Social Reconstruction to-Day

SEPTEMBER, 1908

BY JOHN MARTIN

A RECONSTRUCTION of American society is proceeding apace. We are following the same policy with our social structure as with our city homes. Few city houses live to the bad old age usual in Europe. The initial construction is flimsier; changes of taste and of sanitary method are anticipated; long before the walls crumble the old front gives way to the newest fashion in façades, the plumbing is remodelled,and the decorations are modernized. So with our society: though it is new, the design of the founders is already undergoing alteration. Gradually the house is being rebuilt while the family remains in occupation.

Until recently the fundamental assumption of American life has been that every man had an equal opportunity with his fellows to achieve economic independence; that our society was built upon lines immutably just and wise, and that, by the expedient of leaving every man to look after himself, the best possible social result was obtained. It has been tacitly agreed that failure to make a living indicated some personal lack; or that, if social conditions were at all to blame, a fuller provision of schools and colleges would make all right. Therefore education and relief have almost monopolized legacies and gifts. Colleges, libraries, lectures; hospitals, dispensaries, relief funds, — on these have been lavished generous millions. When the would-be “pious founder” looked for the worthy cause on which to spend his benevolent impulses, public opinion and the political philosophy on which he was reared practically confined him to these fields.

The Sage foundation, by the terms of its establishment, marks conspicuously a change of sentiment; it indicates a growing conviction that, without destroying our social structure, it must be repaired and brought up to date. In her statement about the object of the fund, the “improvement of social and living conditions in the United States,” Mrs. Sage, advised by eminent men, points out that it is within the scope of the foundation “to investigate and study the causes of adverse social conditions, including ignorance, poverty, and vice, to suggest how these conditions can be remedied or ameliorated, and to put in operation any appropriate means to that end.” “Mrs. Sage wished some broad plan that would embrace public welfare rather than individual betterment,” says Mr. Robert de Forest, the able chairman of the trustees. The causes of ignorance, poverty, and vice are therefore assumed to be not entirely individual, but partly social; curable, therefore, not only by personal regeneration, but also by change of environment.

This is the most conspicuous among a number of indications that thoughtful and influential sections of our society see that alterations are needed in our national life; and of the unavowed, but none the less unequivocal, abandonment of the social philosophy of laissez faire, laissez aller.

The National Civic Federation, with a list of officers and committeemen that includes some of the most powerful and respected names in business and political life, is committed to attempt various readjustments which a few years ago these officers would have derided. Primarily, the Federation works for the settlement of disputes between employers and employees by pacific bargaining, a purpose which assumes the recognition of Trade Unions and their right to the help of expert counsel and representatives, and marks a far departure from the attitude once universal amongst employers. By calling representatives of the general public to its committees this Federation, the creation of Mr. Mark Hanna, a man who incarnated the American business spirit, declares that the business world is beginning also to admit that there is a third party to most trade disputes, a party whose interests can no longer be ignored, the hitherto disregarded public.

The welfare department of the Federation assumes further that an employer may owe to his workmen something more than the wages for which the man has agreed to work; that lunch-rooms, baths, clean and well-ventilated shops may legitimately come into the reckoning. The Federation’s Immigration department and Municipal Ownership commission show a recognition even wider, on the part of these typical publicists and business rulers, that perhaps there are gaping joints in our social armor. Had the federation leaders been dominated by the business creed of fifty years ago, they would have dismissed proposals to restrict or regulate immigration, or to investigate Municipal Ownership, with the saw, “That government is best that governs least.” Nowadays such theoretic dogmatizing has gone out of fashion. Investigation and discussion are undertaken on the hypothesis that only by deliberate organization can the best social result be secured.

Likewise repudiating the old maxims of state philosophy, shippers of freight demand that railroad charges shall be controlled by the community represented in legislatures and courts. Even financiers like Mr. Jacob Schiff, by requesting federal control of railroads as an alternative to State legislation, admit that the old ideal of free, untrammeled action by individuals and corporations has been abandoned, — an admission which Mr. Ingalls, ex-president of the Big Four railroad, in set terms urges his colleagues to make. Hardly anybody with authority ventures nowadays to argue, with the optimism of the Spencerian period, that the transportation business will best serve the community’s interests if it be left to go its own way.

In conformity with the changing idea of social responsibility, the National Association for the Prevention of Tuberculosis, composed of persons belonging to the classes which, twenty-five years ago, were convinced of the perfection of our social arrangements, is demanding further limitation of the liberty of the consumptive to do what he likes and to go where he pleases. A Public Health Defense League recently chartered, with two thousand charter members, — not cranks, but doctors, lawyers, and the like, — represents a determination to push much further the limitations of individual freedom whenever the public health seems to be involved. The drastic quarantine measures that were submitted to when yellow fever smote New Orleans, and the rigorous crusade which the stricken city waged against the pestilent mosquito, illustrate how completely the individual may be subordinated to the collective will in a period of danger.

With similar bias each year the freedom of the merchant to settle with the purchaser individually about the purity of his goods is being curtailed. Hardly were the Federal Pure Food Act and the Meat Inspection Act of 1906 signed by the President, before drafts of state laws in conformity with them were in preparation, — and not by faddists, but by groups of responsible people such as form the National Wholesale Grocers’ Association. For years Congress held stoutly to the old philosophy of non-interference, but now Congress finds few so mean as to do that philosophy reverence.

To-day the United States government is constructing twenty-five irrigation projects and spending a million dollars a month to reclaim three million acres of land, and not a voice of protest against this government activity in business enterprises disturbs the silence. Year by year the hours of labor, especially of women and children, are slowly being curtailed by legislation; last session the most drastic child-labor bill in the world, a measure which, besides keeping children under fourteen at school, establishes an eighthour day for children under sixteen, and forbids even their presence in a factory except between the hours of 8 A. M. and 5 P. M., passed the New York Legislature. Reluctantly, but surely, the courts have admitted the right of the state to provide regulations for the greater safety and comfort of factory and railroad employees, to limit the hours of labor of men in mines and on street railways, and to prescribe how employees shall in certain cases be paid.¹ The theory of noninterference, which served our fathers and harmonized with the political philosophy that had grown up with the country, has been bit by bit abandoned.

The most penetrating appeal for social reconstruction comes from the White House. In April, 1907, when a strike was imminent on the western railroads, which would have tied up forty-four lines with half a million employees and would have put half the country in a state of siege, President Roosevelt sent negotiators who demanded and secured a settlement, in the name of the community, by arbitration. When public coal-lands were dropping under unified control the President withdrew millions of acres from entry. He has insisted that the coal and oil under these lands shall remain a federal possession. He encourages a federal child-labor law, and the enforcement of the Eight-Hour Law by the government departments. He advocates inheritance and income taxes, not for raising money to run the government, but for the novel purpose of equalizing fortunes. He fulminates against the outcome of free enterprise in railroad management. In consultation with all sorts and conditions of men, he is framing a federal programme of reform which will occupy Congress several years. Each of its items will probably contradict the idea that free play is fair play, each will mock the patriarchs who hold to the teachings of the fathers.

These tendencies toward social change are the more remarkable in that they were equally pronounced in a period of prosperity, while business was in a fever of activity and every steady man could find a job. No temporary dissatisfaction with a passing condition do they indicate, but a deep-seated feeling, extending even to the powerful classes, that the ship of state needs overhauling.

Essentially the tendencies are not class movements. Therein lies their significance and their hope. They contradict the faith professed by the organized, hard-shell Socialists. According to the doctrines of these teachers, society tends to a clear-cut division into two hostile camps, the propertyless and the capitalist. Inevitable economic development makes the chasm between these classes day by day wider and deeper. Finally they will confront each other, savage and relentless, virtue and honesty with the overwhelming majority, wealth and wickedness monopolized by a handful of tyrants. The awakened army of the dispossessed, invincible when roused, will then fight its Armageddon, overthrow the economic oppressors, confiscate the wealth which these exploiters have amassed, and establish with meteoric swiftness a coöperative millennium. Administrative difficulties do not appal these fervid souls. They are confident that good intentions will solidify spontaneously into concrete achievements.

Plainly, the social reconstruction actually in process is based on no such conception. It is being planned and executed by men who repudiate the Socialism thus expounded.

If then Individualism is in practice rejected and doctrinaire Socialism is not adopted, upon what social philosophy are we proceeding ? We have left the old moorings, — whither are we steering ? Or are we merely drifting ? Is there no leading idea in the minds of the lawyers, business men, legislators, and philanthropists who are so busy altering the social structure ? If a house be remodeled without architect’s plans, each workman acting on his own notion of what is convenient and lovely, the resulting botchwork is a horror. Are we running the risk of a similar result with our social rebuilding?

Logical halting-places upon the road we are traveling are not visible. Each step leads inevitably to another. Voluntary arbitration of some labor disputes upon pressure from the White House, leads easily to compulsory arbitration of all labor disputes under the law; a small inheritance and income tax, gently graduated, suggests the desirability of a bigger tax more steeply graduated; government regulation of railroad rates, involving the control of private property, proceeds smoothly to government ownership of railroads with full responsibility for the property. When coal-lands are withheld from settlement, and the ownership of the fuel under them is retained by the government, the first step is taken toward public operation of the mines and oil-wells so retained. If the nation constructs, owns,and leases irrigation works, why should it not a little later proceed to the ownership and leasing of the lands which the irrigation has redeemed from the desert ?

If the State of New York can spend $101,000,000 for the enlargement of the Erie Canal, upon the demand chiefly of the merchants of Buffalo and New York City, upon what principle can it decline to start schemes of harbor improvement, afforestation, and the like, in times of depression, for the aid of the unemployed ? Since freight is carried on this canal free of toll-rates, why may not passengers be carried in city street-cars on the same easy terms ? Eight hours having been made the legal working day for some men and some occupations, what irrefutable argument remains to prevent the legal eight-hour day for all men in all occupations ? If good employers can be persuaded by benevolent federations and public opinion to spend freely on the comfort of their workmen, cannot the bad employers be brought into line by the irresistible force of a statute? Since the reduction by state law of $50,000 salaries paid by insurance companies is held by the Supreme Court of the United States to be constitutional, and is declared by state legislatures to be proper protection of the interests of the policy-holders, would not legal reduction of the $100,000 salary paid by the Steel Trust be proper protection of the interests of the stockholders ? Since Federal and State governments conduct experiment stations and distribute seeds, literature, and personal services for the special benefit of farmers, why may they not conduct experiments with coöperative workshops for the special benefit of wage-earners ? Should the administrators of the Sage Fund prove that some of the causes of poverty and vice are social, why should not the tax-fund, the most social of all funds, be requisitioned for their removal ? If freight rates are reviewed by courts for the protection of merchants, why may not tenement rents be reviewed by courts for the protection of workmen? An Employers’ Liability Act, by establishing the right of the community to compel some employers to pay compensation for some accidents, smooths the path for a copy of the English Workmen’s Compensation Act, that assures to all workmen compensation for all accidents. Already free schools have led, in New York and other cities, to free medical attendance and free nursing for the children, while free eye-glasses and free dental care are now recommended by some authorities. Finally (not to make the list tediously long), since excellent consular reports are issued to aid manufacturers to secure trade, why should not special agents prepare and issue labor gazettes to aid immigrants and workmen to secure jobs ?

Most of the social experiments to which I have referred are conducted without reference to general principles. Particular evils are attacked by particular remedies, and broad tendencies are ignored. Perhaps there would be more alarm were some of the acts correctly named. The vast outlay of state money on the Erie Canal and the free use of the canal by everybody is rank communism; but the merchants of the cities at its termini are not dismayed. Communistic also is the vast work of the numerous agricultural departments, which includes keeping a federal stud of horses to improve the breed, making world-wide explorations for new varieties of fruit, plants, and seeds, and the free distribution of advice, of specimens, and of expert help. The taxpayer foots the bill. Communism of this kind is fast spreading and no apprehension is shown. So long as the acts are not labeled, they do not affright us. From one point of view, this neglect of generalities may be pardoned. It may be claimed that the scientific method is to consider each case on its merits, and to judge whether the public benefit outweighs the cost. But in natural science the results of a number of experiments are finally formulated under one law which aids in forecasting the results of further experiments, and so in social and political science the guiding rule may profitably be sought.

Some suggestions of a unifying principle are made. “The square deal” is the phrase most often sent through the presidential megaphone. But what is the square deal ? A crude conception of social justice. And who shall define social justice ? Does it require that the government shall forbid stock-watering by railroad magnates in order to protect stockholders, while investors in industrial stocks are left unguarded ? Does it demand that one-half of a man’s property shall pass to the state at his death, as Mr. Andrew Carnegie advocates, or only the trifling percentage now exacted ? Does it require complete freedom for the sale of crops, but strict limitations on the sale of bonds ? Will it condemn the misbranding of canned goods, and condone the misbranding of woollen and leather goods ? Will it, by reducing rates, appropriate all the unearned increment of railroads, and allow the annual increment of $400,000,000 in New York City land-values to go untaxed? Will it compel coal-owners to pay wage-scales demanded by the miners’ unions, allow operators to raise prices, and leave the unorganized workman and the helpless consumer to foot the bloated bill ? Does it enforce the use of public money in combatting tuberculosis, and forbid its use in feeding under-nourished children? As a catchword to bolster a particular legislative proposal, “the square deal” is effective; as a basis for wide social readjustments, it is too indefinite and variable.

There is one principle characteristic of modern life, and especially of American life, discernible in most of the readjustment that is going forward, — the principle of organization. Settlement of labor disputes by arbitration, regulation of immigration, national health campaigns, semi-judicial control of railroad rates — all conform with the aim of civilization to substitute order for discord, to get the maximum result with the minimum of effort, by arranging to best advantage the application of the effort. Industry and commerce are elaborately organized to prevent waste; society is feeling towards a better organization of the social relations for the same end. When employers and workmen, shippers and railroads and competing corporations fight it out between themselves, there is loss to the community and much friction. It is being dimly discerned that, in proportion as intelligence can be substituted for the brute power of muscles and dollars in the settlement of competing claims, the social structure will be stronger. If a labor dispute is determined by argument before a few men in a court-room, the cost is trifling compared with the cost of a trial of strength between the combined employers and the labor unions, especially when accompanied with street fights, wounds, and murder. When a federal department puts the results of a worldwide investigation at the free disposal of all the citizens, the disorder and waste of the multiplication of such investigations by individuals and corporations is avoided. If each consumptive patient be left to struggle with the deadly bacillus alone, the total cost to society is far greater than when the forces against the terrible little enemy are organized over the country. If millionaires or municipalities invest in large housing schemes, superseding the petty speculative builders who have neither brains nor capital to make the best of the possibilities, rents can be reduced and adequate profits earned, while the community gains from the substitution of harmonious blocks of buildings for conglomerate masses of discordant structures.

This principle of order and organization is likely to produce further wide changes. It may sanction the organization of all workmen into unions or guilds, and the corresponding association of employers, as it has done in New Zealand, in order that it. may substitute for the strike and the lock-out and the irregular intervention of outsiders in the settlement of trade conflicts a legalized system of conciliation and arbitration. It may insist that the teaching of trades shall be systematized, in order that every citizen may acquire skill at some occupation, estimates being made of the number of recruits annually required by each trade, and that number being trained. Thus justice could be done to the wage-earners, whose wages would not be threatened by an over-supply of workmen, and industry would not be checked by a dearth of skill.

A deliberate organization of society will require that the net inflow of hundreds of thousands of immigrants who come annually to this western El Dorado shall be directed to the parts of the country needing them, and not be dumped down in cities already crowded. It will decline to leave to the importunities and necessities of steamship agents the determination of the number of foreigners who will claim our welcome. It will urge us to calculate how many fresh people we can absorb, and that number alone will it permit to enter.

Possibly the greatest task of organization awaiting solution is the adjustment of the quantity of manufactured articles to the requirements. For lack of organization, busy periods with active demand, good prices, and plentiful employment, are succeeded by over-production, glutted warehouses, dropping prices, shutdowns, and unemployment. When prices are good, new mines are sunk, new mills and factories erected, and fresh machinery installed. No attempt is made to calculate the natural requirements of each trade; all is run hap-hazard. A little order is being introduced by the Steel Trust and other enormous combinations, and by the labor organizations. The former, by refusing to put up prices to the top notch, discourage the building of new mills; the latter, by insisting on higher wages in brisk times, increase the cost, and temporarily reduce the demand, thus distributing the demand over a longer period.

Bound up with this problem is another challenge to organization — the cure for unemployment. Figures are regularly published after a great strike or lock-out to show the amazing sums lost to both sides through the stoppage. What colossal sums are similarly lost during hard times, when hundreds of factory boilers are cold and tens of thousands of workmen fruitlessly seek employment! To the able organizers of industrial combinations, the waste of duplicate plants, of antiquated factories running on part time, and of superfluous commercial staffs, are all abhorrent. But these organizers seem not to realize the stupendous wastes of unemployment. The statesman is yet to come who will make the nation conscious of the unparalleled loss involved when Coxie armies are recruited, and who will then enlist the ablest citizens in organizing to ensure steadiness in industry and employment. Collectively, we are convicted of stupidity until that organization is perfected. It is an indictment of our ability to control our affairs when double shifts one year are followed by shut-downs the next year, when feverish haste to fill orders is succeeded by anxious eagerness to secure orders, and when the crowds who come to our shores attracted by the smiles of prosperity are cast adrift as hoboes in adversity. Organization is part of the American accepted creed, and the nation will need to go great lengths in the practice of that creed before the social machinery is running smoothly.

A further principle besides organization, a principle equally important for the future, is discernible in the reconstruction that is going forward. When Mr. Rockefeller gives $32,000,000 at one time for the improvement of education, when Mr. Andrew Carnegie light-heartedly tosses ten millions to college faculties, and when lesser gifts, involving as great sacrifice and good-will on the donors’ part, are reported almost daily, it is clear that, either with full consciousness or without clear formulation, a potent ideal is working in our society. Crœsus is privileged to express by golden gifts the hope which many vaguely feel. What is that hope ? What are its characteristics ?

First, it has no definite religious basis. In olden days the rich man’s gifts and legacies, meant as an entrance fee to Paradise, were put in charge of the church. The priest was the trustee, and seats of learning were adjuncts to religion. But most American gifts have no religious flavor; their aims and administration are secular. Though Mr. Rockefeller is a devout Baptist, and a Baptist is president of Chicago University, the work of the university is hardly touched by the creed of its founder and its head. Mr. Carnegie excludes denominational colleges from the benefits of his pension fund for professors, and the libraries he establishes contain of course few works on theology. Even hospitals and the like, which are given a denominational name, are terribly secular in the operating-rooms and the sick-wards; while the charity-organization societies throughout the country, which are more and more attacking causes of want, invite to membership saints and sinners indiscriminately. Hope of heaven, fear of hell, desire to save the individual soul, are not the motives that direct the modern reconstruction.

Second, the actuating impulse is national in scope; local and state boundaries are neglected by the new builders. The work of the General Education Board, the Southern Education Board, the Carnegie Foundations, the Sage Foundation, the National Child-Labor Committee, the Anti-Tuberculosis Committee, and the rest, show a strengthening consciousness of national life and destiny. Philanthropists and statesmen think in continents. Workmen also become yearly more aware of the unity of the land. Through the American Federation of Labor, and in their international trade unions, the organized laborers are proving an ability to act together over areas thousands of miles apart, and to comprehend how local interests may be transcended by national interests.

Third, the spirit moving in the land believes that individuals can be improved. It is not bound by a despairing conviction that human nature is immutable. Education is almost a fetich in America, and especially with the reconstructors. To education they devote their chief enthusiasm and their most lavish gifts; in the power of a university training to improve the quality of young men and maidens they place unquestioning trust. All their social activities assume that men and conditions are improvable, that the last step of progress has not been taken, nor the last word of hope spoken. So fervent is the faith that American life can elevate those who share it, that semisavage immigrants by the thousand are received into the national home with hardly a doubt of our capacity to civilize them. A fatalistic trust that no human material can resist the chastening and refining influence of American institutions is universal in America.

All the tendencies I have indicated may be summed up: “American leaders are bent upon evolving a higher civilization.” A very eminent American statesman, in discussing with Mr. H. G. Wells the gloomy forecast in his early book, The Time Machine, expressed a fear that perhaps all our struggle for improvement would but end in the development of the two hostile classes pictured in the book: one stunted, brutal, subterranean, the other cruel, luxurious, and inhuman, living on the slave labors of the former. “Perhaps it may come to that,” he exclaimed, “but anyhow the fight is worth while.” Few, however, would find the intoxication of battle sufficient reward, were defeat the likely outcome. A nobler prospect is heartening the fighters.

Slowly and semi-consciously American teachers and practical guides are putting themselves in harmony with the trend that runs through all creation. The evolutionary theory is ingrained in our minds and is taking effect. Man, we know, has been developed from most humble beginnings. His descent can be traced through anthropoid apes, earlier mammals, saurian reptiles, fishes, and plants, back, back to the protoplasmic cell. Through incalculable stretches of time Nature has operated, patiently evolving one type after another. Sometimes a branch of the living tree stopped growing, but always some other branch remained vigorous, and the upward tendency continued. At last, primitive man emerged, a rude creature hardly higher than a brute; but step by step his powers and tastes, his customs and social institutions improved, until civilization and men of genius graced the earth. From the naked savage to Shakespeare and Washington mankind traveled a painful, precipitous road. Acting generally without deliberate purpose to advance, driven like the beasts of the field by Nature’s whips, body and sex-hunger, men were unaware of the destination toward which they moved. But the nineteenth century revealed the scheme of the universe to be the persistent development of higher types of life. To that end, mankind can now coöperate with the forces behind the universe. No longer need progress be haphazard. Favoring conditions purposely established will stimulate the appearance of nobler types. Future civilization may become as much superior to ours as ours is superior to the Kaffir’s; the average citizen as much superior to us as we are superior to the Esquimaux.

America has special advantages over European nations for the establishment of such a civilization. Most easily of all lands, she can secure to her citizens assured subsistence for reasonable exertion and leave surplus energies free for higher activities. She can take the essential step of the elimination of poverty, the freeing of a great, population for the first time in history from the possibility of want. Toward that goal we are moving by the organization of our resources. Already the problem of production is well nigh solved. Enough is grown on America’s broad prairies and manufactured in her mills and factories fully to feed and clothe her eighty millions. But the problem of distribution remains a puzzle. A huge task of organization challenges statesmen and patriots, the task of arranging our system of industrial rewards so that to every person willing to work a sufficient livelihood from birth to death shall be guaranteed. The Sage Foundation for the investigation of the causes of poverty is a sign that the challenge to the task will be accepted.

A second advantage which America, enjoys in setting out towards a higher civilization is the absence, as yet, of a class idle, luxurious, parasitic by tradition. Fewer families than in European countries consist of rich drones, born to affluent ease, disdainful of effort. Our strongest men are active by preference, our social life is still organized on the assumption that work is the noblest lot for man or woman. Therefore we may enlist for the crusade the strongest minds and stoutest hearts. Already the army is forming. Every member of his cabinet, says President Roosevelt, holds his position at financial sacrifice, for each member patriotism and love of honor are stronger than the magnetism of the dollar. Two of our richest men have exchanged telegrams of congratulation upon their success in disposing of their surplus wealth and have agreed that their pleasure in rearing Aladdin palaces for public use is marred by no pang at parting with “the scraps of paper” they cost. From that attitude there are but few steps to the voluntary renunciation of opportunities for gathering the millions, when it is shown that the community will profit more by restraint in the getting than it will profit by liberality in the disbursing.

The men and the women who aim at a social betterment in both the getting and the spending of fortunes are the advanceguard of the soldiers of the coming change. Behind them, uncommitted to any wide-reaching theory, but patriotic and zealous for an improved society, there are marching philanthropists, doctors, lawyers, business men, and legislators, people of distinction, followed by the swelling army of privates who are ready sturdily to walk along the road to the land of promise, the millions on whose backs the burden of our civilization rests, and for whose children the better order will be the greatest boon.