THE FIELD FORTUNE IN EXTENSO
In close similarity to the start of the Astors and many other founders
of great land fortunes, commerce was the original means by which
Marshall Field obtained the money which he invested in land.
Consecutively came a ramification of other revenue-producing properties.
Once in motion, the process worked in the same admixed, interconnected
way as it did in the amassing of contemporary large fortunes. It may be
literally compared to hundreds of golden streams flowing from as many
sources to one central point. From land, business, railroads, street
railways, public utility and industrial corporations--from these and
many other channels, prodigious profits kept, and still keep, pouring in
ceaselessly. In turn, these formed ever newer and widening distributing
radii of investments. The process, by its own resistless volition,
became one of continuous compound progression.
LAND FOR ALMOST NOTHING.
Long before the business of the firm of Marshall Field & Co. had
reached the annual total of $50,000,000, Field, Leiter and their
associates had begun buying land in Chicago. Little capital was
needed for the purpose: The material growth of Chicago explains
sufficiently how a few dollars put in land fifty or sixty years ago
became in time an automatically-increasing fund of millions. A century
or so ago the log cabin of John Kinzie was the only habitation on a
site now occupied by a swarming, conglomerate, rushing population of
1,700,000.[172] Where the prairie land once stretched in solitude, a
huge, roaring, choking city now stands, black with factories, the
habitat of nearly two millions of human beings, living in a whirlpool of
excitement and tumult, presenting extremes of wealth and poverty, the
many existing in dire straits, the few rolling in sovereign luxury. A
saying prevails in Chicago that the city now holds more millionaires
than it did voters in 1840.
Land, in the infancy of the city, was cheap; few settlers there were,
and the future could not be foreseen. In 1830 one-quarter of an acre
could be bought for $20; a few bits of silver, or any currency
whatsoever, would secure to the buyer a deed carrying with it a title
forever, with a perpetual right of exclusive ownership and a perpetual
hold upon all succeeding generations. The more population grew, the
greater the value their labor gave the land; and the keener their need,
the more difficult it became for them to get land.
Within ten years--by about the beginning of the year 1840--the price of
a quarter of an acre in the center of the city had risen to $1,500. A
decade later the established value was $17,500, and in 1860, $28,000.
Chicago was growing with great rapidity; a network of railroads
converged there; mammoth factories, mills, grain elevators, packing
houses:--a vast variety of manufacturing and mercantile concerns set up
in business, and brought thither swarms of workingmen and their
families, led on by the need of food and the prospects of work. The
greater the influx of workers, the more augmented became the value of
land. Inevitably the greatest congestion of living resulted.
By 1870 the price of a quarter of an acre in the heart of the city
bounded to $120,000, and by 1880, to $130,000.
IT BECOMES WORTH MILLIONS.
During the next decade--a decade full of bitter distress to the working
population of the United States, and marked by widespread suffering--the
price shot up to $900,000. By 1894--a panic year, in which millions of
men were out of work and in a state of appalling destitution--a quarter
of an acre reached the gigantic value of $1,250,000.[173] At this
identical time large numbers of the working class, which had so largely
created this value, were begging vainly for work, and were being evicted
by the tens of thousands in Chicago because they could not pay rent for
their miserable, cramped habitations.
By exchanging a few hundred, or a few thousand dollars, in Chicago's
extreme youth, for a scrap of paper called a deed, the buyer of this
land found himself after the lapse of years, a millionaire. It did not
matter where or how he obtained the purchase money: whether he swindled,
or stole, or inherited it, or made it honestly;--so long as it was not
counterfeit, the law was observed. After he got the land he was under no
necessity of doing anything more than hold on to it, which same he could
do equally well, whether in Chicago or buried in the depths of
Kamschatka. If he chose, he could get chronically drunk; he could
gamble, or drone in laziness; he could do anything but work.
Nevertheless, the land and all its values which others created, were his
forever, to enjoy and dispose of as suited his individual pleasure.
This was, and is still, the system. Thoroughly riveted in law, it was
regarded as a rational, beneficent and everlasting fixture of civilized
life--by the beneficiaries. And as these latter happened to be, by
virtue of their possessions, among the real rulers of government, their
conceptions and interests were embodied in law, thought and custom as
the edict of civilization. The whole concurrent institutions of society,
which were but the echo of property interests, pronounced the system
wise and just, and, as a reigning force, do still so proclaim it. In
such a state there was nothing abnormal in any man monopolizing land and
exclusively appropriating its revenues. On the contrary, it was
considered a superior stroke of business, a splendid example of
astuteness. Marshall Field was looked upon as a very sagacious business
man.
FIELD'S REAL ESTATE TRACTS.
Field bought much land when it was of comparatively inconsequential
value, and held on to it with a tenacious grip. In the last years of his
life, his revenues from his real estate were uninterruptedly enormous.
"Downtown real estate in Chicago," wrote "a popular writer" in a
typically effusive biographical account of Field, published in 1901, "is
about as valuable, foot for foot, as that in the best locations in New
York City. From $8,000 to $15,000 a front foot are not uncommon figures
for property north of Congress street, in the Chicago business district.
Marshall Field owns not less than twenty choice sites and buildings in
this section; not including those used for his drygoods business. In the
vicinity of the Chicago University buildings he owns square block after
block of valuable land. Yet farther south he owns hundreds of acres of
land in the Calumet region--land invaluable for manufacturing
purposes."
This extension and centralization of land ownership were accompanied by
precisely the same results as were witnessed in other cities, although
these results were the sequence of the whole social and industrial
system, and not solely of any one phase. Poverty grew in exact
proportion to the growth of large fortunes; the one presupposed, and was
built upon, the existence of the other. Chicago became full of slums and
fetid, overcrowded districts; and if the density and congestion of
population are not as great as in New York, Boston and Cincinnati, it is
only because of more favorable geographical conditions.
Field's fortune was heaped up in about the last twenty years of his
life. The celerity of its progress arose from the prolific variety and
nature of his possessions. To form even an approximate idea of how fast
wealth came in to him, it is necessary to picture millions of men, women
and children toiling day after day, year in and year out, getting a
little less than two parts of the value of what they produced, while
almost nine portions either went to him entirely or in part. But this
was not all. Add to these millions of workers the rest of the population
of the United States who had to buy from, or in some other way pay
tribute to, the many corporations in which Field held stock, and you get
some adequate conception of the innumerable influxions of gold which
poured into Field's coffers every minute, every second of the day,
whether he were awake or asleep; whether sick or well, whether traveling
or sitting stock still.
HIS INCOME: $500 TO $700 AN HOUR.
This one man had the legal power of taking over to himself, as his
inalienable property, his to enjoy, hoard, squander, bury, or throw in
the ocean, if his fancy so dictated, the revenue produced by the labor
of millions of beings as human as he, with the same born capacity for
eating, drinking, breathing, sleeping and dying. Many of his workers had
a better digestive apparatus which had to put up with inferior food,
and, at times, no food at all. He could eat no more than three meals a
day, but his daily income was enough to have afforded him ten thousand
sumptuous daily meals, with exquisite "trimmings," while periods came
when those who drudged for him were fortunate to have any meals at all.
Few of his workers received as much as $2 a day; Field's income was
estimated to be at the rate of about $500 to $700 an hour.
First--and of prime importance--was his wholesale and retail drygoods
business. This was, and is, a line of business in which frantic
competition survived long after the manufacturing field had passed over
into concentrated trust control. To keep apace with competitors and make
high profits, it was imperative not only to resort to shifts, expedients
and policies followed by competitors, but to improve upon, and surpass,
those methods if possible. Field at all times proved that it was
possible. No competing firm would pay a certain rate of wages but what
Field instantly outgeneraled it by cutting his workers' wages to a point
enabling him to make his goods as cheap or cheaper.
HIS EMPLOYEES' WRETCHED WAGES.
In his wholesale and retail stores he employed not less than ten
thousand men, women and children. He compelled them to work for wages
which, in a large number of cases, were inadequate even for a bare
subsistence. Ninety-five per cent. received $12 a week or less. The
female sewing-machine operators who bent over their tasks the long day,
making the clothes sold in the Field stores, were paid the miserable
wages of $6.75 a week. Makers of socks and stockings were paid from
$4.57 to $4.75 a week. The working hours consisted variously of from
fifty-nine to fifty-nine and a half a week. Field also manufactured his
own furniture as well as many other articles. Furniture workers were
paid: Machine workers, $11.02, and upholsterers $12.47 a week. All of
Field's wage workers were paid by the hour; should they fall sick, or
work become slack, their pay was proportionately reduced.
The wretchedness in which many of these workers lived, and in which they
still live (for the same conditions obtain), was pitiful in the extreme.
Even in a small town where rent is not so high, these paltry wages would
have been insufficient for an existence of partial decency. But in
Chicago, with its forbidding rents, the increasing cost of all
necessaries, and all of the other expenses incident to life in a large
city, their wages were notoriously scanty.
Large numbers of them were driven to herding in foul tenements or evil
dwellings, the inducements of which was the rent, a little lighter than
could be had elsewhere. Every cent economized meant much. If an
investigator (as often happened) had observed them, and had followed
them to their wretched homes after their day's work, he would have
noted, or learned of, these conditions: Their food was circumscribed and
coarse--the very cheapest forms of meat, and usually stale bread. Butter
was a superfluous luxury. The morning meal was made up of a chunk of
bread washed down with "coffee"--adulterated stuff with just a faint
odor of real coffee. At noon, bread and an onion, or a bit of herring,
or a slice of cheap cheese composed their dinner, with perhaps a dash of
dessert in the shape of sweetened substance, artificially colored, sold
as "cake." For supper, cheap pork, or a soup bone, garnished
occasionally in the season by stale vegetables, and accompanied by a
concoction resembling tea. Few of these workers ever had more than one
suit of clothes, or more than one dress. They could not afford
amusements, and were too fatigued to read or converse. At night bunches
of them bunked together--sometimes eight or ten in a single room; by
this arrangement the rent of each was proportionately reduced.
It is now we come to a sinister result of these methods of exploiting
the wage-working girls and women. The subject is one that cannot be
approached with other than considerable hesitancy, not because the facts
are untrue, but because its statistical nature has not been officially
investigated. Nevertheless, the facts are known; stern, inflexible
facts. For true historical accuracy, as well as for purposes of
humanity, they must be given; that delicacy would be false, misleading
and palliative which would refrain from tearing away the veil and from
exposing the putridity beneath.
Field was repeatedly charged with employing his workers at such
desperately low wages as to drive large numbers of girls and women, by
the terrifying force of poverty, into the alternative of prostitution.
How large the number has been, or precisely what the economic or
psychologic factors have been, we have no means of knowing. It is worth
noting that many official investigations, futile though their results,
have probed into many other phases of capitalist fraud. But the
department stores over the country have been a singular exception.
Why this partiality? Because the public is never allowed to get
agitated over the methods and practices of the department stores. Hence
the politicians are neither forced, for the sake of appearance, to
investigate, nor can they make political capital from a thing over which
the people are not aroused. Not a line of the horrors taking place in
the large department stores is ever reported in the newspapers, not a
mention of the treatment of girls and women, not a word of the
injunctions frequently obtained restraining these stores from continuing
to sell this or that brand of spurious goods in imitation of those of
some complaining capitalist, or of the seizures by Health Boards of
adulterated drugs or foods.
Wherefore this silence? Because, unsophisticated reader, these same
department stores are the largest and steadiest advertisers. The
newspapers, which solemnly set themselves up as moral, ethical, and
political instructors to the public, sell all the space desired to
advertise goods many of which are fraudulent in nature or weight. Not a
line objectionable to these department stores ever gets into newspaper
print; on the contrary, the owners of these stores, by the bludgeon of
their immense advertising, have the power, within certain limitations,
of virtually acting as censors. The newspapers, whatever their
pretensions, make no attempt to antagonize the powers from whom so large
a portion of their revenue comes. It is a standing rule in newspaper
offices in the cities, that not a specific mention of any unfavorable or
discreditable matter occurring in department stores, or affecting the
interests of the proprietors of those stores, is allowed to get into
print. Thus it is that the general public are studiously kept in
ignorance of the abominations incessantly going on in the large
department stores.
OUTCASTS RATHER THAN SLAVES.
Notwithstanding this community of silence, in some respects akin to a
huge compounded system of blackmail, it is generally known that
department stores are often breeding stations of prostitution by reason
of two factors--extremely low wages and environment. There can be no
disputing the fact that these two working together, and perhaps
superinduced by other compelling influences, do bring about a condition
the upshot of which is prostitution. Such supine reports as those of the
Consumers' League, an organization of well-disposed dilletantes, and of
superficial purposes, give no insight into the real estate of affairs.
In his rather sensational and vitriolic raking of Chicago, W. T. Stead
strongly deals with the effects of department store conditions in
filling the ranks of prostitutes. He quotes Dora Claflin, the
proprietress of a brothel, as saying that such houses as hers obtained
their inmates from the stores, those in particular where hours were long
and the pay small.[174]
Mockery of mockeries that in this era of civilization, so-called, a
system should prevail that yields far greater returns from selling the
body than from honest industry!
It has been estimated that the number of young women who receive $2,500
in one year by the sale of their persons is larger than the number of
women of all ages, in all businesses and professions, who make a
similar sum by work of mind or hand.[175] But one of the most
significant recognitions of the responsibility of department stores for
the prevalence of prostitution, was the act of a member of the Illinois
legislature, a few years ago, in introducing a resolution (which failed
to pass) to investigate the department stores of Chicago on the ground
that conditions in them led to a shocking state of immorality. The
statement has been repeatedly made that nearly one-half of the outcast
girls and women of Chicago have come from the department stores.[176]
It was not only by these methods that the firm of Marshall Field & Co.
was so phenomenally successful in making money. In the background were
other methods which belong to a different category. Whatever Field's
practices--and they were venal and unscrupulous to a great degree, as
will be shown--he was an astute organizer. He understood how to
manipulate and use other men, and how to centralize business, and cut
out the waste and junket of mercantile operations. In the evolutionary
scheme of business he played his important part and a very necessary
part it was, for which he must be given full credit. His methods, base
as they were, were in no respect different from those of the rest of the
commercial world, as a whole. The only difference was that he was more
conspicuous and more successful.
CENTERING ALL PROFITS IN HIMSELF.
At a time when all business was run on the chaotic and desultory lines
characteristic of the purely competitive age, he had the foresight and
shrewdness to perceive that the storekeeper who depended upon the jobber
and the manufacturer for his goods was largely at the mercy of those
elements. Even if he were not, there were two sets of profits between
him and the making of the goods--the jobber's profits and the
manufacturer's.
Years before this vital fact was impressed upon the minds of the
floundering retailers, Field understood, and acted upon, it. He became
his own manufacturer and jobber. Thus he was complacently able to supply
his department store with many goods at cost, and pocket the profits
that otherwise would have gone to jobber and manufacturer. In, however,
the very act of making three sets of profits, while many other stores
made only one set, Field paid his employees at the retail store rate;
that is to say, he paid no more in wages than the store which had to buy
often from the jobber, who in turn, purchased from the manufacturer.
With this salient fact in mind, one begins to get a clear insight into
some of the reasons why Field made such enormous profits, and an
understanding of the consequent contrast of his firm doing a business of
$50,000,000 a year while thousands of his employees had to work for a
wretched pittance. He could have afforded to have paid them many times
more than they were getting and still would have made large profits. But
this would have been an imbecilic violation of that established canon of
business: Pay your employees as little as you can, and sell your goods
for the highest price you can get.
Field was one of the biggest dry goods manufacturers in the world. He
owned, says a writer, scores of enormous factories in England, Ireland
and Scotland. "The provinces of France," this eulogist goes on, "are
dotted with his mills. The clatter of the Marshall Field looms is heard
in Spain, Italy, Germany, Austria and Russia. Nor is the Orient
neglected by this master of fabrics. Plodding Chinese and the skilled
Japs are numbered by the thousands on the payroll of the Chicago
merchant and manufacturer. On the other side of the equator are vast
woolen mills in Australia, and the chain extends to South America, with
factories in Brazil and in other of our neighboring republics."
In all of these factories the labor of men, women and children was
harshly exploited; in nearly all of them the workers were in an
unorganized state, and therefore deprived of every vestige of
self-protection. Boys and girls of tenderest age were mercilessly ground
into dollars; their young life's blood dyed deep the fabrics which
brought Field riches. In this dehumanizing business Field was only doing
what the entire commercial aristocracy the world over was doing.
How extraordinarily profitable the business of Marshall Field & Co. was
(and is), may be seen in the fact that its shares (it became an
incorporated stock company) were worth $1,000 each. At his death
Marshall Field owned 3,400 of these shares, which the executors of his
estate valued at $3,400,000. That the exploitation of labor, the sale of
sweatshop and adulterated goods, and many other forms of oppression or
fraud were a consecutive and integral part of his business methods is
undeniable. But other factors, distinctly under the ban of the law,
afford an additional explanation of how he was able to undersell petty
competitors, situated even at a distance. What all of these factors were
is not a matter of public knowledge. At least one of them came to light
when, on December 4, 1907, D. R. Anthony, a representative in Congress
from Kansas, supplied evidence to Postmaster-General Meyer that the
house of Marshall Field & Co. had enjoyed, and still had, the privilege
of secret discriminatory express rates in the shipment of goods. This
charge, if sustained, was a clear violation of the law; but these
violations by the great propertied interests were common, and entailed,
at the worst, no other penalty than a nominal fine.
From such sources came the money with which he became a large
landowner. Also, from the sources enumerated, came the money with
which he and his associates debauched politics, and bribed common
councils and legislatures to present them with public franchises
for street and elevated railways, gas, telephone and electric light
projects--franchises intrinsically worth incalculable sums.[177] With
the money squeezed out of his legions of poverty-stricken employees and
out of his rent-racked tenants he became an industrial monarch. The
inventory of his estates filed in court by his executors revealed that
he owned stocks and bonds in about one hundred and fifty corporations.
This itemized list showed that he owned many millions of bonds and
stocks in railroads with the construction and operation of which he had
nothing to do. The history of practically all of them reeks with thefts
of public and private money; corruption of common councils, of
legislatures, Congress and of administrative officials; land grabbing,
fraud, illegal transactions, violence, and oppression not only of their
immediate workers, but of the entire population.[178] He owned--to give
a few instances--$1,500,000 of Baltimore and Ohio stock; $600,000 of
Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe; $1,860,000 of Chicago and Northwestern,
and tens of millions more of the stock or bonds of about fifteen other
railroads.
He also owned an immense assortment of the stocks of a large number of
trusts. The affairs of these trusts have been shown in court, at some
time or other, as overflowing with fraud, the most glaring oppressions,
and violations of law. He had $450,000 in stock of the Corn Products
Company (the Glucose Trust); $370,000 of the stock of the notorious
Harvester Trust, which charges the farmer $75 for a machine that perhaps
costs $16 in all to make and market, and which holds a great part of the
farming population bound hand and foot; $350,000 of Biscuit Trust stock;
$200,000 of American Tin Can Company (Tin Can Trust) stock; and large
amounts of stock in other trusts. All of these stocks and bonds Field
owned outright; he made it a rule never to buy a share of stock on
margin or for speculative purposes. All told, he owned more than
$55,000,000 in stocks and bonds.
A very considerable part of these were securities of Chicago surface and
elevated railway, gas, electric light and telephone companies. In the
corruption attending the securing of the franchises of these
corporations he was a direct principal. The narrative of this part of
his fortune, however, more pertinently belongs to subsequent chapters of
this work.
FOOTNOTES:
[172] Census of 1900.
[173] Eighth Annual Report, Illinois Labor Bureau:370.
[174] See his work, "If Christ Came to Chicago." Much more specific and
reliable is the report of the U. S. Industrial Commission. After giving
the low wages paid to women in the different cities, it says: "It is
manifest from the figures given that the amount of earnings in many
cases is less than the actual cost of the necessities of life. The
existence of such a state of affairs must inevitably lead in many cases
to the adoption of a life of immorality and, in fact, there is no doubt
that the low rate of wages paid to women is one of the most frequent
causes of prostitution. The fact that the great mass of working women
maintain their virtue in spite of low wages and dangerous environment is
highly creditable to them."--Final Report of the Industrial Commission,
1902, xix:927.
[175] See an article on this point by the Rev. F. M. Goodchild in the
"Arena" Magazine for March, 1896.
[176] In the course of inquiries among the Chicago religious missions in
1909, the author was everywhere informed that the great majority of
native prostitutes were products of the department stores. Some of the
conditions in these department stores, and how their owners have fought
every effort to better these conditions, have been revealed in many
official reports. The appended description is from the Annual Report of
the Factory Inspectors of Illinois, 1903-04, pp. ix and x:
"In this regard, and worthy of mention, reference might be made to the
large dry goods houses and department stores located in Chicago and
other cities, in which places it has been customary to employ a great
number of children under the age of sixteen as messenger boys, bundle
wrappers, or as cash boys or cash girls, wagon boys, etc. In previous
years these children were required to come to work early in the morning
and remain until late at night, or as long as the establishment was open
for business, which frequently required the youngsters to remain
anywhere from 8:00 to 9:00 o'clock in the morning until 10:00 and 11:00
p.m., their weak and immature bodies tired and worn out under the strain
of the customary holiday rush. In the putting a stop to this practice of
employing small children ten and thirteen hours per day, the department
found it necessary to institute frequent prosecutions. While our efforts
were successful, we met with serious opposition, and in some cases
almost continuous litigation, some 300 arrests being necessary to bring
about the desired results, which finally secured the eight hour day and
a good night's rest for the small army of toilers engaged in the candy
and paper box manufacturing establishments and department stores.
"In conducting these investigations and crusades the inspectors met with
some surprises in the way of unique excuses. In Chicago a manager of a
very representative first class department store, one of the largest of
its kind, gave as his reason for not obeying the law, that they had
never been interfered with before. Another, that the children preferred
to be in the store rather than at home. The unnaturalness of this latter
excuse can be readily realized by anyone who has stepped into a large
department store during the holiday season, when the clerks are tired
and cross and little consideration is shown to the cash boy or cash girl
who, because he or she may be tired or physically frail, might be a
little tardy in running an errand or wrapping a bundle. This character
of work for long hours is deleterious to a child, as are the employments
in many branches of the garment trade or other industries, which labor
is so openly condemned by those who have been interested in anti-child
labor movements."
[177] For detailed particulars see that part of this work comprising
"Great Fortunes from Public Franchises."
[178] The acts here summarized are narrated specifically in Part III,
"Great Fortunes from Railroads."