LETTER XI
My dear Judd:
I don’t know whether you ever played poker, but I did a few times in my naughty youth. I recall a game known as “freeze-out”; you played till you lost all your money, and the game ended entirely when one man got all the chips. That is our social system—a colossal game of “freeze-out,” with winter and disease and death to clear the players from the board. Those who lose at the game are the workers of the world.
You, Judd, must realize that you are in an unusual position for a worker grown old; you own two lots and three houses, and can live partly on the rent. But how many others are there like that? Consider the statement given out this month by the Industrial Accident Commission of California: “One million men and women of America suffered disabling accidents in industries this year.” Assuming that a workingman puts in forty years, as you have done, what are his chances of getting off without a disabling accident? There being forty-two million people gainfully employed, the chances would appear to be one in twenty; but of course only part of the disabling is permanent—the victims get well, and go back to be disabled again. The number of accidents increased 30 per cent in 1924, so you see your chances grow less and less.
The worst you got, Judd, was a rupture. But suppose you had been one of the 21,232 to be killed; or suppose you were of the 105,629 who suffered “permanent partial disability” last year; or suppose that you had eight or ten children, instead of one or two; or that your wife, instead of dying in an accident as she did, had been crippled, and left upon your hands for life. Do you think you or your heirs would still have the two lots, and the three houses, and the fine American sense of security?
Look, old friend, here are some figures worked out from insurance tables by the National City Bank of New York, the richest bank in the country. They are trying to persuade people to take out insurance, so that the money will come back to Wall Street for them to use in stock gambling. Taking 100 people 25 years old, they ask what will be the position of these same people at the age of 65; and they say 1 will be independent, 4 will be well to do, 5 will be working for a meagre living, 36 will be dead, “many of them for want of attention that money would have secured,” and 54 will be dependent upon others. “Out of the entire 100, only 5 will be in satisfactory circumstances.” There you have a picture of what the richest nation in the world has been able to achieve in the way of sound human happiness!
Our Mother Nature is a wasteful parent, who creates many millions of salmon eggs in order to produce one salmon. It is the same way with human life also in its dark beginnings; history is a tale of mighty empires arising only to be destroyed again, and of populations wiped out by plague and famine and slaughter. But now the light of reason is beginning to dawn; a few of us have the idea that human energies might be rationally guided, and that men might cease to spend their time digging holes in the sand and filling them up again.
Consider war. Women bear children with much pain, and raise them with loving care, and then send them out, at the very prime of their lives, to be blown to pieces by shot and shell. Other men in factories, who might be making the means of human happiness—automobiles and radio sets and books and music—these men are making explosives to wipe out whole cities, and gases to poison the inhabitants. In the late war we destroyed 30,000,000 human beings and $300,000,000,000 worth of treasure, the product of a whole generation of useful toil.
They promised us that this war was to be the last, but what are the prospects? In 1912 our government spent for defense nearly a quarter of a billion dollars, and our 1926 budget for the same purpose is more than three times that amount. In 1920 the Bureau of Standards analyzed our budget and found that expenses for wars, past and future, composed 93 per cent thereof. Think of it, Judd, a great government spending one dollar to save life and property, and thirteen dollars to destroy it! Of course, the military men will say that the thirteen dollars are to prevent other nations from destroying us, but the obvious fact is that when we spend this money on armaments we cause other nations to do the same, so we might as well do our own destruction and have it over with.
Or consider child labor. We take a million children out of school and put them into factories and mines, thus stunting them in body and spirit, and when they grow up into cripples, defectives, criminals and grafters, we pay ten or a hundred times what we got out of their childhood labor! Or consider crime, which is caused by the presence of extreme poverty alongside extreme wealth. Including criminals and those who catch them, this factor of waste keeps more than 700,000 persons out of productive work. Or take prostitution, caused by poverty and low wages of women in industry. There are over a quarter of a million women in our country who live by spreading vice and disease, and the American Social Hygiene Association estimates that this costs us $628,000,000 every year.
Or consider adulteration, the putting of worthless goods and poisonous foods upon the market, all for profits, of course. Or the wastes of advertising—the seekers of profits spending a billion and a quarter dollars a year, and keeping more than 600,000 people busy all the time, in order to persuade us to stop buying the worthy products of Jones and to buy the unworthy products of Smith. This is civil war within our industry, and one of its weapons is fashion, the making of imbecile changes in our goods every season, in order that we may be ashamed to wear our perfectly good clothes after the first year.
Or take the wastes of mismanagement of industry. The so-called “Hoover Committee” of the American Engineering Societies made an elaborate study of this field, and it is interesting to notice that this employers’ body attributes 50 per cent of the blame to management and only 25 per cent to labor. They estimate the percentage of waste in a few great industries: Metal trades, 28 per cent; boots and shoes, 40 per cent; textiles, 49 per cent; building, 53 per cent; printing, 57 per cent; men’s clothing, 63 per cent. Notice that figure for building, Judd, and be sure you get what it means: out of 40 years you put in at carpentering, 21 years went to no purpose, because those who directed your labor were making money instead of making houses!
One great form of industrial waste is men and women willing to work, and able to work but unable to find work to do. I regard this as the basic evil, the cause of most of the others, and I believe that it is an essential part of our present profit system, without which that system would break down. First, let us see exactly how widespread the evil is.
I point out, Judd, that nowhere in these letters have I given you any Socialist figures about anything; in each case I go to the most “respectable” authorities, those who are least favorable to my point of view. In this case of unemployment I consult a volume prepared and published with money derived from the estate of one of the richest landlords and money-lenders that ever died in the city of New York. I refer to the Russell Sage Foundation, and here is the sentence in which they sum up their final figures on unemployment: “To conclude that, averaging good and bad years, from 10 to 12 per cent of all workers are idle all of the time, is probably an understatement of the situation.” The book calculates the number gainfully employed at 42,000,000, and 12 per cent of that is over 5,000,000.
When you talk about five million people out of work it doesn’t mean much, because we haven’t the mental power to grasp such a thing. Let us say one person out of work, and see what it means. It so happens that before I sat down to my typewriter this morning the postman brought a letter from such a person; twelve miles away from us, in the great rich city of Los Angeles, a war hero is begging a job, and his wife and children are starving. This hero encloses a visiting card, reading, “D. S. C.”—that means “Distinguished Service Cross”—and down in the corner is “Chevalier Legion d’ Honneur; Croix de Guerre,” the decorations prized above all things in France. And on the back of the card he has written: “Ex-soldier, bonus-pest, charity-dependent.” He encloses newspaper clippings: “Top-sergeant in the suicide squad of machine gunners,” left for dead on the field, taken to base hospital, returned to front, made lieutenant, more hospitals and medals—regular hero stuff, you see, and here he has been hunting any sort of job for months, and tells me how it goes:
“Louise the baby is low from malnutrition. Virginia, the oldest, the invalid around whom my book is written, coughs all night incessantly. We are making our last stand. As completely isolated as though in the heart of the Sahara. Today I received my first offer of a good job in weeks, but it necessitates my providing at least $22 of special tools. It’s on tractor transmission; I built them shortly after the armistice, but when I entered Stanford University I was through with mechanics, and gave away my kit. I took my D. S. C. and other war junk down to my favorite pawnbroker Saturday but they wouldn’t bring carfare to Pasadena now.”
So here, you see, is one of the victims of our great game of “freeze-out”; and what was his weakness that caused him to lose in the game? The answer is plain enough—he believed the propaganda of our war profiteers and went over to France and risked his life and ruined his health and fortune—while 23,000 able business gentlemen stayed at home and made themselves into millionaires! “What price Glory,” Judd!