My Life and Work
of usefulness, then will be time enough to think of laying aside, as a
fixed policy, a certain substantial share of income. You are not
"saving" when you prevent yourself from becoming more productive. You
are really taking away from your ultimate capital; you are reducing the
value of one of nature's investments. The principle of use is the true
guide. Use is positive, active, life-giving. Use is alive. Use adds to
the sum of good.
Personal want may be avoided without changing the general condition.
Wage increases, price increases, profit increases, other kinds of
increases designed to bring more money here or money there, are only
attempts of this or that class to get out of the fire--regardless of
what may happen to everyone else. There is a foolish belief that if only
the money can be gotten, somehow the storm can be weathered. Labour
believes that if it can get more wages, it can weather the storm.
Capital thinks that if it can get more profits, it can weather the
storm. There is a pathetic faith in what money can do. Money is very
useful in normal times, but money has no more value than the people put
into it by production, and it can be so misused. It can be so
superstitiously worshipped as a substitute for real wealth as to destroy
its value altogether.
The idea persists that there exists an essential conflict between
industry and the farm. There is no such conflict. It is nonsense to say
that because the cities are overcrowded everybody ought to go back to
the farm. If everybody did so farming would soon decline as a
satisfactory occupation. It is not more sensible for everyone to flock
to the manufacturing towns. If the farms be deserted, of what use are
manufacturers? A reciprocity can exist between farming and
manufacturing. The manufacturer can give the farmer what he needs to be
a good farmer, and the farmer and other producers of raw materials can
give the manufacturer what he needs to be a good manufacturer. Then with
transportation as a messenger, we shall have a stable and a sound system
built on service. If we live in smaller communities where the tension of
living is not so high, and where the products of the fields and gardens
can be had without the interference of so many profiteers, there will be
little poverty or unrest.
Look at this whole matter of seasonal work. Take building as an example
of a seasonal trade. What a waste of power it is to allow builders to
hibernate through the winter, waiting for the building season to come
around!
And what an equal waste of skill it is to force experienced artisans who
have gone into factories to escape the loss of the winter season to stay
in the factory jobs through the building season because they are afraid
they may not get their factory places back in the winter. What a waste
this all-year system has been! If the farmer could get away from the
shop to till his farm in the planting, growing, and harvesting seasons
(they are only a small part of the year, after all), and if the builder
could get away from the shop to ply his useful trade in its season, how
much better they would be, and how much more smoothly the world would
proceed.
Suppose we all moved outdoors every spring and summer and lived the
wholesome life of the outdoors for three or four months! We could not
have "slack times."
The farm has its dull season. That is the time for the farmer to come
into the factory and help produce the things he needs to till the farm.
The factory also has its dull season. That is the time for the workmen
to go out to the land to help produce food. Thus we might take the slack
out of work and restore the balance between the artificial and the
natural.
But not the least benefit would be the more balanced view of life we
should thus obtain. The mixing of the arts is not only beneficial in a
material way, but it makes for breadth of mind and fairness of judgment.
A great deal of our unrest to-day is the result of narrow, prejudiced
judgment. If our work were more diversified, if we saw more sides of
life, if we saw how necessary was one factor to another, we should be
more balanced. Every man is better for a period of work under the open
sky.
It is not at all impossible. What is desirable and right is never
impossible. It would only mean a little teamwork--a little less
attention to greedy ambition and a little more attention to life.
Those who are rich find it desirable to go away for three or four months
a year and dawdle in idleness around some fancy winter or summer resort.
The rank and file of the American people would not waste their time that
way even if they could. But they would provide the team-work necessary
for an outdoor, seasonal employment.
It is hardly possible to doubt that much of the unrest we see about us
is the result of unnatural modes of life. Men who do the same thing
continuously the year around and are shut away from the health of the
sun and the spaciousness of the great out of doors are hardly to be
blamed if they see matters in a distorted light. And that applies
equally to the capitalist and the worker.
What is there in life that should hamper normal and wholesome modes of
living? And what is there in industry incompatible with all the arts
receiving in their turn the attention of those qualified to serve in
them? It may be objected that if the forces of industry were withdrawn
from the shops every summer it would impede production. But we must look
at the matter from a universal point of view. We must consider the
increased energy of the industrial forces after three or four months in
outdoor work. We must also consider the effect on the cost of living
which would result from a general return to the fields.
We have, as I indicated in a previous chapter, been working toward this
combination of farm and factory and with entirely satisfactory results.
At Northville, not far from Detroit, we have a little factory making
valves. It is a little factory, but it makes a great many valves. Both
the management and the mechanism of the plant are comparatively simple
because it makes but one thing. We do not have to search for skilled
employees. The skill is in the machine. The people of the countryside
can work in the plant part of the time and on the farm part of the time,
for mechanical farming is not very laborious. The plant power is derived
from water.
Another plant on a somewhat larger scale is in building at Flat Rock,
about fifteen miles from Detroit. We have dammed the river. The dam also
serves as a bridge for the Detroit, Toledo & Ironton Railway, which was
in need of a new bridge at that point, and a road for the public--all in
one construction. We are going to make our glass at this point. The
damming of the river gives sufficient water for the floating to us of
most of our raw material. It also gives us our power through a
hydroelectric plant. And, being well out in the midst of the farming
country, there can be no possibility of crowding or any of the ills
incident to too great a concentration of population. The men will have
plots of ground or farms as well as their jobs in the factory, and these
can be scattered over fifteen or twenty miles surrounding--for of course
nowadays the workingman can come to the shop in an automobile. There we
shall have the combination of agriculture and industrialism and the
entire absence of all the evils of concentration.
The belief that an industrial country has to concentrate its industries
is not, in my opinion, well-founded. That is only a stage in industrial
development. As we learn more about manufacturing and learn to make
articles with interchangeable parts, then those parts can be made under
the best possible conditions. And these best possible conditions, as far
as the employees are concerned, are also the best possible conditions
from the manufacturing standpoint. One could not put a great plant on a
little stream. One can put a small plant on a little stream, and the
combination of little plants, each making a single part, will make the
whole cheaper than a vast factory would. There are exceptions, as where
casting has to be done. In such case, as at River Rouge, we want to
combine the making of the metal and the casting of it and also we want
to use all of the waste power. This requires a large investment and a
considerable force of men in one place. But such combinations are the
exception rather than the rule, and there would not be enough of them
seriously to interfere with the process of breaking down the
concentration of industry.
Industry will decentralize. There is no city that would be rebuilt as it
is, were it destroyed--which fact is in itself a confession of our real
estimate of our cities. The city had a place to fill, a work to do.
Doubtless the country places would not have approximated their
livableness had it not been for the cities. By crowding together, men
have learned some secrets. They would never have learned them alone in
the country. Sanitation, lighting, social organization--all these are
products of men's experience in the city. But also every social ailment
from which we to-day suffer originated and centres in the big cities.
You will find the smaller communities living along in unison with the
seasons, having neither extreme poverty nor wealth--none of the violent
plagues of upheave and unrest which afflict our great populations. There
is something about a city of a million people which is untamed and
threatening. Thirty miles away, happy and contented villages read of the
ravings of the city! A great city is really a helpless mass. Everything
it uses is carried to it. Stop transport and the city stops. It lives
off the shelves of stores. The shelves produce nothing. The city cannot
feed, clothe, warm, or house itself. City conditions of work and living
are so artificial that instincts sometimes rebel against their
unnaturalness.
And finally, the overhead expense of living or doing business in the
great cities is becoming so large as to be unbearable. It places so
great a tax upon life that there is no surplus over to live on. The
politicians have found it easy to borrow money and they have borrowed to
the limit. Within the last decade the expense of running every city in
the country has tremendously increased. A good part of that expense is
for interest upon money borrowed; the money has gone either into
non-productive brick, stone, and mortar, or into necessities of city
life, such as water supplies and sewage systems at far above a
reasonable cost. The cost of maintaining these works, the cost of
keeping in order great masses of people and traffic is greater than the
advantages derived from community life. The modern city has been
prodigal, it is to-day bankrupt, and to-morrow it will cease to be.
The provision of a great amount of cheap and convenient power--not all
at once, but as it may be used--will do more than anything else to bring
about the balancing of life and the cutting of the waste which breeds
poverty. There is no single source of power. It may be that generating
electricity by a steam plant at the mine mouth will be the most
economical method for one community. Hydro-electric power may be best
for another community. But certainly in every community there ought to
be a central station to furnish cheap power--it ought to be held as
essential as a railway or a water supply. And we could have every great
source of power harnessed and working for the common good were it not
that the expense of obtaining capital stands in the way. I think that we
shall have to revise some of our notions about capital.
Capital that a business makes for itself, that is employed to expand the
workman's opportunity and increase his comfort and prosperity, and that