Like most Americans, the old man was too deeply involved with labor and
capital to think in those terms. Instead he thought of the people he dealt
with as personalities - and judged them by their work.
There was Henry Johnson, for example, whom he'd hired as a boy, and taught
how to fix shoes, and who would stay with him for the next 50 years through
his various ventures, mastering one skill after another. The old man's
apprentice would grow old with him, and die two weeks before he himself did.
The family smiled knowingly. They knew Henry had just gone ahead, as usual,
to scout things out.
There wasn't much theoretical about the way the old shoemaker lived and
prayed and worked. Yet he would have understood instinctively the theory
that a politician named Lincoln once propounded before a convention of
farmers:
"(L) abor is prior to, and independent of capital; that, in fact, capital is
the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first
existed; that labor can exist without capital, but that capital could never
have existed without labor. Hence . . . labor is the superior - greatly the
superior - of capital."
On this Labor Day, a great deal will be said in the usual press releases,
but none of it will be more eloquent than work done well. To me, two new
soles on a pair of well-shined shoes still say more than all the Labor Day
speeches ever written.