People who study the history and development of industry in America—and particularly the evolution of relations between Management and Labor through the last 150 years—invariably come to focus on Whiting Williams, because, at a critical moment on the timeline, it was he who altered the course of how factories deal with their workers.
And in trying to understand why Williams went to such great lengths of personal sacrifice in order to influence industrialists of the 1920s, the research inevitably leads back to Shelby, Ohio.
That’s because Williams said it himself: growing up in Shelby is what ingrained into his character the sense that everybody is responsible for the well-being of everybody else.
No doubt, these values were first imprinted growing up in the Methodist Church on South Gamble Street. All the Shelby people who knew him—not only in his church but in every neighborhood of town—assumed that the young man would grow up to be a minister: it was so evident that his nature was to stand up for those who couldn’t speak for themselves.
And they read him correctly: ultimately his life’s calling was to understand the needs of those who had no voice, and then communicate the essence of that message to the nation.
The First Education
After he graduated from Shelby High School in 1894, Williams had the transformative experience of meeting some of the most influential people of his generation who were engaged in transforming social consciousness: like attorney Clarence Darrow, the author Jack London, and America’s Nobel Prize-winning social pioneer Jane Addams. All of these icons of social change spent time at Oberlin College when Whiting Williams was enrolled there.
It was there that he became absorbed in understanding a concept that was gaining a foothold in American theology at the time, known as the “Social Gospel;” which was a call for Christianity in Action—reforming society’s problems through humane legislation and broader cultural education.
This tremendous need of his to help motivate humane civilization forward in the 20th century was a source of great frustration to Williams for the first decade of his adult career. He wanted more than anything to be useful in a big way.
His desire to spread well-being embraced the whole Earth, but he couldn’t see how his job at Shelby Tube was improving anything outside a small corner of Richland County.
So he decided he needed to see more of the world.
He used his savings to get to the coast, and then booked passage to England on a cattle boat—paying his way by shoveling manure. Then he walked 200 miles to London.
It was in the steel mills of London where his education truly began.
The Greater Education
Without really realizing it at the time, Whiting Williams established the trademark skill in London that would ultimately make him influential in the history and development of Human Compassion: he applied for a job with no experience.
He found out first-hand what Industry thought of him, and what his fellow workers thought of their bosses.
A decade later, this experience would be key to his own Gospel of Service. He was hired in Cleveland to work in the Personnel Department of a huge steel firm, and his assignment was to find a way to avoid a looming labor strike.
He asked permission to speak with the workers who were about to strike—not as a white collar negotiator, but rather, undercover as a regular clock-punching working man.
He changed his name, grew a mustache, put on the worn and patched clothes of someone down on his luck, and then walked in to apply for a job at his own company.
Williams spent six months working alongside the steel handlers, eating with them, living in their housing, and walking their walk.
His report afterwards was such a ground-breaking, insightful tool for resolving conflict that he was asked to speak before other corporations having labor troubles. And then he wrote more articles, worked in more industries, and through it, forged a wholly unique and indelibly useful career.
So useful, in fact, that they talked about him for decades. He became well-known in the media as the White Collar Hobo—a title commonly recognized across America in the 1920s and ’30s. It is easy to track him through the years in headlines of newspapers of towns and cities all across the country where he spoke to civic groups, Union meetings, lecture circuits, and student councils dozens of times every year.
At the end of his life he was eulogized as a pioneer in Labor/Management relations.
His persona of the Anonymous Laborer was so popularly familiar that different men throughout the country would pretend to be him in order to get a job or a handout.
His efforts to reduce complex labor issues to common logic took his writings to the reading public in every available outlet: including Popular Science magazine.
A Legacy of Validation
Whiting Williams contributed to the American culture of his time the understanding that what is most important about a job is the way workers feel about themselves.
He became, essentially, a journalist because his goal was effective education. Conflict, he said, is inevitable, but solutions for resolving conflict require dignity for both sides.
To this end he wrote what were known as “Inside Stories” for Collier’s Magazine: stories from BOTH SIDES. He went to work as a scab in a Pennsylvania RR strike, then the next month walked the picket line at West Virginia coal mines.
Today it is known as “embedding” a journalist into difficult situations. In the 1920s, it was called “participant/observer” journalism, when it was a cultural art created by Whiting Williams.
During early years of the Great Depression he went back into hobo clothes again to stand in unemployment lines so he could report first-hand on how effectively National Recovery Act programs were advancing the well-being of working people.
Thank You!
Images in this article were provided by the Shelby Museum of History, Jay Herbert, and Will Harmon.
Richland County History 