Cyrus Ching, a renowned labour mediator in the United States, was born in Prince Edward Island, but I hadn’t heard of him before reading about him in the October 26, 1949 edition of the Charlottetown Guardian.
I am familiar with his dry wit, though, and I wonder if it came from his early PEI childhood, which sounded quite challenging. I’ve known a few farmers possessed of a dry wit, usually accompanied by the calm and goodnatured mien necessary to persevere in an occupation where you are constantly at the mercy of weather and fortune. I have benefited from being on a couple of community boards with some intelligent, dry-witted farmers, and have learned a lot from them about curbing my chatterbox tendencies and making few, brief comments after all the other chatterboxes have exhausted themselves. It is a powerful technique, and people listen.
Here’s the entire article (including, unfortunately, a bit of the casual racism of the time):
Dry Native Humor Of Islander Is Noted In Refereeing Labor Spats
Washington D.C., Oct. 25 – One of the few reassuring sights in strike-tense Washington these days is a massive man with a shy grin and a huge pipe who lumbers in and out of the White House, the least mysterious participant to enter mysterious meetings.
If you were to point him out to a stranger and say, “That’s the man who is in the middle of one of the most crucial strikes in U.S. history,” the stranger wouldn’t believe you. Cyrus P. Ching, Director of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, just doesn’t look like the “crucial” type.
Only clue to the tremendous responsibility which he has carried around for the last couple of years in the job, and which today is at peak-load, is a slight stooping of his huge frame and a minor hesitation in his step. Even stooped shoulders, however, don’t bring his six-foot, seven-inch frame down to the level of average men.
Few persons have the privilege of becoming legendary while they are still alive. Ching has that honor. There just seems to be a sort of legendary quality about the constant, semi-amused, yet quietly profound manner of the man.
Many Anecdotes
There’s almost no limit to the anecdotes involving his dry humor and the subtle devices he has used to get labor and management in a friendly mood. He calls these things “establishing better communications with people.”
Once he was having a particularly difficult time with a union man named Lee, during a tough negotiation. Lee was about to walk out when Ching said: “Maybe we’d better get out of this labor business altogether and start a little laundry.” After the moment it took for all present to catch the gag, there was a big guffaw which relaxed the tension and greased the way for a successful settlement. His favorite line to use on a negotiator who has his dander up is to ask him if he ever heard of “rule six” of the British Navy. That brings the question of what rule six is, and then Ching tells this story:
“During World War I U.S. Navy Secretary Josephus Daniels was visiting British Admiral Beatty. In their presence a captain started sounding off about how the war was being run. Beatty said to him in a sharp voice. ‘You are violating rule six of the British Navy.’ That shut him up and later Daniels asked Beatty what rule six was. Beatty replied, ‘Never take your self too damn seriously.'”
Nation’s Foremost Mediator
Ching is the nation’s No. 1 labor mediator for many more reasons than having a good collection of stories. He has had a key part in the most controversial piece of labor legislation in history, the Taft-Hartley Act, and after two years still has the confidence and friendship of both labor and management leaders.
Ching sums up his philosophy on labor relations in this way:
“Promoting proper labor relationships is nothing you can do overnight. It isn’t anything you can do by law. You can set up machinery to soften the blows of people not inclined to get along together. You can pad their gloves a little, and it may be necessary to have a referee to do that. But in the last analysis labor relations begin down in the bottom department of the plant between the foreman and employee.”
On his job as boss of the Conciliation Service he says:
“We cannot measure the efficiency of a conciliation service by the number of fires it extinguishes. We can measure it only by the machinery we build up to encourage people to settle their own disputes. In other words, the test of conciliation is how few disputes lead to strikes and how many disputes are settled directly by the parties, with whatever help we can supply. My job is to contribute to fire prevention.”
Born In P.E.I.
Ching knows the hard road of success. At 13 he took over management of the Prince Edward Island, Canada, farm on which he was born. After a stint of fur trading and commercial fishing following his farming, he went to a Canadian business school. Soon after graduation at 19, he took off for the big city of Boston. It has been written:
“All he had at the time, when he stepped off the train, was a gripsack, a copy of Bryce’s “The American Commonwealth,” which he had read at 14, and $31.”
First job was on the Boston Elevated Railway Co. Not too many years later he was assistant to the traction company’s president. He had studied law by that time and personnel matters were his specialty. Then labor relations became his sole endeavor and he wound up director of that activity for the U.S. Rubber, just before he came to Uncle Sam.
When people ask him about his Chinese-sounding name – which is Welsh – he replies: “I am three-quarters Scotch and one-quarter soda.”
The article notes that Cyrus had “a slight stooping of his huge frame and a minor hesitation in his step,” but the writer neglected to mention that Cyrus was 73 years old in 1949! According to his Wikpedia entry, he worked up until his death in 1967 at age 91. His Wikipedia entry links to a National Archives clip of Cyrus on an early US television program, and it’s worth a look to try to hear his Island roots in his speech.
