Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania. Tommy Lynch had swung a pick before
John Lewis did and, like Lewis, had risen by virtue of hard work and
real ability, from one position to another—one to become the head of a
group of mines, the other to become the head of a group of miners. But
no union could keep up with Tommy Lynch in the improvements he demanded
for his mines and miners. It was he who originated the famous slogan
“Safety First.” When I talked with him about rescue crews he swore
heartily, “Damn rescue work—prevent accidents.”
Tommy Lynch’s work did not end in the mine. He had a theory that you
could not be a good worker unless you had a good home. He literally
lifted some seven thousand company houses, which he had inherited from
an old management, out of their locations between high mountains of
lifeless slag and put them onto tillable land, gave every woman water in
her kitchen and a plot of land for a garden.
In 1914, when I was first there, out of 7,000 homes 6,923 had gardens.
And such gardens! It took three days for Mr. Lynch and two or three
other distinguished gentlemen to decide on the winners of the nine
prizes given for the finest displays. They were estimating that the
vegetable gardens yielded $143,000 worth of vegetables that year. I went
back to see what they were doing with those gardens in the middle of the
late depression. There were even more of them, and they were even more
productive. Knowing what the garden meant, the miners had turned to the
cultivation with immense energy. The company had plowed and fertilized
tracts of untilled land near each settlement, and the men were raising
extra food for the winter. Many of these miners were selling vegetables
in the near-by town markets.
Believing as I do that the connection of men and women with the soil is
not only most healthy for the body but essential for the mind and the
soul, these gardens aroused almost as much thankfulness in my heart as
the safety work.
But Tommy Lynch could not have worked out his notions of safety and
gardening without the cooperation of the miners, even if it was
sometimes begrudging.
Then there was Henry Ford attacking the problem which most concerned his
plant, labor turnover—in his case something like 1200 per cent. He had
come into the industrial picture with his minimum wage of five dollars a
day just before I began my work. In May of 1915 I set up shop for ten
days in a Detroit hotel in order to study what he was doing. The days I
spent in and around the Ford factory; nights, tired out with
observations and emotions, I came back to a hot bath and dinner in bed,
talking my findings into a dictaphone until I fell off to sleep.
Connections had not been hard to make. There was then at the head of
Ford publicity an experienced and able gentleman who realized that
articles in _The American Magazine_ on the Ford plant, whether favorable
or not, were good for the concern, and who saw to it that I had every
chance. Mr. Ford himself was my first important objective. He saw me in
his big office looking down on the plant, a plant then employing
eighteen thousand men. At the first glimpse of his smiling face I was
startled by the resemblance to the picture of the young Lincoln which
had played such a part in the launching of the Lincoln articles in
_McClure’s_. It was the face of a poet and a philosopher, as in the
young Lincoln there was a young Emerson.
Like a poet and a philosopher, Henry Ford was unhurried. He was no slave
to his desk. I saw it practically abandoned when he was wrestling with
the successor to Model T. “Mr. Ford does not often come in,” my
conductor told me. “He is wandering through the factories these days. We
never touch his desk.”
He was boyish and natural in off hours. Coming into the private
lunchroom for officers at the plant, where I judged a place was always
left for him, I saw him throw his long right leg over the back of the
chair before he slid leisurely into the seat.
“I have got an idea,” he said. “People complain about the doors of the
car—not convenient. I am going to put a can opener into every car from
now on and let them cut their own.”
He delighted in the flow of Ford jokes, wanted to hear the latest, to
see it in the house organ.
When he saw me, it was he who did the talking, and he seemed to be
straightening out his thoughts rather than replying to my questions.
When I asked him his reasons for mass production he had a straight-away
answer.
“It is to give people everything they want and then some,” he said. And
then he went on to enlarge in a way I have never forgotten.
“There’s no reason why everybody shouldn’t have everything he needs if
we managed it right, weren’t afraid of making too much. Our business is
to make things so cheap that everybody can buy ’em. Take these shears.”
He picked up a handsome pair of large shears on his desk. “They sell for
three or four dollars, I guess. No reason you couldn’t get them down to
fifty cents. Yes, fifty cents,” he repeated as I gasped. “No reason at
all. Best in the world—so every little girl in the world could have a
pair. There’s more money in giving everybody things than in keeping them
dear so only a few can have them. I want our car so cheap that every
workman in our shop can have one if he wants it. Make things everybody
can have—that’s what we want to do. And give ’em money enough. The
trouble’s been we didn’t pay men enough. High wages pay. People do more
work. We never thought we’d get back our five dollars a day; didn’t
think of it; just thought that something was wrong that so many people
were out of work and hadn’t anything saved up, and thought we ought to
divide. But we got it all back right away. That means we can make the
car cheaper, and give more men work. Of course when you’re building and
trying new things all the time you’ve got to have money; but you get it
if you make men. I don’t know that our scheme is best. It will take five
years to try it out, but we are doing the best we can and changing when
we strike a snag.”
What it simmered down to was that if you wanted to make a business you
must make men, and you must make men by seeing that they had a chance
for what we are pleased to call these days a good life. And if they are
going to have a good life they must not only have money but have low
prices.
There was much more, I soon found, than five dollars a day and upwards
that was behind the making of men at Ford’s. There was the most
scientific system for handling mass production processes that I had ever
seen. Tasks were graded. A workman was given every incentive to get into
higher classes. But I was not long at Ford’s before I discovered that it
was not this system, already established, it was not the five dollars,
it was not the flourishing business, it was not advertising—deeply and
efficiently and aggressively as all these things were handled—which at
the moment was absorbing the leaders of the business. It was what Mr.
Ford was calling “the making of men.” It was a thoroughly worth-while
and deeply human method. Mr. Ford knew that, do all you can for a man in
the factory—a short day, higher wages, good conditions, training,
advancement—if things are not right for him at home he will not in the
long run be a good workman. So he set out to reorganize the home life of
the men.
It was done by a sociological department made up at that time of some
eighty men all taken out of the factory itself, for Mr. Ford’s theory
was then that, no matter what you wanted done, you could always find
somebody among the eighteen thousand “down there,” as he called it, that
was qualified. So they had selected eighty for social service work and
these men were doing it with a thoroughness and a frankness which was
almost as important as the five dollars a day had been.
“Paternal” was the adjective generally applied to the Ford method; but
one of the interesting things about Mr. Ford is the little effect a word
has on him. Call a thing what you like, it is the idea, the method, that
he is after. If that seems to him to make sense, you may have your
word—it doesn’t trouble him.
So they went energetically about their determination to add to what they
were doing for the making of men inside of the factory a thorough
overhauling of the men’s lives outside. There were certain things that
were laid down as essential. You had to be clean—cleanliness had played
no part in the lives of hundreds of these men. But when they did not get
their “big envelope” and asked why, they were told it was because their
hands were dirty, they didn’t wash their necks, didn’t wear clean
clothes. Ford’s men must be clean. Already it had made an astonishing
difference in the general look of the factory. And this cleanliness was
carried by the sociological department into the home. The men must be
kept clean, and the women must do their part. Many of the women as well
as the men were discovering for the first time the satisfaction of
cleanliness. “Feels good,” said a working woman to me, reluctant but
thorough convert according to my conductor. “Feels good to be clean.”
They were enemies of liquor, and no man who drank could keep his place.
But he was not thrown out: he must reform. And some of the most
surprising cures of habitual drunkenness that I have ever come across I
found in the Ford factory in 1915.
There was a strong sympathy throughout the factory for derelicts. There
were four hundred men in Ford’s when I was there who had served prison
terms. Nobody knew them, but each had his special guardian; and no
mother ever looked after a child more carefully than these guardians
looked after their charges.
In this social work Mr. Ford was constantly and deeply interested. As
nearly as I could make out, there was nothing of which they all talked
more.
I dined one night with four or five of the officers, including Mr. Ford,
and while I had expected to hear much about mass production and wage
problems the only thing I heard was, “How are you getting on with Mary?”
“How about John?” “Do you think we can make this housing scheme work?”
That is, what I was discovering at Ford’s was that they were not
thinking in terms of labor and capital, but in terms of Tom, Dick, and
Harry. They were taking men and women, individuals, families, and with
patience and sense and humor and determination were putting them on
their feet, giving them interest and direction in managing their lives.
This was the Henry Ford of 1916.
But work like that of Tommy Lynch and Henry Ford depended upon
individual qualities of a rare and exceptional kind, also upon the
opportunity to test ideas. Neither Lynch nor Ford was willing to let bad
situations, a stiff problem alone. It challenged their wits,
particularly when it concerned men in mine and factory. They were not
hampered by dogmas or politics. They did things in their own way, and if
one method did not work tried another; and both had a rare power to
persuade men to follow them. They were self-made, unhampered products of
old-fashioned democracy, and both were thorns in the flesh of those who
worked according to blue prints, mechanized organizations or the status
quo. But the success of both with the particular labor problems they
tackled was the answer to critics.
Only how could men of lesser personality, lesser freedom of action, and
lesser boldness in trying out things follow? They could not. They had to
have a more scientific practice if they were to achieve genuine
cooperation in working out their problems. And what I was seeing in
certain plants, as I went up and down the country, convinced me it had
come in the Frederick Taylor science of management.
I had first heard of Taylor in the _American Magazine_ office. John
Phillips had sensed something important on foot when he read that Louis
Brandeis, acting as counsel for certain shippers in a suit they had
brought against the railroads, had told the defendants that they could
afford lower rates if they would reorganize their business on the lines
of scientific management which Frederick Taylor had developed. They
could lower rates and raise wages.
“And who is Frederick Taylor?” asked Mr. Phillips. “Baker, you better
find out.”
And so Frederick Taylor had come to know the _American_ group, and he
had given to the _American_, much to our pride, his first popular
article explaining what he meant by scientific management. In the
following letter Mr. Taylor tells a protesting friend why he gave it to
us:
I have no doubt that the Atlantic Monthly would give us a better
audience from a literary point of view than we could get from the
American Magazine. But the readers of the Atlantic Monthly consist
probably very largely of professors and literary men, who would be
interested more in the abstract theory than in the actual good which
would come from the introduction of scientific management.
On the other hand, I feel that the readers of the American Magazine
consist largely of those who are actually doing the practical work
of the world. The people whom I want to reach with the article are
principally those men who are doing the manufacturing and
construction work of our country, both employers and employees, and
I have an idea that many more persons of that kind would be reached
through the American Magazine than through the Atlantic Monthly.
In considering the best magazine to publish the paper in, I am very
considerably influenced by the opinion I have formed of the editors
who have been here to talk over the subject; and of these Ray
Stannard Baker was by far the most thorough and enthusiastic in his
analysis of the whole subject. He looked at all sides in a way which
no other editor dreamed of doing. He even got next to the workingmen
and talked to them at great length on the subject. I cannot but
feel, also, that the audience which reads the work of men of his
type must be an intelligent and earnest audience.
Mr. ——, who has just been here, suggested that among a certain class
of people the American Magazine is looked upon as a muckraking
magazine. I think that any magazine which opposed the
“stand-patters” and was not under the control of the moneyed powers
of the United States would now be classed among the muckrakers.
This, therefore, has no very great weight with me.
Taylor believed like Henry Ford that the world could take all we could
make, that the power of consumption was limitless. “To give the world
all it needs is the mission of industry,” he shouted at me one day I
spent with him at Boxley (his home near Philadelphia)—shouted it with
many picturesque oaths. I have never known a man who could swear so
beautifully and so unconsciously.
Mr. Taylor’s system in part or whole had been applied in many factories
which I visited in my four years. You knew its outward sign as soon as
you entered the yard. Order, routing, were first laws, and the old
cluttered shops where you fell over scattered material and picked your
way around dump heaps were now models of classified order. A man knew
where to find the thing he needed, and things were placed where it took
the fewest steps to reach them.
Quite as conspicuous as the physical changes in the shop was the change
in what may be called its human atmosphere. Under the Taylor System the
business of management was not only planning but controlling what it
planned. Management laid out ahead the day’s work for each man at his
machine; to him they went with their instructions, to them he went for
explanations and suggestions. Office and shop intermingled. They
realized their mutual dependence as never before, learned to respect
each other for what they were worth. Watching the functioning, one
realized men had come to feel more or less as Taylor himself felt: that
nothing of moment was ever accomplished save by cooperation, which must
be “intimate and friendly.” Praised once for his work on the art of
cutting metal he said a thing all leaders would do well to heed:
“I feel strongly that work of any account in order to be done rightly
should be done through true cooperation, rather than through the
individual effort of any one man; and, in fact, I should feel rather
ashamed of any achievement in which I attempted to do the whole thing
myself.”
Nothing was more exciting to me than the principles by which Taylor had
developed his science. They were the principles he had applied to
revolutionary discoveries and inventions in engineering. I made a brief
table of them. They make the best code I know for progress in human
undertakings:
1) Find out what others have done before you and begin where they
left off.
2) Question everything—prove everything.
3) Tackle only one variable at a time. Shun the temptation to try
more than one in order to get quick results.
4) Hold surrounding conditions as constant and uniform as possible
while experimenting with your variable.
5) Work with all men against no one. Make them want to go along.
There is enduring vitality in these principles and there is
universality. They are as good for battered commonwealths as for
backward disorganized industries. Think what it would mean in Washington
today if all the experimenters began where others had left off, if no
demonstrated failure was repeated, if theory was held to be but 25 per
cent of an achievement, practice 75, if one variable at a time was
experimented with, if time were taken for solutions and above all if
everybody concerned accepted “intimate and friendly” cooperation as the
most essential of all factors in our restoration.
This hunt for practical application of the Golden Rule in industry left
me in much better spirits than my studies of transportation and tariff
privileges. The longer I looked into the latter the deeper had been my
conviction that in the long run they would ruin the hope of peaceful
unity of life in America. They seemed to me inconsistent with democracy
as I understood it and certainly inconsistent with my simple notions of
what made men and women of character. Were we not getting a larger and
larger class interested only in what money would buy? Particularly did I
dislike the spreading belief that wealth piled up by a combination of
ability, illegality, and bludgeoning could be so used as to justify
itself—that the good to be done would cancel the evil done. What it
amounted to was the promotion of humanitarianism at the expense of
Christian ethics; and that, I believe, made for moral softness instead
of stoutness.
But there was nothing soft about the experiments I had been following.
Where they succeeded, it was by following unconsciously in general
Taylor’s stiff principles. Patient training, stern discipline, active
cooperation alone produced safety, health, efficient workmen, abundance
of cheap honest output. I had faith in these things. They were the
foundation of genuine social service. All desired goods followed them as
they became part of the nation’s habit of life, reaching down to its
lowest depths.
Many of my reforming friends were shocked because the one and only
reason most industrial leaders gave for their experiments was that it
paid. Generally speaking, the leaders were the kind who would have cut
their tongues out before acknowledging that any other motive than profit
influenced them. Certainly they sought dividends; but they believed
stability, order, peace, progress, cooperation were back of dividends.
That industry which paid must, as Mr. Ford said, “make men.” That the
right thing paid, was one of their most far-reaching demonstrations. Men
had not believed it. They were proving the contrary; so in spite of the
charge of many of my friends that I was going over to the enemy, joining
the corporation lawyer and the company nurse, I clung to the new ideals.
What I never could make some of these friends see was that I had no
quarrel with corporate business so long as it played fair. It was the
unfairness I feared and despised. I had no quarrel with men of wealth if
they could show performance back of it untainted by privilege.
Sometimes I suspected that the gains I set forth as practical results of
this experimenting inside industry were resented by those who had been
working for them for years through legislation, organization, agitation,
because they had come about by other methods than theirs and generally
in a more complete form than they had ventured to demand. But that the
idealists had been a driving force behind the new movement inside
industry was certain. Their method could not do the thing, but it could
and did drive men to prove it could be done.
My critics who charged me with giving comfort to the enemy did not see
that often this enemy disliked what I was trying to do even more deeply
than my so-called muckraking. Indeed, he took those pictures of new
industrial methods and principles as a kind of backhanded
muckraking—indirect and so unfair. It threw all established methods of
force into a relief as damaging as anything I ever had said about high
duties and manipulations of railroad rates.
Whatever challenges my new interest aroused, however confused my own
defense of it was, I knew only that I should keep my eye on it and
report any development which seemed to me a step ahead. That, of course,
was counting on continued editorial sympathy in the _American_. But
hardly had I finished my book before that sympathy was cut off by a
change in ownership.
The change was inevitable, things being as they were in the magazine
world after 1914. The crew who had manned our little ship so gallantly
in 1906 when we left _McClure’s_ had lost only one of its numbers. A few
months after we started Lincoln Steffens withdrew. He objected to the
editing of his articles, demanded that they go in as he wrote them. The
same editorial principles were being applied to his productions that
were applied to those of other contributors. They were the principles
which he himself had been accustomed to applying and to submitting to on
_McClure’s_. The editorial board decided the policy could not be changed
and accepted Steffens’ resignation.
Back of his withdrawal, as I saw it, was Steffens’ growing
dissatisfaction with the restrictions of journalism. He wanted a wider
field, one in which he could more directly influence political and
social leaders, preach more directly his notions of the Golden Rule,
which certainly at that time was his chosen guide.
Certainly it was the creed of the _American_. It had always been John
Phillips’ answer to our fervent efforts to change things, “The only way
to improve the world is to persuade it to follow the Golden Rule.”
I suppose Steffens had heard of the Golden Rule, but I am certain he had
never thought about it as a practical scheme for improving society. It
seemed to me, at the time, that it came to him as an illumination, and
for some years he held tight to it, preaching it to political bosses, to
the tycoons of Wall Street, the Brahmins of Boston, confronting them
with amazing frankness and no little satisfaction with their open
disregard of its meanings. He became greatly disillusioned finally by
discovering that men were quite willing to let their opponents act upon
the Golden Rule but much less so to be governed by it themselves.
My first realization that Steffens was struggling with the problem which
confronted us all—that is, whether we should stick to our profession or
become propagandists—was one day when I looked up suddenly to find him
standing by my desk more sober, less certain of himself than I had ever
seen him.
“Charles Edward Russell has gone over to the Socialist party,” he said.
“Is that not what we should all be doing? Should we not make _The
American Magazine_ a Socialist organ?”
I flared. Our only hope for usefulness was in keeping our freedom,
avoiding dogma, I argued. And that the _American_ continued to do.
In the years that were to come, wars and revolutions largely occupied
Steffens. Wherever there was a revolution you found him. He wrote many
brilliant comments on what was going on in the world. When he came back
from Russia after the Kerensky revolution he was like a man who had seen
a long hoped-for vision.
“I have looked at the millennium and it works,” he told me.