Outspinning the Spider: The Story of Wire and Wire RopeMumford, John Kimberly
History
Outspinning the Spider: The Story of Wire and Wire Rope
Mumford, John Kimberly
John A. Roebling's Sons Company; Wire; Wire rope
In a town like this are lessons for those who like to try to translate
the foreigner for the good of American industry. There are those who
cherish a superstition that the foreign workman in the United States
lives poorly. In Roebling it is remarked that it is the foreigner who
is the best customer in groceries and butcher's meat. He buys chickens
instead of beef brisket, and not one chicken, but two and three. It is
he also who buys the Hood River apples and the best grape fruit.
And as for bread--you should see the bakery. "Sunny Jim" would sing to
see it--clean and shining, and turning out all kinds of bakestuffs
besides the big round red-blond loaves of "European bread," which they
say "has the strength" in it. The baker's wagon, loaded to the very top
of the canvas cover, goes through the town and the workers' little
children run homeward from it with two, three, four loaves altogether
as big as themselves. Crescent rolls, which cost a nickel at a French
bakery in New York, are sold here for two cents apiece.
So it goes in Roebling. Over on the one side are the negro quarters.
They have everything anybody else has including a recreation house--and
when they recreate, they just recreate.
* * * * *
If Roebling was an experiment, it is not so any longer. It is full of
comfortable people, and in seventy years the Roebling theory as to what
a workman wants and how he should be treated has never proved itself
more conclusively than here. It is a suggestive fact that in all that
time, save for some insignificant incidents, the Roeblings have been
free from the nightmare of "labor troubles." It may be because its
workmen have nothing worth while to complain of. Every effort is made
to make them comfortable without making them feel like dependents.
It is the outworking of a great business theory. In these times it is
of impressive significance.
End of Project Gutenberg's Outspinning the Spider, by John Kimberly Mumford
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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