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Excerpt from Steel: The Diary of a Furnace Worker
The book is written from a diary of notes put down in the evenings when I was working on day shifts of ten hours. Alternate weeks, I worked the fourteen hour night shift, and spent my time off eating or asleep.
The book is a narrative - heat, fatigue, rough house, pay, as they came in an uncharted wave throughout the twenty-four hours.
But it is in a sense raw material, I believe, that sug gests the beginnings of several studies both human and economic. Mr. Walter Lippmann has recently pointed out that men do not act in accordance with the facts and forces of the world as it is, but in accord ance with the picture of it they have in their heads.' Nowhere does the form and pressure of the real world differ more sharply from the picture in men's heads than among different social and racial groups in indus try. Nor is anywhere the accuracy of the picture of more importance. An open-hearth furnace helper, working the twelve - hour day, and a Boston broker, owning fifty shares of Steel Preferred, hold, as a rule, strikingly different pictures of the same forces and conditions. But what is of greater importance is that director, manager, foreman, by reason of training.
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