“But I was on the right track; I was in a land of opportunities. I soon
found work and a business that was to my taste; a business, too, that
the good Providence has removed in part, at least, from the domain of
the competitive destroyer—the business of producing crude petroleum
from the earth.
“Since 1870 I have been more or less of an oil producer. In 1866, I
came to the Ohio oil fields and began the business of producing oil at
Lima. Since that time I have followed it both in Ohio and Indiana, and
to some extent in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. In 1893 I invented
some improvements in appliances for producing oil, and, finding
manufacturers unwilling to make the articles, fearing there would be
no profit, I concluded to undertake their manufacture. This brought
me in contact with labor conditions in a city for the first time in
my life. As a rule, labor in the oil fields had enjoyed large wages
compared with similar classes outside. I found men working in Toledo
for a fraction of a dollar a day. I began to wonder how it was possible
for men to live on such a small sum of money in a way becoming to
citizens of a free republic. I studied social conditions, and these
led me to feel very keenly the degradation of my fellow-men, and I at
once declared that the ‘going wages’ rule should not govern in the Acme
Sucker-Rod Company, which is the firm name of our business. I said that
the rule that every man is entitled to such a share of the product of
his toil as will enable him to live decently, and in such a way that
he and his children may be fitted to be citizens of the free republic,
should be the rule governing the wages of our establishment.
“To break down the feeling of social inequality, we began to ‘get
together,’—that is, we had little excursions down the bay. We invited
our workmen and their families, and also some other people who live in
big houses and do not work with their hands. We sought to mix them, to
let them understand that we were all people—just people, you know.