I may disagree in what I say with the pet theories a great many of you hold. I undoubtedly will. I think possibly our theories, both academic and political, and especially those in newspaper rooms, that have gotten us in wrong in the last 8 or 10 years are the ideas that everybody who disagrees with us is a crook. It would be an awful world if we didn’t, once in awhile, disagree and we would be an awful fatuous body of people if there didn’t once in awhile new ideas or new opinions spring up. If there is anything I admire in working people or politicians, it is to see them come out, either in an original idea or walk right up and down the asile telling others what they’ve got to say about a thing. A short time ago I talked to one of our greatest statemen. He has a reputation of never saying anything. I had talked with him for about an hour. I got up to leave and I think he had said seven words. I got up to go. The other party with me said, "Still water runs deep". "Yes," I said, "I guess you’re right, but the gentleman I have just been talking to for one hour doesn’t know a bit more now than when I started to talk to him. He doesn’t know what I’ve predicated my ideas on, if he had jumped on me every five minutes, and made me prove each statement that I made, then when I got through with that hour, that fellow would have been able to intelligently interpret the things I was trying to get at". I claim still water does not run deep. I have found and met probably the best educated men across the country and they are men who talk, who give you their idea of the thing and make you prove yours. Traveling across the country in the smoking room I generally find the man who knows what he’s talking about and knows how to express it, gets up and bats them all over. And he doesn’t do it to show how wise he is. Not a bit. He does it to get everybody else’s ideas about it, and he thinks possibly when he hears from them that he will change his views and usually does somewhat. And the fellow who has started that and keeps it up for a good many years, when he’s been jamming up against fellows who have known about the other side of things, finally that man gets to a point where he is fairly well informed. I have met a lot of those men in the country and each one of them has told me they never could get anything at all from the man who agreed with them all the time. The fellows from whom they get the information are the fellows who say, "I don’t believe that statement, and here’s why I don’t. Now you show me why you said that; prove it." You hear that on the Broadway Limited and on the 20th Century. You hear it every day. I like to hear it, and I’ve never yet heard a discussion, where both of them kept their tempers, but what before they got through, both of them had modified their views a great deal. I’ve seen fellows, editors, if you please, statemen, bankers, manufacturers, "bang, bang, bang, this is my idea", and somebody else would walk in and say, "Now wait a minute, this is a free train and free air, just let me talk about it for awhile" and when he gets through the other fellow says, "Well, there’s an angle I hadn’t seen it from before" and when they didn’t start to argue about it and simply discussed it, both finally admitted that their premises, on the start, were not only quite a little bit wrong, but they agreed that both of them, in the views that had been exchanged by that discussion had learned a great deal. And so I only predicate that in my little address here because I want to tell you that I’m going to put my whole argument on one foundation and ask you whether these four principles are not right:

          First, there is no man big enough today, there was no man big enough yesterday and there won’t be any man big enogh tomarow, to hate and reason at the same time, for the simple reason that hate in itself is insanity. You have never seen a man get boiling mad in his life but what 15 minutes later he said, "I wish I hadn’t said that." He wouldn’t have uttered an insane remark would he if he had kept his temper? Correct. All right, that is, I think, the first principle on getting along in this world, the fact that we’ve got to realize that before we can reason, we’ve got to stop hating, regardless of what the subject is or regardless of how that subject has been brought up.

          Second, if you never see Sherman Rogers again in your life, remember this—this is true: there are three sides to every dispute, there are three sides to every question that ever came up since the world began—your side, the other fellow’s side, and the right side. And there isn’t a possible chance in the world, now get me straight on this, there isn’t a chance in the world of your ever arriving at the right side, unless the two sides will sit across the same table and talk it over, not argue it, and when they do that they will find one side is 90 percent right and the other side about 10. I think, generally you will find it runs about 60—40 and when 40 percent of right from one side is put in with the 60 percent of right from the other side, when they get that 100 percent right, they are going to have something, and the only way I can see peace in industrial relations, where the widow can live and where the stock holders are able to exist and where the employe will get every single nickle that is coming to him without fighting for it, is for the two sides, management and labor, to sit down across the table and discuss it, but at the same time both of them, being of equal power at that council table where neither side can take advantage of the other, even if he wanted to.

          Third, ninety-five percent of men are honest. If that wasn’t true, we wouldn’t be here tonight. I think it was Morgan who said that if 10 percent were crooked, not a bank in the United States could exist. Nobody could exist for the fact that all business is done on credit, mighty little cash. If 10 percent of people were crooked we couln’t do business, so if 95 percent are square labor and capital—it must take in both of them, worker and foreman, it’s got to take in both of them—it seems to me if we approach the question from the right side, without argument, it seems to me we can sit down and get along pretty well right if we use our heads in doing it.

          Fourth, again, if you never hear of Sherman Rogers again, I think this will pay me for coming: You people here are supposed to be leaders; I think that most of you are. If YOU are leaders, you have long ago, if you belong in the position you now hold, decided that you can lead a good man through the fires of hell but you can’t drag him across the side walk. If you are leaders, you’ve learned long ago that until a foreman can tell the difference between discipline and abuse, he isn’t a foreman, he’s just a man on a payroll, but just as quick as he has learned the difference between discipline and abuse, gentlemen, he has started climbing up the ladder and he’s going to hit the top rung and nothing can keep him down.

          You, as leaders, can only get those that are following you for you instead of against you by inspiring respect; you can’t force it; by inspiring co-operation and good will and not trying to compel it; and then when you pull, those fellows are going to go down the line with you and, gentlemen, they’re going to be with you until hell freezes over, if you have inspired respect and confidence. And how are you going to do that? Well, you can’t get back from men one ounce more respect than you give them. Take it from Sherman Rogers. You can’t get back one single bit more co-operation from the men under you than you give them. You’re not going to get one bit more enthusiasm out of the crew that you lead than you, yourself, manifest. Now, gentlemen, when you come down with a grouch and expect your crew to smile all over, you’ve got a queer idea of life. You’re a grouch and you’ve got a grouchy crew, you are up in the air and your crew will be up in the air. You are hitting on all six and there isn’t a law in the universe can prevent your crew from hitting on all six. That is up to you.

          Next, gentlemen, I’ve been a working man all my life; I’ve worked with the roughest fellows in America, and I started in early, when I was 14, and I started in among the roughest in the mining camps, railroad camps, and lumbering camps in the West. I worked with all kinds of foremen, scores of them, I guess hundreds of them because a lumber jack who stayed in one camp three weeks, thought he was there for life and generally we, went to the place that fed the best chuck and that was hard to find because they all fed pretty good. When we went to town and met a fellow we liked and he said, "I work up to Blue Bell Donovan", that’s where we would be for awhile. Then maybe we’d have some trouble; both of us couldn’t win the fight and when we got back to town again we met somebody else and we went to some other camp, so we finally got around a great many foremen.

          Now if you could go back over my history in the lumbering camps you would see that I stayed at one camp two years, one a year, one seven months and another five months and a half. There was no chain to hold me there either. In each one of those places I worked harder than in any other camp. You go back over them and see that I got less wages in those camps than others paid, but if you look up the names of the foremen I worked under, you’ll see why I worked there. In each one of those four instances it was a foreman who was a leader and, by Golly, I just liked to get up and follow him if he took you right down into the fires of hell. We’ll take John Long first: John Long, boys, when just, giving an order, could be heard a mile. It sounded like the bellow of a Texas steer but, by the great horned spoon, when he shot it out, I knew and he knew that I knew that he was with me from the top of his hair to his boots. Johnny Long never gave me an order to do a thing that he wouldn’t do himself and believe me, gentlemen, all those orders came out like the whip of a black snake but the sting was all left out, all the time. There wasn’t a single man in that logging camp that wouldn’t have gone to hell any time he wanted us to go. He just stood out like Mount McKinley on fire, never had any trouble with crews; driver? You bet he was, in just one way, he got the work, with the fellows with him, the pep and the enthusiasm; everybody said Johnny was a good fellow and yet he always looked at you like he wanted to eat you and when he smiled it just seemed like the whole sky cleared up and the sun was beating down on you again and the whole world was a darned fine place to live in.

          But he was a natural born leader and had studied it very earnestly. It was personality that did it and let me tell you, Foremen, that 90 percent of your asset with the P. R. R., 90 percent of your asset in climbing to a bigger salary, rests in the fact that you develop a personality. Personality is the sales agent and, oh my God, if you haven’t got personality you’ve got to be a regular Julius Cesaer with brains to even get to the first rung of the ladder. And every other rung that you try to get up, about forty men, are knocking your head to keep you back, unless you’ve got personality because, as I tell you, without any question, it’s the advance agent, it’s the press agent, of ability. You can get by in the world with very little ability if you have plenty of personality. I don’t mean "bull", gentlemen, I mean personality; whether you know what a mush is or not I don’t know, but you can’t be a mush. It’s a fellow who gives out gibberdash. Now, that’s a man who pallavers all over, don’t mean a confounded thing he says and you know it and he knows that you know it. This fellow who puts his arm around your shoulder and you’d like to knock him out with a left on his chin—he’s a mush.

          Now, in order to maintain discipline, you’ve got to make your workers want discipline. You can’t have any discipline at all if it’s one of fear. If this man just does this or that because he fears you, you’re through, because the minute you turn your back, he’s at it, he’s gone. And the thing you’ve been trying to guard against, happens. But if you can make your men demand and uphold discipline, then you’ve got somewhere. Oh no, Sherman isn’t dreaming. I want to tell you something—I’ve never worked with a bad man in my life. I have worked with some awful looking characters but I haven’t found a single one of them but what if you could reach him underneath his vest, and that was an awful easy job, he’d give you his shirt off his back, but I’ve also found out as I have worked through life, that as I walked in to meet a stranger, I met him with one thought in my mind, "am I going to like him or not like him". I met a dozen men here tonight and as I met them, as with every man I’ve met in my life, the minute I was introduced to them, I was thinking just this one thing, "Is this fellow real?" I have always wanted to like the man I shake hands with, there’s no question about that, but gentlemen, if he looks sour, even if a smile has just started on my face, it is frozen right up, because I can be just as sour as any man living; if he smiles, I smile.

          Benecker, an artist over in Cleveland, drew the picture that appeared on "The Outlook" Magazine cover in 1918. It was the picture that drew me to the Outlook Magazine. It’s the picture of a workingman with his arms folded. It’s the greatest drawing ever done by the hand of a man. Take that from me, if any of you want it, just drop a line and I’ll get you a reproduction of it. It’s a picture you can stand and look at by the hour, but above everything else, this one thing will; stand out, that face is a mask, and although it’s a pencil sketch, you can smile and darned if that picture don’t smile back at you, gentlemen, frown at that picture and it spits at you. No, no I mean that, you just try that, either way, there’s that masked individuality wanting to smile if you smile but with a reservation, "If you want to fight, I’ll fight too and take it from me, kid, I can fight", and I think that is human nature everywhere in the world. I have never found anybody that wasn’t just that kind of an individual in overalls. He will wait and either smile if you smile, or his eyes can shoot fire.

          You don’t have to go any further to realize what a foreman or an employe ever must do to get men to work with him instead of for him. In other words, he’s got to inspire something way down deep in that fellow; if he can do that he’s got him and if he can’t he hasn’t got him. No two ways about it. Now, but you will say, "I wish you had some of these birds in my crew". Now, I’m going to say to every one of you—if there’s any trouble in your outfit, if you haven’t got your men hitting on all six like you think they ought to, don’t go damning the men, forget about it. Look in the mirror that you generally shave in and you’ll be looking at the fellow to blame. I know you won’t like that. I used to be a foreman but it’s true nevertheless. Only I didn’t keep the job long; just as soon as I’d fly off the handle, I’d realize that I had lost all respect and I knew I couldn’t regain it, and the next morning, Sherman Rogers was not in camp and nobody knew where he was. I didn’t have to be kicked out of camp. Just the second I lost the absolute respect of my crew I knew it and I didn’t want to stay any longer and I didn’t, and I learned very easily because I was sensitive and I learned that you couldn’t get work out of any man unless you had every man wanting to go down the line with you. Men who sprang out of the ranks now, with the good will of the men, you just couldn’t keep them down, they became Superintendents tomorrow, and pretty soon they had a company of their own. I learned that they come to do that by leading their men, leading them right along behind them, maybe you think I am wrong but let me tell you something: you’ve heard a great deal about the I. W. W. in the West. I’m supposed to be an I. W. W. but that outfit was never radical enough to suit me. I never was in sympathy with them. I couldn’t believe in the overthrowing of the Government, though and I also couldn’t believe that all we had to do was fold our arms and stop work. If the employer was a different man than I thought he was, if that proved to me later on that if the employer had wanted to meet me like Bill Haywood met me, I never would have gotten the idea that my employer was wrong in the first place. In other words, I mean if the employer had spent as much of his time in selling himself to me as Bill Haywood did, I would undoubtedly have followed my employer and probably would have thrown Bill Haywood out of the camp on his head when he came in, but the employer thought all he had to do was to sit in the office and write checks to manage the business. He knew he had to go down to the banker and sell himself if he wanted a loan, he knew he had to sell himself to the wholesaler and to the public in general, yet all the time he forgot to sell himself to the man he should have sold himself to in the first place and that was the worker in his camp. Right. Now he sold himself to the banker, you know gentlemen, any man who can sell a cold blooded banker ought to hold his head in shame when he says he can’t reach the worker. I’ve got the best banker you ever saw in New York, and if I put up $500.00 in Liberty Bonds, he’ll loan me $50.00 any time. My namesake, Bill Rogers, in a speech made before a Bankers’ Association meeting in Chicago said, "It’s necessary that they be slightly cold-blooded but not completely frozen up twelve months of the year". When addressing the National Bankers’ Association in New York, Will Rogers said this: "Bankers and Fleece-hounds: I’m glad to meet you. I want to tell you that I think a great deal of bankers. I’m going to tell you why I do but I want to tell you what I think about it first and you can decide whether you want to listen to me any longer or not: I had a friend in Chicago and this friend was a man of big affairs. Very often he would go down and borrow two or three or ten thousand dollars and finally he came along, during the panic time and he needed three thousand dollars in the worst way and in the meantime his assets had risen. He walked in to a banker and said, ‘Sir, with you lend me three thousand dollars’? ‘Well,’ the banker said, ‘You’re a pretty good fellow but before we loan money ahead now we’ve got to know that a man can see away into the future. I’m going to give you a test’ and he started writing a check. ‘Now,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you the test: My boy, I’ve got two eyes, but one is glass and the other is good. Now you tell me which one is glass and which one is good and I’ll sign my name and you get the three, thousand. How about it?’ And he said, ‘Very well, I’ll take that’. He looked at him a minute and he said, ‘Your right eye is your good eye’. ‘Well’, said the banker, ‘you’ve certainly got a good head on you but how did you tell that?’ ‘Because, in your left eye there is a gleam of human kindness. Your right eye must be your good eye.’"

          Now gentlemen, as foremen, you cannot emulate bankers, because the banker has to be in a position where all people come in and everybody he does business with has come in to get something. Remember that nine-tenths of the time the fellow in your gang can step right across the street or go to the next town below and get just as good a job as he’s got with you. While the banker can only get by by showing kindness out of his glass eye, let me tell you that your biggest asset is the one the banker can’t have anything to do with; your biggest assest is the biggest artery that shoots blood through your body which is filled with the milk of human kindness. I don’t mean mush. I used to know two preachers. One was a dried up little fellow with a high hat and an umbrella and I think he must have been the original from all the cartoons are made of the preacher with the proverbial umbrella. Oh, he used to walk up to that pulpit and say, "We will now start the morning services with Luke 14" or whatever it was. He always talked to just about four women and that’s all that kept coming and they kept coming I think because they felt when they heard this preacher that there was something in common between them, there was certainly a feminine touch from the platform. Just two blocks below was a man who walked out, and he stood six feet six and chewed tobacco and I understand he knows what good whiskey is. "Now boys," he said, "let me tell you", and he’d come in and shake his fists and he laid everybody out and he’d hold them up where they could look at themselves and then tear them to pieces. He spoke the most beautiful thoughts I every heard in my life and out of Faith and Christianity and God Almighty, he made a great big pulsating red-blooded appeal in a sermon. He didn’t figure that faith, rightousness and principle had to be spoken of in whispers. He felt that that was the biggest red-blooded thing before the public today and he put it up to them like an honest-to-God red-blooded he-man.

          So I tell you, boys, exactly the same thing applies in selling personality, in imbibing the milk of human kindness, from your crew. You don’t have to be a sissy to do that. No. no, it’s the biggest red-blooded thing in the world and you; talking about working hard, and having to do this and that; I want to tell you the biggest thing in the world is when you can make him want to do it. Take it from Sherman, that’s the big idea—leading; you don’t think that can be done? I think every one of you was in the army. I didn’t get half as much out of that army as I’d like to have gotten. We didn’t accomplish much in the long run and I think we’re losing all we did accomplish but we found out one thing, that a Corporal or a Sergeant or Lieutenant who couldn’t sell himself to his men wasn’t in the right place and we found that those fellows who could take 20 mile hikes and come back singing, they were the fellows for leaders. I know that my squad, right through the war, in the 130th Division, First Infantry, there wasn’t a man in that seven of our squad who wouldn’t have licked any man in the company who got our corporal in wrong. Our corporal didn’t have to do much. Every man in the squard too, demanded discipline because we knew we had the wisest corporal who ever stood in boots. That little fellow was the devil himself. He was a Filipino, only weighed about 115 pounds, but I’m awfully glad I never got mixed up with him. I think he could lick any wild cat of his weight on earth, and when he said anything, nobody started questioning and one of the fellows he was giving orders to was a Swede weighing about 240 pounds. He made us walk the chalk line but you bet your life every minute he let us know he was with us and if it came to a Battle between us and the Captain, that Corporal took our part every time. If your man is right, and it comes to a battle between a man in your gang and the boss, why, never mind the P. R. R., you back up the man. Maybe Mr. Atterbury wouldn’t like that so much, maybe your Master Mechanic here will kick but whether he does or not, you’ll find out before long that it’s mighty good medicine and works both ways. When you know your man is right and it comes to an argument between him and your Master Mechanic, for Heavens sake, stick with the man. Maybe you’ll get fired but you’ll get a mighty lot further if you do because you’ll build your own character, you’ll have a confidence that you haven’t got on this job if you don’t do that. Let alone the Master Mechanic here, who is a very nice fellow, and the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, which is a very fine company and the President, and I think not as much of any man as I do of him, yet the whole three don’t amount too much when it comes down to whether you are going to dispise yourself if these three people make you do what you don’t want to do. So the main reason I’m here on the platform tonight, I know your Vice-President is as good as any man on earth, I know there isn’t a crooked hair in his head and I know he thinks more of working men than he does of any man in America, and I know he makes bigger fights for the man than any other man on the System, although some have been much bigger advertisers. He has put W. W. Atterbury’s life right in the hands of the common workers of the P. R. R. and take it from me he couldn’t have done that unless he had faith in the men and in his plan. If any man in this room, tomorrow or next week or next month, has a single thing on his chest at any time of the day and if you think for one second you are not getting a fair deal from the head of this railroad, don’t you work an hour, quit your job, walk up to your Master Mechanic and talk it over. Don’t get mad at him. You don’t get anywhere when you are. Go to your Master Mechanic and if you can’t settle it with him, and still think you are right, next morning, as foreman, ask for a blue ticket from your Master Mechanic. You go up to Philadelphia, walk up to the entrance where it tells W. W. Atterbury’s office is and present your ticket and say "Sherman Rogers sent you" and take it up to W. W. A. The biggest job that Mr. Atterbury has today is not financing the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, it’s not hauling freight, because he’s got more freight than he can haul now, but the biggest job he’s got and he knows it, is that every single supervisory officer on the P. R. R. is working in unison, for a set purpose, together, and when they are not doing it, I don’t care who they are, gentlemen, they’re a detriment to the Company, I don’t care if they are working for nothing or if they are paid for coming to work; on the other hand, if you feel satisfied; you’re worth your salary, I don’t care what that salary is, I don’t think a discontented man who is discontented just because he doesn’t want to get straightened out, I don’t think he’s worth his salt. I’ll tell you, as I’ve told all the supervisory men I’ve spoken to in this country, if you can’t settle it, don’t have a thing on your chest for two hours, go up to your Master Mechanic, and talk it over with him. If your Master Mechanic is worth a pinch of salt, he will want to get your attitude as long as you don’t call him too many names. He wants to get every single complaint you’ve got, because you are not worth a dam until you’ve got it off your chest. If you can’t settle things with him and still think you’re right go up to Mr. Atterbury because the biggest job he’s got is to see that you are set right. If you can’t settle it up there, don’t go back to work, go to some other job. John Jones is a big man, the P. R. R. is a big company, Mr. Atterbury is a big man, but they don’t any of them compare with you. If you want to slack on the job for a year and it costs the Pennsylvania Railroad Company $2.00 every day you do, that’s only $700.00 and they’ve got more money than that—you see I know, because I paid my fare down here tonight and I’ve been working out the ratio—but while they’ve lost a little bit out of bank, you’ve lost your whole life for one year and you can’t afford to do it. I want to make this plea to every one of you: if you don’t like the job you’re working at, you haven’t got to the right place in life. There is a place we all fit in and we don’t get there we don’t make a success. Caruso never would have made a blacksmith. I doubt if Bob Fitzsimmons would have made a success as a preacher. Even Ford realized at 45 that he wasn’t getting anywhere, a failure up to the age of 45 and then he decided the thing he liked to do best of all was mechanical work and he became a mechanic and judging from his bank roll, he’s getting along pretty well. While we must admit his success as a manufacturer, however, there are doubts about his political aspirations ever being realized for it would never do to have a Ford in the White House and a Lincoln in the garage. That thing would never work out and he’ll never realize that ambition. But these men have drifted back and forth until they hit their niches and you men are now looking at the greatest failure in the civilized world up to about 5 years ago.

          When I was younger and worked in a logging camp, I thought, oh, if only I could be the editor of a newspaper, if I could only write for the magazines, and when I heard a speech, oh, if I could only get up there and make a speech. Form the time I was 15 years old I always held those three dreams, but that’s as far as I got. I was cutting logs, or else I was down on the deck or boom or on the drive and I never liked it, see, but it just happened to be that was the likeliest thing in the way, I always figured too, that I was worth about five times more than I got, and now, when I look back I know I got a lot more than I was worth. Every once in awhile I’d get a swat on the jaw and I went down further and further and how in the devil I ever got out I don’t know myself. But I remember the last time I got kicked in the slats was just after I got out of the war. They sent up to me in the hotel where I was staying in Seattle, "You owe this hotel $16.00; we are not an emosenary institution". Well, that was the first time I ever heard that word, didn’t know what it meant, but I had a pretty good idea that they wanted money and that was about the last thing I had on this earth. I had just one thing that kept me from being a bum; a politician, so long as he can keep his peaked hat, he’s a politician, the same with a man in the woods, with a six or eight dollar hat on his head he’s pretty well up in the world. Your hat, out in the woods, determines your position in society. If you haven’t got a John B. Stetson hat you’re no good. If you’ve got a poor looking hat on you’re a bum. Well, after getting their note, I sat there for awhile debating whether they’d throw me out that night or wait until next morning and as I got up to go out, I looked in the mirror and I said, "Sherman, Old boy, you’ve tripped yourself, nobody within 10 miles of you when you fell down that hill. I had always imagined there must have been forty fellows gave me a kick and there wasn’t anybody near me. You will have lots of friends but you’ll never have but one enemy and that’s yourself. You’re the only man who is standing on your neck right now, nobody else has hold of you now and nobody else can lift you up until you’re willing to get off your own neck, so we stood there looking at each other in the glass and when Sherman finally decided that all of his trouble was right under his own John B. Stetson, my eyes rolled up and just bulged out. This happens to be a true story. I was still looking in that mirror when the maid opened the door the next morning at 8.00 o’clock and during that 10 hours had come a total complete regeneration of the man. Sherman Rogers still weighed 171 pounds but there was no single atom in Sherman Rogers at 8.00 o’clock that morning that was in him at 8 the night before. Just as different as if he had been reborn, because he had been finally squared with himself; that’s the biggest thing in the world and that night, Mr. Rogers, who had always been an enemy of Sherman’s, we decided to get acquainted and we shook hands and started to talk it over and that’s the first time we got acquainted with each other and then I began to pick myself to pieces and I wondered if there was anything at all good enough in me to balance the other side of the scale. The things that were no good began to pile up on one side and I thought they were insurmountable and then I began to pile up on the other side, the decent part of me. I knew what was decent and knew what was not, and pretty quickly I saw the scale go down; I began to see the best in me start to balance the worst of me and we have never had any trouble since. I was making $15.00 at that time, shortly after that I was making one thousand dollars a month and if I told you now how much I am making you’d think I was a plutocrat; I had an automobile then—I mean an automobile, not one of these Christian Science affairs—then I had a house with eight rooms and library and study and little garage in the back; now I’ve come to New York and make 15 to 20 times, 30 times as much as I made then, and now, low and behold, I can’t even afford a Ford. I pay $3,600 a year —for five little musty rooms, I have to walk slow when I step in the bedroom for fear I’ll break my nose on the other side. I was born in a very poor building, my father was poor, took him a long time in life to get somewhere and while we weren’t anywhere we lived in a very unpretentious house. Well, I’m back in that same kind of house and I’ve got to the point where I make 50 times as much as my father made and I’m still living in a small house and the only difference is he paid $15.00 and I pay $300.00 a month. I don’t want to think what I’ve gained for fear I’ll go back to the woods again and I don’t want to go back. But, gentlemen, 7 months from that time I had contributed one of the main feature articles in the Saturday Evening Post, it was editorialized all over the country and the first time I had dipped my fountain pen at all in ink, 18.000 words for the New York World; I stopped at the 5th grade in school and was mighty lucky to get that far before I had to go out and earn bread but I’ve never had a single word blue penciled, never had an article that hasn’t been accepted and haven’t had the slightest trouble and there is only one reason—I work 20 hours a day right now.

          But gentlemen, I want to tell you, I’m crazy about my Missus and I’ve got the best looking woman in the world and she is the best woman in the world barring maybe your wife or sweetheart, but I’m 10 times as much in love with what I’m doing as I am with my home and there is no trouble at all, yet if I had stayed out in the woods, I’d still be out there making $15.00 a week. So gentlemen, if you don’t love the work you’re doing, quit your job tomorrow, if you’ve got to walk out of Wilmington on your hands and knees and your wife and kids on your back and leave your board bills behind. Don’t do it, because you’re not being square with John Doe and you want to be square with him first of all. Be dead sure you’ve got a grievance, be dead sure first that you are playing square with the company, be dead sure first that s you’re square with yourself because it may be that the reason you haven’t gotten along well was because you were your own enemy, and I’ll give you an instance of that. I was up in Buffalo and made a speech before a meeting up there not long ago. I was standing out after the meeting, in an overcoat, a big heavy one because it was twenty below zero—I don’t know why anybody lives up there anyhow—and I was standing on a platform with the wind coming down the street 40 miles an hour, and a fellow came along with a great big ratcoon coat on, I don’t, know how he ever packed that big coat because he was a little man. He had wool socks and galoshes on and he walked up and stood there and he said "If this isn’t the damnedest country I’ve ever seen, this is no place for a white man at all, the Indians should still be here freezing to death" and just before the car started off, up comes a little bit of a slim guy, about six feet tall, no overcoat on and he had a summer suit on, his nose was just as red as it could be and he came running up and said, "Oh boy, this is what I call real, if this place won’t make a man out of you, why, hell, you ought to be drowned", and I sat looking there as I got in the street car and said to myself, "There’s all there is to life, it’s just the way you look at it".

          The first time I went to Pittsburgh, Penna.,—I say Pennsylvania because there is one in Kansas, you know, it’s on the map pretty big too,—and you go through one of those big mills in Pittsburgh, Pa., and I looked at the big ladles and when I saw the steel come out, and a fellow up there pounding that little stick to see if it was right tempered, I happened to think, "Well, here is red hot iron, that’s been burning with the hottest fire you can get under it and that steel is rolled out of there, and now this fellow has got to run up and down with that stick because if he dosen’t handle that iron right after it’s hot, it will go back to poorer material than it was in the first place but if he tempers it right after it’s at a certain heat, he makes a steel that’s the very best. Let me tell you that our troubles, that we’ve got to fight down every day, are the fires of experience, they temper the honest to God qualities in man and either you come out, after you’ve gone through these adversities, unbreakable, unbendable, with a character that you can’t beat or you’re back in that condition where you haven’t even got the spine you had in the first place. And a man without adversity—why men, she must be a poor life. I talk to Rockefeller a great deal—he dosen’t always talk to me as I’d like him to, but I eat three times as much as he does and he pays the bill. I always sense a little melancholy feeling in John D. Jr., and I get the uncanny feeling that he has never gotten any pleasure out of life, he’s never had any adversity. You know, when I was a kid I worked three years, saving pennies to buy a bicycle. Worked and saved my pennies for three years and when I got it, had one ride on it and broke it, hung it up in the wood shed and it’s there yet I guess. I didn’t buy fireworks for the Fourth of July, didn’t get anything for Christmas and saved for three years for that bike and if they had sold me a Pierce Arrow for that money I’d never have gotten any more pleasure out of planning than I did for the bicycle, and to go through life without any adversity, why gentlemen, it couldn’t be worth living.

          Now I want to get one thing across to you: If you don’t love men, quit. If you don’t love men you are in the wrong place right now. As I told you when I first started out, I’ve had to lick lots of men and I want to tell you that I haven’t always got licked. But I have been licked, licked awfully hard, sometimes it was a day or two before I knew where I was. Out in Minneapolis is where we coined that phrase that has gone all over the world. A man walks in a saloon out there and says, "I can lick anybody in the United States". A little French-Canadian looks at him for a minute and says "Huh". The little fellow walks over and knocks him down and when he wakes up and comes to he says, "Who in the hell are you?" The little guy says, "I’m the guy you thought you were about five minutes ago". When you want a fight you’re always going to get it, but boys, the more I’ve lived with men, the more I’ve gotten out and seen men, the more I’ve mingled with all kinds of men, Republicans, Democrats, I. W. W., all phases from Fifth Avenue society to the fellows who run around with coffee stands; every single one of those fellows I’ve mingled with I couldn’t help but like. By golly I don’t care who the man is, when you get acquainted with him, he’s right there. I walked up the avenue in New York the other night and stopped to listen to a fellow who was speaking from a soapbox and from the way he talked I thought he was going out and lick the United States Army himself. I walked up to him and I said, "I’m hungry" and he said, "Do you need some money" and I said, "Well, I’m broke" and he said, "Come on fellow, we’ll both eat". We both went out to eat and to talk too and when I got that fellow across the table where he said what he thought, instead of trying to make other people believe what he thought he meant, I said, "Who are you?" and he said, "I’m the father of six kids and I’d like to have you come home and meet them". I went to see him in Brooklyn and I’d rather go and talk to him than to the President of the United States. He was a conversationalist and he thought he could go out and save this whole world in one stroke. Totally mislead, got the wrong education, but he was right down here, he was right at heart.

          When the panic came along we were all hungry out in my country; all out of a job, one fellow, up on the peninsula, struck out with me and said, "How are we going to get back to Seattle"? The only way I saw to get there was to walk and I said so. He said "All right, let’s go". I said, "No, not with you". His forehead set right back from his eyes and he looked, oh, 210 pounds, short and stocky and flat eared and cauliflowered and when he said, "What’s the matter with me", I said, "I might disagree with you and be afraid to tell you". He said, "If I had always kept my mouth shut I wouldn’t have such thick ears". Well, we set out together and we went down across country and I was packing 70 pounds and he had a little bit more and we had a five day trip of it; Pretty soon my pack got heavy over the mountains and all of a sudden when I wore out, I sat down and said, "You go ahead, I’ll catch up to you again". He only said, "Hell, give me that pack" and he packed both of them packs. When we arrived in Seattle, tired and hungry, we came to a hotel where there was a sign "We want a dish washer—will give him his three meals a day". Well, that was the most grand and glorious feeling that ever went through me in my life. I hadn’t had anything to eat for so long and here was the opportunity, and I went in and said, "You mean you’ll give me three meals a day for washing dishes" but when I saw the dishes I pretty nearly changed my mind. Looked like they had been saving them for me for two months, but I waded through and afterward got my dinner and oh boy, this was going to be some meal. I had been munching all along too, they brought in the pie and when they had it all piled in front of me I said, "If it’s all the same to you, I eat at midnight and I’d like to take this along and have it then", and I went out to look for my pal. Just as I left that restaurant, when the night man took my place, who should meet but my pal looking for me. He beckoned and I said, "What have you got" and he said, "Never mind, come along, the stores close in 15 minutes". Well, I went with him across the street to a clothing store. We started in and I got to thinking "What’s the matter with this bird" and he said to the clerk "Give him a Stilson-Kellog" which is the finest logging boot in the world; he got me a shirt, then, a necktie, and then some underwear, good and heavy, and then he said, "That’s a hell of a hat you’re got on" and he bought me an $18.00 Stetson". Well, when we got out I said, "I don’t care where you got it but if you’ve killed anybody, tell me and we’ll get out of town right quick". We walked from there back to the restaurant and there he pulled out a roll, counted out half and gave me $13.00. I said, "Say, what’s the matter with you", and he told me that about 10 years ago he had cut a lot of cord wood for a fellow and he beat him out of his pay. He had put it in the hands of a lawyer for collection, who collected it and had been looking for him for five years. He said, "I’ve got $26.00 left, here’s 13 for you", and I’ve never seen him again from that day to this, and then you talk to me about bad men. I want to tell you, gentlemen, there’s no such animal living; now that fellow was as hard-boiled as you find them and I had just to appeal to that fellow under his shirt and he was ready to give me half of what he had made.

          Gentlemen, I want to tell you-in the first place, you may wonder who is paying me, and in your mind you can probably only think of two men, Judge Gary or Samuel Gompers. Now, neither Judge Gary nor Samuel Gompers would pay me even if I wanted them to because the theories I have wouldn’t fit in very well with either of theirs. I recognize Judge Gary as being the greatest stabilizer of prosperity that ever stepped in American industry and Gompers as the greatest organizer of industry that has ever put foot in this country. Judge Gary has been the greatest instrument in progress in making industry hum in the United States, yes, sir, the greatest of the century. I recognize the American Federation of Labor as being the greatest instrument of progress for the advancement of working men, but Gary, lacking contact, and understanding, has a fear of men that he should not feel; honest as he is, and he’s got to be honest; Gompers, honest as he is, and he’s got to be honest, lacking that close intimate contact with men of big affairs, doubts them, is afraid of them, questions them and he thinks the only honest people in the world are men in overalls, that work for a small wage per day and so those two men, both great organizers, feel they need protection against those fellows because they don’t know them. Why don’t they get acquainted? I was over in Buffalo one night and talking to men, and after I got through with my speech, three men arose and came up to me and as I stood there on the platform—I can remember yet, the tears running down my face and they all sat down again but one man, with a face as red as a gobbler’s, and he said, "I’d like to think you think that there can be an honest employer but I don’t. I don’t see how it could be possible, where they could work out this proposition without hatred and prejudice and I think you must have hypnotized yourself". And he said, "Where does the walking delegate come in"? Well, he sort of had me by the hair; I had to think for a full half minute before I could answer him. I said, a walking delegate is a third party and I’ve had an awful lot of trouble with a third party. I’m a married man. I’ve got a young wife who is full of pep and I’m dead myself and every once in awhile I know there is a cyclone coming. I lived in Kansas, and I know what they’re like and I don’t like them and when I see one coming, I take her by the hand and we walk over to the table, sit down across from each other and talk it over. We discuss the problem, we don’t argue for we both realize that the entire happiness of both of us depends on whether we are able to keep our tempers at that table and just as long as we two sit across that table we settle everything fine and dandy, but-just as soon as my mother-in-law comes in, there’s hell to pay all the time. She’s the walking delegate.

          Gentlemen, I want to tell you something. I’m not fighting any individual on earth. I believe that there isn’t a man living who isn’t 90 percent good although the 10 percent, bad is the thing we always hear about. All I’m trying to do is to get the people on a basis of understanding; If I can’t do that, then I had better stayed in the woods and if I take away from Capital one single right, then it were better I had never been born, and if I deprive Labor of a single, right in the world by what I have done, then it would be better had I never been born and I’m certainly kidding myself if I have done it, but out in the woods, when we, used to go out for 5 or 6 months and I’d have to pull up my belt, you bet I’d sail into them when I believed it was fighting for a good principal and if we couldn’t reach an understanding, we were to fight for it and yet, at that time, ignorant, uneducated, unlettered, the idea grew in my mind that some day we would stop being a set of damn fools and sit down and begin to try to reason these things, instead of trying to destroy industry and men and women and get the best there was without going through months and months of poverty. When we were in the scrap, a war that should never have been declared, I used to think to myself, My God, there’s surely some way out of this, and when the big I. W. W. scrap came off, we all walked out and that was a bitter fight for six weeks. I went to town to see the big boss and he said, "Who are you" I told him and he said, "1 don’t know you", I said "You haven’t anything on me" but I said, "I want to tell you something: I like the 7,000 men that are working for you. I know them, I’ve worked with them and their friends in various parts of the State for the last 7 years. I’ve fought with them, worked, with them and take it from me I like them, every damn one of them and I don’t know but what you’d like them if you got to know them" but I said, "all these scraps are unnecessary". "Well, " he said, "any time they get ready to want to reason, we can stop the fight". I told him, "You are just as ignorant of what is going on down there in that camp as I am of what is going on in your office. The need for education lies on both sides here and have you ever heard of Bill Heywood"? "You bet I have", he said. I said, "Do you know that he lives in Chicago, almost two thousand miles from here, and do you know there isn’t a miner or lumberman in these states that hasn’t seen and heard Bill Heywood". "What are you driving at", he said. "Now you’re beginning to think", I said, "now if he who has a thousand things on his hands, leading labor movements all over the United States, and all over the world, if he can get out and meet every man, so every man can see and hear him and rub elbows with him and just from the standpoint of watching him to know whether he’s sincere, if he can do that, why in the Sam Hill couldn’t you stamp your personality indelibly on the minds of the 7,000 men who are only 60 miles from Seattle " "Well, I haven’t time", he said and I said, "If Bill Heywood can find the time, you’ve got to take the time". "You’ve got to sell yourself to the bankers, and wholesalers and retailers and public, and whenever you get ready to take a page out of Bill Heywood’s book, and take off that coat and white collar you’ve got on and come out there to the camp and tell us about your aims and ambitions and sit across the table with us and begin to figure that we are part of this organization, it wouldn’t be healthy for Bill to come back I’m quite sure of that, but you yourself have been the Bolsheviki maker, you’ve withheld friendship, everything that a man could have to follow you with, and you’re sore when you never even gave them a chance to see you". Well, hard-boiled John went out to his camp and that was the first in the State of Washington that a man ever came out to camp as he did. He was a he-boy at that. I can still remember the first words he spoke. He said, "Boys, because of my mistakes, we seem to misunderstand each other". He didn’t jump on those fellows, not a little bit, he didn’t talk about Bill Heywood, but, he said, "I’m going to correct my mistakes right now. I’m going to get acquainted with you men, every man on my payroll, and you’re going to know me and know who I am and what I want"—and he talked on for three hours and when he got through there wasn’t an I. W. W. in that camp; that was five years ago and there hasn’t been a strike in that camp since and you can go right straight across the street from that camp to one that’s got 95 percent I. W. W., and the employer doesn’t do as this fellow does. This fellow’s camp hasn’t had any trouble since. I was out there this summer on a picnic, attended by 7,000 people, all one big family, where there will never be another strike in camp again. When I saw that thing work out I made up my mind this was somebody’s salvation and I began to read the stuff put out by various employers’ associations and chambers, and I got so I wanted to fight because the stuff they spilled was just as blood-firing as the stuff put out by the wildest labor organization. They were all fighting among themselves like a lot of tomcats, you couldn’t sleep at night for the noise. I decided to go right to New York, and inside of a week I was there. I went to the office of the New York World; I wanted to see the Editor and the 6th day I went there to try to see him, the office boy said he would go back to see if he was in. I heard him talking to the managing editor and the editor said, "I’m not in". I heard him tell the boy that so I walked in and said, "I know you’re not in but won’t you tell me when you will be?" He said, "What do you want"? "I want to write a story about what makes Bolshiviki and how to unmake them", I said. He said, "Golly, you hate yourself don’t you", Then I told him that I had worked with them all my life and loved them and he said, "You love them, I. W. W.’s? and I answered "Yes, sir." I sat down and talked with him for an hour and at the end of that time he told me to sit down and write and so that night, for seven hours, I wrote, and 18,000 words appeared in the New York World for a week, dictated it to the stenographer and one morning came a beautiful embossed envelope and an invitation from the New York State Chamber of Commerce requesting "the honor of the presence of Sherman Rogers, at a meeting to be held in the Ball Room of the Waldorf Astoria", signed J. D. Rockerfeller, Jr., Chairman of the Speakers’ Committee, and I said, "Honey, I guess I’ve worked too much late, I’m beginning to see things, and I handed her the letter and she read further "this will be a formal affair". And she said, "The difference between that and what you’ve got on, and you’ll be broke again". Well, I went right down to the Columbia University in New York and went to one of the professors and said, "Listen, I’ve never been through school, but I want to talk to all those great men and I realize I haven’t the ability to talk to those people like I ought to talk to them and I’m going to give you the meat and I want you to put the letters around it. He wrote it in about five thousand words and gentlemen, I’ve been buying books ever since; I’ve bought three big dictionaries and I have two encyclopedias, just out of pure curiosity to know what some of the words mean but there are still many words that appear in that speech that I haven’t been able to find yet in any of the books I’ve run across. I memorized that thing, backward and forward and the night of the speech up came the dress suit and it was a peach. When they tell you there isn’t good stuff in those suits, you laugh at them. I put it on, it fit like wax, all but the vest and it was too small. I asked my wife what we were going to do about it and she said, "Cut it up the back" so we did and that was some vest to stand all the puffing and blowing I did in it. Then there were all those great men, the Garys, the Rockefellers and Morgans and Vanderbilts, right down there under me. I turned to my right to a fellow sitting there and I said, "Your name, please" and he said "Perry". I said, "That’s the name of the fellow who went to the North Pole, isn’t it". and he said, "Yes, that’s me". Everybody I talked to had the name of some great man and it always turned out to be he himself. Oh I was in select company I was. I tell you, gentlemen, my knees began to shake and I was supposed to be the second speaker and was mumbling my speech to myself. All of a sudden the other fellow finished and I heard the Chairman say, "Now we’ll hear from another speaker whom we know nothing about, but we promise him a respectful hearing". You see, the bird was taking no chances on Sherman Rogers. It wasn’t very much to stand on or to start off with but just as I stood up— well, you’ve all been in the moving pictures when the reel broke and everything whirled around, everything shooting around but you couldn’t see anything—well, there was my five thousand words going around, around, and round. I stood looking at them for what seemed four or five minutes—they told me afterward it was only one, anyway that was the longest period I ever stood speechless. All of a sudden, Rockefeller who was sitting down below me talking to the fellow next to him, and his eyes were wondering from my shoes up and just as they got up to my knees he began to laugh. I found out afterwards they were just telling a joke but I thought then that they were laughing at me. There are two things you can’t do out in the woods, make fun of a man’s diction or laugh at his clothes, do either and you’re a goner, because, if the fellow who fights you can’t lick you, the whole camp will pile on you. Just in one second I hit the table and the first thing I said that night was "If you want to know what makes Bolshevism, go home and look in the looking glass". You can imagine the way those fellows felt. It was just as though you had dropped the North Pole in the Waldorf Astoria Dining Room. Well, I talked at them for awhile, and pleaded with them and they were a bunch of sports, they let me go on, and when I finished, they gave me a wonderful reception. Next morning I had form 2 to 4 columns in each paper in New York City. I’ve talked to 400,000 people and written for the best magazines in the country and the last time I saw Bill Heywood I told him he was all wrong. I said, "Why, you’re trying to bring about a millenium to teach one class of people to hate another class; don’t you know that you can’t teach a class of people to hate? Don’t you know that if you had spent one-half that much energy teaching employers to respect workers, you would have had a peace that would have been lasting; you cost the country a billion dollars, teaching hatred, and I am going to get back that billion by teaching faith. I have addressed thousands of people, bankers, associations and I have never addressed an audience of employers yet who didn’t almost rise out of their chairs. I have met the same approval from employers and workers by selling faith that Bill Heywood got by selling hatred. And when I began to talk to the employers when it was all over, they say, "I believe you’re right, we’ve been asleep". I haven’t met but two employers in the last four years who told me "Boy, you’ve got to drive them to get anything out of them".

          I want to say one thing to you about the plan you’ve got on the railroad. It’s my baby. I’d go to hell for the P. R. R. on this plan they’ve started. I told Atterbury when they started it. "If you’ve got a string on this, if there is a single solitary thing in this plan you put up that gives you any advantage over the, men, you’re going to get the soundest licking you ever got in your life and you’ll find yourself out on the street". He said, "If there is a single thing in my plan, here it is, read it over, if there is a single thing in it that doesn’t give every man absolute justice and prevent me from taking anything away from them, you go and change it for yourself. That’s fair enough isn’t it?" I said, "Yes, sir, that is, "and I tell you now, if there is anything wrong with this plan on the Pennsylvania Railroad, if you will bring it to me, and you can show me that the company has the slightest opportunity to prevent you from getting everything you ought to get without fighting for it, I’ll change it myself. I’ll guarantee you that right now, and gentlemen, my whole plan these last five years, has been trying to work this thing down to a basis of common justice, realizing as I do when you, train any army to fight that that army is going to want to fight, armies are not trained for peace, generals know nothing of peace, all they know is how to fight and if we are going to bring up organizations of capital to fight labor and organizations of labor to fight capital, then we are going to keep fighting and fighting until we destroy the things we have built. Take that from Sherman. I’ve been through as many fights as any of you have and I’ve never been in a strike yet that couldn’t have been prevented in a minute by the plan you’ve got on this system, no matter how rich the company is, they couldn’t withhold justice from you. Just one more thing, boys, I don’t know of anything, —you can’t get anything unless you pay for it. I’m married, and I’ve got the smartest woman in the world. She married me, she’s high strung, and when she wants to fight, suddenly I kind of feel that fight’s a great idea. One day she said, "Listen Sherman, no more arguments", but I knew she wasn’t willing to do things I wanted to do and I knew she would want to do things I didn’t want to do, some of them being things I wasn’t able to buy, and so on and so I got a bigger payroll, and when she asked for a new pair of shoes I said no so quick it took her breath away, One night I had bought tickets to the Follies and I came home when my wife said, "I’ve decided we don’t want to go to that show, it costs too much money". Isn’t that some woman? "But," she said, "‘let’s take a walk, let’s take them back and exchange them and get our money back". Well, I was willing, and we went down to the box office and they were more than willing to take them back as there were a number of people waiting to buy them and I walked out with the money when she said, "Let’s walk around a little while". She walked me right down to Lord & Tayor’s window and right inside was a nice fur coat and she said, "Sherman, dear, isn’t that a marvelous coat"? I said, "Yes, that’s a marvelous coat". "And won’t it be wonderful when you make money enough so that I can wear that coat" she said. So we walked on. That was Saturday. On Monday morning, I called up at 10 o’clock—she usually takes my kiddies out in the Park, but this morning Mrs. Rogers was staying at home. I told the maid to tell Mrs. Rogers that the package she was looking for would be there in about a quarter of an hour. Now she’s been running that scheme for about four years. I know I’m going to get kidded when she starts in. I’ve never told her I’m wise to her game because I kind of like to be kidded. I’m not going to tell her either, for it’s natural for her, she has the scheme of leading Sherman and she gets anything she wants and right now, if she was to ask me for a new pair of shoes, mechanically I’d say no, absolutely no. Now boys, I know what you’ve got in your minds; you’re saying, it’s all right to talk that way but you ought to have some of the birds in my gang, you ought to meet up with some of my foreigners. But I want to tell you this, that there is no such animal as a foreigner. I could never find anything in the heart of a Swede, or an Italian, or a Welshman, or a Canadian, German or Jap, I’ve seen that the same kind of blood comes from the heart of all of them. I’ve seen them risk their necks to save a man in the woods, whether it was a Chinaman or an Englishman, a Canadian or a Welshman. There is no such thing as a foreigner and we are all about alike, but I am going to show you that foreigners are very often kind of—oh, you’ve got the wrong idea about them. I like them, I like every man alike, I can’t see any difference in anybody. Foremen, you’ve one failing if you have it here on the P. R. R., you probably haven’t got it, I’ll give you that compliment because I want to get out of here tonight. Too many foremen can only say well done when they order a steak. I think the lack of appreciation by foremen for working men’s labor has caused more heart aches than any other cause in American industry. I’ve got the hardest-boiled father-in-law that ever lived. My father-in-law, if he had started prize fighting, would own castles in this country. He’s got a steel jaw and he knows how to snap it but I just took his girley out from under his nose and later on something happened, that proved that even the hardest boiled man in the world was a pretty good fellow. He was the hardest worker and the best mechanic in the country. I worked with him for awhile and I, of course, did the work while he told me how and finally one morning, when we were going down town in his machine another fellow came by in an automobile and Bill said, "That’s the Superintendent. I don’t like that fellow; I’m going to knock his head off and get another job; we can go anywhere and get a job just as good as we’ve got with him". We docked our Henry and were just going in when the Superintendent came around and said, "Bill, I want to see you up in the office". Bill said to me, "You go in and get the dope, cans and everything, we’re fired’. Somehow or other I had got a different idea from that voice but Bill went up in the office. In twenty minutes he came down and, my God, he wouldn’t let me touch the hammer. "I never saw such a slow man in my life" he said, and he was just making the whole place ring and I stood there looking at him. Usually I did the work but not this morning, and he liked me, this fellow did, and he showed it, and before, I was watching all the time for fear he’d drop a wrench on my head. When we stopped work and were on our way home, when we got about 20 feet from the house he hopped right out and then began to tell his wife what he had heard and showed her a copy of a letter, about a machine that had been made for some industrial concern out West who said it was a wonderful piece of work and they wanted the company to go down and thank Bill for that machine as it was the best workmanship they had had ever received on the Pacific Coast and the Superintendent had said, "Bill, I’ve been wanting to tell you for a long time that you’re the most perfect mechanic we’ve got here". I might tell you that old Bill has told that story a thousand times; Sue, my mother-in-law has told it everywhere she’s ever been from the day to this. I might also add that my father-in-law now is the kindest individual, he’s the loveliest looking human you ever saw. Now people don’t talk about him being hard-boiled, he has the face of a preacher and that was done in twenty minutes in that office that morning by the Superintendent. Not giving him any hot air but just giving him the credit due him.

          Now I’m going to finish about telling you why I’ve got a boy named Tony. He’s the finest boy in the world, oh but he’s a fine little chap. He’s going to be the man that I wanted to be and that fellow is going to play the game fifty-fifty. I know he is because he’s already doing it, because I’m teaching him to do it. He knows that just as soon as you start to lie, you are licked. There is only one fellow who ever beat the game of fifty-fifty and he died so he didn’t get away with it. He was a pie dealer, and he said, "I’m going to make the people in the United States eat rabbit pie and we’ll send all the beef to the other side." He looks around awhile and then comes back to Brooklyn and makes rabbit pies and three months later, all the P. R. R., N. Y. C., B. & 0. and P. & R. box cars were loaded down with rabbit pies and all of a sudden, people found out there were just about as many rabbits left as before they started to make rabbit pies and they asked this man "How do you do it, do you put anything else in this rabbit pie besides rabbits"? He said, "Why, yes, horse". They said, "What ratio?" He said, "Fifty-fifty basis, one horse to one rabbit". But the fact he’s dead proves that not even he beat the game and you can’t.

          Now, everybody who comes around to my house says, "Why did you name this beautiful boy Tony"? Why, I don’t let anybody come up to my house if they’ve got small children, I don’t want to take the great responsibility for I realize that after seeing my boy they’d want to go home and choke theirs. I wouldn’t blame them a bit. So when they come and ask me why I ever named that beautiful boy after a "Wop", I tell them a story and I want to tell you gentlemen, that you’ve got millions of people in this country today who are grouches, they hate everything they look at and yet, underneath every one of those men’s ribs, underneath all their vests is a battery; Great God it’s a battery that would drive them through anything and there’s only got to be somebody who will turn on the battery. They can’t, or won’t do it themselves. Just like these automobiles standing out here in the street, just as dead as they can be, newsboys come along and kick the fenders, yet when you step in and swing the key that inanimate piece of steel all of a sudden jumps into life and she’ll go 60 miles an hour for you, fast enough to get you locked up, even in Philadelphia and that’s going some and yet that machine can’t move until you insert that key. Every man has that battery under his vest, some ideal in life only many of them need to have someone else turn the key. I’ve seen men reach the hearts of crowds of men, the tears running down their cheeks, I’ve watched Bill Heywood stand up to his full height, with the tears running down his face and that wobble in his throat and I’ve seen 15,000 men strain to their feet just because, momentarily Bill Heywood had inserted the key in the battery that was underneath every vest in that assembly.

          Boys, a foreman is he one big man in the country that can put the key in the switch, in that switch that touches and let’s loose, that dynamic battery in the heart of every man living, and I don’t give a continental what country he came from, how old he is or who he was, because emotionally we are all the same.

          When I was 18 years old I was a road man in a lumber camp out in the western country. There was a logging road, an ice road in the center where we came down the hill with great loads of logs, three hills, came right straight down the hill with those logs. It was Tony the Wop’s job to sand those hills because while we were doing it we had the life of that teamster and that team in our hands. Tony had been there for eight years and in all those years, had never had a single bit of trouble on those hills. Tony had never had a shave in his life and oh, how I hated him. He thought a bath tub was a coal scuttle, had a great big hump in his back and his great big Italian eyes were just as expressionless as a chunk of soft coal. Tony had never had any clothes in his life but what they were all covered with great patches; oh, he was a funny fellow and nobody knew anything about him.

          One morning the Superintendent came to me and said, "Son, I’m going to go to town today and I’ll leave you’ in charge". I said, "Yes, sir, but how can I preserve discipline" and he said, "Discharge them". Later he said, "I suppose you’re thinking about going right down and firing Tony" and I said, "Yes, sir, I’m going to discharge that Wop right Off". So he said "Now let me tell you something, he’s slow and lifeless and expressionless but, fellow, do you know that he’s never had an accident? He don’t mingle with you fellows but listen, I would hate to have the wop leave the camp, even your own brother told me last night if the wop wasn’t here he’d leave camp in the morning because the wop’s hill is always right". I came to the top of the canyon that morning and what I saw ahead of me I’ll never forget; there was the wop, it was 20 below zero, he didn’t have any coat on though he had on a light hat, nothing on his ears, canvas mittens, the kind you can buy at any store for six for a quarter, little bit of a fire and there he was, drying sand, tears running down his face and there was my brother coming down the hill with a load of logs, and I realized he was hurrying down to get his fourth load for that day and I involuntarily said, ‘My brother’. Something hit me, I was young. I went up to Tony and said "How are you this morning," He looked at me there and said "Good morning", and said, "Tony, I’m boss today". He said he knew it and went on with his work. I said, "Tony, my God I’m sorry you’re cold". And I said, "I want to tell you something that will warm you up" and I told him what my brother had told the Superintendent and he said, "BOSS, did he say that"? I said; "Yes, sir, he said that, and then I told him what the Superintendent had said and Tony the Wop said, "BOSS, did he say that?" and the tears got bigger and he said, "My God, did, he say that? ". About 6 o’clock that night I got back to camp, minus my job, I was back in the ranks again. A fellow came running in and said, "My God, have you seen Tony the Wop lately?" That Wop has thrown enough sand to sand a hundred hills and the hump is all out of his back".

          I had a walk of 17 miles before me that night, going to see my girl; it was a Saturday night and when I got out of camp I saw something slouching ahead of me and I soon found it was Tony. He said, "Hellow Boss, fellow, you’re always going to be boss to me" and, he said, "Won’t you coma hava da sup with me?" I said, "My God, Tony, can you cook?" "No, no", he said, "Marie", and those eyes began to dance and I yelled, " Tony, are you married?" "I gotta finest Marie and four kids", he said and I thought, is it possible any woman ever got under one roof long enough to have four children with that. We walked along in silence for over two and a half miles and Tony began to get excited. All of a sudden I heard a whistle going out from his face and I looked ahead and right before us was a little clearing, half an acre, maybe three-quarters, a little house, with three real windowpanes but was one that was papered up and as I looked something flashed out of there and a woman jumped out and one, two, three, four, kids, they all followed out, just like a step ladder, the oldest about 8 and the last just toddling along and Tony never stopped to open the bars, he jumped right over them and I never knew Tony had life enough in him to do it. Well, he just made one wild rush to that Wop’s arms and they went down together and I thought, "Oh hell, here’s the closest thing to nothing that I’ve ever seen, I wouldn’t think there was anything at all under those old clothes, dirty face, uncut hair and unshaven face and here was the kindest father and most intelligent husband you could imagine. He kissed one after the other and they rushed over in the house and slammed the door. I was out there in the cold, 15 or 20 minutes went by, I didn’t want to go in there, when he came to the door and said, "BOSS, come in, we hava da sup". I went in and sat down and realized that I was about to partake of the great Italian dish and pretty soon we all sat down together. Tony and Marie began talking and all of a sudden she jumped up, ran to me, swung me around in my chair and kissed me flush on the lips, garlic, onions and all and I said "Tony what’s all this mean?" and Tony said, "Boss, I just told Marie that it was the first time since I came in this country 8 years ago that a foreman talked white to me and she’s showing you her appreciation in the only way she knows how" I might stop the story right there. I walked into the camp next morning and said, "Listen Bill, there’s a dynamo in every man if the man who leads him has only sense enough to hunt for the hole and put the key in and let it go. About six months later, Tony the Wop became foreman of all the road operations of that company. Now, 61 years of age, Tony the Wop can lick Firpo in one round in any ring they want to make, straight as a gun barrel, he’s got a pair of eyes just like diamonds; gentlemen, that fellow would have been a Bolsheviki just slouching along if I hadn’t dropped in there and unlocked the thing that made him grow and Tony today has one wonderful family; all have been through the University, two of them are married, they got two little kids, and today Tony is Superintendent of the biggest logging company in North Western Washington and I tell you, if Tony could have had a dynamo that, being unlocked, could make him grow, it can be done with anybody in the United States if you only turn the switch; and if you’re going to get what you ought to get from men, if we’re going to make this country what we ought to make it, if we are going to get the harmony we should get, then gentlemen, the day has arrived when the best there is in you must appeal to the best there is in men and when that time comes, then this is going to be a mighty fine city, a fine state, and a fine nation to work in. I thank you.