Talking Business (Volume 1)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1919. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER XXIV REPRESENTATIVE BUSINESS ADDRESSES Speakers and Topics The business addresses--all of recent date--here illustrated by means of analyses and extracts, represent various phases of what is decidedly the most notable type of public speaking in America today. To represent the form with anything like entire adequacy would require far more space than is here available. The passages here given, it may be said, are significant in several ways. The speakers, it will be noticed, are all men in executive positions of various kinds. They have earned the right to speak for American industry not merely as having demonstrated their skill in utterance but also by their statesmanlike administration of wide responsibilities. The audiences to whom the addresses here cited were delivered were in nearly all cases business men gathered upon a business occasion. The topics discussed are vital problems of our industrial society--questions of industrial policy in its broadest aspects. Most of them, naturally, are concerned with some phases of our war-time problems: that by Mr. Kahn with the nation's support of the soldiers; those by Messrs. Gary, Gompers, and Schwab with the active co-operation by capital and labor in the nation's effort. The question of the relations between industry and the community is treated in the eight addresses by Messrs. Gary, Gompers, Johnson, Perkins, Rockefeller, and Schwab. The question of relations between employers, managers, and working force is definitely the theme of those by Messrs. Rockefeller and Watson, and appears prominently in those by Messrs. Gompers and Schwab. These addresses are especially significant for the student of this book by reason of their spirit and form. They deal with themes of great practical importance broadl...