The Iron Puddler | Page 4

He didn't understand the phraseology.
"Where were you previous to the eighth and immediately subsequent
thereto?" the attorney asked him for the third time.
All the prisoner could do was look guilty and say nothing.
"Answer the question," ordered the judge, "or I'll send you up for
vagrancy."
Still the man kept silent. Then I spoke up:
"John, tell the court where you were before you came here and also
where you have been since you arrived in the city."
"I was in Pittsburgh," he said, and he proceeded to tell the whole story
of his life. He was still talking when they chased him out of court and
took up the next case. He was a free man, and yet he had come within
an inch of going to jail. All because he didn't know what "previous to
the eighth and immediately subsequent thereto" meant.
The man was an expert puddler. A puddler makes iron bars. They were
going to put him behind his own bars because he couldn't understand
the legal jargon. Thanks to the great educational system of America the
working man has improved his mental muscle as well as his physical.
This taught me a lesson. Jargon can put the worker in jail. Big words
and improper phraseology are prison bars that sometimes separate the
worker from the professional people. "Stone walls do not a prison
make," because the human mind can get beyond them. But
thick-shelled words do make a prison. They are something that the
human mind can not penetrate. A man whose skill is in his hands can
puddle a two hundred-pound ball of iron. A man whose skill is on his
tongue can juggle four-syllable words. But that iron puddler could not
savvy four-syllable words any more than the word juggler could puddle
a heat of iron. The brain worker who talks to the hand worker in a
special jargon the latter can not understand has built an iron wall
between the worker's mind and his mind. To tear down that wall and
make America one nation with one language is one of the tasks of the
new education.
If big words cause misunderstandings, why not let them go? When the
stork in the fable invited the fox to supper he served the bean soup in a
long-necked vase. The stork had a beak that reached down the neck of
the vase and drank the soup with ease. The fox had a short muzzle and

couldn't get it. The trick made him mad and he bit the stork's head off.
Why should the brain worker invite the manual worker to a confab and
then serve the feast in such long-necked language that the laborer can't
get it? "Let's spill the beans," the agitator tells him, "then we'll all get
some of the gravy."
This long-necked jargon must go. It is not the people's dish. With foggy
phrases that no one really understands they are trying to incite the hand
worker to bite off the head of the brain worker. When employer and
employee sit together at the council table, let the facts be served in such
simple words that we can all get our teeth into them.
When I became secretary of labor I said that the employer and
employee had a duty to perform one to the other, and both to the public.
Capital does not always mean employer. When I was a boy in Sharon,
Pennsylvania, I looked in a pool in the brook and discovered a lot of
fish. I broke some branches off a tree, and with this I brushed the fish
out of the pool. I sold them to a teamster for ten cents. With this I
bought shoe blacking and a shoe brush and spent my Saturdays
blacking boots for travelers at the depot and the hotel. I had established
a boot-blacking business which I pushed in my spare time for several
years. My brush and blacking represented my capital. The shining of
the travelers' shoes was labor. I was a capitalist but not an employer; I
was a laborer but not an employee.
"Labor is prior to and independent of capital," said Lincoln. This is true.
I labored to break the branches from the tree before I had any capital.
They brought me fish, which were capital because I traded them for
shoe blacking with which I earned enough money to buy ten times
more fish than I had caught.
So labor is prior to capital--when you use the words in their right
meaning. But call the employee "labor" and the employer "capital," and
you make old Honest Abe say that the employee is prior to and
independent of the employer, or that the wage earner is independent of
the wage payer or, in still shorter