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OUR BUSINESS
CIVILIZATION
[Illustration] BONIBOOKS [Illustration]
[Illustration]
OUR BUSINESS
CIVILIZATION
[Illustration]
_Some Aspects
of American Culture_
BY
JAMES TRUSLOW ADAMS
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
[Illustration] ALBERT & CHARLES BONI [Illustration]
COPYRIGHT, 1929, BY ALBERT AND CHARLES BONI, INC.
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
TO KAY
PREFACE
All of the chapters included in this volume have appeared in various
magazines, although in their present form many of them have been
altered and several of them have been greatly enlarged. The author
wishes emphatically to state that the volume is not intended to give
a fair and complete presentation of the contemporary American scene
and its tendencies. The essays deal only with certain aspects, as the
title of the book indicates, and those the more sinister ones now to be
noted in what is, in many respects, the vigorous growth of our national
life. If a doctor pronounces a patient to have a bad circulation and
a dangerous local infection in his leg, it cannot be complained of
him that he has failed to speak the whole truth because he has said
nothing of what a good husband, loyal friend and able executive the
patient happens to be. Those are not aspects with which the doctor has,
at the moment, concerned himself. To change the metaphor, much of the
criticism that these essays have encountered when in magazine form, and
much of what I confidently anticipate they will now encounter in their
new and more elaborate presentation, is based on no more logical ground
of attack than that instead of saying what a dull dish prunes make
or how unhealthful cucumbers may be, I should have performed a much
more useful, patriotic and agreeable service by saying how delicious
strawberries are. My only answer to that sort of criticism is that at
the moment I am talking about prunes and cucumbers, not strawberries,
though some time I may discuss those. Sufficient unto the day....
My thanks are due to the editors of _Harper’s Monthly_, the _Atlantic
Monthly_, the _Forum_, the _Saturday Review of Literature_, and
_McNaught’s Monthly_, who enabled me first to discuss my unpopular
topics in their pages.
JAMES TRUSLOW ADAMS.
London, 1929.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
PREFACE VII
I. A BUSINESS MAN’S CIVILIZATION 9
II. THE COST OF PROSPERITY 35
III. OUR DISSOLVING ETHICS 63
IV. JEFFERSON AND HAMILTON TODAY 83
V. OUR LAWLESS HERITAGE 101
VI. HOOVER AND LAW OBSERVANCE 121
VII. TO “BE” OR TO “DO” 147
VIII. MASS PRODUCTION AND INTELLECTUAL PRODUCTION 179
IX. THE MUCKER POSE 195
X. MAY I ASK? 221
XI. IS AMERICA YOUNG? 241
XII. HOME THOUGHTS FROM ABROAD 261
XIII. THE ART OF LIVING 289
CHAPTER I
A BUSINESS MAN’S
CIVILIZATION
A BUSINESS MAN’S CIVILIZATION
I
As one grows older and, let us hope, wiser, one becomes more and more
shy of easy generalizations and classifications. As one moves through
one’s world, the old generalized types, for example, of fiction and
youth, standing for an “artist,” a Frenchman, or an Englishman, break
into the many and varying individual artists or Frenchmen or Englishmen
of one’s acquaintance, much as a ray of white light is broken into
a rainbow of colors through a prism. But age and experience would
be but poor substitutes for youth and freshness if they resulted
only in bringing chaos to our minds, a substitution of multitudinous
individuals for species and genus. If the old crude stock-in-trade
types compact of ignorance and too facile generalizing have to be
submitted to the spectrum of experience, individuals we find, in spite
of seemingly baffling variety, do somehow combine to form distinct
group types, and in the national sphere characteristics emerge that set
one nation off from another even though their millions of inhabitants
may differ among themselves almost more than some of them differ from
foreigners. For a traveler constantly passing from one country to
another and now long past the stage of mere romantic interest in the
exotic, there is no more fascinating task than to attempt to establish
the genuine characteristics of a nation out of the welter of individual
impressions.
It would be absurd to contend that America offers a simple problem to
the observer. If the scene is less varied than in some other countries,
nevertheless, to see about one only Babbitts means that one is not an
acute observer. But as one comes back again and again from foreign
countries, with fresh eyes and new standards of comparison, one comes
to simplify our civilization in some respects, as a scientist does the
continent. To the lover of scenery the Long Island beaches, the Big
Smoky Mountains, the prairies, the Arizona desert, the golden coast of
California, or the glaciers of Alaska offer variety in plenty; yet the
geologist finds North America the simplest of all the great continents
in the basic lines of its structure. In the same way, as we penetrate
below the surface variety of its social life, we begin to see that its
civilization is equally remarkable as that of the continent itself for
its extreme structural simplicity. This simplicity lies in the fact
that it has come to be almost wholly a _business man’s civilization_.
It may be asked why, in a modern industrial world in which everyone
must have money to live, and in which most people are engaged in
making it in one way or another, is America any more of a business
man’s civilization than that of any other country? The answer is to
be found in a wide variety of social, economic, historic, geographic,
and other factors. Let us, for example, contrast it with England, the
country which I know best outside of my own, and where I happen to be
writing at the moment. England has always been a great commercial and,
for the last century, a great manufacturing country, the “nation of
shopkeepers” in the eyes of European continentals. Business and trade
are foundation stones of England’s prosperity and power, yet English
civilization, whatever it may one day become, is not as yet a business
man’s civilization in the same sense as is America’s. The reason is
that the influence of the business man here upon society has been
limited by the presence of other and very powerful influences stemming
from sources other than business and having nothing to do with it.
In the first place, there is that relic of feudalism, the aristocracy,
including in its numbers, of course, many men and fortunes made by
trade, but exerting its influence through a long tradition. It may
be that “every Englishman loves a Lord”—though it is quite certain
he does not worship him as do many American women—but it is true
that the aristocracy exerts an influence upon the social manners and
customs of the people at large which is incomparably greater than
that exerted by the probably wealthier, but far less picturesque,
untitled bankers, shipping merchants, iron manufacturers, and what
not. In the country—still the best source of English life, though fast
passing—aristocracy and landed gentry possess so great an influence
that if a nouveau riche wishes to become somebody, he does not take a
great house and give costly entertainments in London but buys an estate
somewhere in the “counties” and painfully tries to make his way among
families that may have but a fraction of his own wealth.
Nor is the influence of these two great bodies of the aristocracy and
gentry based solely on social position or snobbery. Of black sheep in
both there have been plenty, but these two classes still retain the
best element in the feudal system, the duty of service. The broad lands
of the feudal lord, unlike the stocks and bonds of the modern business
magnate, were not his solely for pleasure. Just as his men owed
service to him, so he owed physical protection to them; and he was not
likely to retain his lands and castles long if he could not give it. A
considerable part of the wealth and power of England is still in the
hands of these landowners, large and small, who still perform in more
modern ways the duties that go with their wealth. The difference in
the sense of responsibility toward the public felt by the descendants
of historic families and the members of the new business magnates may
be noted in one minor, but illuminating, particular. For the most part
the treasures of art accumulated by the old families are regarded by
them as a public trust, and the public, at least on certain days of the
week are admitted to see them. The private galleries of Knole House, of
Warwick Castle and of scores of others are as well known and as easily
accessible to the public as are those of the national museums. On the
other hand, the motto of the new business magnate is usually “what is
mine is my own.” As a rule when a picture by a great master is carried
through the doors of the palace of a water-power magnate, a meat packer
or a banker in America it is lost to the public, save in rare cases as
an exhibit in a temporary loan collection, until after long years sale
or bequest may bring it into a public museum.
Again, there is the Church of England, dependent for its existence and
support not upon the gifts of business men but upon local taxation,
age-long endowments, and the support of the State. The leading
universities, for similar reasons, are independent of business to
an extent impossible in America. Politics, the army, navy, and the
diplomatic and civil services offer life-careers for the ablest
of men. The professions, such as law and medicine, are still
uncommercialized. A young man of ability and ambition may choose,
depending upon his particular tastes or opportunities, among a dozen
careers, not one of which has anything to do with business, and any one
of which offers him as a possible reward all the prizes that a man can
wish, although from the pressure of democracy on the one hand and big
business on the other this is becoming less true, perhaps temporarily,
than it has been heretofore. However, the successful business man still
finds himself only one among many factors influencing the manners,
thought, and life of his time. His own contribution is absorbed into
the varied and rich life of the nation made up of the ideals and
outlook of many other types and classes in addition to his own.
In America from the beginning there has been an entirely different
social scene, although in many respects it was more variegated in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries than it is to-day. Neither the
best nor the worst of feudalism, however, was transplanted to the
colonies. We fell short of developing an aristocracy or a permanent
landed gentry. With the exception of a few colonial experiments, there
has never been an established church. Politics, save in a few rare
cases, have ceased to attract first-rate men as a career, and there is
none either in diplomacy, which is usually only an episode, or in the
civil service, which holds no position worth striving for. The rewards
of a lifetime spent in the army or navy are negligible. On the other
hand, we have the richest virgin continent in the world to exploit,
and the prizes for a successful business career, measured in money
and power, have been such as are undreamed of in European business.
In Europe a “great fortune” is reckoned in millions; in America
in hundreds of millions and now, in a few cases, even in billions.
Generation after generation the opportunities, instead of becoming
less, have become colossally greater. The result has been that most of
the energy, ability, and ambition of the country has found its outlet,
if not its satisfaction, in business.
Certain results have flowed from this fact. In the first place, human
nature alters, perhaps, less than we wish it might. Two of its most
persistent traits are love of distinction and the need to follow
leaders. When in founding the nation we did away with all titles
and badges, we opened the way in a fashion not anticipated to the
social sway of the business man. We may note for example that the
much-despised stars and ribbons of the old aristocratic order in Europe
have been replaced in America, where they are unconstitutional, by
the innumerable ornaments of the Mystic Shriners, the Order of Junior
Mechanics, and other similar emblems. Theoretically, since the American
and French Revolutions men have given lip-service to the doctrine of
equality, but in reality everyone craves his own little share of social
distinction, a something that will tend to set him somewhat above his
neighbor. Founded if you like in vanity, it is, nevertheless, one of
the most important elements in progress and conduct.
The great mass of men also tend to copy those above them, those who
by common consent are the leaders of the nation, or occupy the most
prominent and enviable positions in it. The youth of a savage and
warlike tribe will emulate its great warriors and shape his life
on theirs. In England, as we have seen, the genuine leaders of the
aristocracy and gentry still exert a great influence upon the manners
and outlook of those below them. In America these leaders have become
the great business men. In their hands are the wealth and power of
modern America. Their ideals, their manners, their ways of life, their
standard of success are, therefore, those which the great mass of
Americans, consciously or not, strive to make their own. In America,
moreover, no Order of Merit, no Companionship of the Bath, no peerage
is to be won as a symbol of a successful career. Most men, as we have
said, crave some badge as a tangible evidence of their distinction if
they have attained any. In America for those not content with being
a Master of a Grand Lodge or the High Priest of something-or-other
wealth is the sole badge of success. All other orders in society having
been swept away, and a business career being the sole one that leads
inevitably to power when successful, the business man’s standard of
values has become that of our civilization at large.
Owing in large measure to this, to the emphasis placed in America by
our universities on equipment and plant, and to their constant need of
money for endowments and upkeep, they also have come under the sway of
the successful business men to an extent undreamed of in Europe. If the
equipment of European universities seems meager and poor in comparison
with America, no one can claim that the work being done in them is
inferior; and partly due to the smaller demands for money for constant
building and expense, and partly to the presence in the European social
system of important classes other than business men, the universities
there are far more independent of business domination and ideals than
they are with us. The entire religious system of our country, also,
is in the same relation of dependence upon the business man. In the
absence of any establishment of large endowments from the past, the
churches of every denomination are dependent upon the richer members of
their congregation for support. As for politics, the relations between
parties, legislatures, and the business interests are too notorious
to call for specific comment. The present disgraceful struggling of
private interest against private interest, with no consideration for
the interest of the public or the nation, exhibited in the Tariff
controversy in Congress is merely one phase of what we have come to
consider a normal relation of American business to American government.
The dominant economic and social power of any country is bound to be
the dominant political one. If agriculture, for example, is now the
Cinderella of American prosperity and government interest, the cause
is in part to be found in the fact that the number of men engaged in
agriculture has dropped from 90 per cent of the total in 1790 to 36 per
cent in 1910 and 29 per cent in 1920. The professions, as we shall note
later, are also rapidly coming under the domination of the business
man’s type of civilization.
Thus, unlike Europe, the business man with us finds himself the
dominant power in the life of the nation and almost alone in his
control over the direction of its entire life, economic, social,
intellectual, religious, and political. It is a situation that, so far
as I know, is unique in history and well worth analyzing.
II
First let us analyze the business man himself. Is there such a thing
as a business “type”? Thinking of all the variations among those one
knows, much as one thinks of one’s varied French friends, one may think
it impossible to classify them under one head; but just, as contrasting
one’s French friends with English or Russian, a French type does
emerge, so contrasting a man who is in business all his life with those
engaged in other pursuits, a business type does also take form. Apart
from initial tastes and nature, a man is bound to be molded by the
aims, ideas, ideals, and whole nature of the career to which he devotes
practically his entire energies and time. It is obvious that a poet or
musician will react to the facts of existence differently from the way
a steel manufacturer, an admiral, a high ecclesiastic, a politician, or
a Supreme Court judge would do. All of them naturally have to provide
themselves with a living, but the fundamental facts that regulate their
reactions to the world about them are different.
For a business man that fundamental fact is, and is bound to be,
_profit_. Having made money, the business man may be, as he often is,
more generous and careless with it than an aristocrat or a churchman;
but that does not alter the fact that the main function of his work,
his main preoccupation, and the point from which he views everything
connected with his work is that of a profit. For one thing, all men,
whether they be poets, soldiers, diplomats, or department-store owners,
crave, as we have said, success and recognition in their chosen field.
The hallmark of success in business is the extent of profit a man gets
out of it. An artist may find no public for his wares but, if he is
doing great work, he will be supported by the opinion of his peers. A
doctor may struggle in a country village with nothing but a pittance
but he has the satisfaction of a noble work nobly done. A man like
Asquith may spend his whole life in the service of his country and yet
retire as prime minister with the income of a bank clerk. But a man
who spends his life in business and ends no wealthier than he began is
voted a failure by all his fellows, even though he may have personal
qualities that endear him to his friends.
This fundamental preoccupation with making a profit has been much
emphasized by the shift of business from the individual to the
corporate form. A man may do what he likes with his own and if he
chooses to be quixotic he can be; but in the new triple relationship
of workmen, executives, and stockholders in the modern corporation
there has ceased to be personality anywhere. The American is a great
believer in the magical power of words. The bare facts of business are
now being covered over by the new American gospel of “service”; but
when we analyze this, does it not merely come down to the obvious facts
that the business man performs a highly useful function in society and
that, so far as he can, he should see that the public gets its full
money’s worth? The fundamental need of profit remains. The professional
classes—doctors, artists, scholars, scientists and others—may, as they
often do, work for little or nothing at all, but, except in the rarest
of personal instances, the business man is precluded from doing so.
What stockbroker, manufacturing company, railway or electric light
corporation with all their talk about service would ever consider
running their business at a voluntary loss in order to render greater
service or tide the public over a crisis? It cannot be done. It is
profit first, and then, perhaps, as much service as is compatible with
profit.
Now this primary and essential preoccupation with making a profit
naturally tends to color a business man’s view of his entire world,
and is what, in my opinion, mainly differentiates business from the
professions. Nor do I speak as an impractical intellectual. Of the
last thirty years I have spent about one-half in business and half in
professional work, and I realize the great difference, having paid my
monthly bills, between concentrating primarily on the work rather than
the profit.
Moreover, dealing inevitably with material things and with the
satisfying of the world’s material wants, the business man tends
to locate happiness in _them_ rather than in the intellectual and
spiritual unless he constantly refreshes his spirit away from business
during his leisure. When the pressure of business on his time, or his
concentration on it, becomes so great as to preclude his reasonable use
of leisure for the development of his whole human personality, he is
apt to become a complete materialist even if, as is now frequently not
the case, he ever had it in him to become anything else. He may live in
a palace, ride in the most luxurious cars and fill his rooms with old
masters and the costliest manuscripts which his wealth can draw from
under the hammer at Christie’s but if he cares more for riches, luxury,
and power than for a humanely rounded life he is not civilized but what
the Greeks properly called a “barbarian.”
Aside from narrowness of interests, the business man, from the nature
of his major occupation, is apt to have short views and to distrust
all others. It was once said, as superlative praise, of the late J. P.
Morgan, one of the most public spirited and far-sighted business men
we have had, that he “thought in ten-year periods.” Most business men
think—and do well to do so as business men—in one or two-year periods;
the business man cares nothing for the tendency of what he is doing.
This has been emphasized in the American business man by the vast
extent of the natural resources with which he has had to deal and the
recuperative powers of an active people in a half-settled continent.
If, as he did in the northern Mississippi Valley, he can make his
personal profit by ripping the forests off the face of half a dozen
states in a decade, he is content to let those who come later look
after themselves.
Nor is he any more solicitous about the social results of his
activities. Obviously, what interests the business man as a business
man is a free hand to gather wealth as quickly as may be, combined
with a guarantee that society shall protect him in that wealth once he
has gathered it. He may steal the water resources of a dozen states
but, once they are stolen, he is a defender of the Constitution and
the sanctity of contract. It is not hard to understand why the United
States is the most radical country in the world in its business methods
and the most conservative in its political!
Preoccupation with profit, again, tends to make a business man, as
business man, blind to the æsthetic quality in life. A beautiful bit
of scenery, such as Montauk Point, is for him merely a good site for a
real-estate development; a waterfall is merely water-power. America’s
most successful business man, Mr. Ford, while rolling up millions by
the hundreds in profits, was content to turn out what was, perhaps, the
ugliest car on the market. It was only when his profits were threatened
that he turned to the consideration of beauty, and he would not have
done so had it not promised profit. No sane business man in charge of a
large business would do so. It is much the same with the cultivation
of the business man’s mind. Time is money, and anything which takes
time and does not give business results is waste. But if you tell him
that if he shows an interest in Keats he can probably land Smith’s
account—Smith being a queer, moony guy—or that if he will go to hear
the “Rheingold” he can make a hit with that chap he has long been
after, the effect will be magical. Innumerable advertisements of books
or teaching of foreign languages will easily illustrate what I mean.
These and other qualities of the business man are his qualities
_as_ a business man. They are qualities that are bred in him by his
occupation. Plenty of business men are much more than business men
and outside of their offices and business hours have other qualities
and other interests. But there is this to be said. Society at large,
including the business man himself, owes its opportunity for a fully
rounded life mainly to those who have not been business men. What will
be the effect on all of us of the growing dominance of the business
type and of the hold which the business man and business ideals have
attained upon our civilization?
III
Before we discuss this let me gladly admit that the business man’s
search for a profit has in many ways been of great cultural, as well as
material, benefit to the community at large. I am by no means decrying
business. If the business man has not, culturally, been a creator, he
has done marvellous work as a middleman. In the phonograph and the
radio, for example, the business man has brought the work of the
scientist on the one hand and the musician on the other together in
such a way that the lonely resident of a country village can listen to
the symphony orchestra of perhaps a half-dozen cities. The business
man, indeed, does not care a rap whether Jones listens to a symphony
or a prize fight, but he has given him an opportunity. Yet that
opportunity could not come to Jones unless both the abstract scientist,
reaching the business man through the medium of the inventor, and the
musical composer had existed and done their work in a spirit quite
remote from business. In a world entirely made up of business men (with
the qualities of business men only) it is doubtful if either pure
science or music would have existed.
Taking this cultural aspect of a possible business man’s civilization
worked out to its final result, we may note several things. If modern
business is not a profession—and I certainly do not believe it is—it,
nevertheless, has become an intensely absorbing occupation. Moreover,
like science and most of modern life, it has become highly specialized,
both for workmen and for executives. At no time before in the history
of the world have the occupations of all men tended to render them
so lopsided. Never before have leisure and a wise use of it been so
necessary. The functions of the lawyer and doctor, even of the thinker
and the artist, have become narrowed to only a small part of the field
formerly covered by them. Compare for example a modern scientist in any
branch with a Bacon, or a modern painter with men like Michelangelo
or da Vinci,—easel painters, mural decorators, poets, architects,
sculptors, military engineers, and other things by turns. The narrowing
of the field of work for all men has greatly intensified the need of
their finding opportunity for the development of other sides of their
personalities in pursuits other than their major ones. This is most
true of the business man because of the effect upon him of his work as
contrasted with the professions and other careers. The danger lurks in
exactly that situation; for the one who most needs, but least realizes,
the value of leisure and culture, of a fully rounded personality, of
what we may call humanism, is the one who has become the controller of
the destinies of all.
In the remainder of this article we can but glance briefly at some
of the effects, already becoming visible, of the dominance of
business ideals. Let us take first the question of that leisure so
essential from the standpoint of a humane civilization. In an economic
civilization in which efficiency is the one great good, leisure will
be considered as waste save in so far as it promotes the individual’s
productive capacity in his next stint of work. Having little use for
sanely occupied leisure themselves, our business spokesmen try either
to confuse it in the public mind with idleness or to make people
utilize it for the satisfaction of more material wants. Thus in his
_American Omen_, which we may take as an ultra-expression of the new
business ideal, Garrett says, speaking of leisure, that the American
“does not know what to do with idleness. He does not understand it.
Generally it kills him.” Again, speaking of adult education, he adds
that “in England the intent of adult education is to give the wage
earner a cultural interest to fill up his leisure time—nature study,
astronomy, the physics and chemistry of everyday life, literature,
perhaps. In Germany the intent is technical. In Denmark it is to
stimulate the mind generally. In France there is not much of any kind.
But,” he adds triumphantly, “the American idea of adult education is
to enable a man to find greater self-expression in his job.” Certainly
from the standpoint of humanism, of a fully rounded human existence, no
comment on this business ideal is needed.
If it be claimed that Garrett does not speak responsibly for business,
let us turn to another spokesman. Harvard University has taken the lead
in giving its scholastic benediction to business, which it proclaims
in stone over the entrance to its Business School, given to it by one
of the richest business men in America, to be “the oldest of the arts,
the newest of the professions.” Doctor Carver, professor of economics
at Harvard, writes that in America “we may take a certain genuine
satisfaction in the fact that we have no leisure class and are never
likely to have one ... though we do fall behind in those arts that are
commonly cultivated by a leisure class ... and must therefore content
ourselves with such arts and graces as can be cultivated by busy
people.”
It is obvious, except to our “practical” business men, that there are
many kinds of work, not only like the arts, needful for humanism,
but like pure science, needful for business itself, that can be the
fruit only of free time and of the absence of the need to turn the
results into immediate cash. Yet here again we run counter to the new
business ideals as promulgated by Professor Carver. “Generally with
some exceptions,” he writes, “the more useful the person the more he
is paid,” adding that “if a pupil shows a special aptitude for a kind
of work which is being overdone and poorly paid, to train the pupil
for that work would be to condemn him to poverty, and no conscientious
educator would care to do that. He must, in fact, train the pupil for
a kind of work which is reasonably well paid.” We need not add the
recent dictum of another professor that the best standard of value
of a piece of literary work is, after all, what it will fetch in the
market, to see how the new leaven of the business ideals of profits
and “service” are working in our academic minds. “The greater the
service rendered, the greater is the personal income” (we may thus
syllogize this idea), “therefore, we can estimate the service in terms
of income, and (with no selfish philosophy, of course, only idealism)
we must train our boys to make the largest incomes possible so that
they may be sure they are rendering the greatest service to society.”
Q.E.D. Naturally the business men, whose badge of success is income,
applaud such a theory, for it establishes indubitably that the owner
of a cigar-store chain is infinitely more valuable to humanity than a
Keats, even though from every past civilization the only things which
remain of value to humanity are the creative works of those who were
not business men. The business men of those days are as forgotten
and indistinguishable as the leaves of yesteryears in Vallombrosa.
Nothing could bring out more clearly than this barbarous syllogism
and philosophy the difference between a humanistic and an economic
civilization.
We may also note the changes occurring in the spirit of the professions
as they conform themselves to the dominant note of a business man’s
civilization. That civilization, as we have said, cloaks its crudity
under the name of service, yet even in the medical profession, perhaps
as yet the least tainted, what is the service rendered as compared
with a generation ago? Many articles in our magazines have dealt with
the seriousness of the crisis which is overtaking whole countrysides
where no physician can now be found to labor for little pay, and the
difficulties of finding medical service even in the cities at low cost
or at moments inconvenient for the doctor, such as night calls. But
if social service can be calculated in income, why not? If the theory
is true, is it not a doctor’s duty to leave a whole countryside to
struggle without medical care if it can pay him only three or four
thousand a year when in a city he can make twenty thousand if he gets
in with the right people?
The same applies even more to the legal profession. The great prizes in
this are for the most part now to be won only from the great business
men and their corporations. A man may struggle in private practice for
twenty years and not make in all that time what a more fortunate fellow
may get as a retainer from a railroad or a water-power trust in one
year. The business-civilization ideal of wealth as distinction would be
a powerful influence tending to make the lawyer turn to business in any
case, but now the new business philosophy of service measured by income
makes that turning a social duty and salves the professional conscience.
Another profession, architecture, is beginning to feel the influence
of the dominance of business. We have good architects in America—none
better—but business does not give them their chance. Buildings are
built to sell, and, being built on borrowed money on speculation,
must be sold as quickly as possible. No chances can be taken on
not pleasing the taste of the public. Moreover, in buildings every
inch of space must be made to bring in rent. In every direction the
architect’s hands are tied. In many cases, partly from the spread
of the business ideal of life and partly perhaps from despair, the
architect has come to adopt the attitude expressed by one of the
well-known ones recently. “As an architect,” he writes, “I am really
just a manufacturer of a commodity known as building space, and my job,
as I see it, is to make as attractive a package as is physically or
æsthetically possible for me in view of all the conditions imposed.”
The consequence is that in architectural experiment America is falling
so rapidly behind countries like Denmark, Holland, Germany, Austria,
and even Russia, that after studying the new buildings, particularly
the private houses in those countries, returning to America is almost
like going back to the early Victorian age. I have not been to Russia,
but the noted French architect Le Corbusier has recently gone there to
investigate the new buildings and he reports of the Muscovites that
“their works are a splendid outburst of lyrical poetry. They are poets
in steel and glass.” The picture of the new “Palace of Industry” at
Charkov certainly goes far to confirm this opinion. Much of the new
architecture I have seen and the marvellously interesting new bloom
everywhere in the countries which I have named makes the American
revamping of the English, Colonial, and Spanish types seem to belong to
a past world. Plagiarism is a confession of sterility. Of all the new
movement and the new method of living it entails, the American public
is almost totally ignorant. The business man with an eye solely to an
immediate profit, and the architect who considers himself a business
man, “just a manufacturer of a commodity known as building space,” are
not likely to carry America far on any new road.
IV
Of the effect of a business man’s civilization on the manners of
society I shall speak in a later chapter and need not here anticipate
what I shall there say. We may note, however, in passing, its effect
on taste and habits. As for taste, a business civilization has as its
core the idea of a money profit and of a material standard of values.
Business men devote their tireless energy to creating new wants which
their factories can supply. But two points must be noticed. One is that
these wants which they create and foster must be material or there is
no manufacturing to supply them and no profit to the business man. If
people wish to tramp about the countryside remote from motor cars, or
read a book or go to an art museum or simply engage in intelligent
conversation at home, the manufacturer is losing a possible profit.
The constant endeavor of modern business is therefore to get people
to fill up their leisure with _things_, things that can be made and
sold. Another point with regard even to these things is, that the
great profits being in mass-production, the wants so scientifically
created by advertising are such as may be made to appeal to the masses.
The spiritual or æsthetic value of the new wants is bound to be made
subordinate to the possibility of their being filled in quantity.
Some of the problems touched upon, as well as others, are world
problems. Their special importance in America is due to the curiously
lopsided development which American civilization has increasingly
followed. With the unique position that the business man has here
attained to impress himself upon the entire cultural life of the
people, the dangers of certain business tendencies are enormously
increased as compared with other countries where the ideals and
activities of the business man meet with checks from many other
influences, contemporary or historic, in the civilization as a whole.
Even if the American business man were alive to the enormous social
responsibility of the position in which he finds himself, it is not
likely that he could assume the rôles in civilization which have
hitherto been taken by a dozen or so classes of other types, that he
could include within himself all the springs to thought and action
and all the checks and balances which a variety of social types have
hitherto supplied. For one thing, the prime factor in business life,
the need for making a profit, is at war with the spirit of all the
arts and with what should be the spirit of the professions. Again, the
training in taking short views, the ignoring of the future results of
action beyond a reasonable period of profit, the subordinating to the
thought of profit of all the larger social implications of action,
are among the characteristics of business as business that do not
augur well for placing the supreme control of the entire national
civilization in business hands. The business man, moreover, is merely
a purveyor and not a creator of the real values of a civilization. If
under his dominance the business philosophy indicated above takes—as it
seems to be doing—increasing hold upon the universities, the churches,
the professions, and the people at large, it may be asked how long
shall we have any creators?
If the fundamental idea underlying our civilization, its _primum
mobile_, is to become that of a business profit, it is inevitable that
we shall decline in the scale of what has hitherto been considered
civilization as contrasted with barbarism in the Greek sense. The
Harvard professor may dismiss lightly the loss of the “arts and
graces,” but if his doctrine of the valuation of social service in
terms of income is to become established, is it not much more likely
to be lost than the “arts and graces”? What becomes of the artistic
spirit, of the professional spirit, of the pure scientific spirit? The
American is apt to think of his own country as in the van of at least
everything material and of Europe as negligible; but even in the things
considered distinctly American we are falling behind. That we have
recently lost the speed record both on land and water with that special
darling of America, the gasoline engine, may not be important, but it
will surprise most Americans to know that both the fastest and the
average speed of all trains in England and some parts of the Continent
are higher than in America. In aerial passenger routes America, in
spite of the efforts to make it appear otherwise, is far behind Europe,
where the whole continent is covered with a network of aerial routes
used as readily as we use trains at home.
I have touched at some length on architecture because it was not many
years ago that we were hoping for a genuine renaissance that should
have its beginning in America, and because we have, as I said, some
absolutely first-class architects. The present renaissance, however,
has come wholly in Europe from men like Le Corbusier in France, Gropius
in Germany, or Oud in Holland, with their enthusiastic followers. We
have had so little to do with it and are sharing so little in it that
the most recent pronouncement on the new movement there dismisses the
United States in three lines as offering nothing of theoretical value.
Civilizations rest fundamentally upon ideas. These ideas to be
effective must be those of the dominant classes in the civilization.
In making the business men the dominant and sole class in America, that
country is making the experiment of resting her civilization on the
ideas of business men. The other classes, dominated by the business
one, are rapidly conforming in their philosophy of life to it. The
business man, in so far as he is more than a business type, in so far
as he is a fully rounded personality (as, I repeat, many of them now
are), owes that development of himself outside his work to the work of
other classes in the past or present. If those classes become merged in
his own, whither can even he himself look for his extra-occupational
development? If the leaders are not humanely rounded personalities,
civilized rather than barbarian, what shall be expected of the mass
which patterns itself upon them? In a word, can a great civilization be
built up or maintained upon the philosophy of the counting-house and
the sole basic idea of a profit?