James J. Davis

“ 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 responsibility.
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. ”

“ Every puddler has a helper. Old men have both a helper and a boy. I got a place with an old man, and so at the age of twelve I was part of the Big Show whose performance is continuous, whose fire-eaters have real flame to 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. ”

“ 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 juggler 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. ”

“ 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 nothing of slavery, knows that the wage system is not real slavery; it's not the genuine, lash-driven, bloodhound-hunted, swamp-sick African slavery. None is genuine without Simon Legree and the Louisiana bloodhounds. The silk-socked wage slave, toiling eight hours for six dollars, is not the genuine old New Orleans molasses slave. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 conquering the wild.
There is something in man that drives him forward to do the world's work and build 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. ”

“ Squeezed dry of its luminous lava, the white-hot sponge is drawn with tongs to the waiting rollers—whirling anvils that beat it into the shape they will. Everywhere are hurrying men, whirring flywheels, moving levers of steam engines and the drum-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. ”

“ 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 output of field and factory, whether it be heaven's drought or man's loafing, starves the economic state and starves all men in it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I have watched the long struggle of unionism in America and I know the law that has governed all its ups and downs. Wherever it was still a movement it has thrived; wherever 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. ”

“ 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. Sympathy is the iron fiber in man that welds him to his fellows. Envy is the sulphur that pollutes 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. ”

“ 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 capitalism 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. ”

“ 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 Comrade 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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 brimstone that makes him brittle. He is pig-iron until he boils them out of his system. Savages and criminals are men who have not tried to boil this dross out of their nature. ”

“ Were these men hastening the downfall of America as the communist predicted? 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 of work. The union paid a weekly benefit to men who had to strike for better working conditions. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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 education tears a nation down. Right education will build it up. One generation of right education will remake the world. ”

“ But call the employee “labor” and the employer “capital,” and you make old Honest Abe say that the employee is prior to and independent of the employer, or that the wage earner is independent 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 employer; the Government is an employer but it is not capital, and when any one is arguing a case for an employee against his employer let him use the proper terms. ”

“ Praying banishes all selfish thoughts from mind, and gives the voice of conscience a chance to be heard. I 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 civilization 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. ”

“ Ford owns the flivver factory, but everybody owns the flivvers. The oil king owns the gasoline, but he has to tote 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. ”

“ 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 understanding will come social justice which is so essential to the highest human happiness.” ”

“ 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 Russia 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 life.
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 Russia. Russia may never develop, but America will. A nation's future lies not in its resources. The American mind is right. Go to America.” ”