Dr. Samuel W. Grafflin,

      Let me first of all say that the Chairman has confused me with Dr. Cadman.  I do broadcast and I do get letters of appreciation and thanks and all the other things, but don’t for a minute confuse me with Cadman, because I think that he is doing one of the greatest pieces of work that is being done in his Sunday Afternoon Talks.  I do tell stories for the home and I do make inspirational addresses to the young.

      Now, I am here “pinch hitting” for Sherman Rogers, who tired to do the impossible; namely make eighteen speeches in three days, and he simply killed himself trying, because he puts every ounce of him into the thing he is doing and uses himself up, burning his candle at both ends.

      If I know anything about the situation in this country to which every man of us is called, it is a very simple proposition, it is not as intricate as most of us think, you can boil it down to two or three very simple things.  For fourteen years I was a foreman, fourteen years I hired and fired and handled men.  When I came to that job there was just one great big idea in the minds of the group and that was to raise six cents and send the apprentice boy out with the can.  That was the one beautiful idea, the one thought, if they could raise the price of a pint, a pint cost six cents in those days, and if they could raise six cents among the group to send the apprentice boy through the loose board that we always kept in the fence so that he could just swing the board out and could get in without anybody’s knowing that he had made the trip, that was a great achievement.  I lived to see that “rough neck”, hard drinking bunch every man a total abstainer, every man but one a member of the church and every man owning his own home during the little over fourteen years in which I was foreman, and for the last three years the can was used as a nail can.  During that time I found two or three very simple things.  I found that we were building five-point men.

      I have a friend who has just perfected a great electric car, a ten-ton truck.  He has an arrangement with a big battery concern so that he can simply slide one battery into the car, go to the next station, slide that battery out and substitute another, and he has reached the point where he can send his ten-ton truck one-hundred and twenty miles without recharging, but he can only get a ninety-mile man.  At the end of ninety miles the man holding down the ten-ton truck has to be lifted out.  Now, we have an airplane that will hop from this country to any of the other countries in twenty-four hours.  We have a 2500 mile airplane now, but who is the man who is going to stand out on the wings and fry his bacon and eggs.  We have got to have men who are physically fit, the fellow who can put his hands on the ground without bending his knees.

      We have got to have men who are educationally trained, men who have a real something in their heads.  Years ago when I was a foreman I gave my men this motto, “To whatever success you travel, you are going to travel to that success along the high road of your head”.  That simple phrase meant more to that gang than any other single thing.  They stepped up on that thing.

      Then we have got to have men who are industrially efficient.  Very few men are industrially efficient; very few men are capable of doing a big piece of work.  We have so few men who are efficient when the boss is not there.  When the great Baltimore fire broke out and sifted down along that water front wiping out one-hundred and twenty-five acres, the old boss for whom I had worked had three ribs broken and was confined to his home.  At eleven o’clock on the first Sunday night I called him up.  I said, “Boss, the wind is turning, the water front is going tonight. What are the orders?”  I had not worked for him for two years and I knew he needed somebody.  He said, “If you will have a carriage here tomorrow morning at half past five, we will do something”.  The next morning I had a carriage at his suburban home at 5:30, loaded him up and proceeded to a part of the town where there was no danger of the fire spreading, rented a new warehouse and got building materials.  That was my boss’s business and, of course, they would have to rebuild the city.  He cleaned up $60,000.00 while they were rebuilding the city.  We rented a warehouse at 8:30 and by 9 o’clock we had made our first sale and the fire did not burn itself out for twenty-four hours.  After the first man left, having bought his first piece of material, I turned and the old boss was crying.  I said to him, “What is the matter?  You are going to make more money in the next couple of years than there was in the old place.”  He said, “I am not worrying about the buildings burning down, they were all insured, but there were just three things I would like to have had.  I would like to have saved the three desks in the office and especially my desk.  The old order book with which I started business thirty-four years ago was locked up in that desk.  The only good pictures of my four children that are out there in the graveyard are on the desk.  If we could have only saved those things I would not care about the fire.”  As he talked, around the corner came a half-dead horse dragging a big truck, and on it was a black man, a German apprentice boy and the three desks.  He just went out and hugged the black man and the apprentice boy and said to them, “How did you come to do it?”  When the wind turned last night I went and called Nelson and asked him, “What would Mr. Sammy do if he was here?”  “Well”, said Nelson, “he would take an axe, break in the office door and save the desks”.  Men, I would rather have raised two men who had the initiative to pull that off than to have done that myself.  It is a bigger piece of work of train men who in your absence would do the thing that should be done, better than to have done it yourself.  That is training them, isn’t it?  That is training them, so that in your absence they will do the big, fine piece of work.

      You have got to train them to be morally sound.  Several years ago I was called in consultation at a large steel plant.  At this plant they were losing about eight thousand dollars a month.  We went down and the way the discovery was made was this.  The Supervising Manager dropped in on one of the foremen one Sunday.  They were at dinner and on the table of that foreman, alongside of his little roast of lamb, there laid the most exquisite carving knife you ever saw, it was of the finest steel, rosewood handle and countersunk brass pins throughout.  Oh! She was a “beaut” and must have taken a man eight hours to make it and there was quite a little bit of material in it.  He didn’t say a word, but he toyed with the knife for a few minutes, and then when he got himself together he said, “Arthur, you are fired unless I know the story of this knife.”  “Well, I don’t care to lose my job, one of the men made that for me at the plant.  Honestly, I think he made it for me to keep my mouth shut.  He was making a lot more for the rest of them.”  It developed that the big drug stores in that town were losing one-hundred thousand dollars a year in patent medicines, and in return for this the boys and men of that big steel plant were making enough material to trade in carving knives, pocket knives and other things to trade out to these boys working in the big drug stores.  You know they were not doing anything else but making trinkets and robbing the drug stores.  I said, I would get some Bibles and start in, and what he said, Oh! gentlemen, I would not even think that kind of language.  The Manager happened to be a member of the Mormon Church.  Well, I would use some Bibles on that crowd.  And so we went ahead and for days and weeks and months we did nothing but drill into them the plain, simple things that the priests and the preachers and the rabbis have been trying to say for the last three-thousand years.  At the end of six months the Manager said, “We have broken ahead of the game.  We are making money again.”  From losing eight-thousand dollars a month they turned to drilling the men in that sound type of ethics that makes a man honest. 

      If you want to make a great big “killing” with the men, you have got to give the men the real spirit of service.  The word “Service” is being overlooked like the word “Efficiency”.  I was climbing a hill not long ago and I saw for the time in twenty years a dead horse lying in a field, surrounded by buzzards.  Well, I thought to myself,   Shades of my Boyhood, I think that must be old “Efficiency”.  He was pretty near dead the last time I saw him and he must have died climbing that hill.  We worked that old word “Efficiency” almost to death, and I don’t want to work the word “Service” to death. 

      We have gained in morals what we have lost in morale, we have gained in pitch what we have lost in tone.  Let me illustrate this.  Down on the Southern Railroad, when I was a boy, if a conductor did not own a farm at the end of twenty years, they fired him.  They knew he was stealing money and the way in which the railroad was run was that the conductor was supposed to provide for his old age in the first twenty years and then give the company a chance.  A train was pulling into a terminal one day when the conductor, looking back in the smoker saw it was empty, and he began to make up the day’s manifests.  He took out his roll and divided it, five for the company and five for me, ten for the company and ten for me, etc., until two great stacks of bills lay in front of him and there was a one dollar bill left over which he threw up into the air and it came down on his pile.  He then made up his manifests and placed them in the tin box, and when he was closing the box Mr. Spencer, First Vice-President of the Southern Railroad, laid his hand on his shoulder and said, “I would like to see you tomorrow morning, at ten o’clock, at the office”.  Broken-hearted the man went home, he did not own his farm yet, he had only been a conductor eight years.  That evening he held a Lodge of Sorrow with his wife, but ‘orders is orders’ in the railroad business and at ten o’clock he was in the outer office.  Just as soon as he opened the door to walk in, the inner door opened and Mr. Spencer walked out and said, “I am certainly glad to see you, come in and take this chair”.  Mr. Spencer went to the safe and from the bottom took out a bottle marked “Madeira 1837” and a couple of toasting glasses.  He handed one to the conductor and said, “I want to drink to your health, sir, if you please”.  “George, there are some cigars there, you will bring the cigars.”  Out came the fifty-centers, men fifty-centers were some cigars those days, and he proffered the conductor a cigar which he took and laid down on the table.  “George, right there on the shelf is a plush case”, and the black boy brought the case and the Vice-President presented to the astonished conductor a beautiful hunting case watch with the words, “From the Southern Railroad to one of its most trusted and respected employes”.  The conductor just looked at him for a minute and then said, “Look here, Mr. Spencer, what does this mean?  You saw me steal that money yesterday and I came down here to be fired this morning.  I am welcomed like a long lost brother from South America, I have been treated to the finest vintage, given a rare cigar, and am not fired.”  What?  Don’t you know, man, you are the only conductor in the employ of the Southern Railroad that would have given the company a chance for that odd dollar?”  The fact remains, gentlemen, that we don’t steal as much as we did, we have gained in morals, but lost in morale. 

      In those days, when “Bummy” Kelley came down the Main Line wearing a plug hat we knew that he was drinking.  We sent a man out at the first crossover and took him out because we could not have him drinking in the cab, but one night, when Crazy Six turned over this side of Frederick and killed the Firemen, broke Kelly’s shoulder and crushed his ankle, he crawled back half a mile with a red lantern to flag a passenger train behind him.  They do not drink as much as they did in the old days, but they are not as gallant, something has gone out of it, and you superintendents and foremen of men, the real leaders, you have got to see that this thing is put back into it.  We have been barking up the wrong tree long enough.  You hold America’s future in the hollow of your hands.  We have got to put some new wine in some new bottles.

      We have had three great big fool notions in our heads, one is that force would get a crowd somewhere.  That you could put over a big piece of work with a club instead of leadership.  The second was that money was the whole thing in the game, and the third thing was that man could not, would not lift themselves up on a great big proposition if we gave them the real leadership.  There was something futile about leadership, but that is not so, and I wish you would ask questions if you want to, while I am talking, or wait until I get through and I will answer any honest question.

      I want to name the seven things that we have got to do if we are to put this new wine into new bottles, if we are to get anywhere.  The first is, we have to have the courage to pioneer, but it takes more courage to do a new thing in a new way than any other type of courage in the world and very few of us have the courage to do the new thing in a new way.  They locked the “bird” up in jail who said, “I want a patent on a needle with the eye in the point of it”.  They said, “Lead this brother right out into the padded cell”. For ten thousand years tired women tugged with needles with the thread through the back end, and nobody but a fool would think of putting an eye in the point of the needle, but we could never have had a sewing machine on the face of the earth until somebody had the sense to put the eye in the point of a needle.  There are just as many big discoveries waiting for men.  We have all been so conservative, we have all been so afraid to do something big and fine and new; afraid we would be laughed at.  We have not had the courage to pioneer.  We talk about our ancestors that brought over the Mayflower.

          “Was the Mayflower launched by cowards,
          Steered by men behind their time?
          They were men of present valor,
          Stalward old iconoclasts;
          Unconvinced by axe or gibbet
          That all virtue was the Past’s.
          But we make their truth our jailer
          Thinking that hath made us free,
          Hoarding it in moldy parchments,
          While our tender sprits flee
          The rude grasp or that great impulse
          That send them across the sea.”

      I am tired of that 1620 bunch.  They are dead and gone and we need some men who are big enough to say something new and who would dare to have the courage to pioneer.  I stood in 1879 at the ford of the White River in Indiana.  I saw six-hundred prairie schooners ford that river going west, and on the side of the schooners was this legend “Black Hills or Bust”.  We have North and South Dakota because of those prairie schooners.  That is America’s laboratory; that is where they try anything once, and by that same token thoroughly working out all experiments of political and educational facts.  It took a man of real vision to open the doors of the State Penitentiary, free the prisoners, and make it a present to the United States.  They haven’t put anybody back in there.  Behind this idea was the fact that you have got to have the courage to pioneer; to do something new with men and in men.

      The next thing you have got to have is the will to investigate and not many men have the will to investigate.  I was lecturing out in Chicago sometime ago to a group of men, and when I finished there came out of the group a seventeen or eighteen year old, small, hungry looking Jewish boy, and he said, “Mister, you sound honest”.  I said, “I thank you son, I have never double-crossed anybody yet”. “Yes”, he said, “you sound honest.  I have made a great discovery.”  “That is fine”.  He began to be a little shaky right off.  “I have made a chemical discovery.  I can reduce fifty per cent. the use of one of the great chemicals in this country, but I can’t reach the big New York men that use it, and I want money enough to get an education.”  I said, “Don’t tell me what it is”.  He said, “Oh, for God’s sake don’t tell any of them, they will steal it”.  I want to tell you gentlemen that was sad, that was the worst thing that could be said about industrial men that a man would be afraid to trust one of them.  Never let it be said about you again, men, that any boy out in Chicago was afraid that a group of big New York men would steal a little thing from him.  Mr. Eastman, the Kodak man, proved it wasn’t so when he gave the young man two-hundred thousand dollars, who discovered that you could write your name on the end of a photograph.  But the boy was afraid to trust the big men, so I said, “I will see what I can do”.  As I came East I read in one of the magazines on the train of a New York firm, which was the largest firm of its kind in the world, and I knew that they used this chemical.  I called at that office and was held up by the office boy.  I said, “I want to see the General Manager”.  He said, “What is your name?  Write on this piece of paper in full what you want, sign your name to it and ask for an appointment.  You will have to do that or you cannot see the General Manager.”  I said, “All right, I am going to wait”.  I stuck around until lunch time warming a bench, and when he found out he could not get away without seeing me he came out and said, “What is it that you want”?  I said, “I met a little boy out in Chicago who has made a great chemical discovery”, but he said, “I have no time to hear your story.  We have a laboratory of our own.  We are not interested.”  I went right down to the next largest firm, saw the General Manager in three minutes.  He said, “If what that boy said is so, he has made a very important discovery”.  They gave him eighteen thousand dollars for his little idea.  Some day I am going to tell the President of that other concern what an ass of a General Manager they have, who would shut the door in the face of something that was going to reduce the cost of their product fifty per cent.

      You know that when God got ready to bring the children of Israel out of Egypt he gave the man who was to pull that stunt forty years of careful training, then forty years of mature reflection and then set him an examination.  I hate to think that the reagents of this state would have done with Moses at the end of eighty years of preparation.  Not so with God.  He just set a little bush on fire at the other side of the desert.  Moses said, “I will now turn aside and investigate and see why that bush burns and is not consumed”.

      I want to tell you of the greatest tragedy in the history of America, without any exception the greatest industrial and commercial tragedy.  George Washington recorded in his diary, “While I was scouting in the valley of the Ohio, I found a spring that apparently ran pure grease.  I think that stuff will burn.”  Not a canteen full did he bring along, not a pint did he retrieve.  He turned his back on running petroleum which was not drilled for until 1847.  At the very hour that George Washington turned his back on running petroleum, Benjamin Franklin, rubbing a pussy’s back and seeing the sparks jump off said, “if these sparks are the same as jump off that cloud, all I have got to do is to have a big enough pussy and a fast enough hand and I can make that stuff.”  If George Washington had brought one pint of that oil to Benjamin Franklin to see if that stuff would burn, we would have had the internal combustion engine, we would have had the automobile in 1800 instead of 1900.  The industrial revolution would have centered in coal oil and not in coal, and instead of asking the coal dealer when I lived down South, if it was Sunbury “nut”, I would never have heard of anthracite coal.  The whole industrial revolution and the fuel problem is going to center in oil again to a great extent, and we are coming to the internal combustion engine in the next half century, and all of these things would have happened a century ago if George Washington had just been an investigator instead of a soldier.  Look into the thing that any man tells you, any time, and give it a chance.  Some of the greatest things have come from men that looked “double dumb” out on the line.

      Then we have got to have the capacity for new truths.  We haven’t the capacity for new truths, we haven’t even capacity for old truths.  One sermon ought to be enough on one topic for a life time, but the poor preachers have got to get up every Sunday morning and tell the same things over, because he haven’t capacity for the old truths.  We have got to have capacity for the old truths and by that same token we have got to also be ready to have an open mind for the new things that come to us; capacity for new truths.

      Some time ago there was a big industrial trouble in New York City.  For six months they had no production in this big factory.  The Manager came to me and said, “You know so much, tell me what to say tomorrow morning”.  I said, “All right, let’s go, it isn’t until next Wednesday morning.  Give me until Wednesday morning and we will have an answer.”  Wednesday morning came along and I said to him, “Are you all set?  Where are you going to meet these men?”  He said, “I am going to meet them on the shipping floor, that is empty.  I have gotten orders for 1700 machines and not one single machine in the plant.”  I said, “Before you meet them go get a brush and with black asphalt paint on the side wall in four foot letters these words, ‘Good Will, Good Work, Good Wages’ and leave it there”.  “No siree, I will not put it there”.  “Well, then I will go in and suggest it to the Directors.  You gave me an order three days ago and I have been working on it.”  He said, “Well, all right, it can’t hurt anything”.  At the end of twenty minutes, (he could not wait any longer), he came out and the spokeman for the crowd said, “Mr. ‘M’, do you mean that?  Then the strike has been over for ten minutes.  Come on, boys.”  In just six months there were thirty-four machines on the floor and were pushing the salesmen.  They are now enjoying the largest production in the history of the industry, the largest payroll and the best good will.  They got out a little joy book congratulating themselves on having found the solution of the industrial problem, so I got out a little card which simply states ‘Good Will—Co-operation, Good Work—Production, Good Wages—Profits’, but I put them in the right order.  When the angels sang on that first Christmas night they did not sing, “Peace on Earth, Good Will to Men”.  You have gotten that on your Christmas Cards, haven’t you?  The angels did not sing anything of the kind.  What they did sing was, “Peace on Earth to Men of Good Will”.  It makes all the difference in the world.  Anyhow, I got the cards out and at my next speech, standing right in front were Mr. Gompers and Mr. O’Connor, head of the Longshoremen’s Union.  I took this card out of my pocket and said, “Mr. Gompers, before we go any further, will you either O. K. or answer that suggestion?”  He died hard but he swallowed it, but you should have seen the Bankers’ Association when I showed it to them.  Sam looked at the “Good Work”, the “Good Will”.  They could not see it with a spy glass that the first thing was good will.  You can’t have good wages, or good work or good profits until you have good will.  That is, God’s will, in the thing. 

      Then, let us be tolerant.  We must have a great tolerance for radical youth while we hold steady.  I have got one single daughter left and if my wife came upstairs and said, “There is a nice settled young man downstairs calling on Dorothy”, I would say, “You just hold him until I get an axe”.  I don’t want any nice settled young men.  I want them, so long as their hearts are pure and clean and honest, I want them hitting on all six and popping at 150.  I have one son, who won his first case yesterday, won his first case yesterday, and didn’t take anything for it, but offered his first fruits to the good Lord.  Good kid.  That boy brings at least ten crazy ideas into the office every day.  The stenographers and clerks begin to laugh when they hear him come down the hall, when they hear his step, but shrewd lawyers come and sit in there and wait for him.  Nobody will ever be able to work out those crazy notions, but some day one is going to bear fruit.  Be tolerant with radical youth, but at the same time you hold steady.  Do not be radical yourself.  The young man who is down on the ground at twenty will never go up, and the old man who is up in the air at fifty will never come down.  Mr. Dooley covered it when he said, “Old men for the crossing and young men for the cab”.

      After that we have got to have a sense of responsibility to Almighty God for this thing.  You have not been trusted only with pieces of work to do, you have been trusted with he characters and lives of people, and I was prouder during the years I worked in the position as foreman, fourteen odd years, that those boys were sober and all bought houses and became church members, than when the boss wrote a big O. K. at the end of the week and began to slip me chunks of money ranging from one-hundred and fifty to four-hundred dollars out of his own pocket at the end of the year because the production was coming up.  I was prouder of that than I was of the production. 

      When Daniel Webster finished his great speech on the Constitution, that for all time crystallized the minds of the American people and made this a government of laws and not of men.  (This is not a government of men.  This is a government of laws, so that Mr. Harding could die and Mr. Coolidge could take his place with but a few simple services.)   When a reporter asked Mr. Webster, “What is the greatest thought that ever came through your mind”, he said, “Young man, the greatest thought that ever came into my mind was that of my personal responsibility to Almighty God”. You have lives to handle.  Men are going to be bigger or smaller because they passed through your hands.  American industry is going to be more stable or more shaky.  The future of this country is in the hands of the foremen, managers and superintendents.

      The next thing that you have got to have is a set of great convictions.  You have got to do these things because you believe in them, not because you have read them out of a book or because Sherman Rogers came and told you about them.  I don’t want any “shruggers” about me.  That reminds me too much of the story about the boy who came to his father and said, “Father, the Captain says the ship is going down”.  His father said, “Well, what is that to us, the ship don’t belong to us”.  If the ship goes down we go down with it.  You have got to have a set of great convictions.

      And in the last place you have got to have Sacrificial Persistence.  You can’t get out of this, there is no end to it.   I have a brother who went into the Spanish-American War as a common soldier and came out of the World War as a Major of Engineers.  He is a real construction man, he had built some of the greatest single enterprises that have been built in this country.  He saved Uncle Sam millions of dollars during this last war.  Although he has a wife and three beautiful children, do you know that he takes one night every week with his non-English speaking employes at his house, just as many as can get in there, to teach them English, and anybody can see Mr. Jack any time, anywhere, on anything, when he is not crushed with business.

      When the armistice was signed over on the other side, in one of the camps there was a peculiar situation.  There was a young lad who had been a Y. M. C. A. Secretary and when the war came on he dropped his job and voluntarily went to the front.  After he had been over about a year and a half, or something like that, just as soon as the American boys got to going over the top, he was a lieutenant by this time, he led his crowd over and came back with his left arm shattered.  They took him to a hospital, amputated his arm and then said, “Boy, go on home”.  “Not on your life”, he said, “give me one of those detention camps”.  So they gave him one of the camps in Poland, in which there were nothing but big, light-haired, blue-eyed, six-foot Russians that had been captured in one of the drives.

      This boy only had three ideas in his head.  One was that the only language for anybody on earth was the English language, the second was that the only game was base ball, and the third was that the only city that was fit for a dog to live in was Cleveland, Ohio.  So he got up and taught them English until noon, he played base ball with then until supper time and then by the lamp of the camp he told them what a wonderful city Cleveland was.  I needn’t tell you that as soon as the war was over and they were released that whole bunch of Russians hopped to Cleveland.  They arrived in a body and went to work in some of the big industries in the city.

      Twelve of them found jobs in one of the automobile shops.  They spoke excellent English but they went down to a night school to perfect their education.  They had not been there two weeks when the young teacher asked them “Would you like to meet a great America business man who can help you get somewhere”?  They said, “Yes, Uhuh”.  He said, “All right”, and the next Tuesday night one of the finest and most magnificent men met that class, and for ten minutes he held them on the edge of their seats, and when he concluded he said, “Would you like to have an hour with me?”  “Yes.”  “When?”  They said, “Next Tuesday night.”  “Where?”  “Your office.”  “What hour?”  “Six to seven.”  He waited from six to seven and not a Russian came.  He went back and said, “Boys, I missed you but I will be back next Tuesday night”.  He waited from six to seven but not a Slav showed up that next Tuesday night.  Ten more nights he waited there sending back word each time and not one of them came.  I hate to tell you what I would have done by this time. 

      On the thirteenth night he saw one of them peeping around the door.  He ran out and got him, set him down on a chair and gave him a most wonderful hour.  The next Tuesday night another one of them came, not the same one, and then for ten Tuesday nights they came, one at a time, until each one had spent an hour.

      I can hardly tell it but on the twenty-fifth night those twelve young Russians dressed in their best clothes, shoes shined and shaved walked into his office.  “Here we are Mr. “C”, we have been here everyone of these twenty-four nights.  We came from a land whose rulers were tyrants, whose priests here hypocrites.  We came from a land in which we did not believe in God or the flag, and we did not believe in your God or your flag, and we did not believe in the stuff you told us that night; we did not believe in you; we did not believe in your American God or your flag, but now we believe.  We have had a demonstration.  Put us in the church you please, put us in the schools you please, put us in the social group you please.  We believe in your god, we believe in your flag, we believe in your country, we believe in your American ideals, you have given a demonstration.”  And on the next Sunday he placed these twelve men in three of the different churches, in the churches of their desire.  Every man applied for his first citizen papers; every man on his way to an education.  All because one business man had laid twenty-five previous evenings on the altar for twelve Russians whose names he could not even pronounce.

      If you have courage to pioneer, the will to investigate, capacity for new truths, tolerance with radical youth while you hold steady, if you have a real sense of responsibility to Almighty God, a set of great convictions and a sacrificial persistence, there isn’t any question about how things are going under your care.