The only way to get big business on the side of public health is to get public health and private profit on the same side. Health makes efficiency, efficiency makes profit, and whenever public health can be bought at a price that seems likely to yield a profit in efficiency, big business will buy. That is the way Professor Fisher figures it out and here is a case that he cites in point:
The girls in one of the Chicago telephone exchanges that is located in a particularly smoky and dusty part of the city complained to the manager of the smoke and dust. He cheerfully advised them to forget the smoke and dust and go on with their work, which, having more hunger than money, they did.
A few months later a growing volume of complaints against bad service caused the manager to investigate. He found that the smoke and dust were interfering with the operation of the switchboards. The little brass tags were so gummed that frequently they did not fall when subscribers called. Nor did the grime on the “plugs” with which connections are made constitute a good medium for the flow of electricity.
When the manager learned what the smoke and dust were doing to his human machines he did nothing. But when he learned what smoke and dust were doing to his metallic machines he wasted no time. He laid the matter before his superiors, with the result that a plan was installed for the filtration, through water, of every particle of air that entered the exchange.
It is not to the interest of big business as a whole that the people should have pure food. The markets are flooded with unwholesome food that an honest law, honestly administered, would have barred. Professor Fisher relates an incident that shows how afraid the big meat dealers are of the pure food law.
The professor was sitting in the lobby of a hotel not distant from New York. The proprietor of the hotel called up a New York meat dealer on the long-distance ‘phone to complain that some bad beef had been sent to the hotel. He said he had never yet fed his patrons on rotten beef and he didn’t intend to begin. The beef must be taken away and the charge deducted from his bill. The man at the other end of the wire evidently offered no opposition, and the receiver was hung up.
Soon the telephone rang again. New York was on the wire. The conversation was brief. All that Professor Fisher could hear was the hotel man’s single remark: “I’ll see what I can do and let you know.”
The hotel man rang off and immediately called up a local restaurant. Then Professor Fisher heard this cheerful statement go over the wire:
“I’ve got some beef here that ain’t just right, and the New York people who sent it to me wanted me to see if I couldn’t sell it for them up here ... Oh, it’ll hang together yet, but ’tain’t what I want for my people; you might use it, though ... I don’t know what the price will be. You’ll have to make your bargain with them, but it won’t be much.... All right, send over and get it.”
And this—and a thousand times more than this—under the Pure Food Law! Such crimes could not occur if the government, when it tried to enact a decent law, had not been thrown flat on its back. The pity of it is that when big business and a government come into collision over public health matters, the government is usually thrown on its back.