INTRODUCTION by Joseph G.Cannon.
The man whose life story is here presented between book covers is at the time of writing only forty-eight years old.

When I met him many years ago he was a young man full of enthusiasm.

I remember saying to him then, "With your enthusiasm and the sparkle which you have in your eyes I am sure you will make good." Why should so young a man, one so recently elevated to official prominence, write his memoirs?
That question will occur to those who do not know Jim Davis.

His elevation to a Cabinet post marks not the beginning of his career, but rather is the curtain-rise on the second act of one of those dramatic lives with which America has so often astounded the world.

Bruised and bleeding in a southern, peon camp, where he and other hungry men had been trapped by a brutal slave driver, he drank the bitter cup of unrequited toil.