Iron Puddler, Moose

THE CABINET

A diplomat and his wife (be they from Siam or Switzerland) found Washington a handshaking city on New Year's Day. Having celebrated the end of 1926 according to their tastes, they arose at 9:45 a.m., snatched a cup of coffee and hurried to the White House to be in line for the President and Mrs. Coolidge at 11. Then they went to the lavish Pan-American Building to have a diplomatic buffet breakfast with the Secretary of State and Mrs. Kellogg. As they smoked Mr. Kellogg's cigarets and watched the Aztec fountain play, they exchanged many a felicitation. Most of Washington's bigwigs and their ladies were there--Cabinet members, ambassadors, ministers, Supreme Court justices, Congressmen, Army and Navy officers.

That afternoon, had the diplomat and his wife been extremely agile, they could have called on seven other Cabinet members who were holding receptions in keeping with the annual custom. Only Attorney General Sargent, whose wife had gone home to frosty Vermont, and Secretary of the Interior Work, who is a widower, did not serve tea. Secretary of the Treasury Mellon, with his son Paul, received at his apartment on Massachusetts Avenue.

If the diplomat had drawn any conclusion from his social tour, it would be that the present Cabinet is a steady one. None of its members seem likely to resign at present.*

Secretaries Mellon, Hoover and James J. Davis (Labor) have served since the beginning of President Harding's administration (almost six years). No Cabinet trio has continued in office together for so long since the Civil War. Of the mighty works of Messrs. Mellon and Hoover, much has been said; but what of Mr. Davis, that handsome Moose, who likes so well to write of his iron-puddling days, who runs the youngest department of the Cabinet?

James J. Davis will never be President of the U. S.--nor even Vice President. In 1924 some of his friends at the Republican National Convention were preparing a good-sized boom for him for Vice President. "Boys, that's fine," said Mr. Davis in his jolly fraternal manner, "only don't forget that I was born in Wales."

Leaving the convention, Mr. Davis stopped at Pittsburgh to visit his parents, to tell them how he almost became a candidate for Vice President. With a lump in her throat, Mother Davis said to Father Davis: "David, if you had only been willing to come to America when I wanted you to, we would have had a Vice President in the family."

Mr. Davis* was born in a mill-town called Tredegar, 53 years ago--the son and grandson of stout iron workers. One day, when he was eight, his mother dragged him out from under his bed by the heels. He tried to grip the floor and got splinters in his hands, but he was taken off to the land of liberty by his family, who believed: "The American mind is right. Go to America."

And so, in western Pennsylvania son James J., aged eleven, took up the family art of iron-puddling. At 16, he was admitted to the union and soon was a master puddler. Many years later, when he had become Secretary of Labor, when he was reputedly worth a million dollars, Mr. Davis published an autobiography, The Iron Puddler, in which he told of the glamor of his onetime art:

"For 25 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 minutes and backs off blinking, sweating and choking, having finished the hardest job of getting dinner. But my hardest job lasts not two minutes but the better part of half an hour. My spoon weighs 25 pounds, my porridge is pasty iron and the heat of my kitchen is so great that if my body was not hardened to it the ordeal would drop me in my tracks. ... I am like some frantic baker in the inferno kneading a batch of iron bread for the devil's breakfast."

Mr. Davis puddled along in Sharon, Pa., and in Birmingham, Ala.; then he went to work in the tin-plate mill of William B. Leeds and Daniel G. Reid at Elwood, Ind. Three things began to happen to him in this town of 1,500 souls: 1) He became wealthy: his pay at the tin mill was good; he saved money; he backed his good and enterprising friends in activities from oil speculation to running newspapers; later he became an investment banker in Pittsburgh. 2) He became a member of the Loyal Order of Moose. There have been loyal Moose before, but Mr. Davis was an inspired Moose. Believing that "a boy who knows how to build concrete houses will not have to sleep in haystacks," he was the founding spirit of Mooseheart--famed colony, 37 miles west of Chicago, where boys and girls are 'prepared for life" and graduated at 18. A thousand orphans (together with about 100 widowed mothers and their children) live there; learn to build houses and roads, to farm, to tinker with machinery; labor in the fields and shops; to buy equipment; go forth into the world. Nothing is closer to the heart of Mr. Davis than Mooseheart. He has a home there, and is always on hand for the colony's jubilees. The late "Uncle Joe" Cannon once called him the "Napoleon of Fraternity."* 'He knows nothing of golf, calls it an old man's game. 3) He went into politics. First he ran for town clerk of Elwood, Ind. His opponents, finding that his schooling consisted of one year, said that he was too ignorant for the office. Whereupon, he began to carry a blackboard with him when he made speeches and asked any schoolteacher present to give him an examination. He was the only Republican elected in Elwood in that campaign. The only other public office he held before being appointed Secretary of Labor was county recorder.

When President Harding was casting about for a Secretary of Labor in 1921, there was much talk as to whether he should pick a businessman or a laborite. He compromised and chose Mr. Davis, a man who still carried his union card but who thought well of the open shop. The result was that Secretary Hoover, businessman, ran most of the labor affairs of the Cabinet. When the conference on unemployment was held in 1921, Mr. Hoover dominated it, causing Clinton W. ("Mirrors") Gilbert to remark that "the finest example of the unemployed at it was the Secretary of Labor." Last winter during the anthracite coal strike, President Coolidge and Mr. Hoover continually let it be known that they were healing the difficulties. Mr. Davis was crowded out of the picture. But, at the end when both the strikers and employers were approaching exhaustion, Mr. Davis suggested peace and got it. In the recent ten and a half months' Passaic textile strike, his attempts at settlement were few and futile. But there is not a single major strike now going on in the U. S.--the coal, railroad, Manhattan garment and Passaic strikes have all been settled in various ways. Who can say whether a Secretary of Labor with his fingers in every strike would be as happy today as Mr. Davis?

He might almost be called "Secretary of Immigration," for there is his chief interest and there he has accomplished his greatest works. He helped frame the restrictive immigration act of 1924 and he has administered it with scarcely a hitch. He seldom misses an opportunity to write about immigration; and who can do it better than this man who was once pulled out from under a bed in Wales?

*Rumors in November, which intimated the resignations of Secretaries Kellogg and Mellon, have now died down.

*His real family name was Davies. His father, who could neither read nor write, signed X (his mark) on his citizenship papers; the registration clerk entered Davis. Davis has stuck.

*Mr. Davis is a Mason, Odd Fellow, Knight of Pythias, Elk, Moose.