The potters herald. [volume] (East Liverpool, Ohio) 1899-1982, 1941-02-13
.EncoL
The WORKER
BY SPENCER MILLER, JR.
Director, Workers Education
Bureau Of America

For more than three score years
poets, philosophers, historians and
statesmen have sought to probe the
inner secret of Abraham Lincoln's
power.
Genealogists have traced his lineage
back to Norfolk County in England.
Historians have followed the footsteps
Of the Lincolns from the arrival of his
forcbears in the Puritan colony of
New bingham on Boston Bay in the
year 1857 to the humble log cabin in
Kentucky. Students of the American
scene have examined Lincoln's writ
ings from his earliest briefs as a
young lawyer in Illinois to his Sec
ond Inaugural. Yet a complete un-
derstanding of his brooding spirit has
escaped many Of these scholars and
writer's.
There is a source Of Lincoln's power
that deserves to be recognized in any
estimate of the man. 1t was in his
work life. There is a spiritual disci-
pline and strength that comes from
manual labor. Lincoln was the prod
uct of long and varied work expert
ence in a frontier civilization. This
discipline of manual work had a DOW
erful influence in shaping his char
acter and career. Lincoln was first a
worker before he was statesman.
Indeed, it is Lincoln the worker that
foreshadows Lincoln the Great Eman-
cipator who saved the union.
The clue to an understanding of
Lincoln the man, then, is to be found
in the work life of the young Lincoln.
His early life was that of the typical
youth born in the poverty and OBJ
scurity Of the frontier; he was early
to learn the values of adversity as a
test of character.
ABE was the chegcseag. of the Knob
Creek farm as soon as he grew big
enough to run errands, to hold a pine
knot at night lighting his father at a
job, or to carry water, fill the wood
box, clean ashes from the fireplace,
hoe weeds, pick berries, grapes, per-
simmons for beer-making. He hunted
the timbers and came back with wal
nuts, hickory and hazel nuts.
His hands knew the stinging blist
ers from using a hoe handle back and
forth Summer afternoon, and in the
Autumn the mash of walnut stain that
wouldn't wash off, with all the rinsing
and scrubbing Of Nancy Hanks home
made Soap."
Thus writes Carl Sandburg in "The
Prarie Years"
The boy worked beside his father,
Tom Lincoln, as he hewed down trees
and fashioned them into logs for a
flat-boat on the creek. He learned the
mastery of the axe, an indispensable
tool in frontier country where one
had literally to hew a living out of
the wilderness. To work, as he did,
in the primeval forests of the frontier,
to clear timberland for pasture, to
split rails, to milk COWS, to churn but
ter, to husk corn, these were a part
of the endless variety of the work en-
vironment of that kentucky frontier.
He knew, too, from his father,
master cabinet-maker, something of
the skill of hand that goes to make
articles of furniture of rare artistic
excellence.
1t was said of Abe Lincoln that be-
fore he had grown to mans estate he
had been successfully day laborer,
a farmland, a carpenters assistant,
a ferryman and hired hand.
In all Of these work experiences he
came not only to understand the part
and place that labor plays in mans
progress but the extent to which an
advancing civilization depends upon
the labor of hand and brain.
at was by the labor of their hands
and brains that he, his father and
their neighbors had opened south
western Indiana to the uses of men.
He saw labor as the foundation of all
that might come after it, for he had
labored himself, starting a COM
munity," writes Ida M. Tarbell in "In
the Footsteps of the Lincolns"
Insight Into Labor's Role
This deep insight into the place of
labor in society was not only to per-
meate all of his later thinking but
to make him the unrivaled interpreter
both of the dignity of work and of
the rights Of workers. For did he not
say: GAS labor is the common burden
Of our race, so the effort of some to
shift their share of the burden onto
the shoulders of others is the great
durable curse of the race?
Anyone who attempts to analyze
Lincoln's speeches will discover again
and again how his illustrations and
anecdotes were of the work life that
he had known as young working
boy. 1t was on the occasion of his trip
to New Orleans on flatboat, largely
built by his own efforts, that he was
to see for the first time the sale of
Continued on Page Two)