Septeinboi- 111. 1H19 



HARDWOOD RECORD 



22a 



of wisdom iu them. 1 holievf they are in some sense misled, as most 

 men are misled, by power. They are not the only ones that err, and 

 through theiie very leaders I believe we shall flud a .solution for the or- 

 ganized labor of the United States, But I take issue with any man, presi- 

 dent or anybody else, who says that the issue for the United States today 

 is an issue of three million men, and not of one huudred and ten million 

 men, women and children. 



These last few months I have been in contact with the men from the 

 farms down through the Mississippi Valley, the South and the Southwest, 

 up north to the Cauadian border, and 1 believe today that our safety in 

 these problems lies in those men who never have been organized, and who 

 never have, tor any long period of time, followed after false gods. They 

 realize today that they are business men. Talk of the fixing of prices by 

 the government ! We bad a price tixed on wheat, fixed as wisely as could 

 be done in war times, and it holds over, and today that price, on the 

 pre-sent price of labor, is inadequate, and many a farmer will not earn six 

 per cent on his invested capital this year. Yet the price stands fixed to- 

 day. The idea that down there at Washington a little political group, 

 made up of cliques can manage and dictate the greatest business that 

 the world has ever seen — I say it is wrong ; it is false. 

 Lack op Sense 



If we were all assembled here as stockholders, how much money would 

 we advance for a corporation w'hose operations from day to day, and 

 hour to hour, and month to month, were at the beck and call of a bod.v 

 such as the Federal Trade Commission? Yet that is the licensing bill of 

 Kenyon of Iowa, and Kellogg of Minnesota comes along with another dream 

 that is almost worse, and then to have that midsummer madness, almost 

 of the mad dog, you have Plumb come along to take the greate.st business 

 of all the world and throw it intti a witches' caldron, with a few poli- 

 ticians to stir the broth. That is what we are getting, because we busi- 

 ness men are idle, because we are concerned with our own affairs. And 

 then a man named Siegel comes along and he says that everything that I 

 wear and everything that I eat, down to the smallest unit, shall be 

 branded with the cost of manufacture, excluding freight. How in the 

 name of God you can get at that as practical business men, I do not 

 know ! Nevertheless, it is in the law ; it is presented ; it is backed ; it is 

 heralded throughout the United States as one of the administration meas- 

 ures to cure the high cost of living. The collar that I have got on must 

 have the price marked, or printed on it so it cannot be taken off ; my 

 shirt, every article I have on, my shoe-s, must be branded witli the hot 

 iron so the market cannot be eradicated. 



Politics Adjourned 



Today there is not an.v real issue as between Democrats and Kei:iul)licans. 

 It is an issue of men, of common horse sense, and I wondi'r, if Lincoln 

 were here, what he would think of the way we are evolving. liack in Chief 

 Justice Marshall's time, in a decision published at that time, Marshall 

 well defined the Federal power, and we have stood to it ever since — 

 regulation of interstate commerce. Today men at Washington are not 

 dealing with regulation but they are dealing with operation. 



Railroad operation you have seen. I came in a week or so ago, as you 

 men have just come in, from various parts of the United States. Do you 

 like it? (Cries of no, no.) Is it good? (Cries of no, no.) Is it efiicient? 

 (Cries of no, no, and "rotten.") Is there any single thing in the railroad 

 operation by the government of the United States that you as business 

 men can justify? Answer if you can! (Cries of no, no.) 



Then with that demonstration let us give them the packers ; let us give 

 them leather, because that goes into shoes : let us give them all the food. 

 And then when we are not content with that, let us turn to the American 

 Federation of Labor, with three million men, and say "Y'ou gentlemen, be- 

 cau.se you are organized, and because you have the vote, and because we 

 wish to be re-elected, and certain of us wish high oliice to be maintained 

 throughout the years until we die, we will surrender everything else to 

 you and you tell us hmv to operate this business that we have taken over." 

 Value of CouR.\r,E 



Y'ou know we did have a president who had some courage. Most of 

 the time I disagreed with him. It did not make any difference to him. 

 But I reserved the right to disagree with him. There was not a time 

 when I could not have gone to him and told him that I disagreed with 

 him, and he wouhl have tried to argue it out with me — and his name was 

 Theodore Roosevelt, and he is dead. 



Sometimes right ; sometimes wrong — very frequently wrong. I never 

 knew a man w^ho was worth one cent that was not wrong a lot of the time, 

 and I never knew a man who was worth anything to the people at large, 

 unless he had the courage to admit that he was frequently wrong, but I 

 know some men that have not got that courage. 



The last time Roosevelt spoke in public I introduced him. The last 

 time I saw him, five weeks before he died, up here at the Blackstone 

 Hotel, he had an engagement with me to come to Chicago. I talked with 

 him until midnight, alone in his room. Whether it was a presage of death, 

 a premonition, no man can know- now ; none of us ever know until it is 

 too late, but that night his secretary found me in the lobby of the Black- 

 stone and said that Mr. Roosevelt had intended to go on to Omaha that 

 night, but was ill and stopped off, and wired Omaha to postpone his 

 speech, and that he was lonesome and rather blue. I happened to he the 

 only man in sight that he knew, so I went up and talked with him. 

 Roosevelt told me, in discursive, happ,v fashion, the way human beings 



talk, yciu know, not this ultimate superman who see things far beyond 

 the common race, and who is out of touch with all men, and like Wilhelm 

 of (Jermany, in touch only with the Deity ; Roosevelt sat there in this 

 old easy chair, and told me of the mistakes he had made ; no confidence 

 with me ; he told it to a thousand men as he met them. He was human, 

 and the thing as he saw it was right because he was human, and the re- 

 action was to the country at large, and to mankind in general, and not 

 simply to the last ultimate sense of the personal ego in the development 

 of an idealistic theory. 



Do you realize that under the OeHnition of profiteer, as applied by our 

 administration and by the bureaucrats, and by the American Federation 

 of Labor, that there are ninety-four million profiteers, and only six mil- 

 lion of the elect? Ninety-four million profiteers, of whom forty million 

 are farmers, and the farmers have finally been invested with this business 

 men's title, and have been told that they are manufacturers. When he 

 rises to that height, then be is knocked down again, and he is told that 

 he is a profiteer. And he has to be told. He is going to be told how he 

 can operate his farm ; how many acres in wheat, and how much he will 

 get for hi.s wheat, and then he finds he has to pay six, or eight, or ten 

 dollars a day for a man on the farm, everything found, and furnished. 



A Summary 



A word and then I am through. An ill digested thought, just happens 

 to be warm off the griddle. It is not nearly as hot as I would like to 

 make it, but some of you have not had my training in the yards, and you 

 would not understand my language. Y'ou would probably take exception 

 to it. A spade is a spade, and after all an agreement is an agreement, 

 and labor, when it gets through, has got to come down to the point where 

 it is organized as a corporation, recognized by the law. and made to stand 

 to its agreements the same as we do, a new thought to them ; not to us. 

 We must obey our contracts, but they must not. What is the use in con- 

 tracting nowadays? Strike? I say this talk of strike has got to stop, 

 and if Roosevelt were in the presidential chair at Washington, it would 

 stop I When we impounded men down at Ft. Oglethorpe, because the.y 

 looked cross-eyed, and because they spit at the flag, or because they made 

 some seditious statement, we did it wisely. The man who says that the 

 industries of the United States, upon which one hundred and ten million 

 people of our countr.v are dependent, and upon which all the world sec- 

 ondarily is dependent, shall stop, in order that he may have the thing 

 that he demands, regardless of its justice, should find his place behind the 

 barbed wire fence of Ft. Oglethorpi'. The sooner we meet that issue, and 

 stop talking mush, and stop talking politics, the better off we will be ; 

 and I have got faith that Sam Oompers is big enough to do that, and see 

 that that sort of rot, that sort of sedition sliall stop. We have a method 

 n<iwadays. by which men can be brought into agreement and accord. We 

 have conciliation boards galore. We have departments galore. In every 

 single strike that 'has come up there has been one issue, and that is a 

 referendum to the men : and in each case, especially here in Chicago, and 

 now in New York, the delay in the settlement of the strike has been be- 

 cause some chap who ought to be in jail, who belongs in jail, and fre- 

 quently came from jail, tells them that they shall not 'have a referendum. 

 That is the trouble with the carpenter's strike today. Ninety per cent 

 of the men want a referendum. 



Y'ou know, for a long time the soft pedal came from Washington, and 

 we were told not to be rough with the men who talked sedition, with the 

 men who carried bombs, the men who carried a knife in the girdle and a 

 six shooter in the hip pocket. Do .vou know, when the change came, it 

 was the country that did it, and not Washington. The slogan of the tank 

 corps was : "Treat 'em rough." We treated them rough, -ifter that we 

 did not hear much of interference with the government, and aspersions 

 on the flag. The chap who played the damned fool on the street got the 

 boots. That reniind.s me of the old story about the man in Dublin who 

 wanted to find out where the hospital was. The man whom he asked said 

 "Just say. 'To hell with the Pope.' and you will find the hospital right 

 away." 



I am not arguing violence, but the (b)wnright resolution of each one of 

 us that he will not be dictated to either by the politician, the man who 

 calls himself a laboring man. without justice or right, the agitator on the 

 streets, or the pamphleteer who is on his way to ultimate socialism, such 

 as Kerensky hoped for. 



What do you think of it. in an arsenal of the United States, at a time 

 when we are at war. No peace treaty has been signed. What do you 

 think of it, when the administration takes to itself all of the war powers 

 given to it by congress, by the people, and then turns over that great 

 arsenal into a soviet, where the men must be called together before Tom 

 Brown or Dick Smith can be reformefl. disciplined or discharged ! A 

 soldiers' and sailors' council ! Trotzky's dream of that is rather mild as 

 compared with this demonstration out here in our arsenal in war time. 



The meeting was one in which addresses by leading men were the 

 principal feature. A number of the talks were formal and carefully 

 prepared arguments ; others were short and extempore. Men in differ- 

 ent lines of business presented their views, and those views were vari- 

 ous and of wide range, but all focused to the main purpose held steadily 

 in view. The program had been arranged in such a way that the lead- 

 ing topics before the country were discussed by specialists in those 

 lines; yet all held the principal facts in view. The day we declared 



