Crowds / A Moving-Picture of Democracy

by Gerald Stanley Lee

This is the question that our machine civilization has set itself to answer.

All the men with good honest working imaginations, the geniuses and the freemen of the world, are setting themselves the task of answering it.

Some say, "Machines are on the necks of the men. We will take the machines away."

Others say, "We will make our men as good as our machines. We will make our inventions in men catch up with our inventions in machines."

We naturally turn to the employer first as having the first chance. What is there an employer can do to draw out the latent force in the men, evoke the divine, incalculable passion sleeping beneath in the machine-walled minds, the padlocked wills, the dull unmined desires of men? How can he touch and wake the solar plexus of labour?

If any employer desires to get into the inner substance of the most common type of workman, be an artist with him, express himself with him and change the nature of that substance, give it a different colour or light or movement so that he will work three times as fast, ten times as cheerfully and healthfully, and with his whole body and soul, spirit, and how is he going to do it?

Most employers wish they could do this. If they could persuade their men to believe in them, to begin to be willing to work with them instead of against them, they would do it.

What form of language is there, whether of words or of actions, that an employer can use to make the men who work nine hours a day for him and to whom he has to express himself across acres of machines, believe in him and understand him?

The modern employer finds himself set sternly face to face, every day of his life, with this question. All civilization seems crowding up day by day, seems standing outside his office door as he goes in and as he goes out, and asking him—now with despair, now with a kind of grim, implacable hope, "Do you believe, or do you not believe, a factory can be made as human as a department store?"

This question is going to be answered first by men who know what iron machines really are, and what they are really for, and how they work—who know what people-machines really are, and what they are really for, and how they work. They will base all that they do upon certain resemblances and certain differences between people and machines.