EIGHTH SERIES.
LONG REACH FOR A GAVEL.
Speaker of the House of Representatives Served Lengthy Apprenticeship Before He Was Called to Preside.
Joseph G. Cannon, Speaker of the House of Representatives, recently concluded a few words of advice to a writer investigating the condition of affairs in the national government by saying: “I don’t know but that I’d have you study twenty years before beginning to write.”
The advice was not given sarcastically. Cannon himself has gone about his work thoroughly, systematically, and, to all appearances, slowly. There has been nothing spectacular or hysterical about his progress, but the amount of ground covered has been enormous. Every new work undertaken has been based upon arduous and exhaustive preparation in other work leading to it. As a result he has come from a clerkship in a country store to the Speakership of Congress, and he has filled the office ably in a stirring and momentous period.
Joseph G. Cannon is descended from Massachusetts Quakers who migrated from the colony to North Carolina to escape persecution. His father was left a penniless orphan in infancy, and two maiden Quaker women adopted him and supported him until he was able to study medicine. The future statesman was born in Guilford, North Carolina, in 1836, and as the Quakers had protested persistently against slavery, the South became unsafe for them, and many, Dr. Cannon’s family included, moved North. The Cannons settled near the Wabash River, at Annapolis, Indiana.
Dr. Cannon was drowned when Joseph was fifteen years old. The doctor’s eldest boy was in college, and the family decided to allow him to finish his studies. The youngest was near-sighted, and was unable at that time to find employment. Joseph, the second son, had shown self-reliance, and had worked between school hours, so he was sent to work in the local general store. The first year’s pay amounted to one hundred dollars.
At the age of twenty Joseph had earned a thousand dollars and saved five hundred, and though his employers tried to persuade him to stay, and even offered him a partnership, he left them to begin the study of law. The trial of a slander suit he attended aroused in him a resistless ambition to become a lawyer. The privations he must undergo to realize his ambition were patiently endured. He took his five hundred dollars and went to Terre Haute, where he entered the office of John P. Usher.
Office work for two years, supplemented by six months’ study in a Cincinnati law school, fitted him for practise. Before he went to Cincinnati he had never been in a large city, had never seen a theater, and had heard but little music. The city broadened him, for there he heard Moncure D. Conway and Horace Mann, and received a newer and truer idea of the world. Practise in a large city was alluring, and for a time he thought of settling in Cincinnati. Then he turned from it and located at Tuscola, Illinois.
The first year he did not earn enough to pay his board bill. He could not afford to keep a horse to ride the circuit as most of the other lawyers did, so he tramped it over the prairies, picking up a little business that gave him much work and scarcely any money. Farm truck, grocery orders, and on one occasion a couple of cured hams, on another a side of veal, on still another a pair of trousers much too large for him, constituted some of his fees. Shortly after he started practise he had an appointment with a prospective client. He waited until late in the evening and the man did not come. Then, in desperation, he started after him.
“Why didn’t you come to see me?” asked Cannon when he had found him.
“Oh,” said the man easily, “I forgot to tell you. I find I can pay more than I expected, so I have hired another lawyer.”
The struggle Cannon underwent was a grim, hard one that called into play all the sturdy qualities of his nature. Instead of souring him as it has many other men, it increased in him a desire to help others who have the same fight to make, and many a young man battling for a practise, or facing the work of Congress for the first time, has received the benefit of it.
“Uncle Joe really knows how to help a fellow,” said one of the young lawyers to whom he had given a helping hand. “He’s been up against it himself.”
The hardships of the first year of practise gave way in the second year to better things, and Cannon was able to make a scant living and pay off his debts. He went into politics, too, and stumped the county, getting directly at the people, winning fame among them as well as winning the regard of his party managers. He had a fairly good practise when he decided to marry, and he built a four-room cottage at Tuscola.
His wife was an Ohio woman, and before going to their new home the two went to Chicago to buy furniture for it. They selected Potter Palmer’s department store as the best place, and were highly pleased with the intelligence and skill of the young clerk who waited on them. His name was Marshall Field. After spending part of the three hundred dollars Cannon had with him, he proudly brought his wife home to the little cottage.
“There, Mary,” he said as he walked her from one room to another, “I don’t think a young couple could ask for a better start in life.”
His wife did all her own housework, and as he was State’s Attorney for the district until 1868, and earned about fifteen hundred dollars a year, they considered themselves prosperous. From 1868 to 1872 he built up a private practise, and that paid him better. Besides, the short-sighted brother had gone into banking, had taken Joseph’s money for investment, and succeeded mightily.
In 1872 “Old Joe” Gillespie pushed Cannon forward for the Congressional nomination, and Cannon not only won it, but was elected after a brisk campaign. He has been in Congress, with the exception of one term, ever since then.
Altogether, Mr. Cannon has served thirty-two years, and, according to his own statement, it has cost him three hundred thousand dollars to live during that time. The government has paid him one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The rest came out of his private income. Nearly twenty years of the time has been spent as a member of the Committee on Appropriations. When the expenditures steadily increased Cannon was taxed with extravagance.
“You think,” he said in reply, “that because I am chairman of the Committee on Appropriations that it is my duty to make appropriations. I tell you it is rather my duty to prevent them being made.”
During the period of his service Congress has spent nearly twelve billion dollars. Since he has been Speaker it has spent nearly two billion dollars, and he has fought down expenses constantly. It is a staggering total, but the country that demanded such expenditures has reached a wealth never attained by another nation, and the leading men who ran the government and made the appropriations have been of giant size. Cannon stands among the foremost.
Speaker Cannon is a poor man, as far as personal wealth is concerned, and yet he is as happy as when he built the little four-room cottage for his wife and with her began the upward fight that has landed him in a supreme position in the national government.
A DEVELOPER OF CITIES.
Canadian Boundary Line Fails to Bisect the Sphere of Usefulness of a Massachusetts Man.
Henry M. Whitney has crowded three or four great business careers into his life, and each of them has resulted in good to the community in which he operated. His father, General James S. Whitney, was fairly prosperous, though there were then no capitalists and no rich men, as rich men are reckoned to-day, in Conway, Massachusetts, where he lived.
Henry M. Whitney was born in Conway in 1839. He studied in the public schools and at Williston Seminary until he was sixteen years old; then he went to work in the Conway Savings Bank. When his father became collector of the port of Boston, he went with him as a clerk, and later, when the father entered the employ of the Metropolitan Steamship Company, the son again went with him, still as a clerk.
His rise was neither rapid nor spectacular, but it was steady, continuous, and solid. When General Whitney died in 1879 he was president of the Metropolitan, and his son succeeded him in the office.
At forty years of age Henry M. Whitney was a fairly rich man, but known to few people. The work that made his name known throughout the country came afterward. He had begun to deal in suburban real estate in the vicinity of Boston, and had picked Brookline as especially fitted for development. It was a section much favored as a place of residence by Boston business men, and as a first step in the development of his holdings Whitney built, chiefly at his own expense, a magnificent boulevard from the town to Boston. Over this the men who had offices in the city were accustomed to drive daily, just as to-day they go in their automobiles.
The development and extension of the trolley in the late eighties gave Whitney another opportunity, and he built a trolley line from Brookline to Boston. When he reached the city limits he found himself against a stone wall.
The Boston horse-car companies would not allow him to transfer his passengers without their paying another fare, and would make no provisions for connections between the cars. They would not permit him to get a franchise, and they ridiculed the idea that their own lines would ever be operated by electricity. The Brookline line was sandbagged and rendered worthless, for all it could offer passengers was a pleasant, and, at the time, a novel ride to the Boston city line.
Whitney made several attempts to persuade the Boston companies to allow him to use their tracks, and offered to stand part of the expense of installing electric equipment. The offer was turned down, and the little “West End” road still hung on the ragged edge.
Then Whitney went to work in another way. He quietly bought up the stock of the various companies, and when at last matters came to a test he and his friends were in control, and the “West End” entered Boston. Later it gave its name to practically the whole Boston street railroad service.
As a first result of Whitney’s control and amalgamation of the Boston streetcar lines, that city was among the earliest in the country to benefit from an adequate trolley service.
In 1893 Whitney got control of the Cape Breton coal mines. Before then the mines had dragged along, doing a fair business, but not advancing to any extent. The people in Cape Breton did not have the money to develop them, and the English capitalists in control were disinclined to advance any money for the purpose.
Whitney saw a chance to push Cape Breton coal into new markets, and soon the mines at Louisbourg and Glace Bay were doubling and trebling their output, and Sydney and North Sydney became thriving ports. He had also entered the gas business in Boston, and he began importing Cape Breton coal for the gas and coke works at Everett, near Boston. Such an increase in industry gave a tremendous impetus to Cape Breton, but it was not until Whitney added steel, coke, and gas plants that Cape Breton realized the full benefit of his work.
About the time Whitney entered the coal-mining industry, a fisherman had come in with a killock so peculiar that it drew attention. Examination showed that it was almost pure iron ore. He had found it near Belle Isle, between Newfoundland and Labrador. Further search showed that there were enormous deposits of excellent iron ore at Belle Isle.
The Sydneys had a good port and coal in abundance. Whitney made the combination that has resulted in the building of the great iron works at North Sydney. Fifteen years ago the two towns together did not have much more than four thousand inhabitants. At present they have nearly five times that number, and are thriving, growing cities, shipping enormous quantities of coal, and the Dominion Iron and Steel Company at North Sydney is regularly turning out twenty thousand tons of steel a month. About three-fourths of this is steel rails, and the enormous development of Canada’s railroad extension easily calls for much more than that.
Cape Breton is no longer a negligible section of the world, dependent on its fisheries, the scanty farm produce that its stony soil yields, and its mines slovenly managed and ill-developed. It is steadily growing rich, and the workers are prosperous. Both of these conditions are directly due to the foresight and management of Henry M. Whitney.
PEGGED ON TO FORTUNE.
The Career of a Future Governor Illustrates Soundness of the Adage: “Cobbler, Stick to Thy Last.”
William L. Douglas, who stands well in the forefront of the American shoe manufacturers, alone makes more shoes every year than were manufactured in the entire country when he started to learn the business.
Mr. Douglas was born in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1845, and when he was five years old his father died. At seven he was apprenticed to a shoemaker, and was put to pegging shoes. Practically every operation was done by hand, though Howe’s sewing-machine was used by the more progressive manufacturers for stitching the uppers. But the rest of the work, fastening the soles included, was done by hand, and the larger factories employed only a dozen or so men.
Douglas worked at the bench from six o’clock in the morning until evening made it too dark to see where to drive his awl. At fifteen he could make a shoe, from cutting the uppers and trimmings and preparing the bottom stocks and heels to sandpapering the soles and blackening and burnishing the edges and heels. Then he began to look around for easier and more remunerative work.
The cotton mills of the State seemed to offer it, and he started in, as bobbin-boy, to learn a new trade. He remained at it only a few years, for he heard the glowing stories of how much skilled shoemakers were needed in the West. When he was nineteen he went to Colorado, and after working through a number of mining-camps he located at Denver and opened a cobbling shop.
The prices he received for his work were big, but they were nearly offset by the prices he had to pay to live, and he was forced to work sometimes sixteen hours a day. He was of slight build, and the strain began to tell on him to such an extent that he was forced to abandon the business and return East.
By 1876 machinery had begun to revolutionize the shoe business, and Massachusetts was making shoes for the whole country. Douglas had a few hundred dollars, the savings of the long days in Colorado, and he began manufacturing. He could not afford to buy all the machines necessary.
He commenced with three men, working himself. The little shop prospered and grew. Before long it was sending out shoes all over the country. As machinery was improved and a greater output became possible, the shop increased its business and began to export shoes. From the original output of forty-eight pairs of shoes a week it has grown to fifteen thousand pairs a day, and the shoes are sent all over the world.
The making of shoes and the organization of a great Industry has not absorbed Mr. Douglas’s whole attention. As a Democrat he has been a member of the Massachusetts House and Senate, Mayor of Brockton, and in 1903 he was elected Governor of Massachusetts, though the State is usually Republican. He worked during his campaign the way he worked in business, putting in the number of hours a day necessary to complete the task set, and he kept his political lieutenants working the same way. By this means he became the first Democratic executive the State has had since 1893, and he gave the people a business administration they liked.
It was Governor Douglas who settled the disastrous Fall River strike, after a number of futile attempts had been made to bring about an understanding, and his findings appealed to both sides, for the workers knew he had once worked in the mill and the employers recognized his acute business sense.
Fortune.
Fortune does us neither good nor hurt; she only presents us the matter and the seed, which our soul, more powerful than she, turns and applies as she best pleases, being the sole cause and sovereign mistress of her own happy or unhappy condition. All external accessions receive taste and color from the internal constitution, as clothes warm us not with their heat, but our own, which they are adapted to cover and keep in.—Michel Eyquem de Montaigne.