tariff, was La Follette of Wisconsin. Others were Beveridge of Indiana,
Cummins and Dolliver of Iowa, Borah of Idaho, and Bristow of Kansas.
They were already familiar figures at the _American_ along with certain
members of the House, particularly the salty and peppery William Kent of
California—Phillips, Baker and Steffens being in frequent communication
with them.
The most brilliant and witty, as well as the most thoroughly informed of
the tariff insurgents was the amiable Senator Dolliver from Iowa—twenty
years in Congress—always regular—always stoutly supporting the tariff
bills turned out by the committee.
“What ails you now?” I asked him.
“Well,” he said, “I had been going on for twenty years taking
practically without question what they handed me; but these alliances
between the party and industrial interests have at last set me thinking.
I began to understand something of the injustice that was being done to
the consumer. And then we promised to reform the tariff.”
When the insurgents divided up the schedules for study, Schedule
K—wool—the most difficult and the most important politically, fell to
Senator Dolliver. He found he had been voting for years for duties
which, when he sat down to read the schedule, he could not understand.
He discovered they were a mixture of tricks, evasions, and
discriminations—intended to be so, he believed. He determined to master
them.
And master them he did by months of the severest night work. He pored
over statistics and technical treatises. He visited mills and importing
houses and retail shops. He sought the aid of experts, and in the end he
knew his subject so well that he went onto the floor of the Senate
without a manuscript and literally played with Schedule K, and
incidentally also with Senator Aldrich, who was said to fly to the cloak
room whenever Senator Dolliver rose to speak. When he had finished his
clean, competent dissection, Schedule K lay before the Senate a law
without principles or morals; and yet, just as it was, the Senate of the
United States passed it, and the President of the United States signed
it, and it went on the statute books.
Why? Neither Mr. Taft nor Mr. Aldrich defended the wool schedule which
made the bill odious. They both were frank in explaining that it was
politically necessary, not at all a question of the fairness of the
schedule, but a question of what powerful interests demanded. The wool
interests could defeat the bill if they did not get what they wanted.
My conviction about the inequity of Schedule K was so strong that when
the _Outlook_ published a long defense of it, plainly an advertisement
but not so marked, I protested in a personal letter to its vociferous
contributing editor, Theodore Roosevelt, with whom by this time I was on
fairly friendly terms. Just what I said in my letter about the _Herald_
which so stirred his wrath I do not remember, but his answer to my
comment is so typically Rooseveltian in temper and reasoning that I
think it should be preserved:
May 6, 1911
Oh! Miss Tarbell, Miss Tarbell!
How can you take the view you do of the Herald! You compare it with
the Tribune. It is perfectly legitimate to compare the Tribune with
Mr. Watterson’s paper, the Courier-Journal. Honest people could
agree or disagree about those two papers. Personally I think that
during the last thirty or forty years the Tribune has been
infinitely more helpful to good causes than the Courier-Journal,
but, as I say, people can differ on such a subject; and I should be
very glad to meet at any time either Henry Watterson or Whitelaw
Reid. But to compare either one of them with the Herald is literally
and precisely as if I should compare either the American Magazine or
The Outlook with Town Topics.
Having expressed his opinion of the _Herald_, he proceeded to an
elaborate specious explanation of the matter which had so stirred my ire
that I had protested to him.
Now as for what you say about The Outlook’s publishing “The Truth
about K.” In the first place, I admit at once that the title, the
type, and the placing of this advertisement _did_ make it look to
many readers like an editorial article. We used the same title, type
and placing that had been used for similar articles for twenty
years; but our attention was subsequently called to the fact, to
which you now call my attention, i.e., that some people were misled
in the matter; and in consequence we at once abandoned this twenty
years’ custom. From now on, every article of the kind will appear
under the heading of “Advertising Department” or “Advertising
Section,” so that there cannot be any possible mistake in the
future. As for the publication of the article itself, I most
emphatically think that it was not only justifiable, but
commendable. The Outlook publishes continually letters from people
upholding policies or views with which The Outlook diametrically
disagrees. (For example, The Outlook has on several different
occasions published letters taking a very dark view of my own
character and achievements, whether at San Juan Hill or elsewhere.)
This particular article by Spencer I should have been glad to see
published in the regular section of the Outlook as putting forth his
side of the case, just as I am now trying to secure publication in
The Outlook of an article from the North Western farmers giving
their side of the case against Canadian reciprocity. Spencer’s
article, however, was too long, and such being the case, as I say, I
was not merely willing but glad to see it put in. (I did not know it
had been put in, of course, until long after it had appeared; but
when I did see it, I was glad that it had been put in.) Probably you
know that on April 8th The Outlook editorially took up this
question, stated that the American Woolen Company was entirely
justified in printing their article as an advertisement, and that
The Outlook violated in no degree the ethics of journalism in
admitting the advertisement to its pages and expressed its total
disagreement with the views expressed in the article. I would have
gone further than this; I would have stated that The Outlook did not
violate the ethics of journalism, but rendered a great and needed
service as an example in showing its willingness to accept the
statement of a case with which it did not agree, to put it in
exactly as it was written, and then itself to comment with absolute
freedom, as it has done, upon the arguments made in the
advertisement. Let me repeat that if The Outlook had had space,
which it unfortunately did not have, I should have been glad to see
Spencer’s article inserted, not as an advertisement, but as a
communication signed by Spencer, and avowedly stating his side of
the case.
Sincerely yours
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
I felt that I had won my case with Mr. Roosevelt’s assurance that
henceforth every article of the kind would appear under the head of
“Advertising Department.”
When the Payne-Aldrich bill was finally passed with Mr. Taft’s and Mr.
Aldrich’s brutally frank explanations, I was done with the tariff as a
subject for further study and writing. Four years later came the
Democratic effort to make a revision. I had only the most casual
interest. It was the same old method. They might make a better bill, I
told myself, but there never could be a fair one as long as tariffs were
set by a Congress under the thumb of people personally interested.
One thing seemed to me clear which is still clearer now, the combined
prohibitive tariff industries were digging their own grave. Foreign
markets they had to have; but they refused to buy from those to whom
they wanted to sell. What the gentlemen did not realize was that by this
procedure they were practically forcing nations not naturally industrial
to copy their methods, industrialize themselves. These nations soon were
succeeding with such skill that in spite of the boosting of the tariff
again and again the foreigners continued to undersell us.
But the prohibitive protectionists were building a future competitor
threatening to be stronger than foreign trade. This in the realm of
politics. There had been no more hearty and conscienceless supporters of
prohibitive tariffs than certain groups of organized labor,
conspicuously the Amalgamated Steel and Iron Workers under John Jarrett.
They were not a numerous body, but with the cry of the full dinner pail
they were able to back the demands of the employers. They had a body of
votes that no political party dared defy. But in teaching organized
labor the power of political pressure the industrialists gave them a
weapon that they did not see might one day be turned against themselves.
Back in the eighties one of the wisest and soundest economists we have
produced, David A. Wells, said in substance of the victory of the tariff
lobbies: “This is a revolution. It will take another revolution to
overthrow the leadership now established by business men.”
I felt after the bill of 1909 that there was nothing for an outsider
like me to do but wait for that revolution.
I felt this so deeply that when President Wilson invited me to be a
member of the Tariff Commission he formed in December, 1916, I refused.
I was pleased, of course, that Mr. Wilson thought me fit for such a
place. I knew that I should find the associations interesting. The dean
of tariff students in the United States—Dr. Taussig of Harvard—was the
chairman. To be under him would be an education that would be worth the
taking, but I did not hesitate.
First, there was my personal situation—my obligations. I had no right to
give up my profession for a connection of that sort, in its nature
temporary. Then I realized my own unfitness as Mr. Wilson could not. I
had had no experience in the kind of work this required. I was an
observer and reporter, not a negotiator. I am not a good fighter in a
group; I forget my duty in watching the contestants. But primarily there
was my hopelessness about the service the Tariff Commission might
render. Its researches and its conclusions, however sound, would stand
no chance in Congress when a wool or iron and steel or sugar lobby
appeared. A Tariff Commission was hamstrung from the start.
Of course it was not only my interest and work on the tariff that had
led Mr. Wilson to offer me the position. He was looking about for women
to whom he could give recognition. He was an outspoken advocate of
suffrage and wanted to use women when he thought them qualified.
Jane Addams pleaded with me to accept “for the sake of women,” but I did
not feel that women were served merely by an appointment to office.
Women, like men, serve in proportion to their fitness for office, to the
actual fact they have something to contribute. I had no enthusiasm for
the task, did not even respect it greatly. I believed, too, that harm is
done all around by undertaking technical jobs without proper scientific
training. The cause of women is not to be advanced by putting them into
positions for which they are untrained.
The press comments on the idea of a woman on this commission were not
unfriendly, as far as I saw them; but they were a little surprised and,
as I was to find later, protests were made to Mr. Wilson. My friend Ray
Stannard Baker, working on the Wilson papers, came across an answer of
the President on December 27, 1916, to one protesting gentleman which I
am not too modest to print:
As a matter of fact, she has written more good sense, good plain
common sense, about the tariff than any man I know of, and is a
student of industrial conditions in this country of the most serious
and sensible sort.
14
THE GOLDEN RULE IN INDUSTRY
I was done with the tariff, but it was out of the tariff that my next
serial came—born partly of a guilty conscience! In attempting to prove
that in certain highly protected industries only a small part of a duty
laid in the interest of labor went to labor, I had taken satisfaction in
picturing the worst conditions I could find, badly ventilated and
dangerous factories, unsanitary homes, underfed children. But in looking
for this material I found, in both protected and unprotected industries,
substantial and important efforts making to improve conditions, raise
wages, shorten hours, humanize relations.
My conscience began to trouble me. Was it not as much my business as a
reporter to present this side of the picture as to present the other? If
there were leaders in practically every industry who regarded it not
only as sound ethics but as sound economics to improve the lot of the
worker, ought not the public to be familiarized with this belief?
At that moment, and indeed for a good many years, the public had heard
little except of the atrocities of industrial life. By emphasizing, the
reformers had hoped to hasten changes they sought. The public was coming
to believe that the inevitable result of corporate industrial management
was exploitation, neglect, bullying, crushing of labor, that the only
hope was in destroying the system.
But if the practices were not universal, if there was a steady, though
slow, progress, ought not the public to recognize it? Was it not the
duty of those who were called muckrakers to rake up the good earth as
well as the noxious? Was there not as much driving force in a good
example as in an evil one?
The office was not unfriendly to the idea. As a matter of fact _The
American Magazine_ had little genuine muckraking spirit. It did have a
large and fighting interest in fair play; it sought to present things as
they were, not as somebody thought they ought to be. We were
journalists, not propagandists; and as journalists we sought new angles
on old subjects. The idea that there was something fundamentally sound
and good in industrial relations, that in many spots had gone far beyond
what either labor or reformers were demanding, came to the office as a
new attack on the old problem. Mr. Phillips, always keenly aware of the
new and significant, had his eye on the movement, I found, and was
willing to commission me to go out and see what I could find.
This was in 1912, and for the next four years I spent the bulk of my
time in factories and industrial towns. The work took me from Maine to
Alabama, from New York to Kansas. I found my material in all sorts of
industries: iron and steel in and around Pittsburgh, Chicago, Duluth;
mines in West Virginia, Illinois, and Wisconsin; paper boxes and books
and newspapers everywhere; candy in Philadelphia; beer and tanneries and
woodwork in Wisconsin; shirts and collars and shoes in New York and
Massachusetts. I watched numberless things in the making: turbines and
optical lenses, jewelry and mesh bags, kodaks and pocketknives, plated
cutlery and solid silver tea services, Minton tableware and American
Belleek, cans and ironware, linen tablecloths and sails for a cup
defender, furniture I suspected was to be sold in Europe for antiques,
and bric-a-brac I knew was to be sold in America as Chinese
importations, railroad rails and wire for a thousand purposes, hookless
fasteners and mechanical toys. I seemed never to tire of seeing things
made. But do not ask me now how they were made!
I never counted the number of factories I visited. Looking at the volume
in which I finally gathered my findings, I find there are some
fifty-five major concerns mentioned; but these were those which in my
judgment best illustrated the particular point I was trying to make.
There were many more.
My visits had to be arranged beforehand. I took pains to make sure of my
credentials, but I soon discovered that my past work served me well. The
heads of the industries and many workmen were magazine readers, liked to
talk about writers and asked all sorts of curious questions about men
and women they had become acquainted with in _McClure’s_ and the
_American_: Kipling, Baker, Steffens, Will White, Edna Ferber, just
coming on at that time. There was often considerable asperity at the top
when I presented my letters of introduction. They set me down as an
enemy of business; but again and again this asperity was softened by a
man’s love of Abraham Lincoln. He had a habit of reading everything
about Lincoln that he could put his hands on, collected books, brought
out my “Life” to be autographed. That is, while I was _persona non
grata_ for one piece of work, another piece softened suspicion and
opened doors to me.
My first move in a factory was to study the processes of the particular
industry. Machines were not devils to me as they were to some of my
reforming friends, particularly that splendid old warrior Florence
Kelley, then in the thick of her fight for “ethical gains through
legislation.” To me machines freed from heavy labor, created abundance.
That is, I started out free of the inhibition that hate of a machine
puts on many observers. I think because of this I was better able to
judge the character of a factory, to see its weak as well as its good
points. I was able to understand what the enemy of the machine rarely
admits: that men and women who have arrived at the dignity of steady
workers not only respect, but frequently take pride in, their machines.
Again, I gave myself time around these factories. The observer who once
in his life goes down for half a day into a mine or spends two or three
hours walking through a steel mill, naturally revolts against the
darkness, the clatter, the smoke, the danger. As a rule he misses the
points of real hardship; he also misses the satisfactions. As my
pilgrimage lengthened, I became more and more convinced that there is no
trade which has not its devotee.
“Once a miner, always a miner.” “Once a sailor, always a sailor.” One
might go through the whole category.
“Why,” I now and then asked miners, “do you stay by the mine?”
“I was brought up to it.” “I like it.” “Nobody bothers you when you are
working with a pick.” “Nice and quiet in the mines.”
“But the danger!”
“No worse than railroading.” “My brother got killed by a horse last
week.”
In the end I came to the conclusion that there was probably no larger
percentage of whose who did not like the work they were doing than there
is in the white-collar occupations. In the heavy industries
particularly, I found something like the farmer’s conviction that they
were doing a man’s job. It made them contemptuous of white-collar
workers.
I spent quite as much time looking at homes as at plants. The test I
made of the industrial villages and of company houses was whether or no,
if I set myself to it, I could make a decent home in them. I found even
in the most barren and unattractive company districts women who had made
attractive homes. There was the greatest difference in home-making
ability, in the training of women for it. The pride of the man who had a
good housekeeper as a wife, a good cook, was great. I do not remember
that a man ever asked me to come to his house unless he considered his
wife a good housekeeper. I remember one so proud of his home that he
took me all over it, showing with delight how his Sunday clothes, his
winter overcoat, the Sunday dress of his little girl, were hung on
hangers with a calico curtain in front to keep them clean. His
housekeeper, in this case a mother-in-law, confided to me in talking
things over that night that in her judgment the reason so many men drank
was that the women did not know how to keep house.
Visiting with the family after the supper dishes were cleared away, I
managed to get at what was most important in their lives. After steady
work it was the church. After minister or priest, the public-school
teacher was the most trusted friend of the household. In many places,
however, I found her authority beginning to be divided with the company
nurse, for the company nurse was just being added to industrial staffs.
Many of my reforming friends felt that in going into a factory and
taking a salary a nurse was aligning herself with the evil intentions of
the corporation, but the average man did not feel that way. She helped
him out in too many tight places.
As to the relation of workmen to their union—for often they belonged to
a union—I concluded that in the average industrial community it was not
unlike that of the average citizen to his political party and political
boss.
Both the union and the employer seemed to me to be missing opportunities
to help men to understand the structure of industry, perhaps because
they did not themselves understand it too well, or sank their
understanding in politics. Both union and employer depended upon one or
another form of force when there was unrest, rather than education and
arbitration. In doing this they weakened, perhaps in the end destroyed,
that by which they all lived.
The most distressing thing in mills and factories seemed to me to be the
atmosphere of suspicion which had accumulated from years of appeal to
force. I felt it as soon as I went into certain plants—everybody
watching me, the guide, the boss, the men at the machines.
But to conclude that because of this suspicion, this lack of
understanding, which keeps so many industries always on the verge of
destruction, there were no natural friendly contacts between the
management and the men is not to know the world. I found that
practically always the foreman or the boss, sometimes the big boss, in
an industry had come up from the ranks. In various industrial towns I
found the foreman’s family or the superintendent’s family living just
around the corner, and his brother, perhaps his father, working in the
mine or the mill. He was one in the family who had been able to lift
himself. Nor did it follow that there was bad blood between a “big boss”
and the head of a warlike union. I had been led to believe they did not
speak in passing. I had supposed that, if Samuel Gompers and Judge Gary
met, they would probably fly at each other’s throat; but at the
Washington Industrial Conference in 1919, standing in a corridor of the
Pan-American Building, I saw the two approaching from different
directions. They were going to pass close to me. I had a cold chill
about what might happen. But what happened was that Mr. Gompers said,
“Hello, Judge,” in the friendliest tone and Judge Gary called
cheerfully, “Hello, Sam.” And that was all there was to it. Later, when
I was to see much of Judge Gary, trying to make out what the famous Gary
code meant, and how it was being applied, we talked more than once of
Samuel Gompers and his technique. The Judge had great respect for him as
a political opponent, as well he might.
It is hard to stop talking when I recall these four years, drifting up
and down the country into factories and homes. The contrast between old
ways and new ways was always before me. Many a sad thing I saw—nothing
more disturbing than the strikes, for I managed to get on the outskirts
of several and follow up the aftermath, which was usually tragic.
There was the ghastly strike in certain fertilizer plants at Roosevelt
on the Jersey coast. I followed it through to its unsatisfactory end.
Rival labor and political bodies fought each other for days while the
men with drawn and hopeless faces loafed in groups in saloons or on
doorsteps.
“All going to the devil while their unions fight,” said the woman who
gave me my meals in the only boarding house in the desolate place. “I am
for the union, but the union does not know when they go into a strike
which they can avoid what they are doing to men. It turns them into
tramps. They leave their families and take to the road. It is better
that they leave. I think the women often think that, so they won’t have
any more babies. No, the union does not see what it does to men. But
what are the men going to do when things were like they were in this
place? You know what their wages were. You know what a hellish sort of
place this is. What are they going to do?”
It was the men who saw industry as a cooperative undertaking who gave me
heart. I do not mean political cooperation, but practical cooperation,
worked out on the ground by the persons concerned. The problems and
needs of no two industrial undertakings are ever alike. For results each
must be treated according to the situation. The greatest contributions I
found to industrial peace and stability came when a man recognized that
a condition was wrong and set out to correct it.