The Iron Man

OCTOBER, 1921

BY ARTHUR POUND

I

A YEAR ago I sat in a meeting of schoolmen and leading citizens who were wrestling with plans for a new high school and technical college. The leading citizens were manufacturers of motor-cars, because our town’s reason for existence is the production of such cars, of which we can be relied upon to deliver upwards of one hundred thousand a year, when the public buys them fast enough to clear the loading-docks. Our leading citizens, consequently, are leaders in their industry as well. For downright public spirit, no more satisfactory group of employers can be found anywhere. They took it for granted that our new high school and technical college was to be keyed to utility. They wanted practical education, or, as one phrased it, ‘education for life.’ As their programme unfolded, it seemed that their goal was rather education for production. They may have seen new light since the wheels slowed down, but neither then, nor later, did the school-men offer any protest. As an outsider, a member of neither group, I sat there, dazed, silent, a little dashed and fearful, as one amid new ruins. I knew there was something wrong with the programme of these manufacturers; but what it was I could not say. Now I know, because I have been studying the reactions of automatic machinery upon social relationships.

There is no better place for such a study than this town of ours. It exists for, and accepts the dictation of, industry highly automatized. In brisk times more than twenty thousand men and women work for three corporations, whose plants are full of automatic machinery. When these marvelous tools are busy, the town is prosperous, gains population, spends lavishly, yet saves much withal; when the tools are stilled, the town loses population, develops poverty, and lives on its savings.

In 1900 this was a quiet little manufacturing city of 13,000. In 1904 it produced its first motor-car, and growth from this time was rapid and sustained, draining away the surplus labor of nearby farms and villages. The 1920 census showed 38,550. In the next ten years, the city achieved a population of nearly 100,000, acquiring, among other interesting phenomena, a Little Poland, a Little Hungary, a Little Serbia, other immigrant colonies, and a Cosmopolitan Club financed by the Chamber of Commerce. We built a Polish church and school, two Russian churches, a Czech church, and presently we shall have a Jewish synagogue. During the war we imported camps of negroes direct from the Black Belt. All these non-natives, about 75,000 in the twenty years, came either to tend automatic machines, to supply the economic and domestic wants of the operatives, or to coöperate in a scheme of production in which the automatic tool was the decisive factor.

Of course, this growth induced the usual and to-be-expected rise in rents and land-values. We built houses as fast as we could find the money; but in spite of enormous profits to constructors and investors, we could not provide housing fast enough to satisfy the industrial leaders. In 1919-20 the corporation controlling our two largest plants built thousands of homes. As a strike ensued, the builders fell back upon the principle which had profited them in automobile manufacture, substituting for skilled labor machinery and unskilled labor.

In 1920, production on automatic machines here and elsewhere having outrun consumption, the wheels slowed down to a fraction of their former speed. Immediately our town began to lose population; thus proving that, with cities as with plants, quick growth means weak roots. Coincidentally rural districts began to gain. While we were losing 15,000 out of our 100,000, a village eighteen miles away added twenty per cent to its 1920 census of 400. Money brought these people into town, and, jobs failing, lack of money took them out again into the fields, woods, and villages. Michigan woods were full, last winter, of men who, a year ago, were tending automatic machines. What back-to-the-land propaganda failed to do in twenty years, economic necessity accomplished in six months.

Of all the states, Michigan shows the greatest percentage of urban growth from 1910 to 1920; also the greatest growth in the use of automatic tools. This is because ours is the automobile state. The automobile, as an economic want, burst into being rather than grew. It was a new means of transportation, not the development of an older means. Its makers faced the markets with open minds and almost empty hands. They had no well-established shop-practice to consider, little or no machinery to junk. Their margins were large enough to ensure that whatever increased production would return profits. Moreover, the nature of the business required large outputs of identical parts, accurately machined, standardized and interchangeable. Hence the automobile industry is to-day the most highly automatized. Hence the reactions of automatic machinery upon human nature and the social order may be observed here in all their vigor.

Those machines which tend to replace the worker or reduce his function to a minimum are described as automatic. They are so designed that the worker need not know the vital steps which the mechanism takes in producing the desired result. The dividing line between these tools and those that merely lengthen or strengthen the arm of man is nowhere definite and precise, but examples will help to point the distinction.

With the power wool-clipper, as with the sheep-shears, the mind of the operator must work with his muscle, to extract from use the increased efficiency of the tool. But with an automatic tool, the attendant is required only to feed the machine and relieve it of its produce from time to time. There are a good many semi-automatic machines; but the tendency is toward their complete automatization. Each year sees semi-automatic machines develop toward automatic perfection; each month sees the scope for skill in industry lessened, particularly in those basic industries which concentrate large numbers of workers in given centres, and so exercise a determining influence upon social relations.

Skill, of course, is still vital; but the need for skill has passed upward. Machine-design, shop-organization, routing of materials, and distribution of produce — these require a concentration of skill and technical knowledge far beyond the similar requirements of non-automatic industry. The rank and file need use only a fraction of their native intelligence and manual dexterity, while the skill-requirement, which formerly spread more or less over the whole shop, is distilled into a relatively small group of engineers and executives.

This shift of vital function from the man to the machine is the key to many problems. It affects all departments of life. We have seen how it broke down the barrier of apprenticeship which had sealed factories more or less against rural labor and brought raw farm-boys into town, leveling farm and factory wages, lifting food prices. We have seen the power of the Iron Man to pull the negro north and the peasants of Europe west. And we have seen something, but not all as yet, of his influence in shifting women from the home to the mill. The clear, unmistakable tendency of automatic machinery is to level labor, as to both supply and wage.

Certain collateral effects are equally impressive. Many automatic machines can be operated as well by a child of twelve as by his parents. In fact, the tender of automatic machines reaches his or her highest economic power early in life, when nerves are steadiest. The strain involved in nursing automatic machinery is a repetition-strain, complicated by clatter. The operative does the same thing over and over, amid rhythmic sounds, in an atmosphere frequently stale with oil or dust. Youth stands this better than age, because youth reacts more quickly. Whereas, in the old days, a man used to come more slowly into earning power, reach his highest pay at thirty-odd, and continue fully competent until age began to slow him down at sixty-odd, his son leaps into high pay as a hobbledehoy, reaches his economic apogee short of twentyfive, and from thirty-five to forty-five slides swiftly downhill. He is a better earner at twenty than his father was; but the chances are that he will be a poorer provider at fifty.

I prefer not to be too dogmatic on this point. Automatic machinery is so new, having been in common use about twenty years and still being in its infancy, that present deductions on economic life-expectancy are founded upon too few instances to be altogether conclusive. Moreover, the swift decline of earning power in middle life may be partly due to causes only indirectly related to industry — poor housing, youthful excesses, and the like. However, present indications point to the correctness of the cycle outlined above.

Now the difficulties of the problem presented to educators by automatic machinery begin to emerge. The majority of youths, male and female, no longer need to be taught how to earn their living. Three days after the law that sets limits on child-labor leaves them free to work at the machines, they will be earning big money — practically as much as they ever will earn. There is little to learn; the mills can teach that better and cheaper than the schools. The labor turn-over cost, per man ranges from $25 to $100; this includes the pay of the novice and his instructor, investment, depreciation, and overhead. Since it includes the non-automatic and semi-automatic processes, the cost of training men to serve the automatics must be considerably less than the average, and will decrease as automatization becomes more intense. The instruction period on automatics varies from half-a-day to a week; it is estimated that seventy per cent of the workers in an automatized plant can be brought to efficient production in three days or less. The schools can never match this record; in addition, the cost to the schools of the equipment for the effort is prohibited.

The pockets of these children are full of money at an age when their fathers earned less than a living wage as apprentices. They are economically independent of home and social control. They have the eternal belief of youth that the preceding generation is fossilized, and the buying power to act upon their belief. They are foot-loose to go wherever automatic machines are turning. They can buy their pleasures, and they do. They can afford to flout age and authority; they do. Their very active minds have no background, and feel the need of none. They have no conception of the cost of civilization; no standard of reference by which to judge social and political questions. They have not even lived long enough to learn the simple truth that, common sense and wisdom spring from the same root. With far greater need for early thrift than their elders, because their effective economic life may be shorter, they spurn the homely virtue of economy. They buy pleasures, buy companions, buy glad raiment; they try—desperately—to buy happiness. And fail. Yet they are splendid raw material for citizens. Let a great cause kindle them, and they rise to it like knights and ladies — noblesse oblige. They met every war-need more than half-way; fought and fell; sacrificed and saved — during the emergency. Their faults are those of youth plus affluence.

Here is the explanation of our youthful delinquency. Our ‘bad men’ of this winter are mostly minors. ‘My court,’ said a Detroit judge, ‘is the scene of a procession of beardless boys.’ They acquire appetites — expensive appetites; pleasure leads into bad company. A prank gone wrong, an unfortunate slip, a month without a job and nothing laid by — and we have the beginning of what we call the crime wave.

II

Much as this situation complicates the educational problem, the school-system somehow must be adapted to it. Somehow these children must be brought up to a mental and moral level approximating the economic level upon which they set foot immediately after leaving school. This is a grim task. In the public schools, certain things must be taught before the age of sixteen, which now are taught only in college, and to which many college students appear to be immune. The proposal itself would be revolutionary if it did not arise from a new set of industrial conditions, to which society is accommodating itself clumsily, but, in the main, peaceably. As such, the change, though startling, is clearly evolutionary — and inevitable.

What are the positive educational requirements of the machine age? To clear the ground, let us eliminate the non-essentials. The child who is going to tend an automatic machine does not need, in any economic sense, to read more than a shop-poster or directionsheet. If he can sign his name to a pay check, that is enough. If he is willing to trust the shop to figure out his pay, he need not know his numbers. For the time he stands beside the machine, his earning capacity is not increased by anything he knows. Knowledge may be useful in getting him away from the machine; but that escape is going to be more difficult as automatization proceeds toward its logical conclusion. Such knowledge as the operative conies by in school possesses for him only a cultural value. It floes not help him in the least to earn his living; but it helps him immensely to spend his leisure.

For these children — these prosperous, precocious children — possess leisure, and the means to make the worst of it. They work, most of them at least, no more than eight hours a day. Presently it may be seven, even six. As production becomes more and more automatic, the wants of men can be supplied with less and less labor. Consumption, of course, may expand enormously; yet the demand for goods remains in stiff competition with the universal demand for leisure. ‘I’ve got enough; let’s go fishing,’ was a state of mind so common in 1919 that it disturbed factory schedules, roused employers, and set tongues wagging about labor-profiteering.

Employers may light the tendency toward the shorter working day, but theirs is a losing fight. Of late, in our town, we have gone along producing on a five-hour schedule all of our kind of automobiles which the restricted market would absorb. In so doing, we have discovered that with picked men, heightened morale, and with a closer synchronizing of all the elements involved, production per man can be greatly increased. If the present highly effective organizations are slowly enlarged, thus preserving their efficiency, it is difficult to see how the market, under normal conditions, can absorb more than eight hours’ produce from day to day.

If this seems to contradict previous observations on the elimination of the personal element through machine use, please note that the improvement is due largely, if not altogether, to the work done by the engineers and executives in more efficiently routing materials to the machines. Under boom conditions, the stream of supply was often interrupted, thus throwing the machines out of production. This has been largely corrected; also, in the meantime, the machines have been tuned up, and new ones added in some cases. The attendant of the automatic machine remains just where he was; but the machine has the chance to do more and better work. Of course, even in a highly automatized plant, there remain a good many jobs that require either no machinery or semi-automatic machines; and in such cases the recent weeding out of the ineffectives does produce beneficial results. If the market will not absorb the products of the longer working day, on the present more efficient per-man per-hour basis, then it seems apparent that, viewing the country as a whole, industry will have to adjust itself to eight hours or fewer, probably fewer. The nation’s supply of automatic tools is not going to be decreased simply to lengthen the working day; on the contrary, competition continually forces more and more of such tools into operation.

A shorter working day manifestly means greater leisure for the masses. Now it is everlastingly true that the bulk of human mischief is done in spare time. There is precious little chance for original sin, or any other kind of sin, to work itself out under the strict regimen of a modern factory. While human beings are at work, they are, perforce, reasonably decent: the employer sees to it that the time he buys is not wasted; but no one exercises an equal degree of control and supervision over a man’s unbought time, — his leisure, — unless it is the man himself.

In a town dominated by automatic machinery, therefore, the educational problem is to train youth for the right use of leisure. Why waste time teaching city children how to work, when their chief need is to know how to live?

Precisely here is the point of my argument. Education for leisure, under the conditions of automatic production, is education for life. The attendant of automatic tools does not live while he is on the job; he exists, against the time when he can begin to live, which is when he leaves the shop. His task does not call for a fraction of his full powers as a sentient being, or monopolize his interest. If he could buy the same amount of well-financed leisure as easily in any other way, he would shift jobs to-morrow. It is impossible for him to grow mentally through his work. So he comes to his post as a slave to the galley, and leaves it with the gladness of a convict escaping prison. Psychologists say that a large part of industrial arrest is due to the inhibition which automatic tools place upon the expression of personality through labor. Be that as it may, the fact is that the hours given to tending automatic machines are given to buy leisure; and in that leisure the operative lives. He lives in his sports, at the movies, at the prize-fights, at the blind pig, as well as at the theatre, the lecture, the library, the park, and on the front porch of his inamorata.

In general, it has ever been true that leisure is the cream of life. We have tried desperately to build up an immunity to leisure, with our dull gospel of work for work’s sake. There is a glory in creative work; but even that becomes pain and weariness if we are kept too long at it. All labor produces, sooner or later, weariness and pain, nature’s signal to quit and go a-playing. When does that most stolid of men, the peasant, live most fully — when he plods the endless furrow, or when, at evening, he sings his songs, dances, prays, and courts his maiden? When did the skilled mechanic of another day feel his manhood soar highest above clod and worm — when he was chasing a screw with a cold chisel, or when he was taking the air in his garden, or, perchance, hobnobbing with his mates in the corner saloon? Is the tireless business man better company when he is chasing a golf-ball, or when he is chasing a profit? Is the banker best satisfied with himself when he is figuring interest, or when he is hip-deep in the stream, figuring trout? I think that the men of the best sort reach their farthest north in life, not in the hours they pay for life, but in the hours they spend in living. Certain am I that none but an imbecile could find delight in sharing the dailytoil of the urban masses, so mechanized has it become. Consequently, education for leisure is precisely education for life. And education for life comes squarely down to education for culture.

To apply the early Victorian ideal of education to a machine age, to call upon Matthew Arnold to prescribe for a flurried and worried democracy, may seem absurd. But that is what the situation needs; and the necessary is never absurd. That cultural ideal was to fit. for leisure those who had leisure — a small minority. With certain reservations in the interests of truth, it may be said to have produced a few first-rate minds and a very considerable number of gentlemen and gentlewomen. Now, because leisure has broadened out to include the majority, we must cultivate gentlemen and gentlewomen en masse. What was once a privilege for an arrogant aristocracy has become a necessity for an arrogant democracy. Unless our American gentlemen and gentlewomen appear in due time and in sufficient numbers, civilization will be wrecked by machine-made barbarians, unable — though their machines compass the globe — to replace what they have destroyed.

III

What is the first requirement for the right use of leisure? Self-restraint. Leisure is liberty from an exacting, definite control — that of the boss. In leisure a man is subject only to the state. When the worker leaves the shop, he passes from a positive control to a negative control. Inside, he is required to do certain things; failure to do them results in sure discovery. Outside, he is required not to do certain things, although, if he does them, no penalty may follow. Thus we see that it is immensely more difficult to train human beings for life and leisure than for toil, and that, in America, only odd and unusual persons get very much out of leisure. About all that a retired business man feels equal to is golf and musical comedy. The workers offer more encouragement — Brashear and Henry George showed what laboring men could do in spare time.

Need for self-restraint increases in direct proportion to affluence. I am sure that eight dollars a day at eighteen — and some of our lads earn much more than that — would have corrupted me beyond repair. The wonder is, not that some of these highly paid striplings go wrong, but that all do not do so, considering the opportunity offered them by their cynical and predacious predecessors. More even than wild oats, I am sure that eight dollars a day at eighteen would have insulated me against right relationship with the world of ideas and ideals, past, present, and future, by blasting nascent inquiry and speculation. The establishing of this relationship in youth is, I take it, the end of all true and worth-while education, involving, as it does, the subjugating of the assertive, unbaked Ego to the social well-being, as manifested in the legal, moral, and ethical codes prevalent in one’s environment and enforced, more or less, by the power with which common consent invests political institutions. Respect for authority, even that qualified assent involved in the pragmatic view of established institutions, has extreme difficulty in getting a roothold in a generation whose youth is economically self-sufficient.

It follows that knowledge, as the chief restraining influence in the youthful mind, is the substitute that education must establish in place of the set of controls which formerly resulted from the young man’s poverty or fear of poverty. Remembering that the rising generation reaches its highest economic utility early in life, and that it soon, relatively speaking, reaches the economic status of old age, I think we must agree that, unless youth is taught thrift, pauperism will lengthen and strengthen from this point in time. A grievous outlook, to be forestalled at any cost.

There is need, therefore, to drill thrift into children; let the experts busy themselves on methods. The whole field of economics must be opened earlier and charted more simply. Is it not odd, in a nation that bows down to economic fact, to find the teaching of that economic theory almost wholly a college monopoly? It ought to be possible to begin the teaching of economics in the kindergarten, and to bring the pupil along so that, before he becomes a part of the economic machine which supplies human wants, he may understand at least its delicate nature. Suppose a child of five were set moving a given number of blocks from this space to that by hand — an hour’s work. Then suppose the child were given a basket to ease the job — time, ten minutes. Then suppose, further, that an intelligent teacher explained that the basket was capital, the result of previous thrift, of labor in past time. That lesson would stick. Somehow to get this, and other fundamentals, into the mind when it is plastic, is the supreme educational task of the future.

So with the idea of law. My children know, among other surprising things, the chief products of every state in the Union; but they have no conception of the legal system which enforces equity and fair play in the exchange of those products. It seems the simplest thing in the world to teach them that laws exist to protect the weak from the strong, the just from the unjust, the person of good intent from the swindler. Once they had mastered that idea, they might see the policeman as a friend rather than as an enemy, and our economic-juridical system as something to be protected instead of destroyed. A generation so reared might insist upon the law doing its primal duty; but it would be evolutionary, not revolutionary, in its demands.

But self-restraint is not, of course, all that a man needs in order to make something out of leisure. A man may be ever so self-restrained, and yet be desperately bored at the prospect of spending an hour in his own company. Self-restraint, is merely the brake upon the ego-motor; it will keep the individual from running amok in society, but it will not start anything. Its virtue is negative. What the ego-motor needs in leisure is fuel, something upon which it can travel, progress, journey into new realms of thought. The best fuel for the purpose is compounded of interest in the present, understanding of the past, and sympathy with the future. History, literature, science, art, music — all these give to life meaning, and to leisure, inspiration; a reasonable concern in all that man has done, is doing, or is about to do upon this planet; with such equipment any fool could use leisure aright. To sow that seed is the first, duty of educators, now as always, now more than ever.

So much for the background. But backgrounds are always hazy; let us concentrate. Since work is coming to be no longer a primary interest for the child of the masses in civilized lands, it is incumbent upon us to provide, in so far as they can be provided, other primary interests through which the individual can justify his existence; interests which, rising out of and sustained by his background, shall flourish like the green bay tree all the days of his life. Every man, whether he works a turret-lathe or a comptometer, needs a hobby to busy himself with in this age of growing leisure. We hear less of vocational training than we did — for good reason, since its utility is passing. Presently we shall hear more of a vocational training, which shall give every youth destined for the mill or office a hobby for the centre of his garden of leisure.

In a machine age the applied sciences are paramount. Let them remain so. There are important posts on the peaks of industry which must be filled. Let us see to it that every mind fit to join the directorate of industry gets its educational opportunity. Machinery is undeniably one of the prime intellectual interests of the American masses; in leisure an informed generation would continue inventing, perhaps invent faster than ever. Therefore let us give youth all it can stomach of the sciences, deepened and broadened to the uttermost. But by no means should we submit to the specialist’s obsession, that, with the key to universal knowledge in his hand, he travels down a walled alley, shut off from the humanities, from philosophy, from religion, from life.

I am not competent to provide the synthesis for this analysis, to describe the educational reforms which are necessary, and which I am sure are on the way. That is a task for many and mature minds. But certain key-points emerge out of the haze. We must I think insist upon ten years’ schooling for every child, as an irreducible minimum, before plunging into the whirl of automatic production. There should be four school-terms instead of two, with a brief holiday between; the long summer vacation is an anachronism in a factory town. So also is the Saturday holiday — six days a week in school henceforth. There is so much to be taught, and there are so few years to teach it in, that youth must hurry. At the same time, school should be so much more interesting that the charge of drudgery could not hold. Then, too, there must be more teachers and smaller classes; better equipment; more money spent all round. Finally, there should be a complete system of continuation schools, wherein those who desire to use their labor-bought leisure by securing further instruction could be accommodated on their own time. All graduates presumably will have been so far inoculated with the intellectual virus that they will go on improving their minds at leisure, to some extent, thus demonstrating on a wide scale that education is not a matter of youth, but of life. With such a start, the many will read, discuss, and enjoy the noblest works of man. And some among them, have no fear, will create as well as recreate.

But the programme, after all, may be left safely to the specialists, now that the problem is stated for their attention. They may have been a bit tardy in seeing how the Iron Man is frustrating their efforts, and why; but that is because they have been concentrating upon an even more wonderful mechanism — the human mind. Let them quarrel, as no doubt they will, over the details of the programme; but they can be trusted to accept the statement, — once they square the facts by the rule of reason, — that the welfare of our people and the preservation of our institutions depend upon our educating youth to use reasonably and gloriously the growing leisure which the common use of automatic machinery has in store for humanity.

(The author’s next topic will be ‘The Iron Man in International Politics.’)