Vernon L. Kellogg

“ The history of mining is more a history of how mines with mineral in them have not succeeded in becoming mines where the mineral could be profitably got out of them, than of how such mines have succeeded. A successful mine is infinitely more than a hole in the ground with mineral at its bottom. It is railroads and steamers, mills, housing for men, men themselves, organization, system, skill, brains, all-around human capacity. Herbert Hoover is a great miner because he is—I say it bluntly and not from any blind hero-worship—a great man. ”

“ We are faced with a new orientation of our country to world problems. We face a Europe still at war; still amid social revolutions; some of its peoples still slacking on production; millions starving; and therefore the safety of its civilization is still hanging [Pg 293] by a slender thread. Every wind that blows carries to our shores an infection of social diseases from this great ferment; every convulsion there has an economic reaction upon our own people. If we needed further proof of the interdependence of the world, we have it today in the practical blockade of our export market. ”

“ It must, nevertheless, be adhered to if the ideal of our democracy is not to be abandoned.
I do not believe we can attain this equality of opportunity or maintain initiative through crystallization of economic classes or groups arraigned against each other, exerting their interest by economic and political conflicts, nor can we attain it by transferring to governmental bureaucracies the distribution of material and intellectual products. I do believe that we can attain it by systematic prevention of domination of the few over the many and stimulation of individual effort in the whole mass. ”

“ I say mysteriously, for, despite all the wonderful new knowledge of heredity that we have gained since the beginning of the twentieth century, the way by which any of us comes to be just the sort of man he is is still mostly mystery. Herbert Hoover is simply a kind of man who, when brought by circumstances face to face with the distress of a people, is especially deeply touched by the distress of the children, and is impelled by this to use all of his intelligence and energy to relieve this distress. ”

“ Out of the strain of war, weaknesses have become ever more evident in our administrative organization, in our legislative machinery. Our federal government is still overcentralized, for we have upon the hands of our government enormous industrial activities which have yet to be demobilized. We are swamped with debt and burdened with taxation. Credit is woefully inflated; speculation and waste are rampant. Our own productivity is decreasing. Our industrial population is crying for remedies for the increasing cost of living and aspiring to better conditions of life and labor. ”

“ This American, who has had to live in the whole world and yet has remained more truly and representatively American than many of us who have never crossed an ocean or national boundary line, is an object of absorbing interest today among the people of his native land. He is hardly less interesting to millions in other lands. He has carried the American point of view, the American manner, the American qualities of heart and mind to the far corners of the earth. ”

“ The employers will naturally in face of a minimum wage retain in employment that quality of worker that can give the maximum effort. Another difficulty is the tendency for wages of all workers, regardless of their ability, to fall to the minimum, for the employer naturally reduces the good to average with the poor worker. I would not want to be understood to necessarily oppose the possibilities of a minimum wage for women over large areas, as distinguished from craft minimums for men, because certain social questions enter that problem to an important degree. ”

“ Vienna, itself, "die lustige schöne Stadt Wien" was, as it still is today and for long will be, the saddest great capital in Europe. Reduced from its position of being the governing, spending, and singing and dancing capital of an empire of fifty-five million people—it never was a producing capital—to be the capital of a small, helpless nation of scant seven million people concentrated in a region unable to meet even their needs of food and coal—Vienna represents the pathetic extreme of the cataclysmic results of War. ”

“ We have until recently greatly neglected the human factor that is so large an element in our very productivity. The development of vast repetition in the process of industry has deadened the sense of craftsmanship, and the great extension of industry has divorced the employer and his employee from that contact that carried responsibility for the human problem. This neglect of the human factor has accumulated much of the discontent and unrest throughout our great industrial population and has reacted in a decrease of production. ”

“ And no man realized more clearly than he the direful consequences that it threatened not only to the peoples of the suffering countries themselves but to the peace and stability of the world, to restore which every effort had now to be exerted. Hoover was not only the man logically indicated to the President of the United States to undertake this saving relief on the part of America, but he was the man whom all of Europe recognized as the source of hope in this critical moment. ”

“ The large development of industrial units with possible cessation of production and service, through strikes and lockouts, penalizes the public. The public is not content to see these conflicts go on, for they do not alone represent loss in production, and thus lowering of the standard of living, but also they may, by suspension of public service, jeopardize the life of the community.
But the solution of the industrial problem is not solely the prevention of conflict and its losses by finding methods of just determination of wages and hours. ”

“ To me there is no question that we should try the experiment of the perhaps longer road proposed by the Industrial Conference for the development of mutuality of relationship between employer and employee, rather than to enter upon summary action of court decision that may both stifle the delicate adjustment of [Pg 332] industrial processes and cause serious conflict over human rights. We must all agree that those deficiencies in our social, economic and political structure which find solution through education and voluntary action of our people themselves are the solutions that endure. ”

“ I do not believe that drastic force need be applied to maintain economic distribution and sane use of supplies by the great majority of American people, and I have learned a deep and abiding faith in the intelligence of the average American business man whose aid we anticipate and depend on to remedy the evils developed by the war which he admits and deplores as deeply as ourselves. ”

“ The inheritance tax has not been fully exploited as yet. It cannot be deducted from either farmer or consumer, it does not affect the cost of living, it does not destroy initiative in the individual if it leaves large and proper residues for dependents. It does redistribute overswollen fortunes. It does make for equality of opportunity by freeing the dead hand from control of our tools of production. It reduces extravagance in the next generation, and sends them to constructive service. ”

“ There is a great weakness in our present railway situation bearing upon the farmer and consumer. Everyone knows of the annual shortage of cars during the crop-moving season. Few people, however, appreciate that this shortage of cars often amounts to a stricture in the free flow of commodities from the farmer to the consumer. The result is that the farmer, in order to sell his produce, often unknown to himself makes a sacrifice in price to local glut. The consumer is compelled at the other end to pay an increased price for foodstuffs due to the shortage in movement. ”