LETTER II
My dear Judd:
The Bible tells us that “man does not live by bread alone.” To hear some people talk, you would think the Bible said that “man does not live by bread.” You and I know that he does; and if he is to be decent and civilized, he needs many other things, a home with several rooms in it, and clean clothing, and books, and recreation. There is nothing more destructive of health and happiness than extreme poverty; the inability to get for yourself and your loved ones the common necessities of life.
There are parts of the world where poverty is an infliction of nature; but that is surely not true of the United States in the year 1925. We have a country of nearly four million square miles, with greater variety and wealth of natural resources than any similar area in the world. We have almost everything needed by modern industry; the bulk of our imports are luxuries—coffee and bananas and music and French fashions. We have forty-two millions of workers, all carefully trained to their jobs, and we have the most highly organized industrial system. We produce 40 per cent of the world’s iron and steel, 52 per cent of its coal, 60 per cent of its copper, 75 per cent of its corn, 85 per cent of its automobiles, and so on through a long list.
Twenty-seven years ago our government made a study of hand-power as compared with machine-power in some of the common industries; thus, making ten plows by hand took 1,180 hours, while making them by machinery took only 37½ hours; making one hundred pairs of cheap boots took by hand 1,436 hours, and by machinery only 154 hours. From these calculations it appeared that machinery had cut human labor, in some cases 80 per cent, in some cases as high as 95 per cent. That was in 1898; and since then, how much more has been done! We have the Ford factory, employing 165,000 men, and turning out 2,500,000 cars and trucks every year, one for twenty days’ labor of a man! In Chicago are great ovens, worked automatically by electricity, which turn out 14,400 perfect loaves of bread every day. I have a friend who owns a book-making machine which turns out 64-page books at the rate of 5,000 every hour. One might fill pages with miracles of this sort. We are now harnessing the rivers and water-falls, and in Maine the tides of the ocean, and engineers estimate that machine-power provides us with the equivalent of three billion hard-working slaves. Mr. Roger W. Babson, who runs a big statistical bureau, presents figures of machine-production from which it appears that 13 important industries now average 88 times as much production as by hand-labor.
Obviously, then, everybody in the country ought to be 88 times as well off; poverty for the willing worker ought to be one-eighty-eighth of what it was in 1825. But what is the matter, Judd? For some reason there is just as much poverty as there ever was, and possibly more! In the old days nobody starved—that is, unless he was a loafer or a drunkard. Our ancestors were well fed, and managed to raise families of ten, and sometimes even twenty sturdy children. How many of the workers in our mills and mines can afford such a luxury today?
I have before me a photograph of our national capital at Washington, with its high white marble dome; the picture is taken over the top of filthy slum tenements, falling into decay. And this is not a made-up picture, it is a photograph that you might take from many different spots in Washington. Or go to New York, the centre of our wealth and fashion; the school authorities there report that two-thirds of the children are physically defective, and one-fourth come to school suffering from hunger and malnutrition; two years ago the State Planning Commission reported two-thirds of a million people in the city “miserably housed.”
In New England are thousands of mill-workers now on strike against reduction in their starvation wages; here you find the “she-towns”—all the men have gone away, and you can buy a woman for the price of a sandwich. In Pennsylvania a hundred thousand miners are on strike to preserve their wretched livings; they dwell in hovels, and can barely keep their families. In Georgia and the Carolinas you find the mills run on the labor of little children; and nearby are palatial estates of the rich, a happy condition described by a woman poet:
The golf-links lie so near the mill
That almost every day
The laboring children can look out
And see the men at play.
The defenders of our industrial system will admit these facts, if you pin them down, but they say that things are getting better all the time. A professor of Harvard University has just published a book, in which he tells how our glorious system is rapidly solving all problems; very certainly and very soon there will be no poor. Well, now, I am going to make a statement, Judd, and you paste it in your hat, and look at it every now and then while you are sawing timbers or mixing cement:
The condition of the mass of workers in the United States has been getting slowly but steadily worse for the past thirty-five years.
Let us see now. We want to determine what are called “real wages”: that is to say, wages in relation to the cost of living. It is clear enough that if your wages rise from four dollars a day to eight, and at the same time the cost of living doubles, you are no richer than you were before. That is one way to fool the workingman; but we are not going to let ourselves be fooled!
The problem is not a simple one; you have to figure wage-rates in representative industries over a term of years; and then you have to figure the average cost of goods for the same period of time. It is easy to “load” your figures, by giving emphasis to those trades in which wages rose, or, on the other hand, by featuring those goods whose prices stayed low. For example, as I write, Secretary Hoover reports to the President, and the President gives out to the press, a set of figures showing how the American workers have made some gains in real wages during the last few years; and these glad tidings are featured upon the front page of all our great newspapers. And what is it? Simply a barefaced fraud! Mr. Hoover has figured wholesale prices! He knows that these prices have gone down, while retail prices have not gone down correspondingly; also, needless to say, he knows that American workingmen do not buy their food and clothing at wholesale!
Prof. Paul H. Douglas of the University of Chicago published in the Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science (Vol. XI, No. 2), a very elaborate study of real wages from 1890 to 1924. This is the best work I had seen, and the results may be summed up in one sentence: real wages in the United States from 1890 to 1924 suffered a decrease of five per cent. To phrase it another way: where a workingman could buy 20 pounds of necessaries in 1890, he could buy 19 pounds today.
These figures caused a sensation; for you can understand that there is nothing our masters try so hard to keep from their servants as this very fact. I used the figures throughout these letters; but just as I am through, and about to send the manuscript to the printer, the professor writes me a letter, saying that he has revised the work, and he now shows a gain in real wages during the past four years. The reason for the change is, he has decided that the earlier figures were “unduly weighted with pork and beef, which rose much more rapidly than other commodities.”
Here you see the very thing I explained. How much pork and beef shall be figured in the family budget of a workingman? Our fathers ate pork and beef, and grew to be full sized men; but of course there was no beef trust in those days. If, now, the cost of pork and beef rise too fast, the workingman can adjust himself to a coolie diet, those starchy foods which are cheap and relatively stable in price. But I, for my part, eat pork or beef once a day, and I claim the same right for you, Judd!
This much is certain: in many basic industries there has been a loss. The new figures which the professor sends me show losses for the clerical workers and the postal clerks; and the only large gainers are the teachers, who regard themselves as professional persons, not as workingmen. Surely those striking textile workers in Massachusetts have made no gains this year, nor the 158,000 striking miners! Ask the farmers of the Northwest about their case, and you will hear a loud shout of denial! Ex-governor Lowden of Illinois stated at a public banquet in New York that from 1920 to 1924 the American farmer’s return on his invested capital was three-tenths of one per cent!
I know there is a great deal of apparent prosperity among our workers today. But that is due to a new factor—that the worker now spends his money for things that last, a home, and an auto, and clothing and radio sets, instead of spending it for beer and whiskey. That is a vast gain in civilization, but it is not the same thing as a gain in real wages, and don’t let anybody fool you by this argument.
To get a clear view of the real truth, ask this question: has the capitalist suffered a loss of purchasing power during the past thirty-five years? Merely to suggest such a thing is to raise a laugh! There are some, like Henry Ford, who are a million times richer today than they were thirty-five years ago. It is probable that the Rockefellers are twenty times as rich as in 1890. The total wealth of our country increased from 65 billions in 1890 to 320 billions in 1922; and as the workers didn’t get the difference, the rich must have. Here is what they admit having got, in their income tax statements, during four years 1921-1924. The number of fortunate ones who got more than $300,000 a year income increased from 246 to 773. The number of those with incomes between $100,000 and $300,000 increased from 2,106 to 4,921. The number with incomes between $25,000 and $100,000 increased from 37,663 to 62,158. Those are the real insiders—and remember, Judd, they didn’t have to admit any “stock dividends,” nor to pay anything on the billion or two they have invested in tax exempt securities.
There is a statement commonly made by Socialists, justifying their prophecy that our present system is on the way to a breakdown. The statement is that the rich are growing richer and the poor growing poorer. I know of no statement which causes more irritation to the capitalist press; I suppose I have read a thousand editorials in which the statement is ridiculed, or denounced, or waved aside as out-of-date and not applying to America. Nevertheless, it is the truth, Judd; all the workers are growing relatively poorer, and vast groups of them are growing absolutely poorer, in the terms of what they can buy with their wages. And this in the headquarters of prosperity, the richest of all nations, which houses in its treasure-vaults more than half the total gold-reserves of the world!