But to conclude that because of this suspicion, this lack of understanding, which keeps so many industries always on the verge of destruction, there were no natural friendly contacts between the management and the men is not to know the world. I found that practically always the foreman or the boss, sometimes the big boss, in an industry had come up from the ranks. In various industrial towns I found the foreman’s family or the superintendent’s family living just around the corner, and his brother, perhaps his father, working in the mine or the mill. He was one in the family who had been able to lift himself. Nor did it follow that there was bad blood between a “big boss” and the head of a warlike union. I had been led to believe they did not speak in passing. I had supposed that, if Samuel Gompers and Judge Gary met, they would probably fly at each other’s throat; but at the Washington Industrial Conference in 1919, standing in a corridor of the Pan-American Building, I saw the two approaching from different directions. They were going to pass close to me. I had a cold chill about what might happen. But what happened was that Mr. Gompers said, “Hello, Judge,” in the friendliest tone and Judge Gary called cheerfully, “Hello, Sam.” And that was all there was to it. Later, when I was to see much of Judge Gary, trying to make out what the famous Gary code meant, and how it was being applied, we talked more than once of Samuel Gompers and his technique. The Judge had great respect for him as a political opponent, as well he might. It is hard to stop talking when I recall these four years, drifting up and down the country into factories and homes. The contrast between old ways and new ways was always before me. Many a sad thing I saw—nothing more disturbing than the strikes, for I managed to get on the outskirts of several and follow up the aftermath, which was usually tragic. There was the ghastly strike in certain fertilizer plants at Roosevelt on the Jersey coast. I followed it through to its unsatisfactory end. Rival labor and political bodies fought each other for days while the men with drawn and hopeless faces loafed in groups in saloons or on doorsteps. “All going to the devil while their unions fight,” said the woman who gave me my meals in the only boarding house in the desolate place. “I am for the union, but the union does not know when they go into a strike which they can avoid what they are doing to men. It turns them into tramps. They leave their families and take to the road. It is better that they leave. I think the women often think that, so they won’t have any more babies. No, the union does not see what it does to men. But what are the men going to do when things were like they were in this place? You know what their wages were. You know what a hellish sort of place this is. What are they going to do?”