“Yes, they rolled the first American rails here,—iron rails.”
“And having done that there was not enough enterprise left merely to change the process from iron to steel?”
“Well, there was some reason. I’ve heard it said a committee of New Damascus business men went out to investigate the steel process. They reported there was nothing in it. Then the steel rail knocked the iron rail out completely. There isn’t an iron rail made anywhere in the world now.”
“And nails. New Damascus was once the seat of the nail industry. What became of that?”
“Same thing. They made iron nails here,—what we call cut nails. The cheap steel wire nail knocked the iron nail out. Then, of course, you must remember that when the Mesaba ore fields were opened we had to close our mines. We couldn’t compete with that ore. It was too cheap.”
“That wasn’t inevitable, was it? Since New Damascus stopped, other towns have grown up from nothing in this valley,—towns with no better transportation to begin with, no record behind them, hauling their raw material even further.”
“Yes,” says the banker. “Well, I don’t know. There’s something wrong in the atmosphere here.”
The banker on the next corner has another explanation.
“It’s the labor,” he says. “People who’ve been around tell me, and I believe it’s true, that labor here is more independent, more exacting, harder to deal with, than labor anywhere else. In other mill towns you’ll find Italians, Hungarians, Polacks and that like. All our labor was born here. Jobs go from father to son. Foreigners can’t come in.”
“That’s strange. One never hears of any serious labor trouble at New Damascus—not the kind of trouble they have in other mill towns.”