LOGIC WINS IN THE STRETCH


At seven o'clock we met again and several men made short talks
opposing the strike. Each fellow, when he got up, seemed to have
a lot of ideas, but when he tried to express them he grew
confused, and after stammering a while he could only put forth
the bare opinion, "I don't think we ought to strike." This
meeting was quite different from the other one. Here every man
was thinking for himself but nobody could say anything. In the
previous meeting the speakers had talked passionately, and the
rest had been swept along with them as a unit. In other words,
the first session had become group-minded instead of individual-
minded. It is like the difference between a stampede and a
deliberative body. The second meeting was calmly deliberative and
it finally voted a reconsideration, and the strike resolution was
overwhelmingly defeated.

If this were a novel, it would be fine to record in this
chapter that the young orator who at the last moment turned the
tide and saved the day became the hero of the union and was
unanimously elected president. That's the way these things go in
fiction. And that is exactly what happened. In due time I found
myself at the head of the Local, and nearly every man had voted
for me. 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