The American Omen - Garrett

7/28/2019 The American Omen - Garrett

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TheAMERICAN OMENB Y

G A R E T G A R R E T TAuthor of "Ouroboros," "The Cinder-Buggy," etc.

E . P. DUTTON & CO., INC.PUBLISHERS : : NE W YOKE


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T H E A M E R I C A N O M E N , C O P Y R I G H T , 19 2 8B Y E . P . D U T T O N & C O . , I N C .ALL RIGHTS RESERVED : : PRINTED IN U.S.A.

Fi rst Prin ting September, 1928.Second Pr inting September, 1928.Third Printing September, 1928.Fourth Printin g September, 1928.


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N O T E :

Contained herein is matter that appeared seriallyas "The American Book of Wonder" inThe Saturday Evening Post.


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CONTENTSPage

WITNESS OF EPOCH 3I Interrogating the face of change . . 3I I Why has the sign of world supremacyp a s s e d t o t h i s h e misp h e re ? . . . . 5I I I The f a l s e war m y t h 10I V F a c t s t h a t c a n n o t e x p l a i n t he m se lv e s . 1 3

BEVOLT OF THE MIND 18I T h e A m e r i c a n m e n t a l i t y 1 8I I N a t i v e w a y s of t h i n k i n g 24I I I S t r u g g l e w i th th e old w o r l d ' s d o o m b o o kof po l i t i c a l economy 28I V The s a c r e d law of p o v e r t y . . . . 31V T h e t h o u g h t t h a t o v e r t h r e w i t . . . 40

CONFLICT 43I N a t i v e w a y s of fee l ing 43I I The economic secre t is h u m a n . . . 48I I I D i s c o v e r i e s in u n d e r s t a n d i n g . . . . 59I V E v o l u t i o n of sc i e n t i f i c man ag e me n t . . 68V T h o u g h t is emot iona l i zed , fee l ing i sr a t i o n a l i z e d , and the r e v o l u t i o n is com-

p l e t e 73KEYS TO PLENTY 78I New time 78

I I The forces of production set free . . 82I I I Mechanical extensions 86IV Dilemma of quantity 90

V Save the man; spend the machine . . 94VI Our fifty tame slaves per capita . . . 97

VII Effects of this American tempo . . 100[v i i ]


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CONTENTSPage

VIII On the capital function of money . . 103IX On the output of wealth and power of

consumption 107X On Wall Street control of business . . 110

DIVISION 113I Yours and mine and ours 113

II The irrational dispute 115III Creative parts 121IV The exploiting lord's solution . . . 125V Uprooting the low wage fallacy . . . 128

VI Finding the true law of wagesa lawof proportion 132

VII Application of that law also to profits 138VIII Bankrupt antagonisms 145

TH E NEW MEANING OF BUSINESS 1 51I Rise of the moral structure . , . . 151

II What was there before 153III Motives 159IV The age of dreadsocialism, revolution

or self-conquest 167V Sudden advent of a power no law could

tame 170VI Business immemorially stigmatized as

a vulgar art 173VII Its social redemption 175

VIII The word and spirit of service . . . 182IX Penetrations 186

TOMOEEOW 1 91I The question: Is prosperity unlimited? 191

II Concerning the idea of progress . . 194III Two fears 196[viii]


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CONTENTSPage

I V O v e r p r o d u c t i o n c l a s s ic a l l y r e g a r d e d asa menace 199V I t s o t h e r m e a n i n g 203V I T w o r e a s o n s w h y p e o pl e m a y b e u n a b l et o c o n su m e w h a t t h e y p ro d u c e . . . 207V I I O v e r p r o d uc t io n r e g a r d e d as the p r i c eo f g r e a t e r p l e n t y 21 3V I I I T h e second f ea r a nnu l s the first . . . 217I X Eff iciency as a new dimension . . . . 220X V a s t m a r g i n s 22 3MACHINE PEOPLE 22 8

I M a n ' s f e a r of m a c h i n e s is d r e a d of h i m -self 228I I Al l w heels do r u n by f a i t h 233I I I E x p l o r i n g t h e a b s o l u t e s e a . . . . 240I V N o w a y t o g o b a c k . . . . . . 245V T h e i n c o r r u p t i b l e i m a g e of t r u t h . . 250V I I t s effect upon our minds an d be-haviour 254*


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V I S T AH P H ER E have been two great American construc-- tions.T he first w as political. Perilous ideas of com-mon freedom were put headlong to a working trial;and the proof now is that among the major unitsof human society this is the only one that hasendured as a nation for a century and a half by nograce of king, priest, tyrant or dictator.The second was economic; and here now is astandard of common living the highest so far as weknow in the history of the race.Beginning to appear are the ground signs of athird construction. I ts significance, if it ha ppens,will be social.Freedom as we know it is a condition of ego.Prospe rity is a condition of things . Increase thesesatisfactions to any degree and there is still thatknowledge of incompleteness which torments thespirit. Th is is the anx iety of the perishable I fra g-ment to make affinity with an imperishable whole.Beyond the sense of belonging to himself man cravesalso the sense of himself belonging. W e a re boundto live two lives a t a time. One is our own, a l ittlearc, sudden and discontinuous; the other is the lifeof society, perp etua l and perhaps imm ortal. To livethem consciously, without conflict, so that one shallfulfill the other, is the nex t achievement. Necessitylies in one, completion in the other.

That servile status of the individual binding himto the sceptre, to the sta te, to the lord, to the land on[ x i ]


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VISTAwhich he grew, with no inalienable rights of being,is the oldest political story . The extreme revolu-tion, wherein the state itself becomes the cringingbody, mob-serving, owing everything to the individ-ual who owes it nothing in return, is a complicatedmodern story, with some fearful and abrupt periods.An entirely new story would be that of a people jeal-ously egoistic dedicating their freedom to a socialimperative discovered in themselves and learning bythat act what freedom is for.In the mirror of fa ith there is a lready reflecting anaerial image of this third great American construc-tion. Le t us be not discouraged if for momentstogether it disappears from view. It s beginnings,as were those also of the other two, are involved inconfusion, up roa r and episodes of disaster, w ithbesides some aspects of new unsightliness. This isinevitable. W e stand too nea r. So however thew orld was made, it w as not made w ithout much wasteand litter; and truth itself must first come true.

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THE AMERICAN OMEN


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THE AMERICAN OMENWITNESS OF EPOCH

IInterrogating the Face of Change

TO stand first in the earth, paramount thereon, isthe p a rt of one people a t a time by lot and period.The sign regnant went to and fro inAsia beforethere was any western civilization, and sometimegilded the dome of Africa. Rome conquered it. Fora thousand odd years it was lost; then it rose againin Eu rope . Now it comes to us. I ts migra tion tothis hemisphere is a fundamental event and onemighty for change.W orld supremacy is not by golden chance. Suchan idea was the bad star of Spain 4)00 years ago.What was it then seated England in that office ofpower? Economic facts, perha ps. Rich coal meas-ures at tidewater, skill of trade and banking, argo-sies, amonopoly of machine cra ft. Yet she had noore. There was other coal. Th e D utch were grea ttraders and bankers, with many ships, before theEnglish knew the art of international commerce.And as for machine craft, anyone so minded mighthave beaten her a t it. The Germans, when they w ereready, did it in thirty years.The weakness of economic explanations is theirsuave plausibility. They pass over the historicalfootnote that says supremacy has in every case indi-cated a significant contribution to the data of human

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THE AMERICAN OMENexperience. In the case of Great Britain , was it anerrand to the backward peoples of the earth in theguise of trade, or was it to demonstrate the first ageof industrialism? I t may be too soon to say . B utimagine wiping out the fact of British supremacy asif it ha d never been. Would the w orld be a differentplace? Or in the same w ay erase the fact of Roma nsuprem acy. Certa inly life now would be in somew ays very different. Yet you cannot say preciselyhow; you cannot say what would have happened inplace of what did.And now American supremacy regarded as anevent: W ha t does th a t mean?Here is the beginning of power in new series withnew meaning. Never before had people so muchpow er either actua l or relative. The fact came sud-denly to view, as if it had not been historically pre-pared, and that is a way of happening peculiar tothe things of destiny. Nobody knows w hat destinyis. If perhaps it is in itself a necessity higher thanour own, we do not know w hat law it obeys. But wemay be sure it cannot act where there is nothing tobe acted upon. T o bring its ends to pa ss, it mustbe supposed to require conditions. Therefore, asconcerning the cause, w hether you conceive i t to hav ebeen circumstantial or mysterious, you come to thesame question. You may ask by w hat means wehave arrived unawares at this place or you may askw hat was here to at tra ct this destiny. I t is all thesame.W ha t were the conditions ?


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WITNESS OF EPOCH

I IWhy Has the Sign of World Supremacy Passed to

This Hemisphere?Other people are asking, most anxiously the peo-

ple of Europe, because world supremacy in one handor another had been so long a possession of theirs thatthey had come to think of it as a natural right.Engineers, bankers, economists, trained observersand various missions under private and public man-date have been sent hither to discover the sources andsecrets of American power. What they have foundand reported in every case were the effects. Wealth,prosperity, methodthese are the functions ofAmerican power; works and things are its visibleaspects. Wipe them out entirely and they will pre-sently appear again for the same first reason and inthe same meaning. No foreign analysis of what isworking in this country has discovered either thatreason or that meaning.

The German investigators, with no word in theirown language for what we mean when we say pros-perity, have been deeply impressed by the rationalityof our mechanical and methodical procedures; theyhave already produced a literature on the rational-ization of industry, which is now having voguethroughout Europe; and they have, of course, beenrationalizing German industry, more or less as theBerlin banker rationalized his clerical departmentafter having seen in the Federal Reserve Bank ofNew York time-saving equipment and method by

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THE AMERICAN OMENmeans of which one American clerk did the work oftwenty German clerks. H e imported both the equip-ment and the method and let out nineteen clerks inevery twenty; but when an American asked him ifhe had raised the pay of the twentieth clerk he wasunable to comprehend the meaning of the question.Had the clerks bought the equipment or discoveredthe method? No. D id the twentieth clerk workany ha rder than he had w orked before? No. Thenwhy should he have more pa y ? T ha t view , of course,is rational.The British have identified a more significanteffect. They hav e been seeking the American secretof high wages.A London newspaper sent a delegation of trades-union people on a voyage of discovery. They v isitedmany w orks, touched the fur coats and silk garmentsin the indiv idual lockers of American industry 'swomen workers, stared at the wage earners' motorcars parked by hundreds around the factory, talkeda good deal about wage-rate systems and the differ-ent theories that govern themand went home now iser. Th eir repo rt was a tale of wonder.

Two British engineers produced a sensation witha book on the dynamics of American industry . Moremechanical power, keener instruments, better methodand mass production at low coststhere was thesecret. Let Engla nd mind. But here again themistake of tak ing effect as cause. M ultiple produc-tion, now called mass production, is as old as indus-trial machines; Great Britain had it first. Whatmakes it so astonishing to them as they now see it in[ 6 ]


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WITNESS OF EPOCHthe United States isthe degree of its development,which is merely an effect. Besides, there is mass pro -duction inGreat Britain directly copied from us.You may see it. A t Oxford is amotor plant wherethe form of practice, moving chain and all, is asit is m Detroit. An American, who was neither anengineer nor an industrialist, going through thispl a nt, came to the pa int job . They seemed particu-la rly proud of it and said to him, "H ere we can pa inta body in two minutes."The American, knowing the output, made amen-tal calculation and said, "Inthat case you mighteasily do the whole job in one stall . W hy four stallshere in the middle of your pl a nt, mak ing a bad trafficjam, when you could paint all your bodies in one?"They said, "Our customers, unfortunately, arenot so easily pleased as your own. W e have to givethem achoice of at least four colors."The American said, "Yes. Still, why four stallswhen one w ould do ?"They said, patiently, "Don't you see?the manthere now is spra y ing black pa int. Th e next bodymay call for blue. If he should have to blow all theblack paint out of his tube and clean it for blue, thatwould be wasteful of time and materialwhat youAmericans call inefficient."The American said, "Yes. But why not four tubesto one sta ll? "Th ey were silent for aminute, and then answered,"Do you know, that idea had never occurred to any-one here."The American tried to think of some way to tell[ 7 ]


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THE AM ERICANthem why it would be impossible for such an ideanot to occur to someone in an American plant, whyit might occur ju s t as easily to the man handling thepaint tube as to the superintendent, why the man atthe paint tube could not help imparting it once ithad occurred to him, and why B ut he gave itall up and said nothing . There was the form andnot spirit.

fhen a royal British delegation was appointed byHis Majesty's Government to study and report onindustria l conditions in the United Sta tes. I t dida typica l British jo b , full of excellence, an d reported,among other discoveries, that:"The workpeople accept experiments toward re-duced costs of p roduction, as they hav e always foundthat the result of lower costs has been increased con-sumption and consequently more employment."The British point of view is explicit in the term"workpeople." It is thereafter implicit in theassumption that when costs are reduced and con-sumption consequently has been increased, the bless-ing of it to the workpeople is simply more employ-ment.Lastly, the League of Nations decides to make acareful study of American industry in contrast withthat of Europe in order to see if it will be possible,quoting the words of Monsieur Loucheur, "to trans-pose certain parts of the American system into theEuropean system."As well speak of transposing certain parts of a

tree. You might have all the parts, yet without thesubtle principle of the living tree, the natural laws[ 8 ]


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WITNESS OF EPOCHof its origin, growth and reproduction, you wouldhave only lumber for your pa ins. The whole Am eri-can industrial system is an effectthe mere visi-bility of invisible powers.What parts of it, as parts, Europe would like totranspose are not ha rd to guess. One of the Frenchexplorers was Andre Siegfried, an eminent econo-mist, who wrote a book entitled America Comes ofAge. A brilliant book, containing glimpses of deeppolitical insight. The French mentality is politica l.But as to the American industrial system, touchingthe same idea that now animates the economic mindof the League of Nations, Monsieur Siegfried says:"The question that Europeans find most intrigu-ing is whether America will be able to withstandinterna tiona l competition and a t the same time main-tain her enormous wages and exceptional standardof living. Possibly we are not aw are of the immenseeffort that has been made since the war to adaptAmerican industry to the change in the labor mar-ket, by installing the very la test equipment. Oneis almost tempted to state that Europe, with herintelligence, technical perfection and high civiliza-tion, could adopt the same policy and also profit byher lower wages and less pretentious mode of living."Which is only to show how far he had missed itthe secret they all come seeking.They see in the American system low costs ofproduction, high wages, high standards of commonliving; and they think, "If only we had those lowAmerican costs with our low European wages, howprofitable that would be!"[ 9 ]


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THE AMERICAN OMENIII

The False War MythWhat they seek is not obvious. All the truth of it

is new and fundamentally strange to Old World tra-ditions and mind habits. But there is one definiteand fatuous reason why they miss it. Their charac-teristic approach is under tyranny of the idea thatAmericans got rich in the war. Thus all the higherphenomena of American prosperity appear to themto have occurred by chance and to wear an aspect ofpost-wartime unreality. Even when upon reflectionthey recognize that other causes must have beenacting, still, almost invariably they put that notionfirst. It has become a morbidity of Europeanthought. For a fairly complete representation of itsee any European article on the subject of war debtsor on the possibilities of an economic union of Europeagainst the United States.

The royal delegation appointed to study industrialconditions in the United States could not avoid thethought that we had been war-made. It wrote:

"The war gave an impetus to the expansion ofmanufacture in all branches of industry and leftthe United States a creditor nation in relation toEurope." Immediately it was obliged to add: "Since1922 there has been a rapid increase in the volumeof manufacture in most branches of industry."

It is true, the war stimulated industry in theUnited States, necessarily; it stimulated industryalso in Great Britain, France, Germanyevery-whereto the utmost. That after the war there was

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WITNESS OF EPOCHnot a farther expansion in Europe, such as occurredin the United Sta tes, is the crucial fa ct. Conditionswere similar on both sides. Inflated w ages, highcosts, people wanting more things than they hadever wanted before, and from the war an industrialcapacity much greater than had ever existed inpeacetime. The problem was the same there as itwas herewhether to cheapen goods or cheapenlabor.One way is to satisfy more w ants ; the other way isto limit them. W e cheapened the goods simply byincreasing the productivity of labor, and found notonly that what had been regarded as an excess ofindustrial capacity could be employed but that moreand more was needed.In July, 1926, the Monthly Labor Review, pub-lished by the United States Department of Labor,sa id: "W e are a t the present time experiencing themost remarkable advance in productive efficiency inthe history of the modern industrial system." T ha tmeans the cheapening of goods; it means low costsand high w ages. The aim is prosperity .This advance in productive efficiency was thedirect cause of that rapid increase in the volume ofmanufacture since 1922 referred to by the royaldelegation. The w ar stimulus had nothing w hat-ever to do with it; neither had gold anything to dowith it, nor the fact that we had become a creditornation in relation to Europe.It is not entirely from selling itself a politicalpropaganda against debt payment that the Euro-pean mind becomes fixed upon the thought that it


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THE AMERICAN OMENwas the w ar made Americans rich. Th e E uropea nmind's traditional way of regarding wealth, conceiv-ing it to be a product whereas we conceive it to be afactor, would hinder its understand ing. As we thinkof wealth it is not a sum, variable only by additionand subtra ction , nor is it exten t of possession. I t isa body of great means, containing a principle ofproliferation that causes it to increase by division.We think much less about wealth as such thanabout prosperity , and they are not the same. Th emeasure of prosperity is not what people possess; itis w hat they consume. The per ca pita w ealth ofRobinson Crusoe's kingdom w as very grea t. Tw omen possessed every thing. Yet their state of pro s-pe rity was low, because w ithout the engines and toolsto multiply the power of their hands they could notproduce more than enough to satisfy the wants ofsimple necessity. All the gold in the w orld, a ll theforeign investments in the world, plus unlimitedsources of raw materials, would not have increasedtheir prosperity in the least.So in the foreign doctrine that the United Statesgot rich in the war one must recognize both maliceof fable and disability of view.The facts a re these : Above their own exertionsin the war, the American people, out of their ownresources, produced and loaned to the Allies goodsto the va lue of $10,000,000,000. Th en in the firstten y ears af ter the w ar, the American people, thoughtheir own wants were rising, nevertheless producedand loaned to European and other foreign countriesgoods to the va lue of $15,000,000,000 more. For[12 1


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WITNESS OF EPOCHthese goods we hold receipts in the form of paperpromises to repay . W hether in fact we shall everbe repa id, or if so, how , we do not know . T ha t is notthe topic. The question is how the United Sta tescould have got rich, how its prosperity could havebeen increased at all, by lending away to other peo-ple in the course of twelve years some $25,000,000,-000 worth of consumable goods.

If we were receiving any of them back, or thematerial equivalent, it might be supposed that wewere now enjoying a postponed power of consump-tion. But we are not. W e a re still lending aw aymore than we a re getting back. All we have to showfor the goods we have loaned away to Europe arebondssome of them of very dubious value. W ecannot eat or wear foreign bonds, we cannot ridethem, we cannot use them as T-beams or turbineblades, and they have no fuel va lue. Among all theabsurdities of economic thought, this is perhaps theone most w eird, th a t a na tion may achieve prosperityby exporting more goods than it imports.IV

Facts That Cannot Explain ThemselvesNo material part of the spectacle of Americanprosperity is owing to the war; it is in spite of thewar, in spite of our having loaned away, perhapsforever, enormous quantities of goods that we havenot ceased to w ant for ourselves. I t may be th a t weowe to the experience of war a sense of power thatmight otherwise have come a little more slowly, a[ 1 3 ]


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THE AMERICAN OMENlesson in solidarity, a clarification of the nationalmind, a new fa ith in our own values; but it is no suchbusiness of the spirit people mean when they say itwas the war gave Americans first place in the world.Explanation turns next to the catalogue of Amer-ca's na tura l adv antages. Item : The extent andvariety of our resources in raw ma terials. Ite m :Our self-containment in essential food staples. Item :The size of our jealously protected domestic market,with its apparently insatiable capacity to absorbgoods. Item : Enormous quantities of cheap me-chanical pow er. And so on.But w hat a ll this amounts to is simply description.It may be that for world supremacy to pass fromEurope to America it was necessary that we shouldpossess these advantages: it is none the less certainthat merely the fact of our possessing them was notthe cause of tha t event. T ry b ut a few simplereductions.Raw materials?Access to sources of raw material has presented noproblem to Europe in the past, nor does it presentany problem now. Those who are urg ing an eco-nomic union of Europe against America already areboasting that Europe, with her vast colonial posses-sions, is superior to the United States in suchresources, and this is undoubtedly true. Moreover,there is the fact that the United States is the world'sheaviest buyer of raw materials. W e a re, for ex-ample, Great Britain's largest rubber customer.

Our self-containment in food staples?Europe for more than half a century has delib-[ 1 4 ]


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WITNESS OF EPOCHerately pursued the policy of exchanging manufac-tured goods for food, that is to say, skilled labor forpea san t labora s a pa y ing proposition. Besides,the market for food staples is an international mar-ket ; the price is a world price.The capacity of our domestic market?Th is is, of course, very importa nt. No coun try inEurope knows the capacity of its own market, forthe simple reason th a t not one has ever systematicallyor intensively explored it. Only now, in the Am eri-can example, are the industries of Euro pe beginningto reg a rd the possibility of rea lly exploiting domestictrade.Our supply of power?That we use much more mechanical energy percapita than any other people is not owing to theextent of our power resources, nor to the fact thatour power is chea p. W e do not use it because it isch ea p; it is cheap because we use it. Euro pe has notutilized her resources to anywhere near the samedegree. Nor is it tha t our engineering and technicalskill is superior. En gland knows better tha n to w asteenergy by millions of horsepower burning her coalin open grates.In any case, the physical, geographical and politi-cal conditions were all previously know n. W hyshould foreign countries be sending missions to theUnited States to confirm such facts as may be readout of the almanacs and yearbooks of any modernlang uag e? W e have no hidden na tura l resources,no secret sciences, no inventions that are not for sale.It is supposed that in the extremes of mechanical[ 1 5 ]


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THE AMERICAN OMENskill we a re inferior, and this may well be tru e. Intechnical knowledge we a re not superior. There isnothing we make that other people may not makealso, as well or perha ps better. W e have nothing inthe way of industrial method that is not publishedin tra de journa ls and magazines of technology. Any -one is free to copy our methods. The League ofNations is welcome to transpose the American sys-tem into the European system by part or whole;we make no mystery of it. W e have no new ideasamong us, abstract or concrete, but we give themimmediate circulation in print.The American book lies open. I t expla ins every-thing and is itself unexplained. W ho expounds themeaning that underlies the text?W ha t is new in the w orld is w ithout a name. I t isnot a system, not a method, not yet a formulatedphilosophy. Out of it is proceeding a new rea lity .American prosperity is its light and witness.D o we understand it ourselves ? Our relation to itis functional, no t contemplative. Tak e certain prem-ises in the interrogative case, as for example:American business is unlike business anywhereelse; it is unlike itself as it was only a few years ago.Wherein is this difference and what are its prin-ciples ?Formerly the American business man, like anyother, was content with money profit alone; thedegree of his profit was the degree of his content-ment. T h a t is no longer true. W ha t has happenedto him?We were once facing all those evils of laborism,[ 1 6 ]


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WITNESS OF EPOCHsuch as limitation of output, demarcation of jobs,puerile jurisdictional tyrannies, that still hinder theprosperity of Great Britain; there was a babel ofcounsel, no one knew the w ay out. Yet we escaped.How?We had capitalism here in its dangerous forms.But now, as we know labor without laborism, so weknow capita l w ithout capitalism. How is tha t?

We have gone much further than other peoplewith standardization and mass production, and yetwhat was predicted as an inevitable consequence ofthis method when it should have been carried to theAmerican extremenamely, th a t it would reducehuman beings to the mindless condition of automa-tonshas not happened. So fa r otherw ise, w hatstrikes the foreign observer deeplyeven the Eng-lish, who most of all dread losing their individualismto machine craftis the individualistic character ofAmerican w age earners. W ha t does th a t signify?Why is the conflict of man with himself and withhis environment more creative here tha n in countriesthat are older in culture, richer in experience andhad first possession of the transforming power ofmachines ?The American's own first impulse is to recitefacts from the open book that tells what we are doingand how we are doing it and yet contains no accountof itself.

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REVOLT OF THE MIND

The American Mentality/ I AHE first necessity is to comprehend American-- pro sperity as idea. Its works are for use andwonder; but the works of a people can be nothingelse than their thoughts externalized. If we aremak ing an o rigina l a ttack upon the economic aspectsof rea lity , it follows th a t we have among us, and musthave had to begin with, original ways of thinking.W ha t are they? How do Americans think ?The American mind possesses certain characteris-tics uniquely its own. So does the German mind, theFrench mind, the English mindany collective men-ta lity . W herein they differ one from another maybe a matter of very subtle comparison, and yet fromthe projection of such differences comes all contrast.Consider the American mind on its inventive side.Whether it is more or less inventive than the Euro-pean mind is often debated. Suppose it were eithermore or less. Th ere might still be an importantdifference in how it employs the inventiveness it has,and in fact there is. This can much better be illus-trated than defined.A Russian removing a dead horse from the stablepremises proceeds in this manner: He arrives witha live horse and wagon, alone. I t is the wagon youfirst notice, for it is high and narrow, with a rackaround it, and has no tackle or equipment for han-dling a carcass. You wonder how he expects a ll by[ 1 8 ]


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REVOLT OF THE MINDhimself to lift half a ton of dead horse into it.Leisurely he proceeds to do tha t thing. H e unhooksthe live horse and uses it to drag the carcass to aposition parallel to the wagon and about five feetfrom it. Nex t he goes to the other side of the wagonand with the leverage of a pole first sets it rockingand then tips it over toward the dead horse on theground. Now, w ith the w agon resting on its side,almost touching the carcass, he passes a rope aroundthe neck of the dead horse, which is limp, and easilylifts itthe neck aloneto the center of the wagonbed; there he suspends it by making the end of therope fast. Another rope he ties around the rum p,and the free end of that rope is laid around the hubof the upper rea r wheel, w hich, w ith the w agon on itsside, revolves in a horizontal plane.Now, using the wheel as a powerful windlass, helifts the whole body of the dead horse to the centerof the wagon bed, where he suspends it, as he sus-pended the neck, by making the rope fa st. W iththe carcass secured in the bed of the w agon, it is easyto tip the wagon back again to its natural positionby using the pole as a lever; or, if that is too muchexertion, he can do it with an overslung rope attachedto the live horse. This done, he hooks the live horseto the wagon and disappears.That the particular Russian one may happen tosee at this job did not invent the procedure is irrele-v ant. I t is a fine example of Russian ingenuity .No American could beat it, because, given the diffi-culties, the solution is perfect. The Russian is thusresourceful with difficulties; he invents ways to over-[ 1 9 ]


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THE AMERICAN OMENcome them. But he accepts the difficulties to beginw ith. Th ere is the pointA ty pica l Am erican, w atching this R ussian, wouldnot be in the least impressed by the ingenuity of theperformance. H e w ould say, "How dum b!" mean-ing how stupid in the first place to accept the diffi-culties. W hy not remove them? T h a t is his impulseremove the difficulties, change the fa cts. Specifi-cally, he thinks of a wagon built for the purpose,low swung on bent ax les, w ith proper tackle attached .Having imagined the special wagon, he asks himselfif it would pa y . Perhaps not. Such a w agon wouldnot be rig ht for general purposes also. Thereforethe special wagon calls for an organized specialactivity . W ith tw o or three of them one mightremove a ll the dead horses in Moscow. Then i twould pay.Such is the American's natural process of mind.Hence new forms, new methods, then new difficultiesand more new forms and methods, all in a state offluid change.Another rare characteristic of the American mindrequires in the same w ay to be illustrated . ThomasEdison ha s been a deep observer of it. Some yearsago, when electric locomotives w ere evolving, he usedto ask:"Have you seen that big electric engine on theNew York Central Railroadhow the power iscoupled to the wheels? No? I'l l tell you a storyabout it to show w hat happens to a ny of us when weget in a rut from knowing too much about the diffi-culties. Those engineers had finished the engine, a ll[ 2 0 ]


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REVOLT OF THE M INDbut one detail. They couldn't think of a proper w ayto get the power down to the wheels. T ha t sillyproblem has bothered engineers all over the world.You will see if you look in how many different waysthey have solved it. W ell, these engineers w ere stuck ,all in a rut. They had looked at the thing so longand knew so much about it that they couldn't see it.So they posted a notice. Five hundred dollars toanyone who could make a w orking suggestion. Weekspassed. Still nobody could think of a way to couplethe power to the wheels."One day a boy from the drafting room stoppedat the chief engineer's desk and made a little scrawlof a pencil sketch. ' I don 't know any thing about it,'he said, 'bu t would this w ork?' The engineer lookeda t it and said he believed it might and it did. Youw ill see it w orking the nex t time you leave the GrandCentral Terminal. T ha t boy w asn't in a ru t. H edid n't know w hat the difficulties were. H e ju s tlooked at the thing."That is what has been called the theory of igno-rance. Clearly, ignorance is not the right word.Innocence is not much better. There is no exactword for what is meant, which is that in order toact upon a thing in an original manner you must beable to see it naively, with no prepared ideas, takingnothing about it for gra nted . So Edison w orks. Ifhe were an economist he would not take the law ofsupply and demand for granted. So Fo rd w orks.They a re only celebrated examples. Th e head of thelargest industrial research laboratory in the countryin the worldbegan with a gang of linemen.[ 2 1 ]


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THE AMERICAN OMENFrom post-hole digging to the mathematics andphysics of high mechanics by common sense andskepticism! I t is one of the notable tra its of ourcommon mentality and so well known th a t an expres-sion of it occurs in vernacula r speech: "Show me!I'm from Missouri!"It is important as a negative fact that the Ameri-can is not political minded. Superficially, this mayseemand probably isuntrue; fundamentally, itis so. Certainly , no other people so distru st thepol itica l approa ch to an economic problem. On thep a rt of cap ital , this is fa irly notorious. Th e sameinstinct for keeping politics and economics a p a rt ac tsw ith labor. Trades-unionism in Grea t Brita in, forexample, is definitely pol itica l. The re is a La borP a rt y , an d there has been a La bor government.Here trades-unionism.is just as definitely economic;temperamentally it is so, to the despair of an Ameri-can cult calling itself liberal, from some notion it hasof kinship with the Liberal Party in British politics.This fact of separation runs very deep, if you followit down, and has structural significance in the Amer-ican scheme.

Anciently it was that the individual existed forthe state in all senses, political, moral and economic.The true crime of Socrates against the Greek statew as to have ta ug ht the doctrine of individual r ig h ts ;the political offense of early Christianity was of thesame root. In the course of 2000 yea rs the individ-ual became supreme in the highly civilized forms ofW estern society. The ancient doctrine was quite[ 2 2 ]


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REVOLT OF THE M INDreversed. T h e sta te w as declared to exist for theindividual .The perfect acknowledgment of this modern ideais in Great Bri ta in , where a man, because he is Bri t -ish born, is enti t led to sustenance and to a certains tandard of l iv ing, i r respect ively of what he may ordoes prod uce . H e does not alw ay s ge t the k ind ofl iving to which he feels enti t led and his disappoint-m ent is a chronic pol i t ical issue. T h e E ng lish m a nw ho say s the sta te owes him a l iv ing utt er s a n opinionth a t everyone accep ts . I f he has no jo b the s ta tem us t kee p him in dol es; if his w age is insufficient toprovide him a decent l iving the state must househim in a manner of minimum comfort , and so on.Here, i f a man says the s ta te owes him l iber ty ,pro tec t ion , equa l i ty o f oppor tuni ty , tha t i s a l readyack now ledged. Th ese a re pol i t ica l benefits. B u t ifhe says the state owes him a l iving he is r idiculed;if he insists we know there is something wrong withhim. H e is a fa i lure, a ne 'er-do-w el l , a nuisance.Here the state exists for the individual in pol i t icalsenses only; economically the individual is on his own.Where i t is otherwisethat is , where the activeresponsibil i t ies of the state to the individual are bothpolit ica l and economic, there equa l i ty of op po r-tunity, which is a pol i t ical conception, passes intoth e economic life as levelment of rew a rd. T h a t isfinally to penalize efficiency for the benefit of in-efficiency. U nd er th a t condition such a th in g a sa fast piece worker receiving a higher rate per piecethan the s low worker would be unknown.[ 2 3 ]


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THE AMERICAN OMENThis is one of the special fea tures of the A merican

wage system and represents a revolution of thought.As economics, it is sound in a new lig ht . Obviouslythe labor of one who lays 2000 bricks per day in thewall of a building is worth more than twice as muchas the labor of one who lay s only 1000. I t is w orthmore per brick, because it brings the building somuch faster to completion, with all that means intime and interest saved; or, in the case of two costlymachines exactly alike, an output of 2000 units perday from one is cheaper per unit than an output of1000 units per day from the other; and rightly forth a t reason may bear a higher rew ard per un it to theone prod ucing it. As a method, however, it is no tpossible until both capital and labor see it alike inprinciple and labor can trust the employer not tobrea k the basic piece ra te simply because the efficientman is making a handsome w age.

I INative Ways of Thinking

Given these three characteristics of mind, youmight expect strange American answers to the OldWorld problems and riddles of industrialism.You will remember that industrialism was immi-g ra n t here. W e did not conceive it. It s spontane-ous app earan ce was in Euro pe. W hen it was halfa century old and highly developed there, life in thiscountry presented still an agricul tura l picture. W ecame la te to machine cra ft. Europe's da rling ambi-tion was to monopolize it in order to be able to

[ 2 4 ]


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REVOLT OF THE MINDexchange manufactured goods with the rest of thew orld for food and raw materials. W e importedmachines when we could, and when it was impossibleto buy them, owing to the European embargo, thenwe held out inducements to men who could carry theplans in their heads and build them here.And as we got from the Old World the primarymethods and mechanisms of industrialism, so at thesame time we got the European ways of thinkingtha t had attended it. W e imported the Europe anbook of political economy. I t did not belong here.It was a manual of instructions we had done betterperhaps never to have read at all.There is grimness in the fact that a peopledeparted from Europe to find freedom of mind andspirit in the wilderness of the New World and toembrace the dignity of labor should have imposedon themselves unawares at the beginning of theirindustrial career a set of Old World formulas, calledthe science of economics, that had come straight upfrom traditions of feudalism, caste and peasantry.That was one more piece of mysterious evil to chal-lenge the enterprise of Puritan faith.You may take it classically that the science ofpolitical economy is the study of the creation anddistribution of w ealth. Historica lly , in Europe , itshows three principal figuresnamely, the Utopian,the apologist and the radical. The Utopians a rethose who flee from rea lity and tak e refuge in fan-tasy . The apologists are those who hold tha t w hatis was to be. The radicals a re those who propose toseize the moneybags. [25 1


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THE AMERICAN OMENDissimilar as they earnestly think themselves to

be, they are rooted all alike. In the manner of theRussian loading the dead horse, they accept thedifficulties. They find industria lism w orking in acertain way and say that is the law of industrialism.They find capital working in a certain way and saythat is the law of capitalthe law of its nature, asif it had an immutable na tu re ! Th ey find menbehaving in certain ways for gain and say this isthe law of economic motive. They a re one indespair.The Utopians have generally said mankind wasspoiled in his nature by bad rulers and bad experi-ence ; so they have tak en man as he ideally should beand arrang ed him in imag inary w orlds. T h a t ismerely to Lave the dead horse on the groundreality too difficult.Between the apologist and the radical there is fullagreement, save only as to what should be done inview of the accepted facts. Hav ing examined w ealth,idleness, poverty, the uses of capital and the frustra-tions of human happiness, the apologist has said,"Su ch is the economic law . The law is implacable.Le t things be ." Th is is the celebrated doctrine oflaissez faire. The radical has amended this to say,"Such is the law of capitalism, and that law isimplacable. Therefore destroy ca pita l."Counsel of flight. Counsel of do no thing. Coun-sel of destruction. Mak e the economic life over bylegislating a fantasy; let it be and endure its evils;abolish capitalistic society and save the people fromdoom. [ 2 6 ]


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REVOLT OF THE M INDSuch were the ways of thinking about it that ioh

lowed industrialism from Europe to this country.The first fruits here were Euro pean fru its. Climatedid no thing to change them. The economic historyof the last third of the nineteenth century is thememory of an American nigh tmare. All th a t isnew began when the collective American mind, withits passion to alter the sacred circumstance and seethen what will happen, its gift for seeing only thething itself and its preference for any practicalsolution that will work, began freely to act uponthe phenomena of industrialism.There is no natural law of capitalism any moretha n there is a na tura l law of voodooism. Capitaldoes not occur in a mysterious manner, with a natureof its own. People invent it, crea te it , consume it,destroy it. How they create it and w hat they dowith it is the way it works with them, and there is noother law. There was a Mosaic w ay with cap ita l; itwould work now if people were again like that.There is a Mennonite way with capital, there is aEuropean way with capital, and there is an Ameri-can way with capital, and it is in every case the wayof people w ith their own. Ev ery form of society m usthave an economic structu re. A society of ants hasth a t. But there is no universal law of economicsany more than there is a universal law of taste ormorals. How people produce, divide and consumewealth is according to their capabilities, understand-ing, industry and cha racter. Th e formal rules andlaws about it merely declare what is standard prac-tice in that time and place, and the practice comes[ 2 7 ]


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THE AMERICAN OMENfirst. The pyram ids were built by one w ay w ithw ealth, sky scrapers a re built by another.This had all to be imagined and then to be dem-onstra ted. F irs t of a ll, it was necessary to doubt aEuropean philosophy that assumed the existence ofa proletariat naturally consecrated to poverty.

I l lStruggle With the Old World's Doom Booh ofPolitical EconomyThe French originated systematic curiosity as tothe sources of wealth and how it passes around.They were the first to realize that society must havean organ ic economic struc ture . From think ing ofit, they visualized it and made a drawing to repre-

sent itthe famous Tableau Economiquewith hol-low columns to symbolize the different classes ofsociety, such as farmers, who alone were productive;then the proprietors and nobles, and finally thesterile class, which included tradesmen, artisans,servants, artists and intellectuals; and among thesecolumns were tubes in zigzag arrangement throughwhich the flow of wealth occurred, like the circula-tion of blood.The enthusiasm for this crude graph was extraor-dina ry . Mirabeau said of it :"There have been since the world began threegreat inventions which have principally given sta-bility to political societies, independent of manyother inventions which has enriched and advancedthem. The first is the invention of w riting. The[ 2 8 ]


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REVOLT OF THE MINDsecond is the invention of money. The th ird is theEconomical Table, the result of the other two, whichcompletes them both by perfecting their object; thegrea t discovery of our age, bu t of w hich our posteritywill reap the benefit."It was a mechanism hitherto invisible that hadbeen all the time working by itself. As they lookedat their picture of it they began to think of control-ling it. Th en they broke into a violent dispute as towhether it was working as it shouldwhether whatthey saw happening was the natural order or adeformity of it. Those who believed w ith Rousseauthat man by nature was good, unselfish and wise,and had been degraded by government, so that theonly political problem was how to restore him to hisnatural dispositionthese said the economic ma-chine was working in aberration; all you had to dowas to make it work as its own true nature was andthe w orld would be perfect. Utopias began to befounded. This was in the middle of the eighteenthcentury . Th ere was yet to occur the French Revo-lution, in which so much economic fantasia wentheadlong to disaster that people everywhere turnedback to reality.The French had invented an economic mode ofthought; but the English founded what is called thescience of politica l economy. Adam Smith's bookThe Wealth of Nations, published in 1776is theimperishable old testam ent of th a t science. I t wasthe first work in which the economic life was treatedas a system of minute activities for the most partunknown and invisible to one another, and yet all[29 1


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THE AMERICAN OMENrelated in a definite manner to one whole scheme.The industrial revolution now was taking placemachine craft displacing hand craft, industrialismin opposition to agriculture, division of labor, for-eign trade regarded as an international division oflabor, phenomena of cost, value, price and exchange and alway s pov erty . Th e w ealth of the w orldincreasing prodigiously by new means and still theache and scandal of human poverty.Smith's w ork was primarily descriptive. B utrunning all through it was a thesis that justified thefirst 100 years of industrialism as a horrible para-dox . The thesis was th a t economic institutions w ereof na tura l origin. Therefore nobody could be heldresponsible for how they worked. Nobody couldhelp how they w orked. I t was to be supposed tha ton the whole they worked in a beneficent manner,like other na tura l things. La bor touched his sym-pa thies. Also, he said, labor was the true source ofw ealth. Nevertheless, he said, there was a na tur a lwage determined by the number of people."The number of people," he went on, "depends onthe demand of society, and this is how it works:Among the proletariat, generally speaking, childrena re plentiful enough. I t is only when wages a re verylow tha t pov erty and misery cause the death of manyof them; but when wages are very high, several ofthem manage to reach maturity."T ha t is to say , the wage rates regula tes the supplyof proletariat."It deserves to be remarked," he continued, "thatit necessarily does this as nearly as possible in the[ 3 0 ]


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REVOLT OF THE M INDproportion which the demand for labor requires.If this demand is continually increasing, the rewardof labor must necessarily encourage in such a man-ner the marriage and multiplication of laborers asmay enable them to supply that continually increas-ing demand by a continually increasing population.If the reward should at any time be less than whatwas requisite for this purpose, the deficiency of handswould soon raise it; and if it should at any time bemore, their excessive multiplication would soon lowerit to this necessary ra te. The mark et would be somuch understocked with labor in the one case and somuch overstocked in the other, as would soon forceback its price to that proper rate which the circum-stances of the society required. I t is in this mannerthat the demand for men, like that for any othercommodity, necessarily regulates the production ofmen; quickens it when it goes on too slowly and stopsit when it advances too fast."

IVThe Sacred Law of Poverty

Th e ox prospect for human labor! A prol eta riat,automatically obedient to the law of demand andsupply, doomed to fluctuate between just enough atone time and misery a t another. If w ages provideit with a little more than enough, it over-producesitself, wages fall and it sinks into misery; when themortality of misery has made it a little scarce, wagesrise to encourage a proper supply from procreation.[ 3 1 ]


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THE AMERICAN OMENIt happened that Adam Smith's doctrine of indi-

vidual irresponsibility for how economic institutionsworked, and his remorseless theory of natural wages,perfectly suited the mentality and spirit with whichEurope approached the opportunities of industrial-ism. The ido la try w ith which they were received,especially in Great Britain, is understood only onthe supposition that they met some urgent heed ofthe hum an conscience. On The Wealth of Nationsas a Bible was reared a complete system of thought.It was taught in the primary schools and even innurseries as finished truth that children ought toun dersta nd ; it was expounded in the form of pop ula rtales and conversations with young Caroline by MissM artineau and M rs. M arcet. Its hold on the men-ta lity of Eu rop e is not broken to this day . Its influ-ence upon economic and political behavior is stillpowerful, if not dominant.After Adam Smith came M a lthus, w ith his law ofpopulation, to prove that the human race tends toreproduce itself faster than the means of sustenancecan be increased; therefore inevitably, and as anatural fact, a great fringe of misery.

"The poor are themselves the cause of their ownpo v erty ," he said, simply by not refraining fromexcessive procrea tion. Thus the responsibility forpoverty is passed from the ill working of economicinstitutions, which no one can help , to the pro leta ria titself.Next came Ricardo, whose authority was greatbecause he was himself a capitalist and able from[ 3 2 ]


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REVOLT OF THE MINDexperience to confirm what the economists had de-duced by theory. H e sa id:' 'The natural price of labor is that price which isnecessary to enable the laborers one with another tosubsist and to perpetuate their race without eitherincrease or diminution."Adam Smith had treated labor as a commodity.H ere Ricardo treats it as of a race a pa rt. H e a dded:

"It is a truth which admits of no doubt that thecomforts and well-being of the poor cannot be per-manently secured without some regard on their partor some effort on the part of the legislature to regu-late the increase of their numbers."And it was Ricardo who stated it as a law thatw ages and profits w ere in direct opposition. Onecould not be increased except at the expense of theother, and this conflict was eternal, again like anyother natural fact.The revised and polished version of all this think-ing was written by John Stuart Mill, who, fromregarding with his emotions what his mind said waslogically true, became a tormented pessimist, full ofmelancholy reflections on the futility of progress,wishing for a stationary state and wondering if lifewas not destined to run itself out in a quagmire.The re w as some heresy in him. All the laws ofeconomics, he said, were not na tu ra l law s, immutable."The laws and conditions of the production ofwealth partake of the character of physical truths,"he said. " I t is not so," he believed, "w ith the dis-tribution of w ealth. Th is is a ma tter of human[ 3 3 ]


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THE AMERICAN OMENinstitutions solely. The things once there , mank indindividually or collectively can do with them as theylike."Such a thought about division was heretical; itwas socialistic. But it was not serious, rea lly , anddid no damage to the fundamental thought that gov-erned European industrialism, because at the sametime he w as, w ithin th a t thought, sound as to w ages.It was he who formulated in a final manner whatthe socialists have ever since called the brazen law ofw ages. N a tura l w ages, in the long run , he said,were determined, as the price of everything wasdetermined, by the cost of productionby the costof producing the human w orker. And the famouslimited-wage-fund law he stated thus:"Wages depend on the proportion between thenumber of the laboring population and the capitaldevoted to the purchase of labor, and cannot underthe rule of competition be affected by anything else."What did an emotional heresy about division mat-ter when at the same time he proved by logic thatwages, representing labor's share in the total prod-uct of wealth, were twice limitedonce by a naturalprice which was nothing else than the cost of pro-ducing a laborer, and again by a rigid wage fund?H e was himself distressed by the implica tions. Theonly means of amelioration he could suggest were,first, to increase the wage fund by saving, and, sec-ond, to limit procrea tion. When the socialistsretorted that from the natural wage as he defined itthere was nothing to be saved, and that his othermeans meant condemning the laborer to celibacy, he[ 3 4 ]


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REVOLT OF THE MINDrecanted and w ithdrew his theory . This produceda great sensation in the world of respectable eco-nomic thought. But on reflection he felt obliged toput it back, because it was logic, and he did put itback, w ishing it were not so. There it is.In the industrial countries, or in those destined tobecome such, especially Great Britain and France,government very easily accepted the thought sys-tem founded on Adam Smith, because it cancelledmoral responsibility . The economic affair was gov-erned by na tura l law. No one could change it. Theless it was meddled w ith the better. The pla y ofindividua l self-interest was trium phant. Each forhimself and none for a ll. Sentiment, the hum ani-tarian impulse, a feeling for the poor, socialnessthese were a ttributes of the emotional na ture. Theeconomic man was in that aspect another animal;the only way he could act was for his own, by anatural principle of selfishness.And for a while it did seem that this was theregime required for the development of industry inits new form. I t flourished amaz ingly. Appearedthe great centers of production, such as Manchesterand Birmingham in England, Lille and Mulhouse inFra nce. W ealth increased in a fabulous manner,with a concentrating tendency.But where was the prosperity?There was much more w ealth. T ha t was evidentto all senses of measurement. There was more pov -erty , too; or, in any case, the spectacle of it was moreterrible. Misery, like w ealth, was tending to con-centrate itself in a few places and thus all contrasts[ 3 5 ]


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THE AMERICAN OMENw ere intensified. Magnificence and high profits onone hand, for the few; on the other hand, low wages,long hours, squalor and wretchedness for the many for the pro leta riat as a race a pa rt. Conditionsbecame so bad that the manufacturers themselvesbecame alarmed lest the growing generation shouldbecome hopelessly enervated under the strain ofexhaustive toil for sometimes as many as fifteenhours a day, and insufficient nourishment at theend of it.W ha t could they do? They w ere not responsible.Such was the economic law, including the law ofwagesthe law that wages must vacillate betweenjust enough and not enough to sustain life, for thatwas the natural price of labor.Sensitive na tures began to rebel. There arosesocialists, communists, ana rchists, mystics like Rena nand moral judges like Carlyle, all saying the eco-nomic life was abominable.Beneath the visible tragedy that moved them wasanother in which they themselves were involved un-aw ares. Th is was a tragedy of the mind. One spellworked upon Utopians, radicals and conservativesalike. They believed the same things , held amongthem a common delusion. T h a t is to say , they re-garded the evils complained of as inherent in thenature of economic institutions, inevitably proceed-ing from the natural laws that governed them.The Utopians, seeing how industrialism worked,and being unable to imagine its working in any otherw ay , pleaded w ith people to forsake it. Seeing howcompetition w orked, and unable to imagine any other[36 1


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REVOLT OF THE MINDprinciple of competition, they preached cooperation.Seeing how private capital worked, and with nointuition that it could work differently in a capital-istic state of society, they embraced communism.The radicals, believing with the conservatives thatthere was an eternal conflict between profits andwages, demanded that the wage and profit system beabolished. Believing w ith the conserva tives th a t ina capitalistic state of society, owing to that eternalconflict, there was bound to be a proletariat doomedto poverty, they advocated the overthrow of society.Th is is finally illustrated in the case of K a rl M a rx ,the grea t B uddha of radicalism, whose name for morethan half a century has been a terror to Europeancapitalism. H e did not a ttack the economic law asit was founded on Adam Smith. H e agreed w ithSmith, Rica rdo and Mill. W ha t he undertook todo was to push the law to its ultimate conclusion, asno one else had da red to do. Not only would heprove that such was the law of capitalistic societyand capitalistic production; by the same pure logiche would prove th a t the law was implacable. Th isthe others had not prov ed; they had assumed it. Ina surprising manner Marx avoided the discovery tha tthe law was false. The spell saved him from th a tpitf a ll . Tw o or three times he seemed to glimpse itor suspect it, and each time he put a mark there.For, of course, if he had stumbled into it his wholethesis would have fallen.W ha t he thoug ht he had proved w as th a t the samenecessity obliging capitalistic society to exploit theproletariat equally obliged it to destroy itself. The[ 3 7 ]


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THE AMERICAN OMENrich would become richer and fewer and the poormore wretched and numerous, until at last the pro-letariat at one gulp would swallow up the rich."What the bourgeoisie"the capitalistic middleclass"produces above #11?" he said, "are its owngravediggers."Thus, under the law, the doom of the proletariatwas poverty, but the doom of capitalistic society wasdea th. In his calm moments he seemed quite indif-ferent as to when or how the fate should fallwhether by an act of violence or by a simple declara-tion of the fact accomplished. Most of his follow-ers, few of whom are capable of understanding hisprocess of logic, construe him to prefer class war inits violent aspect.The whole drama of European industrialism waslike a dream to w hich no one had the key. In thephysical dimension appeared and reappeared a kindof reality th a t was mistaken for a mirage. T h a t wasthe phenomenon of overproduction, causing panics,periods of frightful depression and unemployment.The first occurrence of this kind was in 1815, whenthe British merchants and industrialists found them-selves w ith more goods tha n they could sell. Theirown people had no reserve buying power becausethe natural wage had held them to the barest neces-saries of life from day to day; and the NapoleonicWars had left the world at large in a low eco-nomic state, so that the export market failed.The nex t crisis was in 1818. Th ere was ano ther in1825.Every few years this thing occurredoverproduc-es ]


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REVOLT OF THE M INDtion and poverty at the same time, too many goodsand nothing to buy them with.The economists, as you might suppose, assumedthe existence of a natural law for this contradiction.The recurrence of crises suggested periodicity. Thew ord "periodicity " suggested "cy cle." If you couldsee it all in one heap, you would be astonished atthe extent of the profound literature on cycles inbusiness. One eminent economist traced the na tu ra llaw thereof to sun spots and wrote a book to proveit. If sun spots caused industria l depressions, over-production and unemployment, then, of course, itwas God 's business. Economic institutions were notto blame; again, nobody was responsible.Why did the economic thought of Europe assumethis false fa tal istic shape? One is obliged to askth a t question. W hy was industrialism in Euro peaccompanied by a logic that proved always its limi-tationsa natural wage just above the line of mis-ery, a proletariat whose lot could not be mitigated,a perpetual conflict between profit and wages, aremorseless law of capital, the utter impossibility ofdiffusing prosperity in a progressive manner?

The answer is, if they could persuade the mindto prove these things, then their scheme of humanrelationships was justified. Th eir think ing was rich,but their traditions were fixed. All the reasoningwith which they proved to themselves a false eco-nomic case was but a dialectic, and beneath it was asocial assumption th a t could not be proved. Thafcassumption was, and still is, that a certain struc-ture of society is ordained and natural, a caste struc-[ 3 9 ]


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THE AMERICAN OMENture, one caste to labor, one to contrive and one toenjoythe lower, the middle and the upper classes.Thus, class warfare in the Old World, now takingits images from industrialism and employing thelanguage of economics, is simply the ancient socialstruggle among those three classes. Industria lismintensified it, principally by massing the politicalpower of the lower class.Industrialism did not create the pr ol eta ria t; it didnot limit the prosperity of the prol eta riat. I t wasproletarianism deep-rooted in the Old World systemthat limited the tremendous social significance oftools and methods whereby for the first time in thehistory of mankind there is the feasibility of greatplenty.

The Thought That Overthrew ItIt must now be fairly clear why the book of eco-nomics that we received along with industrialismfrom the Old W orld did not belong here. In thefirst place, it defined limitations, and we disbelieved

in limitations. In the second pla ce, it was designedfor and took to be forever granted a social structureth a t did not exist here. T h a t is to say , industrial -ism as we received it was founded on a foreign phi-losophy, one that we had definitely rejected in theD ecla ration of Independence. I t was one of twothings th a t could ha ppen . We had either to changeour social philosophy or change the meaning of in-dustrialism; and for a long time, half a century at[ 4 0 ]


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REVOLT OF THE M INDleast, tHere was doubt as to which would, happen.

It was an American, Francis Amasa Walker, in1876, who prepared the destruction of the two dis-astrous foreign theories, namelythat there was ana tura l w age for la bor, meaning the ba re living w age,and, that profits and wages were in perpetual con-flict.What did it mean that among competitive indus-tries it often happenedas a rule, it happenedthat the one making the highest profit was the onetha t paid also the highest w ages? Th is invariablyturned out to be the most efficient industry of itskind.Thus , it occurred to him that wages need be lim-ited in fact only by the productivity of labor; andas for profits, it occurred to him that "Under freeand full competition, the successful employers oflabor would earn a remuneration which would beexactly measured, in the case of each man, by theamount of wealth which he could produce with agiven application of labor and capital, over andabove what would be produced by employers of thelowest industrial or no-profits grade, making use ofthe same amounts of capital and labor."Therefore profit was not that horizontal chargeupon production which the European book of eco-nomics said it was. Prof it, above interest on thecapital employed, might be pure surplus, a plusquantity altogether; that is to say, it might be anactual increase in the production of wealth frombetter methods and higher skill, with only the sameamount of ca pita l and labor as before. So wages[ 4 1 ]


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THE AMERICAN OMENand profits were limited not by each other at all, butonly by the productivity of capital and labor incollaboration.These ideas, though now so familiar among us,were a t th a t time strange. W e did not copy rightthem. The y were free to the whole w orld. But itwas only here they took root. Th ey grew slowly a tfirst, and more slowly in the gardens of economictheory than in the testing grounds of experience.In notable instances they were proved by results.The ir implications enla rged. Then suddenly theyput forth their strength and overthrew the Euro-pean book of economics.This, you see, was their native soil.

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CONFLICT

Native Ways of Feelingis a w ay of thinking? Thought may befeeling rationalized; feeling may be thoughtemotionalized. A way of think ing will not move

people until it has become also a way of feeling.It was a characteristic way of American thinkingthat overthrew the fatal dogmas imbedded in theEuropean book of political economythe book re*-ceived in this country along with the forms of OldW orld industrialism. ^,The first and most disastrous of these dogmas wasthe brazen law of w ages. Such was the term fixedby socialists upon the economic doctrine that therewas a natural wage, or a natural price for labor,just above the line of misery, for if wages were morethan this the proletariat would multiply too fast,thereby increasing the supply of labor and breakingthe price. Another form of the same dogma wasthe doctrine of a limited wage fund. The tota l ofwages that could be paid was determined by theamount of capital available for the purchase oflaborthe wages fundand this fund could beincreased only by capital savings from the profitsof industry.Then the second dogma, namelythat profitsand wages were directly opposed in natural princi-ple. Neither could be increased but at the expenseof the other. Therefore profits, from which the

[ 4 3 1


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THE AMERICAN OMENwage fund was derived, could not be increased with-out reducing wages to begin with; if, on the olherhand, wages were increased, then profits were di-minished and the w age fund was impaired. Sec-ondly, if wages for any reason increased above theneeds of bare existence, then the supply of laborincreased by procreation, with again a disastrouseffect upon the price of labor.

Thus , from the operation of what was believedto be a natural economic law, a proletariat doomedto exist outside the pale of prosperity, with nosense of participation in the increase of wealth,no strength of its own but the strength of despair.Old World industrialism under the tyranny ofthis way of thinking became a menace to society;and if the state, acting on motives of both fear andhumanity, had not interfered to provide out ofthe public funds such minimum decencies of en-vironment as the proletariat was unable to buy withits natural wage, industrialism would have becomea menace to the human race.In this country occurred a revolution of thought.The American doctrine is that capital, profits andw ages a re limited only by production. If there isany law to limit production, we have yet to discoverit. Therefore, so fa r a s we know, prosperity is un-limited by any inherent fact. W ha t we did dis-cover, however, was that production could be lim-ited by a state of feeling.Leave capital and profits to come back to; takeit now simply as to w ages. More tha n fifty yearsago an American economist definitely formulated[ 4 4 ]


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CONFLICTthe thought that wages were unlimited save by theproductiv ity of labor. This was a vast seed, con-taining the complete principle of economic deliv-erance. Yet it did not immediately transformAmerican industrialism.W hy was tha t? And why was Eu rope , whoseeconomists took this American seed and examinedit criticallywhy was Europe unable to grow it atall in the soil of Old World industrialism?The answ er to the first question is th is : W e per-ceive that wages are limited only by the productiv-ity of labor. To increase w ages in a progressivemanner you have only to increase the productivityof labor per man in the like ma nner. V ery good.But how are you going to increase the productiv-ity of labor per man or per man hour? You mayput in the hand of labor a tool more powerful andcunning, you may devise a science of motion, youmay impose the perfect method; but if labor is darkat heart, if it is hostile or secretly disbelieving, stillproduction will be limited. You may promise th a tthe effort of willing collaboration shall be rewardedby higher wages, you may offer the wage before-hand; labor has heard all that before and has beenmany times so tempted to drive itself.You see w hat has happened . La bor has acceptedthe old employers' law of conflict between wages andprofits in principle. I t has organized itself a ga instthe despair implicit in that law, against an indus-trialism that treats labor as an impersonal commod-ity; specifically, it has bitterly organized itself tolimit the production per man per hour in order to[ 4 5 ]


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THE AMERICAN OMENmake more jobs. Suppose, it say s, tha t for grea terproductiv ity you did pa y higher w ages. T ha t wouldmean fewer jobs, unemployment, then two men run-ning after one job everywhere and ultimately lowerwages than before.So, notwithstanding the liberating thought, thebetter machines, the more scientific method, produc-tion is still hindered. I t is hindered by ways ofthinking and feeling on the part of labor, and whatlabor thinks and feels is inevitable from the wayof thinking that has hitherto governed industrialism.There is the last impasse. No thought, merely asthought, has the pow er to break it. Th e thoughtmight lie for centuries on the shelf of abstraction.It contains the mystery of fecundity; to germinate,it requires to be buried in the ground of commonfeeling. I t must grow downward into feeling andbecome emotionalized; it must appear again on theplane of thought as feeling rationalized. Th en itbecomes dyna mic. T ha t tak es a length of time.As to the second question, why the American ideathat wages were limited only by the productivity oflabor was a seed that could not germinate in theground of Old World industrialism, the answer isth a t it was alien to a social philosophy assuming thenatural existence of a proletariat in a condition dis-ciplined by poverty and fear of want.There was all the time a characteristic way ofAmerican feeling. In the strugg le between indus-trialism as it was in the 70's, 80's and 90's of thelast century, and the old Puritan expectation thateconomic and social motives were to be reconciled,[ 4 6 ]


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CONFLICTit suffered many defea ts. A t crucia l moments itappeared to have lost its v itality . Th e early successof industrialism as a heedless force so offended andmocked it that some of it had turned away, findingrefuge in cults of mortification. Much of it ha dbeen overwhelmed by the alien flood. This was theimmigration that began about 1870 and continuedfor forty y ea rs. Regarded merely as a movementof humanity from one world to another, it was ofepic proportions. Rega rded from the traditiona lAmerican point of view, it was catastrophic.These were not such people as had been comingbefore, self-selected out of the ancestral stock. Theywere new people racially, and would be perhapsmuch more difficult to assimilatesome 5,000,000of them in four decades, added to a population thatwas less tha n 40,000,000 when the inundation began.Generally their social emotions were class-conscious.They preferred the industrial centers and either re-garded themselves as wage slaves or responded tothat view of their condition when it was presentedto them by demagogic leaders. For this was theOld World proletariat, bringing its feelings with it.American industrialism, be it said, treated it assuch; and the human spectacle in the environs oflarge production became even worse than it wasin Europe, because here the material was polyglot,with nothing more in common than fear of thepolice, hatred of the boss and a sense of oppression.Thus, industrialism in the European meaning,governed by Old World dogmas of political econ-omy, was continued here long after that event of[47 1


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THE AMERICAN OMENthought which was sometime to transform it, simplyby reason of having this enormous and endless sup-ply of cheap labor that bred itself in Europe andmigrated hither.Industry then had no ethical or social ground, notechnic of justice. As an assertion of pu re w ill, un-tamed, neither moral nor immoral, it had an aspectof gra ndeur. The scars of its infliction w ere deep.Americans who lived by their hands were engulfedand suffered w ith the aliens. The words th a t followare those of an industrialist, Henry S. Dennison,president of the D ennison M an ufa cturing Company,and now a director of the American ManagementAssociation:"There will be an underlying suspicion for onefull generation after employers have for the mostp a rt been square and wise. The tales to-day 's w ork-men heard their fathers tell at the supper tableset their subconscious attitudes."

I IThe Economic Secret Is Hwman

But a certain way of feeling was implicit in thisfoundation. The w ar was its pow erful rea gent ; andif the passion then and afterward to Americanizealien things did seem often unreasonable or intoler-ant, that was only the surface tension, the zeal thatgoes to waste in any great motion of the humanspirit. Those who sneered a t 100 per cent Ameri-canism, crude and ugly as the phrase wasAmeri-cans who sneered at itwere those who had gone so[ 4 8 ]


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CONFLICTfar in contempt of their own that they did not knowwhat the word "loyality" was a touchstone of.And w hat was it a touchstone of? Pa rticula rly ,w hat does one mean by a way of feeling, na tive here,that could liberate the forces of production?F ir st, you might look. Glimpses of its effect onhuman behavior are everywhere familiar, only thatwe take them too much for granted and so miss theessential impression.As a traveler by rail, you must sometime haveseen the official train go byone or two Pullmansand the president's priva te work ca r. And haveyou noticed how it is saluted by the men on thegroundyardmen, train crews, even section gangsout on the right of w ay ? They all make one gestureal ike. I t is a free, wide sweep of the arm , w ith thisinteresting peculiaritythat although it takes formsuddenly as a reflex action, it ends slowly, insteadof snapping out like a military salute.Its character as human expression lies in thatdifference. The power th a t sustains it in space forone more instant at the end of the arcwhat is it?You do not see, perhaps, that the men on the offi-cial trainexecutives, managers, superintendents,the president himselfare continually making thatsame gesture, no matter w hat else they may be doingor think ing . Sometimes they make it first, some-times they see it first; tha t is by chance. Th e ges-ture asserts nothing. I t is to and from a ll mannerof men alike and yet is no assertion of their equality.To assert equality is puerile, as we know, for if ithas to be asserted it does not in fact exist. The ges-

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THE AMERICAN OMENture is a sign of something they all know, and sealsit silently.As a refugee, a reporter, almost any kind of per-son, you might have been on a train that had wadedmiles through the Mississippi River flood, the traincrews out ahead of the locomotive using poles tomake sure the invisible track was still there; youmight have noticed that at the end of the journeySecretary Hoover went forward and talked withthe engineer. As Secretary of Commerce in chargeof relief, it was his job to know more than anybodyelse about the flood. What he said to the engineerwas to this effect:"I hate to think what would have happened tothis country without your railroad and its gang.I'm going to tell your president what I think of ital l .""He's doing a good job, isn't he?" said the en-gineer, adding the railroad president's surname."H e is," said M r. Hoover. "B ut I 'm thinkingparticularly of the way you pulled us out of thewater today with this train.""That's my job," said the engineer.

T ha t is all there was of it. Still nothing a sserted.V alues implicit. H is job , the gang's job , the gen-eral manager's job, the president's job, and thatone fine gesture as their common sign.As one pursuing the economic theme, you mightcome to the grea t steel pl a nt a t Ga ry . Here is thela test w ord in steel mak ing. The operation is solarge that you have to see it from an observation carattached to a y a rd engine. Th e superintendent says

r s o i


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CONFLICTi t m ay ta k e tw enty minutes to get the ca r u p . W hi leyou were wait ing, would you l ike to see the town?See the tow n! I t is a steel tow n. On ly a fewyears ago you were expected not to see a steel town.N obo dy mentioned i t . Ev ery bo dy took i t somehowto be hopeless. Steel w orkers w ould live like th a t."We can hi t the high spots and be back in twentym inutes ," says the superintend ent . P u t t in g a sec-t ion of rai l down on his papers, he starts for hishat , but turns back to his desk and pushes somepho togra phs tow ard you . "T h a t ' s our own beachou t there on the lak e sho re," he sa y s. "Som e shotsof ou r picnic la st w eek." Steel-tow n people p la y in gon the sa nd ! You recognize the superintend entamong them."Oh, yes ," he says , " the execut ives go a long.Those two kids right behind meno, the other one,there they a re tw ins . T h a t ' s the mother . T he ydid hav e a t im e of it . Look al l r ig h t now, do n' tt h e y ? "T h e modern w ord in s teel m a k ing. T h e w orksa s ta nd a rd of wonder. Y et before the w orks youmust see the town, and before seeing the town youmust take a minute to look at photographs of theal l -hands picnic on the company sands, which i l lus-t r a t e , besides many things, that a cer tain Slavwoman's twins, notwi thstanding the t ime they hadof i t , are looking very well .Later, in the works, when you see men in smallthoughtful gangs minding volcanic energies , re leas-ing t ides of power, control l ing by means of t inylevers machines that cause tremors in the earth as[ 5 1 ]


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THE AMERICAN OMENthey go in and out of motionthen you rememberthe town and you understand how important it isthat steel people should have nice houses, parks,playtime, freedom from all unnecessary anxiety.You remember the tw ins and make a relation. If,in the act of putting a million-dollar piece of me-chanical equipment into a motion, a man were to beseized with a panic about his twins or by a bitterreflection on the wretchedness of their surroundings,he might jam the works quite without meaning todo it. Or if he had meant to do it, you w ould neverbe able to prove it. Th e hand slipped that w as a ll.Leave out the slip. There is no visible accident.There is only the difference between a hand thatis willing, always pressing for the optimum result,and a hand that is slack or heavy because the mindbehind it is sullen, cares nothing for the ideal out-put, or means deliberately to retard production inorder to keep more men on the job . When by meansof mechanical equipment you have multiplied thepower of the hand a million times, so you have mul-tiplied this difference a million times, and it becomesenormous.

The more your investment is in machines, thegreater your stake is in the man who touches them,in his general well-being, his manner of living, hisconscious and unconscious a ttitudes. You see clea r-ly what the head of the United States Steel Corpora-tion means when he says the true problem of modernindustry is how to gain the loyalty, the cooperationand the understanding of the individual man. N otmen in general the man. And there is new mean-[ 5 2 ]


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CONFLICTing in a saying you will hear very often among in-dustria l managers:"The better the coat a man wears to his job, themore he is worth to industry."Suppose you come to a motor tow n. I t ma y beFlint, where the General Motors Corporation, or-ganized somewhat like a federated government offree states, has several automobile companies, allcompetitive as to product and method, each one pos-sessing state rights of which it is very jea lous. Thegovernor of one of these sta te jobs is a m an who eatsdrop forgings as an after supper delicacy. H ehandled machines before he could reach them fromthe floor, and the drive boss of old industry was hischildhood nature study, from the point of view ofthose who were driven.

He is talking when the personnel man walks in,and stops to introduce him. Everyw here, in every-body 's office, the personnel man. W ha t does i tmean ?"I 'l l tell you," says the governor. " It 's 90 pe rcent bu ll." H e grins as he says it, and the person-nel man grins too.The governor goes on with what he was saying.The man he keeps going around looking for roughspots ha d said to him the frame riveting job was badin any w ay of looking a t it. The hot rivetsone ma nto slip them into place, another to hold them, an-other to set them. A mean jo b ; nobody liking it.The trouble was no one could think of a way to doit in a neat automatic manner.The governor had said to him, "You've got a[ 53 ]


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THE AMERICAN OMENnew jo b from today . D on 't do any thing else, don 'tthink of an y thing else, until you find a w ay to cha ngethat operation."And they were now about to change it. The lit-tle thing to change it with was thatstanding therein the middle of his deska new automatic tool.When you have admired it, he takes you to seewhat he thinks is the finest foundry in the world.No dirt, no dust. D o you know w hat a foundry usedto be?On the way, as you are entering the works, hesays suddenly : "N o man in this pl a nt can be firedby his boss. I c an't fire one myself. The most aboss can do is to suspend a man and send him upto the personnel court for tr ia l. No boss can firea man. D o you get tha t? "

Along with it, lest you should forget it, you re-ceive a half-ton hydraulic thum p in the ribs. Re-calling what he said ten minutes before on themeaning of personnel work, you perceive that suchwas levityhis way of punching the personnel manin his ribs."Well, what do you think of that foundry?" heasks.You tell him it is fine. Only at the shakeouttha t's a little bad yet. The governor is terribly letdown.He says, "Now, of course, you would notice that,w ouldn't you? It 's the one damn bad spot wehaven't ironed out. B ut w e're on it. "Almost the last place you might think to lookwould be in the clothing trade, with the traditions[ 5 4 ]


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CONFLICTof feud and discord that belong to i t ; and for thereason, moreover, that because the machines must besmall and individual , the industry would seem not topresent big opportuni t ies for increased product iv i typer man by scienti f ic management on a machinebasis . Nevertheless, in any one of the so-calledx-production shops in Chicago where the union ofAmalgamated Clothing Workers of America hasbeen developing the principle of col laborat ion youw il l see a new thin g. T h e prod uct ion ma na ger re p-resent ing capi t a l meets the product ion manager rep-resenting labormeets him on the f loor in the openshopand asks , "How ' s i t go ing?"The product ion manager represent ing l abor says ,"H er e an d there a l i tt l e p i l ing up . N othing weca n ' t move. Look a rou nd ."From opposite sides they come to common pointof view. T he w ork goes a t hig h speed, pa y m ent isby the piece, production is intensively intended, andyet the rhythm is spontaneous and se l f -sustaining.Wages are goodeighty cents to a dol l a r an hourfor men and women togetherand the costs arelow.

This is a case in which the intelligence acted first ,the feeling ensued. N oto riou sly , i t w as a sw eatedindustry, wages low, hours long, condit ions wretched.Union thought was general ly radical , imbued wi ththe idea of class warfare, learned in the Old World.If once the workers by mil i tant sol idari t

The American Omen - Garrett

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Transcript of The American Omen - Garrett