The Career of a Future Governor Illustrates Soundness of the Adage:
“Cobbler, Stick to Thy Last.”
William L. Douglas, who stands well in the forefront of the American
shoe manufacturers, alone makes more shoes every year than were
manufactured in the entire country when he started to learn the
business.
Mr. Douglas was born in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1845, and when he
was five years old his father died. At seven he was apprenticed to a
shoemaker, and was put to pegging shoes. Practically every operation was
done by hand, though Howe’s sewing-machine was used by the more
progressive manufacturers for stitching the uppers. But the rest of the
work, fastening the soles included, was done by hand, and the larger
factories employed only a dozen or so men.
Douglas worked at the bench from six o’clock in the morning until
evening made it too dark to see where to drive his awl. At fifteen he
could make a shoe, from cutting the uppers and trimmings and preparing
the bottom stocks and heels to sandpapering the soles and blackening and
burnishing the edges and heels. Then he began to look around for easier
and more remunerative work.
The cotton mills of the State seemed to offer it, and he started in, as
bobbin-boy, to learn a new trade. He remained at it only a few years,
for he heard the glowing stories of how much skilled shoemakers were
needed in the West. When he was nineteen he went to Colorado, and after
working through a number of mining-camps he located at Denver and opened
a cobbling shop.
The prices he received for his work were big, but they were nearly
offset by the prices he had to pay to live, and he was forced to work
sometimes sixteen hours a day. He was of slight build, and the strain
began to tell on him to such an extent that he was forced to abandon the
business and return East.
By 1876 machinery had begun to revolutionize the shoe business, and
Massachusetts was making shoes for the whole country. Douglas had a few
hundred dollars, the savings of the long days in Colorado, and he began
manufacturing. He could not afford to buy all the machines necessary.
He commenced with three men, working himself. The little shop prospered
and grew. Before long it was sending out shoes all over the country. As
machinery was improved and a greater output became possible, the shop
increased its business and began to export shoes. From the original
output of forty-eight pairs of shoes a week it has grown to fifteen
thousand pairs a day, and the shoes are sent all over the world.
The making of shoes and the organization of a great Industry has not
absorbed Mr. Douglas’s whole attention. As a Democrat he has been a
member of the Massachusetts House and Senate, Mayor of Brockton, and in
1903 he was elected Governor of Massachusetts, though the State is
usually Republican. He worked during his campaign the way he worked in
business, putting in the number of hours a day necessary to complete the
task set, and he kept his political lieutenants working the same way. By
this means he became the first Democratic executive the State has had
since 1893, and he gave the people a business administration they liked.
It was Governor Douglas who settled the disastrous Fall River strike,
after a number of futile attempts had been made to bring about an
understanding, and his findings appealed to both sides, for the workers
knew he had once worked in the mill and the employers recognized his
acute business sense.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Fortune.]
Fortune does us neither good nor hurt; she only presents us the matter
and the seed, which our soul, more powerful than she, turns and applies
as she best pleases, being the sole cause and sovereign mistress of her
own happy or unhappy condition. All external accessions receive taste
and color from the internal constitution, as clothes warm us not with
their heat, but our own, which they are adapted to cover and keep
in.—=Michel Eyquem de Montaigne.=