. I started negotiations for more
frequent paydays, and a few months later we were being paid on the first
and fifteenth of the month. Life is indeed dramatic,--at least it has
seemed so to me. Some men say that life has no meaning; that men are the
playthings of blind forces that crush them, and there is no answer to
the riddle. This is nonsense. I admit that we are in the grip of blind
forces. But we are not blind. We can not change those forces. If we
fight against them they will crush us. But by going with them, guiding
our careers along their courses, they will bear us to the port we're
steering for.

The mob spirit in man is one of those blind forces that so often lead
to shipwreck. The mob-mind differs from the mind of reason. To tell them
apart is like distinguishing mushrooms from toadstools. They look alike,
but one means health and the other is poison. Life has taught me the
difference between a movement and a mob. A movement is guided by logic,
law and personal responsibility. A mob is guided by passion and denies
responsibility.

I have seen meetings turned into mobs and mobs dissolved again into
meetings. Swept by passion we willed a strike. That strike would have
been just, and, yet, it would have ruined us. We were like a mob in
which every man forgets his own responsibility, The mob mind would have
rushed us to our own ruin. My speech called for individuals to stand up.
That set each individual thinking: "If I stand up, that crazy guy will
smash me." Each man became responsible again. The mob was gone, and all
we had was individual men, each thinking for himself. That thinking then
went on and each man reached a verdict based on logic, sense and duty.
The meeting could no longer speak with one voice. It couldn't talk at
all. It stammered. The action showed that each mind stood apart, alone.
And yet the vote revealed that they were all together.

I have watched the long struggle of unionism in America and I know the
law that has governed all its ups and downs. Wherever it was still a
movement it has thrived; wherever it became a mob it fell. The one Big
Union was a mob. No movement based on passion finally wins; no movement
based on reason finally fails. Why then say life is a riddle and man
helpless?

When I became Secretary of Labor, one of the first letters I received
was from Mrs. Eli Baldwin whose coal oil I burned shamelessly, studying
far into the night. Mrs. Eli Baldwin wrote from Atlanta, In