MASS PRODUCTION AND
INTELLECTUAL PRODUCTION
MASS PRODUCTION AND INTELLECTUAL PRODUCTION
Education in America, where there are about seven hundred thousand
students in institutions of collegiate rank alone, has become almost
a major industry. Although teachers are not yet organized into trade
unions there is a greater cohesion among them as a body than there is
among artists, journalists, clergymen, authors, and other men leading
what may loosely be called the artistic or intellectual life. Moreover
it is easier to get at the economic situation of the professor’s
household than it is to do so in the case of the others. Statistics of
income are readily available and, thanks to two recent studies, one
made of the faculty of Yale and the other of that of the University
of California, we have very definite information as to their detailed
expenses. For these various reasons the question of the professional
income of the intellectual worker and its relation to the general wage
or income scale of the country and the standard of living has largely
been confined to the teacher. For the same reasons the teacher offers
perhaps the best starting point for a present discussion of our problem.
The California study[1] was a survey of the incomes, expenses, and
ways of life of ninety-six married members of the faculty, and I shall
attempt to summarize only a few of the salient points brought out by
the investigation. Half of these families had one child or none and
the entire ninety-six averaged one and a half children per family. As
a rule the salaries did not cover the necessary living expenses, the
median salary of the whole group amounting to only sixty-five per cent
of its total income (mostly spent), the difference being made up almost
wholly from extra earnings and not from investments. The salaries
ranged from $1,400 to $8,000, the average being $3,000; the bulk of the
men holding full professorial rank being paid from $4,000 to $5,000. In
forty per cent of the families the wives worked and added to the family
income. As a rule, the men found teaching in the summer the only way
of making the additional amount called for by their expenses, so that
one-third of the faculty members and their wives reported no vacation
at all; forty per cent had less than two weeks; and sixty per cent less
than four weeks.
Correlating salaries and length of service, we find that after four
years at college and three to five years additional preparation working
for a higher degree or as a teaching fellow, a man may serve on the
faculty from twelve to twenty-five years and be close to fifty years of
age before he is at all assured of getting from $3,000 to $4,000, even
if he is retained and successful. After fifteen years’ service on top
of from seven to nine years’ preparation, he has one chance in ten of
earning from $5,000 to $7,000. Fourteen years’ service, or twenty-one
to twenty-three in all, are required to bring him to security of tenure
on a salary of from $4,000 to $5,000. No family spending less than
$6,000 was able to afford a full-time maid. Nearly one-third of the
wives, mostly college-bred themselves, did all of the family laundry
as well as the rest of the housework. For two-thirds of the husbands
and one-half of the wives, clothing was reported as costing annually
between $100 and $200 each. The average amount spent per family for
recreation, other than an automobile, was $200 a year. As a result of
the study the investigator reaches the conclusion that $7,000 is the
minimum amount per year on which a professional family can live without
impairing their own efficiency in their professional work.
The findings at Yale are equally striking. The official report[2]
made on conditions there recites, with regard to the members of the
faculty spending $4,000 a year, that “the married men at this level
are usually of assistant professor rank, often with families of
young children. They must live with extreme economy in the cheapest
obtainable apartment, borrowing to meet the expenses of childbirth or
sickness. The wife does all the cooking, housework, and laundry.” Of
those spending $8,500 the report states that “the families of associate
professors and the younger full professors at this level, with three
children and school expenses from nothing up to $1,000 a year, may
either have a full-time servant or spend only $200 to $400 for
occasional service. They live on the edge of a deficit. Even a small
insurance premium is paid with difficulty and the purchase of clothing
is kept as low as possible.” More than a quarter of the faculty
families covered by the report had no children, and the average number
of children in such families as had any was exactly two. An instructor
for the first two years gets a salary of $1,500-$1,800, in his third
year $2,100, and thereafter $2,500. An assistant professor gets $3,000
during his first three years, $3,500 in the next three years, and
$4,000 during his next three. An associate professor gets from $4,000
to $5,000 and a professor from $5,000 to $8,000. A first-class cook
in New Haven costs about $1,000 a year. Summing up, the report adds
that “taking into account the expenses to which his position subjects
him and judging by the home that he is able to maintain, the American
university teacher in many cases lives essentially as do men of the
skilled mechanic class.... It would perhaps be generally conceded that
a reasonable standard for the economic level for a professor after
twenty-five years of service would be the amount of money necessary to
maintain a home in a ten-room house, which he owns free of mortgage, to
keep one servant and pay for some occasional service, and to provide
an education for his children in preparatory school, college, and
professional school on an equality with that obtained by the general
run of students in this University. From the costs of various modes of
living shown above [in the report], it appears that life at this level
in New Haven now comes to about $15,000 or $16,000 a year.”
It is well known to those familiar with the situation of other
intellectual workers that they find themselves in the same plight as
the teachers in every case in which they do not sell their product in
a mass-market, but before carrying the argument further I must touch
on one more point in connection with the teachers. In another recent
report[3] covering 302 colleges with 11,361 faculty members, it is
stated that the average salary paid instructors, assistant or associate
professors, and professors was $2,958. This compares with $1,724 in
1914-15. If we take that year as par and accept the usual comparison of
the value of the dollar now as 61.7 cents, we find that in purchasing
power the present average salary is $1,825, or about six per cent more
than eleven years previously. It is evident therefore that the present
crisis and deep discontent among intellectual workers is not due, or
due only in small part, merely to the depreciated value of money. We
must seek the cause elsewhere.
It is due in my opinion mainly to two things, both of which derive
largely from mass production, namely, a rapidly altered standard and
ideal of living, and a vast and equally rapid shift in the economic
positions of the various classes of society.
Mass production, for the manufacturer, greatly decreases the cost of
production, and selling in vast quantities greatly increases profits.
There will come a time for almost every product when the inertia of
selling it in a market already fairly saturated with it will increase
the selling cost to such an extent as may more than equal the decreased
cost of production, as is already occurring in certain lines. But
meanwhile mass production has created enormous profits. In some cases
and to some extent, though much fewer and less than generally assumed,
the consumer has shared in these profits through lowered retail prices.
The rest of the increased profit has gone in part to the workmen and,
in much larger part, to the owners of the plants. In some lines,
notably ready-made clothes for men, the prices of which are two and a
half times those of 1912, the consumer has not benefited at all.
A generation ago the range of goods which even the rich might buy was
comparatively restricted, and the scale at expenditure for practically
every one was moderate. Today there is an almost unlimited range,
and although mass production may have put innumerable things at the
disposal of the public, the cost of living has not only been enormously
increased by them (as in the case of the automobile which absorbed
on the average six per cent of the total expense of the University
of California faculty), but the constant assault on people’s minds
by the most insidious sort of advertising makes these things appear
necessities. Mass production requires mass sales, and mass sales
require that the public shall be made to believe in the necessity of
buying. The ideal of the modern business man is not to supply wants but
to create them. America has always been a mass-minded country, and the
modern sales manager not only appeals to the individual in creating new
wants but enlists on his side the whole force of social opinion. His
effort is directed not only at making an individual desire a certain
article for itself but at making him feel that his standing in the
community and the welfare of his wife and children depend upon their
having it.
Mass-production salesmanship thus develops throughout all society
a vast number of new and formerly unfelt wants, wants based on the
things themselves or on social prestige. If these wants are satisfied
by purchase the family expense is greatly increased. If the individual
resists when others of his own class, and more particularly those
formerly considered as in a lower social or economic class, buy freely,
he feels himself sinking in the social scale in a country in which the
“standard of living” has come to have wholly a material significance.
Moreover, many of these new things, such as the automobile and
telephone, become literal necessities, when they become so common as
to create a new social life based upon their possession. As I pointed
out in an earlier chapter a very considerable part of the increased
cost of living is due to the so-called higher scale of living, so
that a comparison between the increase of salaries and the increase
in the cost of certain goods is no indication at all of the increased
difficulty of living.
The scientific inventions and new commercial products of the past
twenty years would, in any case, have made their appeal to such classes
in the community as could have afforded them, but the complete change
in the American mode of life and the consequent cost which has engulfed
us all like a tidal wave would not have occurred had it not been for
mass production. No one is troubled by not having something of which
he has never heard, and he is not greatly so by not being able to have
something which no one has whom he is ever likely to know personally.
For example, it could not have troubled a college professor or writer
in 1890 that he had not an automobile. It does not trouble him today
that he cannot have a private five-hundred-foot ocean-going yacht
like Vincent Astor. It is not wholly a question of keeping up with
the Joneses. Having a $2,000 car when one ought to have only a Ford
is sheer ostentation, but having some car in the country is now a
necessity unless one is going to cut one’s self and one’s family off
from a very large part of social “neighborhood” as well as from the
pleasures that all one’s friends, practically without exception, are
enjoying. The fact that today “everyone is having everything,” whether
they pay for it or not, is due to advertising and “high-powered
salesmanship,” and these are due primarily to mass production which
requires mass markets.
But even these would not have been sufficient to alter so completely
the status and peace of mind of the intellectual worker had it not been
for the other effect of mass production mentioned above, that is, the
shift in the economic status of the other classes. Formerly, although
the intellectual worker occupied a comparatively low position in the
economic scale, he was distinctly above the laboring class, and even
between him and the successful business man there was no unbridgable
gulf. Between the home of the college professor, clergyman, or author
and that of the business man there was a difference in degree but not
in kind. The intellectual, like his business acquaintance, could have
decent living quarters for his family and a maid to relieve his wife
of the heaviest household duties, and make his home an expression of
himself.
Today the intellectual finds his life and status attacked both from
above and below. Whatever may be the other and somewhat problematic
results of mass production, it has assuredly made the rich incredibly
richer than they ever were before. Ford, who has refused an offer of
one billion dollars’ cash for his plant, and who, in his incorporated
form, keeps a balance at the bank of four hundred millions, is only
a glaring example of what has been going on all around us. The same
figures that represented the entire capital values of considerable
fortunes twenty years ago represent today but the annual incomes of
the fortunate transient war profiteers or permanent mass producers.
This colossal increase in the wealth of the wealthy is tending to
place a complete gulf between classes and at the same time to establish
unprecedented standards of living.
Though it may seem a minor matter, take for example the question of
furnishing a home. If the laws of imitation are of great power in
society, so is that which makes expressing one’s own personality one
of the joys of life. The masters of mass production may preach the
benefits of standardization but they themselves are exempt from the
process. “A standardized print on your wall is just the thing for
you,” say they, while, like Mr. Mellon, they are reported to bid Count
Czernin a million dollars for a Vermeer. “Standardized furniture is
just the thing for the home,” they preach from magazines while they
sweep the market clean, at fabulous prices, of the fine old bits that
even the most modest collector might have hoped to pick up with luck
twenty years ago, until they have forced even the richest museums to
forgo purchase. The intellectuals, because they are intellectual, are
among the most insistent of human beings against being standardized.
The mass production managers feed them Ford cars, Victrolas, cheap
prints and other forms of _panes et circenses_ and tell them they
should be satisfied, while they themselves by the power of their
wealth, and in their frantic endeavor to escape standardized homes for
themselves, bid fantastic prices against one another for old silver,
chairs, tables, pictures, and every product of non-machine-made art and
artisanship. The average man today, who wishes to make his home, sees
everything but standardized articles soaring into the financial heavens
above like toy balloons escaped from a child’s hand. It is symptomatic
of much else in a new world suffering from colossal and concentrated
wealth. The intellectual finds himself deprived of more and more in
comparison with the business man, and shoved downward into the general
undistinguished standardized mass.
But if he is shoved downward by the effect of the mass production
wealth above him, he also has had a serious blow from the mass
production wages of the classes below him. All wages have felt the
effects of the mass production scales, and the result is that while the
wealthy can pay the $900 or $1,000 demanded by a maid, the intellectual
worker’s wife does the cooking and laundry, as we saw above. Is it any
wonder, as a man watches his wife, who perhaps has as good a mind as
his own, spend her days over the range and the tub in order that he
may use his own mind to the best advantage, that he wonders what is
ahead for her and the children and meditates escape for all of them
from the plight into which they have been plunged? In a less material
civilization, such as that of France, where, moreover, intellectual
work has social recognition and reward quite apart from its financial,
the plight is in many respects less serious even in the face of what
Americans would consider poverty.
Such an escape, as we have just suggested, however, if made, has two
aspects, the individual and the social. Frequently it is not difficult
to make. It may be a complete flight from the intellectual to the
business world, as has been and is being made by many. Or it may take
the form of adapting one’s intellectual product to mass consumption.
One may try for the movies, preach sensational sermons, become a
popular lecturer, write text books, or, if one has been writing for
the serious magazines, try to learn the trick of writing for those
with circulation in millions; and quadruple one’s income or even
amass a fortune. All the methods of escape suggested, however, entail
for the individual a warping of the characteristic bent of his mind
and generally a serious degeneration in his intellectual quality and
character.
The escape thus has its social aspect. America already has, probably,
the lowest grade mental life of any of the great modern nations. It
can ill afford to destroy what intellectual life it has and force
all intellectual and artistic individualism into the mass pattern.
At the end of that road lies an Assyria, a Babylon, a Carthage. Not
only can a nation not continue to function humanely with a large part
of its intellectual life suppressed, but it may be asked whether it
can permanently continue to function at all. The rich may buy up
all the old furniture and paintings in the world, but without new
mind it would seem as though a machine civilization based on science
must perish. All of our practical business men and inventors are now
dependent in the last analysis on the pure scientist, the man whose
thought and experiments bear no apparent relation to the practical
life. The business man may consider the intellectual a crank and of no
account in a practical world unless he submits to mass production and
rolls up royalties that can be understood even by a realtor, but the
intellectual life is all of a piece and it may be questioned whether a
nation that gauges its values by purely material standards and yet at
the same time reduces its intellectual workers below the economic level
of a freight-car conductor can continue indefinitely to produce even
the pure scientist. As M. Herriot said in an address to the students of
the Sorbonne last July, “ne croyez pas à l’artificielle distinction
des sciences et des lettres.... Les faits sont innombrables et les
formes infinies. Au-dessus de tout, il y a l’esprit, maître du monde.”
Europe might supply us with ideas in exchange for dollars but I see
no remedy for our own intellectual life except a gradually growing
sense of the real values of civilization on the part of the people. If
business men consider a railway conductor a more important person than
a professor, they will, quite apart from the law of supply and demand,
give him a larger salary, and provide for college buildings rather than
for the men who alone can give the buildings any significance. The
problem comes back, as most do, to what people consider the real values
in life. If, in the overwhelming mass of the population, those values
are material and not spiritual, one cannot expect the spiritual life to
flourish.
Of course for the intellectual worker of any sort, Grub Street has
always been in the background, and a teacher, writer, or artist is
probably further removed from the fear of starvation and the gutter
today than perhaps ever before. It may also be conceded that the
intellectuals should lead the way in renunciation and a sane ordering
of life. But it must be remembered that in America owing to mass
_mores_ the individual (with his family) is infinitely less free to
lead his own life in his own way and yet retain social contacts with
others than he is in almost any country in Europe. To a considerable
extent, it is only after he has conformed to the material American
standards that his real spiritual freedom and influence in personal
relationships, begin. Moreover, whereas in Europe one can both
preach and practise renunciation of the material for the sake of the
spiritual, the doctrine in this country is considered un-American, and
if carried out by many would obviously bring the whole system of mass
production crashing about our ears. This is readily understood by the
business leaders, who are the real heroes and ideals of the people. The
last thing in the world that they want either preached or practised is
the simple life. The intellectual here, therefore, who is himself quite
content to live that life and do his creative work without any thought
of competing for rewards with the business man, finds solidly aligned
against such a scheme of living not only the mass production wage
scales which make the cost of almost any decent living prohibitive, but
also the opinion of a spiritually unawakened public singularly bent
upon forcing conformity to its own standards, and the opinion of the
interested leaders of the public, the business men whose own profits
now depend upon the public’s becoming more and more materialistic.
The gigantic powers of manufacturing now in existence require for
their profitable exploitation that the public shall be made steadily
to develop new wants, wants that can be satisfied only by manufactured
articles. Hoover and others may prate all they like about the
concurrent need of an intellectual and spiritual life, but how is that
life to develop if people are to be made to use their whole energies
in satisfying new wants on the material plane? Yet if, on the one
hand, they do not so grow, and, on the other, the intellectual classes
become steadily more pinched between the two classes benefiting by mass
production,—the owners above setting ever higher standards of living
and the operatives below pressing steadily past them in an orgy of
material well-being,—what will become of the intellectuals and how long
will they continue to struggle and deny themselves, and have their
wives do the laundry, in a civilization which will more and more look
down upon their lack of earning power and their declining economic and
social status?
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Getting and Spending at the Professional Standard of Living. By J.
B. Peixotto. New York: The Macmillan Co. 1927.
[2] Incomes and Living Costs of a University Faculty. Edited by Y.
Henderson and M. D. Davis. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1928.
[3] Teachers’ Salaries 1926-7. By Trevor Arnett. General Education
Board. 1928.