Part 8

ohn Johnson of Jones' Crossroads, as to its efficiency. Then when the board did not wax enthusiastic over his new toy, he would slide out and forget to come back. His heart was set on making a better tool at less expense to the consumer, than the world had ever seen. Thus would he lessen labor and increase production. So besides great talent he had a unique simplicity, which often supplied smiles for his friends. James Oliver had a sort of warm feeling for every man who had ever held the handles of an Oliver Plow--he regarded such a one as belonging to the great family of Olivers. He believed that success depended upon supplying a commodity that made the buyer a friend; and heaven, to him, was a vast County Fair, largely attended by farmers, where exhibitions of plowing were important items on the program. Streets paved with gold were no lure for him. In various ways he resembled William Morris, who, when asked what was his greatest ambition, answered, "I hope to make a perfect blue," and the dye on his hands attested his endeavors in this line. Both were workingmen and delighted in the society of toilers. They lived like poor men, and wore the garb of mechanics. Neither had any use for the cards, curds and custards of what is called polite society. They hated hypocrisy, sham, pretense, and scorned the soft, the warm, the pleasant, the luxurious. They liked stormy weather, the sweep of the wind, the splash of the rain and the creak of cordage. They gloried in difficulties, reveled in the opposition of things, and smiled at the tug of inertia. In their natures was a granitic outcrop that defied failure. It was the Anglo-Saxon, with a goodly cross of the Norse, that gave them this disdain of danger, and made levitation in their natures the supreme thing--not gravitation. The stubbornness of the Scot is an inheritance from his Norse forebears, who discovered America five hundred years before Columbus turned the trick. These men were well called the "Wolves of the Sea." About the year One Thousand, a troop of them sailed up the Seine in their rude but staunch ships. The people on the shore, seeing these strange giants, their yellow hair flying in the wind, called to them, "Where are you from, and who are your masters?" And the defiant answer rang back over the waters, "We are from the round world, and we call no man master." James Oliver called no man master. Yet with him, the violent had given way to the psychic and mental. His battleground was the world of ideas. The love of freedom he imbibed with his mother's milk. It was the thing that prompted their leaving Scotland. James Oliver had the defect of his qualities. He was essentially Cromwellian. He too would have said, "Take away that bauble!" He did not look outside of himself for help. Emerson's essay on "Self-Reliance" made small impression upon him, because he had the thing of which Emerson wrote. His strength came from within, not from without. And it was this dominant note of self-reliance which made him seem indifferent to the strong men of his own town and vicinity. It was not a contempt for strong men: it was only the natural indifference of one who called no man master. He was a big body himself, big in brain, big in initiative, big in self-sufficiency. He could do without men; and there lies the paradox--if you would have friends you must be able to do without them. James Oliver had a host of personal friends, and he also had a goodly list of enemies, for a man of his temperament does not trim ship. He was a good hater. He hugged his enemies to his heart with hoops of steel, and at times they inspired him as soft and mawkish concession never could. And well could he say, "A little more grape, Captain Bragg." Also, "We love him for the enemies he made." He had a beautiful disdain for society--society in its Smart-Set sense. He used to say, "In order to get into heaven you have to be good and you have to be dead, but in order to get into society you do not have to be either." Exclusion and caste were abhorrent to him. Oliver gave all, and doing so he won all in the way of fame and fortune that the world has to offer. His was a full, free, happy and useful life. Across the sky in letters of light I would write these words of James Oliver: TO BENEFIT YOURSELF, YOU MUST BENEFIT HUMANITY. * * * * * Zangwill has written it down in fadeless ink that Scotland has produced three bad things: Scotch humor, Scotch religion and Scotch whisky. James Oliver had use for only one of the commodities just named--and that was humor. Through his cosmos ran a silver thread of quiet chuckle that added light to his life and endeared him to thousands. Laughter is the solvent for most of our ills! All of his own personal religion--and he had a deal of it--was never saved up for Sunday; he used it in his business. But James Oliver was a Scotchman, and this being so, the fires of his theological nature were merely banked. When Death was at the door an hour before his passing, this hardy son of heath and heather, of bog and fen and bleak North Wind, roused himself from stupor, and in his deep, impressive voice, soon to be stilled forever, startled the attendants with the stern order, "Let us pray!" Then he repeated slowly the Lord's Prayer, and with the word "Amen" sank back upon his pillow to arise no more. For the occasional drunken workman, he had terms of pity and sentences of scorn in alternation. At such times the Scotch bur would come to his lips, and the blood of his ancestors would tangle his tongue. One of his clerks once said to me, "As long as Mr. James talks United States, I am not alarmed, but when he begins to roll it out with a bur on his tongue, as if his mouth were full of hot mush, I am scared to death." * * * * * In Eighteen Hundred Ninety-three, James Oliver spent several months at the Chicago Exposition. He was one of the World's-Fair Commissioners. Hundreds of people shook hands with him daily. He was a commanding figure, with personality plus. No one ever asked him, any more than they did old Doctor Johnson, "Sir, are you anybody in particular?" He was somebody in particular, all over and all of the time. That story about how the stevedores on the docks in Liverpool turned and looked at Daniel Webster and said, "There goes the King of America," has been related of James Oliver. He was a commanding figure, with the face and front of a man in whom there was no parley. He was a good man to agree with. In any emergency, even up to his eightieth year, he would have at once taken charge of affairs by divine right. His voice was the voice of command. So there at Chicago he was always the center of an admiring group. He was Exhibit A of the Oliver Plow Works Exhibition and yet he never realized it. One day, when he was in a particularly happy mood, and the Scotch bur was delightfully apparent, as it was when he was either very angry or very happy, an elderly woman pushed her way through the throng and seizing the hand that ruled the Oliver Plow Works in both of her own, said in ecstatic tones: "Oh! it is such a joy to see you again. Twenty years ago I used to hear you preach every Sunday!" For once James Oliver was undone. He hesitated, stammered and then exclaimed in flat contradiction, "Madam, you never heard me preach!" "Why, aren't you Robert Collyer--the Reverend Robert Collyer?" "Not I, madam. My name is Oliver, and I make plows," was the proud reply. That night Oliver asked his trusted helper, Captain Nicar, this question: "I say, Nicar, who is this man Collyer--that woman was the third person within a week who mistook me for that preacher. I don't look like a dominie, do I, Captain?" And then Captain Nicar explained what Mr. Oliver had known, but which had temporarily slipped his mind--that Robert Collyer was a very great preacher, a Unitarian who had graduated out of orthodoxy, and who in his youth had been a blacksmith. "Why didn't he stay a blacksmith, if he was a good one, and let it go at that?" But this Nicar couldn't answer. However, the very next day Robert Collyer came along, piloted by Marshall Field, and Oliver had an opportunity to put the question to the man himself. Robert Collyer was much impressed by Mr. Oliver, and Mr. Oliver declared that Mr. Collyer was not to blame for his looks. And so they shook hands. Collyer was at Chicago to attend the Parliament of Religions. This department of the great Exposition had not before especially appealed to Oliver--machinery was his bent. But now he forgot plows long enough to go and hear Robert Collyer speak on "Why I Am a Unitarian." After the address Mr. Oliver said to Mr. Collyer, "Almost thou persuadest me to be a Unitarian." "Had you taken to the pulpit, you would have made a great preacher, Mr. Oliver," said Mr. Collyer. "And if you had stuck to your bellows and forge, you might have been a great plow-maker," replied Mr. Oliver--"and it's lucky for me you didn't." "Which is no pleasantry," replied Mr. Collyer, "for if I had made plows I should, like you, have made only the best." The Oliver Exhibit at the great Fair was a kind of meeting-place for a group of such choice spirits as Philip D. Armour, Sam Allerton, Clark E. Carr and Joseph Medill; and then David Swing, Robert Collyer, Doctor Frank Gunsaulus and 'Gene Field were added to the coterie. 'Gene Field's column of "Sharps and Flats" used to get the benefit of the persiflage. Collyer and Oliver were born the same year--Eighteen Hundred Twenty-three. Both had the same magnificent health, the same high hope and courage that never falters, and either would have succeeded in anything into which he might have turned his energies. Chance made Oliver a mechanic and an inventor. He evolved the industrial side of his nature. Chance also lifted Collyer out of a blacksmith-shop and tossed him into the pulpit. Collyer was born in Yorkshire, but his ancestors were Scotch. Oliver's mother's name was Irving, and the Irvings appear in the Collyer pedigree, tracing to Edward Irving, that strong and earnest preacher who played such a part in influencing Tammas the Titan, of Ecclefechan. Whether Oliver and Collyer ever followed up their spiritual relationship to see whether it was a blood-tie, I do not know: probably not, since both, like all superbly strong men, have a beautiful indifference to climbing genealogical trees. I once heard Robert Collyer speak in a sermon of James Oliver as "a transplanted thistle evolved into a beautiful flower," and "the man of many manly virtues." Seemingly Mr. Collyer was unconscious of the fact that, in describing Mr. Oliver, he was picturing himself. Industry, economy, the love of fresh air, the enjoyment of the early morning, the hatred of laziness, shiftlessness, sharp practise and all that savors of graft, grab and get-by-any-means--these characteristics were strong in both. And surely Robert Collyer was right: if the world ever produces a race of noble men, that race will be founded on the simple virtues, upon which there is neither caveat nor copyright--the virtues possessed by James Oliver in such a rare degree. * * * * * George H. Daniels, of the New York Central Railroad, and James Oliver were close personal friends. Both were graduates of the University of Hard Knocks; both loved their Alma Mater. When Daniels printed that literary trifle, "A Message to Garcia," he sent five thousand copies to Oliver, who gave one to every man in his factory. Daniels was one of the Illini, and had held the handles of an Oliver Plow. He had seen the great business of the Olivers at South Bend evolve. Oliver admired Daniels, as