hat many were from my ward.
Incidentally I dropped a word here and there about the "Young American
Political Club," and asked them to come around to some of the
meetings. I found out where they came from and wherever I could, I
associated them with some of their fellows with whom I had worked. I
found out about their families. In brief I made myself know every man
of them as intimately as was possible.

I don't suppose for a minute that I could have done this successfully
if I hadn't really been genuinely interested in them. If I had gone at
it like a professional hand shaker they would have detected the
hypocrisy in no time. Neither did I attempt a chummy attitude nor a
fatherly attitude. I made it clearly understood that I was an American
first of all and that I was their boss. It was perfectly easy to do
this and at the same time treat them like men and like units. I tried
to make them feel that instead of being merely a bunch of Dagoes they
were Italian workingmen. Your foreign laborer is quick to appreciate
such a distinction and quick to respond to it. With the American-born
you have to draw a sharper line and hold a steadier rein. I figured
out that when you find a member of the second or third generation
still digging, you've found a man with something wrong about him.

The next thing I did was to learn what each man could do best. Of
course I could make only broad classifications. Still there were men
better at lifting than others; men better with the crowbar; men better
at shoveling; men naturally industrious who would leaven a group of
three or four lazy ones. As well as I could I sorted them out in this
way.

In addition to taking this personal interest in them individually, I
based my relations with them collectively on a principle of strict,
homely justice. I found there was no quality of such universal appeal
as this one of justice. Whether dealing with Italians, Russians,
Portuguese, Poles, Irish or Irish-Americans you could always get below
their national peculiarities if you reached this common denominator.
However browbeaten, however slavish, they had been in their former
lives this spark seemed always alive. However cocky or anarchistic
they might feel in their new freedom you could pull them up with a
sharp turn by an appeal to their sense of justice. And by justice I
mean nothing but what ex-president Roosevelt has now made familiar by
the phrase "a square deal." Justice in the abstract might no