All in the Day's Work: An Autobiography

by Ida M. Tarbell

There was the ghastly strike in certain fertilizer plants at Roosevelt on the Jersey coast. I followed it through to its unsatisfactory end. Rival labor and political bodies fought each other for days while the men with drawn and hopeless faces loafed in groups in saloons or on doorsteps.

“All going to the devil while their unions fight,” said the woman who gave me my meals in the only boarding house in the desolate place. “I am for the union, but the union does not know when they go into a strike which they can avoid what they are doing to men. It turns them into tramps. They leave their families and take to the road. It is better that they leave. I think the women often think that, so they won’t have any more babies. No, the union does not see what it does to men. But what are the men going to do when things were like they were in this place? You know what their wages were. You know what a hellish sort of place this is. What are they going to do?”

It was the men who saw industry as a cooperative undertaking who gave me heart. I do not mean political cooperation, but practical cooperation, worked out on the ground by the persons concerned. The problems and needs of no two industrial undertakings are ever alike. For results each must be treated according to the situation. The greatest contributions I found to industrial peace and stability came when a man recognized that a condition was wrong and set out to correct it.

There was Thomas Lynch, president of the Frick Coke Company of Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania. Tommy Lynch had swung a pick before John Lewis did and, like Lewis, had risen by virtue of hard work and real ability, from one position to another—one to become the head of a group of mines, the other to become the head of a group of miners. But no union could keep up with Tommy Lynch in the improvements he demanded for his mines and miners. It was he who originated the famous slogan “Safety First.” When I talked with him about rescue crews he swore heartily, “Damn rescue work—prevent accidents.”

Tommy Lynch’s work did not end in the mine. He had a theory that you could not be a good worker unless you had a good home. He literally lifted some seven thousand company houses, which he had inherited from an old management, out of their locations between high mountains of lifeless slag and put them onto tillable land, gave every woman water in her kitchen and a plot of land for a garden.

In 1914, when I was first there, out of 7,000 homes 6,923 had gardens. And such gardens! It took three days for Mr. Lynch and two or three other distinguished gentlemen to decide on the winners of the nine prizes given for the finest displays. They were estimating that the vegetable gardens yielded $143,000 worth of vegetables that year. I went back to see what they were doing with those gardens in the middle of the late depression. There were even more of them, and they were even more productive. Knowing what the garden meant, the miners had turned to the cultivation with immense energy. The company had plowed and fertilized tracts of untilled land near each settlement, and the men were raising extra food for the winter. Many of these miners were selling vegetables in the near-by town markets.

Believing as I do that the connection of men and women with the soil is not only most healthy for the body but essential for the mind and the soul, these gardens aroused almost as much thankfulness in my heart as the safety work.

But Tommy Lynch could not have worked out his notions of safety and gardening without the cooperation of the miners, even if it was sometimes begrudging.

Then there was Henry Ford attacking the problem which most concerned his plant, labor turnover—in his case something like 1200 per cent. He had come into the industrial picture with his minimum wage of five dollars a day just before I began my work. In May of 1915 I set up shop for ten days in a Detroit hotel in order to study what he was doing. The days I spent in and around the Ford factory; nights, tired out with observations and emotions, I came back to a hot bath and dinner in bed, talking my findings into a dictaphone until I fell off to sleep.

Connections had not been hard to make. There was then at the head of Ford publicity an experienced and able gentleman who realized that articles in The American Magazine on the Ford plant, whether favorable or not, were good for the concern, and who saw to it that I had every chance. Mr. Ford himself was my first important objective. He saw me in his big office looking down on the plant, a plant then employing eighteen thousand men. At the first glimpse of his smiling face I was startled by the resemblance to the picture of the young Lincoln which had played such a part in the launching of the Lincoln articles in McClure’s. It was the face of a poet and a philosopher, as in the young Lincoln there was a young Emerson.