Madison county, Indiana, was a Democratic stronghold outside the mill towns, and a few farming townships. Free silver orators were telling the farmers that under a gold standard no factory could run. The farmers could see the smoke of the tin mills which had built a great city just beyond their corn-fields. The silver men explained that smoke as “a dummy factory set up by Mark Hanna with Wall Street money to make a smoke and fool the people into thinking that it was a real factory and that 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 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 Democrats 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.
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 foreigner 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 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 administration 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 goading. 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 Welshman and a blockhead, but what is more deadly still, I was a gorilla and an assassin.
And the next day I was elected.
I will go back and relate more details of my race for office. Having won the nomination, I thrilled with pleasure and excitement, but I was at a loss as to how to begin my campaign for election. Should I hope for support among the white-collar classes in the “swell” end of town, among the merchants and mill owners or only in the quarter where the workers lived?
The first act of a candidate is to have cards printed and pass them out to every one he meets. My cards bore my name and my slogan: “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 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 everywhere swarm into any region where a strike is on. They are seeking audiences. They have no love for humanity except that portion 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 Pullman. But when the job falls down, the strike crowd sticks together for days. This gives the crack-brained lady opportunity to catch the Transcontinental limited and get there in time to pound their ears with her oratory. She prefers a foreign crowd that can not understand 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 their audience understands. She wants her audiences 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 nothing 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.
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 comrades. 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 element” 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 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 humiliated 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 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.
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 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 regretfully: “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 possibility. 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. I could only resolve to follow his example, to stand for a square deal for children everywhere.
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 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 summer 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.
I was the only Republican elected that year. But for this exception the Democrats would have made a clean sweep of the city. If the editor had not charged me with being illiterate I would neither have been nominated nor elected. When I appeared before audiences in the “swell end” of town and wrote my lessons on my little slate, I gained their sympathy. They believed in fair play. And I found I had not lost their support by thrashing the editor.
Nearly all of the mill workers in Elwood voted for 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 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 Republican 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 Republicans 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 protecting 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 them and got them off again. A firm of lawyers, Greenlee & Call, stood by me in my 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 kindness 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 contractors should graft on the city nor give boodle to the officials. I remember one stirring 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 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 overtures 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 campaign slogan). It finally dawned on the corrupt 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 governing 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 minutes 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 prices. I opened and read aloud the various bids, including that of the big boss, Jeff Rowley, 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 protecting the honor of the city, and that the citizens would not permit my action to cost me money. The local banker took up a collection 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 petitioned 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.”
“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 expect 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 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 Wednesday I am sure they will do this for you.”
I played the game fair throughout my term of office. I hate dishonesty instinctively. I like the approval of my own conscience and the approval of men. This is egotism, of course. I claim nothing else for it. I am no prophet. I do not claim to be inspired. The weaknesses that all flesh is heir to, I am not immune from. I write this story not to vindicate my own wit nor to point out new paths for human thought to follow. I am a follower of the old trails, an endorser of the old maxims. I merely add my voice to the thousands 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 educator 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 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 employee. I could do nothing 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 employers. 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 understanding 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 workers and employers and relieving the public 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 arguing 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 approximately three and one-half million workers and indirectly many others. At first seventy per cent. of the cases were strikes before conciliation 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 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 physical laws are eternal and unbreakable. The wise can see that the moral law is just as powerful 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.
During my term as county recorder at Anderson, Indiana, I saved money. I was unmarried and had no dissipations but books, and books cost little. I had lent money to several fellows who wanted to get a business education. By the year 1906, or ten years after I quit the mill, the money I had lent to men for their education in business colleges had all come back to me with interest. All my brothers had grown up and left home, and mother wrote that I ought not to send so much money to her as she had no use for it. Although unmarried, I had bought a house, and still had several thousand dollars of capital. 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 newspapers in which no great profit was possible. So many of the ventures thrived, that by the time I was forty I was rated as a prosperous young man. This gave me a great confidence 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 competence in his thirties is not such a bad country 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 Hindenburg offensive in the spring of 1916 overwhelmed the Allies. The French soldiers I met were worried and asked what word I brought them from America. I said: “I am an iron worker and can speak for the workers. 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 transportation, 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 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 station, to do the things that I can do, and never to feel embittered because other men have gifts far surpassing mine.
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 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 chartered 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 hundred 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 education 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 gateway 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 possible. The men in the Moose before me had 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 results from my preliminary efforts. The convention 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 increased 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 enormously. Having passed the hundred thousand mark it swept on to the half million goal. The “Mooseheart idea,” as we called it, had caught the imagination of the men. To-day the city of Mooseheart in the Fox River Valley, thirty-seven miles west of Chicago, is the home of more than a thousand fatherless children and one hundred and fifteen mothers who are there with their children, 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.
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 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 dozens of other fundamental trades that nourish our industrial life, a life that draws no nutriment 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.
There is a school with more than a thousand 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 youngsters 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 education is the gift of more than half a million foster fathers. The Moose are mostly working 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 Bible. 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 college once and saw how Greek was taught. They showed me a clay model of ancient 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. But their soldiers brought back malarial fever from Africa. It destroyed the builders and their secret perished 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 that's 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. “Transportation is civilization.” We teach civilization 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 treasures 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.
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 bumblebees' nests, wade and fish in the creek and go boating and swimming in the river and the clear lake.
When a boy gets old enough to leave the kindergarten and start in the primary school 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 permitted 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 gardening.
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 specialize. 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 orchestras.
Students are graduated when they are eighteen. Up to that time they are permitted 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.
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.