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: