“The human element comes first. I want the employers to understand the hopes and yearnings of the workers, and I want the wage earners to understand the burdens and anxieties of the wage payers, and all of them must understand their obligations to the people and to the republic. Out of this understanding will come social justice which is so essential to the highest human happiness.”
The Labor Department has been able to settle, after candid argument, thousands of disputes saving millions of dollars for workers and employers and relieving the public from the great loss and inconvenience that comes with strikes and industrial war. I have but one aim, and that is justice. I know but one policy, and that is honesty. I am slow to reach decisions. I must hear both sides. I want the facts, and all the facts. When all the facts are in my mind the arguing ends; the judgment begins. I judge by conscience and am guided by the Golden Rule. Decision comes, and it is as nearly right as God has given me power to see the right.
Out of four thousand disputes handled by the Department, three thousand six hundred were settled. These directly involved approximately three and one-half million workers and indirectly many others. At first seventy per cent. of the cases were strikes before conciliation was requested. Now, in a majority of the cases presented, strikes and lockouts are prevented or speedily adjusted through our efforts.
This was due to perfect candor in talking. Honest opinions were honestly set forth. Both sides took confidence in each other, and both sides accepted my suggestions, believing them sincere and fair. And so I say to the young men that honesty is the best policy because it is the only policy that wins. The communists tell the young that honesty is not the best policy. They say that the rich man teaches the poor to be honest so that the rich can do all the stealing. They say that the moral code is “dope” given by the strong to paralyze the weak and keep them down. It is not so. Honesty is the power that lifts men and nations up to greatness. It is a law of nature just as surely as gravity is a natural law. But one is physical nature and the other moral nature. A fool can see that physical laws are eternal and unbreakable. The wise can see that the moral law is just as powerful and as everlasting.
Had I not won the people's confidence while I was city clerk of Elwood, Indiana, my public career would have ended there. But after four years in that office I aspired to be county recorder. The employers who once had feared that I would be unfair, now said, “Davis is the man for the job,” and so I got their vote as well as the vote of the workers, and I was elected to that higher office by a great majority.
CHAPTER XLIII. FROM TIN WORKER TO SMALL CAPITALIST
During my term as county recorder at Anderson, Indiana, I saved money. I was unmarried and had no dissipations but books, and books cost little. I had lent money to several fellows who wanted to get a business education. By the year 1906, or ten years after I quit the mill, the money I had lent to men for their education in business colleges had all come back to me with interest. All my brothers had grown up and left home, and mother wrote that I ought not to send so much money to her as she had no use for it. Although unmarried, I had bought a house, and still had several thousand dollars of capital. So from time to time when some friend saw an opportunity to start a business in a small way, I backed him with a thousand dollars. My security in these cases was my knowledge of the man's character. Some of these ventures were in oil leases in which my chance of profits was good and they ranged from novelty manufacture down to weekly newspapers in which no great profit was possible. So many of the ventures thrived, that by the time I was forty I was rated as a prosperous young man. This gave me a great confidence in myself and in the institutions of this country. A land where a boy can enter the mills at eleven, learn two trades, acquire a sound business education and make a competence in his thirties is not such a bad country as the hot-headed Reds would have us believe. I was now launched on a business career and my investments were paying me much larger revenues than I could earn at my trade. It was a rule of the union that when a man ceased to work in the iron, steel or tin trades he forfeited his membership. However, the boys thought that Mahlon M. Garland—a puddler who went to Congress—and myself had done noteworthy service to the labor cause, and they passed a resolution permitting us to remain in the organization. Mr. Garland served six years in Congress and died during his term of office. I still carry my membership and pay my dues.
I was in France when the great Hindenburg offensive in the spring of 1916 overwhelmed the Allies. The French soldiers I met were worried and asked what word I brought them from America. I said: “I am an iron worker and can speak for the workers. Their hearts are in this cause. They will work as one man until all the iron in the mountains of America is hurled into the belly of the Huns.”
The war was an iron war. The kaiser had the steel and the coal that move armies. France lacked these, and the Germans thought she was doomed. They cut the French railroads that would have brought the troops and munitions to defend Verdun. Then the Germans attacked this point in overwhelming numbers. But the French troops went to Verdun without the aid of railroads. The Germans did not dream that such a thing was possible. But America had given the world a new form of transportation, trains that run without rails and with-out coal. Motor-trucks, driven by gasoline, carried the troops and munitions to Verdun. And so, after all, the genius of America was there smiting the crown prince to his ruin long before the first American doughboy could set foot in France.