All my life I have been changing big words into little words so
that the employee can know what the employer is saying to him.
The working man handles things. The professional man plies words.
I learned things first and words afterward. Things can enrich a
nation, and words can impoverish it. The words of theorists have
cost this nation billions which must be paid for in things.

When I was planning a great school for the education of
orphans, some of my associates said: "Let us teach them to be
pedagogues." I said: "No, let us teach them the trades. A boy
with a trade can do things. A theorist can say things. Things
done with the hands are wealth, things said with the mouth are
words. When the housing shortage is over and we find the nation
suffering from a shortage of words, we will close the classes in
carpentry and open a class in oratory."

This, then is the introduction to my views and to my policies.
They are now to have a fair trial, like that other iron worker in
the Elwood police court. I know what the word "previous" means. I
can give an account of myself. So, in the following pages I will
tell "where I was before I came here."

If my style seems rather flippant, it is because I have been
trained as an extemporaneous speaker and not as a writer. For
fifteen years I traveled over the country lecturing on the
Mooseheart School. My task was to interest men in the abstract
problems of child education. A speaker must entertain his hearers
to the end or lose their attention. And so I taxed my wit to make
this subject simple and easy to listen to. At last I evolved a
style of address that brought my points home to the men I was