The Iron Puddler: My Life in the Rolling Mills and What Came of It

It was while I was in Birmingham that the industrial depression reached rock bottom. In the depth of this industrial paralysis the iron workers of Birmingham struck for better p...

With father's warning on my mind I went to the meeting where the strike was to be voted. Nobody had opposed the strike, for the cause was plainly a just one. The men wanted thei...

A fight in the first chapter made a book interesting to me when I was a boy. I said to myself, “The man who writes several chapters before the fighting begins is like the man wh...

H. G. Wells has asked all scholars to unite in writing a “Bible of the New Education.” I am no scholar, but if Wells will take suggestions from an iron puddler, I offer him thes...

I was the only Republican elected that year. But for this exception the Democrats would have made a clean sweep of the city. If the editor had not charged me with being illitera...

The loss of our baggage was only the beginning of our troubles in New York. With the feather ticks went also the money mother had got from selling the bedsteads and other furnit...

When I was eleven I got a regular job that paid me fifty cents a day. So I quit school just where the Monitor had sunk the Merrimac in the “first fight of the ironclads.” Therea...

It was during the panic in 1894 that the strike vote was defeated. We worked on until the first of July, 1896, when our agreement expired. By that time the tin mill was on its f...

The dry years had ended and once more the northern farms were yielding mammoth crops. But the country was so sick that it couldn't sit up and eat as it ought to. So the farmers...

Our little four-room company-house in Sharon had its doors open to the wayfarer. There was always some newcomer from Wales, looking for a stake in America, who had left his fami...

We stayed a week with father's brother in Hubbard. Then we went to Sharon, Pennsylvania, where father had a temporary job. A Welshman, knowing his desperate need of money, let h...

An iron puddler is a “pig boiler.” The pig boiling must be done at a certain temperature (the pig is iron) just as a farmer butchering hogs must scald the carcasses at a certain...

That caravan of railroad cars bearing the happy lodge members to their meeting in the Rockies, had started a train of thought that went winding through my mind ever after. In fa...

I have said that the labor problem has three parts. I call them (1) Wages, (2) Working Conditions and (3) Living Conditions. By living conditions I mean the home and its securit...

Mooseheart is at once a farm, a school and a town. The boys help handle the crops and herds under the guidance of the experts who teach the classes in agriculture. For extra wor...

For three years after we came to Sharon I went to school, and in my spare time worked at my shoe shining and other odd jobs. We had bought feather beds again and our little home...

After I had read the various pamphlets that Bannerman gave me I was like the old negro who went to sleep with his mouth open. A white man came along and put a spoonful of quinin...

In the Sharon town band I played the clarinet from the time I was thirteen until I left that town several years later to chase the fireflies of vanishing jobs that marked the la...

I will go back and relate more details of my race for office. Having won the nomination, I thrilled with pleasure and excitement, but I was at a loss as to how to begin my campa...

The rolling mill where father worked was Life's Big Circus tent to me, and like a kid escaped from school, eager to get past the tent flap and mingle with the clowns and elephan...

The Greasy Spoon was all right. It was a peaceful place. The landlady was Irish, and her motto was: “If there's any fighting to be done here I'll do it myself.” On the sideboard...

I had some money in my belt, but I would need that for the boarding-house keeper in the Alabama iron town. So I drew something from my vest pocket and said:

After melting down the pig-iron as quickly as possible, which took me thirty minutes, there was a pause in which I had time to wipe the back of my hand on the dryest part of my...

I thought I made a number of enemies among the men while I was head of the mill committee. When a man dissipated and afterward came back to work, trembling and weak, the boss wo...

And so the great dream of my life has been realized. In youth I saw the orphans of the worker scattered at a blow, little brothers and sisters doomed to a life of drudgery, and...

What kind of school is Mooseheart? That can not be answered by making comparisons, for it is the only school of its kind. When the Moose committee met to decide what sort of sch...

Every race gets a nickname in America. A Frenchman is a “frog,” a negro a “coon” and a Welshman a “goat.” All the schoolboys who were not Welsh delighted in teasing us by applyi...

Now that I was a master puddler, I faced the problem of finding a furnace of my own. I saw no chance in Sharon. Furnaces passed from father to son, so I could not hope to get on...

From my mother I learned to sing. She was always working and always singing. There were six children in the house, and she knitted and sewed and baked and brewed for us all. I u...

In Birmingham I found a job in a rolling mill and established myself in a good boarding-house. In those days a “good boarding-house” in iron workers' language meant one where yo...

From my father I learned many things. He taught me to be skilful and proud of it. He taught me to expect no gift from life, but that what I got I must win with my hands. He taug...

“Then when you oppose beer you are doing it to keep yourself from getting sick, aren't you? Do you really care a darn whether those fellows get sick at the stomach or not?”

It had been our plan to go from New York to Pittsburgh, but the mill that father was working in had shut down. And so he had sent us tickets to Hubbard, Ohio, where his brother...

Elwood, Indiana, was a small village that had been called Duck Creek Post-Office until the tin mill and other industries began making it into a city. In my capacity as president...

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 fell...

I played the game fair throughout my term of office. I hate dishonesty instinctively. I like the approval of my own conscience and the approval of men. This is egotism, of cours...

Madison county, Indiana, was a Democratic stronghold outside the mill towns, and a few farming townships. Free silver orators were telling the farmers that under a gold standard...

At seven o'clock we met again and several men made short talks opposing the strike. Each fellow, when he got up, seemed to have a lot of ideas, but when he tried to express them...

I didn't care very much for day school. The whipping that I got there rather dulled the flavor of it for me. But I was a prize pupil at Sunday-school. Father had gone to America...

While I was feasting on the watermelons and feeling at peace with all the world, a long passenger train pulled into the junction. The train was made up of Pullmans and each car...

In summer the temperature in the tin mills is very high. It is as hot as the Fourth of July in Abyssinia. One day a philosophical fellow was talking religion to me. He said, “I...

There was an interval of nearly five months between the time of my election, which was in May, and the date of taking office in September. I decided to use this time to improve...

The charge which I have been kneading in my furnace has now “come to nature,” the stringy sponge of pure iron is separating from the slag. The “balling” of this sponge into thre...

On October 27, 1906, I joined the Loyal Order of Moose at Crawfordsville, Indiana, and a new chapter in my life began. The purpose of the Order was merely social, but its vast p...

For twenty-five minutes while the boil goes on I stir it constantly with my long iron rabble. A cook stirring gravy to keep it from scorching in the skillet is done in two minut...

My family is Welsh, and I was born in Tredegar, Wales. David and Davies are favorite names among the Welsh, probably because David whipped Goliath, and mothers named their babie...

The Greasy Spoon isn't an appetizing name; not appetizing to men who live a sedentary life. But it was meant as a lure to men who live by muscular toil. It sounded good to us mi...

The majority of the Moose are men in the mechanical trades. But the primary trade, the one on which all others rest, is agriculture. The men knew this, and so they founded Moose...

The hard times I have been describing were in the early nineties. The year before there had been a financial crash. Nobody seemed to know what was the matter at the time, but it...