Perhaps a technique may some day arise which will supply the executives of industry not only with the facts about employees in their varied racial and social groups but supply the facts with due emphasis and in three dimensions so that the controller of power may be able to see them as descriptive of men of like mind with himself. The conclusion most burned into my consciousness was the lack of such knowledge or understanding in the steel industry and the imperative need of securing it, in order to escape continual industrial war, and perhaps disaster.
There are certain inferences, I think, like the above, that can be made from this record. But no thesis has been introduced and no argument developed. I have recorded the impressions of a complex environment, putting into words sight, sound, feeling, and thought. The book may be read as a story of men and machines and a personal adventure among them no less than as a study of conditions and a system.
C. R. W.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] Public Opinion: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922.
Contents
| I | Camp Eustis Bouton, Pennsylvania | [1] |
| II | Molten Steel in the "Pit" An Initiation | [16] |
| III | The Open-Hearth Furnace Night-Shifts | [30] |
| IV | Everyday Life | [45] |
| V | Working the Twenty-Four-Hour Shift | [62] |
| VI | Blast-Furnace Apprenticeship | [81] |
| VII | Dust, Heat, and Comradeship | [96] |
| VIII | I Take a Day Off | [114] |
| IX | "No Can Live" | [127] |
| EPILOGUE | [141] |