DEATHBEDS AND DIVIDENDS
Stock market reports do not show a relationship between deathbeds and
dividends. Such a relationship exists, however. In this country, many
are made to die miserably in order that a few may live magnificently.
Every year, more than half a million human beings are compelled to die
in order that a few thousands may make, every year, perhaps half a
billion dollars. More than three millions are kept sick in order that a
handful may be kept rich.
This is not mere rhetoric. It is fact. Irving Fisher, Professor of
Political Economy at Yale, and President of the Committee of One Hundred
on National Health, is one of the authorities for the figures. In his
report on national vitality, to the Conservation Commission, he declared
that in this country, every year, 600,000 human beings die whose lives
might be saved; that there are constantly 3,000,000 ill who might be
well.
Dr. Woods Hutchinson, New York physician, endorses these estimates.
Moreover, the estimates are confirmed by the actual experience of New
Zealand. New Zealand’s death-rate is 9.5 to the thousand. Our death-rate
is 16.5 to the thousand. If New Zealand’s population were as great as
our own, the number of deaths each year, under her present rate, would
be 630,000 fewer than the number of Americans who die each year. Yet the
climate of New Zealand is no more healthful than is that of America. New
Zealand simply does not sacrifice her people to private greed. America
does.
Plenty of laymen know how typhoid could be made a dead disease. Germany
has already made typhoid all but a dead disease in Germany. Yet, in this
country, tuberculosis, typhoid and other diseases that could easily be
prevented, are permitted to go on, killing their millions.
Why? Because capitalism stands in the way. Because deathbeds could not
be decreased in number without decreasing dividends in size. Because
we can reduce the death-rate only by acting through our
governments—national, state and municipal—and big business, rather
than ourselves, controls these governments. Big business, desiring to
keep the special privileges it has and to get more, puts men into
office whom it believes will do its bidding. Usually, these men know
nothing and care nothing about promoting the public health. They are
politicians. If they do know something about promoting the public
health, and attempt to apply their knowledge at the expense of
somebody’s dividends, there is a fight. If it is a disease-infected
tenement that it is desired to tear down, the injunction is brought
into play.
Such a situation seems appalling. It is appalling. It borders upon the
monstrous that a people who have at last learned how to prevent the
great diseases should not be permitted to apply their knowledge. That
the people endure such a condition can be explained only on the theory
that they realize neither the ease with which modern science could
extend their lives, nor the identity of the few who put dividends above
life.
In order that there shall be no doubt concerning the power of present
knowledge, if applied, to destroy some of the great diseases and cripple
others, I shall set down here a question that I asked of Professor
Irving Fisher, Dr. Woods Hutchinson, and Dr. J. N. McCormack. Dr.
McCormack is an eminent physician, who devotes his entire time to
lecturing throughout the United States, under the auspices of the
American Medical Association and the Committee of One Hundred. His topic
is the advisability of applying modern knowledge to the public health
problem. Here is the question:
“If you had the power of a czar, could you destroy tuberculosis and
typhoid fever, and also greatly reduce the number of deaths from
pneumonia?”
Professor Fisher and Dr. McCormack replied promptly in the
affirmative. Evidently, I might as well have asked Dr. Hutchinson if,
having a glass of water, he could drink it. He was most matter of
fact. Without a doubt, tuberculosis could be destroyed. So could
typhoid fever, which is solely a filth disease that no one can get
without eating or drinking matter that has passed through the stomach
of a typhoid victim. Parenthetically, I may say that I heard Dr.
Hutchinson tell a committee of the United States Senate that if a
National Department of Health were established and properly
administered, half of the crime would cease in twenty-five years. Dr.
Hutchinson also said that it was entirely possible to save the babies
that died from preventable diseases—dysentery, for instance. The
lowest estimate of the number of babies who die every year from
preventable diseases is 100,000.
Ask the same question of any physician in the country who is worth his
salt and he will give the same answer. Thus well known are the methods
by which the great diseases might be destroyed.
The way to wipe out tuberculosis quickly, for instance, would be to
destroy every habitation that is known to be hopelessly infected—and
there are many such—permit no habitation to be erected without provision
for sufficient sunlight and air; permit no factory or other workplace to
be erected without sufficient provision for sunlight and fresh air—and
destroy such workplaces as now exist without this provision; reduce the
cost of living so that the millions who now cannot afford to live in
sanitary homes and buy adequate food could do so; isolate the infected
and educate the people with regard to the necessity of sleeping with
their bedroom windows wide open.
If this program were put through, tuberculosis would cease as soon as
those who are now infected should either have recovered or died. It is
because such a program has not been put through that, according to
Professor Fisher, there are always 500,000 Americans suffering from
tuberculosis, and the annual death-roll from the disease is 150,000. Any
municipal government, if it were disposed to do so and the courts were
willing to let it do so, could put through the housing part of the
program in a single summer. The dangerous habitations could be
condemned. The government, if necessary, could build and rent at cost,
sanitary houses in the suburbs, as the government of New Zealand does
for its people. Congress, the President and the courts, if they were
disposed to do so, could reduce the cost of living. If the government
can teach farmers by mail how to prevent hog-cholera, there would seem
to be no reason why it should not teach human beings by mail to breathe
fresh air both night and day.
What stands in the way of immediately putting through such a program?
Nothing in the world except the men whose property would be destroyed,
or whose stealings in food-prices would be stopped. The property loss
would be enormous. (Think of calling the destruction of a lot of
death-traps a “loss.”) The “value” of the property destroyed might be a
billion dollars. Maybe it would be two billions. What difference need it
make if it should take five billion dollars’ worth of labor, lumber,
bricks, steel and other materials to replace death-traps with
life-traps? One hundred and fifty thousand lives would be saved every
year from tuberculosis alone, and the rebuilding operations would create
greater prosperity for labor than was ever created by any act of
Congress.
A hundred years ago, no one knew how to stamp out tuberculosis. What
good does it do us to know how? We are not permitted to apply our
knowledge. We can peck away if we want to, at the edge of the problem,
but we mustn’t strike at the middle. If we should, we might cut
somebody’s dividends. We might interfere with the “vested interests” of
the owners of the cellars in which 25,000 New York families live, or
with the owners of the 101,000 windowless rooms in which New Yorkers
live, or with the owners of the unsanitary houses and factories in other
cities. Our public officials know better than to try to do anything
really radical in the health line. They have condemned just enough
pestholes to know how dangerous it is to political prospects to grapple
with property, and enforced just enough of the factory laws to know how
dangerous it is to try to enforce factory laws at all.
In New York City, according to Tenement House Commissioner Murphy, 45
persons are burned alive every year in death-trap tenements. A new
tenement house law prohibits the erection of death-traps, and in the new
tenements there are no cremations. But the old death-traps are permitted
to stand. In ten years, 450 more persons will have been burned alive. In
10 years, 1,500,000 more Americans will have died from tuberculosis.
“Of the people living in the United States to-day,” said J. Pease
Norton, Assistant Professor of Political Economy at Yale, “more than
8,000,000 will die of tuberculosis.” Between the ages of 20 and 30,
every third death is from consumption, and, at all ages, the mortality
from the same disease is one in nine.
We now censure ancient kings for having slaughtered men in war for
private profit. But what ancient king ever made such a record in war as
our dividend-takers make in peace? What ancient king, in his whole
lifetime, ever slew 8,000,000 men? What modern war marked the end of so
many men as tuberculosis kills in a year? During the four years of the
Civil War, only a little more than 200,000 men were killed in battle.
Tuberculosis kills 300,000 Americans every two years. Other diseases
that could be prevented if dividends were out of the way bring up the
total of avoidable deaths in this country to 1,200,000 every two years.
What if our Government did nothing to end a war that was killing 600,000
Americans each year? What if a few contractors who were making millions
out of the war controlled elections, administrations and the courts and
would not let the government end the war?
What difference does it make whether foreign foes and army contractors
kill these millions, or whether domestic dividend-takers and their
governments kill them? Dead men not only “tell no tales,” but they have
no preferences. It is as bad to be dead from one cause as from another.
“During the next ten years,” said Professor Norton, “more than 6,000,000
infants less than two years old will end their little spans of life,
while mothers sit by and watch in utter helplessness. And yet this
number could probably be decreased by as much as half. But nothing is
done.”
Dr. Cressey L. Wilbur, Chief Statistician for Vital Statistics for the
Federal Census Bureau, says that at least 100,000 and perhaps 200,000
children less than five years old die in this country every year from
preventable causes.
Our national government freights the mails with circulars telling how to
cure hog-cholera and kill the insects that prey on fruit trees; but in
all the years since the Revolutionary War, it has never sent a circular
to a mother telling her how to keep her baby alive. The state and the
municipal governments have done something, but they have usually stopped
when they reached the big money bags. Not a state or a city has made it
impossible for a baby to be given bad milk. Not a state or a city has
rid itself of unsanitary habitations. Not a state or a city has
condemned all the workshops in which men and women work at the peril of
their lives. Not a state or a city has even enforced its own
factory-inspection laws.
If the men whom big business has put in office were even intelligently
interested in public health, probably 50,000 babies could be saved each
year without tearing down a rookery or providing a single better house.
A little intelligent effort and a few thousand dollars would suffice.
Dr. Hutchinson tells what a little intelligent effort and a few dollars
did for the babies of the small English city of Huddersfield. A few
years ago a physician was elected mayor. One of his first acts was to
announce that he would give a prize of ten shillings to the mother of
every child born during the mayor’s administration, provided the babies
were brought to his office in perfect health, on the first anniversary
of their birth. The only other stipulation was that no mother should be
eligible to a prize who did not immediately report to the mayor the
birth of her infant.
Though the prize was small, there was no lack of mothers who were
willing to be takers. The doctor-mayor established what amounted to a
correspondence school for mothers, and, at the birth of each child,
began to send circulars telling how to take care of the baby; what to
feed it and what not to feed it; what to do if the baby appeared
so-and-so—and so on. Moreover, he kept a city physician on the circuit
to look in at each home as often as possible, to see how the babies
appeared and give the mothers further advice.
That’s all there is to this story—except that he brought down the
death-rate for babies from 130 to 55; saved 75 babies each year to each
thousand born. More than that he helped the babies who would have lived
anyway. Good care, says the doctor, will increase the strength of strong
babies from 15 to 25 per cent.
Any American government could do as much. By condemning unsanitary homes
any American government could do more. All that is necessary is the
desire—and the permission of those who control the governments. The
people that cast the ballots are willing to give the permission, but the
ballots they cast perpetuate the conditions against which they complain.
Otherwise, there would be no death-trap houses; nor impure food; nor
extortionate food-prices; nor unsanitary workplaces. And somebody would
go to jail if an ice trust, desiring to cripple competitors who might
cut prices, should send ships up a river to destroy the ice. It was
brought out in court that the New York Ice Trust did that. The ice trust
was convicted under the State anti-trust law. But nobody is in jail. And
ice is still selling at a price that kills the children of the poor.
The only way to get big business on the side of public health is to get
public health and private profit on the same side. Health makes
efficiency, efficiency makes profit, and whenever public health can be
bought at a price that seems likely to yield a profit in efficiency, big
business will buy. That is the way Professor Fisher figures it out and
here is a case that he cites in point:
The girls in one of the Chicago telephone exchanges that is located in a
particularly smoky and dusty part of the city complained to the manager
of the smoke and dust. He cheerfully advised them to forget the smoke
and dust and go on with their work, which, having more hunger than
money, they did.
A few months later a growing volume of complaints against bad service
caused the manager to investigate. He found that the smoke and dust were
interfering with the operation of the switchboards. The little brass
tags were so gummed that frequently they did not fall when subscribers
called. Nor did the grime on the “plugs” with which connections are made
constitute a good medium for the flow of electricity.
When the manager learned what the smoke and dust were doing to his human
machines he did nothing. But when he learned what smoke and dust were
doing to his metallic machines he wasted no time. He laid the matter
before his superiors, with the result that a plan was installed for the
filtration, through water, of every particle of air that entered the
exchange.
It is not to the interest of big business as a whole that the people
should have pure food. The markets are flooded with unwholesome food
that an honest law, honestly administered, would have barred. Professor
Fisher relates an incident that shows how afraid the big meat dealers
are of the pure food law.
The professor was sitting in the lobby of a hotel not distant from New
York. The proprietor of the hotel called up a New York meat dealer on
the long-distance ‘phone to complain that some bad beef had been sent to
the hotel. He said he had never yet fed his patrons on rotten beef and
he didn’t intend to begin. The beef must be taken away and the charge
deducted from his bill. The man at the other end of the wire evidently
offered no opposition, and the receiver was hung up.
Soon the telephone rang again. New York was on the wire. The
conversation was brief. All that Professor Fisher could hear was the
hotel man’s single remark: “I’ll see what I can do and let you know.”
The hotel man rang off and immediately called up a local restaurant.
Then Professor Fisher heard this cheerful statement go over the wire:
“I’ve got some beef here that ain’t just right, and the New York people
who sent it to me wanted me to see if I couldn’t sell it for them up
here ... Oh, it’ll hang together yet, but ’tain’t what I want for my
people; you might use it, though ... I don’t know what the price will
be. You’ll have to make your bargain with them, but it won’t be much....
All right, send over and get it.”
And this—and a thousand times more than this—under the Pure Food Law!
Such crimes could not occur if the government, when it tried to enact a
decent law, had not been thrown flat on its back. The pity of it is that
when big business and a government come into collision over public
health matters, the government is usually thrown on its back.
“I doubt,” said Dr. Hutchinson, “whether there is a local health officer
at any post of entry in the United States who, if a case of plague,
cholera or yellow fever should appear on a ship, would not think three
or four times before he reported it. And if he did report it, as the law
requires him to do, his act would cost him his position. Business
interests would cause his removal.”
This is not mere talk. Nor is it simply prophecy. It is history. So long
as New Orleans was subject to periodical outbreaks of yellow fever, the
health authorities were compelled not only to fight the disease, but to
fight the business interests that denied its existence. Dr. Hutchinson
says that business interests once caused the removal of the State health
officer of Louisiana, merely because he insisted that yellow fever
existed in the State—which it did.
Dr. Hutchinson himself, as State health officer of Oregon, in 1905–6,
had to fight big business to conserve public health. Big business
whipped him. His experiences were not novel, but one of them will be
related for the simple reason that it was not novel, and therefore shows
the sort of opposition that health officers, all over the land, are
compelled to encounter.
Soon after taking office Dr. Hutchinson began an investigation of the
water supplies of the chief cities of Oregon. His report showed that the
water that private corporations were serving to municipalities carried
typhoid infection.
Immediately the business interests of the State turned their guns upon
him. Through the newspapers, which they controlled by reason of
advertising contracts, they denounced him as an “enemy of the State.”
“The fair fame of the commonwealth” was being traduced by a reckless
maligner. He was even dared to show his face in one city. An attempt was
made to remove him from office, but the governor happened to be a man
who could not be browbeaten, and Dr. Hutchinson remained.
But while the business interests of Oregon were not able to get the
governor, they got somebody. The city officials who could have purified
the water took no step to do so. If they had merely recognized the
existence of infected water and urged the people to boil it, some
service would have been performed. But the municipal officials upheld
the “fair fame” of their various communities by denying that the water
was infected. Notwithstanding their denials typhoid soon broke out. The
outbreak at Eugene, the seat of the State university, was particularly
severe. Several students died.
Yet the San Francisco plague case must long stand as the classic
illustration of the manner in which business fights government when a
great disease comes. Black plague—the deadliest known to the Orient; a
disease that, more than once, has killed 5,000,000 persons during a
single outbreak—appeared in San Francisco in 1900. The local board of
health quarantined the Chinese district, and the news went out over the
country. The horror of horrors had arrived! The black plague! It sent a
shudder over the land.
It sent a greater shudder over the business interests of San Francisco.
These business interests quickly saw visions of quarantines against the
State and cessation of tourist traffic. An appeal was made to a Federal
Judge to declare the quarantine illegal. He promptly did so. In giving
his decision, he went out of his way to make this statement:
“If it were within the province of this court to decide the point, I
should hold that there is not now, and never has been, a case of plague
in this city.”
The local board of health that discovered the plague was removed, as was
the State board of health that confirmed the prevalence of the disease.
The governor of the State sent a remarkable message to the Legislature
in which he denounced those who said plague existed in San Francisco,
and appointed a committee of physicians and big business men to go to
the California metropolis and make an “impartial” investigation. The
business men on the committee included the biggest bankers and merchants
in California. They reported in the most positive terms that there was
no plague.
Dr. Kinyoun, the Marine Hospital Surgeon in charge, held his ground. Dr.
Kinyoun was shortly transferred to Detroit. His successor said there was
plague. His successor was shortly transferred to a distant city.
Of course, no one now denies that black plague was in San Francisco
precisely when Dr. Kinyoun said it was. Even the eminent bankers and
merchants who certified that it wasn’t there admit that they were in
“error.” It is nowhere denied that there were more than 200 cases. It is
nowhere denied that there were more than 100 deaths.
Such is the situation that has been imposed upon us by a system that
places private profits above human life. Having painfully accumulated
the knowledge with which we could combat the great disease, we are
unable to apply it because we do not own and therefore cannot manage our
own country.
“We look with horror on the black plague of the Middle Ages,” said
Professor Norton. “The black plague was but a passing cloud, compared
with the white plague visitation.”