a transition to our day--and we have but begun! In the days of
Franklin, according to our best authorities, less than one out of
eight of the population depended for a living on manufacturing, trade,
transportation, and fisheries. As early as 1851, it was one out of
five. The character of the nation had undergone a complete and sweeping
change.
Yet, let me repeat, the American industrialist of that day was not
the serf he is to-day. In every sense, he was a free and independent
man. True, he had been forced to leave the household plan for the
factory plan; but yet he managed without any trouble to keep the
spirit of individualism and independence thoroughly alive. Industry,
in the middle of the last century, was carried on in this country in
scattered individual plants, each one a little independent republic of
its own. The owners generally worked in the factory and the mill. Half
a dozen partners, perhaps, laboured side by side with the men in their
employ. Men stepped swiftly from the position of wage workers to the
independence of ownership. The doors of individual opportunity stood
wide open.
I would, if I dared risk tiring the reader with extended comment
upon subject matter that has been handled often much better than I
can handle it, dwell upon this happy phase of the making of America.
For it is germane to my subject. And then, again, it is gone from us
forever--gone with the happy simplicity and innocence of the youth of
our nation. In its stead there has come upon us an age of industrial
terror, of fierce, abnormal struggle for expansion and wealth beyond
the dreams of the fathers.
Often, as the years have passed, I have heard older men talk with
affection of the “good old days.” I put it down to the failing memory
of man, which forgets all that is ugly and repugnant, and remembers
best the beautiful. When men in society spoke of the past, they seemed
to me to be ignoring the many advantages of the present. As time has
fled, however, I come to realize that they spoke truly. They were
thinking of this “golden age,” this high mid-day of our industrial
history.
They were thinking of the free American, son of the soil, of the
factory, as you will, yet free, independent, unafraid. They were
thinking of a nation that did not tolerate tyranny, political or
industrial, within its borders. They were thinking of that rich
America where no man dwelt in poverty. They were thinking of the utter
astonishment with which European travellers noted in our cities the
absolute lack of beggars, of want, of hunger, and of cold. They were
thinking of that happy day, now dead and gone, when evenly and justly
the reward of labour fell upon the people, scattered far and wide and
sufficiently, like the dew that falls at night upon the fields.
Perhaps you think that Society, as such, cares little about these
things. You are eternally wrong. Society is a group of men and women
and children. The best of the men and the best of the women think
deeply, as the best of men and women think deeply everywhere. Because
it is educated, and because it, too, is engaged in an eternal fight for
life, Society, perhaps, studies these matters more zealously and more
accurately than the rest of the world that makes a nation.
The leaders of the social world in the middle of the last century saw
as clearly as any one the tendencies of the time, and recognized as
fully as any one the bearing of the conditions of labour and capital
upon the purely social problems. They knew that because wealth was
evenly distributed as it flowed from the mine, the forest, and the
field, Society had nothing to fear. They knew, too, that, when the
division of wealth began to be uneven, danger to the social world
began. The lesson of the French Revolution was better understood in
those days than it is to-day in high Society--because high Society in
those days had, at least, read Carlyle or Junius; while to-day it reads
little more than the Sunday editions of the newspapers.
Very few, in that time, were the new recruits in the army of Society.
The old laws still lived. The ancient families of New York, Boston,
and Philadelphia still held sway. The leader of the social world could
afford to speak of her father and her grandfather and even, in some
cases, of her great-grandfather, without treading on dangerous ground.
The subtle barriers of caste, flimsy as they always are in a new
country, had yet withstood all the puny assaults to which they had been
exposed.
Happy, indeed, was Society; and happy, too, were the people of the
country. Yet the poison was even then at work within their veins.
Already, here and there, rich men were selling out of industry, taking
their mighty profits, and moving away from the industrial cities and
towns into the great social and business centres. There is no social
index to record the exodus; but one may note, here and there, in
government reports of the time, strange facts that to-day are all too
clear in their meaning.
In the year 1840, at the beginning of this golden period of national
happiness and prosperity, there were in this country 1,240 cotton
manufacturing plants, with a combined gross output of $46,000,000
worth of goods. Each plant made $37,000 worth of goods. Twenty years
later, the number of plants was 1,091, and the output was $115,000,000.
Our fathers saw these figures; but it is not on record that any man, at
that time, saw their true meaning. It was simply, to their minds, the
working out of the factory system to its completion. It meant economy.
It was part of the same system that had reduced the cost of making a
yard of broadcloth from fifty cents in 1823 to fifteen cents in 1840.
They could not, naturally, see in it, as we can, the seeds of a
revolution that was to make over again the America of that day, to drag
the boasted freedom of America in the mire of poverty, to prostitute
our political system, to tear and wreck and sweep away the sacred
barriers of Society. It was, in truth, the handwriting on the wall,
but America lacked a prophet. If, indeed, there had been such a one,
his warning would have been in vain. For evolution is inexorable; and
the nation, high and low, rich and poor, poverty and Society--all are
but its creatures, brought into life by it, buried at its command.
Let me hurry on to sketch the progress of this wonderful change that
was to found in America two great new classes, the Idle Rich and the
Slaves of Industry.
I have compiled a table from the census reports, dealing with textile
industries alone, because that branch of manufacturing was the oldest
and one of the greatest, as it is to-day, and because it illustrates
perhaps better than any other the progress of principles, rather than
the influence of special causes, particularly through this twenty-year
period of which I am writing:
TEXTILE INDUSTRIES OF THE UNITED STATES
Average Av. No. of
Year No. Capital Employés Product Average
1860 3027 50,000 65 75,500
1870 4790 62,500 57 108,600
1880 4018 103,000 96 144,000
In these few figures all the industrial history of that great period
may be found epitomized. The number of plants, instead of increasing
as the volume of demand for products increased, was contracted. The
leadership of the trade, and, therefore, the making of prices, was
taken by the houses of larger capital. The average capital employed in
the trade doubled in the twenty years. The output also doubled for the
average factory. The number of employés, on the other hand, increased
but half. Better machinery, more efficient control over the workers,
more drastic industrial discipline, fiercer industrial competition for
individual work, did their destiny-appointed task.
Here one begins to see on this broad canvas, but faint in outline,
the tracing of the picture of America to-day. The chains began to
tighten. Men who had grown to comfortable wealth in the long period of
small factories, scattered industries, and free and easy industrial
democracy, began to gather together into industrial groups. Little
industries were rolled together into big industries. The capital of the
factory expanded, doubling, on an average, in the decade. At the same
time, by more intense methods of carrying on the trades, the number of
employés needed to produce a given value of products was cut down.
Let me turn, for a moment, to introduce a slight record of that
industry which has done more, perhaps, than any other to bring about
the creation of the class of whom I write--the idle rich. I have not
dwelt upon it in the beginnings of American industry, for it was
scarcely existent. I refer to the iron and steel industry.
In 1860 there were in this country only 402 plants manufacturing
wrought, forged, and rolled iron. They used an average of $58,000 of
capital apiece, produced products worth $91,000 each, and employed an
average of 55 men. In 1880--twenty years--there were 1,005 such plants,
with an average capital of $23,000, average products of $296,005, and
an average roll of 121 men. Here the evolution of an industry from the
small, scattered plants to the concentrated, efficient, and powerful
“combine” is unmistakable.
To summarize: In this twenty-year period, the value of products
trebled, while the number of workers doubled. The wealth-producing
capacity of each worker increased from $1,438 to $2,015.
If the tendency toward monopoly was striking in the twenty years from
1860 to 1880, what may one say of the twenty years that followed? In
the iron and steel trade, the 699 plants of 1880, with an average
production of $419,000 each, became 668 with an average production of
$1,203,500 in 1900. The average number of employés per plant rose from
197 to 333. In the cotton mills, the average number of employés in each
mill rose during the same period from 287 to 1,185.
Here is the birthplace of the idle rich. Hundreds of men who had owned
small manufacturing plants sold them out at good profits in the first
ten years of this era and retired to live on the proceeds. Men who,
twenty years before, had built their puny mills on river banks and
rapidly developed them into great wealth-producing plants by natural
growth, then turned them over to the trusts and combinations at prices
that would have staggered the imagination of the fathers of the
industry.
The firm gave way to the corporation. Industries that had been for
generations family affairs were suddenly capitalized in the form of
stocks and bonds, and the owners retired from the active business,
hiring skilled men to carry on the work. They themselves sat down in
comfort and ease and luxury to draw their sustenance from interest and
dividends on the securities that represented the plants.
Into the mighty cities of the East there moved an ever-growing army of
those who had gathered, from the mines of California, from the forges
of Pittsburg, from the forests of Michigan, from the metalled mountains
of Montana, wealth beyond the dreams of Midas. They had capitalized
the products of their own labour, and brought with them the tangible
evidences of wealth in the shape of stocks and bonds.
I remember very well the first great march of the suddenly rich upon
the social capitals of the nation. Very distinctly it comes back to me
with what a shock the fact came home to the sons and daughters of what
was pleased to call itself the aristocracy of America that here marched
an army better provisioned, better armed with wealth, than any other
army that had ever assaulted the citadels of Society.
The effect of these immigrations from the fields of labour to the
cities of capital I shall sketch more fully in another chapter. I
would now, instead, touch upon the conditions that they left behind
them, the conditions that made possible their own retirement from
actual labour to the ease and comfort of luxurious leisure.
It is not too much to say that they left behind them a people reduced
to industrial slavery. Gone forever was the free America our fathers
knew. Faded into history was the ideal of Washington and Jefferson and
Lincoln. From the year 1890 onward the progress of the United States
has been the fearful march of manufacturing industry. In that year the
products of industry and agricultural wealth were about equal. Ten
years later the products of industry were two to one against the wealth
gathered from the fields.
Side by side with this conquest of America went the growth of tenant
farming, as against the old free tenure farming that had marched
steadily into the farthest untilled corners of the land so long as
land was free. To-day there is no free land within the borders of the
nation, save for a few small tracts hardly worth mentioning. Here, as
in the industries, capital did not hesitate to claim and capture all
that it dared. Law after law was passed to prevent the centralization
of the power of exploiters over great tracts of the West. Law after law
was broken, evaded, or laughed at. Once the spirit of exploitation on a
large scale was abroad in the land, nothing could stand against it.
To gain its ends, wealth crept stealthily into every seat of power.
The law stood in its way; therefore, in legislative halls and in
political caucuses, wealth had to have its representatives. The
legislatures, the courts, the press--these were made pawns in the game
of exploitation. Where-ever possible, the army of exploiters laid
profane hands even upon the trusteed funds that guard the poverty of
the spoiled and broken, the funds of the savings-banks, and of the
insurance companies. Nothing was sacred; nothing was secure.
The raw material of wealth, as I have stated in a previous chapter,
is the labour of men. In the days of individual effort, exploitation
of labour was not possible, for men shied off from the chains of the
exploiter, took to the boundless free fields of the West, and declared
over again that they would dwell and labour in freedom, or they would
die.
But, in the census of 1900, it is shown clearly that the average
employé in this country produces every year $1,280 of wealth, after
full allowance for the cost of the material he works with and all
possible running expenses that are paid by his employer. Out of this
amount of wealth he gets $437. The remainder, $843, goes into the hands
of other men--the capitalist or the exploiter of labour.
That money, nearly two thirds of the wealth produced by the men who
labour with their hands and heads, goes to pay interest and dividends
on the securities that represent the increment gathered by those who
sold out in other days, or who capitalized their plants and settled
down to draw their sustenance from the labour of other men.
Hence the idle rich. I do not mean to say that by any means all of the
dividends and interest are gathered by the idle rich. Such a condition
as that can exist but once in the history of a nation. It came about
in Rome--and it led to the fall. It came about in France--and it led
to the terror. Here, in America, it has gone far to be sure, and the
tendency is still onward; but it has not yet quite reached a point
where one may say: “To-morrow the harvest is ripe!”
“_As well might the oligarchy attempt to stay the flux and reflux
of the tides as to attempt to stay the progress of freedom in
the South. Approved of God, the edict of the genius of Universal
Emancipation has been proclaimed to the world, and nothing,
save Deity himself, can possibly reverse it. To connive at the
perpetuation of slavery is to disobey the commands of Heaven. Not
to be an abolitionist is to be a wilful and diabolical instrument
of the devil. The South needs to be free, the South wants to be
free, the South SHALL be free!_”
--HINTON ROWAN HELPER.
_Chapter Four_
WHO ARE THE SLAVES?
For thirty years, since 1880, we have been piling up wealth in the
hands of men who do not work. In almost every year there has been
pouring from our mills a steady grist of idlers. It has gone so far
that to-day, in every city of the Union, the class of the idle rich
has reached proportions that to the thoughtful student of events are
alarming. The millionaire habit has spread until to-day men of millions
are far more numerous in our great cities than were men of one tenth
the wealth twenty years ago.
I do not desire to criticize wealth; for I am not a Socialist, and I
entertain no Utopian dreams concerning the equal distribution of wealth
among the people or the public control of all sources of wealth. I
agree thoroughly with Mr. Carnegie, and with much older economists, in
the opinion that any arbitrary distribution of wealth, or any arbitrary
assignment of the sources of wealth, would be but temporary, and would
be followed by another period of adjustment which would end with the
reappropriation of wealth and the reassignment of the sources of wealth
into the hands best qualified by nature to hold them. I take it to be
proven by the experience of the world that individual exploitation
of the sources of wealth remains as the established basis of the
industrial, commercial, and social development of the world.
Yet, I confess, the terrific sweep of industrialism across this land
throughout the past century appalls me as I study it from records
written and unwritten. I cannot go down through the crowded tenement
sections of our great cities without having it borne in upon me that
we as a nation pay a fearful price in human blood and tears for our
industrial triumphs. I cannot see the poverty, even the degradation, of
the wives and children of the wage-working class in many cities, and
even in many rural districts, without being visited by the devastating
thought that surely, if the principle of the thing be necessary and
right, there must be fearful errors somewhere in the application of the
principle.
For the grim fact stands out beyond denial that the men who are the
workers of the nation, and the women and the children dependent upon
them, are not to-day given the opportunities that are their proper
birthright in free America; and that, struggle as they will, save as
they may, lift their voices in protest as they dare, they cannot obtain
from our industrial hierarchy much more than a mere living wage. And,
on the other hand, it is equally true that the wage of capital is high,
that the class of idle rich has grown out of all proportion, and that
it has taken upon itself a power and an arrogance unsurpassed in the
industrial history of the world.
Somewhere there is something wrong. I speak as a rich man. I speak
as a representative of the class of which I write, and to which in
particular I address myself. We can no longer blind ourselves with
idle phrases or drug our consciences with the outworn boast that the
workingman of America is to-day the highest paid artisan in the world.
We know those lying figures well. Many a time I myself, in personal
argument, have shown that the American workman receives from one and a
half to three times as much as his English cousin at the same trade;
but we know now that it means nothing. We are learning, instead of
envying the American workingman his lot, to pity more deeply that
English cousin. We are learning, too, that what we give our workers
in wages we take back from them in the higher cost of necessities, in
food, in clothing, in medicine, in insurance--in a hundred devious ways
all with one tendency--to keep the living margin down.
Many centuries ago two great Greek philosophers, Aristotle and
Plato, predicted that the time would come when the tools of wealth
production--machinery--would have reached such an advanced stage of
development that it would become unnecessary to enslave anybody for
the sake of allowing any one class to devote itself to the pursuit
of culture. These great philosophers believed in slavery during that
period of the world’s development in which they lived, on the ground
that only by the exploitation of forced labour could any class be left
free to develop the higher attributes of mankind. Yet both looked
forward to the time when, in the progress of humanity toward the ideal,
the perfection of methods would permit the emancipation of all mankind.
Aristotle and Plato were no visionaries. Their dreams, so far as the
methods are concerned, are to-day realities; but, alas, how different
the result! Instead of emancipation we have welded about the necks of
the people the chains of industrial slavery. It is true that the form
of slavery, the direct exploitation of the bodies of men, has been
wiped out in every civilized nation; but is it not equally true that
since our own great struggle for freedom from the pollution of chattel
slavery we have but stepped out of a process of direct exploitation of
a few enchained slaves into a process far more expansive and embracing
far more people, namely, the indirect exploitation of wage workers for
the benefit of capital?
The fruit of the genius of the inventors of the world is plucked not by
the hands of the workers, but by the hands of the comparatively small
and personally insignificant class who, by virtue of the genius of
their fathers, or by virtue of mere chance, administer the tremendous
power of capital.
The evolution of the ages, then, has brought about this strangely
ironical condition. Humanity is face to face with a God-given
opportunity to acquire and apply knowledge. The wealth producing
machinery of the world has the capacity to give to all men the
opportunity of enjoying leisure. Knowledge and culture are the proper
birthright of humanity to-day. Even in the face of obstacles, knowledge
and culture spread among the people. Only one great obstacle remained
to block the fulfillment of the prophecy of the great philosophers.
That obstacle is the idle rich. It is the leisure class that to-day
destroys the spirit of our dream.
It cannot be for long. We in America are moving fast toward social
revolution. Conflicts between labour and capital are assuming the
proportions of civil war. The once powerful middle class, which is the
safety of every nation, is to-day weak, and is every day declining.
Soon, politically it will be a memory, and the battle field will be
cleared for conflict.
It is, I know, a hopeless and a thankless task for any man to raise his
voice in an appeal for peace. The forces which have been set in motion
in the making of America so far must, I suppose, run their allotted
course. To-day the class spirit in America is thoroughly aroused, and
it is almost with terror that I, a representative of one of the two
classes that are to fight this battle, raise my feeble voice in warning
to the other members of my class.
But lately I have read again a monumental work, written fifty years
ago by a Southerner, in an attempt to turn the minds of his fellow
citizens from the fatal error of chattel slavery. The book is called
“The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It.” Of all the books
that I have ever read upon public problems it has always seemed to me
to be the most sane and factual. Here is a paragraph taken from it
which I marked when first I read the book, and which I have read over
and over again with infinite satisfaction:
The truth is that slavery destroys or vitiates, or pollutes
whatever it touches. No interest of society escapes the influence
of its clinging curse. It makes Southern religion a stench in the
nostrils of Christendom--it makes Southern politics a libel upon
all the principles of republicanism--it makes Southern literature
a travesty upon the honourable profession of letters.... When will
the South, as a whole, abandoning its present suicidal policy,
enter upon that career of prosperity, greatness, and true renown,
to which God by His word and His providence is calling it? That
voice, by whomsoever spoken, must yet be heard and heeded. The time
hastens--the doom of slavery is written--the redemption of the
South draws nigh.
To-day the author’s position is similar to that of Helper, who wrote
these words, save that it differs in one important particular. Helper,
though a Southerner, was not a slave-holder. I am in every sense a
member of the class to whom I write. I do not flatter myself that my
words will have any more effect among mine own people than Helper’s had
among the people of the South, but fortunately my voice is but one of a
hundred that are raised to-day to warn the leisure class of the rocks
toward which it is drifting.