University of Virginia Library

VIII
TO THE BROTHERHOOD OF LOCOMOTIVE FIREMEN,
CHATTANOOGA, TENN., SEPTEMBER
8, 1902

Mr. Grand Master, Governor McMillin, Mr. Mayor, my
brothers, men and women of Tennessee, my fellow-citizens:

I am glad to be here to-day. I am glad to come as the
guest of the Brotherhood. Let me join with you, the
members of the Brotherhood of this country, in extending
a most cordial welcome to our fellows from Canada
and Mexico. The fact that we are good Americans only
makes us all the better men, all the more desirous of seeing
good fortune to all mankind. I needed no pressing
to accept the invitation tendered through you, Mr. Hannahan,
and through Mr. Arnold, to come to this meeting.
I have always admired greatly the railroad men of the
country, and I do not see how any one who believes in what
I regard as the fundamental virtues of citizenship can fail to
do so. I want to see the average American a good man,
an honest man, and a man who can handle himself, and
does handle himself, well under difficulties. The last time
I ever saw General Sherman, I dined at his house, and we
got to talking over the capacity of different types of soldiers,
and the General happened to say that if ever there
were another war, and he were to have a command, he
should endeavor to get as many railway men as possible
under him. I asked him why, and he said: "Because on

account of their profession they have developed certain
qualities which are essential in a soldier." In the first
place, they are accustomed to taking risks. There are a
great many men who are naturally brave, but who, being
entirely unaccustomed to risks, are at first appalled by
them. Railroad men are accustomed to enduring hardship;
they are accustomed to irregular hours; they are
accustomed to act on their own responsibility, on their
own initiative, and yet they are acccustomed to obeying
orders quick. There is not anything more soul-harrowing
for a man in time of war, or for a man engaged in
a difficult job in time of peace, than to give an order and
have the gentleman addressed say "What?" The railroad
man has to learn that when an order is issued there
may be but a fraction of a second in which to obey it.
He has to learn that orders are to be obeyed, and, on the
other hand, that there will come plenty of crises in which
there will be no orders to be obeyed, and he will have to
act for himself.

Those are all qualities that go to the very essence of
good soldiership, and I am not surprised at what General
Sherman said. In raising my own regiment, which was
raised mainly in the Southwest, partly in the Territory in
which Mr. Sargent himself served as a soldier at one time
—in Arizona,—I got a number of railroad men. Of course,
the first requisite was that a man should know how to
shoot and how to ride. We were raising the regiment in
a hurry, and we did not have time to teach him, either.
He had to know how to handle a horse and how to handle
a rifle, to start with. But given the possession of those
two qualities, I found that there was no group of our citizens
from whom better men could be drawn to do a
soldier's work in a tight place and at all times than the
railroad men.

But, gentlemen, the period of war is but a fractional
part of the life of our Republic, and I earnestly hope and

believe that it will be an even smaller part in the future
than it has been in the past. It was the work that you
have done in time of peace that especially attracted me
to you, that made me anxious to come down here and see
you, and that made me glad to speak to you, not for
what I can tell you, but for the lesson it seems to me
can be gained by all of our people from what you have
done.

At the opening of the twentieth century we face conditions
vastly changed from what they were in this country
and throughout the world a century ago. Our complex
industrial civilization under which progress has been so
rapid, and in which the changes for good have been so
great, has also inevitably seen the growth of certain tendencies
that are not for good, or at least that are not
wholly for good; and we in consequence, as a people,
like the rest of civilized mankind, find set before us for
solution during the coming century problems which need
the best thought of all of us, and the most earnest desire
of all to solve them well if we expect to work out a solution
satisfactory to our people, a solution for the advantage
of the nation. In facing these problems, it must be
a comfort to every well-wisher of the nation to see what
has been done by your organization. I believe emphatically
in organized labor. I believe in organizations of
wage-workers. Organization is one of the laws of our
social and economic development at this time. But I
feel that we must always keep before our minds the fact
that there is nothing sacred in the name itself. To call
an organization an organization does not make it a good
one. The worth of an organization depends upon its
being handled with the courage, the skill, the wisdom,
the spirit of fair dealing as between man and man, and
the wise self-restraint which, I am glad to be able to say,
your Brotherhood has shown. You now number close
upon 44,000 members. During the two years ending

June 30th last you paid in to the general and beneficiary
funds close upon a million and a half dollars. More than
six and one-half millions have been paid in since the starting
of the insurance clause in the Constitution—have been
paid to disabled members and their beneficiaries. Over
fifty per cent, of the amount paid was paid on account of
accidents. Gentlemen, that is a sufficient commentary
upon the kind of profession which is yours. You face
death and danger in time of peace, as in time of war the
men wearing Uncle Sam's uniform must face them.

Your work is hard. Do you suppose I mention that because
I pity you? No; not a bit. I don't pity any man
who does hard work worth doing. I admire him. I pity
the creature who does n't work, at whichever end of the
social scale he may regard himself as being. The law
of worthy work well done is the law of successful American
life. I believe in play, too—play, and play hard while
you play; but don't make the mistake of thinking that
that is the main thing. The work is what counts, and if
a man does his work well and it is worth doing, then it
matters but little in which line that work is done; the
man is a good American citizen. If he does his work in
slipshod fashion, then no matter what kind of work it is,
he is a poor American citizen.

I speak to the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen,
but what I say applies to all railroad men—not only to
the engineers who have served an apprenticeship as firemen,
to the conductors, who, as a rule, have served an
apprenticeship as brakemen, but to all the men of all the
organizations connected with railroad work. I know you
do not grudge my saying that, through you, I am talking
to all the railroad men of the country. You, in your
organization as railroad men, have taught two lessons:
the lesson of how much can be accomplished by organization,
by mutual self-help of the type that helps another
in the only way by which, in the long run, a man who is

a full-grown man really can be helped—that is, by teaching
him to help himself. You teach the benefits of
organization, and you also teach the indispensable need
of keeping absolutely unimpaired the faculty of individual
initiative, the faculty by which each man brings himself
to the highest point of perfection by exercising the
special qualities with which he is himself endowed. The
Brotherhood has developed to this enormous extent since
the days, now many years ago, when the first little band
came together; and it has developed, not by crushing out
individual initiative, but by developing it, by combining
many individual initiatives.

The Brotherhood of Firemen does much for all firemen,
but I firmly believe that the individual fireman, since the
growth of the Brotherhood has been more, not less,
efficient than he was twenty years ago. Membership in
the Brotherhood comes, as I understand it, after a nine
months' probationary period; after a man has shown his
worth, he is then admitted and stands on his footing as a
brother. Now, any man who enters with the purpose of
letting the Brotherhood carry him is not worth much.
The man who counts in the Brotherhood is the man
who pulls his own weight and a little more. Much can
be done by the Brotherhood. I have just hinted, in the
general figures I gave you, at how much has been done,
but it still remains true in the Brotherhood, and everywhere
else throughout American life, that in the last
resort nothing can supply the place of the man's own
individual qualities. We need those, no matter how perfect
the organization is outside. There is just as much
need of nerve, hardihood, power to face risks and accept
responsibilities, in the engineer and the fireman, whether
on a flyer or a freight train, now as there ever was.
Much can be done by the Association. A great deal can
be accomplished by working each for all and all for each;
but we must not forget that the first requisite in accomplishing

that is that each man should work for others by
working for himself, by developing his own capacity.

The steady way in which a man can rise is illustrated
by a little thing that happened yesterday. I came down
here over the Queen and Crescent Railroad, and the General
Manager, who handled my train and who handled
yours, was Mr. Maguire. I used to know him in the old
days when he was on his way up, and he began right at
the bottom. He was a fireman at one time. He worked
his way straight up, and now he is General Manager.

I believe so emphatically in your organization because,
while it teaches the need of working in union, of working
in association, of working with deep in our hearts, not
merely on our lips, the sense of Brotherhood, yet of
necessity it still keeps, as your organization always must
keep, to the forefront the worth of the individual qualities
of a man. I said to you that I came here in a sense
not to speak to you, but to use your experience as an
object-lesson for all of us, an object-lesson in good American
citizenship. All professions, of course, do not call
for the exercise to the same degree of the qualities of
which I have spoken. Your profession is one of those
which I am inclined to feel play in modern life a greater
part from the standpoint of character than we entirely
realize. There is in modern life, with the growth of
civilization and luxury, a certain tendency to softening
of the national fibre. There is a certain tendency to forget,
in consequence of their disuse, the rugged virtues
which lie at the back of manhood; and I feel that professions
like yours, like the profession of the railroad men of
the country, have a tonic effect upon the whole body
politic.

It is a good thing that there should be a large body of
our fellow-citizens—that there should be a profession—
whose members must, year in and year out, display
those old, old qualities of courage, daring, resolution,

unflinching willingness to meet danger at need. I hope
to see all our people develop the softer, gentler virtues
to an ever-increasing degree, but I hope never to see
them lose the sterner virtues that make men men.

A man is not going to be a fireman or an engineer, or
serve well in any other capacity on a railroad long if he
has a "streak of yellow" in him. You are going to find
it out, and he is going to be painfully conscious of it,
very soon. It is a fine thing for our people that we should
have those qualities in evidence before us in the life-work
of a big group of our citizens.

In American citizenship, we can succeed permanently
only upon the basis of standing shoulder to shoulder,
working in association, by organization, each working for
all, and yet remembering that we need each so to shape
things that each man can develop to best advantage all
the forces and powers at his command. In your organization
you accomplish much by means of the Brotherhood,
but you accomplish it because of the men who
go to make up that brotherhood.

If you had exactly the organization, exactly the laws,
exactly the system, and yet were yourselves a poor set
of men, the system would not save you. I will guarantee
that, from time to time, you have men go in to try to
serve for the nine months who prove that they do not
have the stuff in them out of which you can make good
men. You have to have the stuff in you, and, if you have
the stuff, you can make out of it a much finer man by
means of the association—but you must have the material
out of which to make it. So it is in citizenship.

And now let me say a word, speaking not merely especially
to the Brotherhood, but to all our citizens. Governor
McMillin, Mr. Mayor: I fail to see how any American
can come to Chattanooga and go over the great battlefields
in the neighborhood—the battle-fields here in this
State and just across the border in my mother's State of

Georgia—how any American can come here and see evidences
of the mighty deeds done by the men who wore
the blue and the men who wore the gray, and not go away
a better American, prouder of the country, prouder because
of the valor displayed on both sides in the contest
—the valor, the self-devotion, the loyalty to the right as
each side saw the right. Yesterday I was presented with
a cane cut from the Chickamauga battle-field by some
young men of northern Georgia. On the cane were
engraved the names of three Union generals and three
Confederate generals. One of those Union generals was
at that time showing me over the battle-field—General
Boynton. Under one of the Confederate generals—General
Wheeler—I myself served. In my regiment there
served under me in the ranks a son of General Hood,
who commanded at one time the Confederate army against
General Sherman. The only captain whom I had the
opportunity of promoting to field rank, and to whom this
promotion was given for gallantry on the field, was Micah
Jenkins, of South Carolina, the son of a Confederate
general, whose name you will find recorded among those
who fought at Chickamauga.

Two of my captains were killed at Santiago: one was
Allyn Capron, the fifth in line who, from father to son,
had served in the regular army of the United States, who
had served in every war in which our country had been
engaged; the other, Bucky O'Neill. His father had
fought under Meagher, when, on the day at Fredericksburg,
his brigade left more men under the stone wall than
did any other brigade. I had in my regiment men from the
North and the South; men from the East and the West;
men whose fathers had fought under Grant, and whose
fathers had fought under Lee; college graduates, capitalists'
sons, wage workers, the man of means and the man
who all his life had owed each day's bread to the day's toil.
I had Catholic, Protestant, Jew, and Gentile under me.

Among my captains were men whose forefathers had been
among the first white men to settle on Massachusetts Bay
and on the banks of the James, and others whose parents
had come from Germany, from Ireland, from England,
from France. They were all Americans, and nothing
else, and each man stood on his worth as a man, to be
judged by it, and to succeed or fail accordingly as he did
well or ill. Compared to the giant death-wrestles that
reeled over the mountains round about this city the fight
at Santiago was the merest skirmish; but the spirit in
which we handled ourselves there, I hope, was the spirit in
which we have to face our duties as citizens if we are to
make this Republic what it must be made.

Yesterday, in passing over the Chickamauga battlefield,
I was immensely struck by the monument raised by
Kentucky to the Union and Confederate soldiers from
Kentucky who fell on that battle-field. The inscription
reads as follows: "As we are united in life, and they
united in death, let one monument perpetuate their
deeds, and one people, forgetful of all asperities, forever
hold in grateful remembrance all the glories of that terrible
conflict which made all men free and retained every
star on the nation's flag." That is a good sentiment.
That is a sentiment by which we can all stand. And oh,
my friends! what does that sentiment have as its underlying
spirit? The spirit of brotherhood!

I firmly believe in my countrymen, and therefore I believe
that the chief thing necessary in order that they shall
work together is that they shall know one another—that
the Northerner shall know the Southerner, and the man
of one occupation know the man of another occupation;
the man who works in one walk of life know the man who
works in another walk of life, so that we may realize that
the things which divide us are superficial, are unimportant,
and that we are, and must ever be, knit together into one
indissoluble mass by our common American brotherhood.