The Iron Puddler: My Life in the Rolling Mills and What Came of It
(This is the autobiography of James J. Davis, an iron bar ...)
This is the autobiography of James J. Davis, an iron bar maker (a puddler) who left the mill to go into politics, rising to represent Pennsylvania in the United State Senate from 1930 to 1945 after being U.S. Labor Secretary under Presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. He wrote his autobiography while Labor Secretary so it lacks insight into his subsequent Senate career. It still provides insights into the Pennsylvania politics, economy, and life during his times.
James John Davis was an American fraternal order leader, secretary of labor , and senator from Pennsylvania.
Background
James John Davis was born on October 27, 1873 in Tredegar, Wales. He was the oldest son and second of six children of David James Davies and Esther Ford (Nicholls) Davies. An immigration official changed the name to Davis when James's illiterate father came to America. The family joined him in April 1881, settling in Sharon, Pa. , where the father worked in the iron mills, as he had in Wales.
Education
He was educated at the School of Business School.
Career
Young Davis began full-time work at the age of eleven, but later continued his education in night school. After a year in a nail factory, he became a puddler's assistantin the iron mills and at sixteen a puddler. He thrived on the hard work and throughout life took pride in his muscular strength.
In 1893, after brief employment in Pittsburgh and Birmingham, Ala. , he moved to Elwood, Ind. , where he worked in a tin mill, joined the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel, and Tin Workers of America, and as president of his local union established a reputation for good judgment among both workers and employers.
A foe of free silver, he campaigned for William McKinley in the presidential election of 1896. He was elected city clerk of Elwood in 1898, and before assuming officespent several months attending business college. In 1902 he was elected recorder of Madison County, a post he held until 1907. During this period he also read law in an Elwood law firm.
Davis then began a career in fraternal affairs that was to occupy much of his life. He had joined the Loyal Order of Moose in 1906, and the following year he negotiated a contract with its officers that gave him the title of supreme organizer and the exclusive right to establish lodges and collect fees. He was named director general in 1907.
Living in Pittsburgh, Davis devoted his full time to building the Moose as a traveling organizer of lodges. He also established a publishing concern, a jewelry firm to supply pins and insignia to the order, and a real estate firm to build and lease lodges, ventures which eventually provided him with an annual income that reached as high as $50, 000. He helped found the order's vocational school for orphans at Mooseheart, Ill. , in 1913 and was chairman of its governing body. His efforts were primarily responsible for the growth of the Moose to over 500, 000 members by 1916.
Davis was indicted in 1932 for violating federal lottery laws in connection with a Moose enterprise, and, though acquitted, he became less influential in the order thereafter, giving up his contract as organizer for a regular salary as director general. In 1921 President Harding appointed Davis secretary of labor. Although Davis had maintained his union membership, he had had little contact with the labor movement since the 1890's, and his appointment was opposed by organized labor.
He viewed trade unions more as benevolent associations than as opponents of capital, and felt that strikes were seldom justified. He distrusted doubters, radicals, and intellectuals and held fast to a philosophy compounded of Republicanism, fraternalism, conservative trade unionism, and his simple Welsh Baptist faith.
As secretary of labor, Davis nevertheless followed a conciliatory course, tempering antilabor opinion within the Republican party.
Herbert Hoover, the secretary of commerce, was the dominant influence in the administration's domestic policy, and Davis' role was therefore limited, but his sympathy for labor's point of view and his opposition to antiunion pressures eventually won the grudging respect of organized labor. Reappointed by both Coolidge and Hoover, Davis served them and the party faithfully as a link to the labor movement and as an effective political campaigner. During his tenure the Labor Department became responsible for enforcing the new immigration laws. A supporter of restrictive legislation, Davis tried to thwart illegal entrants, but advocated humane methods of examination and processing of immigrants.
Davis left the cabinet in 1930 following his election to the United States Senate from Pennsylvania. Competing for the vacancy caused by the Senate's refusal to seat William S. Vare, he had won the Republican nomination by defeating the incumbent, Joseph Grundy, in a tangled primary. Davis was reelected to full six-year terms in 1932 and 1938. In the Senate, he sponsored one significant measure, the Davis-Bacon Act (1930), which required contractors to pay standard local wages for labor in federal construction.
Although he frequently criticized the implementation of New Deal programs, Davis voted for the Social Security, Wagner, and Fair Labor Standards acts. He also supported the neutrality legislation of the 1930's, while at the same time favoring preparedness. Never a forceful figure in the Senate, Davis survived politically through a combination of folksiness, popularity among trade unionists and fraternal order members, and careful attention to issues important to Pennsylvania voters. In 1942 he unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination for governor.
Plagued by ill health and having steadily faded from publicattention, he was narrowly defeated for reelection to the Senate in 1944.
(This is the autobiography of James J. Davis, an iron bar ...)
Politics
Davis supported the eugenics movement. Historian Hans P. Vought argues that Davis lamented the influx of cheap labor from Southern and Eastern Europe. Vought writes that Davis believed that Americans had, thanks to the eugenics movement, learned to discern between "bad stock and good stock, weak blood and strong blood, sound heredity and sickly human stuff. "
Davis supported the rights of workers to strike, but only to a certain extent; he asked unions to "be slow to use the strike weapon. " He was against the 14-hour workday that predominated in the American steel industry during the early 1920s.
Personality
A stocky, robust man, hearty and gregarious, "Puddler Jim" believed in the American dream, with its virtues of hard work and self-help.
Connections
Davis married Jean Rodenbaugh of Pittsburgh, Pa. , on November 26, 1914; they had five children.