Crowds / A Moving-Picture of Democracy

by Gerald Stanley Lee

The department store that based its success on selecting clerks of a high order of human insight, that paid higher wages to its clerks for their power of being believed in, for their personal qualities and their shrewdness in helping people and a gift for discovering mutual interests with everybody and for founding permanent human relations with the public, had not been thought of a little while ago.

All that had been thought of was the appearance of these things. It was an employer's business, speaking generally, to get all he could out of his clerks and have them get as little as possible out of him. It was their business in their turn to get as much money out of the public as they could get, and to give the public as little in return as they dared.

The type of employer who liked to do business in this way, and who believed in it, crowed over the world nearly everywhere as the Practical Man. And for the time being certainly it has to be admitted that he seemed the most successful. Naturally there came to be a general impression among the people that only certain lower orders of life and character could be employed, or could stand being employed, in the great department stores.

I used often to go into ——'s. Everybody remembers it. I went in, as a rule, in a helpless, waiting, married way, and as a mere attaché of the truly wise and good. All I ever did or was expected to do was to stand by and look wise and discriminating a minute about dress goods, when spoken to. I used to put in my time looking behind the counters—all those busy, pale, yellow-lighted people in little holes or stalls trying to be human and natural in that long, low, indoor street of theirs, crowds of women staring by them and picking at things. Always that moving sidewalk of questions—that dull, eager stream of consciousness sweeping by. No sunlight—just the crowds of covetousness and shrewdness. I used to wonder about the clerks, many of them, and what they would be like at home or under an apple tree or each with a bit of blue sky to go with them. They used to seem in those days, as I looked, mostly poor, underground creatures living in a sort of Subway of Things in a hateful, hard, little world of clothes, each with his little study or trick or knack of appearances, standing there and selling people their good looks day after day at so much a yard.

To-day, in a hundred cities one can go into department shops where one would get, standing and looking on idly, totally different impressions. There are hundreds of thousands of young men and women who have made being a clerk a new thing in the world. The public has already had its imagination touched by them, and is beginning to deal with clerks, as a class, on a different level.

This has been brought to pass because the employer has been thought of, or has thought of himself, who engages and pays for in clerks the highest qualities in human nature that he can get. He picks out and puts in power, and persuades to be clerks, people who would have felt superior to it in days gone by—men and women who habitually depend for their efficiency in showing and selling goods upon their more generous emotions and insights, their imaginations about other people. They gather in their new customers, and keep up their long lists of old and regular customers, through shrewd visions of service to people, and through a technical gift for making the Golden Rule work.

When one looks at it practically, and from the point of view of all the consequences, a bargain is the most spiritual, conclusive, most self-revealing experience that people can have together. Every bargain is a cross-section in three tenses of a man. A bargain tells everything about people—who they are, and what they are like. It also tells what they are going to be like unless they take pains; and it tells what they are not going to be like too sometimes, and why.

The man who comes nearest in modern life to being a Pope, is the man who determines in what spirit and by what method the people under him shall conduct his bargains and deal with his customers. ——, at the head of his department store, has a parish behind his counters of twenty-five hundred men and women. He is in the business of determining their religion, the way they make their religion work, eight hours a day, six days a week. He seems to me to be engaged in the most ceaseless, most penetrating, most powerful, and most spiritual activity of the world. He is really getting at the imaginations of people with his idea of goodness. If he does not work his way through to a man's imagination one minute or one day, he does the next. If he cannot open up a man's imagination with one line of goods, he does it with another. If he cannot make him see things, and do as he would be done by, with one kind of customer, another is moved in front of him presently, and another, and another—the man's inner substance is being attacked and changed nearly every minute every day. There is nothing he can do, or keep from doing, in which his employer's idea of goodness does not surround, besiege, or pursue him. Every officer of the staff, every customer who slips softly up to the counter in front of him makes him think of the Golden Rule in a new way or in some shading of a new way—confronts him with the will, with the expectation, with the religion of his employer.

In ——'s store (where I looked in a moment yesterday) one thousand of the two thousand five hundred clerks are men. If I were a minister wondering nearly every day how to work in for my religion a fair chance at men, I should often look wistfully from over the edge of my pulpit, I imagine, to the head of ——'s department store, sitting at that quiet, calm, empty looking desk of his in his little office at the top of his big building in —— Street, with nothing but those little six or seven buttons he softly puts his thumbs on connecting him with a thousand men.

And he does not even need the buttons. Every man knows and feels, personally and intimately, what the man at the desk is asking him to do with a particular customer who stands before him at the moment. As soon as the customer is there, the man at the desk practically is there too. His religion works by wireless, and goes automatically, and as from a huge stored-up reservoir, to all that happens in the place. He makes regularly with his idea of goodness anywhere from twenty to sixty pastoral calls (with every sale they make) on a thousand men a day. He is not dependent, as the ordinary minister often is, on their dying, or on their babies, or on their wives, for a chance to get at men with his religion.