The Iron Puddler: My Life in the Rolling Mills and What Came of It

Davis, James J. (James John), 1873-1947Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.0
Word count
273K words
Chapters
28

Tags

English Originals General Biography Working ClassFactory LifeSteel IndustryPersonal StruggleInspirationGrowing UpMemoirIndustrial AgeSocial ObservationAmerican Industry

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.The Iron Puddler: My Life in the Rolling Mills and What Came of It by DavisAuthor: Davis, James J. (James John), 1873-1947,Language: English, Class: HD: Social sciences: Economic history and conditions, Production, Release Date: May 1, 1998

Editor's review

This is the autobiography of a steelworker. Davis emigrated from Britain to the United States and from boyhood worked as a "puddler" in rolling mills, earning his living amid heat and heavy labor before later entering public life. The subtitle's "what came of it" is the book's thread: how factory experience shaped a man's character, his view of labor, and his public concerns. The descriptions of shop-floor division of labor, relations among coworkers, immigrant life, and workers' self-education are vivid and concrete—a firsthand account of American industrial labor at the end of the nineteenth century. It does not argue from data but presents, in a participant's voice, how industrialization both tested and formed people. Readers interested in labor history, immigration history, and industrial society can read it as a memoir, taking care to distinguish personal perspective from broader historical judgment.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Not a good fit for

Reading tips

  1. Read the first few chapters to learn the author's background and how he entered the mills, then proceed chronologically.
  2. When reading about factory work, note the job types, processes, and coworker relations as you go.
  3. After finishing, look up the late-nineteenth-century American steel industry and compare the personal account with the broader history.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28

FAQ

Is this book mainly about steel technology or about people? About people. The author writes as a participant about his labor and growth in the rolling mills; technical details serve the experiences and feelings of the person, not a systematic introduction to metallurgy. It works better as a memoir than as a technical book.
What does "puddler" in the title mean? It refers to the job of stirring molten metal in an iron furnace to remove impurities—hot, heavy labor. The book builds its depiction of shop-floor division of labor, labor intensity, and workers' conditions around this role, and it is a key term for understanding the whole.
Should I be mindful of the autobiography's stance? Yes. This is a personal memoir, carrying the author's own value judgments and the limitations of his era. Read personal feelings and historical facts separately; when you encounter sweeping comments, ask what they rest on and compare them with labor-history scholarship.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Davis, James J. (James John), 1873-1947 Author · American · 1873–1947

James J. Davis (1873–1947) was an American politician who served as Secretary of Labor and immigrated to the United States from Wales in his early years. One work by him is held in this collection: The Iron Puddler: My Life in the Rolling Mills and What Came of It. As the title suggests, it is an autobiographical work centered on his experience of labor in the steel mills, recounting his life in the rolling mills and what came of it. The subject stays close to the real circumstances of the working class, written in the plain tone of a memoir that interweaves personal experience with the industrial background of the era. Because public information is limited, little can be confirmed about the book's specific contents, publication details, or later reception; its style and influence are best understood in terms of autobiography and labor themes.