IN the many factories where I have worked most men talked vilely to
their fellows and long afterward I was to begin to understand that a
little. It is the impotent man who is vile. His very impotence has made
him vile and in the end I was to understand that when you take from man
the cunning of the hand, the opportunity to constantly create new forms
in materials, you make him impotent. His maleness slips imperceptibly
from him and he can no longer give himself in love, either to work
or to women. “Standardization! Standardization!” was to be the cry
of my age and all standardization is necessarily a standardization
in impotence. It is God’s law. Women who choose childlessness for
themselves choose also impotence--perhaps to be the better companions
for the men of a factory, a standardization age. To live is to create
constantly new forms: with the body in living children; in new and more
beautiful forms carved out of materials; in the creation of a world of
the fancy; in scholarship; in clear and lucid thought; and those who do
not live die and decay and from decay always a stench arises.
These the thoughts of a time long after the one of which I am now
writing. One cannot think of the figure of a single man as being in
himself to blame but as the man named Ford of Detroit has done more
than any other man of my day to carry standardization to its logical
end might he also not come to be looked upon as the great killer of
his age? To make impotent is surely to kill. And there is talk of
making him President. How fitting! Tamerlane, who specialized in the
killing of men’s bodies but who tells in his autobiography how he was
always desirous that all living men under him retain their manhood and
self-respect, was the ruler of the world in his age. Tamerlane for the
ancients. Ford for the moderns.
In our age why should we not all have houses alike, all men and women
clad alike (I am afraid we shall have a bad time managing the women),
all food alike, all the streets in all of our cities alike? Surely
individuality is ruinous to an age of standardization. It should at
once and without mercy be crushed out. Let us give all workers larger
and larger salaries but let us crush out of them at once all flowering
of individualities. It can be done. Let us arise in our might.
And let us put at our head the man who has done in his own affairs what
we are all so universally agreed should everywhere be done, the man who
has made standardization the fetish of his life.
Books may be standardized--they are already almost that; painting may
be standardized--it has often been done, and the standardization of
poetry will be easy. Already I know a man who is working on a machine
for the production of poetry. One feeds into it the letters of the
alphabet and out comes poetry and one may pull various levers for the
production of poems either of the _vers libre_ sort or poetry in
the classic style.
Arise, men of my age! Under the banner of the new age we shall have a
great machine moving slowly down a street and depositing cement houses
to the right and left as it goes, like a diarrhœic elephant. All the
young Edisons will enlist under the banner of a Ford. We shall have
all the great minds of our age properly employed making car wheels out
of waste newspapers and synthetic wines out of crude oils. I am told
by intelligent men who were soldiers in the World War that in all the
world before the war standardization had been carried to the highest
pitch by the Germans but now the Germans have been defeated. May it
not be that we Americans have all along been intended by God to be the
nation that will carry highest the banner of the New Age?