O OR MORE 268

XIV. LADIES FIRST? 279

[Transcriber's Note: Please note that the book does not credit an
author. The Library of Congress lists Nella Henney as the author.]

PART I

THE BOOK OF BUSINESS ETIQUETTE

I

THE AMERICAN BUSINESS MAN

The business man is the national hero of America, as native to the soil
and as typical of the country as baseball or Broadway or big
advertising. He is an interesting figure, picturesque and not unlovable,
not so dashing perhaps as a knight in armor or a soldier in uniform, but
he is not without the noble (and ignoble) qualities which have
characterized the tribe of man since the world began. America, in common
with other countries, has had distinguished statesmen and soldiers,
authors and artists--and they have not all gone to their graves
unhonored and unsung--but the hero story which belongs to her and to no
one else is the story of the business man.

Nearly always it has had its beginning in humble surroundings, with a
little boy born in a log cabin in the woods, in a wretched shanty at
the edge of a field, in a crowded tenement section or in the slums of a
foreign city, who studied and worked by daylight and firelight while he
made his living blacking boots or selling papers until he found the
trail by which he could climb to what we are pleased to call success.
Measured by the standards of Greece and Rome or the Middle Ages, when
practically the only form of achievement worth mentioning was fighting
to kill, his career has not been a romantic one. It has had to do not
with dragons and banners and trumpets, but with stockyards and oil
fields, with railroads, sewer systems, heat, light, and water plants,
telephones, cotton, corn, ten-cent stores and--we might as well make a
clean breast of it--chewing gum.

We have no desire to crown the business man with a halo, though judging
from their magazines and from the stories which they write of their own
lives, they are almost without spot or blemish. Most of them seem not
even to have had faults to overcome. They were born perfect. Now the
truth is that the methods of accomplishment which the American business
man has used have not always been above reproach and still are not. At
the same time it would not be hard to prove that he--and here we are
speaking of the average--with all his faults and failings (and they are
many), with all his virtues (and he is not