Some Men Who Have Done Things, IX. James G. McDonald

Some Men Who Have Done Things. BY JOHN HENRY EVANS, OF THE LATTER-DAY SAINTS' UNIVERSITY. IX.— James G. McDonald. THE ROAD A CANNY SCOTCH LAD TOOK FROM A SMALL SHOP WITH A BELL OVER THE DOOR TO THE ONLY EXCLUSIVELY CHOCOLATE HOUSE IN AMERICA, AND THE GAIT HE WENT AT. Is there a boy hereabouts who looks with yearning eyes toward Canada, Mexico or South America because he sees no opportunities close by? Let him get by heart the story of McDonald. Does any young man in all our West lose heart because he had no chance to acquire an education? He cannot do better than read about James G. McDonald, who went to school only thirteen weeks. Ten minutes in the McDonald office, down there on Third South Street, in Salt Lake City, would tone up such a boy's system— would fill him so full of "go" that he would never have time again to mourn over lost opportunities, or opportunities he james c. Mcdonald. never had. "You're the first person that has]ever asked me to lookback,"

SOME MEN WHO HAVE DONE THINGS. 829 Mr. McDonald said to me, when I called on him. "I'm too busy looking ahead. Besides, I don't believe in looking back." When I remembered what happened to Lot's wife, on account of a predilection she had for rearward glances, I could not in all conscience blame him, provided he would look back only this once. And he did. Twenty-five years ago Mr. McDonald ventured out in business for himself. That business was handling confectionery, Chinese mat rice, and other such articles. Today he employs about four hundred workers in his Salt Lake chocolate and cocoa plant, and has five branch houses— Denver, Seattle, Spokane, Portland and Los Angeles. The only capital he had to begin with was a Scotch parentage and some early lessons that sank deep. His mother was pronounced in the ability to get, his father in the capacity to keep, and both in the power to work tirelessly. James G. has far outstripped his parents in all these capabilities, and opened up realms in each that the parents did not even dream of. That his home environment was of the right sort otherwise, also, is evident. Mr. McDonald believes in himself, but he believes profoundly in the Lord, as well. He declares that he has never in his life undertaken an important step without first making it a matter of earnest prayer — a thing for which a good many business men nowadays have no time. A couple of stories, I think, will reveal the secret of James G's success in life. When a boy he was fond of the violin, as he is yet, in fact; for the McDonalds have a gift in music. And so he wished to take lessons of Professor So-and-so,- up the street. He wanted to know what the father thought about it. "D'ye think, Jimmie," said the canny Scotchman, "ye can be the best fiddler in the world?" Jimmie disclaimed such far-reaching ambitions in the field of the violin. "Well, then, dinna ye study music. Take something useful. There's monny fiddlers in hell— dinna ye go there." And here's where Mr. McDonald first learned the difference between a violinist and a fiddler.

830 IMPROVEMENT ERA. A year or so after his marriage he was passing Swaner's jewelry store one evening on his way home. Glancing in at the window he saw a beautiful sterling silver water pitcher. Instantly a bit of sentiment took hold of him. He went in. "How much is that vase?" he asked the jeweler. "Thirty-seven dollars." "I'll take it." On his way home he got to thinking. "There's thirty-seven dollars I've sunk," he said to himself. "Thirty-seven dollars put out of commission. With that money I could have bought so much goods, turned them so many times a month, and in a year made several hundred dollars." He has never bought any more silver water pitchers. I have often, in this series of articles on successful men, had occasion to point out the fact that when you look carefully into the lives of those who have done anything on a big scale, nine to one you will be astonished at the simplicity of their ways of doing it. In none of the men on our list is this fact more patent than in James G. McDonald. There is nothing resembling the dark and devious in his career and methods. The motive of his life is to succeed. This is a passion with him. Money is not his aim— has never been. Small, as men go, in size, he is a tremendous force. When he sets his Scotch head, depend upon it, something's going to pop, and it won't be the Scotchman, either. And the more difficult the thing, the harder he sets his head. It's a tonic, the way he does things. Daring and venturesome in business as an old buccaneer on the ocean, yet, paradoxical as it may be, he will never enter upon anything till he is assured it will succeed. "I dislike failure of any sort," he said. "I don't want to be a party to anything that is going to fail, that is not going to succeed." The other day a man came to him with an invitation to join a business enterprise. "What do you know about it?" he inquired The man did not know very much about it except the general plan. "Then what do you want to go into it for?" A few days afterwards he met the same person. "Since I spoke to you last," he told him, "I have studied that business affair. I've found out the actual standing of concerns like it in Denver, have discovered

SOME MEN WHO HAVE DONE THINGS. 831 the headway it has made, the money invested, the territory it has to put its goods in, and I don't think I want to go into the enterprise." He looks before he leaps, not because his money may be involved, but because of his desire for success. Mr. McDonald, however, does not want merely to succeed. He wants to succeed by perfectly honorable and straightforward means. It would be just as easy for him, as for others, to dope his candy, shell his cocoa, or to use other long-shot methods in his trade. But he does not. Instead of using second or third grade butter in his candy, he uses only first grade, and first grade materials in every variety of his products. It is better, he thinks, to ask a fair price for a first class article, than a low price for a second class article. If you satisfy your customers, they will trade with you. "What would happen, do you think," he asked me, "if I should turn out long-shot goods in cocoa?" "People would take to drinking tea,'' I answered. "Correct!" he exclaimed. "And where would my cocoa business be?" "But," I protested, "a good many business concerns act on the principle that they can turn out successfully long-shot goods." "That is true," he replied. "But they're fools. Nobody can build up a permanent and growing trade on such a principle. You can't deceive people all the time. The housewife may take your cheap-made goods this once, and say nothing about it. But she goes somewhere else next time. I am building up a business to hand down to my children, and I can't afford to hand them anything that's tarnished." Nor does Mr. McDonald stop with the material of his candies and cocoa. The very boxes are a thing of beauty and, therefore, desirable. It came about in this way. When he first went into the business of making his own paper boxes, it was new to him, and he had to make haste slowly. But he knew the principle upon which everything, boxes included, should be made. He knew right from wrong, even here. And so, when his employees, who were on piecework, turned out a crudelooking box, he carried it gingerly over to the heating stove in the

832 IMPROVEMENT ERA. factory and threw it in. The workers lost their piecework and he lost his material, by this interesting process, but he didn't have to keep on burning boxes. And that's a great point. After six months in this business, he took the gold medal for the best boxes, and that against strong competition. The same honesty characterizes his methods of disposing of his goods. Once he learned that one of his men was resorting to questionable ways of gaining trade. He called him upon that green rug in the office. "Look here," he said, "this business was not built up by tricks. .If these things you sell are good, people will buy them and want more. If they're not, what's the use lying about them?'' Success, honest success, but success out of the material at hand — that is also true of Mr. McDonald. And this is a point worth learning. Mr. McDonald does not go around wondering whether he could not succeed if he only had the moon or some of the fixed stars as his place of abode. He took up his residence, he picked up a business, on this old earth of ours, on the American continent, in western America, in Salt Lake City. And why? Merely for the trivial reason that he happened to have been born here and not somewhere else. If he had been born in New Jersey, he wouldn't have been hunting for Salt Lake. He believes in home industry with a vengeance. "For a number of years," he said, when I asked him about finding opportunities or making them, — "for a number of years our young men have been leaving the state of their birth, their inheritances for what they imagine greater opportunities elsewhere. At the same time farmers and business men of the East and the Middle West have been coming among us and finding greater possibilities than they could find anywhere else. The truth is, too many of our people have got it into their heads that they have to have a hundred and sixty acres of land to make a living on, and as soon as they can't find that amount here they go somewhere else. An Illinois or an Ohio farmer will make an independent fortune out of twenty acres. A Chinaman gets rich out of five acres. "I visited a plant in this city the other day where they dress about seven thousand chickens a week. Salt Lake city uses about

SOME MEN WHO HAVE DONE THINGS. 833 sixteen thousand pounds of chicken every week. These fowls are shipped here from Kansas. Formerly they were sent in cold storage, but now they come alive in car loads. And the proprietor told me that the saving in feathers alone, which sell for from nine to eighteen cents a pound, almost pays the freight on the whole. "Why doesn't somebody raise chickens here? Does Kansas have any greater natural advantages than Utah? The trouble is that a good many people do not make the best of what they have. "A fruit packer in Utah county told me that one acre down there yielded, in peaches, sixteen hundred dollars in one season. WHERE THE CHOCOLATES ARE MADE.

834 IMPROVEMENT ERA. That's rather high, isn't it? But suppose you take half of this fjgure as an average yield. Five acres, properly cultivated, will bring four thousand dollars a year. That's not bad. "There's no need for our young men to go away. All they have to do is to look around them, to make use of what they've got. If they go away, others will take their places here, and then they'll be sorry they went." The way Mr. McDonald has gone about it, is what has counted most, I think. He has done two things that every boy ought to know. First, he has specialized. It isn't generally known that he deliberately threw away a hundred and fifty thousand dollars worth of business, in order to specialize. He eliminated seven hundred kinds of confectionery in order that he might take up one — chocolates. "I cut out the cheap confectionery," he said, "prize boxes, chewing gum, nuts, and such things. What did I do? I went into the exclusive manufacture of chocolates." This was a hazardous thing to do, for no one else had the nerve to try it in America. People said he was crazy, a fool, and called him other choice epithets. But he had his eye on bigger things than what these "people" saw. And now everybody knows the result. He early learned the great law of division of labor — that you can do one thing better than you can do a hundred different things. And he knew, too, the immense territory there is in these western states. He asked me: "Do you know what I would do if I owned the Blank Hat Factory? (He didn't say hat factory at all. He said something else. But hats will do.) I would specialize. If I only made boys' hats, I would go to Philadelphia, get the most skilled hatters (if I couldn't get them here) buy the most modern machinery, and turn out the best boys' hats in the civilized world." There's nothing like this idea of doing one thing and doing that absolutely right. How many McDonalds do you think there is room for in Utah? Would we had a few more! Home industry would be a different thing then. And you wouldn't have to coax people to buy home-made goods. They'd buy them without. You couldn't stop them from buying. Who has to be wheedled and cajoled into eating McDonald's chocolates!

SOME MEN WHO HAVE DONE THINGS. 835 The second thing I promised to speak of is the man's tireless energy. This is positively something amazing. In this respect he resembles the forces of nature. He believes it is better to wear out than to rust out. A prominent man told him, when he was eighteen, that he was burning the candle at both ends. And yet it seems to last as well as some candles that have never been lighted. "Most Americans are lazy," he observed. "They're afraid of work — unless you give a different meaning to the word 'afraid,' as in the case of the boy who was so little afraid of work that he lay down and slept by it. Do you think I could have built up a business like this on eight hours a day?" "Eighteen, rather," I suggested. And he is long-visioned as an eagle. He invented that phrase about Salt Lake's being the hub. He drew a map with Salt Lake as the hub, and seven other cities at the end of the spokes. That came out of the candy and chocolate business. He established a branch house in Los Angeles — and lost money there for four years. Now, however, he is getting it all back — and more. The same is true of Seattle. That is still a bottomless pit. But he characteristically persists, because his eagle eye can see that that city commands the territory of Alaska and of British Columbia. So it will go on till, in the end, by foresight, by intelligence, by honesty, by untiring work, this astonishing man shall have it literally to say, as he now says figuratively, "McDonald feeds chocolates to the world!" New States. The Arizona and New Mexico statehood bill, after remaining on the Senate calendar for almost three months, was taken up by the Senate on June 16, and passed, after a debate lasting a little more than two hours. Speeches were made in favor of the bill by Senators Beveridge, Frazier Hughes and Smoot. As amended by the Senate, the bill provides for the admission as states of the two territories, after a constitution has been adopted by each of them, approved by the president and ratified by Congress. The bill, as amended, has passed both houses, and was signed by President Taft, June 20, 1910.

ELDER CHARLES W. PENROSE, Of the quorum of Twelve Apostles, who landed in New York June 17, on his return from presiding over the European mission. He left Salt Lake City, October 15, 1906, and arrived June 21, 1910. The Era joins his many friends in extending him hearty greetings on his return home.