  “Where were you previous to the eighth and immediately subsequent thereto?” asked the city attorney. The prisoner looked sheepish and made no answer. A box car had been robbed on the eighth and this man had been arrested in the freight yards. He claimed to be a steel worker and had shown the judge his calloused hands. He had answered several questions about his trade, his age and where he was when the policeman arrested him. But when they asked him what he had been doing previous to and 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 phraseology. “Where were you previous to the eighth and immediately subsequent thereto?” the attorney asked him for the third time. 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 before you came here and also where you have been since you arrived in the city.” “I was in Pittsburgh,” he said, and he proceeded 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 puddler 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 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 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. 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 had 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 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 employee 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 blacking boots for travelers at the depot and the hotel. I had established a boot-blacking business which I pushed in my spare time for several years. My brush and blacking represented my capital. The shining of the travelers' 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 capital,” 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 “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. 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 professional 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 billions 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 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 because I have been trained as an extemporaneous speaker and not as a writer. For fifteen years I traveled over the country lecturing on the Mooseheart School. My task was to interest men in the abstract problems of child education. 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; therefore, 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 established it, for their number is so great that their names alone would fill three volumes as large as this. J.J.D.
THE IRON PUDDLER |
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