THE RIGHTS OF PURCHASERS
In any given community every person is directly or indirectly a
purchaser. From birth to death choice is made for us or we ourselves
choose objects of purchase daily, even hourly. As we do so, we help to
decide, however unconsciously, how our fellow men shall spend their
time in making what we buy. Few persons can give much in charity;
giving a tithe is, perhaps, beyond the usual custom. But whatever
our gifts may be, they are less decisive for the weal or woe of our
fellow beings than are our habitual expenditures. For a man is largely
what his work makes him--an artist, an artisan, a handicraftsman, a
drudge, a sweater’s victim or, scarcely less to be pitied, a sweater.
All these and many more classes of workers exist to supply the demand
that is incarnate in their friends and fellow citizens, acting as
the purchasing public. All of us, all the time, are deciding what
industries shall survive, and under what conditions.
Obviously the purchaser ultimately decides all production, since any
article must cease to be produced if consumers cease to purchase it.
The horsehair furniture of the early part of the nineteenth century
has now virtually ceased to be manufactured. On the other hand, any
article, however injurious to human life and health the conditions of
its production may be, or with whatsoever risk they may be attended,
continues to be placed on the market so long as there is an effective
demand for it; _e. g._, nitro-glycerine, phosphorous matches, and mine
products of all kinds.
This great purchasing public, embracing the whole people, which
ultimately decides everything, does so, on the whole, blindly, and in a
manner injurious to itself, and particularly to that portion of itself
which is engaged in production and distribution.
It would seem an obvious right of the purchaser that the food which
he buys at the price asked should be pure and clean; that the garment
purchased of an entirely reputable dealer should be free from poisonous
dyes, vermin, and the germs of disease; and that both food and garments
should leave his conscience free from participation in the employment
of young children or of sweaters’ victims.
Yet these seemingly obvious rights were, perhaps, never farther from
attainment than to-day, in the opening years of the twentieth century.
Adulteration of foods has never, in the history of the human race, been
carried on upon a scale so vast as at present. The sweating system
with its inevitable accompaniment of filth and disease conveyed in the
product, persists and increases in spite of sixty years of effort of
the philanthropists and the needle-workers to check it.
The oldest recognized legal right of the purchaser is to have his
goods as they are represented. To sell goods under false pretenses
has long been an offense punishable with more or less severity. But
of late this right, if it was ever widely enforceable, has become
largely illusory. In the vast complications of modern production
and distribution, conditions have arisen such that the individual
purchaser at the moment of buying, cannot possibly ascertain for
himself whether the representation of the seller is accurate or not.
The rule _caveat emptor_ fails when the purchaser is prevented by the
nature of the case from exercising _enlightened_ care. Thus in the case
of adulterated foods, or of foods exposed to filth or disease in the
course of preparation, and in the case of garments sewed in tenements,
the purchaser is at the mercy of the producer and the distributer, and
is debarred from exercising care in these respects at the moment of
purchasing.
Not only may a department store advertise with impunity in a dozen
daily newspapers that “all our goods are made in our own factory,”
when it neither owns nor controls a factory, but the sales-clerks
may safely reiterate the assurance over the counter in regard to an
individual garment which, in truth, was finished in a tenement house
by a bedridden consumptive. The machinery for identification is so
imperfect, the difficulties in the way of tracing a garment are so
many and so subtle, that the law has no more terrors for a mendacious
sales-clerk than for the reckless advertising agent, or for the
business office of those daily papers which thrive upon the wholesale
mendacity of retail commerce.
Yet the demand for opportunity to obtain garments and food which may be
purchased with a clear conscience grows imperative, has become, indeed,
an ardent and abiding desire of enlightened purchasers who long for
some trustworthy assurance that they are free from participation in
the employment of children, in starvation wages and in the continuance
of the sweating system. Granted that this new aspiration may be far
from general, far from achieving its own gratification on any large
scale, the mere fact that it is present in the minds of thousands of
purchasers involves a new ethical standard on their part and must, in
the course of time, bring fundamental changes throughout wide reaches
of production and distribution.
The relation of this aspiration to certain legislation forms the
subject of this and the ensuing chapter.
=Ignorance of Conditions of Production.=--The most serious obstacle
to the realizing of this aspiration is the willing ignorance of the
masses, particularly of the masses of women who constitute the direct
purchasers of the largest portion of the articles used for personal
consumption. Even the producers, themselves, suffer so keenly from the
lack of intelligence of their customers, that they are fitting out
museums for the purpose of educating them, the Commercial Museum of
Philadelphia being a promising type of such undertakings.
Recognizing no duty in this matter, asserting no right, the
unintelligent purchasers tempt the greed of producers and distributers.
Devoid of enlightened imagination, these purchasers exert no stimulus
favorable to the honest manufacturer.
Because the germs of the deadliest diseases are not discernible by the
eye, because they have no conspicuous and offensive smell, a shopping
public devoid of imagination remains easily unaware of their presence
on the counters of reputable merchants. In the same way, ices and
syrups colored in tints and shades unknown to the fruits and flowers
of nature, arouse no imaginative wonder. Peas of brilliant green in
January, corn taken as yellow from the can in March as from the ear in
July, these impossible objects are credulously accepted by the buying
multitude. Why? Because it prefers not to know the truth.
Because the purchasing public, on the whole, prefers at present not
to know the facts, we are all in danger of eating aniline dyes in
tomatoes, jams, jellies, candies, ices, fruit syrups, flavoring and
coloring extracts; and salicylic acid in our canned peas and other
vegetables which we insist upon having preserved of midsummer hue at
midwinter. We wear more or less arsenic in our print goods and the
germs of tuberculosis and of countless other diseases in our outer
garments.
A physician who visits among the poorest of the poor in New York City
recently found a woman in the last stages of consumption, making, as
she lay propped among her pillows, little boxes for wedding cake,
licking the edges to moisten the gum to make it hold together. The
teacher of a class of defective children in the same city, while
visiting the home of a lad whose left arm and right hand had been
amputated by reason of cancerous growths, found the father suffering
from tuberculosis, but making a trivial addition to the family income
by cracking walnuts (for which he was paid seven cents a pound if no
kernels were broken and three cents a pound if his work was imperfect).
The father complained that he lost much time in fetching and carrying
the nuts and kernels between the store and his home, and could crack
but fifteen pounds in three days.
The individual purchaser would doubtless prefer to eat nuts cracked
in a workroom not frequented by a father afflicted with tuberculosis
and little son mutilated by the ravages of cancer. The individual has,
however, at present no method of enforcing this reasonable preference.
We are all much in the position of the Italian immigrants in any of our
great cities. They support at least one store for the sale of imported
maccaroni, vermicelli, sausage (bologna and other sorts), olive oil,
Chianti wine, and Italian cheese and chestnuts. These articles are
all excessively costly, by reason of transportation charges and the
import duties involved; but the Italians are accustomed to using
them and prefer a less quantity of these kinds of food to a greater
abundance of those cheaper and more accessible supplies by which they
are surrounded. The pitiful result is that the importer buys the least
quantity of the Italian produce requisite for the purpose of admixture
with American adulterants. The most flagrant example of this is,
perhaps, the use of Italian olive oil, of which virtually none really
pure is placed upon the market for sale at retail. What the Italian
immigrant gets is the familiar Italian label, the well-known package
with its contents tasting more or less as it tasted at home in Italy.
What the actual ingredients are he knows no more than an American knows
what he is eating when he places his so-called butter or honey upon
his so-called wheat-cakes. The demand of the Italians in America for
Italian food-products, although large, persistent, and maintained at
a heavy sacrifice on the part of the purchasers, is not an effective
demand, because the immigrants have neither the knowledge nor the
organization wherewith to enforce it, while the legislation of the
various states affords them virtually no redress.
The privilege of remaining thus unintelligent costs the shopping
public uncounted thousands of lives and other uncounted thousands of
invalids. But it is a privilege dear to modern crowds. Indeed, the
preference for things which come from afar, whose industrial history
cannot be known to the purchasers, appears to be almost universal.
Thus the writer has seen in a filthy hovel, in the grimiest street
in Chicago, Sicilian peasant women sewing into the waistbands of the
cheapest little knee pants, tags bearing the words _New York_, because
the purchasers like the illusion that all garments sold in the United
States are made in New York. The same illusion is cherished as to
numerous food products--the purchaser will have it that they came from
some other place than their real source. Figs from California must be
labeled Smyrna; cotton seed oil from South Carolina must bear French
or Italian labels calling it olive oil.
Why all these queer mendacities? Because the purchasing public
will have it so! Because the number is still sadly small of those
who perceive the duty to know their sources of supply and assert
their right to know them; who are willing to sacrifice that deadly
privilege of remaining ignorant, which the careless majority exercise
at frightful cost of disease spread among innocent families, and of
poverty, illness and death among the workers. The willingly ignorant
purchaser carries a heavy share of the guilt of the exploiting
manufacturer and the adulterating distributer.[12]
=Some Typical Purchasers.=--How inadequate is the individual demand
of a single wide-awake customer, is well shown by the experience of
a conscientious shopper of the writer’s acquaintance. Deeply moved
by an eloquent appeal on behalf of the sweaters’ victims and their
sufferings, she determined to free her own conscience by buying only
goods made in factories and workrooms, never in home sweat-shops. She
began her search for such goods in the leading department store in
which she had always fitted out her boys for school. The sales-clerk
assured her that, “All our goods are made in our own factory; we
handle no sweatshop goods.” Being a canny person and well-instructed,
she asked for a written assurance of that fact signed by a member
of the firm, to be sent home with the goods. They were never sent,
although this was an excellent customer whom the firm was in the
habit of obliging if possible. This process she repeated in several
stores and outfitting establishments, until it became clear to her
mind that, alone and unaided, she could never free her individual
conscience. The loneliness of this enlightened purchaser is one of the
instructive phenomena of our times. The great, careless, thoughtless
mass of American men and women have performed the act attributed to
the ostrich. Hiding their minds in the pleasanter oblivion, they have
pretended that the enemy was not present.
During the long period in which there had not yet been discovered a
practicable method of dealing with the sweating system, many otherwise
intelligent people deliberately adopted a policy of ignoring conditions
which they saw no way of improving. Thus it was once the fortune of
the writer to address a club of unusually influential women, on the
conditions of work in the needle-trades in Chicago, as they existed
during the smallpox epidemic of 1894. The story was a painful one of a
disorganized trade, pauperism of skilled workers, destruction of home
life in the tenements, incompetence in the Board of Health, filth,
disease and death. The members listened with visible impatience. In
the course of the discussion which followed one member said: “This
club exists for the purpose of education and recreation. Listening to
the recital this afternoon certainly cannot be regarded as recreation.
Unless the speaker can offer a method by which we may participate
in some practical effort for the improvement of conditions in the
needle-trades, our way of spending this afternoon can have no claim to
be regarded as education. For my part, I find it satisfactory to buy
garments wherever I find them attractive, and then send them to the
steam-cleaner.”
Manifestly this individualistic solution of the problem of the
needle-trades was insufficient, even from the point of view of the
speaker, for any ordinary cleaning of those days would certainly not
have reached the germs of smallpox or of scarlet fever; and few persons
share the willingness of that speaker to buy goods trusting to the
efficacy of subsequent disinfection. Since, however, there was at that
time no method available which could be offered to the critic, the
writer was left defenseless. The community has borne both the risk of
infection and the guilt of participation in maintaining the sweating
system with sadly complete equanimity, far more amiably, indeed, than
it has endured the painful process of enlightenment.
Among all the cherished forms of ignorance, none is more tenacious
than that of the prosperous purchaser able and willing to pay for the
best that the market affords and convinced that, whatever the sorrows
of purchasers of ready-to-wear goods, he is safe, because he gets
his garments only of the merchant tailor and pays a high price for
the assurance that they are made up under conditions which guard him
against disease, and enable the merchant tailor to pay the working
tailor a fair price for his labor. But this customer is really no
better off than the well-instructed club woman making her ineffectual
search for righteously made ready-to-wear goods for her boys. For
example, as factory inspector of Illinois, the writer was one day in
search of a cigarmaker who was said to have smallpox in his family,
during the terrible epidemic of 1894. Quite by accident a tailor was
discovered newly moved into the suspected house, and not yet registered
with the department or with the local board of health. In this tailor’s
shop, which was his dwelling, there was a case of smallpox. In the same
shop there was, also, a very good overcoat, such as gentlemen were
paying from sixty to seventy dollars for in that year. In the collar
was a hang-up strap bearing the name of a merchant tailor in Helena,
Montana. Now, that merchant tailor had had, in his store window in
Helena, excellent samples of cloth from which the customer had ordered
his coat. The Helena tailor had taken the necessary measurements and
had telegraphed them, together with the sample-number of the cloth,
to the wholesale house in Chicago, of which he was an agent. The
wholesaler had had the coat cut and had sent it to the kitchen-tailor
in whose sickroom in an infected house in Chicago it was fortunately
discovered. But for the happy accident of the finding of the tailor
during a search for an entirely different person, the purchaser
in Helena, Montana, would surely have bought smallpox germs in his
expensive coat.
Beside this fatuous belief that his custom-work, because it is costly,
is made under clean and wholesome conditions, the purchaser of
expensive garments usually comforts his conscience with the assumption
that the working tailor who makes them receives some substantial
share of the high price in the form of wages. While it is true that
the tailors who do custom work have a more stable trade union than
workingmen in the ready-to-wear branches, and command, therefore,
somewhat better pay, it is also true that the tailor in this case, as
in scores of others during the same epidemic, was driven by extreme
poverty to conceal the dreadful fact that he had smallpox in his
family, through fear of losing a few days’ or a few weeks’ work. So the
high price of the coat did not even entitle the customer in Helena,
Montana, to an easy conscience on the score of the wages paid to the
people who worked upon it.
In the matter of wages, however, there is no longer an available excuse
for ignorance on the part of the purchaser as to the wages paid for
the manufacture of his garments; and to-day, he who remains ignorant
upon this important point does so by his own choice. For the tailors
were already, at that time, offering a label attached to goods made
under conditions of pay and of hours of work satisfactory to both the
employer and the worker.
=Efforts to Enlighten Purchasers.=--Clearly the first step towards
the assertion of the rights of the purchaser is the acquisition
of knowledge; and it is an idiosyncrasy of the present industrial
situation that a large part of the effort exerted for the enlightenment
of purchasers has come, not from themselves, but from manufacturers,
physicians and philanthropists (in the form of restrictions upon the
sale of drugs, or recommendations in favor of municipally prepared
vaccine, anti-toxine, etc.), from public authorities in the shape of
official reports, from the Consumers’ League in its endeavor to form a
large and stable body of organized purchasers, and finally and chiefly
from the trade unions, disseminating information in the interest of
better working conditions for themselves.
Among all these agencies, the press and the advertising merchants
might be expected to appear. These have, however, little claim to
any educational quality in their endeavor. Their exertions have been
directed distinctly not toward education. Rather they have been meant
to stimulate, to persuade, incite, entice, and induce the indifferent
to purchase. Much of the current advertising, of which the patent
medicine advertisement may be taken as the type, is aimed directly
at the ignorance of the purchaser. Nearly all of it is aimed at the
cupidity of the public and it, therefore, offers cheapness as the one
great characteristic. It is immoral rather than ethical.
Such measures as exist for the inspection and testing of food products
have usually been obtained either by hygienists and physicians for
philanthropic purposes, or by producers who were furthering their own
interests while nominally promoting those of the purchaser. Such is the
requirement that oleomargarine shall be colored pink when offered for
sale in certain states, nominally for the protection of consumers, who
may not care whether the substance which they use for frying or for
spreading on bread is made of the milk of the cow or the fat of the
steer. The people who obtained the enactment of this law were not the
outraged consumers of oleomargarine, demanding to be protected against
it, but the farmers whose butter market was threatened by the invasion
of the oleomargarine.
Similar protection to American purchasers of foreign food products
is afforded by the federal bureau with its laboratories for the
investigation of imported articles, nominally in the interest of the
public health, but really in the interest of the American producer,
whose adulterations are left by the federal government to the varying
efficiency and honesty of local boards of health, and state chemists,
and food and dairy commissions.
In consequence of these diverse and multifarious exertions on behalf of
the purchasers, there have grown up regulations of strangely unequal
effectiveness. Thus in many cities the sale of a small number of
well-known deadly drugs is hedged about with precautions intended to
prevent murder and suicide by the ancient method of poisoning. In some
cases, the purchaser of such drugs must be identified, and must state
the purpose for which the purchase is made. Arsenic and strychnine,
having an old established reputation as possible enemies of human
life, and but slight profit for the retailer in the quantities in which
they are sold to individual purchasers, are surrounded by precautions;
and the package may even have to be conspicuously labeled with skull
and crossbones, so that no careless third party can unintentionally
come to harm.
Meanwhile the milk sold by the grocer next door to the druggist may
be conveying typhoid germs in every bottle, and his cream may be so
thickened with corn-starch and other substances as to starve any baby
depending upon it; or serve as a gradual poison to a diabetic patient
conscientiously endeavoring to follow his prescribed diet of fats and
to avoid starch in all its forms. The products of the dairy have an
excellent reputation as bases of wholesome feeding for infants and
invalids; the purchaser is not habitually on guard against them, as
he is forewarned against the corner druggist’s arsenic and strychnia,
nor has he any available means of personal self-defense. The typhoid
germ and the thickening substance added to his cream and milk he cannot
discover for himself at will. He must take his chances of protection
through the intelligence and faithfulness of the municipal officials
who deal with the milk supply. The constant appalling death rate of
infants who depend upon milk, in all great cities, demonstrates the
insufficiency of this agency, under present conditions.
Only the intelligent farmer, managing his own dairy, or the coöperative
society owning its dairies and buying its own product, can be certain
of avoiding poisons, quite as dangerous to life and health as
strychnia and arsenic, with which American society has not yet learned
to deal by any effective summary procedure. The experience of some
of the English cities, and of Rochester, New York, seems to indicate
that the difficulties of the milk supply can be met only by the
institution of municipal milk, analogous to the municipal water supply;
and municipal provision of all useful drugs, analogous to the present
municipal supplies of vaccine and anti-toxine serum.
On the other side from the dairyman, the druggist’s next door neighbor,
perhaps, is a tailor, who may be actively engaged in poisoning society
in yet a different manner, by the sale of garments made in places in
which there is infectious disease transmissible in articles exposed
to it. In this case, also, as in the case of the dairyman’s milk, the
customer is at the mercy of the community and its officials. For when
he orders a suit, it is out of his power to sit in the tailor’s shop
while the garment is cut, and then follow it whithersoever the merchant
tailor may send it, first to a workshop to be stitched, afterward to a
second place in which the buttonholes may be made, and then to a third
place, commonly a tenement-dwelling, in which the vest and trousers
are felled and otherwise completed before the garment is sent back to
the tailor for the removal of whatever grease and vermin it may have
acquired in its travels. For the tailor, as for the dairyman, there has
never yet been brought to bear any precautionary measure adequately
protective for the customer.
Scarcely more availing than the restrictions upon strychnia and arsenic
in the wilderness of modern retail trade, are the efforts of the public
officials to protect the purchasing public by the dissemination of
information. The Department of Labor at Washington, the state bureaus
of labor, the state inspectors of factories, the municipal and state
boards of health, the state chemists and dairy commissions, all publish
annually or biennially (some of them quarterly, monthly, and weekly)
information for the enlightenment of the citizens. But very little of
this information has, hitherto, served the purpose of the individual
purchaser. If I have read the reports of all these officers, I am not
only in as great danger as before of buying glucose for sugar, acetic
acid for vinegar, and paper in the soles of my shoes; but I am in as
great danger as before of buying smallpox, measles, scarlet fever,
infectious sore eyes and a dozen forms of disease of the skin in my
new garments. For not one of these officials publishes the list of
the kitchen-tailors to whom the merchant tailor gives his goods to be
made up; just as not one of them can possibly give information whereby
adulterations of foods can be successfully detected in the private
kitchen.
On the other hand, the available official information already existing
has hitherto remained largely ineffectual. In vain has the fact
been printed that a certain bouillon (so extensively advertised as
particularly delicate and suitable for the use of aged persons and
little children) is boiled in such close proximity to the fertilizer
storage of the packing establishment that the factory inspectors fall
ill on the days of inspection of these premises. The bouillon continues
to be served at the luncheons of the socially aspiring. Official
statements on all these matters, safely buried in official reports, do
not reach and influence the great mass of the buyers.
For many generations manufacturers have been offering to their patrons
the guarantee of the brand, whereby the producer stakes his reputation
upon the excellence of the article bearing his name or device. But
the public attaches such slight importance to this guarantee that, at
present, many factories send out more goods without the brand than with
it, not wishing to shoulder the discredit incident to their cheapest
and most worthless product, which yet proves the more profitable
portion of the total output.
The difficulties of the manufacturers in their efforts to enlighten
purchasers are greatly intensified by the extraordinary incompetence of
the “average” purchaser to judge articles on their merits. For certain
great modern industries men have devised tests for the product, and
warships, locomotives, railway bridges, and electrical installations
can all be tried and tested before the bills are paid. But for the bulk
of the products intended for personal use, nothing effective has been
designed corresponding to these tests. Especially is this true of all
those branches of manufacture which were once carried on by women in
the home, and have now gone out into shops and factories. Concerning
these products, purchasers must still rely upon their individual skill
as buyers. The old rule _caveat emptor_ is here carried out to its
utmost application.
The most promising step forward in the effort to educate the purchasing
public has been taken whenever a state has required the manufacturer
of an article of food or medicine to state clearly and truthfully the
ingredients composing each package offered for sale. This is a direct
appeal to the intelligence of the purchasing public. Such measures
become effective just in proportion as the purchasers coöperate with
the officials who are charged with the duty of testing and analyzing
samples bought in the ordinary course of trade. A community in which
this coöperation is well sustained protects the life and health
of its citizens, stimulates their intelligence in a direction of
ever-increasing industrial importance, and enforces honesty upon
producers who are under the heaviest moral strain when left unsustained
under the pressure of competition.
The same principle underlies a bill entitled “An Act for Preventing
the Adulteration or Misbranding of Foods or Drugs, and for Regulating
Traffic Therein,” which has twice passed the House of Representatives
only to fail each time of passage by the Senate. This is the attempted
application of the principle that the purchaser is of right entitled to
trustworthy information furnished by the producer and guaranteed by the
ceaseless activity of officials created for the purpose of examining
the products and testing the veracity of the labels attached to them.
By providing for a continuous appeal to the intelligence of the
individual purchaser, and an ever present warning to the producer to
tell the truth as to his product, this bill[13] promises an important
ethical gain through legislation.
FOOTNOTES:
[12] In England, a large body of purchasers has, for more than one
generation, striven to attain an effective knowledge of its sources of
supply, and to organize demand for the express purpose of influencing
the conditions of distribution, namely the coöperative societies. In
America, however, the coöperative movement (aside from insurance and
building and loan societies) has gained no considerable headway in
either production or distribution. The work of the trade unions in the
direction of affording information and arousing an interest in the
conditions of production will be dealt with later.
[13] For the text of this bill see Appendix V.