In a town like this are lessons for those who like to try to translate the foreigner for the good of American industry. There are those who cherish a superstition that the foreign workman in the United States lives poorly. In Roebling it is remarked that it is the foreigner who is the best customer in groceries and butcher’s meat. He buys chickens instead of beef brisket, and not one chicken, but two and three. It is he also who buys the Hood River apples and the best grape fruit.
And as for bread—you should see the bakery. “Sunny Jim” would sing to see it—clean and shining, and turning out all kinds of bakestuffs besides the big round red-blond loaves of “European bread,” which they say “has the strength” in it. The baker’s wagon, loaded to the very top of the canvas cover, goes through the town and the workers’ little children run homeward from it with two, three, four loaves altogether as big as themselves. Crescent rolls, which cost a nickel at a French bakery in New York, are sold here for two cents apiece.
So it goes in Roebling. Over on the one side are the negro quarters. They have everything anybody else has including a recreation house—and when they recreate, they just recreate.
If Roebling was an experiment, it is not so any longer. It is full of comfortable people, and in seventy years the Roebling theory as to what a workman wants and how he should be treated has never proved itself more conclusively than here. It is a suggestive fact that in all that time, save for some insignificant incidents, the Roeblings have been free from the nightmare of “labor troubles.” It may be because its workmen have nothing worth while to complain of. Every effort is made to make them comfortable without making them feel like dependents.
It is the outworking of a great business theory. In these times it is of impressive significance.