, crazy propagan- 
 dists from everywhere poured into Elwood 
 and began teaching the men bi-metalism, 
 communism, bolshevism and anarchy. A 
 communist propagandist is like a disease 
 germ; he doesn't belong in healthy bodies. 
 If he gets in he can't increase and is soon 
 thrown out again. But let a strike weaken 
 the body of workers, and the germs swarm in 
 and start their scarlet fever. 
 
 As soon as the strike was won, I threw my- 
 self into the task of combatting the rising tide 
 of class hatred led by Bryan, representing 
 agrarians in a fight against bankers and in- 
 dustrialists. I was chairman of the mill 
 workers' Sound Money Club. Bryan was 
 running for president on a platform declaring 
 that the laboring man should "not be cruci- 
 fied upon a cross of gold." No laboring man 
 wanted to be. I was on the same side of the 
 fence with Bryan when it came to the cruci- 
 211 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 fixion question, but on the opposite side of 
 the fence regarding the gold question. Of 
 course I knew little about finance, and could 
 not answer the Nebraskan. But had he ad- 
 vocated the free and unlimited coinage of 
 pig-iron I could have talked him into a gasp- 
 ing hysteria. For, we mill fellows figured 
 that this was exactly what Bryan's money 
 theory amounted to. His farmer friends had 
 borrowed gold money from the bankers, 
 spent it in drought years plowing land that 
 produced nothing, and then found themselves 
 unable to pay it back. They wanted to call 
 silver and paper cash and pay the debt with 
 this new kind of money. He wanted a money 
 system by which a farmer could borrow 
 money to put in his crop, then having failed 
 to raise a crop (I have mentioned the great 
 drought years) could yet pay back the money. 
 But no farming nation can suffer great crop 
 losses without being set back financially and 
 starved to where it hurts. You've got to fig- 
 ure God's laws into your human calculations. 
 "Bryan might as well try to dodge the hun- 
 gry days by advocating the free and unlimited 
 coinage of tomato cans," is the way one of 
 the fellows put it; "then every man could 
 borrow a dollar and buy a can of tomatoes. 
 212 
 
FREE AND UNLIMITED COINAGE 
 
 After eating the tomatoes he could coin the 
 can into a dollar and buy another can of 
 tomatoes. And so on until he got too old to 
 eat, and then he could use the last dollar 
 from the tin can in paying back the banker." 
 Schemes like that are all right for orators and 
 agitators who make their living with words. 
 But farmers and iron workers know what 
 it is that turns clods into corn and what makes 
 the iron wheels that bear it to market. It 
 is muscle applied with the favor of God. 
 
 Without labor, no crops., Without rain, no 
 crops. It was world-wide crop failures that 
 finally brought the lean years of the nineties. 
 The return of big crops was already reviving 
 the sick world. It rejected the radicals' 
 "remedy" and next year it was well. Had we 
 taken that wrong medicine in the dark it 
 would have killed us. Thirty years later Rus- 
 sia let them shoot that medicine into her arm 
 and it paralyzed her. The rain falls upon 
 her fields and the soil is rich, but it brings 
 forth no harvest and the people starve. 
 
 Russia has had famines before, but they 
 were acts of God. The rain failed and there 
 was no harvest. Their present famine is an 
 act of man. Labor ceased. And the ensuing 
 hunger was man's own fault. Nations that 
 213 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 think labor is a curse, and adopt schemes to 
 avoid labor, must perish for their folly. 
 
 In 1896 we came within an inch of adopting 
 financial bolshevism. This taught me that a 
 people are poorly schooled who can not tell 
 the good from the bad. The wise heads knew 
 what was good for the country. Hard work 
 and good crops would cure our ills. But mil- 
 lions voted for a poison that would have 
 destroyed us. From that time on I dreamed 
 of a new kind of school, not the kind we had 
 that turned out men to grope blindly between 
 good and folly. But a school based on the 
 fundamental facts of life and labor, the need 
 of food and housing, and the sweating skill 
 that brings man most of his blessings. A 
 school from which no man could come out 
 ignorant. That school should teach the eter- 
 nal facts, and he that denied the facts would 
 then be known for a fool or a rogue — and not 
 be thought a Messiah. 
 
 I love sentiment, and I believe in God. And 
 I believe that facts are God's glorious handi- 
 work. "Ye shall know the truth, and the 
 truth will set you free." The man who shuns 
 realities because they belittle him is on the 
 wrong road; he is hopelessly lost from the 
 beginning. 
 
 214 
 
CHAPTER XXXVIII 
 
 THE EDITOR GETS MY GOAT 
 
 Madison County, Indiana, was a Demo- 
 cratic 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 industry 
 was reviving under a Republican tariff." The 
 orators said the best proof that it was a sham 
 mill lay in the fact that the plutocrats claimed 
 "■* it was a tin mill, while "everybody knows it 
 is impossible to manufacture tin plate in 
 America." 
 
 My method of getting votes for the tariff 
 was to take young Democrats from the mill 
 and transport them to Democratic rallies in 
 215 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 the far corner of the county where they 
 heard their Democratic orators saying that 
 the mill was a sham put up to fool voters and 
 that it was not manufacturing any tin. When 
 the young Democrats heard such rot they 
 turned against their party. They were farm 
 boys who had been brought up in that county 
 and had quit the farm and gone into the tin 
 mill because they could earn twice as much 
 making tin as they could farming. A worker at 
 work is hard-headed enough to know that 
 when an orator tells him he is not working and 
 not earning any money, the orator is an ass. 
 These lies about fake factories hurt the Demo- 
 crats by turning all the mill Democrats into 
 Republicans. This is the only method I have 
 ever used in campaigning. The Republicans 
 carried the town. When, two years later, I 
 ran for city clerk, they passed around the 
 rumor that I was a wild Welshman from a 
 land where the tribes lived in caves and wore 
 leather skirts and wooden shoes, and that I 
 had had my first introduction to a pants- 
 wearing people when I came to America. 
 They said that I had not yet learned to speak 
 English, could not spell my own name, and 
 was unable to count above ten. 
 216 
 
THE EDITOR GETS MY GOAT 
 
 These charges printed in the opposition 
 paper offered me my only chance for election. 
 I went to all my meetings with a big slate. 
 I asked my audience to call out numbers. I 
 wrote down the figures and then did sums in 
 arithmetic to prove that I could count. I 
 would ask if there was a school-teacher in 
 the audience (there was always one there). 
 He would rise, and I would ask him to verify 
 my calculations. I would also have him ask 
 me to spell words. He would give me such 
 words as "combustion," "garbage disposal," 
 "bonded indebtedness" and so on. I would 
 spell the words and write them on the slate. 
 He would then ask me questions in history, 
 geography and political economy. Then the 
 school-teacher would turn to the crowd and 
 say: 
 
 "Friends, I came to this meeting because I 
 had read that Mr. Davis is an ignorant for- 
 eigner unfitted for the duties of city clerk. 
 I find to my surprise that he is well informed. 
 I am glad we came here and investigated, for 
 we can all rest assured that if he is elected 
 to the office, he is entirely capable of filling 
 it." 
 
 I handled the money and kept the books 
 217 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 for the union, and this work in addition to 
 my campaign efforts wore me down at last. 
 Two nights before the election I decided that 
 I had small chance of winning. I was on the 
 Republican ticket, and the Republicans had 
 been in office four years and their adminis- 
 tration had proved unfortunate. There had 
 been rich pickings for contractors in that new 
 and overgrown city, and the people blamed 
 the Republicans and were determined on a 
 change. 
 
 I was passing the office of the opposition 
 editor late at night after canvassing for votes 
 all day. I thought of the nasty slurs he had 
 written about me and my whole ancestry. I 
 had fought hard to educate myself and had 
 been helpful to others. My self-respect 
 revolted under this editor's malicious goad- 
 ing. I happened to see him in his front 
 office, and on a sudden impulse, I went in, 
 took hold of his collar, and gave him a good 
 licking. 
 
 The next day he bawled me out worse than 
 ever. He said I was not only a wild Welsh- 
 man and a blockhead, but what is more 
 deadly still, I was a gorilla and an assassin. 
 
 And the next day I was elected. 
 218 
 
CHAPTER XXXIX 
 
 PUTTING JAZZ INTO THE CAMPAIGN 
 
 I will go back and relate more details of 
 my race for office. Having won the nomina- 
 tion, 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 mer- 
 chants 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: "Play the game square." I argued 
 that the workers should take part in the city 
 government. I quit the tin mill and went 
 around making speeches. And as there were 
 no movies, and the men had nothing to do 
 evenings but listen to speeches, it was no 
 trouble at all to find an audience. I learned 
 that a politician or an orator has the same 
 219 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 appetite for audiences that a drunkard has 
 for gin. "When is an orator not an orator? 
 When he hasn't got an audience. I found that 
 when a horse fell down on the street and a 
 crowd gathered to pick it up, somebody began 
 "addressing the gathering on the issues of the 
 day." 
 
 Now I know why the cranks from every- 
 where swarm into any region where a strike 
 is on. They are seeking audiences. They 
 have no love for humanity except that por- 
 tion of humanity which is forced to be an 
 audience for their itching tongues. I have 
 known rich Jawbone Janes to travel half 
 across the continent to harangue a poor bunch 
 of striking hunyaks. These daughters of 
 luxury wanted one luxury that money could 
 not buy. The luxury of chinning their drivel 
 to an audience. You can't buy audiences as 
 you buy orchids and furs. Accidents make 
 audiences. When a horse falls down and a 
 crowd gathers, he'll be up again and the 
 crowd gone before a girl from Riverside 
 Drive can come a hundred miles in a Pull- 
 man. But when the job falls down, the strike 
 crowd sticks together for days. This gives 
 the crack-brained lady opportunity to catch 
 220 
 
PUTTING JAZZ INTO THE CAMPAIGN 
 
 the Transcontinental limited and get there in 
 time to pound their ears with her oratory. 
 She prefers a foreign crowd that can not un- 
 derstand English; they are slower to balk on 
 her. Not understanding what she says, it 
 fails to irritate them greatly. I know of one 
 radical rich girl who boasts she has spread 
 the glad tidings to audiences of thousands 
 representing every foreign language in 
 America. She still hopes some time to catch 
 an audience that understands her own 
 language. That would be a little better fun, 
 she thinks; but still the joy of talking is the 
 main thing, so it matters little whether your 
 audience understands. She wants her au- 
 diences to be alive, that's all; she doesn't care 
 much what they're alive with. 
 
 When the worker comes to understand that 
 these "leaders" from high society care noth- 
 ing for him but only want a prominence for 
 themselves and have no natural talents with 
 which to earn that prominence, then the 
 worker will get rid of that tribe forever. Bill 
 Haywood lacked the qualities that made Sam 
 Gompers a labor leader. Bill decided to be a 
 leader without qualifying for it, and history 
 tells the rest. 
 
 221 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 I circulated among the audiences that were 
 listening to other candidates and waited for 
 the men to express their opinions. I heard 
 one stalwart old fellow declare he was going 
 to vote for Jazz. "Jazz is the fellow we want 
 for City Clerk," I heard him tell his com- 
 rades. I had never heard of Jazz in those 
 days : Jazz was decidedly a dark horse. But 
 the man was strong for him and wanted his 
 friends to vote the same way. 
 
 There is a trick that was often used in 
 small-town elections. When the "reform ele- 
 ment" made a fight on the "old gang" it was 
 customary for the gang to lie down and place 
 the name of the new man on the ticket. The 
 reformer thought the gang beaten and that 
 his own election was sure, so he didn't make 
 a hard campaign. But the gang quietly passed 
 around word to scratch the name of the 
 reformer and to write in the name of a gang 
 candidate in the secrecy of the polling booth. 
 
 Was this trick being played on me? Were 
 they now passing around the word to scratch 
 me and write in the name of their friend, 
 Jazz, who had not come out as a candidate 
 before? I edged in closer to the man who 
 was boosting Mr. Jazz for my job, and after 
 222 
 
PUTTING JAZZ INTO THE CAMPAIGN 
 
 listening for a while I learned that "Jazz 
 Davis" was the man he was electioneering for. 
 He caught sight of my face and said : "There 
 he is now." 
 
 "My name isn't Jazz," I said. I handed 
 him my card. It read: 
 
 JAS. J. DAVIS 
 
 "What is it then?" he asked. 
 
 I saw that I would lose a vote if I humil- 
 iated him. So I laughed and said: "Yep, 
 I'm him. I was just kidding. I'm mighty 
 glad to have your support. Have a cigar." 
 
 But I went away worried. My personal 
 friends knew me as Jimmy. The men I had 
 electioneered and handed cards to thought 
 my name was Jazz. On the ballot my name 
 would appear JAMES. Between "Jimmy," 
 "Jim," "James" and Jazz" my fellows would 
 find lots of room for confusion. Every vote 
 that I lost on that account would be due to 
 my own carelessness. 
 
 It taught me the lesson of exactness. I 
 never again put out any puzzling language, 
 but tried to stick to words that could not be 
 misunderstood. 
 
 223 
 
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. 
 
 There is a great thrill for the young man 
 ■who comes home with a heart beating high 
 with triumph, to see the love and admiration 
 in his parents' eyes. Father shook my hand 
 and said. "You're a good boy, Jimmy, and 
 I'm proud of you. I always knew you'd make 
 your mark." 
 
 "I haven't made much of a mark, dad," I 
 224 
 
FATHER TOOK ME SERIOUSLY 
 
 laughed. "City clerk isn't much. County 
 recorder is what I'm aiming for." In fact, 
 I had gone so far as to dream of being auditor 
 of the state of Indiana. 
 
 A jolly old uncle who was there and who 
 was looked on as the sage and wit of the 
 Welsh settlement, began kidding me. 
 
 "From city clerk to county recorder is only 
 a step, Jimmy," he said. "Next you'll be 
 governor, and then president." 
 
 Father took it seriously. 
 
 "You'll never be president, lad," he said, 
 "because you wasn't born in this country." 
 He seemed to think that was the only reason. 
 He turned to my uncle and explained regret- 
 fully: "Of all my boys, only one has got the 
 full American birthright. My youngest boy, 
 [Will, is the only one that can be president." 
 
 "Well," said the jolly old uncle, "the rest 
 of 'em can be government officers." 
 , Even this joke father took as a sober possi- 
 bility. I saw then the full reason why he 
 came to America. He wanted to give his boys 
 boundless opportunities. A humble man 
 himself, he had made all his sacrifices to 
 broaden the chances for his children. This 
 was a lesson to me. I could not repay him. 
 
 225 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 I could only resolve to follow his example, 
 to stand for a square deal for children every- 
 where. 
 
 Mother was as pleased with my humble 
 success as was father. When I sat down to 
 the table she apologized for her cooking and 
 said: 
 
 "After the fine food you have been eating 
 in the big hotels, you will find our table 
 pretty common." 
 
 "You're wrong, mother," I said. "The best 
 food I ever had I got right here at your table. 
 You've never lived in boarding-houses, but 
 father has. He knows that it's a rough life, 
 and they don't feed you on delicacies. Hotel 
 cookery is not like the cookery in the Old 
 World. Over there they make each dish as 
 tasty as they can, and good eating is one of 
 the main objects in life. But Americans 
 don't like to eat. They begrudge the time they 
 have to spend at the table. They get it over 
 as soon as they can. They seem to take it 
 like medicine; the worse the medicine tastes, 
 the better it is for them. An egg is something 
 that is pretty hard to spoil in the cooking. 
 Yet some of these boarding-house cooks are 
 such masters of the art that they can fix up 
 226 
 
FATHER TOOK ME SERIOUSLY 
 
 a plate of steak, eggs and potatoes and make 
 them all as tasteless as a chip of wood. I've 
 had this kind of fare for the last few years, 
 and getting back to your table is the best part 
 of home-coming." 
 
 Father was still a puddler, and to show my 
 appreciation of all he had done for me, I 
 went into the mill every afternoon that sum- 
 mer and worked a heat or two for him while 
 he went home and rested in the shade. 
 
 The workout did me good. It kept my 
 body vigorous and cleared my brain so that 
 my studies were easy for me, and I advanced 
 with my education faster than ever before. 
 
 This proved to me that schooling should 
 combine the book stuff with the shop work. 
 Instead of interfering with each other, they 
 help each other. The hand work makes the 
 books seem more enjoyable. 
 
CHAPTER XLI 
 
 A PAYING CONTRACTOR PUTS ME ON THE PAYING 
 
 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 illit- 
 erate I would neither have been nominated 
 nor elected. When I appeared before au- 
 diences 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 me. I supposed that I had made 
 many personal enemies among the men by 
 refusing to take their grievances up with the 
 bosses when I thought the men were wrong. 
 But the election proved they were my friends 
 after all. The confidence of my own fellows 
 pleased me greatly. Later on, the men as a 
 further token of their good will clubbed 
 228 
 
A PAVING CONTRACTOR 
 
 together and gave me a gold watch. This 
 gave me greater joy, no doubt, than Napoleon 
 felt when, with his own hand, he placed a 
 gold crown upon his head. 
 
 When it came time to qualify and be sworn 
 into office I found trouble. The Republican 
 boss was disgruntled because only one Re- 
 publican was elected while the Democrats 
 got everything else. He wanted me to give 
 up the office. "Let the tail go with the hide," 
 he said. "Let 'em have it all." His idea was 
 to give the Democrats a closed family circle, 
 so that when temptation came along, they 
 would feel safe in falling for it. He feared 
 that a Republican in the house to watch them 
 would scare them away from the bait. He 
 wanted them to take bribes and be ruined by 
 the scandal, and that would bring the Repub- 
 licans back to power. It was a good enough 
 way to "turn the rogues out" by first letting 
 them become rogues, but my heart was not 
 set on party success only. I believed in pro- 
 tecting the public. So I went ahead and got 
 bondsmen to qualify me. But as often as I 
 got men to sign my bond, the boss went to 
 them and got them off again. A firm of 
 lawyers, Greenlee & Call, stood by me in my 
 229 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 struggle to make my bond. These men were 
 ten years older than I. I was twenty-five. 
 They acted as godfathers to me. They gave 
 me the use of their library, and throughout 
 my term as city clerk I spent my nights poring 
 over their law books. I became well 
 grounded in municipal law and municipal 
 finance. I was able to pay back their kind- 
 ness some years later when C. M. Greenlee 
 aspired to be judge of the Superior Court of 
 Madison County. I went to the convention 
 as a delegate and worked hard for Judge 
 Greenlee until he was nominated, and 
 elected. 
 
 The city administration of which I was a 
 member let many contracts. As I said before, 
 a cross-roads town had become a city and 
 there were miles of paving and sewer to put 
 in, and scores of public buildings to go up. 
 Old Francis Harbit was the Democratic 
 mayor, and he didn't intend that the con- 
 tractors should graft on the city nor give 
 boodle to the officials. I remember one stir- 
 ring occasion. There was a big contract for 
 sewers to be let, and if a certain bid should 
 go through, the contractor would profit 
 greatly. Big Jeff Rowley (I'll call him) was 
 230 
 
A PAVING* CONTRACTOR 
 
 the grafting contractor who had ruined the 
 Republican administration. He was six feet, 
 two inches tall in his stocking feet. He had 
 put in his sealed bid and then had approached 
 everybody with his proposition. His over- 
 tures were scorned and he was told that we 
 were not out for boodle but were "playing the 
 game on the square" (that had been my cam- 
 paign slogan) . It finally dawned on the cor- 
 rupt old bully that the lowest bid would get 
 the contract. He then came into my office 
 and took down his bid to revise it. It was 
 such a big contract that he could not afford 
 to lose it. I told him that if his bid was not 
 back in time I would so note it. 
 
 Bids were to be opened that night and read 
 by me before the mayor and council. I was 
 familiar with every detail of the law gov- 
 erning municipal bonds and contract letting. 
 We had advertised that bids must be filed 
 before seven-thirty that evening. Big Jeff 
 took down his bid at seven-fifteen and filed 
 his new bid at seven forty-five; fifteen min- 
 utes after the legal time limit. 
 
 The council was in session and hundreds of 
 citizens were there to protest against any 
 more deals in letting contracts at exorbitant 
 
 231 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 prices. I opened and read aloud the various 
 bids, including that of the big boss, Jeff Row- 
 ley, adding that Jeff's bid had been filed too 
 late to be legal. 
 
 "You lie!" he screamed. "You're a Welsh 
 liar, and I'll kill you for this!" The threat 
 was heard by the council and the citizens. 
 But the man seemed so terrible that no one 
 dared reprimand him. 
 
 A few moments later the city attorney sent 
 down to the clerk's office for some blanks. 
 Jeff was waiting behind a corner of the hall. 
 He hit me a blow in the neck that knocked me 
 four yards. It was the "rabbit blow" and he 
 expected it to break my neck. The hard 
 muscles that the puddling furnace put there 
 saved my life. I sprang up, and he came 
 after me again. I seized the big fellow by 
 the ankles and threw him down. Then I 
 battered his head against the floor until I 
 was satisfied that he could do me no more 
 harm. He went home and took to his bed. 
 
 He announced that when he got out he 
 would charge me with assault. I went before 
 the mayor and offered to plead guilty to such 
 a charge. The mayor protested against it. 
 He said I had done the right thing in pro- 
 232 
 
A PAVING CONTRACTOR 
 
 tecting the honor of the city, and that the 
 citizens would not permit my action to cost 
 me money. The local banker took up a col- 
 lection to pay my fine in case a fine should be 
 assessed against me. 
 
 My salary as city clerk was forty dollars a 
 month. My wages in the tin mill were seven 
 dollars a day. A week in the mill would have 
 brought me more than a month's pay in the 
 city office. But I hoped the clerkship would 
 lead to something better. 
 
 One incident that happened while I was 
 city clerk I have already related. The city 
 attorney almost sent a man to jail because he 
 couldn't understand the lawyer's questions. 
 I put the lawyer's language into simpler 
 words, and the man then understood and 
 quickly cleared himself of the charge against 
 him. At another time, the mill owners peti- 
 tioned for the vacation of an alley because 
 they wanted to build a railroad switch there 
 to give access to a loading-out station of the 
 mill. 
 
 "I suppose," their representative told me, 
 "that since this would be a favor to the mill, 
 and you were opposed by the mill owners, 
 you will hand it to us in this matter." 
 233 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 "Why should I?" I asked. "Don't you think 
 you ought to have this alley?" 
 
 "Certainly we do, or we wouldn't have 
 asked for it." 
 
 "Do you think the city needs the alley 
 worse than you do ?" 
 
 "No. It is an alley only on paper. There 
 are no residences there and nobody needs 
 the alley but us." 
 
 "But you think because I am a labor man 
 and you are a mill owner, and you and I have 
 had many hot fights over wage questions, 
 that I will fight you on this just for spite?" 
 
 "Such things have been done." 
 
 "Well, I am not spiteful. Many a time I 
 have, made the men mad at me by being fair 
 to you. Spite and malice should have no 
 place in dealings between employer and 
 employee. If you had a chance, would you 
 give the men a dirty deal just for spite?" 
 
 "We're business men," he said. "And we 
 never act through malice, but we often ex- 
 pect it from the other side." 
 
 "Well, don't expect it from me. As a city 
 
 official my whole duty is to the city. If we 
 
 give you that railroad switch it will help the 
 
 mill and can't hurt the city. Without your 
 
 234 
 
A PAVING CONTRACTOR 
 
 mills there would be no city here, and all the 
 alleys would be vacated, with grass growing 
 in them. If I took advantage of my city job 
 to oppress your mill business, I would be two 
 kinds of a scoundrel, a public scoundrel and 
 a private one. I favor the vacation of the 
 alley and when the council meets next Wed- 
 nesday I am sure they will do this for you." 
 
CHAPTER XLH 
 
 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 vin- 
 dicate 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 add my voice to the thou- 
 sands who have testified before me that the 
 old truths are the only truths, and they are all 
 the guidance that we need. I am an educa- 
 tor of the young, not an astounder of the old; 
 and it is for the boys and girls who read my 
 book that I thus point the morals that life's 
 tale has taught me. 
 
 Had I proved unfaithful in my first office 
 236 
 
THE EVERLASTING MORALIZER 
 
 I could not have gone to higher offices. My 
 opponents would have "had something on 
 me." As secretary of labor, I am called on to 
 settle strikes and to adjust disputes between 
 employers and employees. I could do noth- 
 ing if either side distrusted me. But since 
 both sides believe me to be honest, they get 
 right down to brass tacks and discuss the 
 cases on their merits only. Sometimes the 
 employees ask too much, sometimes the em- 
 ployers. When either side goes too far I feel 
 free to oppose it. 
 
 I approach each problem not only from the 
 economic but from the human angle. I took 
 my guidance from the words of President: 
 Harding, when he said : 
 
 "The human element comes first. I want 
 the employers to understand the hopes and 
 yearnings of the workers, and I want the wage 
 earners to understand the burdens and 
 anxieties of the wage payers, and all of them 
 must understand their obligations to the 
 people and to the republic. Out of this under- 
 standing will come social justice which is so 
 essential to the highest human happiness." 
 
 The Labor Department has been able to 
 settle, after candid argument, thousands of 
 disputes saving millions of dollars for 
 237 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 workers and employers and relieving the pub- 
 lic from the great loss and inconvenience that 
 comes with strikes and industrial war. I 
 have but one aim, and that is justice. I know 
 but one policy, and that is honesty. I am 
 slow to reach decisions. I must hear both 
 sides. I want the facts, and all the facts. 
 When all the facts are in my mind the argu- 
 ing ends; the judgment begins. I judge by 
 conscience and am guided by the Golden 
 Rule. Decision comes, and it is as nearly 
 right as God has given me power to see the 
 right. 
 
 Out of four thousand disputes handled by 
 the Department, three thousand six hundred 
 were settled. These directly involved approx- 
 imately three and one-half million workers 
 and indirectly many others. At first seventy 
 per cent of the cases were strikes before con- 
 ciliation was requested. Now, in a majority 
 of the cases presented, strikes and lockouts 
 are prevented or speedily adjusted through 
 our efforts. 
 
 This was due to perfect candor in talking. 
 
 Honest opinions were honestly set forth. 
 
 Both sides took confidence in each other, and 
 
 both sides accepted my suggestions, believing 
 
 238 
 
THE EVERLASTING MORALIZER 
 
 them sincere and fair. And so I say to the 
 young men that honesty is the best policy 
 because it is the only policy that wins. The 
 communists tell the young that honesty is 
 not the best policy. They say that the rich 
 man teaches the poor to be honest so that the 
 rich can do all the stealing. They say that 
 the moral code is "dope" given by the strong 
 to paralyze the weak and keep them down. 
 It is not so. Honesty is the power that lifts 
 men and nations up to greatness. It is a law 
 of nature just as surely as gravity is a natural 
 law. But one is physical nature and the 
 other moral nature. A fool can see that phys- 
 ical laws are eternal and unbreakable. The 
 wise can see that the moral law is just as pow- 
 erful and as everlasting. 
 
 Had I not won the people's confidence 
 while I was city clerk of Elwood, Indiana, my 
 public career would have ended there. But 
 after four years in that office I aspired to be 
 county recorder. The employers who once 
 had feared that I would be unfair, now said, 
 "Davis is the man for the job," and so I got 
 their vote as well as the vote of the workers, 
 and I was elected to that higher office by a 
 great majority. 
 
 239 
 
CHAPTER XLIII 
 
 FROM TIN WORKER TO SMALL CAPITALIST 
 
 During my term as county recorder at An- 
 derson, Indiana, I saved money. I was un- 
 married and had no dissipations but books, 
 and books cost tittle. 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 milk 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 no use for it. 
 Although unmarried, I had bought a house, 
 and still had several thousand dollars of capi- 
 tal. So from time to time when some friend 
 saw an opportunity to start a business in a 
 small way, I backed him with a thousand 
 dollars. My security in these cases was my 
 knowledge of the man's character. Some of 
 these ventures were in oil leases in which my 
 chance of profits was good and they ranged 
 from novelty manufacture down to weekly 
 240 
 
FROM TIN WORKER TO CAPITALIST 
 
 newspapers in which no great profit was pos- 
 sible. So many of the ventures thrived, that 
 by the time I was forty I was rated as a pros- 
 perous young man. This gave me a great con- 
 fidence in myself and in the institutions of 
 this country. A land where a boy can enter 
 the mills at eleven, learn two trades, acquire 
 a sound business education and make a com- 
 petence in his thirties is not such a bad coun- 
 try as the hot-headed Reds would have us 
 believe. I was now launched on a business 
 career and my investments were paying me 
 much larger revenues than I could earn at 
 my trade. It was a rule of the union that 
 when a man ceased to work in the iron, steel 
 or tin trades he forfeited his membership. 
 However, the boys thought that Mahlon M. 
 Garland — a puddler who went to Congress — 
 and myself had done noteworthy service to 
 the labor cause, and they passed a resolution 
 permitting us to remain in the organization. 
 Mr. Garland served six years in Congress and 
 died during his term of office. I still carry 
 my membership and pay my dues. 
 
 I was in France when the great Hinden- 
 burg offensive in the spring of 1916 over- 
 whelmed the Allies. The French soldiers I 
 
 241 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 mef were worried and asked what word I 
 brought them from America. I said: "I am 
 an iron worker and can speak for the work- 
 ers. Their hearts are in this cause. They 
 will work as one man until all the iron in the 
 mountains of America is hurled into the belly 
 of the Huns." 
 
 The war was an iron war. The kaiser had 
 the steel and the coal that move armies. 
 France lacked these, and the Germans 
 thought she was doomed. They cut the 
 French railroads that would have brought the 
 troops and munitions to defend Verdun. 
 Then the Germans attacked this point in 
 overwhelming numbers. But the French 
 troops went to Verdun without the aid of 
 railroads. The Germans did not dream that 
 such a thing was possible. But America had 
 given the world a new form of transporta- 
 tion, — trains that run without rails and with- 
 out coal. Motor-trucks, driven by gasoline, 
 carried the troops and munitions to Verdun. 
 And so, after all, the genius of America was 
 there smiting the crown prince to his ruin 
 long before the first American doughboy 
 could set foot in France. 
 
 For years the names of oil king and iron 
 master have been a hissing and a byword 
 242 
 
FROM TIN WORKER TO CAPITALIST 
 
 among the hot-heads in America. Yet oil 
 king and iron master filled a world with 
 motor lorries. The blessings these have 
 brought to every man are more than he can 
 measure. "We mention this as one: They 
 stopped the Germans at Verdun and saved 
 our civilization. It was an iron war and our 
 iron won. 
 
 My days were spent at forge and puddling 
 furnace. The iron that I made is civilization's 
 tools. I ride by night in metal bedrooms. I 
 hear the bridges rumble underneath the 
 wheels, and they are part of me. I see tall 
 cities looking down from out the sky and 
 know that I have given a rib to make those 
 giants. I am a part of all I see, and life takes 
 on an epic grandeur. I have done the best 
 I could to build America. 
 
 If God has given it to the great captains to 
 
 do more than the privates to make the plan 
 
 and shout the order, shall I feel thankless 
 
 » 
 for my share of glory? Shall I be envious and 
 
 turn traitor and want to crucify the leaders 
 that have blessed mankind? 
 
 I am content to occupy my secondary sta- 
 tion, to do the things that I can do, and never 
 to feel embittered because other men have 
 gifts far surpassing mine. 
 243 
 
CHAPTER XLIV 
 
 A CHANGE 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 me to make 
 a talk. I suggested a scheme to save the 
 wastage of child life resulting from the death 
 of parents and the scattering of their babies; 
 and also to provide for the widows and aged. 
 This problem had haunted me from boyhood 
 when, as I have told, I was the bearer of 
 death news to the widows and orphans of the 
 mill town. I felt that the Loyal Order of 
 Moose could cope with this problem. They 
 244 
 
A CHANCE TO REALIZE A DREAM 
 
 elected me supreme organizer and put me in 
 charge of the organization work, and after 
 several years I showed so much zeal that the 
 office of director general was created and I 
 was put in full charge. 
 
 The Order was then nineteen years old, 
 having been founded in St. Louis as char- 
 tered in 1888, in Louisville, Kentucky. It had 
 thrived for a while and then dwindled. At 
 the time I joined there were only two lodges 
 surviving, with a total roll of some two hun- 
 dred and forty-six members. I set to work 
 with great enthusiasm, hoping to enroll a half 
 million men. This would make the Order 
 strong enough to insure a home and an edu- 
 cation for all children left destitute by the 
 death of members. In fancy I again beheld 
 the vision of long trains of lodge men going 
 to their yearly meeting, but this time, in a 
 city of their own building, and over the gate- 
 way to this red-roofed town I saw the legend : 
 
 THE CITY OF HAPPY CHILDREN 
 
 But alas for dreams! Any one can have 
 them, but their realization is not always pos- 
 sible. The men in the Moose before me had 
 
 245 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 fought vainly for these high ideals. At the 
 end of my first year as director general I had 
 not made one-tenth the progress I had hoped 
 for. Figuring on the rate of progress I was 
 making, I saw that a lifetime would be too 
 short to accomplish anything. It was then 
 that I would have despaired, if my Welsh 
 blood had not been so stubborn. I summoned 
 new courage and went on with the work. At 
 the end of the fourth year I began to see re- 
 sults from my preliminary efforts. The con- 
 vention of 1910 showed that the membership 
 was eighty thousand, distributed among three 
 hundred and thirty-three lodges. It was 
 resolved to start the actual work -of founding 
 an educational institution. A tax of two cents 
 a week was laid on members and later in- 
 creased to four cents. Land was bought, a 
 building erected and in 1913 the school was 
 dedicated by Thomas R. Marshall, Vice- 
 President of the United States. There were 
 eleven children established in the home. 
 Soon the lodge membership increased enor- 
 mously. Having passed the hundred thou- 
 sand mark it swept on to the half million 
 goal. The "Mooseheart idea," as we called it, 
 had caught the imagination of the men. 
 246 
 
A CHANCE TO REALIZE A DREAM 
 
 To-day the city of Mooseheart in the Fox 
 River Valley, thirty-seven miles west of Chi- 
 cago, is the home of more than a thousand 
 fatherless children and one hundred and 
 fifteen mothers who are there with their chil- 
 dren, and several old men whose working 
 days are over. The dream of the Moose has 
 come true. In many ways the "City of 
 Happy Childhood" is the most beautiful and 
 the most wonderful city in the world. 
 
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 the speeches I have ever made have never 
 added a dollar to the taxable value of 
 America. But the tin and iron I wrought 
 with my hands have helped make America 
 the richest country in the world. The Indians 
 were philosophers and orators; they could 
 outtalk the white man every time. But the 
 Indians had no houses and no clothes. They 
 wouldn't work with their hands. A race that 
 248 
 
THE DREAM COMES TRUE 
 
 works with its hands has run the Indian off 
 the earth. If we quit working now and try 
 to live on philosophy, some race that still 
 knows how to work will run us out of this 
 country. The first law of civilized life is 
 labor. Labor is the giver of all good things. 
 Let us teach these orphans how to apply 
 their labor, and after that all things will be 
 added unto them." 
 
 And so we established a pre-vocational 
 school where the young people are taught 
 farming, carpentry, cement construction, 
 blacksmithing, gas engine building and doz- 
 ens of other fundamental trades that nourish 
 our industrial life, a life that draws no nutri- 
 ment from Greek or Latin. I am not opposed 
 to literature and the classics. I make no war 
 on the dead languages. The war that killed 
 them did the business. Why should I come 
 along and cut off their feet, when some one 
 else has been there and cut off their heads? 
 But as an educator I promote the industrial 
 trades, because they educated and promoted 
 me. I have done well in life, and if you ask 
 me how I did it, I'm telling you. Industry 
 first and literature afterward. And if you 
 wish to see that kind of school in action, you 
 can see it at Mooseheart, Illinois. 
 
 249 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 There is a school with more than a thou- 
 sand students, boys and girls of various ages, 
 ranging from one month to eighteen years. 
 Some of the students were born there, the 
 mother having been admitted with her young- 
 sters soon after the loss of the father. Each 
 lad will get an introduction to a dozen trades, 
 and when he selects the one that fits him 
 best, he will specialize in that and graduate 
 at eighteen, prepared for life. This educa- 
 tion is the gift of more than half a million 
 foster fathers. The Moose are mostly work- 
 ing men, and so they equip their wards for 
 industrial life, and then place them on the 
 job. 
 
 A boy that knows how to build concrete 
 houses will not have to sleep in haystacks. 
 If every high-school boy in America was a 
 carpenter and cement builder how long 
 would the housing shortage last? "The birds 
 of the air have their nests," says the Rible. 
 And we know why they have them. Every 
 bird knows how to build its nest. Nature 
 teaches them their trade. But men must 
 learn their trades in school. I visited a col- 
 lege once and saw how Greek was taught. 
 They showed me a clay model of ancient 
 250 
 
THE DREAM COMES TRUE 
 
 Athens and pointed out the house that each 
 philosopher and poet lived in thousands of 
 years ago. "Where are the houses," I asked 
 the graduates, "that you are going to live in 
 to-morrow?" "Heaven only knows," they 
 said. "We'll have to take our chances in the 
 general scarcity; our fate is on the knees of 
 the gods." The luck of the Mooseheart boy 
 is not on the knees of the gods; it is in his 
 own hands. 
 
 I visited the Latin department and heard 
 of Rome's ancient grandeur. "The Romans," 
 they told me, "were not philosophers, but 
 builders. They built concrete roads to the 
 ends of the earth. Rut their soldiers brought 
 back malarial fever from Africa. It 
 destroyed the builders and their secret per- 
 ished with them. Eighty years ago concrete 
 was rediscovered." I asked the students: 
 "Do you know how to make concrete?" "I'll 
 say we don't," they answered. And thafs 
 how much good their Latin education had 
 done them. 
 
 The Mooseheart boys know how to make 
 those concrete roads and how to build the 
 motor-trucks that travel on them. "Trans- 
 portation is civilization." We teach civiliza- 
 
 251 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 tion at the Mooseheart school. We teach art, 
 too. But what is art without civilization? 
 The cave men were artists and drew pictures 
 on their walls. But you can't eat pictures. 
 There is a picture on every loaf of bread. 
 You always slice the colored label off the 
 loaf and eat the bread and throw the art 
 away. The Russians quit work a few seasons 
 ago, and now they are selling their art treas- 
 ures cheap to the roughneck nations that 
 stuck to the pick-ax and the plow. The moral 
 is: Keep working and you'll get the chromo. 
 This truth was taught at Mooseheart long 
 before the Russians saw the point and 
 awarded us their picture gallery. 
 
 What I want to emphasize is that we are 
 not opposed to art and literature. All men 
 want them; need them. We teach how to get 
 them. 
 
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-doors. I heard of some children 
 in the city who found a mouse and thought it 
 was a rabbit. But when the city-born children 
 come to Mooseheart they come into their own. 
 They trap rabbits and woodchucks, fight 
 humblebees' nests, wade and fish in the creek 
 and go boating and swimming in the river 
 and the clear lake. 
 
 i When a boy gets old enough to leave the 
 kindergarten and start in the primary school 
 
 253 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 he mixes agricultural studies with his books. 
 First he plants a small garden and tends it. 
 Then he is taught to raise chickens. Next he 
 learns swine husbandry and then dairying 
 and the handling of horses. The girls learn 
 poultry-raising, butter-making, gardening, 
 cooking, dressmaking and millinery. 
 
 After the boy has had a general course in 
 all the branches of agriculture he is per- 
 mitted to specialize in any one of them if he 
 wants to. He can make an exhaustive study 
 of grain farming, dairying, stock breeding, 
 bee culture, horticulture and landscape gar- 
 dening. 
 
 After this grounding in agriculture, which 
 all the boys must have, the student gets an 
 introduction to the mechanical trades. Then 
 he may select a particular trade and special- 
 ize. The usual grammar-school and high- 
 school courses are taught to all the students, 
 also swimming and dancing and music, both 
 vocal and instrumental. The kindergarten 
 has a babies' band, and both the girls and 
 boys have their own brass bands and orches- 
 tras. 
 
 Students are graduated when they are 
 eighteen. Up to that time they are permitted 
 254 
 
THE MOOSEHEART IDEA 
 
 to stay and learn as many trades as they can. 
 Learning comes easy in such a school as 
 Mooseheart, and many of the boys go out 
 with two or more finished trades. Music is 
 one of the trades that the boys double in. 
 We have graduated many fine musicians, but 
 none who didn't know a mechanical trade as 
 well and, on top of it all, he knew how to run 
 a farm. Such a boy can serve his country 
 in peace or war. Before men can eat they 
 have to have food, and he knows how to 
 raise it. To enjoy their food they must have 
 a house to live in, and he knows how to build 
 it. After a house and food comes music. 
 This lad can play a tune for the cabaret. 
 
 One of Mooseheart's earliest graduates 
 made a high record in his academic studies 
 and mastered the trade of cook, pastry cook, 
 nurseryman, cement modeler, cornetist, 
 saxophone player and landscape gardener. 
 He was brilliant in all these lines and ready 
 to make a living at any one of them. And if 
 all these trades should fail, he was yet a 
 scientific farmer and could go to the land 
 anywhere and make it produce bigger crops 
 than the untrained man who was born on the 
 soil. 
 
 255 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 What other school in the world will give a 
 boy at eighteen an equipment like that? I 
 ask this, not to disparage the old-fashioned 
 schools, but to call their attention to what the 
 new are doing. 
 
CHAPTER XLVH 
 
 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. "Pre- 
 paration for life" is the one aim of Moose- 
 heart. Therefore at Mooseheart the boy or 
 girl will encounter every problem that he 
 will encounter in his struggle in the wider 
 world. Nothing is done for him that he can 
 do for himself. He is taught no false theories. 
 But every fact of life is placed before him 
 in due time. The first wealth of facts comes 
 to these city-bred children when they are set 
 down in the middle of this great, busy, beau- 
 tiful farm. John Burrows says: "No race 
 257 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 that does not take to the soil can long hold 
 its country. In the struggle for survival it 
 will lose its country to some incoming race 
 that loves the soil." Already the Japanese 
 farmers in California have shown that if we 
 should let them in they would take this whole 
 country in a few years. They drive the 
 American farmer out because they have a 
 passion for the soil, and they turn their whole 
 families in to till it. What is the answer? 
 Teach our young to love the soil and to till it 
 well, or else an alien race will take away their 
 heritage. The first lesson in Mooseheart is 
 to till the soil. 
 
 But in addition to being a farm, Moose- 
 heart is a town. The young folk live in cot- 
 tages and do their own cooking and house- 
 keeping. There are no great dormitories 
 where hundreds sleep, and no vast dining-, 
 room where they march in to the goose-step. 
 We are preparing them for a free life, and 
 the only place they use the goose-step is in 
 the penitentiary. Mooseheart is a town 
 instead of an institution. All "institutional- 
 ism" is cast away. In each cottage is a group 
 of boys or a group of girls living under fam- 
 ily conditions. They are not all of the same 
 258 
 
LIFE'S PROBLEMS 
 
 age; some are big and some are little, and 
 the big ones look after the little ones. Each 
 cottage has its own kitchen and orders its 
 own supplies from the general store. The 
 girls' cottages have each a matron (some- 
 times a widow who with her little ones has 
 been admitted to Mooseheart), and she ad- 
 vises the girls how to do the buying and the 
 cooking. 
 
 In the boys' cottages there is a proctor 
 to advise them and usually a woman cook. 
 The boys who care to can learn cookery and 
 household buying under her supervision. All 
 the boys do their own dishwashing, sweeping 
 and bedfmaking. Once three boys about 
 fourteen years old went on strike because the 
 proctor asked them to scrub the dining-room 
 floor on their knees. They thought this work 
 would degrade them, and they started 
 toward the superintendent's office. On the 
 way they met me and told me their troubles. 
 
 "I think it is all right for a young man to 
 scrub a floor on his knees," I said. "I've done 
 it for my mother many a time. I have been a 
 bootblack. But it didn't hurt my character. 
 You are going to the superintendent for his 
 opinion. He is a Harvard man, but he worked 
 
 259 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 his way through school and one of his jobs 
 was bellboy in a hotel. Had he been too, 
 proud to work as a servant he would never 
 have gotten the education that makes him 
 head of this great school. Didn't you ever 
 scrub a floor on your knees? You can see the 
 dirt come out with the suds and you can watch 
 the grain of the wood appear, where before 
 it was hidden by dust and grease. If you 
 never saw that, you have missed something 
 that I have seen many a time. To know how 
 to scrub a floor is as much a part of your 
 education as to know how to sandpaper a 
 floor and varnish it. We could hire this work 
 done better than you can do it, but that 
 wouldn't be giving you a chance to learn the 
 work. Now I'm not telling you boys to go 
 back and do the work if you don't want to. 
 Use your own judgment. Rut fellows that 
 balk on a job never go far. A balky man is 
 like a balky horse, everybody gets rid of him 
 as quickly as they can. A quitter is never 
 given a good job. They always keep him in 
 a place where it doesn't make any difference 
 whether he quits or not." 
 
 The leader of the boys said: "Aw, piffle, 
 cut it out. We might as well be scrubbing 
 260 
 
LIFE'S PROBLEMS 
 
 the floor as listening to this talk. Come on, 
 fellows." He led them back, one of them pro- 
 testing that he would never scrub a floor for 
 any man. He went ahead and scrubbed the 
 floor still saying that he wouldn't That lad 
 was weaker than the leader. He went wher- 
 ever he was led. The leader was a boy who 
 made his own decisions. He was ashamed of 
 calling off the strike, but he did it because he 
 felt the strike was wrong. 
 
 This is the Mooseheart idea of education. 
 Every boy must use his own judgment. He 
 faces every fact that he will face in life, and 
 by the time he is eighteen his judgment is 
 as ripe as that of the much older average 
 man. The Mooseheart boys are not selected 
 students. They come from the humblest fam- 
 ilies, from homes that have been wiped out 
 early. But the training at Mooseheart is so 
 well adapted to human needs that these or- 
 phans soon outstrip the children of the more 
 fortunate classes. They become quick in 
 initiative, sturdy in character and brilliant 
 in scholarship. Visitors who come from boys' 
 preparatory schools where the children of 
 the rich are trained for college are amazed to 
 find these sons of the working people so far 
 
 261 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 ahead of the young aristocrats. The Moose- 
 heart boys as a group have the others beaten 
 in all the qualities that go to make a young 
 man excellent We have prepared them for. 
 life. 
 
CHAPTER XLVII1 
 
 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 guar- 
 antees a home and an education to his chil- 
 dren. 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 individuals, the Moose are not rich men, 
 but in cooperation they are wealthy. They 
 have a plant at Mooseheart now valued at five 
 million dollars, and they provide a revenue of 
 one million two hundred thousand a year to 
 maintain and enlarge it. They received no en- 
 dowment from state or nation. They wanted 
 to protect their children and they found a 
 263 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 way to do it. They based their system of 
 education on the actual needs of men. They 
 know what life is, for they have lived it. In 
 mine and field and factory they had tasted 
 the salty flavor of real things, and they built 
 a school that has this flavor. 
 
 The war drove home a lesson that will 
 forever make false education hateful to me. 
 Education in the wrong direction can destroy 
 a nation and wreck the happiness of the 
 world. The German worker was taught that 
 he would get rich, not by patient toil, but by 
 taking by force the wealth that others had 
 created. 
 
 On my return from France, where I had 
 witnessed the Hindenburg drive into the heart 
 of France, I addressed the Iron Workers in 
 their national convention. "I am glad," I 
 said, "that I was born an iron worker and not 
 a Chancellor of Blood and Iron. For the iron 
 I wrought has helped build up a civilization, 
 while the German's 'Blood and Iron' has 
 sought to destroy it. 
 
 "France stands knee-deep in her own blood 
 
 while the iron of Germany is being hurled 
 
 into her breast. Iron Workers of America, to 
 
 you has God given the answer to the German 
 
 264 
 
BUILDING A BETTER WORLD 
 
 thunderbolt. The iron of the republic shall 
 beat down the iron of the kings. Wherever 
 I walked behind the battle lines in France I 
 told them I was an iron worker and I gave 
 them this message for you: 
 
 " 'The American iron worker will not fail 
 you. We have been taught to believe in jus- 
 tice as the German believes in might. We 
 will back up our soldiers with ships and guns 
 until Kaiserism is beaten. We will set the 
 workers of Germany free — free from their 
 foul belief in murder and in kings. And 
 when we have bound up our wounds we will 
 build a new world that shall be a freer world 
 than man has ever known.' 
 
 "I have dedicated my life to this purpose. 
 We will build this freer world by the right 
 instruction of our young. Education is of two 
 kinds, one kind is good and the other is 
 poison. A poisonous education took but one 
 generation to turn the German working men 
 into a race of blood-letters. Wrong educa- 
 tion tears a nation down. Right education 
 will build it up. One generation of right edu- 
 cation will remake the world. Who will fur- 
 nish this new education? I, for one, will do 
 my share, and more. My heart is in this one 
 
 265 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 cause, and my whole life from now on shall 
 be devoted to it 
 
 "You will hear me speaking for it on every 
 rostrum and in every schoolhouse in America. 
 I have been handicapped in life because I had 
 no education. But it is better to have no 
 education than a false one, for I was left 
 free to know the truth when I found it. I 
 went into the mills when I should have been 
 in school. As a working man I have helped 
 get better conditions for the worker. Think 
 how much more I could have done if I had 
 had an education. Your leaders have done 
 much for the iron workers because they could 
 see farther than the common man. The 
 worker with an education can see far. He can 
 judge quickly and be guided rightly, for he 
 has knowledge to guide him. I have knelt 
 and prayed to God to direct me. Now I know 
 He has answered my prayer. My mission is 
 to bring to the poor man's boy the ample 
 education that the rich man gives his son. 
 Equal education will make men equal in the 
 gaining of wealth. Education is Democracy. 
 
 "A French soldier lay dying on the battle- 
 field, and a comrade kneeling by him asked 
 what last word he wished carried to his wife 
 266 
 
BUILDING A BETTER WORLD 
 
 and children. And the dying man said with 
 his last breath : 'Tell them that I gave my 
 body to the earth, I gave my heart to France 
 and I gave my soul to God.' 
 
 "And so I say to you in the spirit of the 
 French soldier that this, my body, I will give 
 at last back to the iron earth, in whose deep 
 mines and smoking metal shops my muscles 
 took their form. This heart of mine that 
 beats for liberty and equality I give — and 
 give to its last beat — to the cause of equal 
 education for our young. And my soul at 
 last I shall render back unto my Maker 
 knowing that I have served His cause as He 
 has given me to see it," 
 
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 sug- 
 gestions from an iron puddler, I offer him 
 these random thoughts. 
 
 This generation is rich because the preced- 
 ing generation stored up lots of capital. We 
 are living in the houses and using the rail- 
 roads that our fathers built by working over- 
 time. 
 
 When labor loafs on the job it makes itself 
 poor. We are not building fast enough to 
 keep ourselves housed. Were it not for the 
 houses our fathers built this generation would 
 be out-of-doors right now, with no roof but 
 the sky. 
 
 No matter who owns the capital, capital 
 
 works for everybody. Ford owns the flivver 
 
 factory, but everybody owns the flivvers. The 
 
 oil king owns the gasoline, but he has to tote 
 
 268 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
 it to the roadside where every one can get 
 it. Equal division is the goal that capitalism 
 constantly approaches. No man wants all 
 the gasoline. He wants six gallons at a time, 
 with a service station every few miles. 
 Capital performs this service for him. Under 
 "capitalism," so-called wealth is more equally 
 divided than under any other system ever 
 known. 
 
 Work is a blessing, not a curse. This 
 country had the good luck to be settled by the 
 hardest workers in the world. Their big pro- 
 duction made us rich. If we slacken produc- 
 tion we will soon be poor. The Indians 
 owned everything in common. They did not 
 work. And they were so poor that this whole 
 continent would support less than two mil- 
 lion of them. Thousands of Indians used to 
 starve and freeze to death every hard winter. 
 
 The white man who doesn't want to work 
 is sick. He needs a dose of medicine, not a 
 dose of the millennium. The Bible says that 
 in the sweat of his face man shall eat bread. 
 
 When labor loafs, it injures labor first and 
 
 capital last. For labor grows poor to-day 
 
 while the capitalist gets poor to-morrow. But 
 
 to-morrow never comes. The capitalist can 
 
 269 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 turn laborer and raise himself a mess of pork 
 and beans. 
 
 The laborer who does not turn capitalist 
 and have a house and garden for his old age 
 is lacking in foresight. 
 
 Men will never be equal. John L. Sullivan 
 had many fights, and John always whipped 
 the other fellow, or the other fellow whipped 
 John. When all men are equal, every prize 
 fight will end in a draw, and every batter 
 will knock as many home runs as Babe Ruth. 
 
 "There is enough already created to supply 
 everybody if it were equally divided." Yes. 
 And there is enough ice at the North Pole to 
 cool off the Sahara Desert if it were equally 
 divided. There is enough water in the seven 
 seas to flood the six continents if it were 
 equally divided. 
 
 The time to quit work and divide the wealth 
 is just two weeks before the end of the world. 
 For the world's surplus of supplies is just two 
 weeks ahead of starvation. Wheat is being 
 harvested in one country or another every 
 week in the year. And yet with all the hard 
 work that men can do, they can not boost 
 the world's supply of bread so as to increase 
 our two weeks' lead on the wolf of famine. 
 270 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
 The wolf is ever behind us only two weeks 
 away. And if we stumble for a moment, he 
 gets nearer. ' 
 
 American machinery enabled the western 
 farmer to raise and harvest as much wheat 
 as twenty Russian peasants. In India where 
 wheat is raised by hand, the labor of one 
 family will only feed one family. But in 
 the Dakotas, the labor of one man will de- 
 liver in Chicago enough flour to feed three 
 hundred men a year. This increase in man's 
 power to produce wheat caused the world's 
 population to double itself since McCormack 
 invented the reaper. The Chinese and Hindu 
 millions who would have starved to death, 
 have been fed, and that's why they're with us 
 to-day. The natural limit of population is 
 starvation. The more bread the more mouths, 
 less bread, fewer people. Europe and the 
 Orient reached the starvation limit before 
 America was settled. A bad crop meant a 
 famine, and a famine started a plague. This 
 plague and famine would sweep off a third 
 of the population, and the rest could then 
 raise food enough to thrive on. England and 
 "Wales have had famines, Ireland has had 
 famines, France has had famines, Russia has 
 271 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 a deadly famine after every bad crop year, 
 while in India and China famine is a chronic 
 condition. 
 
 America has never had a famine. But 
 we are not exempt from famine. In the 
 year 1816, known as the year of "eighteen- 
 hundred-and-froze-to-death," the crops failed 
 throughout America because of freezing 
 weather all summer long. Little or no food 
 was raised and the Americans would have 
 perished from famine had it not been for the 
 wild meat in the woods. The people lived on 
 deer and bear that winter. To-day if our 
 food supply fails we can not live on venison. 
 No country is by natural law exempt from 
 famine. Our famine will come when we fill 
 this country as thickly as men can stand; 
 China and India have so filled themselves. 
 Famine awaits us when we repeat their folly. 
 That day will come soon unless we bar the 
 unworthy from our gates. 
 
 But cold weather and crop failure are not 
 the only things that could bring a famine in 
 America. Slacking in production has the 
 same effect as crop failure. A farmers' strike 
 could bring a famine. A railroad strike could 
 do the same. Many men advocate a combina- 
 272 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
 tion farmers' strike and railroad strike to 
 destroy capital (that is, to destroy the food 
 supply). Don't get impatient, boys. You 
 shall have your famine, if you will wait long 
 enough. And the less work you do while 
 you are waiting, the sooner it will come. 
 Nature is never whipped. Nature will take 
 a crack at you, if you leave an opening. The * 
 generation that went before you worked ten 
 to fourteen hours a day; they battled face to 
 face with a raw continent in their fight with 
 Nature. And by their muscle they drove 
 Nature back and she surrendered. She went 
 down like crumpled Germany, and she signed 
 a treaty. Hard were the treaty terms our 
 fighting fathers made with Nature. They 
 took an indemnity. She delivered to them 
 more houses than her cyclones had destroyed, 
 she furnished them millions of cattle in place 
 of the wild deer and buffalo. She yielded up 
 her coal regions to warm them in payment for 
 the torture her winters had inflicted. By this 
 treaty she gave them everything she had and 
 promised to be good. 
 
 We are the inheritors of the good things of 
 that peace treaty. We were born rich; we 
 revel in the "reparations" that our fathers 
 
 273 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 wrung from a conquered Nature. But Nature, 
 like Germany, is not really whipped. If we 
 relax, she will default on her payments. As 
 long as Nature is not really whipped, her 
 treaty is a scrap of paper. Nature, right 
 now, is preparing for a come-back. She will 
 not arm openly, for we would then arm to 
 meet her. She is planning to attack us by a 
 method that is new. She will weaken us by 
 propaganda, and when we are helpless she 
 will march over us at will. 
 
 Who then are the propagandists that 
 Nature is using to undermine the race that 
 conquered her? Communists, slackers, sick 
 men and fools. The man who says let us 
 "quit work and divide our cake and eat it" is 
 opening the way for Nature to strike suddenly 
 with a famine. The man who advocates 
 "one big strike" to destroy our capital is the 
 secret agent of starvation. Nature when up 
 in arms can sweep men off like flies. She 
 has always done it and she always will, unless 
 man uses his intelligence and his cooperation 
 to fight the evils in Nature and not to fight 
 his fellow men. 
 
 "Capitalism," as the communists call it, is 
 an imperfect system. But it is the only system 
 274 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
 that has banished famine. Under commun- 
 ism and feudalism there was hunger. Under 
 capitalism the world has been able to feed 
 twice as many mouths as could be fed before. 
 
 Capitalism found a world of wood and iron 
 ore, and made it into a world of steel. How? 
 It puddled the pig-iron until the dross was 
 out, and the pure metal was bessemered into 
 steel. Now the task is to purify men as we 
 have purified metals. Men have dross in 
 their nature. They break under civilization's 
 load. A steel world is hopeless if men are 
 pig-iron. There is greed and envy and malice 
 in all of us. But also there is the real metal 
 of brotherhood. Our task is to puddle out 
 the impurities so that the true iron can be 
 strong enough to hold our civilization up 
 forever. 
 
 I have been a puddler of iron and I would 
 be a puddler of men. Out of the best part of 
 the iron I helped build a stronger world. Out 
 of the best part of man's metal let us build a 
 better society. 
 
 I have no new cure for the ills of humanity. 
 
 Life is a struggle, and rest is in the grave. 
 
 All nature is in commotion; there is wind 
 and rain; and out of it comes seed and 
 275 
 
THE IRON PUDDLER 
 
 harvest. The waters of the sea are poured 
 in thunder wrack upon the hills and run in 
 rivers back into the sea. The winds make 
 weather, and weather profits man. When 
 will man's turmoil cease, when will he find 
 calm? I do not know. I only know that toil 
 and struggle are sweet, and that life well 
 lived is victory. And that calm is death. 
 
 Man must face an iron world, but he is iron 
 to subdue it. 
 
 The lessons of my life were learned at the 
 forge and I am grateful for my schooling. 
 
 "Thanks, thanks to thee, my worthy friend, 
 For the lesson thou hast taught! 
 
 Thus at the flaming forge of Life 
 Our fortunes must be wrought, 
 
 Thus on its sounding anvil shaped 
 Each burning deed and thought." 
 
 THE END 
 
"AN ENDOWMENT FUND OF 
 $10,000,000 IS NECESSARY TO 
 DEVELOP AND PERPETUATE 
 MOOSEHEART. THE AUTHOR 
 IS CHAIRMAN OF THE COM^ 
 MITTEE TO RAISE THIS FUND. 
 HE WILL APPRECIATE YOUPv 
 CONTRIBUTION ADDRESSED 
 TO 
 
 JAMES J. DAVIS, Chairman, 
 
 Mills Building, 
 
 Washington, D. C." 
 
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